denis bider

In Indonesia, a country of 230 million people, they apparently "do not have expertise" to maintain a tsunami detection system which was put in place after the 2004 catastrophe:Locals were given no indication of the coming wave because an early-warning system put in place after the devastating 2004 tsunami has stopped working.

Fauzi, the head of Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysic Agency, told the Associated Press that the system began to malfunction last year, and was completely inoperative by last month.

"We do not have the expertise to monitor the buoys to function as intended," he said.There's just no excuse for this incompetence.

Over the course of 6 years, a country with a population of 230 million has been unable to acquire equipment and train people to run a crucial early warning system? After they received the help to put it in place from countries like Germany, China, France, and the US?

What a waste of help.

Every cent misplaced by helping people who…

According to the French legal system, the value of $7 billion is 3 years in jail. That's what Jerome Kerviel got for fraudulent trading which saddled Societe Generale with a $7 billion loss.

EPA's economic analysis estimates the value of a US human life at about $7 million.

The reason a life can be assigned a value is because it takes a certain amount of money in order to save a US life. If you have $14 million, you could use that in the US to save, most efficiently, about 2 human lives total. Or that's what EPA suggests.

The money wasted by Jerome Kerviel could, therefore, have been used to save 1,000 human lives.

So basically he wasted 1,000 human lives worth of money, and what he gets is 3 years in jail.

Of course the damage cannot be undone, regardless of whether the jail time is 3 years, or a lifetime, or if he is simply executed, like the Chinese would have done.

But money is about human lives. Economic damage is about human lives. A system which handles this sort of wrong…