Interesting Links for 17-01-2025

[andrewducker]

1. A meteorite strike has been captured on video for the first time ever

(tags:meteor space video )

2. Gagging clauses that stop employees exposing sexual harassment set to be banned

(tags:harrassment law censorship )

3. Yes, AI really can be used to tackle potholes

(tags:ai roads infrastructure )

4. Edinburgh Zoo: Trying out the £2,000 bespoke private tour

(tags:zoo edinburgh tour )

5. Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost (why Israel's approach isn't doing any good)

(tags:Israel Palestine )

6. Is the USA Becoming Uninsurable?

(tags:insurance usa doom )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you so much; really good stories.

[andrewducker]

My pleasure!

[gingicat]

Wasn't there a meteorite strike in Russia (Siberia?) that was captured on dashcam video some years back?

[movingfinger]

There were multiple video captures of the airborne fireball, but not of the ground impact.

[gingicat]

Got it, that makes sense.

[hairyears]

(6) Is recurring theme in the Financial Times.

The answer is 'Yes' and increasing numbers of households are becoming trapped in uninsurable houses and farms.

Uninsurable means unmortgageable and unsaleable.

The one thing missing from that article is the pernicious effect of state-backed insurance in Florida, with forty years of overbuilding in flood- and storm-risk disaster areas.

It's happening in the UK, too, with a slightly different flavour: the insurers had a gentleman's agreement with the Treasury and the regulatory authorities, that they would always make insurance available, on the understanding that adequate flood defences would always be built and maintained by the state.

This agreement was quietly abrogated by the coalition cabinet in 2011.

The places to watch are York, and the Severn Valley up- and downstream of Worcester.

[andrewducker]

As usual gentlemen's agreements are worth the paper they're written on.

[fub]

The lesson is to not make a gentleman's agreement with anyone who is not a gentleman. (Or gentle-woman, of course.)

[hairyears]

At most, the worth of nonexistent paper; more often, a substantial net negative for all involved, voluntarily or not.

This is turning into the worst example of value-destruction in North America since the banking collapses of the Great Depression, and it will foreseeably surpass the costs of the Civil War to the Southern Confederate States.

...And it will continue getting worse.

We are observing an economic mechanism by which damaging events become widespread disasters; and I see no actions or policy proposals that will stop it becoming irrecoverable, and worsening.

Neither in the economic view, nor environmentally; and economomists are still persuading policymakers and managers to pretend that these two views as separate and disconnected abstractions.