Most excellent article in Slate about New Orleans.

…The river system’s inexorable downstream current swept cotton, grain, sugar, and an array of other commodities to New Orleans’ door. Because of the region’s geography and topography, many 19th-century observers believed that God-working through nature, His favorite medium-would see to it that anyone shrewd enough to build and live in New Orleans would be made rich.

… But it also brought water, wind, and pathogens, elements of a fickle environment that in the past as now turned cruelly chaotic.

Geographers refer to this as the difference between a city’s “situation”-the advantages its location offers relative to other cities-and its “site”-the actual real estate it occupies. New Orleans has a near-perfect situation and an almost unimaginably bad site.

Curiously that is directly analogous to my model of Microsoft Windows.