Umm..the difference is most of LA isn't a shanty town (keyword: most) and the concrete structures of any significance are reinforced and inspected for earthquake readiness. Now your house..that's a different story. But I'm 99% sure a 6.7+ earthquake in L.A. would not kill 50,000 people. I'd be surprised if it killed 5,000 people. As a side note -everyone is waiting for our aircraft carriers with helicopters to arrive. Are there no other helicopters in the hemisphere? For f's sake, you'd think they were just invented.
at this point, listening to Pat talk about Christianity is like listening to Britney talk about music theory. You'd think they'd be knowledgeable about what they're saying (and they do have their fans), but it's really not worth the time or the pain to listen to them show their ignorance to a mass audience.
I am not giving anything to Haiti and I don't plan to. Not that I think it's a BAD idea for others to give as they'd like, but I'm not sure that it makes sense to me to send money to help rebuild a nation that's doomed to have the same thing happen again. It's a terrifically poor country with 9 million people packed into an area smaller than Maryland. They have a huge trade deficit and little political or economic stability. The country was and is fucked, and the world chipping in and slapping a bandaid on the earthquake aftermath is nice and all, but it does not address the systemic problem and, in fact, it encourages countries to maintain unsustainable population levels and infrastructure. Ed O.
It's sad, but I was just saying today that Haiti will probably end up in better shape after the earthquake than they were before. Millions of dollars are pouring in. They are getting tons of publicity by the media and Hollywood.
I doubt it. If millions of dollars pouring in made much difference to people or countries, the world would look a lot different. 60-70% of NBA and NFL athletes are bankrupt within a few years of retiring. People routinely win the lottery and go bankrupt) Countries sitting on top of mountains of natural resources are often quite poor (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela). OK, step one is to say that Haiti has been poor for the reasons that most countries remain poor. They certainly haven't had any help from the outside, but in the grand scheme of things the qualifications for stable growth aren't a mystery, they're just hard to do. 1. To be wealthy, you need security. Haiti has traditionally been a violent place where people can't be secure in their property in just the basic sense. 2. To be wealthy, you need the ability and incentive to go out and work. Haiti has a highly state influenced economy and a history of requiring significant patronage and confiscating wealth from political opponents. Worst of all, right from the start they never really developed any sort of basic system of property and land ownership the way every successful country ever has done (this is a prime reason the country is an environmental nightmare despite various efforts by the UN and other groups to re-forest it. No one owns the trees and has an interest in protecting them, so they're chopped down the moment they're not surrounded by guns). 3. To be wealthy, you need to have knowledge, some basic level of education. In addition to a political and economic infrastructure that discouraged wealth creation, the basic educational system in Haiti is by far the worst in the hemisphere. Lots of folks can't read, and not just older folks. To grow, these are the requirements and you've almost never had them in Haiti. So how do you take 10M poor, uneducated people, mostly accustomed to doing things the wrong way, and get them on the right track? 1. Offer and encourage their free immigration to places with better infrastructure. Encourage a disaspora. A few poorly educated people added to any society won't hurt it. As a practical matter, the real losers here would be immigrants from other poor countries, if developed nations that could reasonably be expected to absorb more Haitians without major turmoil absorbed more Haitians and fewer, say, Ethiopians. But yeah, as a goal, suppose the US, Europe, China, and the rest of the world absorbed 5M of Haiti's 10M people. That'd make the problem of Haiti itself more tractable. And simply by coming to better placers, you improve the lives of those people. 2. I'm pretty certain the French or the Dominicans don't want to be responsible for Haiti any more than we do. The UN might, but I expect a horror show from that. What benefit accrues to the people/government that takes over? There's a lot of downside and if there's an upside to be seen into developing Haiti into a wealthy place, it's generations in the future. So what we'll probably get is more of the "international soup kitchen" approach to the problem where we distribute aid to avoid really embarrassing mass starvation, but otherwise leave it to the corrupt, poorly educated, and the occasionally truly benevolent folks to try and build the country. But again, since most of the folks that will actually be administering things are trained into non-wealth creating ways of administration and have no incentive to get things right, it basically remains a trainwreck unless some singular piece of luck comes along. In the meantime, anyone who gets wealthy enough to have the means, and has a clue, flees. That is, I don't see a (successful) UN protectorate coming. At least in anything more than a very temporary form. The biggest problem, I think, is that politically no outside actor would have the incentive to be as potentially ruthless as you'd need to be, coupled with, strangely, as benevolent as you'd need to put things on a growth track. The sort of non-Haitian folks that would want to improve Haiti in the long run are also the sort of people who tend to blanch at shooting looters, allowing un-restrained trade, creating a simple, clear system of property rights, and imposing rules on unruly, culturally different populations.
Actually, it really depends upon how they spend the money and what they do going forward. They could rebuild the infrastructure to meet any earthquake standards around. They could invest in renewable energy (being in a very sunny area) to reduce fuel costs. They could create urban density instead of sprawl. I'm just saying...they could.
They should evacuate the entire city and put everyone on cruise ships for the time being. Then begin the reconstruction effort.
Last night at the Orlando game, the fans gave $49K and the team matched the first $16K for a total of $65K. Well done Blazers and their fans.
Dr. (Senator) Frist showed up today and immediately began performing various emergency surgeries. Way cool.
