Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT: Katrina and World Support?

I agree completely that no one group is to blame. Having said that, the general level of "studiousness" of our governments these days is NOT at the same level it was a generation ago (and I'm not even old enough be be remembering the good old days yet).

Some of this can probably be blamed on a more ignorant, shallow electorate not choosing the candidates with demonstrated ability and willingness to tackle the hard problems, but I also think as a continent we have all become more short-sighted and replaced acceptance of hard reality with wishful thinking.

I see the same thing at a corporate level so I am not just blaming our governments here, but to say "we could not have done better" is IMO unacceptable. We do seem to have the foresight to steer just clear of the worst disasters (catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant, accidental release of man-made plagues) but we still have the capability to cause permanent damage to our environment and cause worse disasters than the levee failures in NO.

As our population grows, the population density in our cities rises and we push urban growth into more corners of the world we need smarter and tougher government to deal with the issues and avoid bigger and "badder" disasters.

We are going to have to get back to the point where government is filled with hard working geeks again rather than just lawyers and drones. Put a bunch of us in the LA and NO governments in the right places and I think the NO disaster would have been much less severe... but how many of us would consider working in government these days ?

THAT, folks, is the real problem we have to deal with.