Not that expensive. So long as you prepare for the natural disasters ahead of building, you save a shitload of money from the rebuild and loss of life.
Sure, but it's short term thinking in action; the up-front cost is now, the disaster is sometime in the indefinite future.
Which is why it's the sort of thing that has to be mandated by law (like in that article I linked), or a lot of people simply won't do it. Humans are just too prone to short term thinking to expect anything else.
Apart from the inevitable corruption, there's the issue that a poor family or a poor country may not be
able to afford the up-front expenditure that would be required,
in much the same way that a poor man might buy cheap ten-dollar boots that last him about a year, while a rich man buys expensive fifty-dollar boots that last him ten years, and thus spends less money on boots over that ten-year period - the poor man
cannot afford to spend fifty dollars on a pair of boots, he needs to be able to eat, make rent, and pay other bills, along with wasting some on alcohol to help him deal with how much his dead-end job sucks (and even if he wasn't wasting it on alcohol and other vices, the savings often wouldn't be enough to
really help, because he just doesn't make that much).
A poor country has similar problems, on top of the aforementioned corruption: they only have so much money, they only get so much foreign aid, and even if none of the foreign aid gets grafted onto some bureaucrat's or politician's bank account, they have so
many things that they need to spend it on, that 'houses on stilts in flood-prone areas' might still be missed.
I felt the same way on that line, but Clark's last line has pretty much the same tone.
'We can't teach you if you won't listen.' isn't really the response you give after-the-fact to a situation in which your group was explicitly in the wrong.
Nabu being accepted into the justice league wasn't a situation that OL needed to be 'taught' about, it was something they were doing that was wrong. If he'd approached them then they could have tried to justify it to him, but they couldn't have just 'answered his questions' because he'd have still had to go out and solve the problem.
It's rather unfortunate that OL couldn't tell him that, but OL can't teach Superman if
he won't listen.
Part of the problem is that Superman's World of Cardboard speech from Justice League Unlimited is really true for most versions of him, and this affects how he thinks and behaves, much like Hagrid's great size, strength, and durability affect how he sees 'interesting' creatures. Kal-El is a lot smarter than Hagrid, but he does have similar blind-spots, which can trip him up. He's so powerful that very few beings can threaten him enough to put him in a 'kill or be killed' situation, because he can nearly always find another option. It may well be that this Kal-El has
always been able to find another option, outside of situations where someone like Paul decided to cut the Gordian Knot.
There's also the rather important point that Kal-El is not a utilitarian (which OL is), and even if he were, he seems to assign a significantly greater value to sapient life than Paul does, while Paul seems to assign a greater value to individual freedom and happiness than Superman does, at least when the individual is someone Paul is emotionally close to. As we've seen, if the only way to free a slave is to kill the enslaver, Superman will keep looking for another option possibly forever (but doesn't have a lot of time to expend on it, which doesn't help), while Paul will give the slaver every chance to surrender, and go for the kill once it's clear that other options won't work. Both are insane from a modern Western perspective, but in different ways and for different reasons.
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