Another point that came to me is that many of these disasters seem to occur in 'third world' countries and are given a bit of superficial media coverage and then they (and our interest) moves on to the next headline grabber. When the disaster happens to occur in a developed country like NZ or Japan, they send in Kotchie and Carl Stephanovic and we get saturation coverage. The balance is all wrong.
Mark, I admire your sentiments but the reality is that the third world countries, and I'm thinking of Africa in particular, have told the skilled people, those people who can design earthquake proof infrastructure and repair same, too eff off. The self same countries demonise western technology and farming methods yet using their own indigenous farming methods cannot feed themselves and have a huge population growth rate. Take for example Ethiopia. Since Geldorfs well meaning attempts at alleviating the famine, I think, 1984 Ethiopias population has doubled and is now almost entirely dependent of western food aid. Yet they will happily criticise "western imperialism" in the UN.
SA used to have the most efficient electrical generating capacity and cheapest electricity in the world but the govt decided that the employment figures didn't match the racial demographics and fired/laid off all the white sparkies, techies and engineers. The result is that SA now has a serious shortfall of generating capacity.
Sorry mate, IMO, they bring their woes upon themselves.
