Tone down your brightness then? I use heavily customized dark themes absolutely everywhere, and my screen is hardly brighter than dirt. I have no problem looking at it for 30+ hours straight (though I don't do this anymore for other reasons.)
American here, and we say this about our own cities, an example of which is New Orleans. While I understand your emotional plea, the vast majority of people who do not own homes on a disaster zone do not wish to subsidize those who do. Not everyone is keen to throw endless money down a golden toilet.
I disagree, that might be true for USA, but there are many other examples where the vast majority of the population does in fact subsidize intervention in less fortunate areas. Take the Netherlands for example, the struggle against water has been a collective, charitable effort for centuries, and finally harmonized at the state level: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Publ...
Not everything needs to be done in the name of individual profit.
As a side note, using the term "golden toilet" for New Orleans, or Venice, or pretty much any other City in a difficult situation, doesn't certainly convey empathy as my initial comment wanted to point out.
You don’t live in a disaster zone until you do. I’m sure you think you would have had the foresight to see that this was coming a decade ago, but I sincerely doubt you did. Hindsight is 20/20.
The message you replied to may be facetious, but it makes a fair point. There is too much emphasis on alleviating the suffering of people who probably shouldn't exist in the first place.
In the 90s in Ethiopia there was a famine caused by drought, lack of development and especially over-population. Affluent countries gave tonnes of food aid and reduced the size of the catastrophe.
Soon afterwards, the population of Ethiopia exploded. As a collective they had learnt nothing about the danger of over-population.
In India, there's also a lack of social awareness about the impact humans have on the environment - but the issue isn't famine. Rather, the huge population is bolstered by developments such as modern farming techniques that produce food of dubious quality.
Generally, humans (in the third world in particular) are like most species in that their populations increase to the limit of what development and the environment supports. Sudden environmental changes and rapid, careless development bring suffering to many of the extra millions that exist.
And when suffering occurs, never does anyone of influence say that perhaps humans should stop breeding like rabbits and that perhaps a catastrophe is nature's way of telling us that.
Instead, with every catastrophe we hear pontificating about how terrible it is, and often foreign entities will rush to give aid and thereby reinforce the irresponsible collective behaviour of the societies that are suffering.
Does that sound heartless? It's not quite so heartless as how suffering individuals are treated by their own societies. When a society is mal-developed and contains hundreds of millions, the suffering of an individual is negligible to the whole. In these circumstances it is likely that only mass suffering will cause reflection and change.
Suffering societies need to learn from tragedies and take collective responsibility by reducing their population numbers and valuing the lives of their members.
