On a Friday night, significant rain have hit areas around where I live, which fortunately didn't affect me as much, but still have left a noticeable pool of water in our basement, though nothing drastic.
Our house has already been hit in Summer 2021 by an actual flood, one that left the ground floor with a good 70-80cm of water, which left the walls covered with moisture and destroyed many of our belongings. My parents and I didn't lose anything significant in the process some furniture and some personal belongings, but nothing that couldn't be replaced but the time needed to clean and renovate the house, and the wake-up call that something like that could happen even in Europe was a sobering realization for me: the modern world, in all its "technological advancement", is still powerless in many ways against Mother Nature's wrath.
Of course there are many human factors at play too: surfaces entirely covered in concrete or asphalt are unable to absorb water, neglected river beds become incredibly poor at evacuating water, and an abandoned dam system meant that there was no way to direct the excess water elsewhere, etc. Don't take my words too literally, I'm not very knowledgeable in practical matters, but all that to say that there is a large part of decaying infrastructure, which means that many things could have been done within the system to avoid this.
The thing though is that when it happened, people were far more interested in finding people to blame government, politicians, workers who were supposed to maintain the dams etc. than to actually work on proactive measures. A lot of blaming, some reactive measures, but not a whole lot of sitting down and finding ways to prevent future problems. Not surprising to me, but still disappointing.
At the end of the day, the technological system can only exist through human beings and their coordination, and let's just say that I don't trust the latter. Too many conflicting interests, too little incentive to care about others that one doesn't personally know, too much systematic incompetence and corruption, not enough skin in the game.
The flood that hit us in 2021 were a good reminder of the fragility of the system we have come to rely on. Do not be fooled by the tech gizmos such as LLMs and generative art. If the basic infrastructures that provide us with food, energy and housing break down, the fancy tech doesn't matter. And the signs of fragility are everywhere, its just that people do not dare talk about them.
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2024-05-13