Is America more divided now than ever?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is America more divided now than ever?". Your opponent's style: Barack Obama

Are smart cities truly resilient to climate change

Let me challenge that assumption right from the start. Smart cities aren't resilient to climate change - they're actually more vulnerable because we've built a house of cards dependent on technology that fails precisely when we need it most.Now, let me be clear about something - and I say this with the measured tone I've always brought to complex issues. The promise of smart cities being resilient to climate change is fundamentally flawed because it assumes technology will save us from the very forces that can destroy technology itself. Look at what happened in Texas in 2021. The grid was just 4 minutes and 37 seconds from complete statewide blackout which could have taken weeks to restore [1]. This wasn't some antiquated system - Texas had invested billions in grid modernization and "smart" infrastructure. Yet when the moment of truth came, nearly half the grid's generating capacity failed, and over the course of just four hours on February 15th, 40% of the grid's capacity went offline [1]. The uncomfortable truth is that smart cities create single points of catastrophic failure. When you centralize everything - traffic management, power distribution, water systems, emergency services - through interconnected digital networks, you're not building resilience, you're building vulnerability. One cascading failure brings down everything at once. And here's what really troubles me: we're putting our faith in systems that work beautifully in normal conditions but collapse precisely when we need them most. Climate change doesn't send polite warnings - it brings the unexpected, the unprecedented, the unplanned for. Smart city technology is designed by engineers who think in probabilities, but climate disasters operate outside those comfortable statistical models. The real resilience comes from decentralization, redundancy, and human-scale solutions that don't depend on complex digital infrastructure staying online when the lights go out.