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Georgia's New State Health Plan Is Google
theodp writes "In yet another case of life imitating Dilbert, the State of Georgia has issued a press release touting how helpful Google products will be in getting Georgians to go outdoors. According to the release and a follow-up Yo-State-So-Fat Official Google Blog post, this includes AdWords, Analytics, Maps, Earth, Picasa, Gadgets and a branded YouTube channel for the GO Georgia initiative 'We're thrilled that Google has joined us in the effort to help everyone in the state lead a healthier life,' said Sally Winchester, a manager for Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites. 'At Google, we are committed to helping our employees lead healthy lives,' added Maureen Schumacher, a Google regional sales director. 'We are very excited that Google products will be used as part of this effort to improve the health and well-being of all Georgians.'"
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I don't know about you but my guess is that Georgia's too busy sitting on their front porches proclaiming that people "git off ma property befo' I shoot yo ___".
Let's just say Steps 3 from 5 involve Google buying Georgia, rebranding the state Googlia (still GA), and eventually enslaving.... err.. emoploying the populace to work for the Google AI. Remember, the AI needs healthy people to carry out its will.
so what if it's shameless promotion? the important thing is that the georgia administration is going against the status quo and admitting there _is_ a problem. i hope this gives other states (particularly southern states) the courage to go forward with health initiatives. with 1/4 of its adult population considered obese (as of mid-late 2007 http://vaccine-ophobia.blogspot.com/2007/08/georgia-14th-in-ranking-of-adult.html), this will hopefully start opening eyes and turning heads
Wow, that summary reads like a dream of Ballmer's, except with Google instead of Microsoft being the indispensable tech partner.
I guess there's nothing to worry about, because Google is good, right?
Loose lips lose spit.
Sounds like Georgia wants some free hosting and free tools and will only have to pay a web integration salary instead of a developer ... why the hell not?
No wonder Microsoft is fighting so hard for their Office file format.
I wish they'd just drop the bullshit and come out and say "You want to turn into a lazy fatass and die an early death, that's your problem. Just don't pretend like it was anyone else's fault and don't burden the taxpayers with your poor decision-making and we're cool." I'd have much more respect for our esteemed leaders if they were honest about it.
Has anyone ever been to Georgia? I seriously doubt the rednecks have a 'going outdoors' problem. If it weren't for 2 inches of sheet metal, these people would *live* outdoors.
We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
...Google has been one of the single biggest things keeping me INdoors
-Carl
1: Partner with Google
2: ?
3: Health and profit
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
So I checked out their website http://www.getoutdoorsgeorgia.org/ and overall I'm pretty impressed with the idea. I think this is a good thing. If state park information is located in one place, perhaps more people might take advantage of the facilities.
Looking at the disc golf section though, I'm kind of disappointed that the only information is solely for state parks. Living in Atlanta, I know of a few courses around that aren't state parks but county parks. They are also much closer than 30+ miles of the state parks.
I'm hoping that this is simply due to an early start and more information will get put in as counties might get online. But if not, I think they're missing a big opportunity for more information and getting people more involved at a local level. But perhaps they are simply looking for the extra revenue from the parks since most of the local parks are free access.
Actually, I only briefly heard about the GO initiative last week, just in time for their "all parks free" day. I _had_ to use Google to find the site just get info about it, considering the news broadcast didn't divulge many additional details.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I imagine I am pretty much exactly their target audience, but I live in Atlanta and think this is an awesome idea. My family was never too in to outdoor activity when I was a kid, but now that I am older I often want to get out and go hiking or fishing or camping. Usually what happens is that I get this urge on a Thursday, spend the day googling possible locations, don't come up with much aside from vague directions and maybe a few sites of places 3 hours away, and then it is midday Friday, I get off work without a plan, and I give up. Now, I realize this is largely my fault, but just in visiting this site I have discovered 4 or 5 places that I had never found before, that look like perfect nearby places to get out and bike or fish. Perfect!
Being an employee of the State of Georgia I would of heard this. Ah well there out sourcing us (IT) soon, so I'll have all the opportunity to be out doors.
My girlfriend and I are traveling fulltime and living in the national forests, wildlife management areas, etc. I LOVE when we're in a state that has proactively put tons of information about their outdoor recreation areas online.
It's so much easier to find places to stay and know what's nearby in areas like this than in the more backwards areas where you are just guessing and stopping to ask the locals, who often have no idea or just give bad advice.
This is good for the state of Georgia, it's citizens and anyone traveling through the state that enjoys the ootdoors (the big blue room).
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
Which southern state was giving a Mozart CD to newborns (in lieu of future education and healthcare)? Mississippi?
I tell you what, that's some quality health initiative you got there, boy. Yesiree.
Interesting that the plan does not include promotion of Google Health.
Google already turn out third rate products. It's just that everything else in the free arena is sixth rate, just like Microsoft is almost the only real option on the home office/SME desktop and has been for two decades.
Many markets are run by near monopolies or cartels. It's the natural way of capitalism in any established field.
...high rates of obesity (soul food), diabetes (sweet tea), and heart disease....
Having just moved from there, to the Bay Area, Ca....
Yes, Ga is unhealthy. Alot of the blame can also be put on the government of the state, which continues to push for more and wider highways (as if 16 lanes isnt enough), continue to allow and support the majority of power plants running on fossil fuels, mainly coal and including 3 of the dirtiest in the US, with two in the top 3 of that list. This, combined with naturally high humidity, ultra high pollen counts and high temperatures makes the air quality suck, putting Atlanta in 4th for most challenging place to live with asthma and consistently in the Top Ten smoggiest cities. This keeps people inside. Going anywhere basically means driving there as sprawl and the resulting proliferation of more roads without increased mass transit or even bike lanes(again, gvmt sponsored), reckless drivers in large vehicles thanks to (previously, and relatively) cheap gas and the whole "southern/redneck" bit that leans towards F250s with 12"lift on mud tires, and the horrid air make it difficult to impossible to walk or bike anywhere (outside of Down/Mid Town Atl) for fear of your life. So people tend to sit on their fat asses in their offices all day and eat at one of about 20 McDonads or Waffle Houses in the 2mi radius of their home (after driving there of course)... not that I miss having a 24h eatery nearby (I miss my WaHo and Marietta Diner!). Add to all that that NASCAR is a "Sport" in Ga, and as such, "exercising" consists of sitting in bleachers (or on the sofa), smoking, drinking budweiser and eating chilli cheese dogs while watching cars go in circles.
Alot of this could be fixed by improving mass-transit, curbing Sprawl (which is what really caused the drought) and improving Atlanta's Bikability. Generally getting people out of their cars and walking or biking places. MARTA's subway line only goes to about 3 useful places: the airport, downtown, and perimeter mall, while a majority of people live in Cobb County, which rejected having anything to do with a Marta rail line (think: "It will bring in the colored people to steal our TV's!").
Ga is way behind in most rankings of things as well: the Gov'ner has repeatedly struck down attempts to allow Sunday sales of any alcoholic beverage (outside of a restaurant), the most recent time saying it would teach "better time management," thus keeping Georgia one of 3 states still having such arcane blue laws. The state is kept in the past though laws like this, as well as the control the churches have over it and its citizens, which al
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Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
it'll help the guy that called and asked how to get to Vogel State Park "from I-20." I might point out that I-20 runs through six states...
People in Georgia are fat because if you go outside you'll either get eaten by mosquitoes, suffocate in humidity (unless you have gils and can breathe underwater, but then again you'd have a better place to live), or get sucked in by the swamp and become gator food. No amount of Google partnership is going to help. I've had to live there on and off for 5 years now, my advice is - don't go to Georgia. If you have to drive through, try to go around it, if can't do that drive fast and don't stop. Especially if you're not white, they "don't like yo' kind aroun hea". Again previous sentence applies to Georgia as a whole except for Atlanta, where it's the opposite and if you are white somebody will probably try to "put a cap in yo a$$".
Seriously though I can't speak for all of Georgia, I heard there are nicer places within the state, but I've yet to see one. I've mostly been around south-eastern part of it. Good luck travelers.
Tech innovation from a state where it is still legal to marry your first cousin. The end is near.
Connecticut has a similar outdoors initiative.
http://www.nochildleftinside.org/
Many states do. Not just the obese ones.
I don't know if you've been to Atlanta lately, but its completely yankee town now. I correct that, Damn yankees because they won't leave!
I moved to the Indian Trail area in 1998. It was booming.
A year or so ago we were in the area and decided to drive around the area, including Gwinett Place Mall up on Pleasant Hill.
The whole area, particularly the area east of I-85 on Jimmy Carter is a disaster. The mall was desolate. The whole area just looks run down.
If this is what having an ethnically diverse region does for your community it's no wonder they resisted mass transit to speed its coming.
I have friends on the Norcross Police force. They corroborate my impression of the area where I used to live.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Since the article states that GA is the 12th fattest state, I wondered who was #1:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/health/2269064/detail.html
Not too surprising to see Mississippi is largest. I wouldn't have guessed Michigan would be #2. I guess that happens when it's too cold to go outside 5 months out of the year, and you sit indoors eating pasties (which, admittedly, make a delicious 1500 calorie meal.) Colorado's mountain climbing hippies are the leanest.
What I find really shocking is that most states have about doubled the percent of their population that is obese in just 10 years, from 1991 to 2001. It's not as if fast food didn't exist in the eighties. What has changed so much in that time? Cable TV and DVD players? The internet? Or is it just a general cultural shift towards laziness?
Maybe they'll feel richer now that they're partaking of the goodness of a multbillion dollar CEO.
Growing up in the more rural regions Florida and Georgia, I saw more unhealthy and obese folk in the suburbs and cities, probably because a lot of them have grown up not doing hardly any physical labor and ate Whoppers and the like every day. Out where I lived, there weren't many rotund folks outside of the truly lazy, the spoiled brats a mile down the road, or the old folks who couldn't work in their yards nor fields much anymore and got big by feeding the grandkids well. Maybe my family was an exception, but the kind of cooking I had at home was rich in red meat (steaks two to four times a week), almost always had salads with fresh ingredients (from the local Wal*Mart that got a lot of its produce from farms within an 8 hour drive or so), and had a good deal of fried chicken, pork chops, and other things that'd make vegans weep. Dad was also fond of cooking pasta dishes, but not as much as cooking meat. The other side to all this was that we often worked in the yards, held jobs that required us to move around a lot (it didn't hurt that I was in the marching band in school and rode my bicycle quite often when I was in college), and lived in areas with relatively low pollution levels. I'm not a marathoner, but I'd consider myself pretty healthy, especially compared to most of the city folk I've run into.
The takeaway from this long-winded passage should be that folks need to move around once in a while and, God-forbid, balance what they eat. I love my fried chicken, but I also eat a lot of fruit, salads, and such.
On the other hand, 95+ degree heat along with 95%+ humidity makes sitting on the comfy couch in a 70-some degree air-conditioned house very, very attractive... We all can't live in Colorado and Nor Cal where it doesn't really get oppressively hot.
P.S.: The mass transit system in almost every place I've been here in the US sucks. The best one I've seen so far in my travels was in Denver when I was on leave with a buddy of mine. It was a totally new thing to me to see light rail and buses that took you to places you actually wanted to be.
As a georgia resident, I know for a fact nothing will make people go outside.. well, nothing except a huge bubble over the entire state with a massive HVAC system cooling it about 20-30 degrees depending on the time of year.
This year the winter "lows" were the mid 60's. I was walking around in a t-shirt basting in my own juices simply moving from the car to the grocery store in early january, and at this point in the year the AC barely keeps pace running 24/7 in a home a little over a decade old.
Just to the south-east of atlanta is a small town, and in that town I actually found a runed stone cover to hell. I came back during the summer to find the devil himself climbing out of his domain through this opening proclaiming it's too cold down there, so he's taking a month vacation in ATL.
Nobody in their right mind wants to go outside and fry, so people get fat.. and i mean MORBIDLY FAT. These people knock candy bar cases off the walls as they putter through the checkouts in the carts meant for paraplegics, their corpulence so spread that the 3 ft wide seat looks more like a bar stool.
I think Lincoln made a horrible mistake not allowing the south to secede. They are, statistically and geographically, the US beer gut : P
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
because the past was so unhealthy.
Actually, yes. The overall measure health seems to be measured by is life expectancy. It is significantly higher now than in the past for most parts of the US, and continues to climb as medicine and health issues are solved. Take a look at this Map (and RTFA!) and make your statement again. As Georgia (and its neighbors) remain in the past, so does the avg life expectancy relative to the rest of the US. One of the main suggested causes is health education, something most other states have improved upon year over year. Georgia is at the bottom. Try the stats page (pdf) google turns up as hit #1 on "Georgia Education Rank", Ga ranks in the 40s for most things that count, and top10 where it makes you wonder how that could be (ie: 9th largest, 5th fastest growing state, but 49th High School graduation rate and 44th childrens health). Georgia is behind, its painfully obvious.
Tm
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Why, yes, I *DO* have an arc welder and a barrel of kerosene!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Don't y'all need one of them computer thing-ees to use Google?
I'm just sayin'.
It seems north/south is irrelevant, it's how near an ocean you are. Pardon my ignorance of US geography, but the proximity to the ocean seems irrelevant. To me, it looks like Mississippi river is a bigger influence. Perhaps the consumption of Mud Pies has something to do with it
You gotta love a chain that puts a restaurant on both sides of a freeway exit.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
The crackheads argument is logical in not expanding marta out to the suburb townsâ¦think about it for a minute there. Consider Sandy Springs. Spending time out there where there are a bunch of stops throughout the area, versus Marietta, which is a rock throw away, you learn a lot. It may not be a pleasant reality, but it is a reality.
How about we cut off insurance for fat people and instead every time they need to go to the doctor we give them a cookie? I think this will solve the problem in the long run since the cost of a cookie will never equal a doctor's visit. Eventually they will get fat enough that they won't be able to leave their house. Problem Solved!
Sorry, wasn't trying to troll, just left off the sarcasm tags. Trying to get modded funny. Must try harder next time.
21st Century Renaissance Man