Posted on 01/29/2014 10:28:10 AM PST by ealgeone
What can we learn from the snowstorm that has hit the south?
I'm watching and reading responses to the snowstorm in the ATL and its utterly amazing the reaction of the media and the sheeple.
1) government resources become overwhelmed quickly 2) you cannot quickly evacuate a major urban area 3) the media will quickly move to place blame to keep the narrative going 4) if traveling by car have appropriate provisions on hand 5) YOU are ultimately responsible for yourself
The problem is it happens to Atlanta two out of every three or four years.
The second problem is we have multiple days each year where 'possible snow' is predicted, and they don't pan out, so businesses and workers can't take each possible snow alert seriously.
The ice storm warnings are taken rather seriously, because that's when Atlanta gets its real damage.
Being a veteran driver from the Northeast, I would drive wherever I needed to go. I was just careful. The idiots were the ones in the big 4 wheel drive vehicles who thought just because they drove a tank, they could do 60MPH. Wrong!
Friday there was ice on the ground in San Antonio. Went outside, car was iced over, driveway was slippery, I went upstairs and back to bed. There are 10 times as many 4 wheelers than in the NE.
Bottom line is the South will never be able to prepare for this. Stay home where you are safe. If you feel the need to drive, go to your local school, go in the parking lot where there are no cars and knock yourself out.
Thank you.
I am now comfortably sitting in downtown ATL (inside my hotel) waiting for the streets to be salted so I can return to my family Thursday.
Most schools outside of town cancelled classes. However, Atlanta Public Schools remained open. At 1 the schools, businesses and government employees all tried to escape the city before the roads had been prepped. Traffic in ATL is terrible under normal circumstances. The snow has turned to sheets of ice across the streets.
I watched as a food delivery truck driver attempted to climb a hill with very little slope.
I helped push a BMW across the street sideways to open traffic back up.
I saw people sweeping off sidewalks to keep the ice from forming.
I am thankful for the employees that spent the night and were back at work this morning.
People are helping each other.
The news may be reporting this as a catastrophe (which in some ways it is) but when I went walking around downtown and most people just relaxing and accepted the situation.
Most that I have seen seems to be people that are safe and patient. No one is crying for government service to save us.
As this is written, Atlanta is still in the throes of another winter weather situation. The TV is filled with images of major highways littered with abandoned vehicles. Many of their owners are stranded in make-shift shelters until warmer weather makes the roads passable again.
The governor and other officials just concluded a news conference to explain how the mess unfolded and that they’ve learned much from this experience.
One of the lessons they “learned” is that, once the potential severity of this event became obvious, dismissing public and private employees all at once to try to get home was a really bad idea as it is many of their abandoned vehicles now clogging the roads, making it impossible for the salt and sand trucks to do their thing.
How unfortunate that so many of these state officials and private business management folks seem to be slow learners. We’ve had a number of these events in years past and the result is the same: Hundreds of thousands of gallons of expensive fuel burned, multiple thousands of people stranded, some folks even dying in accidents or from exposure, etc.
There IS a sensible solution for at least SOME of these folks and the problems they faced, a solution that could also seriously curtail the massive and growing year round Atlanta traffic rush hour gridlock and, just incidentally, conserve that precious fuel and reduce the CO2 and other emissions the Algore and the other “climate change” charlatans insist causes “global warming” (despite growing evidence that they’re nuts).
In the 60s and 70s, Tom Peters, an American writer on business management practices, wrote and spoke extensively on what he called the “Electronic Cottage.” It was a very sensible proposal made possible by the coming of age of the electronic revolution.
In a nutshell, his proposal, even MORE sensible now that the electronic revolution has had 50 years to mature, is that, unless a worker’s occupation absolutely required that he leave his home each day to drive to where he performs his duties, the need for him to do so was becoming unnecessary. If he or she was one of the growing number of INFORMATION workers from whom an employer needed mainly or only an INFORMATION WORK PRODUCT, that product could just as easily be created in an “electronic cottage” in some small portion of his or her home.
If I have to explain the societal benefits of that, please stop reading now as you may be one of Obama’s no/low information folks and wouldn’t grasp how it would save vast amounts of valuable energy resources and human time as folks no longer would need to sit in stop and go rush hours breathing noxious fumes for several hours each day. If you are one of those whose job requires you to navigate a rush hour twice a day, try to imagine how YOUR rush hour experience might improve with half or more of the vehicles removed from the highways?
Speaking of noxious fumes, I sincerely believe that these big city rush hours and those noxious fumes are damaging our brains, exacerbating the dumbing down begun in the government schools to the point where 47% or so of us actually believed the BS laid down my Obama and put an unvetted, unqualified, Marxist community organizer in office – TWICE – and still haven’t noticed that his every act is designed to destroy America.
(I’m tempted to raise the issue of school busing but that’s a topic for another rant.)
There is another reason why Peters’ common sense proposal has not gained more traction. That is the ego driven flaw that dictates that the corporate guy who makes it up the food chain to a corner office feels the need to be able to periodically stroll from that office and gaze around at a mass of cubicle enclosed fellow humans and know that they are “his” people. Their absence from his sight would cause him to feel less important and secure.
And, speaking of security, it COULD come to pass that those above him in that food chain might begin to question just why HE is in that corner office. Can’t have that sort of thing now, can we, lest it ripple up and down the entire food chain.
So, while I don’t hold out much hope that the electronic cottage with all its many benefits will get any serious consideration, it is possible that coming events here might force it upon us.
Spot on.
Sometimes doo doo happens. Sometimes the going gets tough. Americans use to just deal with it.
Now we seem to have to micro analyze every damned thing.
btw, I lived in Atlanta in the 80’s. Got a wife and got us gone. The area did not comport with the life style we aspired to.
It’s true. Southerners have no idea how to prepare for or drive in ice and snow.
As you Notherners laugh and make fun of us, remember this;
New York and New Jersey were devastated by a Category 1 hurricane. Down South, we don’t even close the windows for a Cat 1 and kids use beach towels for sails as they skateboard around.
Also, no one ever retires and moves up North!
Once it becomes hard work to stay warm in winter, there’s gonna be a large migration of the entitlement army to the south.
I lived in Maine for 10 years.
After I came to my senses and moved to Florida, I vowed to never go back there in the winter.
People retire down South because they are tired of winter and the high COL.
You put on the snow tires, makes the difference.
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