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Floating Homes

When you can't fight nature, get a home that floats in water and rises with the tide. The homes look beautiful and the technology is quite amazing - maybe the costs will be too. I don't foresee arks of floating homes dot the third world coasts that get pounded by hurricanes, typhoons and the like so routinely that it is no longer newsworthy.

With due respect to the architectural smarts that goes into the creation of stuff like this, the solution is reminiscent of ad-hoc patches that product companies dole out grudgingly for software they no longer support. You fix the symptoms the best you can, wait for your customers to whine en-masse when something else breaks, scotch-tape it and so on. You no longer have the resources to go after root cause analysis.

It is the same with the increasingly feral intensity of natural disasters. While generally attributed to global warming, the powers that be would rather not remedy that and attempt to assuage nature but tempt her with more arrogant and expensive technology for her to wreck her havoc on. For all the religious fundamentalism around us, our readiness to submit to the power of nature and God seems minimal - we still imagine we can continue to do wrong and win.
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