That doesn't put things in any useful context. Each car wreck is an isolated incident. Societies are relatively well-equipped to deal with these incidents: first responders come out, injured are taken to hospital, the dead go to the morgue, where they are buried in a routine fashion. The next of kin are affected, but their lives proceed in a society which has retained its usual level of function, with employment continuing, transportation networks operating, and food supply lines functioning normally. This is all true even for the most massively awful freeway pileups that occur in dense fog.
In a disaster of this nature, supply lines are wiped out. Hospitals are gone. First responders, to the extent there are any, are overwhelmed. It's hard to get food. Sanitary systems, to the extent they existed in the first place, are gone. Communication systems are gone. This is all going to have incredible impact, even in a less-developed country. The disaster affects entire communities for several years at least. No car wreck has this sort of impact.
Sure, death happens in large numbers every day. Why mourn these 10,000 deaths any more than any other deaths from around the world? We probably shouldn't. Because death is natural and unavoidable, it isn't necessarily tragic by itself.
Your community, your system, is able to absorb the deaths which happen within that community. People in your community die from old age, traffic accidents, disease and many other ways, but the wheels of the system keep spinning. In the case of the Philippines, the recent tsunamis and other large scale natural disasters, entire communities were obliterated. These systems have completely broken down. In Leyte, 10,000 people died, but the system which supported tens of thousands more living is broken.
The local economy for many of these people has been pushed back to the stone ages. The rich still have their bank accounts intact. They can jump on a plane and start over somewhere else. The poor don't have this option. There is no functioning system there to support the people who have to stay there. They have nothing to eat, no money for medicine, nowhere to live and they are completely dependent on a government with relatively little resources. Restoring this system will take months if not years. Many people will never fully recover. Future generations will get held back from what they could have been. There's not much of a safety net here.
ETA: And sure, the ripples of this shock won't go much further than the borders of the Philippines. But I think Fukishima might be a good counter to your "natural disasters as a side show" argument. We don't yet know how much this disaster will affect us. It could do serious long term damage to the ecosystem of the Pacific ocean. Could the world see mass cancer from eating fish in the Pacific ocean?
This does not put things into context at all. You do realize that this is a single event, localized in a single region of the world, right?
This is equivalent the population to small neighborhood all dying at once. In addition to destruction caused.
Regardless of the cause, large amounts of loss of human life in a single event are still considered significant. The reverberating effects throughout the neighboring communities are perhaps most noticeable. You are removing an entire node from a graph, rather than individual leaves.
That's not a very helpful context. Lots of people die every year from relatively low-risk activities they choose to participate in, and those deaths don't typically involve the destruction of the entire community support structure in the process.
In other words, the deaths in the Philippines are bad enough, but there are millions of people still alive and put into great distress as we speak. And it's not as if it's their fault (which was the argument brought up for Katrina as well...), it's not as if they can be safe if they move to Japan (as if there were either the funding or political will for that).
Exactly wrong. The response to the acts of war on 9/11 are disingenuous, and not commensurate with the impact. The costs we as citizens pay for a false sense of security are orders of magnitude more than the risk presented. It is sad these people in the Phillipines died. We should help the survivors and we should help the survivors be able to withstand future problems by building better safer infrastructure and other methods. But, this is a normal event in human culture, the comparison is not outrageous, it is simply scientifically accurate. The author's choice of the word sideshow is callous, but objectively somewhat accurate. To those involved or effected by this - it's anything but a sideshow, which is where relative perspective comes in. We should have sympathy and help - but help in all ways.
Well, that's the whole point - if some USA politician really wanted to protect Americans, then it would be appropriate to direct more effort towards traffic and obesity, and ignore 9/11.
The same is in this situation - while help is needed in restoring the communities and sheltering survivors; in the long run anyway those "common killers" should be a priority for the same Philippines communitities, not overly focusing on typhoon-safety.
And the 10 000 dead isn't the number that should be emphasised above others - the main pain in this disaster is the millions of wounded and displaced; I wouldn't be surprised if the death toll of these displacement consequences (malnutrition, disease, etc) is larger than from the initial impact.
Another point I made in my first comment is that in my area, typhoons were rare. Even though we get hit with around 20 per year, my area typically dodges all of them. Yet, in the past two years we have had two devastating typhoons. One was the equivalent of a cat 5 hurricane and the other was just as deadly with less winds but more flooding. Yolanda is was the most powerful storm in recorded history, which is obviously a rarity. If this all points to a trend, perhaps due to something like global warming, then we will all be affected. Perhaps this is just a preview of more to come in a far less comfortable world for everyone. Natural disasters and environmental problems may be moving from side show to center stage. The positive entertainment might take a turn to horror show.
That doesn't make this any less significant. Besides, something in the neighborhood of 9.5m were affected by this typhoon and the season isn't even over.
Apple has more subtle canary. Yours is totally obvious.
The court will consider intention. If it can be shown that the wording was intentionally selected to work as warrant canary and has no other function, the case is clear.
Your canary has clearly only one purpose: revealing the warrant while thinking you are smartass and get away with it.
The court will take into account intention. If it can be shown that the wording was intentionally selected to work as warrant canary, it can be seen as violation of gag order.
1. You don't get it integrated with your applications like browser, email software, text editor or spreadsheet by default. This leads to network effect in reverse. if you are only person to use it within your circles, signing and encrypting data and messages you send to others can't be done.
2. Encryption is extra risk for your data. If you lose the keys, you lose the data. People are bad at backing up their data, why they would be better at managing their keys? Being sloppy with your keys means that somebody can impersonate you with more credibility (what if banks would accepting PGP singed orders in email)
3. Value from widely used PGP happens mostly in society level. Encrypting any particular piece of data has negative expected value in most cases.
4. Using PGP requires understanding the basic concepts and using it well is not that easy (lots of pest practices). People don't know any of this stuff. Even public and private key is far out concept for most people.
If you look at multiple indexes that rank countries by competitiveness, low corruption and infrastructure, Sweden and other Nordic countries are usually in top 10.
If you think countries as companies, they would be like business parks. You can compete with low price or good infrastructure. Sweden is Google of countries. It provides highly educated people, good infrastructure, safety and low corruption with higher price. This will inevitability drive out low margin industries that rely on cheap labour but it will be good environment for high- and middle-tech companies.
Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.