You live on the west coast, don't you? A huricane is not a nice, neat, compact tornado. New Orleans experienced sustained wind speeds of 125 mph (category 3) with gusts even higher. It experienced a major hurricane.
In other posts you seem to think that hurricanes cause most of their destruction by winds, believing that 175 mph winds "blow around cars." While hurricane winds do pick up and throw a lot of debris, none of it is cars; after all, many cars are designed to go that fast down the road and don't get picked up and tossed around by their own drag. The only time a car gets picked up by a hurricane is when said hurricane triggers a tornado.
What does cost most of the damage is flooding, from the rain and the storm surge. The places that you refer to in other posts were wiped out by the flooding. Rising water lifted up buildings and barges and such and moved them inland, otfen depositing them onto other buildings. Water is just a little bit more dense than air and just a little bit goes a long way.
As for the water, the area that the eye passes over actually has some of the least problems with flooding. Water rises in the eye purely on account to the very low static air pressure lifting the water up. However, the arms of the hurricane also cause dynamic pressure by blowing the water towards land (while also dumping rain on the area that doesn't happen in the eye). On the Gulf Coast, it is consistently worse to be on the east side of the eye than under the eye itself, where the winds blow northerly, blowing the gulf on shore. This is what happened to Gulfport and Biloxi: the eye made landfall at Pearl River, the MS/LA border, west of these cities.
Being on the west side brings southerly winds, which would be "better" in most cases, however New Orleans has water to the north as well: Lake Pontchartrain. Category 3 force winds blew Lake Pontchartrain into, against, and ultimately over the levees on the north of the city. If the eye had passed west of New Orleans, it would have been the Mississippi River (south of the city) that would have been blown into the city (and the lake would have washed out cities like Slidell and Mandeville), and if the eye had passed over New Orleans this flooding may not have been as bad as it is now (winds would be blowing west, then east, with nothing but low static pressure at the eye to lift water).
Part of the continued flooding problem comes from the fact that New Orleans continues to be downriver from places that got rained on by the storm later on, but the river normally doens't touch Lake Pontchartrain, and it was the lake (really a tidal pool) that broke the levee in several places.
So, to sum up, a hurricane is much bigger than a tornado; winds can break windows but not knock down (brick/concrete/etc.) buildings, while water can; flooding is worse to the side of the eye, where water isn't just sucked up by low pressure but blown over by winds as well; and New Orleans was flooded even though it was on the "safe" side of the eye because it has water on both sides.
Try sitting through a tropical storm some time before opening your mouth on what a hurricane can and cannot do.
"Of course the amputees are the most obvious beneficiaries."
That cinches it; the Department of Veterans' Affairs will pay to develop this. Most of the amputees in this country lost their limbs in combat and VA is the biggest customer of prosthetics around. That, and veterans, like old people, have the nasty habit of voting.
"It is time for the ACLU to do something helpful to the people, why not defend the people the RIAA goes after? It is a better group to defend than homosexuals or blacks."
"It's not about "winners" and "losers", it's about stopping a virtual monopoly in the portable market, and for that reason I'm all for PSP."
How can you Rage Against the Machine when you're working for Sony? Seriously, what next? Looking towards Microsoft to save you from the evils of Apple's near-monopoly of portable music players?
Come back when Nintendo has abused its near monopoly and has started to rely on shady business tactics instead of making a better product, then maybe I'll care. But even then, I'm not going to look towards Sony as the "little guy"/"underdog"/"hero" in any event.
"DS gets dead pixles just like any other LCD screen out there."
Getting a dead pixel is one thing. Being told by a back-pedalling manufacturer that it isn't a problem (and certainly not a warranty issue) is something else. For a price tag that was 67% higher than the DS, one would expect at least an equivalent warranty policy without having to be guilt-tripped into it.
"Seriously, one big (by which I mean equal to or larger then the two DS screens combined) touch screen would've been VASTLY better. "
Try fitting a DS into your pocket without folding it up. You can't fold a single LCD without Bad Things happening.
"All systems are experiencing a good game drought of late. Everything's been crap the last few months."
The Xbox fanboys at my local EB couldn't stop spooging over Nintendogs. It doesn't interest me, personally, but it seems to have a lot of interest in general.
"Oh no, I might need to read for a week rather than watch the flickering opiate, while waiting for the plows (which we already have around and pay for ourselves, for just such events) to make the roads passable for the electric company repair crews."
If you can't get into work, you don't get paid. No paycheck, no heating oil, no electricity, no food. Oh, it may not be true for you, but it's true of most of the people you want to move out of New Orleans. They may be able to take a day or two and simply tighten their belts (i. e. what they already do when a tropical storm comes into town and shuts the town down for a day or two), but a week straight can be devastating, assuming their job would still be there for you after that week.
Then you should have no problem giving an example.
"In the US, we could avoid virtually all the hurricanes we hear about simply by avoiding the two or three hundred miles nearest the coast from Louisiana through Virgina;"
Yeah, that worked real well for the folks in Jackson, Mississippi, two hundred or so miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Heck, even Tennessee had problems with Katrina. I could mention Kentucky, but there are probably too many rivers for you. Ohio? Great Lake. West of the Mississippi River? There's still the Missouri and Colorado to worry about.
"Almost all the earthquakes and the worst of the droughts by not living in the desert;"
So you redefine someplace as a desert simply because it's getting less rainfall than usual? So all those crappy-ass tomatoes we were stuck with eating around this time last year were actually grown in the desert?
"Tornados shouldn't actually cause damage if people living in tornado-prone areas built appropriate housing;"
You're either overestimating ferrocrete structures or underestimating the power of tornados.
"Tsunamis only cause serious damage right on the coast itself."
You're assuming that tsunamis only hit mountainous areas, where the land gets real high real fast once you find it. Unless they're hitting Indonesia, Japan or Chile, tsunamis do have the potential to go well inland.
"So I would repeat myself, why stay??? "too poor to move" doesn't mean much when staying doesn't have anything more to offer beyond the possibility that the same thing might happen again next year, and the promise that it will happen again eventually."
OK, it's not sinking in. "Too poor to move" isn't a figure of speech. I literally mean that people do not have the amount of available cash for a rental truck and a first month's deposit/down payment/whatever. It does not mean "need to get a better job," if they could do that they'd have gotten one by now (and in the specific example of Louisiana, probably have already left). It does not mean "needs to save up more," they do not have disposable income to save (they're likely not even breaking even). It means "They do not have money," and it's not the sort of thing that will be fixed next paycheck. Even assuming "one slum is just as good as another," there's still costs associated with moving to a different slum (truck, deposit, etc.).
Get your head out of your bourgeois ass, nobody is living in poverty because they like it. The only way they'd move is if they get kicked down from "working poor" to "sleeping on a park bench," and even then the only way they'd be able to leave town is if local law enforcement was "kind" enough to get them a one-way bus ticket to "anywhere but here." If you play your cards right you might be able to move up to "migrant worker," who aren't exactly known for their home ownership.
"Why encourage them to linger in the same place nature gave them a smack-down in the first place??? "
Because their only other option is your backyard, and I don't see you offering it.
"What can I say if you don't "get" that the humor in that sketch doesn't come from the fourth one staying up?"
They can't afford four castles. They can barely afford to rent a few hundred(!) square feet on real estate that had to be practically given away.
"When I took a riverboat ride, I saw thousands of homes over the levee that are clearly below water level. I couldn't help but think "what the hell are these people thinking?" These are brick homes with cars in the driveway, not shacks."
You were on the river. Which bank were you looking at?
"Look at the place on maps.google.com and learn what you're talking about before you post crap like this."
How about I just live in Saint Charles Parish for five years or so instead?
The "nice places" you were talking about tend not to be in New Orleans, I'd wager you were looking at the West Bank when you saw those homes. But even if you did find someplace decent-looking in Orleans Parish proper, they have a habit of ending very abruptly, much moreso than you'd expect coming from points further north (I grew up near Baltimore for reference). Most of those nicer neighorhoods are gated communities, and its a whole other world once you drive outside that gate. A few years back I helped the fiance of a friend move out of a nice little gated apartment complex in West Jeff, and pretty much from the gate looking out you could see the Friendly Neighborhood Crack Dealer.
I've also driven a bit around southeast Louisiana (specifically the third Congressional district), and many parts of the more rural parishes are similarly iffy. Sure, there are small towns/cities along the river, quaint little places you'd expect to see on a postcard from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but it's also very easy to hop on a road leading away from US 90 and away from civilization. I was mostly driving between post offices, and I was in a number of delapidated old buildings that are smaller than the two bed/bath apartment I live in now. And they were both larger and in better condition than some of the houses they served. Even driving along River Road along the West Bank in Saint Charles Parish what you can see from the road changes quickly.
So you took a trip to New Orleans and got to see the tourist parts, the parts of the city that actually bring in money. You probably saw the riverfront as far up as the convention center, and maybe as far down as the aquarium. Or perhaps you took a more detailed tour and got to see a litle bit of the French Quater (IMO, the tourist-laden parts of the French Quarter, lined with bars, clubs, and strip joints support my arguments), some of the tree-lined stretches of St. Charles from a streetcar, maybe near the Tulane and Loyola campuses. But I doubt you took Poydras north of I-10. "Seeing the sights" of any city is designed to give you a pleasant experience, but is by no means useful for judging the general character of it. If you just stuck with the Mallthe memorials and the museums, you'd have no idea where Washington DC's crime rate came from.
No, it's a reason for why they can't leave. Over the past decade or so Louisiana (especially the New Orleans area) has been a place where people have moved away from, not into. With the steadily decreasing population, it's safe to assume that many of those left behind aren't there because they want to be.
" but in the US, any schmuck that can sign their name can get a job at WallyWorld or McDonalds."
Will working minimum wage make you enough money to buy or rent someplace out-of-state, especially when it can be assumed you will be getting little or no money from the sale of your existing property? Are those minimum wage jobs going to allow you to take time off to go out-of-state to scout out the housing/job/etc. situation in your intended destination?
McDonald's and Wal-Mart sure as Hell don't pay for relocation.
"I have chosen to live in a place that doesn't get floods, deadly droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, tidal waves, volcanos, earthquakes, plagues of locusts, or anything of the sort."
No such place on the planet.
" I therefore have VERY little sympathy (in fact, you could call it "outright annoyance that my tax dollars need to bail their asses out over and over and over") for people who live in places that do have such problems chronically."
Then don't complain when they choose to live in a cardboard box on your street corner. If they can't rebuild what they call their house, there's no reason for them to linger anywhere, and the way you paint your home town may make it worth the bus ticket.
"Don't build on fault lines. Don't build in swamps. Don't build below sea-level. Don't build on the slopes of a volcano. Don't build at the lowest poing in the general area."
Where is this fantasy land where we should build, in your opinion?
" People settle and have children where they wish - it's a free country."
No, they can't. The country may be free, but real estate sure as heck isn't.
"Just stop encouraging people to build irresponsibly. I guess if there are fewer places to build, there are fewer people in that unsafe area!"
This is not a solution for people who already live there. Louisiana (especially that part of the state) is a place where people move out of, not in to (a big issue in state politics). Those that are there now tend to have been there for generations.
"I'm SURE that even if the state stayed underwater PERMANENTLY, fishing and shrimping would continue."
Sure, there's a demand for fish and shrimp; cheap fish and shrimp. Pressure from global competitors ensures that many of the people working in that industry are paying to live in a first world country on third world wages.
Oh no, I didn't say "no more taxes," I said "let Louisiana be the one collecting the gas tax." Supporting the nation's gasoline addiction has cost the state a lot of wetlands, and it's only fair that the state pass that burden on to you. The taxes would be the same if not higher, and unless you were a citizen of Louisiana you'd have zero say in the rates, but at least you'd have your precious "no more federal spending!" meme satisfied.
"It's 8 miles (give or take) from the Causeway Bridge to Chef Menteur Highway."
Nit-pick: The Causeway ends in Metairie, Jeff Parish. On the East Bank I can't remember where Jeff ends and Orleans begins, but I do know Causeway ain't it.
"A great majority of the people in New Orleans has feet and the ability to use them. Even getting to La Place, 25 miles west on either I-10 or Airline Highway, is better than sitting in New Orleans."
Uh... no. Assuming they would allow pedestrians on the interstate in an emergency, starting west of I-310 in St. Charles Parish and going well into St. John, I-10 is elevated over water, probably not the best stretch of road to be caught on when the storm starts coming.
Airline is even worse. For example, the Airline/I-310 exchange is notorious for being the first place in St. Charles to go underwater when it starts to rain, even though that's supposedly part of the hurricane evacuation route for St. Charles Parish. Closer Orleans, I hear Airline is closed and sandbagged over in order to suplement the levees there.
As for LaP lace itself, if Lake Pontchartrain has breached the levee in Orleans Parish, why do you believe the situation is any better for other parishes on the lake?
"the emergency services currently being used to airlift Boudreaux, Scioneaux and Arceneaux (yes, those are real names) off the roofs of their houses"
You forgot Thibodaux, or is he still waiting for the airlift?:)
"A mandatory evacuation was announced at least 36 hours beforehand. Anyone with half a brain had ample opportunity to GET THE FUCK OUT."
First off, it's hurricane season. Certain parishes in Louisana are told to evacuate every month or so. After so many false positives, it's only a matter of time before a person, any person, tunes it out.
Secondly, you need more than half a brain. You need a car, a tank full of gas, and someplace out-of-state to go to. We're talking about New Orleans here, not Beverly Hills. Compare the number of people in the city who didn't evacuate with the city's poverty rate and you may learn something.
You're assuming that the other half of guards units undeployed aren't themselves in need of said relief. Most of the population in Louisiana lives in the parts Katrina hit, and I suspect many of them wouldn't even be able to reach their armories even if they were called to them.
The advantage of the state militias is that they're around to help with local problems. The disadvantage is that they're effected by the local problems.
"If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves."
You're assuming that people have the option of moving elsewhere.
Louisiana ain't exactly the richest state in the Union and New Orleans is among the worst of it (as the bumper sticker says, "New Orleans--third world and proud of it!"). A lot of the families living there have been living there since they were emancipated, and were the unfortunate ones that couldn't afford to move north or west during the Nineteenth or Twentieth Centuries. They don't live in houses, they live in shacks (or, in the city, "blighted housing") for which moving into a trailer would be an improvement. They sure as heck wouldn't see any money from selling their homes in an effort to move inland (even less if we follow through with your motion to eliminate subsidized flood insurance), and if they could afford to move out, they would have done so in the past hundred years or so.
And even away from New Orleans, the parts of rural Louisiana ravaged by the storm are those parts where the primary language isn't English; Cajun and Creole country. And, again, these people don't exactly have luxury houses on prime real estate. They never had any money because there's been a history of language-based discrimination longer than and almost as violent as Louisiana's history of race discrimination. And while there's been a bit of reconcilliation in recent decades, there's still a whole mess of Indians and Pakistanis that speak better English than they do.
Their job options consist of shrimping, welding, or getting shot in Iraq (ever wonder why the Deep South has such large military and National Guard enlistment rates?). They couldn't afford to move even before their shack was knocked down by a tropical cyclone. The government's options are either to help them rebuild their "houses," or allow them to wander homeless, possibly scraping together enough money for bus fare so they can wander the streets of your town, since they have little else keeping them in Louisiana.
Or I suppose we could also throw them all in jail...
Telling them to simply move somewhere else is like saying "Let them eat cake." Yes, there are fools who have second homes on Grand Isle, but Grand Isle is not indicitive of that part of the state.
"Don't live by a freaking ocean. Oceans have hurricanes."
Oceans carry ships. Ships carry cargo. Kinda hard to load those forty-foot containers onto a truck when there's nobody living by the ocean to unload them.
" Don't live in a city that is 8 feet below sea level. Flooding WILL occur."
There's no bedrock in New Orleans. It was built above sea level, but it sank.
Also, the fact that nobody else upriver wants flooding to occur in their backyards either means that Louisiana has to builds its levees even higher. The water from half the country has no place else to go.
Don't want to build near the river? See my response to your first bullet point.
Because the FEDERAL government collects a lot of tax on gasoline that comes out of Louisiana refineries. A lot of gasoline and other petrochemical products come out of the region and Louisiana historically doesn't see very much of the tax money collected on it.
If you think Louisiana should pay for it all itself, then give them back their money, stop taxing their oil, and let the state with the most offshore oil operations in the gulf excise the heck out of oil sales inside and out of the state.
Where the heck else are you gonna get your oil fix, Florida? For better or for worse, Louisiana is the only state that has consented to allow things to be built in "their backyard," and the nation as a whole has benefitted from it. If you don't think federal money should be involved in upkeeping the state, realize that sword cuts both ways.
Because it's tough enough keeping the buildings above-ground as it is when there ain't no bedrock, there's no need to think of ways to make them even heavier.
Slashdot Mirror
You live on the west coast, don't you? A huricane is not a nice, neat, compact tornado. New Orleans experienced sustained wind speeds of 125 mph (category 3) with gusts even higher. It experienced a major hurricane.
In other posts you seem to think that hurricanes cause most of their destruction by winds, believing that 175 mph winds "blow around cars." While hurricane winds do pick up and throw a lot of debris, none of it is cars; after all, many cars are designed to go that fast down the road and don't get picked up and tossed around by their own drag. The only time a car gets picked up by a hurricane is when said hurricane triggers a tornado.
What does cost most of the damage is flooding, from the rain and the storm surge. The places that you refer to in other posts were wiped out by the flooding. Rising water lifted up buildings and barges and such and moved them inland, otfen depositing them onto other buildings. Water is just a little bit more dense than air and just a little bit goes a long way.
As for the water, the area that the eye passes over actually has some of the least problems with flooding. Water rises in the eye purely on account to the very low static air pressure lifting the water up. However, the arms of the hurricane also cause dynamic pressure by blowing the water towards land (while also dumping rain on the area that doesn't happen in the eye). On the Gulf Coast, it is consistently worse to be on the east side of the eye than under the eye itself, where the winds blow northerly, blowing the gulf on shore. This is what happened to Gulfport and Biloxi: the eye made landfall at Pearl River, the MS/LA border, west of these cities.
Being on the west side brings southerly winds, which would be "better" in most cases, however New Orleans has water to the north as well: Lake Pontchartrain. Category 3 force winds blew Lake Pontchartrain into, against, and ultimately over the levees on the north of the city. If the eye had passed west of New Orleans, it would have been the Mississippi River (south of the city) that would have been blown into the city (and the lake would have washed out cities like Slidell and Mandeville), and if the eye had passed over New Orleans this flooding may not have been as bad as it is now (winds would be blowing west, then east, with nothing but low static pressure at the eye to lift water).
Part of the continued flooding problem comes from the fact that New Orleans continues to be downriver from places that got rained on by the storm later on, but the river normally doens't touch Lake Pontchartrain, and it was the lake (really a tidal pool) that broke the levee in several places.
So, to sum up, a hurricane is much bigger than a tornado; winds can break windows but not knock down (brick/concrete/etc.) buildings, while water can; flooding is worse to the side of the eye, where water isn't just sucked up by low pressure but blown over by winds as well; and New Orleans was flooded even though it was on the "safe" side of the eye because it has water on both sides.
Try sitting through a tropical storm some time before opening your mouth on what a hurricane can and cannot do.
" Imagine what Stephen Hawking might accomplish if he could walk and talk. "
You're assuming he hasn't done what he's already done simply because he can't get around very well and has lots of time to sit and think.
"Obviously this was a New Zealander who submitted this, pretending to be an Australian to make us all look stupid."
And people say the US outsources everything.
No, wait, we've been outsourcing "Make the US look stupid" to Canada for years.
"Of course the amputees are the most obvious beneficiaries."
That cinches it; the Department of Veterans' Affairs will pay to develop this. Most of the amputees in this country lost their limbs in combat and VA is the biggest customer of prosthetics around. That, and veterans, like old people, have the nasty habit of voting.
Yes, because it's the RIAA and MPAA that steals copyrights from their original owners.
"It is time for the ACLU to do something helpful to the people, why not defend the people the RIAA goes after? It is a better group to defend than homosexuals or blacks."
What about black homosexuals that download music?
I'll just grab the .torrent a week before it hits theaters.
OK, so we have a judge that President Clinton probably never talked to fighting a law that he probably never read. God bless America!
"It's not about "winners" and "losers", it's about stopping a virtual monopoly in the portable market, and for that reason I'm all for PSP."
How can you Rage Against the Machine when you're working for Sony? Seriously, what next? Looking towards Microsoft to save you from the evils of Apple's near-monopoly of portable music players?
Come back when Nintendo has abused its near monopoly and has started to rely on shady business tactics instead of making a better product, then maybe I'll care. But even then, I'm not going to look towards Sony as the "little guy"/"underdog"/"hero" in any event.
"DS gets dead pixles just like any other LCD screen out there."
Getting a dead pixel is one thing. Being told by a back-pedalling manufacturer that it isn't a problem (and certainly not a warranty issue) is something else. For a price tag that was 67% higher than the DS, one would expect at least an equivalent warranty policy without having to be guilt-tripped into it.
"Seriously, one big (by which I mean equal to or larger then the two DS screens combined) touch screen would've been VASTLY better. "
Try fitting a DS into your pocket without folding it up. You can't fold a single LCD without Bad Things happening.
"All systems are experiencing a good game drought of late. Everything's been crap the last few months."
The Xbox fanboys at my local EB couldn't stop spooging over Nintendogs. It doesn't interest me, personally, but it seems to have a lot of interest in general.
" mean that more UMD films and games are available at launch."
"More" in this case still doesn't mean "many."
"Oh no, I might need to read for a week rather than watch the flickering opiate, while waiting for the plows (which we already have around and pay for ourselves, for just such events) to make the roads passable for the electric company repair crews."
If you can't get into work, you don't get paid. No paycheck, no heating oil, no electricity, no food. Oh, it may not be true for you, but it's true of most of the people you want to move out of New Orleans. They may be able to take a day or two and simply tighten their belts (i. e. what they already do when a tropical storm comes into town and shuts the town down for a day or two), but a week straight can be devastating, assuming their job would still be there for you after that week.
"90% of the planet!"
Then you should have no problem giving an example.
"In the US, we could avoid virtually all the hurricanes we hear about simply by avoiding the two or three hundred miles nearest the coast from Louisiana through Virgina;"
Yeah, that worked real well for the folks in Jackson, Mississippi, two hundred or so miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Heck, even Tennessee had problems with Katrina. I could mention Kentucky, but there are probably too many rivers for you. Ohio? Great Lake. West of the Mississippi River? There's still the Missouri and Colorado to worry about.
"Almost all the earthquakes and the worst of the droughts by not living in the desert;"
So you redefine someplace as a desert simply because it's getting less rainfall than usual? So all those crappy-ass tomatoes we were stuck with eating around this time last year were actually grown in the desert?
"Tornados shouldn't actually cause damage if people living in tornado-prone areas built appropriate housing;"
You're either overestimating ferrocrete structures or underestimating the power of tornados.
"Tsunamis only cause serious damage right on the coast itself."
You're assuming that tsunamis only hit mountainous areas, where the land gets real high real fast once you find it. Unless they're hitting Indonesia, Japan or Chile, tsunamis do have the potential to go well inland.
"So I would repeat myself, why stay??? "too poor to move" doesn't mean much when staying doesn't have anything more to offer beyond the possibility that the same thing might happen again next year, and the promise that it will happen again eventually."
OK, it's not sinking in. "Too poor to move" isn't a figure of speech. I literally mean that people do not have the amount of available cash for a rental truck and a first month's deposit/down payment/whatever. It does not mean "need to get a better job," if they could do that they'd have gotten one by now (and in the specific example of Louisiana, probably have already left). It does not mean "needs to save up more," they do not have disposable income to save (they're likely not even breaking even). It means "They do not have money," and it's not the sort of thing that will be fixed next paycheck. Even assuming "one slum is just as good as another," there's still costs associated with moving to a different slum (truck, deposit, etc.).
Get your head out of your bourgeois ass, nobody is living in poverty because they like it. The only way they'd move is if they get kicked down from "working poor" to "sleeping on a park bench," and even then the only way they'd be able to leave town is if local law enforcement was "kind" enough to get them a one-way bus ticket to "anywhere but here." If you play your cards right you might be able to move up to "migrant worker," who aren't exactly known for their home ownership.
"Why encourage them to linger in the same place nature gave them a smack-down in the first place??? "
Because their only other option is your backyard, and I don't see you offering it.
"What can I say if you don't "get" that the humor in that sketch doesn't come from the fourth one staying up?"
They can't afford four castles. They can barely afford to rent a few hundred(!) square feet on real estate that had to be practically given away.
You laugh now, but that's the performance specs when you run software on it with 100 years of bloat. :)
"When I took a riverboat ride, I saw thousands of homes over the levee that are clearly below water level. I couldn't help but think "what the hell are these people thinking?" These are brick homes with cars in the driveway, not shacks."
You were on the river. Which bank were you looking at?
"Look at the place on maps.google.com and learn what you're talking about before you post crap like this."
How about I just live in Saint Charles Parish for five years or so instead?
The "nice places" you were talking about tend not to be in New Orleans, I'd wager you were looking at the West Bank when you saw those homes. But even if you did find someplace decent-looking in Orleans Parish proper, they have a habit of ending very abruptly, much moreso than you'd expect coming from points further north (I grew up near Baltimore for reference). Most of those nicer neighorhoods are gated communities, and its a whole other world once you drive outside that gate. A few years back I helped the fiance of a friend move out of a nice little gated apartment complex in West Jeff, and pretty much from the gate looking out you could see the Friendly Neighborhood Crack Dealer.
I've also driven a bit around southeast Louisiana (specifically the third Congressional district), and many parts of the more rural parishes are similarly iffy. Sure, there are small towns/cities along the river, quaint little places you'd expect to see on a postcard from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but it's also very easy to hop on a road leading away from US 90 and away from civilization. I was mostly driving between post offices, and I was in a number of delapidated old buildings that are smaller than the two bed/bath apartment I live in now. And they were both larger and in better condition than some of the houses they served. Even driving along River Road along the West Bank in Saint Charles Parish what you can see from the road changes quickly.
So you took a trip to New Orleans and got to see the tourist parts, the parts of the city that actually bring in money. You probably saw the riverfront as far up as the convention center, and maybe as far down as the aquarium. Or perhaps you took a more detailed tour and got to see a litle bit of the French Quater (IMO, the tourist-laden parts of the French Quarter, lined with bars, clubs, and strip joints support my arguments), some of the tree-lined stretches of St. Charles from a streetcar, maybe near the Tulane and Loyola campuses. But I doubt you took Poydras north of I-10. "Seeing the sights" of any city is designed to give you a pleasant experience, but is by no means useful for judging the general character of it. If you just stuck with the Mallthe memorials and the museums, you'd have no idea where Washington DC's crime rate came from.
"And you consider that a reason TO STAY???"
No, it's a reason for why they can't leave. Over the past decade or so Louisiana (especially the New Orleans area) has been a place where people have moved away from, not into. With the steadily decreasing population, it's safe to assume that many of those left behind aren't there because they want to be.
" but in the US, any schmuck that can sign their name can get a job at WallyWorld or McDonalds."
Will working minimum wage make you enough money to buy or rent someplace out-of-state, especially when it can be assumed you will be getting little or no money from the sale of your existing property? Are those minimum wage jobs going to allow you to take time off to go out-of-state to scout out the housing/job/etc. situation in your intended destination?
McDonald's and Wal-Mart sure as Hell don't pay for relocation.
"I have chosen to live in a place that doesn't get floods, deadly droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, tidal waves, volcanos, earthquakes, plagues of locusts, or anything of the sort."
No such place on the planet.
" I therefore have VERY little sympathy (in fact, you could call it "outright annoyance that my tax dollars need to bail their asses out over and over and over") for people who live in places that do have such problems chronically."
Then don't complain when they choose to live in a cardboard box on your street corner. If they can't rebuild what they call their house, there's no reason for them to linger anywhere, and the way you paint your home town may make it worth the bus ticket.
"Don't build on fault lines. Don't build in swamps. Don't build below sea-level. Don't build on the slopes of a volcano. Don't build at the lowest poing in the general area."
Where is this fantasy land where we should build, in your opinion?
" People settle and have children where they wish - it's a free country."
No, they can't. The country may be free, but real estate sure as heck isn't.
"Just stop encouraging people to build irresponsibly. I guess if there are fewer places to build, there are fewer people in that unsafe area!"
This is not a solution for people who already live there. Louisiana (especially that part of the state) is a place where people move out of, not in to (a big issue in state politics). Those that are there now tend to have been there for generations.
"I'm SURE that even if the state stayed underwater PERMANENTLY, fishing and shrimping would continue."
Sure, there's a demand for fish and shrimp; cheap fish and shrimp. Pressure from global competitors ensures that many of the people working in that industry are paying to live in a first world country on third world wages.
Oh no, I didn't say "no more taxes," I said "let Louisiana be the one collecting the gas tax." Supporting the nation's gasoline addiction has cost the state a lot of wetlands, and it's only fair that the state pass that burden on to you. The taxes would be the same if not higher, and unless you were a citizen of Louisiana you'd have zero say in the rates, but at least you'd have your precious "no more federal spending!" meme satisfied.
"It's 8 miles (give or take) from the Causeway Bridge to Chef Menteur Highway."
:)
Nit-pick: The Causeway ends in Metairie, Jeff Parish. On the East Bank I can't remember where Jeff ends and Orleans begins, but I do know Causeway ain't it.
"A great majority of the people in New Orleans has feet and the ability to use them. Even getting to La Place, 25 miles west on either I-10 or Airline Highway, is better than sitting in New Orleans."
Uh... no. Assuming they would allow pedestrians on the interstate in an emergency, starting west of I-310 in St. Charles Parish and going well into St. John, I-10 is elevated over water, probably not the best stretch of road to be caught on when the storm starts coming.
Airline is even worse. For example, the Airline/I-310 exchange is notorious for being the first place in St. Charles to go underwater when it starts to rain, even though that's supposedly part of the hurricane evacuation route for St. Charles Parish. Closer Orleans, I hear Airline is closed and sandbagged over in order to suplement the levees there.
As for LaP lace itself, if Lake Pontchartrain has breached the levee in Orleans Parish, why do you believe the situation is any better for other parishes on the lake?
"the emergency services currently being used to airlift Boudreaux, Scioneaux and Arceneaux (yes, those are real names) off the roofs of their houses"
You forgot Thibodaux, or is he still waiting for the airlift?
"A mandatory evacuation was announced at least 36 hours beforehand. Anyone with half a brain had ample opportunity to GET THE FUCK OUT."
First off, it's hurricane season. Certain parishes in Louisana are told to evacuate every month or so. After so many false positives, it's only a matter of time before a person, any person, tunes it out.
Secondly, you need more than half a brain. You need a car, a tank full of gas, and someplace out-of-state to go to. We're talking about New Orleans here, not Beverly Hills. Compare the number of people in the city who didn't evacuate with the city's poverty rate and you may learn something.
You're assuming that the other half of guards units undeployed aren't themselves in need of said relief. Most of the population in Louisiana lives in the parts Katrina hit, and I suspect many of them wouldn't even be able to reach their armories even if they were called to them.
The advantage of the state militias is that they're around to help with local problems. The disadvantage is that they're effected by the local problems.
"If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves."
You're assuming that people have the option of moving elsewhere.
Louisiana ain't exactly the richest state in the Union and New Orleans is among the worst of it (as the bumper sticker says, "New Orleans--third world and proud of it!"). A lot of the families living there have been living there since they were emancipated, and were the unfortunate ones that couldn't afford to move north or west during the Nineteenth or Twentieth Centuries. They don't live in houses, they live in shacks (or, in the city, "blighted housing") for which moving into a trailer would be an improvement. They sure as heck wouldn't see any money from selling their homes in an effort to move inland (even less if we follow through with your motion to eliminate subsidized flood insurance), and if they could afford to move out, they would have done so in the past hundred years or so.
And even away from New Orleans, the parts of rural Louisiana ravaged by the storm are those parts where the primary language isn't English; Cajun and Creole country. And, again, these people don't exactly have luxury houses on prime real estate. They never had any money because there's been a history of language-based discrimination longer than and almost as violent as Louisiana's history of race discrimination. And while there's been a bit of reconcilliation in recent decades, there's still a whole mess of Indians and Pakistanis that speak better English than they do.
Their job options consist of shrimping, welding, or getting shot in Iraq (ever wonder why the Deep South has such large military and National Guard enlistment rates?). They couldn't afford to move even before their shack was knocked down by a tropical cyclone. The government's options are either to help them rebuild their "houses," or allow them to wander homeless, possibly scraping together enough money for bus fare so they can wander the streets of your town, since they have little else keeping them in Louisiana.
Or I suppose we could also throw them all in jail...
Telling them to simply move somewhere else is like saying "Let them eat cake." Yes, there are fools who have second homes on Grand Isle, but Grand Isle is not indicitive of that part of the state.
"Don't live by a freaking ocean. Oceans have hurricanes."
Oceans carry ships. Ships carry cargo. Kinda hard to load those forty-foot containers onto a truck when there's nobody living by the ocean to unload them.
" Don't live in a city that is 8 feet below sea level. Flooding WILL occur."
There's no bedrock in New Orleans. It was built above sea level, but it sank.
Also, the fact that nobody else upriver wants flooding to occur in their backyards either means that Louisiana has to builds its levees even higher. The water from half the country has no place else to go.
Don't want to build near the river? See my response to your first bullet point.
All the ones with their own military bases on the US Gulf Coast.
It's really easy for the US to send people out to be the hero when they're already there. At this point in time, nobody else has such a global empire.
Because the FEDERAL government collects a lot of tax on gasoline that comes out of Louisiana refineries. A lot of gasoline and other petrochemical products come out of the region and Louisiana historically doesn't see very much of the tax money collected on it.
If you think Louisiana should pay for it all itself, then give them back their money, stop taxing their oil, and let the state with the most offshore oil operations in the gulf excise the heck out of oil sales inside and out of the state.
Where the heck else are you gonna get your oil fix, Florida? For better or for worse, Louisiana is the only state that has consented to allow things to be built in "their backyard," and the nation as a whole has benefitted from it. If you don't think federal money should be involved in upkeeping the state, realize that sword cuts both ways.
"why don't they rebuild over the water?"
Because it's tough enough keeping the buildings above-ground as it is when there ain't no bedrock, there's no need to think of ways to make them even heavier.