"Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice,""
Well, I guess I'd start with telling him to stop trying to "trick" people - even kids - into doing what he wants?

It's a routine fault of progressives AND evangelical conservatives: this inherent sense of moral certainty, and the instinctive justification that "pretty much anything goes because I'm doing it to HELP you".

Reading (or more specifically, the desire to read, as there are tons of people with impairments that get in the way of literally reading a book) I'd say is symptomatic of intelligence. So what we really want are people who value intelligence, who value reason. Reading will more or less automatically follow.

I'll be honest, I don't think 'reading' alone is inherently magical. Reading the sports page, or some fantasy smut about milking male minotaurs - they may both be enjoyable, but neither is going to make someone the kind of constructive, reasoning citizen we NEED in our Republic.
Well, that any democracy needs, not just ours.

Of course, then we get back to the 'certainty'. Reasoning adults need to be able to hold in their heads a fundamental RESPECT for the other person's ideas. Even if they don't agree.

So here's the funny bit for me. Kirsch suggests that we trick kids into thinking reading is scandalous, a vice. Is that really what he wants? What if they read actually-scandalous texts (according to Kirsch's orthodoxy) like something by Charlie Kirk? The Art of the Deal? Would he be as intrinsically delighted with "people reading" then?

That makes apparently 1 person in earth that believes the BBC is "too slanted to the right" lol .
Then again, as we've seen over the past 5 years, to the new rage-addled Left Marx himself would have come off as far too right wing.

A retaining wall/dam around my slab would prevent access to the garages, and is not a practical solution. It is an attached garage. And it would need to be 360 degrees, and the back part of the lot would make for interesting problems.

I'm going to offend you here. You've seen one post about a retaining wall/dam and thought it would work. And, it retains all rainfall inside, unless I were to add gated drains, which could fail. Not to mention, while my property is 6 inches below flood level as assessed, how tall should it be? And how deep? You know much about Arizona soil?

The best solution would be to lift the house, re-pour (with demo of the original and full utilities replacement) at least 12 inches higher, and never get there because it is unlikely to be accepted by the HOA, nor the town. The engineering would be interesting, and unlikely to satisfy the regulatory agencies.

It's not fixable. Appreciate the effort. Have a moment and consider I am fortunate to not have been built on expansive soil.

Or, crazy idea I know, maybe wealthy people aren't universally - or even mostly - stuck up self obsessed narcissists, and that's just your own seething envy and sense of self justification?

If I had to choose between Walmart vs a store that literally filters out the poorest at the door, I know where I'd rather work or shop.

I'd put it another way: the "you have to pay to even GET IN THE DOOR" keeps out the rifraff.

"...describes the stores as spaces of "cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups." Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone. Checkout lines form orderly queues. ..."

Note the entire article is about how civilized an experience it is, and how "weird" that is; that Atlantic tries to paint it as "cult like" shows how utterly fucked up our Intelligentsia has become.

If you had read my comments more carefully, you would know I live in Gilbert, Arizona. I do not live on oceanfront, I do not have pure foundation, I am on a slab. I am 6 in below the 100-year flood plain risk as assessed by FEMA. Gilbert is in the desert, what we think of is the valley but is truly a basin. The flooding would be caused by a failure or inadequate drainage and an exceptional monsoon/ thunderstorm, probably several in rapid succession., they have standards, they've done their engineering. Not alone, a great deal of my neighborhood is also in this 100-year floodplain risk. We've been grandfathered in so for the first few years premiums were not horrible, but of course we are paying full price now. It is more expensive than my hazard insurance. And of course, it includes some subsidy towards the flood benefits that would be paid to those who do not have insurance and yet have serious need. If I were to have a loss due to flood, this would be a payout, because I'm paying premiums. If you understand insurance, you know what that means. FEMA is better known for their relief, this is money which is paid to people who are in need, who probably did not pay any money into any fund or any insurance that would have covered the loss that they suffered. Let me try this one more time just so that you get it. This was determined by FEMA due to a survey that they conducted about 10 years ago, and a change in their standards, probably due to the unexpected losses that they suffered around that time. I don't live on the ocean. I don't live on the shore. I don't live near your River or a lake or a stream. A flood for me would be rainwater and inadequate drainage to handle the amount that would come, perhaps in 100 years. For what it's worth, there's no history of such rainfall in this area for more than 100 years, but who can predict the future. Please forgive my typos, I'm dictating this to my phone. If you're unsure about the details of my situation that I'm describing, go back and reread my first comment about this. And remember that we started out talking about people in coastal zones who have a clear and present risk of flooding on a regular basis. Perhaps as often as several times a year. And FEMA somehow can take care of them. Sometimes with delay. What they're doing in West Virginia? I have no idea, but from what I've seen of reports even as recent as last month, not very much. And in New York. It happens.

There's nothing stopping you doing NAT6 either.

In fact, I do, but that's because my ISP is incompetent and IPV6 doesn't work properly (lots of other things don't work properly either, including DNS where I have to talk to a (remote) DNS server on a non-standard port to do DNSSEC[1]).

The nice thing about IPV6-IPV6 NAT if you're using it as a poor mans firewall is that you can do 1:1 address mapping, which also makes debugging issues easier and forwarding things you do want to allow trivial too, no more only one machine can listen on port 443 and you have to use a reverse proxy.

[1] I suspect that DNS does work if you make the router the (IPV4) DNS server but I've not checked that extensively. IPV6 dns doesn't work properly even if you use the ISPs advertised DNS servers.

Agreed, although egress filtering can be tricky if you're using SLAAC with privacy addresses and you want some clients to have external connectivity and not others unless you can partition them onto separate /64.

I use mac based tagging via an iptables firewall rather than have multiple SSID on the wlan.

But egress filtering is getting harder and harder anyway, everybody and his dog talks to something at amazon aws on port 443. So far, I've been able to use SNI inspection and there's been nothing using ESNI that I need to allow to connect, but once that becomes common for things like banking apps I guess the bad guys have won and it will be all but impossible to egress filter, you cannot even use DNS as they'll talk to DNS servers over HTTPS too.

In theory you should be able to MITM bit neither android nor apple make installing an ultimately trusted certificate easy (if it's possible at all)

Hell, it's even hard now to block all outgoing connections on android except via VPN. Always on VPN doesn't actually route everything via the VPN, it likes to chatter to google bypassing the VPN. And it "really doesn't like it" if it cannot confirm direct internet connectivity even though the VPN can connect. You used to be able to divert the connectivity check - which was on port 80, but that seems to be on port 443 with later versions of android and good luck importing a certificate so that you can fake google.com.

Wood framing is ubiquitous even in NoCal. Asphalt shingles likewise. Building with trees so close presents the primary threat. Clearance is necessary... I say this being a Maine native, and while forest fires in even lightly populated areas aren't common in Maine, California has pursued uniquely dangerous forestry practices for a long time. And the attraction of building in the woods I understand. It's just hazardous, especially when adjacent forests are managed so poorly. But cedar roofing certainly presents fire risks, and I'm guessing insurance premiums are reflecting that. Not a solution, just a response.

I genuinely do not know, did a lot of the homes in the Palisades area have flammable roofs? Given the nature of that particular Firestorm, and the one that impacted Malibu, it's unlikely that any fire prevention or effort to try to put anything out was going to work, but in the aftermath all I've heard from a distance is it. The state of California has expressed an interest in rebuilding it all with a different type of housing, but you can't get a permit to rebuild anything so far. Is that accurate?

Well, if my home is in fact flooded, I'm paying my premiums.

Hurricane flooding is so often seen in areas where the repetitive risk is well recognized. You are, I suspect, focused on those risks, and we agree that building on the coast between Key West and, say, Virginia Beach, riskier than doing so inland.

But hurricane flooding is not limited to those well recognized flood plains. FEMA also provides relief for other hazards, mere rainfall for instance, as is my root risk.

So much of West Virginia that was flooded due to unpredictable rainfall should not be rebuilt?

Only one example. Add in fire hazard, and would the Palisades area in California also , if FEMA provided relief, be designated a no-build zone?

"You just don't get to do it with other people's money."

So I pay my insurance premiums and it's 'other people's money'? All this time I thought hazard insurance on my home, be it private or FEMA, was my paying in so that, if a loss occurred, the insurer had the funds to pay the benefit...

"Don't buy in a flood zone. Don't build in a flood zone. Then you won't be affected."

I didn't. FEMA has decided, relatively recently, that there is a flood risk. The town and state actually disagree, but FEMA wins that argument.

Let me repeat, I bought when there was no flood risk assessed. And this is not coastal land, nor is it river or other water frontage. It wasn't recognized as a flood risk when I bought it.

"Good. If I am paying for it, which is what federal flood relief is"

We appear to disagree on what FEMA flood insurance payouts are. You say relief, I say payout. Care to further define why the payout for a FEMA flood insurance claim made on a policy in force is some form of 'relief'? I define it differently, I suspect...

From some personal knowledge, land at significant risk of flooding is not very valuable at all. The buyer will price insurance, and realize it costs more than the land is worth.

Dry land, yes, more valuable often than the structures on it. Wet land, not so much. Flood plain, too often negative value.

FEMA flood insurance isn't last resort. It is virtually the only option.

Ask your insurance agent.

I live in Gilbert, Arizona, I must have flood insurance because there is a 100 year risk that the drainage systems will fail to deal with 100 year exceptional rainfall(s), and my home foundation is 6 inches too low to escape that.

So, if perchance this happens, and the water is not drained away quickly enough, and my home is flooded, i should be prevented from rebuilding...?

This would similarly remove around 80 homes in the general vicinity. And overall in Gilbert Arizona (ARIZONA, folks) about 1500 homes. Due not to storm surge and ocean exposure, but most often due to poorly designed drainage provisions, or failed pumping systems, or a commercial development failing to pay for their own drainage and thereby exposing abutting property to unplanned and undisclosed drainage demands.

Coastal flooding losses, already, results in ruinous flood insurance premiums to rebuild, and sometimes no insurance coverage at all.

I may also point out that if I were to find my home flooded and severely damaged, it would not be relief so much as insurance benefits paid.. Because I am paying for it, and have for almost 10 years. And I expect to for many more years, as will whoever occupies my home when I'm gone. 'Relief' is interpreted as some grant or award. Insurance payouts are not 'relief' in that manner. Your solution is, perhaps, a marginal solution.