@on the cusp @on the cusp @on the cusp @on the cusp @on the cusp

Much of the country is close enough to the coasts to flood within a century or so I live at a fairly low altitude, although I am lucky enough not to live in a flood zone, I do live in whats called a alluvial "terrace" by geologists in an area that was previously glaciated a few thousand years ago. When the glacier retreated it left gravel behind. Lots of it. So it can and probably will be flooded again, just not now.
How much could sea levels rise within my lifetime? The most I see them rising puts me within several miles of the new shoreline, but not right on it.

See the film "AI" for a simulation of what New Your Harbor looks like maybe one or two hundred years in the future. If that happens, the most heavily populated area today will be under water. The skyscrapers in New York City will emerge directly from the water. And the cost of that shift would be astronomical. Better to let the businesses move somewhere else a bit higher and further west or east if they want insurance. Although its becoming as built up as lower Manhattan now, Hoboken is not high enough to be the best place. Probably We need to clean up those areas first. Many of which sit on incredible amounts of pollutants like PCBs mercury, etc. Thats going to be costly cleaning all that up. The New York Harbor area has some of the most polluted soil in the country. Hurricane Sandy revealed the depth of the problem. Big parts of New York City especially the part of Lower Manhattan that includes Wall Street are low enough to be covered with water in a fairly modest storm surge. The current plans are to build something like what The Netherlands has. A series of dike and gate like structures to keep the water out by means of monumental efforts in engineering. But of course, nothing can stop a rising ocean. Big parts of the country will be covered by the sea eventually. Such as the lower elevation parts of California's Central Valley.

Now that will raise the cost of food as its the most heavily farmed area of the country. That area is a river delta and its been the subject of monumental engineering efforts for at least a century. They seem to be prepared already for the usual kinds of flooding, but what if there is something that causes a tsunami, such as happens every couple of thousand years... (this is a known fact and the evidence is in the "chevrons" of sand found all around the world in the geological record) Then all bets are off, and we may have a huge disaster. We have to understand the science and not think we lead a charmed life. Of course most of the tsunami danger is in the West, because of the Pacific "Ring of Fire" But the fossil record shows that tsunamis happen on both coasts. There is a debate about the volcanic island in the ATlantic that hosts the huge volcano at La Palma, in the Canary Islands. for example. The volcano represents the visible part of a huge undersea mountain. A mountain that is said could and someday will slide into the sea. The story goes - the westward and southward facing slope which was featured just a few weeks ago dramatically erupting, is known to be unstable enough to preent a reason to worry that it may slide into the sea in one of these eruptions. If it does it could send a tsunami headed our way that might cause flooding all along the East Coast. How much? We dont know but we do know this has happened in the past from the geological record. We should, when we build, consider such possibilities into our building codes. Its wise to put the effort into accurately determining the elevation of any property you buy and plan to build on. This can be done with what is now very inexpensive GPS hardware using RTKLib.

Its accurate enough to measure remarkably tiny distances and movements. With the right antenna, you can locate yourself to millimeters. Less than one centimeter. This is close enough to get a very good idea of your flood risk. What is your true elevation? A heads up if you live near the ocean shorelines. USGS maps are often old and sometimes they tend towards being wrong, sometimes very wrong. Often they overestimate elevation. More often than not, when they err, they er in the upward direction. So your elevation may be lower than you think. An RTKlib-capable GPS is the best way to find out. This should be able to as I said, computer your exact position to a very high level of certainty. Much more than what most people think GPS is capable of. I have three possibly four RTK-capable GPSs. This is enough to set up my own base station to give everybody within a few miles of me access to very precise short baseline positioning capability. That would be great for automation, such as automating lawnmowers to drive themselves accurately.

@On the cusp, if you want to start a punk band, you really should. If you know what instrument you want to play, just start playing it and find some other similar minded people to jam with.

Many musicians in bands confess that they found each other through classified ads in music magazines or web sites. My wife plays electric guitar and I play keyboard a bit but I'm not very good. But I have fun with it. I only just started.

I used to sort of know "Jello Biafra" who was the lead singer in a San Francisco punk band, he also ran for mayor of SF once and got around 2000 votes. His band was the Dead Kennedys. Check their music out, its great. He was always looking for interesting sounds and more distortion.

Nobody can get flood insurance, like, for 35 years. Insurance practices are not new.
Here, it pre-dates climate change, fits into the time frame of max capitalism. Start that about the 1970s.

@Pluto's Republic @Pluto's Republic

For one thing, insurance policies state upfront that they don't cover a long list of kinds of disasters. Especially things that will cause large areas to become uninhabitable like radiation. Suppose a storm surge causes a nuclear plant to go into criticality after flooding causes it to lose power and go into thermal overload. Its core manages to exit its protective vessel and in response to the force of gravity begins to describe a path downward, towards the center of the earth.. (it happens) .. And no flood insurance for that plant exists. Poof, everybody who might have insured it is off the hook. What happens after such disasters? Some means is created to enslave large numbers of people who are forced, under threat of death, to clean it up under extremely dangerous conditions. Many perhaps most die horrible deaths their cells liquefying and sloghing off. Their hair all falls out. Within a short period of time all are dead, having died in tremendous pain. .

Then afterwards, perhaps monuments are erected to honor their heroism. And their selfless sacrifice. Or more likely, perhaps the whole incident is hidden and knowledge of the event classified "top secret"

Large areas may remain uninhabitable for centuries. It might just be far too costly to clean it up.

Another source of poisoning is the huge amounts of plastic in modern cities, which burns along with the metal in skyscrapers. This kind of fire produces toxic byproducts that are extrordinarily poisonous to life. One of the reason is that the particles consist of unusual structures that at the nanostructural level are extremely interesting, perhaps one of the most interesting nanomaterials. Originally named "buckminsterfullerenes" after the inventor of tensegrity structures like geodesic domes, because the structures resembled Bucky Fullers architecture. These carbon nanotubes are a by product of these tremendously hot fires, and the toxic materials that feed them. They are one of the most dangerous of pollutants. Luckily, at the current time these kinds of materials are rarely released into environments. But if they were, say by a nuclear war that targeted cities, they would wreck havoc with human immune systems and present a huge challenge to those tasked with cleaning up the sites afterward. Like radiation, our system might run into its limits attempting to do this.

Engineered nanomaterials in the environment present tremendous threats to living things of all kinds because of the property of transloction within the bodies of animals and plants. They can penetrate cell walls and they show exceptionally toxic properties.
These kinds of fires in particular were one of the reasons mankind recognized that nuclear wars were absolutely unwinnable and would make the planet far more uninhabitable that war planners had originally thought. This is because they produce substances that cause illnesses much like asbestos does but they are worse. The nanomaterials are perhaps the strongest fibers known to man. They include multiwalled carbon nanotubes. If inhaled into the body they cause endless bizarre health problems because they can penetrate the barriers in the body unpredictably. Also very small materials interact in unknown ways with the immune system at a nanostructural level. We need to recognize that these kinds of materials, although they quite possibly offer benefits few other materials can, they also pose huge dangers in the workplace and in the environment. Hazards that we cannot let industries release into our world. The corporations of the world are not ready for such responsibility.

Studies of current users of engineered nanomaterials indicate that companies rarely disclose the use of engineered nanomaterials on MSDS disclosure sheets, instead they act as if these nanomaterials ae simply the conventional versions of those materials and claim them as "harmless" There currently is as far as I know no regulation of these substances which may well be tremendously dangerous.

Therein lies the answer.

The government has an obligation to protect the people. This nation can afford to self insure — and do so for significantly less cost and corruption than the privately-owned insurance companies bring to the table. It is the insurance cartels in the finance sector that have been controlling the US economy. And that's been going on since the UK plutocrats began investing in the slave trade in the US. The People's pain can be directly traced to this arrangement. That's why all nations (except the US) self-insure their population for health care. And nations should insure the replacement value (not the investment value) of people's homes, which is the reason that people form governments in the first place. Governments are essentially the insurer and protector of people. If they were not, people would have no reason to form any government of which they were not the number one beneficiary.

I should point out here that about 93 percent of all oil extracted in this world is extracted by NOCs (national oil companies) and not by privately owned oil corporations. It is these privately owned corporations that are making all the noise. This is a US problem born in corruption, just like health care.

The author of the article you cited simply does not drill down far enough to find the answer. He throws this atrocious situation back upon the US legislature — which translates into 50 more years of grinding over and over again that which is already powder.

@Cassiodorus

but a bit pre-punk.

be well and have a good one

...I receive a bit of junk mail in my PO box from the "Hightower Lowdown," soliciting the purchase of a subscription. I have no idea how they got my name. At any rate, the front of the envelope says, "You need to know which corporations support TRUMP'S GOP and which support DEMOCRATS." Talk about cheering on corporation A against corporation B!

Yeah that was a non-starter with me. My guess is that 90% of the corporations give money to both parties. It might be a good publication, but they don't promote it like one.