The Onion
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2021–2023
2:32 · 2.8M views · Jan 17, 2008
An Onion News Network satirical segment about a memorial dedicated to the future victims of a dam that officials know will fail. It is a dark joke about known infrastructure risk and inaction.
Invoked as a joke whenever a thread covers neglected infrastructure, failing dams, levees or foreseeable disasters.
5 comments from Hacker News
It will probably be the stuff "hidden" (it's really not, our eyes are just closed) behind many layers that will do us in on a major scale. While worrying about nuclear weapons and weaponized viruses, we're strip mining the planet dry, creating extremely resource consuming stuff just to throw it in a landfill every year, while at the same time pumping the atmosphere and soil full of shit that kills plant life and other animals. So, when this process inevitably leads to a catastrophic breakdown of the planet and human society, we'll be like "ah shit, all the signs were there, but we didn't do anything". We should preemptively build a memorial for all the human lives that will be lost: this video
yeah, dam failures are pretty spectacular. Maybe we're collectively cooler with them because 1) they've been part of our accepted collateral damages list longer (hundreds of years) and 2) because we know better where the fall out will be we put more marginalized people there? I would be really interested in looking at property values or something like that for regions in suspected dam burst zones and neighborhoods that are just outside them. on topic onion sketch this video
Predicting it now, "Worst oil spill in the Red Sea" as no one does anything. Seriously, reading about it is like living in the world of this Onion video: this video "This disaster will have been preventable. All of the warning signs are here, yet no one will have done anything about it." Indeed. Will be happy to be proven wrong.
> For decades it has been clear that the levee was vulnerable. [...] Despite the known dangers, needed repairs hadn’t been done. This reminds me a bit too much of the classic "Memorial Honors Victims of Imminent Dam Disaster" this video
> but it seems like every avenue of "you deserve it" is being explored on social media Trolls are still a thing, this is what they do Edit: As other comments are pointing out, poor planning is not unique to Texas [1] [1] this video