da

Stop building homes, businesses, and towns in reclaimed swampland and on flood plains and the damage will be far less.

Planners seem to think 50 or 100 years is enough to predict flooding. Toronto learned that wasn't so back in 1954 with Hurricane Hazel.

Weather happens.

John

Anyone been *through* a (major) hurricane? A friend survived Andrew and described it as a "surreal" experience.

Were it not for the fact that everything around you is *toast*, afterwards, it seems like it would be an "interesting" experience.

"Here's your bail-out check/loan. Sign here to release the gummit (taxpayers) from any future claims made by (you and any future owners of) YOUR PROPERTY."

How many times do we hear the same folks talk about rebuilding? (why the hell are you still THERE???)

Ah, but how much better if someone else carries much of the cost, FOR you!

I haven't been in any serious earthquakes, so far the most we've run into here in Vancouver, BC is perhaps a 4 on the scale. That felt like a heavy truck drove by, but it kept coming for about 30 seconds...

The problem with earthquakes is everything attached to the ground wants to move 2 to 15 meters laterally in an instant - and not every human construct likes that kind of motion. Not to mention shelves, fridges, and other heavy object - which know all about inertia - if you are in the way, too bad.

John :-#(#

In the 1906 quake here, the first thing some people noticed was that they were flung out of bed and hit the wall. In places the horizontal acceleration was over 1g.

Best to put the paperbacks on the higher shelves.

Oh, no, the money afterward was not just for weather damage, it was for rebuilding after failure of a public work (levees) that went without its recommended maintenance for years (due to Congressional funding decisions). That water control is the reason we have shipping that requires port facilities at New Orleans. There was a suit attempted against the Army Corps of Engineers... sovereign immunity, of course, doesn't allow that.

There's a twist this time in that all the hospitals are maximally pre-filled with deathly ill cocksure rednecks who believe vaccines should be a personal choice and the pandemic is a hoax. Then again NOLA hospital staff are inclined to euthanize their patients, so it may just work out in the end.

That was another of those stalls, they are ALWAYS bad news! Turbulent weather needs to keep moving, and fast, or you're in trouble.

Not to worry, LaToya has everything under control.

Mr. Larkin's prejudices are showing. But yeah San Fran and Boston for that matter are full of annoying twee white people most of whom were born rich but still don't know how to not walk in back of moving cars and s*it at age 35. I couldn't stand 'em for very long either and I'm a "lefty." Good news is the twee residents of e.g. hipster San Fran and Cambridge, Massachusetts are only a small percentage of "the left"

My girlfriend had a room mate like that one time, come to think of it she drove an Audi too, an A4. It was in the dealer shop all the time, what a piece of s*it. She had a loaner for like 8 months I can't even get a loaner out of Chevrolet for one day. I think they eventually just gave it to her or something, being 28 and a looker has its advantages

My 2008 A3 has been wonderful. It's beautiful to look at and to drive and blasts past the chain controls over the Sierra summit. It chews up the San Francisco hills. What a hoot.

It just had its 100K super-sevice and is good for another 10 years. I replace the battery every other year so it starts up good in the mountains in the winter.

They don't offer the 3.2L V6 any more; pity. Everything seems to be a

They do the timing chain? They have to yank the whole engine out of the car I believe for the V6 A3, no room to work in there...

Audi eventually squeezed 260 hp out of their 2.0 turbo for the RS3 back then. Looks like the 2022 RS3 is going to make 400 out of a 2.5 liter

And at a hundred bucks an hour or thereabouts plus parts that's ah...well one must like a 2008 car to move forward with that kinda work

The biggest operating expense is insurance.

Drive a Chevy Spark and save money. You're worth it.

The Spark gets fairly lousy fuel economy for a car its size, it's not particularly aerodynamic and GM's base naturally-aspirated four-banger isn't a very sophisticated engine. Hyundai manages to pull 36-38 MPG highway out of the late-model Elantra with variable timing and lift, running Otto or Atkinson cycle at different times, and other engineering-hacks.

Fleets seem to love them though because they only have them 2 years or something and the money-savings of something more sophisticated takes longer to accrue than that.

I have always thought for those that really want to save money is to find a car for $ 500 to $ 1000 or less. Pay cash for it and just put libility insurance on it. Drive it with out any maintance except for maybe oil changes and when the thing dies just leave it on the side of the road and pull the tag off of it. Then get another car.

You mean like the thousands of people who bought homes built on land that had decades ago been declared a flood plain so it could be used to mitigate flooding by allowing this land to flood. That wasn't the home owners fault. They were only told it was in a flood plain in the mountain of paper you sign at settlement. I insist on reading it all, but that's an extreme exception. I've actually had arguments with settlement agents about issues in the paperwork. Heck, a bank I deal with required me to sign a document that literally made no sense because portions of a paragraph were missing, probably cut off lines that were never proof read.

It's easy to blame the victims in events like these. We love to blame anyone other than ourselves. It makes us feel superior. In this case people have been living on these lands for generations. If you think they don't deserve the same protections as everyone else, then help them pay to move. Global warming is not their fault.

The problem with the buy cheap, "drive-it-into-the-ground" tactic nowadays is that any car you can buy at $500 to $1000 in year of our Lord 2021 has likely already been driven into the ground. But any car from the past 20 years that basically runs and drives is probably worth at least a grand to somebody. Other people have done the same tactic with it but they didn't wait all the way until it died on the side of the road, they're going to pass it off to you, first....

So yes there are cars that you can get for a grand that might be a good value IF you can fix their likely numerous critical maintenance issues yourself. If you can't DIY this option starts to look a lot less like a bargain all the time.

e.g. sometimes people put cars with minor head-gasket leak on the market for cheap they've nursed along for a year and they and buyer thinks that can be repaired at that point. But water has gotten into the bearings and sat on them for a year, that engine is destroyed. Won't be long now...

There's also "existential value" in having a car with more modern safety features too, like what's a serious injury in a wreck do for "saving money" in the US? Death is even less helpful.

Even a relatively minor injury like concussion and a busted ankle will likely destroy any overall savings benefit to going cheap. What are my chances of getting into an accident that has the potential to cause even relatively minor injury each year in my area based on how much driving I do and how many accidents like that happen around, I'd say it's probably between 10-20% per year. Not extremely high, but high enough that it has to factor into the cost-benefit calculation.