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DirectNIC Crisis Manager Braves the Chaos of New Orleans
Aleks Clark writes "The Interdictor, a DirectNIC crisis manager, is currently braving the madness of post-Katrina New Orleans. Server rescues, OC4 repairs and live video and audio feeds abound as he and his crew battle the odds with what seems like the entire internet at his back. 1700+ People are tracking his blog, and IRC channels are full to capacity."
...until you realize how many people are using blogs and other internet services as their only means of communication.
Tim
Your worst team meeting, software development project or vacation gone wrong is 1/1,000,000 as complex as what the relief personnel are handling. You may have been thwarted by snow on the road, delayed flights, crashing computers, lost data, wrong cellphone numbers or ill coworkers; these guys are dealing with non-existant roads, riots, gun shots, power loss and starvation. This is spread across 50,000 square miles of cities turned lakes. None of us can possibly fathom the details evacuating 60,000 people must be, tending to their transportation and health through an almost literal warzone.
We may know it's complex, but unless we're intimitely involved we cannot accurately critique the relief efforts. It'd be comparable to Brian Williams analyzing the Linux kernel structure, or attempting to explain fighter tactics. Without first-hand knowledge, opinions on sophisticated matters are worthless. As slashdotters who regularly tear apart the mass media on technical inaccuracies, we all should know this well
http://americablog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/gu itar-710427.jpg
Pictures of bodies floating by are currently on the front page of the New York Times.
I posted the following quote on the previous article, with no conclusions, but it was modded down by people who dislike facts they disagree with. Additionally there's more information now and I am posting a link to the original article from editor and publisher:
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, in the Times-Picayune
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/artic le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313
The above article also details what cuts were done by Bush to the SELA grants (for levees in New Orleans), which, by the way, were started and funded in 1995.
Additionally it appears that Louisiana should have been "high on the list of FEMA's biggest disaster mitigation grant program" but received nothing. Here's the article that states this: http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-09-2 8/cover_story2.html
Now, as before, mod this post into oblivion so that you don't have to see Bush smiling and playing the guitar yesterday while bodies float around. I'm not sure what disgusts me more -- him doing that, or people closing their eyes to truth.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
He's not talking about food. Or maybe he is. In any event, here is an example:
A hurricane comes through. Houses are destroyed. People come in to rebuild knowing that they will get rich. Governor sets a price cap. Builders know that they can go elsewhere and get better profits with less hastle, so they leave.
The people who come into an area to rebuild need an economic incentive. If you want to remove that incentive, fine. But then you have to mandate that people rebuild regardless of their wishes.
Unless you are going to have government contracts to rebuild things, you can't remove free market incentives.
Now, things like food, clothing, tents should be provided, free of charge, by the government. No if's ands or buts. We spend millions to provide MREs to Africa/Asia; spending billions on our own people shouldn't be a problem.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Merchandise sitting on shelves (and gas sitting in storage tanks!) does not magically cost the business 3x more.
No, but the merchandise they have to buy to replace that merchandise does.
If a business can't make enough on the merchandise on their shelves to purchase replacements, they go out of business.
Price controls are counter-productive.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
About the fact that this was a relatively minor disaster that was experienced and this was how an entire country, the (arguably) richest in the world both in terms of economy and innovation was able to deal with it?
What if we had a larger disaster on our hands such as price/rarity of gas skyrocketing to the point where farmed goods can no longer be delivered in quantity to major metropolitain areas?
As far as the crime situation goes, I can "understand" the looting and mugging, but why the raping? What racial/moral justification is there for that?
I dropped my donation off at the Red Cross for a lack of anything better to do in order to help. My respect goes out to the people risking their ass to get aid to that place.
Maybe I sound tin foil hattish but prior to this hurricane footage, all i was really expecting to see post-hurricane was generic flood photos and cheesy clips of people grabbing TVs from shop windows, not stories of cops siphoning gas from cars for their patrol vehicles and stealing ammo from stores before other people do while "rape gangs" walk around.
Truly a sad day for the human race. Maybe we'll look back on how *we* behaved when we look at other countries and remark about how "uncivilized" they are in the future.
Let's pretend that I own a gas station with a 10,000 gallons of capacity in my underground tanks.
Decision time.
Option one:
I keep the price of my gas at $1.25 until I run out. I lose no money because that gas is already bought and paid for. At the bottom of my tank I find that I have raked in $12,500 - before paying any other expenses such as insurance, electricity, employee salaries and benefits, taxes and so on. Figuring my two cent/gallon profit I have earned $200 for myself.
But wait! I now need to replace 10,000 gallons of gas which will now cost me $25,000. Even assuming I had free utilities, labor and overhead my last storage tank fillup would only allow me to buy 5,000 gallons of gas. A couple more price hikes and I'll be out of business and nobody will be able to buy gas from me because I'll be closed.
Option two:
I jack the prices up to match what I expect my next delivery will cost so I can keep the tanks full and stay in business. Unfortunately, no matter what I charge I'll never make more than two cents/gallon profit - and that doesn't count all of the people who feel entitled to rip me off because I'm "gouging". Or don't come in and buy my fountain drinks and candy bars which is where 80% of my profits come from.
Yes, I could refrain from "gouging" but a quick failure of the business is a definite certainty.
Anti-gouging laws are one of the sillier things ever supplied by pandering politicians to stupid, demanding citizens. During normal times I can charge $15,000 for a generator and nobody will care because they'll go to Home Depot and buy one for $700. I would be in violation of the law but nobody would care because nobody wants to buy generators. But when the disaster strikes and everybody sells out of $700 generators (which are covered with dust because they sat on the shelves for 2 1/2 years because nobody thought that the designation "hurricane zone" actually meant something") and they see my stock of $15,000 generators (covered in dust because in 10 years nobody except the government wanted to buy my generators at a price so far above market) and I would be the greatest villian in the history of mankind, even if I -lowered- my price from $15,000 to $14,000.
Then you have a shortage. In times of normalcy 100 people are willing to buy a generator at $700 and everybody who wants one gets one. In time of natural disaster 50,000 people want a generator at $700 and 49,999 people are SOL because the first person in line buys all of them then sells all 100 out of the back of his truck for $2,000 each. Just because the government says that generators are only worth $700 doesn't mean that that is what they will be sold for.
No, but it is what prevents our economy from looking like Cuba (no food is available), Russia (no heating fuel is available) or Canada (9 months of waiting for a mammogram).
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
This is why I think we need to take a deeper look at ourselves:
1: We knew Katrina was coming...
2: We knew it was big...really huge and as such, the damage would be enormous...
3: We knew that some residents would not beat the time required to vacate Louisiana, may be because of complacency or the traffic mess...
4: We had numbers of those who had managed to escape. We even knew where they were to be found...
5: We even knew the geography of New Orleans, so we could know where to go and how to get there...
6: We knew much more via satellites...since we take ourselves as being the most advanced country on earth...!
But...
1: There was 100% chaos in Louisiana...
2: ...because we seem to have been caught off guard...!
3: Dead bodies lying on the streets?
4: Desperate people walking in s**t?
5: Looting as if this is Somalia?
6: Despite all this, we have politicians ranting up their rhetoric...heck...folks are dying...all you hear is "we are doing all we can..." And this is AMERICA the great? Can some one tell me how a similar catastrophe would be any different in a third world country?
Looting for food and water, maybe beating somebody up that went wacko all of a sudden (posing a risk for you and the people around), maybe I can see, but what justification can you give for, "Whoops! All hell is breaking loose, water's everywhere, I gots to get my freak on!"
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
It was interesting to see in that blog that what I've heard elsewhere is confirmed: Police are doing much of the looting.
Ok, let's be clear about this, because both your and the blog's statements are pretty inflammatory and not accurate.
In a declared emergency, the police are allowed and in fact in some cases even required to commandeer what they see fit to maintain order and public safety. That does include guns and food. This is not "looting". The store owners are all reimbursed by the city and state later.
This happens all the time, but the one instance I can remember that was pretty heavily publicized was during that bank robbery and shootout in Los Angeles a while back, where the police were so outgunned that they went to a gun store during the gunfight and picked it clean. This is part of their duty; they have the authority and responsibility to commandeer items required to do their job during a public emergency.
It's really no different than a firefighter breaking somebody's door down during a fire. I mean, are they breaking and entering? Do you have them arrested for tresspassing? Obviously not - they're doing what they need to do to get the job done, and they're legally allowed to do it.
I think it's actually pretty tasteless for this guy to write something like "who knows what their real motives are?"... I mean, these are the guys out there in the direct line of fire trying to protect and feed a whole lot of innocent people who haven't eaten or drunk anything in 3 or 4 days. They're getting shot at (and hit) by street thugs for no reason, and they're doing their best to restore order in a clear vacuum of leadership and without nearly enough manpower.
The levy that broke WAS upgraded to withstand the cat4 hurricanes.
And the project to upgrade the levys has been going since 1965! This is not the federal governments fault. If the dam levy is so important to people in New Orleans, have them come up with the money to fix it themselves!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
These people are, for the most part, poor folks who had no means to escape town last Sunday when the warning went out. No car. No money to put themselves up in a motel outside of town. The rich white people got the hell out, leaving the poor behind to drown.
Look at the news reports. Most of the faces are black and poor. Instead of being able to escape this shitstorm, they had to resort to being crammed into the Superdome, enduring overflowing stinking toilets, stifling heat, and the goddamn roof ripping off during one of the worst hurricanes this country has ever seen. These people are tired, scared, recently homeless, and very desperate. I'm sure they'd rather be anyplace but the festering bowl of sewage that New Orleans has become in the last couple of days.
Don't you dare make the inference that all 50,000+ of these people are merely stubborn stalwarts or hooligans bent on raising a ruckus now that the rule of law has broken down. While I condemn the reported rapes and other assorted outbreaks of lawlessness (reports of which I'm sure are being overhyped as usual by a racist mainstream media), most of these people are just desperately poor people who are scared at the prospect of what will happen to them in the next 24-48 hours. Put your critical thinking cap on, buddy, it's not like everyone there has turned into a murderous rapist. If you believe that, you're as racist as those peddling that "information."
Disaster stockpiles don't seem to have been in place in New Orleans, even for the cheap stuff. A shipping container of water purification tablets would have been a huge help. Nobody seems to have thought to equip the Superdome, the designated disaster assembly point, with some basic water purification gear.
Congress and the voters need to ask some hard questions about where all that money goes and whether it's being spent properly.
Hate to push you off of your high horse, but how exactly are we to show compassion towards someone committing rape?
Of course you don't show compassion toward that person, considered in isolation.
And yet I have been reading many characterizations of this hurricane's victims as being all looters and rapists, who deserve no sympathy and who should be fired on from helicopters. As if everyone in the city had all gathered in the Superdome and voted for the raping to begin.
Some percentage of the population can't behave themselves even when there is rule of law. Eventually they end up in jail.
An additional percentage of the population will behave, because they don't want to go to jail. When anarchy breaks out, the rule of law is gone, and the cops have no gasoline, bullets, or effective authority, these are the people who run around raping and looting and causing trouble. If they were members of the first group they'd be in jail and you wouldn't see them. When the cops are able to do their jobs, they behave. You meet some of them every day and don't realize it.
Don't be tempted to characterize the entire population by the actions of this group when order breaks down. The media isn't helping, and is conflating them with the "good people" who lift items like toothpaste and bottled water, if they can justify taking it enough to satisfy their consciences. From a helicopter they all look the same.
But the latent troublemakers are just reflecting a facet of human nature- these people exist in all cultures. We saw the same thing happen in Baghdad two years ago, remember? Do you recall the puzzlement? Everyone wondering why are the Iraqis destroying their own country? Not all of them were- the ones that did were the ones that we noticed. Entire populations don't just all just get together and decide to misbehave. You, as an observer, need to be mindful of your own tendency to generalize. Especially now.