tigertoy

It sickens me how much airtime the media spends on "this is so and so who just lost their home and/or their loved ones in the latest disaster, can you please tell us how you feel while can barely keep yourself from crying uncontrollably" garbage. This isn't journalism it's sleazy tabloid garbage exploiting the victims for the sake of emotionally titillating the audience. Disasters are a worthy subject, but what should be covered is explaining what really happened, and more importantly how likely it is to happen again, what we should do to mitigate the risk, and what the economic and political barriers are to doing it.

I knew days ahead of time that Harvey was going to be an epic disaster not because of hurricane winds but because of flooding, based on things that I caught because I know stuff and I was paying attention when they quickly glossed over it. Then after the storm hit, they're incessantly harping on how this was totally unexpected, why didn't we know this was going to happen. We did know it was going to happen, but the media didn't think it was important enough to stress and the country didn't notice.

I knew months ago that we were going to have terrible fires in California, the whole state is tinder dry. I want to hear details on what the local terrain is like to support such an intense fire, and what could be done to make the towns less vulnerable when the countryside goes up in smoke. I don't want to hear how much it sucks to have your house burn down and how terrible it is to come back from the evacuation and see it over and over and over again.

I posted the following rant as a comment in someone else's journal (public).  I feel like saving a copy on my own journal.

( in a debate, don't use the word insane to decribe the opposition )

Awhile back, I got email at work saying that I had to take some online ethics training, and I would get a message with the details.  I didn't pay much attention, figuring I'd just wait until I got the message with the details.

Today, I got a nastygram telling me that I hadn't done it yet, the deadline is Thursday, and by the way I could face a $5000 fine for blowing it off.  But it didn't have the actual details of how to log in.  I searched my inbox.  No, I hadn't managed to ignore it when it came in.  It wasn't somehow in the trash.

Eventually I found it in the spam folder.  I don't actually get spam on that address (yet), but I have the filters set up for my other accounts where I get boatloads, and I'd accidentally enabled it for the work account as well.

So, now I've completed my required ethics training.  Basically a waste of an hour -- what isn't just common sense is stuff I already knew about Illinois law about using state facilities for political purposes.  But I guess there are people who don't have my common sense and either haven't lived in Illinois or lived under a rock and don't know that if your boss tells you to work on his brother's political campaign, you don't have to do it and are supposed to report him, and people really do need to know it.  And at least I didn't have to waste the whole day going off to a classroom to have some poor sod drone through a Powerpoint presentation of the same material.

But if the nastygram had gone into the bit bucket along with the message that told me how to log into the training and the two subsequent reminders, I could have been in hot water on Friday.  And it would all be the fault of those complete wastes of protoplasm, the sort of humans who could only make a useful contribution to life on earth if they were run through a chipper and used for fertilizer -- the spammers.