Katrina Side Effects

Of the half a million people displaced by Katrina, about half don’t want to go back, even though Mayor Nagin went to Atlanta and tried to persuade many evacuees there to come back. That leaves about 250,000 people displaced, and several states holding the bag for integrating them into new locations. The state with the most evacuees is not Louisiana: it’s Texas. Side effects ripple much farther out than that. While I was in New Zealand recently, a common topic was Katrina: how sorry everyone was that it happened, and how NZ people expected their insurance rates to go up because their insurers had been telling them they would. This makes sense, since insurers for the affected areas will probably have to call on their reinsurers, causing the reinsurers, which are typically worldwide, to raise their rates, affecting insurers globally.

So the side effects of lack of preparation for a known risk include not only more than a thousand people dead and more than a hundred billion U.S. dollars in economic damages, but also a quarter million people displaced and higher insurance rates in countries on the far side of the world. A stitch in time (or better levee foundations) would have saved nine.

-jsq

Contentious Wireless NOLA

No sooner had New Orleans announced a municipal wireless network than Bellsouth withdrew a donation of a building for a new police headquarters.

I wonder if Bellsouth had gotten their DSL net back up or offered a wireless service of their own whether NOLA would have gone ahead with a municipal wireless network? I can understand how Bellsouth might be upset about loss of revenue, but when will the big mini-Bells recognize that the spread of municipal or even wireless Internet networks is a market demand appearing because they haven’t provided access to the potential customers at a price the market will bear?

-jsq

Wireless NOLA

Meanwhile, back in the states, Intel, Tropos, and Pronto donated equipment to make a city-wide wireless network in New Orleans. Here’s an interesting map showing current status of Bellsouth’s telephone and DSL networks in New Orleans. Looks like a wireless network is easier to deploy quickly than DSL….

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Airline Security Theater Considered Harmful

Bruce Schneier points out in Wired that not only is airline security such as is currently supplied by TSA is mostly security theater to make people feel better rather actually do anything to make them safer (he’s said that before), but he also listed numerous other problems and proposed what to do instead. I’ve got a few further suggestions.

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Gilmore v. Gonzales Tomorrow

Tomorrow John Gilmore gets a hearing on Gilmore v. Gonzales. On the fourth of July 2002 John attempted to board an airplane, was told he must show identification, refused to do so, and was denied entry to the aircraft. He has not flown since. Instead, he sued.

The hearing will be

December 8th 2005 at 9am
9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Third Floor, Courtroom 3
95 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

If you are familiar with the case and will be in San Francisco, it would be worth attending, especially if you’re interested in helping elminate what Cory Doctorow calls "a back-door to mandating Soviet-style internal passports for travel."

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Wireless Nation

Thomas Crampton points out on Joi Ito’s blog that Macedonia has selected Strix Systems to implement a nationwide wireless network as part of the Internet. This may be the first entire country completely wireless. Crampton suggests artistic uses of the network, which will be very interesting to see. Emergency services, personal uses, and plain old business uses also seem likely. One wonders what new will come out of Macedonia. The most networked country in the world back in the early 1990s was Finland, and from there Linux appeared.

-jsq

Flood Control Act of 1928

The levees and other flood control measures along the lower Mississippi valley are the responsibility of the federal government because of a disaster long before Katrina:

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break, (X2)
When The Levee Breaks I’ll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, (X2)
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.

When the Levee Breaks, Bonham, Jones, Page, Plant, Memphis Minnie

Many of us have heard this Led Zeppelin song a thousand times without knowing what it’s about. Memphis Minnie is listed as one of the songwriters because she originally wrote the song, back in 1927, after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which displaced 700,000 people permanently and probably got Herbert Hoover elected president.

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NOLA Levees Not Deep Enough

It turns out the situation with the levees in New Orleans was even worse than previously reported:
The documents indicated that the steel reinforcements in the levee, known as sheet piling, went to a depth of 17.5 feet below sea level. Sonar tests indicated the pilings went only to 10 feet below sea level, meaning the flood wall would have been much weaker than intended.
The LSU team is working on a report for the state that will say there were serious, fundamental design and construction flaws at both the 17th Street and London Avenue canals. Both broke during Hurricane Katrina, flooding much of the city.
Engineers confirm LSU levee study CNN.com Thursday, December 1, 2005; Posted: 11:23 a.m. EST (16:23 GMT)
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Internet Collapse Predicted (again)

My, it’s been almost a year since the last time Internet collapse was predicted, and here it is again:

If an attack or disaster destroyed the major nodes of the internet, the network itself could begin to unravel, warn the scientists who carried out the simulations.

The virtual attacks showed that the net would keep going in major cities, but outlying areas and smaller towns would gradually be cut off.

The researchers warn that the net has become more vulnerable as it has become more commercialised and key net cables are concentrated in the hands of fewer organisations.
Risk of internet collapse rising BBC News Tuesday, 26 November, 2002, 16:42 GMT

The article correctly says that the Internet as a whole will not collapse, but there may be disconnections.

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Mass. opens DOC

Dan Geer writes:

No more: "Somebody upgraded, so now everyone has to." By making the "public" in "public record" mean something, Massachusetts gets better accessibility, plus competition–not a sole-source provider.
Perspective:  Massachusetts assaults monoculture By Daniel Geer c|net news.com Published: November 29, 2005, 4:00 AM PST

Mass. is requiring state documents to be in an open format (OpenDocument) reaadily accessible via multiple vendors’ word processing software, not to mention by OpenOffice, an open source office suite.

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