Comment by maxbond
16 hours ago
The 2021 incident is why we know it was a bad decision. They had 4 years of warning. Extreme weather is going to continue becoming more common. Texas is going to continue to face extreme weather. If they don't prepare, people are going to die. It's not really acceptable to say that it's not economical to do something about that, or unnecessary based on outdated flooding models. When there's an urgent problem - yeah, you do have to do something about it. Tradeoffs are useful to decide what we do, not whether.
I think you do your argument a disservice by using that particular example. If you're going to imply some lives were simply uneconomical to save, and when challenged say that you aren't familiar enough with the matter to discuss what else could've been done, it just comes off callous. I'm not left with the impression you don't think the alarm system was necessary because you understand the tradeoffs.
The problem isn't that Texans are valuing their lives too much and insisting on too many safeguards. The problem is that the safeguards are insufficient.
I was deferring to the judgement of the local people.
I was not making my own decision on the tradeoffs.
Also, your implication that the tradeoff is lives is unfair, I don't think that's the tradeoff, rather I think they were expecting that other types of alerts would be sufficient.
You're deploying a recent disaster, that killed scores of people, as evidence that people want something done when it isn't appropriate - and you aren't even willing to take a stance on whether what was done was appropriate? That's pretty weak tea. It really undermines your argument. If you aren't willing to take a stand on that, use a different example. Otherwise you aren't saying anything.
You're calling on people to have more nuanced discussions that include tradeoffs, but you retreat immediately from the implication that we're discussing people's lives. That's trying to have your cake and eat it too. Tradeoffs are about balancing different budgets, and it's not just a monetary budget, one of those is a budget of people's lives.