On Sat, Sep 04, 2010 at 01:39:51PM -0400, Philip wrote:
> There must be some ground between "crying wolf" and being complacent.
> Those who sell the events of the day do not seem to have developed that
> ability - much to their shame.
Yeah, but Phil - if people didn't demonize the other side, how could you
possibly hope to have controversy? :)
(In fact, I find *that* to be the most salient characteristic of getting
older: when I was young, most of the people around me knew that the
reasonable answers almost never lay at either one or the other end of
the scale. Today, everything must be instantly classed as "good/evil" or
"right/wrong", with no second thoughts allowed - and there's only one
right choice to be made at any given time. Oh, and since the people
making the other decision are, by definition, evil, there's no problem
with killing them. Go, us - we're the best!)
In the security business, one of the fundamentals of policy design is
that the cost of protecting a resource must always be balanced against
the cost of the resource. In this situation, the government's only
concern is that they not be seen as under-predicting; the fact that
people get hurt or die while rushing about to prepare for these
over-predicted hurricanes, or that millions of dollars are wasted on
preparations, lost work time, expended fuel, useless purchases, etc. is
not their concern.
The moral of the "crying 'wolf'" story is that doing so has a cost that
is borne, at least initially, by other people. I guess some folks miss
that point. If you don't use your own intelligence and judgement, and
base it on _accurate_ information, you're going to lose out every single
time.
--
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