It was for a while. Then they stopped taxing the wealthy and opened loophole after loophole for corporations.
On a good day, the US is a developed country in decline.
its developed in certain portions of a country, while in most other areas its poorly developed.
In those certain portions people still need to be rich enough to be able to access healthcare and education.
“Are we sure America is a developed nation?” Well, if people die because they can’t afford health care, then NO
I’m old and have been through a lot of storms, including hurricanes, tornadoes, and even earthquakes. Power was always restored within a day. Five decades of storms, power always restored quickly.
A few years ago, where I live there was a minor storm. Some wind gusts, nothing hurricane level, heavy rain… power was out for us for five days. This wasn’t a storm of significance, nobody would take time off work for it. Tens of thousands of people without power.
There is something fundamentally wrong with US government today. I am in a state with Democratic control for decades, with some of the highest taxes in the nation.
My city’s “Democratic” city council refused to even vote for a moratorium on building AI datacenters in the city. Motion was made by one council member, didn’t even get a second.
Why’s he putting power steering fluid in the generator?
You ever try to steer a generator?
This is pretty hilarious actually lol
It is probably a repurposed container, lol.
It’s illegal in many places to transport or store gas in an unapproved container.
I’m sure the dude on day 11 without power gives a shit. I get why you’re not supposed to, but anyone who would try to prosecute this is a moron
Laws and regulations are written in blood.
I think most people would consider over a week and a half without power an extenuating circumstance, especially if no gas containers are readily available to purchase in his area (how many other people just ran out to buy one?) and nobody got hurt.
There’s never an ‘extenuating circumstance’ when it comes to breaking the law.
… I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.
have you ever stepped out of your apartment?
Some people will even remove the tags from their mattress! 😱
That’s fine as long as you’re not reselling them in that state.
I’m actually an upholsterer
and I’m obligated by law to put those tags on anything I make.I do not have any of those tags and have never done. I worked at a place that got inspected 3 times in the 20 years I worked there to make sure we were putting those tags on things. We had a box of tags and I blew the dust off them every time they showed up.I just looked at the law and in Ontario at least, it hasn’t been a thing since 2001 lol. At the place I used to work we reupholstered rollercoasters (it had its ups and downs) and we were regulated by the TSSA, apparently, which was different from the Stuffed Articles Act which is old news.
That was fun, I learned things!
Legal deez nuts
Infairness, natural disasters will fuck up any developed nation, but you’ll see huge differences in the way their peoples and governments respond.
But it certainly brings out the worst in people. For example, in Japan, I think our government responds fairly well to natural disasters and our infrastructure has been built a little better to withstand them. But social media is rife with fake news about foreigners looting in the aftermath.
One of the issues with living in a deeply racist society such as the US or Japan is that when a crisis happens and people in that society see images of minorities or foreigners suffering they immediately codify that as a violent threat.
A bunch of black people after Hurricane Katrina getting food from a store was immediately codified as “looting” even though we are talking about a life or death situation where of course people should take the food and figure it out later…
This is a massive liability as any severe injury to society from a disaster must be carefully mediated in the imagery diseminated about it or the society will become violently obsessed with hurting the people who are already suffering… which is the precise opposite of resilience.
What is occurring in Indiana and elsewhere now is a new Civil War which is most of the time not fought with guns but with disaster aid denied for political reasons or just from pure uncaring incompetence.
Well, our governor called for SCOTUS to overturn Loving v Virginia, so old-school racism is still a valid reason.
Within less than 2 years my town in GA was hit with 2 tornados and a hurricane. Parts of infrastructure were completely destroyed and power crews from states away came to assist. Even with that many people working nearly around the clock, I personally was still without power for for 5-7 days at a time.
Actually… in their defense, some towns were completely wiped out by floods, it’s quite a massive “once in a lifetime” storms we’ve been getting thanks to climate change. I’ve a friend in Indiana that works for insurance as a mold specialist, he was out quite a bit last week and had to go to sites in a boat.
That said, you want a real target to shit on? He told me the company isn’t honoring almost any claims since most aren’t sold on real flood insurance (it’s not a place known to flooding). None the less, they’re soulless ghouls.
Edit: oh also, this probably goes without saying but the feds are barely doing shit about it.
That’s kind of surprising, since Indiana is one of the “good” red states. If they’re not getting helped, no one will.
https://www.censusdots.com/race/gary-in-demographics
I’ll give you 3 guesses why they aren’t getting help.
I think the insurance screwing people over is much more common than the government needing more than a week to fix power.
Nope. America has multiple nations, some of them developed, like Canada or Mexico, and some of them undeveloped, like the US.
In the past, crews from Canada would go down to the US and help restore power when there’s disasters. I wonder if that still happens?
Similar happened around Pittsburgh PA about a year ago. Storms came through and took out tons of power lines leaving people without power for well over a week. The “local” utility was impacted way more than surrounding utility providers due to years of underinvestment in infrastructure maintenance despite regularly raising rates. Turns out that’s what happens when it’s majority owned by overseas sovereign wealth funds (in this case mostly Singapore). When line must go up, maintenance becomes just a cost to be deferred. Good news is there was a ton of blowback and things have gotten better. The state PUC opened an investigation and have prohibited rate increase requests for multiple years at this point. We have had more short flickers but a lot less actual outages so maybe they really have learned a lesson? (Not holding my breath on that one)
“We strongly disagree with the characterization of Nipsco’s vegetation management practices,” the company said. “Nipsco’s vegetation management spend has more than doubled since 2016, demonstrating our commitment and focus on maintaining a safe and reliable electric system”.
And yet here we are, Nipsco. Maybe they doubled the spend to $8.
I used to live in a remote part of Australia and the longest we went was 8 days because we were cut of fby flooding, apart from helicopter. Repairs were under way fast when the water receeded. But apart from that, there’s huge investment in maintenance and repair because of laws enforcing it. Companies will get fined big time if they slip below the government’s requirements to operate as a utility provider.
this sounds like pg&E in cali.
no, he’s using a petrol generator
the occasional time we lose power during storms here in Australia, day or two at most fir me, I plug into my EV using V2L. Runs the refrigeration, Internet, couple lights, USB charging etc
No, it runs on power steering fluid
I’m not generally a fan of EVs, but that’s a great use case for it admittedly.
Fuck, 11 days is rough. Worst I ever had was 1 and a half day like 2 years ago and it showed me how difficult this is. Cannot imagine a whole week of that, let alone 11 days, probably still counting.
Hey guys. You can stop it. But it’s not gonna be by asking nicely. (Or asking in a stern voice either)
Jim Halpert: [after he’s been given a demerit] Like, what does a demerit mean?
Dwight Schrute: Let’s put it this way. You do not want to receive three of those.
Jim Halpert: Lay it on me.
Dwight Schrute: Three demerits, and you’ll receive a citation.
Jim Halpert: Now, that sounds serious.
Dwight Schrute: Oh, it is serious. Five citations, and you’re looking at a violation. Four of those, and you’ll receive a verbal warning. Keep it up, and you’re looking at a written warning. Two of those, that will land you in a world of hurt, in the form of a disciplinary review, written up by me, and placed on the desk of my immediate superior.
Jim Halpert: Which would be me.
Dwight Schrute: That is correct.
Jim Halpert: Okay. I want a copy on my desk by the end of the day or you will receive a full dis-adulation.
Dwight Schrute: What’s a dis… What’s that?
Jim Halpert: Oh, you don’t want to know.
I remember an ice storm from when I was a kid, maybe 30 years ago, that left us without power for what might have been 3-7 days. We were lucky in that my stepfather had the money to get a generator, so we could keep the food cold, and plug in heaters and such. I don’t remember much of it, just things like showering by candle light and such. We lived in a decently sized city, where this sort of extended outage was unheard of.
In modern day, I’ve heard from people that live in the sticks, losing power for 1-2 weeks after bad summer storms. For them they just accept it.
Thanks mr Trump. You are doing a wonderful job destroying the USA
Ice Storm '98, Rural Ontario (North Gower) - 3 weeks without power, and since we were on a well and electric heat, no running water or heat.
Ontario invested in putting a lot of wires underground after that, I can tell you that modern life is far to dependent on the grid, and when that grid is above ground due to poor infrastructure development, it can take weeks to restore all of the downed lines. In our case, they even mobilised national guard to get things cleared up.
Canada and the US are both large, and the infrastructure funds are split up over large regions based on population. Cities have modern infrastructure that is more resilient, but much of the rural regions still rely on basic wooden poles and above ground wire that is easily compromised. When the governance for a larger region that encompasses both the larger cities and the rural regions wants to do large investment into the rural regions to even the energy and water security for folks, there is often a two edged sword pointed directly down their throat; one side sharpened by the city populations percentage of citizens who do not see or comprehend the world beyond their immediate sphere, and the other by the rich who have already invested in fixing the issue for themselves with power redundancy (because they can) and of course, their businesses (who the media would of course always talk about as though their businesses were “separate entities” from the affluent).
It took the Ice Storm of '98 for the funds to be invested into the solution in terms of putting more wires underground in Ontario, what will it take for the scales to tip for those in these affected states? What will it take for us to realise how broken these political systems are?
