Misuse of FEMA hurricane debit cards

[4U2Play]

Who's lost a debate?

OK, let's call it even...

I win, you lose.

 

[Dreadsox]

What's the problem here?

If somebody wastes their money at a strip club, so?

If you see a homeless man on the street and you give him $10 and tell him to go buy himself lunch, and instead he goes and buys a cheap bottle of wine and gets tanked, does that negate the fact you did the right thing by helping him out?

People spend money on all kinds of nonsense all the time. And if they had no money for food at the end of the day because they spent it on Hooters, well that's their problem.

I no longer give the homeless the money. I give the money to the food pantry and help cook the meals. If they wish to eat, they can come to where the food is, so I can see with my own eyes that they are eating.

Personally, I have never wasted money in a strip club. I am very judicious about how the money is spent.

 

[Dreadsox]

Fuck Spelling!

Oh, shit....I am sorry if I offended someone. My bad.

 

[AchtungBono]

(without reading the other replies)

What exactly IS a debit card? Is that a card where instead of charging the customer they charge the service provider? What's the difference between this and a credit card?

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

What exactly IS a debit card? Is that a card where instead of charging the customer they charge the service provider? What's the difference between this and a credit card?

A debit card is one with which you pay now from what is in your bank account. So I would imagine the govt put a certain amount on the cards, obviously no attention was paid to what people were using it on. I can't really fault people who have been through such a tragedy finding pleasure and comfort in whatever way they can, on the other hand I could see much better uses for it that would improve their lives long term and not just momentarily. But I put myself in their shoes and it's never cut and dry. I bet I would be seeking temporary escapes from the pain because the past would still haunt me and the future would be very daunting.

Of course there's always the issue of others needing that money for far more important things who didn't get it.

 

[nbcrusader]

No it just proves a last minute, without a plan, wanting to cover up for their fucking up will do for you...

I'd say it is the unfortunate response to partisian political criticism that the existing plan "is not enough".


We must live is a world with few problems when we can expect a debit card just for living through a hurricane.

 

[Irvine511]

I no longer give the homeless the money. I give the money to the food pantry and help cook the meals. If they wish to eat, they can come to where the food is, so I can see with my own eyes that they are eating.

i think this is a good policy.

i don't hand out money, but i've given people my left-overs when i've left a restaurant (and many have gladly accepted). i've also been harassed for money while in line at Chipotle by a guy who said he was hungry, so i offered to buy him a burrito, and he declined, saying that what he really wanted was Chinese food and could he just have the money i would have spent on his burrito and he'd go across the street at get Chinese?



anyway, as for the Katrina victims -- i basically agree with the Canadians in here. i'm not terribly upset, i just think it's a bummer, though inevitable, especially when incompetent cronies are placed in charge of FEMA.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

We must live is a world with few problems when we can expect a debit card just for living through a hurricane.

Well I'd say that we'd live in a cruel, sad world if we didn't offer people at least a debit card, especially when their own governments(state, local, and federal) failed them so miserably before, during, and after the hurricane. It's easy to sit in comfort and make statements and judgments when we have never had to live through a hurricane like Katrina, when we are not too poor to evacuate-and so on, and so on.

Like Anderson Cooper says in his book, hope is not a plan-and the governments failed those people because they basically used hope as a plan. Well that was one reason among many.

 

[Irvine511]

i find it interesting that some find this situation more upsetting than the inability to evacuate the city.

 

[nbcrusader]

Or that we still allow hurricanes to reach our shores...

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Or that Bush stymies so many attempts to do something about global warming (and doesn't seem at all concerned with it), and appoints hacks who have vested and corporate interests to environmental positions. I watched Al Gore the other night on Larry King, it was a real eye opener. I want to see that movie and read the book.

 

[Irvine511]

or that we put idiot incompetent cronies in positions of repsonsibility who have no clue how to effectively manage a response when hurricanes do hit our shores (which happen 5-10 times a year).

 

[BVS]

Fuck Spelling!

Oh, shit....I am sorry if I offended someone. My bad.

 

[nbcrusader]

Or that Bush stymies so many attempts to do something about global warming (and doesn't seem at all concerned with it), and appoints hacks who have vested and corporate interests to environmental positions. I watched Al Gore the other night on Larry King, it was a real eye opener. I want to see that movie and read the book.

If anything, I hope Gore's movie opens the door to honest debate on the topic. The lack of honest debate is the real inconvenient truth on that subject.

 

[Irvine511]

If anything, I hope Gore's movie opens the door to honest debate on the topic. The lack of honest debate is the real inconvenient truth on that subject.

you're right -- i do wish oil companies and the GOP would stop paying "scientists" to dispute widely agreed upon science.

 

[nbcrusader]

you're right -- i do wish oil companies and the GOP would stop paying "scientists" to dispute widely agreed upon science.

That's the junk science spirit!!

Climatologists - the ones you may actually know what they are talking about - have not come to a consensus on "global warming".

In the coming weeks, I hope we get to hear more of the facts, instead of a new chapter of the environmental fear book (right after nuclear winter and acid rain - we were supposed to be wiped out by those already).

 

[Irvine511]

Climatologists - the ones you may actually know what they are talking about - have not come to a consensus on "global warming".

on this we disagree.

and come on -- we know what junk science really is. the first word begins with an "I" and the second word begins with a "D" ...

 

[Dreadsox]

Who in here finds this more upsetting? I never said that!

 

[Irvine511]

^ i'm not saying you did say it.

i am saying that this conversation strikes me as very similar to threads about that terrible, terrible cancer on American society -- playing the race card!

which is far worse than actual racism.

 

[A_Wanderer]

on this we disagree.

and come on -- we know what junk science really is. the first word begins with an "I" and the second word begins with a "D" ...

And surely you must know that consensus is politics and science is built on fact, and it makes testable predictions and is falsifiable. What makes the Greenhouse theory scientific is that it is testable and could be disproved by a measurement that showed CO2 had no trapping effect of long wave radiation. Earths climate is bigger than the greenhouse effect and this almost infinite complexity makes modelling it a bitch and authoratative claims somewhat dubious - an that goes one way or another. I remain agnostic towards large magnitude anthropogenic climate change by carbon emissions, I fully accept that climate change occurs all through the geological record and think that the rapid increase in CO2 that we have recorded may not rank much if we looked back at the record through proxies 1 million years from now. I also think that claims of mass extinction by climate change right now and the recent rise in carbon will definitely be kicking off a new Greenhouse Earth are and should be treated as, junk science.

The green movement is run by left-wing politics, they have just as much as an agenda as the oil industry. No matter how much of an agenda anyone has on their side if the evidence is on their side then they will be vindicated.

The tying in of ID to skepticism (the foundation of science) at wild claims of anthropogenic climate change is somewhat offensive, for instance look at Ian Plimer, Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne who fought a long and hard legal battle against a creationist group that was selling their lies to children, his credentials in standing up for good science are great (he was bankrupted fighting those creationist bastards, google for info about the trial and see why I may get livid towards them and their intent on ruining young minds). He is also a climate change skeptic, he isn't a fool - his field is geology and not atmospheric science but do consider the interdisciplinary nature of climate change research.

There is a lot of investigation going on into past climate, there is a lot of productive scientific debate and it is a really good thing, the facts are what we should base a response on (so Kyoto which achieves nothing is a waste of time). It may be fun to characterise it between an enlightened few gorebots and an array of troglodite Christians but it is also unfair.

 

[A_Wanderer]

you're right -- i do wish oil companies and the GOP would stop paying "scientists" to dispute widely agreed upon science.

Who the hell gave Young the right to dispute widely agreed upon science? The problem here is that every group in the public arena has an agenda and they prey upon either peoples desire to save the world or relax because everything is fine.

If your right then the evidence will bear you out, putting a bigger fraction of the ammount of money wasted on Kyoto into climate research could allow a better understanding and if there is a preventable problem a more effective and cheaper way to deal with it, it's win-win; skeptics get more evidence, the theory is improved and the public debate becomes more informed.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Case in point

Arctic sea level has been falling by a little over 2mm a year - a movement that sets the region against the global trend of rising waters.

A Dutch-UK team made the discovery after analysing radar altimetry data gathered by Europe’s ERS-2 satellite.

It is well known that the world’s oceans do not share a uniform height; but even so, the scientists are somewhat puzzled by their results.

Global sea level is expected to keep on climbing as the Earth’s climate warms.

To find the Arctic out of step, even temporarily, emphasises the great need for more research in the region, the team says.

link

This isn't faith or a computer model, it is data (and even then there is room for error), it shows a trend that is seemingly aberrant with the assumed knowledge, it's not saying that global warmings not happening but it is showing that the controls on things like sea levels are complex and deserve more research. If you have atmospheric carbon projections but you don't know how it will interact with ocean levels then how can we project flooding into low lying areas? or droughts?

 

[Irvine511]

There is a lot of investigation going on into past climate, there is a lot of productive scientific debate and it is a really good thing, the facts are what we should base a response on (so Kyoto which achieves nothing is a waste of time). It may be fun to characterise it between an enlightened few gorebots and an array of troglodite Christians but it is also unfair.

i think you might have been missing the point of my post.

it was more of an aside that ID is junk science, but global warming is not junk science. this was not to pitch one against the other, or to say that those who believe in ID therefore believe that global warming is a hoax.

i also fully agree that more research is needed, systems are complex, etc. but what i don't think is disputable is that many "dissidents" of global warming do so for political reasons -- basically to give people who don't want to change their lifestyles, who don't want to stop driving their Hummers, who don't want to stop running their air conditioners with the windows open, who don't want to hear anything about the very strong possibility that their lifestyles might have a deleterous impact upon the planet. that's why it's crucial for the people who peddle various products to the middle class Western consumer to give them an "out," so to speak, about either their culpability in environmental degredation or the veracity of their personal impact on global warming, lest they be motivated to change their habits and spend less on petrol and great big cars.

 

[nbcrusader]

i also fully agree that more research is needed, systems are complex, etc. but what i don't think is disputable is that many "dissidents" of global warming do so for political reasons -- basically to give people who don't want to change their lifestyles, who don't want to stop driving their Hummers, who don't want to stop running their air conditioners with the windows open, who don't want to hear anything about the very strong possibility that their lifestyles might have a deleterous impact upon the planet. that's why it's crucial for the people who peddle various products to the middle class Western consumer to give them an "out," so to speak, about either their culpability in environmental degredation or the veracity of their personal impact on global warming, lest they be motivated to change their habits and spend less on petrol and great big cars.

The companion to your statement (and you capture the voice of a large segment of society) is that most of the supporters of global warming theories do so for political purposes. By demonizing big corporations and SUV's, the average person can satisfy the need to express moral outrage without doing anything - or focusing on areas of true need.

It also gives an individual an inflated sense of value. Personal impact on "global warming" is not measurable. Collective impact is negligible given the vast size of our atmosphere.

The argument over global warming is actually a luxury of Western society. We face no daily dangers in life - no searching for food (just waiting until Whole Foods opens), no fear of wild animals (unless we crawl in the cage at the zoo), etc. There are people in this world who do face daily life-threatening dangers. So instead of helping those in real need, we vilify the large car driver and the corporate executive and convince ourselves that our work is done.

 

[Irvine511]

The companion to your statement (and you capture the voice of a large segment of society) is that most of the supporters of global warming theories do so for political purposes. By demonizing big corporations and SUV's, the average person can satisfy the need to express moral outrage without doing anything - or focusing on areas of true need.

It also gives an individual an inflated sense of value. Personal impact on "global warming" is not measurable. Collective impact is negligible given the vast size of our atmosphere.

The argument over global warming is actually a luxury of Western society. We face no daily dangers in life - no searching for food (just waiting until Whole Foods opens), no fear of wild animals (unless we crawl in the cage at the zoo), etc. There are people in this world who do face daily life-threatening dangers. So instead of helping those in real need, we vilify the large car driver and the corporate executive and convince ourselves that our work is done.

and absolve ourselves of any guilt that our excessive, consumptive, wasteful lifestyles might have on the planet and its people. (and i love the global warming "theory" -- very deliberate).

i agree that there's hot air, but then there's hot air followed up by quantifiable action. i think you make a big mistake by assuming all those who are concerned about SUVs or 7,000 ft McMansions and their air conditioning don't follow up their rhetoric with action -- that seems to be as much of a stereotype as anything else, and a convenient one as well as it sets up an either/or dichotomy. you've basically said, "stop complaining and feed Africans" when it's quite possible to both complain and to feed Africans, or to not complain (and continue to drive the mile to the store) and to not feed Africans.

there are many people who ride bikes, use public transportation, drive hybrids, buy local produce, wash their clothes in cold water only, take short showers, turn off the lights, turn off the air conditioning, and do a million-and-one little things in their day-to-day habits that do make measurable impacts on energy consumption and carbon emission especially when taken as a collective.

you bring up a great point about global warming being a Western luxury. indeed it is, which makes it all the more critical that the West acts now and develops greener technologies and lifestyles before China and India fully undergo their industrial revolutions. can the planet really support 2 million more people about to live a wasteful Western lifestyle? can the planet sustain another billion cars? another billion air conditioners? (rather hot in India) another billion laundry machines set to "hot/cold"?

 

[A_Wanderer]

and i love the global warming "theory" -- very deliberate

But it is a theory, getting greater scientific literacy means having people understand that scientific theories are not just guesses but testable and falsifiable models is important.

Global warming, or the absorbtion of long wave radiation by greenhouse gases like CO2 is testable and provable. That is what makes it a scientific theory. Just like the testable theory of evolution or the theory of gravity.

ID is not a scientific theory as it makes no testable predictions, it isn't falsifiable and the framework of evolution better explains the observations. The closest science I can find is along the lines of string "theory" which is at present untestable.

You may complain that most people don't know what a scientific theory is but you will not get widespread understanding unless you adress the issue.

The greenhouse effect is a scientific theory, anthropogenic climate change is at present is nowhere near as robust.

 

[Irvine511]

But it is a theory, getting greater scientific literacy means having people understand that scientific theories are not just guesses but testable and falsifiable models is important.

Global warming, or the absorbtion of long wave radiation by greenhouse gases like CO2 is testable and provable. That is what makes it a scientific theory. Just like the testable theory of evolution or the theory of gravity.

ID is not a scientific theory as it makes no testable predictions, it isn't falsifiable and the framework of evolution better explains the observations. The closest science I can find is along the lines of string "theory" which is at present untestable.

You may complain that most people don't know what a scientific theory is but you will not get widespread understanding unless you adress the issue.

The greenhouse effect is a scientific theory, anthropogenic climate change is at present is nowhere near as robust.

yes, yes, we're on the same page -- i was pointing out the deliberate inclusion of "theory" as many tack on to things like Evolution because most people don't understand what a scientific theory actually is and think that any noun modified by the word "theory" gives said word the same level of fallability as JFK assassination theories.

as a point of comparison, does anyone make a concerted effort to tack the word "theory" onto plate techtonics?

 

[Liesje]

I'm not saying global warming doesn't exist or didn't have a role in this disaster, but here's what I think is junk science: building cities well below sea level with levees that obviously cannot stand more than a Cat 3 and local governments not addressing this issue or putting pressure on the federal government. Also, living in a large city below sea level in an area susceptible to hurrianes and not having a proper evacuation procedure. Those are junk science.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Do we call it the Theory of General Relativity?

It is a point of clarification the is very important, more skepticism and critical thinking is good.

I will say that the literature I have read and the experts I have seen quoted say that the hurricane frequency and intensity are not connected to global warming.

 

[Irvine511]

I will say that the literature I have read and the experts I have seen quoted say that the hurricane frequency and intensity are not connected to global warming.

my understanding of this is not that global warming *causes* hurricanes, per se, but that global warming increases sea surface temperatures which contributes to the intensity of hurricanes, so it compounds the problem when the US is currently in a very active hurricane cycle -- not only are there more of them, but because of global warming, we get super-storms like Katrina because the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico in late August is a full degree warmer than it has been in the past.

what's the reasoning (theorizing ... dunno, lack of a better word) behind the two super-cyclones that have smashed into Northern Australia in the past few months?