Lack of money/politics EWM?  Everything is a trade off.  Most of these things have been studied in depth using risk assessment tools and cost-benefit analysis.  

If we spent more money to lower loss of life from say drinking water (place anything here), water would cost so much that only the rich could afford it.  If we made electricity more expensive to make it less poluting, only the rich could afford it, the majority of people would then loose all the benefits they got from it that can help to prolong life, like running water, electric heating (cooking), refridgeration (no spoiled food), electric transport (high speed trains, electric vehicles), etc....  Plus, with more expensive stuff, people then have less money to devote to things that can also let them live longer like say healthcare.  And you can't just make the rich pay for everything, they can just move out of the country if they feel they're being taxed too much.  

The fact is is to make things safer, they also have to be more expensive, and at some point things become prohibitively expensive and the net benefit goes down along with the risk.  The trick is finding the point were the benefits are worth the risks and tring to get the most benefit for the least cost.  

Everything has risk associated with them...for example, in making your house more airtight to make it energy efficient (as many environmentalists suggest doing) you are increasing your risks to indoor air polution and especially radon exposure, which just so happens to be one of the leading non-voluntary causes of ailment.  

Getting back to point, somewhere at sometime somone did a risk ssessment and cost benefit analysis for the south coast and figured that in order to provide everyone in the south coast region with hurricane storm surge protection, they could only provide them with catagory three huricane protection.  This would prevent the most loss of life for the entire region over for a long time.  But if a head on hurricane came and hit a particular region the defenses would fail.  Still, the US just couldn't afford to protect all the hurricane prone areas.  This is why we evacuate when hurricanes come.  Its simply cheaper to rebuild a city then to provide catagory five levies.  How much would catagory 5 levies cost anyway?  Thats alot of earth to move (with poluting trucks and machinery too by the way).  If new orleans got them, then every other community on the gulf coast would demand them too.

In reply to above: Societies resources are indeed finite

1) Different plastics, more likely will lead to more espensive food--> less people get enough nutrition

2) Companies pay alot intaxes so they relocate to china/mexico

3) There is no political way to remove risk, often politicians make rules that do not in fact lower societal risk, but makes people feel safer because people don't truely fear the right risks.  i.e. smoking and drinking are the biggest killers in the US, but are not heavily regulated (ok 18 and 21 age laws but who follows them), whereas comercial nuclear power is one of the most regulated industries in the US and has never had an accidental death directly tied to it (I did say commercial power and US).  

I agree with campaign finance reform, but I don't see this happening anytime soon, politicians are all corrupt in my book.  I think it has something to with the fact that like 95% of all politicians in the US are lawyers.  Just think about it, with a few notable exceptions, they almost all are.  I mean, I'm from wisconsin and every representative I can think of is a laywer.  It has something to do with whats called "framing"  (how you state a question to make it sound either good or bad).

4) yep

5) Yeah, I went out on a limb on this one, but I know this is how all governments and businesses account for risk... It just makes the most since becouse societies resources are finite....

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6) People shouldn;t be allowed to live in a hurricane prone area without proper shelter.  In california they have siesmic related building codes, but no hurricane building codes in the south.  Recently a tornado came through southern wisconsin, they showed a whole neighborhood leveled except for one house... It was built completely with reinforced concrete. Why can't they do this in the south... I think it adds like at most 10-20% to final cost.

7) This is a common fallacy, just because we arn'e using money to pay for military expenditures does not mean it will be available for other things...  We don't even have enough money for the war... We are way to in debt... But what ya gonna do... I think I'd like to hear the EWM plan for an iraq withdrawel that won't make things much worse.... (Opps, political thread stuff, but then again, this is pretty much all a political rant)

priorities.. Moday quarterbacking... If a we cut homeland security and increase fema funds and another terrorist attack comes who would you blame... But on a side note, risk assessment and cost benefit analysis shows that almost all our security increases have not been worth it.

9) mean maybe, logical yes..  It has long been accepted that you must put a price on human life. I think the current cost is about $200000/life year.  Thats $200000 for every extra year of life added.  This has been well documented.  Society simply could not function without this sort of logical cost benefit analysis.  And $10 million for a levy, I think your underestimating cost here... Not only are you gonna have to move lots of dirt from god knows where, but you'll also have to relocate people near levies which will add millions more in lawsuits and relocation costs...

10) most human polution comes from agriculture, But I think volcanoes add quite a bit of non-human polution as well, the problem is that the carbon sinks are being cut down too, so blame brazil and suburban expansion..  China is like gonna completely blow all our polution records away in like a decade. Just wait.  

Its getting late, gotta go watch andromeda....

EWM how is it living in a dream world? do you even know what it cost to make a quality product? for quality you need regulation to hand held the regualtion you need to buy better equipment and beter testing facilities to controll theprodut. do you even know why you pay so much for you water for the tap and sawage?  there are regualtions and maintaining the quality of water the quality of water is disturbed by the industry. but the water company sends licences on the amount of pollution they are allowed to dump. and in order to clean the water by the industry the need better waste management systems and or better product quality to stop useless side effects of pollution.

and i know what i am talking about. i've been working at a water company in holland and i know how a chemicla company works.

and btw everything is cancers at a certain level and i sure know that when in teh stone age you ate black burned meat well that black burned has a chemical compond that can be cancerous

it is all about the level of intake and you need to be sensative for cancer. soem people smoke since their 13th year and didn't even had cancer when they died aroudn 80. **** i work with cancerous compounds most of the time and allproduct for the consumers are same anywar or the FDA is in the conspiray. and they controll things like medicine and other stuff that might harm a human being

actually, the ozone hole haz become 2 separate holes, which have a combined area less than that of the original one

Alright, I fianlly found a source without really looking for one, its from CNN and it states that the army corp of engineers claimed that the cost of just improving the levies around lake poncetrain to catagory 4 or 5 protection would cost between 2.5 to 3 billion dollars.  Thats just a little bigger than the $10 million ewm claimed.

And new orleans levy system is wayyyy bigger than just along this shoreline.  And my argument is is that if you improve New Orleans levy system, you have to improve every communities levy system along the coast, otherwise everyone will be crying foul.  

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/06/neworlean...s.ap/index.html

As far as the ozone hole goes, I think its size depends on the season.  I think we only started monitering it after their already was a hole, so we don't know what what it was like pre-industry, however I'm sure it is most likely a post-industrial event.    

Agreed, I was hoping this topic would die out before.   But I'll do my part.  I pledge that I will never, ever, reply to any politically motivated post again.  Its just pointless.  Only FO topics from now on.  

In relation to this topic, I've got to put in my 2 cents.  My dad told me that when he was listening to the radio, he was listening to an interview with a meteorologist.  This meteorologist talked about the possible existence of a weather machine.  Sounds crazy, but I've seen enough episodes of Unsolved Mysteries to believe the unknown.  This weather machine is thought to be in Russian, and the Russians are using this machine to control the weather to their liking.  This person said that the Russians created Hurricane Katrina to attack the U.S.  I know many of y'all will not believe me, but I'm skeptical about this stuff.  Remember that Russia used to be our enemy?  Heck, they have ties to Iran, a nation that hates America.