New Yorker magazine alert thread

wait how did you already read this

is this what the media is like

also jesus christ
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing

^ this article is so disgusting

Cox does not believe that the death penalty works as a deterrent, but he says that it is justified as revenge. He told me that revenge was a revitalizing force that “brings to us a visceral satisfaction.” He felt that the public’s aversion to the notion had to do with the word itself. “It’s a hard word—it’s like the word ‘hate,’ the word ‘despot,’ the word ‘blood.’ ” He said, “Over time, I have come to the position that revenge is important for society as a whole. We have certain rules that you are expected to abide by, and when you don’t abide by them you have forfeited your right to live among us.”

really hope that guy dies
really hope the guy on death row gets adequately retried & afaict acquitted
so so fucked

i thought connie bruck's piece on diane feinstein and the CIA torture report was an excellent bit of reporting. (alfred, you would like this.) i'm no fan of feinstein, to say the least, but i did come away with a little more respect for her integrity

This is really something: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

yeah that one's gonna keep me awake for ... well, ever

if by "really something" you mean completely terrifying, yes; i will not be visiting portland any time soon

Horrifying. And impressively well written.

A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

hey man I live all the way down in Sacramento & apparently I'm still not safe :(

Saw somewhere else that the article states 29% of Oregon's population is disabled? That's a huge number, how does that compare to everywhere else?

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive.

xp yeah that was kinda eye-opening too & seems insane wtf

hopefully theyre just really lax abt giving out handicap parking tags or something

Earthquake piece ruined my brain

Maybe it's 2.9%? That number stood out to me too.

Maybe that's just the number of ppl who have applied for ssi

I found the detective work about the 1700 quake to be almost creepy in its building realization.

That piece was great but the article about the investigation into the terrorist attack in Argentina was really crazy too, for someone who hadn't heard anything about that story at all.

the earthquake piece really is beautifully written. i occasionally have to write about geologists' work on core samples for a general audience and i loved the elegance of 'Each sample contains the history, written in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years'.

xpost Did a quick search and it looks like the percentage of people in Oregon that report a disability is actually closer to 14%: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/disability-prevalence/

Only thing I can think of is that it's just poor editing/writing, and maybe the author meant 29% of the elderly are disabled.

even though ive been worrying about the distinct prospect of a catastrophic pnw big one since i moved here, that piece still hit me really hard. i read it on transit and got a little moved and misty-eyed thinking about how awful it will be if it happens. ive never experienced an earthquake before, weird to think that if i do experience one it might kill tens of thousands, and destroy the capital cities of bc, wa, and or :/

file:///C:/data/BRFSS_2014_Chartbook_FinalForWeb.pdf

More than 800,000 Oregon adults age 18 and older have a disability. This is almost one
third (27.3%) of the adult population of Oregon. Nationally, about one quarter (22.2%) of
adults age 18 and older has a dis

Huh. Does that mean formally reported a disability? How do they define disability? That link doesn't work for me.

I think that piece is scary and on point, but at the same time, pretty uselessly (if horrifyingly) fatalistic. As described in the piece the quake would be pretty much if not outright the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the US, and the deadliest, and the most expensive, with the most lasting repercussions. How do you plan for that? Almost by definition, you can't. That's what's so scary. It's like fearing an asteroid striking the earth. What can you do? Knowing it's coming doesn't solve the problem.

We're going to Yellowstone this summer, and Yellowstone happens to sit on a huge supervolcano complex. Even the FAQ isn't terribly reassuring:

http://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/volcanoqa.htm

Is the volcano dormant or extinct or still active?

Yes. The park’s many hydrothermal features attest to the heat still beneath this area. Earthquakes—1,000 to 3,000 per year—also reveal activity below ground. The University of Utah Seismograph Station tracks this activity closely.

the link doesn't work for me either. waterface, we need the password to your computer plz

try this

http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/research/centers-institutes/institute-on-development-and-disability/public-health-programs/upload/BRFSS_2014_Chartbook_FinalForWeb.pdf

my password is passw0rd

What do we mean by “disability”?
In the BRFSS survey, people are considered to have a disability if they answer “Yes” to
one or both of the following questions:
1. Are you limited in any way in any activities because of physical, mental, or
emotional problems?
2. Do you now have any health problem that requires you to use special equipment,
such as a cane, a wheelchair, a special bed, or a special telephone?

I agree the disabled stat raises questions, but the bigger point is that something in excess of 99% of the human population of Oregon was not born on Krypton and is vulnerable to the possible effects of being drowned, crushed to death and/or burned alive.

As described in the piece the quake would be pretty much if not outright the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the US, and the deadliest, and the most expensive, with the most lasting repercussions. How do you plan for that? Almost by definition, you can't. That's what's so scary. It's like fearing an asteroid striking the earth. What can you do? Knowing it's coming doesn't solve the problem.

as crazy and over the top as it may sound i totally plan on not living, as i currently do, in the zone that will be effected by the earthquake in the long term.

we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two.

Found this timeline of Cascadia earthquakes over the last 10,000 years or so:

http://seismogram.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/2/6/19267853/5425377.png

one thing that article (understandably) doesn't touch on is how a disaster at that level would impact america's national economy / ripple effect on international markets

hate to be that guy but i wish someone would write an article like that about climate change, which will have even worse effects within our lifetime, is global, near-certain to happen, and (partially) preventable. but i guess it's fun to consider new disasters

i don't know why i even mentioned that, sorry

i've turned into a full-on read-it-on-the-iphone kind of guy. never thought it would be true but the train is too crowded both to and from work, so iphoning it is the only way to go.

one thing that article (understandably) doesn't touch on is how a disaster at that level would impact america's national economy / ripple effect on international markets

I really do think that if it transpired as predicted in that article, it would hurt the economy on a truly huge level, like 9/11 with no one to invade in retaliation. It would be like a great depression, in every sense.

see that's my first thought but (blue sky thinking/) it could also spur the largest rebuilding/reclamation project in history, revitalize the nation, galvanize an entire generation and define our historical era. Or total global economic meltdown, sure.

Think of how hard it was to put a monument up at the 9/11 site. Let alone a building. And that's a spot, not a huge region. I don't have high hopes we could handle this. Though on the plus side (and I'm not saying this to be snide) there's a lot of room in, like, Idaho and Montana and Wyoming, if they had to temporarily put people places. But I could also imagine a mass, ugly exodus to northern California, and even that would largely be by people of means.

Then again, as horribly destructive as Katrina was, the fact that only ("only") 2000 or so died, even factoring in the flooding of a major city (that's still there), is a small miracle.

hate to be that guy but i wish someone would write an article like that about climate change, which will have even worse effects within our lifetime, is global, near-certain to happen, and (partially) preventable. but i guess it's fun to consider new disasters

― 1992 ball boy (Karl Malone), Tuesday, July 14, 2015 4:42 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

the nyer article reminded me a lot of the rolling stone global warming article about miami http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-the-city-of-miami-is-doomed-to-drown-20130620

xp having lived in and around NY prior, during and after september 11 i can say that the issues of rebuilding were pretty sui generis and that an untethered federal government with the referendum of a nation behind it could (I hope) create this millenia's new deal. or, again, maybe not! I sincerely hope i don't live to see this particular nightmare happen; i have friends and family out that way!

the portentous tone of the earthquake piece is a GIGANTIC turnoff for me :/

Yeah, if there's anything I didn't appreciate it's that "Here's how it's going to happen. First, the electricity ... Second, the women and children ..." vibe. It's scary enough without the hypotheticals (even if things as they transpire will likely be even worse than predicted).

this is all making me want to read some kim stanley robinson

it's not like this earthquake has to happen for 2065 to look apocalyptic from an ecological standpoint

Miami is basically doomed already. At least we've got something in common, Northwesters.

http://www.billy.com/Images/moving-locations/montana-movers.jpg

xp yeah, the tone is intense but it's very effective! people are sharing this left and right. may conceivably spur some political action.

Political action to do what?

trade embargoes on tectonic plates

un peacekeepers posted to patrol the ocean floor

I assume the political action would be toward preparedness funding