🤗🩶💛🧡🤎🤍🫂💙💜🩷🩵💗💚🤗*Do you think that is really true?*& Good Thursday Morning to You!*& I hope you have a wonderful day!🤗🤍💙💜🩷🩵🫂💗💚💛🧡🤗
💔💁♀️*Oh Dear!*PEOPLE ARE SO NARROW MINDED!*& MEAN!*I GUESS THEY DON'T GET "YOU DON'T LOVE GOD IF YOU DON'T LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR!"🤗🫂🤗
Well. I probably spoke too soon then.
@FeralRobots @futurebird The Texas Department of Emergency Management has a daily weather call. They knew rains were going to be very heavy three days before the flooding. They communicated that to localities in a timely manner - what the localities did with that warning is on them.
There are a lot of questions that should be asked of Kerr County leadership over the past 20 years for their decisions to not implement an effective flood warning system and their response to TDEM's flood warning ("Let's just sit on this money because spending it would make Biden look good")
"Nobody could have predicted..." is bullshit. The responsible state organization predicted it and informed the counties giving them plenty of time to respond. Abbott is in full CYA mode running cover for Kerr County officials more interested in partisanship and power than running an effective government or saving Texans' lives.
@Okanogen @FeralRobots @futurebird It is reasonable to ask which officials knew what when and what they did with that information.
Also spending decisions for flood warning systems, especially when federal money was available. Did they take the opportunities they had to protect Texans and if not, why not?
@arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
It's not just reasonable it's what needs to be done after every disaster. How could this have been prevented? What will we do differently?
If those aren't on the table then the public is being asked to accept that "these things happen and nothing can be done" and the scrambling from some of the leadership says they care more about this not "sticking" to them than fixing anything.
To me it's very slick and inspires no trust. It's not leadership.
@CatDragon @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
It's insulting to tell people not to be angry. I go with my 5th grade students to a camp, and this has been giving me nightmares.
At least I won't get as much push back about my insistence that they keep their phones phones on them. next year I think. (taking phones is just lazy, I yell at them to put them away and they *learn* to be polite with technology)
@alwayscurious @CatDragon @arclight @FeralRobots
Yes. And it's how they learn when it's OK to use their phone.
Frankly if a kid is on a trip and wants to text mom or dad I think they should be able to without asking for their phone from some box?
And YES there are many activities where I don't want to see the phones at all, but kids old enough to have them can learn these rules. (and if they can't you talk to the parents about if they should have one, which has always worked.)
@futurebird @alwayscurious @CatDragon @arclight @FeralRobots
Exactly. The only thing you teach kids with a phone ban like this is to submit to authority.
If you want adults who understand when it is and when it isn't inappropriate to be on their phone, you can't just expect that knowledge to be automatically bestowed upon them from on high the moment they're out of school. It has to be taught and reinforced.
@futurebird @CatDragon @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots In the world we live in, it's horrifying that teachers would even consider taking a child's phone away from them.
No matter how much of a distraction it may be.
It's less bad than the alternative of being trapped in what's developing into a hostage situation with no way to communicate information to the outside or stranded without medical care during a natural disaster or trapped under rubble.
Not to mention the much more mundane needs of documenting abuses by other kids or authorities.
@dalias @CatDragon @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
There is a mentality that "we didn't have phones so kids don't need them"
But those cabins probably didn't have party lines, or pay phones. The world isn't set up for people who don't have a phone on their person anymore so taking them away isn't like setting the clock back.
And frankly it's just safer when you can communicate if you need to.
@futurebird @CatDragon @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots Even still, the "we didn't have..." mentality is survivorship bias bs.
Would they say "we didn't have seatbelts so kids don't need them"? Or "we didn't have polio vaccines so kids don't need them"??
@dalias @futurebird @CatDragon @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots I mean, there are a lot of people saying "we/our parents/our grandparents didn't have MMR/MMRV, so our kids shouldn't need them."
A lot of those people are in Texas. And their children are dying of measles.
@josh0 @dalias @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
This was once pretty typical. There are all these communication systems that don't exist any more since people use cellphones in their place.
@josh0 @futurebird @dalias @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
"build a party line" fun electronics project becomes "give kid in next room 9V DC shock by turning crank on phone" ... : )
@futurebird @dalias @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots deep sigh.
Well we didn’t have school shootings either did we?
@futurebird @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
I remember after Katrina, the GOP talking point was "Let's not play the blame game." Infuriating.
@futurebird @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
This was a thing in the South of France.
35-ish years ago, there were wide-scale floods, so every town in the South oof France built flood mitigation defences.
25 years ago, in Nimes, the town council were complaining about the constant maintenance bills for something "that we will never need..."
That year, they decided to ok the funding, but it was going to be reviewed next year.
1/2
@futurebird @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
That same summer, the whole of the South of France had the same levels of flooding, but Nimes was the only city that had kept their flood defences funded, and they were the only city in the region that hadn't been flooded. :D
Remember to include the upkeep costs, as well as the capital costs of construction.
This may be where the paranoia about the "strings attached to funding" is coming from.
2/2
@futurebird @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
Though it would probably have been better if they didn;t build on the floodplain in the first place... :D
@kevinriggle @futurebird @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
Like a lot of places in that part of France, it was built on reclaimed marsh land. :D
Lots of fertile soil in an arid area. :D
@apophis @FeralRobots @Okanogen @arclight @futurebird
I was visiting my ex-partner's family when the floods took place, and got some long lectures about the local politics in that part of France... :D .
I took one train from there to a different region of France, and everywhere else wsa flooded... :D
When they looked at the costs for the damage for everywhere else, it was way cheaper to pay the annual maintenance.
Just like insurance premiums. :D
@apophis @FeralRobots @Okanogen @arclight @futurebird
In that region of France, it became a textbook example of why you don't skimp in maintenance. :D
@BillySmith @futurebird @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
A less severe example was during the two winters with extreme snowfall in central Sweden in the mid 00s. All the trains got stuck because there wasn't a snow blower strong enough to clean the tracks.
It ended with the railway company having to wheel out the 1912(!) snow blower from a train museum. That old piece had no problems cleaning some 3-4 feet of snow.
Yes they commissioned one afterwards.
@arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
Real leadership is going after the problem with no regard for the impact on your political future. Just focusing on WHY and what could be changed.
I don't like to assume that people don't care, but when the puffery comes first? I start to wonder.
@Okanogen @futurebird @arclight @FeralRobots
It is hard to overstate how completely deranged some of these people sound. I'm only loosely paraphrasing here:
"It's a trap! If we take this free $5.1m it'll turn us trans and make us hate immigrants less, plus it's an insult to our Great and Glorious Leader Trump. Send it back!"
Commissioners explain it really *is* free money, no trap, and add, "And if we send it back it'll be reallocated to NY, NJ, or CA and we can't have that!"
@CStamp @arclight @Okanogen @FeralRobots
Is it unreasonable that I expect that somethings ought to make some kind of more selfless state of awareness kick in? Like "if I could have done anything to stop this I need to find it and change it?" rather than all of the political calculations?
Maybe. Probably.
@futurebird @Okanogen @FeralRobots One of the major reasons that we have seen so few nuclear accidents in the US since Three Mile Island is the cultural shift with the entire industry to make problem reporting easy and safe. It's one thing to tell people to put safery first, it's another to give them psychological safety and job protection to raise uncomfortable topics without adverse consequences. It's not perfect but is so much better than I've seen in other industries. You don't get a culture like that purely from regulation or edict - it needs to be tended, evaluated, and corrected when is goes astray.
This isn't a sales pitch; I think more people need to understand specifically our stated and practiced cultural norms. When you see the responses to this tragedy, how people behaved before and after the incident, compare the values shown by their culture to what we strive for in nuclear:
@arclight @futurebird @Okanogen @FeralRobots I feel this in my bones.
A culture that looks away, that puts consensus ahead of everything is how this stuff festers. Forcing out anyone who won't go along to get along.
Getting that type of culture to respect consequences, and not just "it won't every happen here" naive trust in probability. Or less than naive, just an unwillingness because our causes discomfort to admit vulnerability.
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