[HN Gopher] Good Design for a Real Problem (2006)
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       Good Design for a Real Problem (2006)
        
       Author : luu
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2021-02-17 13:10 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fromthearchives.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fromthearchives.blogspot.com)
        
       | macintux wrote:
       | > Incompetent and bungling as we were, sandbagging goes
       | shockingly fast. It must be astonishing to watch a crew with a
       | few days' practice; like fast motion film, but not.
       | 
       | I volunteered with a local volunteer emergency response team to
       | respond to a flood in southern Indiana 3-4 years ago.
       | 
       | We were tasked with sandbagging for a while, even though it was
       | fairly obvious that the river was going to flood the area too
       | widely for sandbags to be useful. I helped with that effort for a
       | while, risking my bad back in the process, and I agree: it does
       | go very quickly.
       | 
       | It also made me think that a fair bit of any emergency response
       | is for show: it probably won't help, but it can't hurt, so you
       | throw people at everything until you run out of people or new
       | data helps you refine what will actually work.
       | 
       | If nothing else it probably made the locals feel better than
       | watching a bunch of people stand around doing nothing at all.
       | 
       | Fortunately I was able to later help in a more meaningful way,
       | assisting with evacuations and providing security all night in
       | hopes that the abandoned homes wouldn't be targeted by
       | opportunistic thieves.
       | 
       | Unfortunately, despite our efforts, it turned out that someone
       | (or multiple someones) from nearby communities used boats to hit
       | some of the flooded homes, bypassing our security perimeter.
       | 
       | Frustrating to see.
        
       | skummetmaelk wrote:
       | I enjoyed the contrast between these sentences
       | 
       | > Levees built on sands washed down from hydraulic mining are
       | being eaten from the bottom. 140 year old decisions are active
       | problems.
       | 
       | > They have bellies and they can drive heavy machinery and they
       | make jokes about the enviros. ... they are not environmentalists.
       | 
       | And so the problems keep coming. Not because of "these guys" in
       | particular, but the attitude displayed. We clearly see the effect
       | of bad decisions that were expedient in the past causing problems
       | now and at the same time we can not limit our own desire for
       | expediency and convenience at the expense of our future.
        
         | war1025 wrote:
         | Care to elaborate? I'm having a hard time figuring out what
         | point you were trying to make.
        
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