As of this post the projected path puts this hotel, a local landmark, The Don Cesar as ground zero.
The storm surge will flow unabated (nothing but net) into Tampa Bay and slam McDill AFB head on with 15foot+ storm surge & 100mph+ sustained winds, along with everything else from funneled driving water into the shallows / beach / inlets.
On the beaches all of the curbs and sidewalks and parking lots are sand mounds, broken buildings, debris, homes of wrecked and soggy (and decaying) furniture, bedding, cars, clothes motorcycles, e-scooters & bikes from 11 god damned days ago from the last hurricane to pass by.
The highways inland going north are choked. Half my family & friends are in Jacksonville in a hotel, they live 5 miles inland from the Don CeSar hotel. Those who haven’t left yet can only hope to outrun this storm and drive south like hell, along a coast 1/4 of the way, to duck underneath it. Except there’s no gas / petrol left where they are, and I suspect along the 1st 1/4 of the route. Home Depot / Lowes are all out or boarding wood(s), there’s no bottled / jugged water left.
There’s going to be sanitation and disease issues, fresh water and food issues. Three days after the storm there will be an explosion of mosquitoes, Deer & Black flies.
It’s also been raining for days. Ground saturation was hit days ago. Even in Miami, a 5 hour drive away, we are completely saturated and have some flooding.
My childhood hometown will be a bloodbath.
I myself am south of Miami, in a mangrove waterway / swamp aboard my 29’ cruising sailboat hiding out in the same fucking spot I left just 7 fucking days ago storm dodging.
So any Conservative / GOP / Republican / MAGA or thier supporters and enablers can burn in fucking hell. I’m dedicating at least part of my life to never knowingly allow these people, companies, or their products into my life.
Crazy how we have a $1.4T national defense budget and yet we remain powerless in the face of some wind and rain.
Beginning to wonder if the budgets for the F-35A/B/C/D/I, the Virginia Class submarines, and STAR WARS anti-ICBM space laser systems might have been misspent relative to the need for sea walls, dykes, and storm bunkers.
Wind and rain that we knew a century ago how to prevent. The greenhouse effect was discovered during the French Revolution. Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been known for about 50 years now.
The thing is handling wind and rain sounds easy until you understand it as force carried through the media of air and water. As a midwesterner I know not to underestimate wind, it can destroy your home without slowing down. This is a bombing campaign of force in a different form.
The thing is handling wind and rain sounds easy until you understand it as force carried through the media of air and water.
But we do have industrial scale infrastructure to curb the effect of these storm surges. We have construction techniques to make buildings more durable. We have artificial breakwaters and coastal preserves to blunt the landfall of these big storms. We have mass transit infrastructure technology to evacuate people quickly and efficiently, rather than stranding them in giant traffic jams in the middle of a storm.
This is a bombing campaign of force in a different form.
We’ve known how to build bunkers for over a century. Perhaps we need a modern day Enver Hoxha in the Florida governor’s seat.
I stand by the money comment, there’s zero indication there isn’t money to complete both coastal hardening projects, and robust disaster relief.
I stand by the conservative comment because Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name. More directly, desantis and such openly avoid collaboration with the democratic white house out of spite
That’s fine. But it isn’t just a question of money. Its a question of expertise and manpower. At some point, you have a soft cap on the volume of intellectual and engineering man hours at your disposal. Funneling our best and brightest into a Pentagon vanity project means drawing down the pool of skilled workers in other industries.
It’s the same problem modern mathematics and physics is having with the financials industry. Anyone who excels at high level mathematics gets sucked up to do HFT at some Wall Street hedge fund. They spend their best years combing over market data for optimizing arbitrage in regional commodities prices. The modern day Hawkings and Einsteins are very likely tied up inventing new ways to raid your pension funds, rather than spearheading the next generation of astronomy and physics.
In the same way, the trillions we spend on the F-35 are drawing people into a field that exists exclusively for the cat-and-mouse of perimeter intrusion. Meanwhile, civil engineering is a field for neo-babies looking for government sinecures and B-students who don’t realize they’re getting into a retreating field.
Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name
Conservatives-in-all-but-Name are a big chunk of the party. Manchin isn’t the exception in the Senate, he’s just the name we all recognize. Gillibrand and Hickenlooper and Ossoff and Durbin and King and Tester and on and on… they’re all along for the ride.
DeSantis is a freak on social issues. But on fiscal austerity and “business-friendly” subsidies, he’s right in line with the Dems in his state’s congressional delegation.
I agree with much of your comment but must say I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower. I understand your draw argument, but would contend that it’s not that overlapped a Venn diagram. There aren’t that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids that you’re losing staff from one to the other.
I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower
When you’re the US Feds, money isn’t real. You can spend 20% of GDP while carrying a $35T debt and nobody cares.
But you still need to spend the money on stuff. You can’t buy a trillion in waffles because that many waffles don’t exist. Similarly, you can’t hire $2T in engineering talent over 10 years without depleting a well of talent shared by other engineering professions.
You’re creating an enormous vacuum in the industry when you can pay 2x-5x what other engineers are making and you’re employing thousands of people for the job over a decade.
There aren’t that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids
This isn’t a question of “hybrid”. This is a question of “which college has the best graduate salaries?” and “which professors are in the highest demand into the next decade?”
$2T over ten years is it’s own (very lucrative) industry. That’s before you get into the draw this has on electrical engineers and materials specialists and management training.
As of this post the projected path puts this hotel, a local landmark, The Don Cesar as ground zero.
The storm surge will flow unabated (nothing but net) into Tampa Bay and slam McDill AFB head on with 15foot+ storm surge & 100mph+ sustained winds, along with everything else from funneled driving water into the shallows / beach / inlets.
On the beaches all of the curbs and sidewalks and parking lots are sand mounds, broken buildings, debris, homes of wrecked and soggy (and decaying) furniture, bedding, cars, clothes motorcycles, e-scooters & bikes from 11 god damned days ago from the last hurricane to pass by.
The highways inland going north are choked. Half my family & friends are in Jacksonville in a hotel, they live 5 miles inland from the Don CeSar hotel. Those who haven’t left yet can only hope to outrun this storm and drive south like hell, along a coast 1/4 of the way, to duck underneath it. Except there’s no gas / petrol left where they are, and I suspect along the 1st 1/4 of the route. Home Depot / Lowes are all out or boarding wood(s), there’s no bottled / jugged water left.
There’s going to be sanitation and disease issues, fresh water and food issues. Three days after the storm there will be an explosion of mosquitoes, Deer & Black flies.
It’s also been raining for days. Ground saturation was hit days ago. Even in Miami, a 5 hour drive away, we are completely saturated and have some flooding.
My childhood hometown will be a bloodbath.
I myself am south of Miami, in a mangrove waterway / swamp aboard my 29’ cruising sailboat hiding out in the same fucking spot I left just 7 fucking days ago storm dodging.
So any Conservative / GOP / Republican / MAGA or thier supporters and enablers can burn in fucking hell. I’m dedicating at least part of my life to never knowingly allow these people, companies, or their products into my life.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Crazy how we have a $1.4T national defense budget and yet we remain powerless in the face of some wind and rain.
Beginning to wonder if the budgets for the F-35A/B/C/D/I, the Virginia Class submarines, and STAR WARS anti-ICBM space laser systems might have been misspent relative to the need for sea walls, dykes, and storm bunkers.
Wind and rain that we knew a century ago how to prevent. The greenhouse effect was discovered during the French Revolution. Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been known for about 50 years now.
The thing is handling wind and rain sounds easy until you understand it as force carried through the media of air and water. As a midwesterner I know not to underestimate wind, it can destroy your home without slowing down. This is a bombing campaign of force in a different form.
But we do have industrial scale infrastructure to curb the effect of these storm surges. We have construction techniques to make buildings more durable. We have artificial breakwaters and coastal preserves to blunt the landfall of these big storms. We have mass transit infrastructure technology to evacuate people quickly and efficiently, rather than stranding them in giant traffic jams in the middle of a storm.
We’ve known how to build bunkers for over a century. Perhaps we need a modern day Enver Hoxha in the Florida governor’s seat.
There’s ample money for both. Conservatives just block it.
glancing at the F-35 $2T budget
At some point, you start making trade offs.
glancing at the voting records of Manchin, Sinema, and Coons
I wish it was just conservatives.
I stand by the money comment, there’s zero indication there isn’t money to complete both coastal hardening projects, and robust disaster relief.
I stand by the conservative comment because Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name. More directly, desantis and such openly avoid collaboration with the democratic white house out of spite
That’s fine. But it isn’t just a question of money. Its a question of expertise and manpower. At some point, you have a soft cap on the volume of intellectual and engineering man hours at your disposal. Funneling our best and brightest into a Pentagon vanity project means drawing down the pool of skilled workers in other industries.
It’s the same problem modern mathematics and physics is having with the financials industry. Anyone who excels at high level mathematics gets sucked up to do HFT at some Wall Street hedge fund. They spend their best years combing over market data for optimizing arbitrage in regional commodities prices. The modern day Hawkings and Einsteins are very likely tied up inventing new ways to raid your pension funds, rather than spearheading the next generation of astronomy and physics.
In the same way, the trillions we spend on the F-35 are drawing people into a field that exists exclusively for the cat-and-mouse of perimeter intrusion. Meanwhile, civil engineering is a field for neo-babies looking for government sinecures and B-students who don’t realize they’re getting into a retreating field.
Conservatives-in-all-but-Name are a big chunk of the party. Manchin isn’t the exception in the Senate, he’s just the name we all recognize. Gillibrand and Hickenlooper and Ossoff and Durbin and King and Tester and on and on… they’re all along for the ride.
DeSantis is a freak on social issues. But on fiscal austerity and “business-friendly” subsidies, he’s right in line with the Dems in his state’s congressional delegation.
I agree with much of your comment but must say I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower. I understand your draw argument, but would contend that it’s not that overlapped a Venn diagram. There aren’t that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids that you’re losing staff from one to the other.
When you’re the US Feds, money isn’t real. You can spend 20% of GDP while carrying a $35T debt and nobody cares.
But you still need to spend the money on stuff. You can’t buy a trillion in waffles because that many waffles don’t exist. Similarly, you can’t hire $2T in engineering talent over 10 years without depleting a well of talent shared by other engineering professions.
You’re creating an enormous vacuum in the industry when you can pay 2x-5x what other engineers are making and you’re employing thousands of people for the job over a decade.
This isn’t a question of “hybrid”. This is a question of “which college has the best graduate salaries?” and “which professors are in the highest demand into the next decade?”
$2T over ten years is it’s own (very lucrative) industry. That’s before you get into the draw this has on electrical engineers and materials specialists and management training.