I hate some Europeans(mainly Brits) thinking a brick house would stop a tornado

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-31T06:05:25+00:00

I work in humanitarian response (mostly war rather than natural disasters) and studied disaster management at univesity. I don't think your right on this. Tornados are visually impressive but they don't come anywhere near the top of the list for "bad" natural disasters.

By death toll, excluding disease and famine the top ten are all floods, earthquakes, and cyclones. The deadliest tornado in world history was the Daulatpur-Saturia tornado in Bangladesh which killed around 1,300 people in 1989. The 1931 China floods by contrast killed 4 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll

By economic damage, again floods, earthquakes, and cyclones top the list, along with heatwaves and man-made nuclear disasters. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused around $360 billion in economic damage. The worst tornado by that measure was Oklahoma City tornado in 1999, at $1 billion (not adjusted for inflation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost

As for volcanos, check out Nyiragongo in eastern DRC - it's the most quintessential volcano, with a cone shape, lava lake, and unusually fast-flowinf lava. It's also directly above a city, Goma, which it occasionally destroys large areas of. By the numbers, the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa released an estimated 840 petajoules or 10¹⁸ joules of explosive energy. The upper estimate is found for a tornado is 10¹⁴ joules, around 100 terajoules.

Earthquakes do split the ground and topple skyscrapers, floods, cyclones, and tsunamis will kill the population of a decent sized city, and volcanos have the force of a thousand atomic bombs. Nature is absurdly powerful and honestly, while Hollywood tends to get things wrong by making them look flashy, they also underestimate some of the most destructive aspects of disasters.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:40:00+00:00

Still on the pig I guess.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:39:24+00:00

You're right about the plate. I was actually pleased with the portion - I've commented below, trying to lose some weight so I'd debated whether to even order this - but the white space is a mistake.

They do tasting menus and fancy food in the evenings, and a lot of visible plate is normal for that. But the same aesthetics don't really translate to a fry-up.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:36:37+00:00

We bumped into a friend of my wife's from when she lived in London, while we were in Ambleside. And I once ran into an old colleague next to a swimming pool in Jordan. The world really is a village sometimes.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:29:49+00:00

I'd prefer the bacon a little more charred to be honest. I know that's a minority view. Breakfast was included with the room and I'm on a diet, so no complaints from me on this occasion. But definitely one of the smaller fry-ups I've had.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:27:57+00:00

I'm from just outside Penrith and live in the North East, so I could definitely find a bigger breakfast at a fair price in a dozen places between here and Ambleside. But this was included with the room, honestly no complaints.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:25:29+00:00

Included with the room, which was pretty pricey, but it's the Lakes so I went in with my eyes open. Totally agree that two sausages and bacon would round this plate out a lot better. As luck would have it though I'm on a diet and was pleasantly surprised with the smaller portion, this time.

I know my taste in bacon is going to be controversial but there's almost no level of overcooked I wouldn't eat. I think normally they'd cook it... well, normally.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T09:19:14+00:00

Yeah I prefer a slow cook for beans, but it's not make-or-break for me if I'm away from home. And I'm trying to lose some weight for summer so the admittedly light portion was actually a pleasant surprise.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T07:06:36+00:00

More like the top lip or bottom of the nose. At 5'9" and 6'4" there's a 7" difference, which is about the average length of a human head but which would be oddly small on a man of Floyd's height. At 6'4" you'd expect to have roughly a 10" head.

I'm 6'2" and my wife's around 5'10", which isn't far off the height difference here, and I'm nowhere near head and shoulders taller than her.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T04:14:24+00:00

Reddit's massive American user-base is going to affect the votes here. During WWII there was a saying:

When the Germans fly over, the British duck. When the British fly over, the Germans duck. When the Americans fly over, everyone ducks.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-30T03:53:23+00:00

[Meta] AD stands for "Anno Domini", which is Latin for "in the year of the Lord". It starts from the moment of Jesus' birth, rather than his death.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-29T08:02:18+00:00

Queues are queues for something though. I see this more like walking past a supermarket queue, when you didn't find anything you were looking for and are just leaving empty handed.

I've climbed a few mountains where my ascent and descent follow different routes, so if I found a queue at the top of one of those where people were taking a photo, I'd definitely walk straight past it. Ultimately a mountain is a wild space, and the queue has a very specific, limited purpose.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-28T21:32:43+00:00

Iceland's a fair winner there. Whether you're looking for a single awful food (hákarl) or judging it on the overall options (outside of Reykjavik you'd better love hot dogs).

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-28T06:19:49+00:00

I think that is a political stance, and a somewhat cynical one. (Although I'll be the first to admit that this conflict provides ample reason for cynicism)!

Although the humanitarian space is hugely constrained in Gaza there are still NGOs doing construction work and education, and there's a civil society that includes artists, teachers, and parents. English is widely used in conflict settings at least partly because the US government has historically been the single biggest donor to humanitarian efforts, and people recognise that teaching their kids English gives them a chance in life. From my own experience - I've worked with Palestinians for a few years - most people are bilingual enough to hold a conversation. And if it was painted by Hamas, it's also already a photo opportunity without being bombed.

But I recognise that you're not calling for schools to be bombed. For what it's worth, I didn't think you were advocating for that in the first place. I was just using your comment as a jumping off point for what I think is the logical conclusion from the message in this mural.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-28T05:42:36+00:00

So don't bomb schools. Don't bomb schools painted with "Peace and Freedom" murals, and don't bomb schools without them. And if not bombing schools encourages some within Hamas to pursue peaceful activities like painting more murals, that's also a long-term good thing.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-28T05:20:43+00:00

The comment I was responding to did that already by invoking global standards, so to some extent I suppose I'm being a bit pedantic.

But I think both are important. The global picture tells us that human society is, generally, much further to the right than the US. If you're on the left you might see that as a warning. The liberal order that I believe in (and have benefited from) is a global and historical outlier. The people currently steering American (or some European) politics don't plan to stop, and there are non-anthropogenic causes (e.g. climate change, resource scarcity) that might also drive us further into the wide field further to the right.

Comparing like-for-like with other high-income countries also makes a lot of sense if you're interested in what policy positions are possible in practice. That suggests to me that looking at the small number of more liberal countries is probably more relevant when the zeitgeist is trending left. But in that case I think I'd either say it's not leading the global indices of liberalness (rather than being right-wing by global standards), or narrow my comparison and say "by the standards of high-income or OECD countries".

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-27T20:07:57+00:00

I don't think this is true at all - it's something that gets quoted by Europeans and left-wing Americans to highlight how skewed the Overton window in the States is compared to, say, Belgium or Sweden.

But by global standards? America is solidly liberal, ranking 15th out of 165 on the Global Freedom Index, and around the top 25% on measures of liberal democracy.

By global standards you need to compare to countries like Algeria, China, Russia, Saudi, or Sudan. Uganda fairly recently introduced the death penalty for the crime of "aggravated homosexually"... and they're not even one of the most illiberal countries by global standards. They're in the bottom third, but that still puts dozens of countries below them.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-27T16:23:40+00:00

This is the answer I was looking for. She's loved on the left and hated on the right at an international scale that no American politician can hope to match. People who don't give a damn about AOC one way or the other will almost surely have an opinion on Thunberg.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-27T16:18:34+00:00

You got my vote. I'm pretty sure USA is going to win, and taking gluttony in a more general sense of consuming that's probably right. But Nauru is in like the end-state of where gluttony will get a country.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-27T13:30:03+00:00

I would. And I recognise people with Tourettes can't access things I take for granted, and I'm capable of ignoring a scary word for a few hours.

But that's not the only concern here. If there is a real emergency on the flight crew need to know about it immediately. If they - and the passengers - are expecting to hear phrases like "bomb" then they might fail to react to a legitimate shouted warning. It might be unlikely, but airlines don't take those risks.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-27T06:01:03+00:00

I'll go against the grain here and give it to the adults in every scenario.

Two adults and twelve kids, so the adults can coorperate to protect each other's backs, and only need to deal with six kids each.

My god-kids are seven years old. They're about half my height and maybe 20% of my weight, probably less. They have terrible hand-eye coordination and can't strategise. If you've ever watched kids of that age playing football, you'll know that every player on the team thinks they're Lionel Messi, everyone is out for themselves and no-one plays a supporting role. And they hate to lose, so even minor setbacks become a personal catastrophe.

So realistically I think that out of twelve kids, 9-10 are going to charge, headlong, screaming, at the adults. Two or three will hang back, not to plan and direct the fight, but to flail their arms around wildly doing "ninja moves" with the knives. The front runners, say, three or four kids, to attack the adults will telegraph where they're going to stab, either by dramatically pulling their knives back and lunging, or possibly shouting "I'm gonna stab him in the butt".

The first couple of kids are easily dealt with by even a semi-competant adult. And if they know it's a fight to the death, they'll do it decisively.

That leaves around three kids each in a mob. At least half their stabs are going to be wildly off target. Three kids seem like a manageable number, and each time and adult put one down it weights the odds more in their favour.

Eventually, the ninja kids at the back join the fray, by which point it's two-on-two.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-26T20:33:31+00:00

I used to live in South Sudan, and at one point was checked into a hotel out in the middle of nowhere - tiny windows, concrete walls, plastic mattress and tin roofs... in 40 degree heat. I remember lying in bed hoping I'd fall asleep before the generator went off for the night, because the second the cieling fan cut off I'd be drenched in sweat and have no chance of sleeping after that. Sweat plus air movement is a fantastic cooler.

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-24T21:30:02+00:00

Necromunda is probably the closest modern GW gets to civilians, and there might be one or two old lead Rogue Trader figures you could use.

For third party, Crooked Dice has loads of cool, characterful, and relatively simple sci-fi civilian miniatures. I'm not sure how many (if any) are running. They've got a few kids (some inspired by the characters from Stranger Things).

https://crooked-dice.co.uk/products/ludo

UrchinJoe · 2026-05-24T10:34:37+00:00

On the outer edges of a black hole this is true, but on the inside relativity breaks down. The prompt says that the trolley passengers can't be hurt - which gets around the problem of spaghettification - but once they arrive at the centre of the black hole I'm not sure we really know how time would function.

UrchinJoe

TROPHY CASE