Typical Modern American Mindset

[Paolo]

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/11/01/te ... ake-sandy/

Now, before you read the text, what really cracks me up is how fucking stupid we've become as a technologically dependent nation of Sheep.

My main question in life - where is the fucking manual override switch/lever/hand pump system?

Billions of gallons of gas in storage, but we can't pump it because there's no power.

Where's the fucking manual over ride/pump?! No one knows to take a fuel pump from an auto parts store and duct tape some fish tank tubing or garden hose to it and run that off a car battery?

Jesus Christ, this species is a lost cause. How god damn stupid have we become?!

*

Text:

Nerves are fraying and tensions boiling over at gas stations, home improvement stores and on streets where utility workers scramble to restore electricity as much of the Northeast entered a third day without power.

Gasoline, in heavy demand for both cars and home generators, had customers waiting in line for hours and losing patience. In Wayne, N.J, police reported breaking up angry confrontations at gas stations throughout the day on Wednesday. In Brooklyn, tempers flared outside a Getty station, with drivers getting out of their cars and exchanging angry words.

"I don't have any lights and need this gasoline for my generator," Abdul Rahim Anwar told Reuters as he waited at a Getty service station in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Officials said more than half of all gasoline service stations in the New York City area and New Jersey have been shut down because they are either out of fuel or don’t have power to operate pumps. In addition, pipelines and refineries have been shut down due to storm damage. More than 80 percent of stations in New Jersey were unable to sell gasoline as of Wednesday, according to the New Jersey Gasoline, Convenience, Automotive Association.

Residents of southeastern Connecticut were driving more than an hour north to find stations with power to run their pumps. One attendant there said tension becomes especially raw when people wait in line to fill gas cans, as opposed to vehicle tanks.

“You're waiting in line for five friggin’ gallons of gas!" he said.

At an Exxon station in Northvale, N.J., where a line of cars stretched for a third of a mile late into Wednesday night, and another line of men waiting to fill red jerry gas cans inched along,

“I’ll wait here all night,” said Barry Levin, 42, of Cliffside Park. “I need this for my family.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie moved to increase supplies of gasoline and diesel by waiving requirements that make it harder for stations to buy from out-of-state suppliers. The waiver will be in place until Nov. 7.

“When shortages threaten after natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, fuel buyers need to venture farther from state borders to ensure that their customers get the gasoline and diesel they need,” Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff said. “Temporarily suspending licensing is a prudent way of empowering merchants to buy fuel farther from the state line, boosting supplies for New Jersey motorists who need fuel to get to work and do their jobs.”

Kevin Beyer, president of the Long Island Gasoline Retailers Association in Smithtown, N.Y., said customers would be even more frustrated if they considered that the gas they need is underground – it just can’t be pumped.

"I have gas in the ground but no power,” Beyer said. “For many others they're facing the opposite problem, with power but no gasoline. For the few stations that are lucky enough to have both they've got huge lines out front."

Beyer estimated it could take until the end of next week to get all fuel stations operating again.

For now, the flow of precious fuel has slowed to a trickle and that has customers nerves frayed. Patch of Mendham-Chester, N.J., reported that a scuffle broke out Wednesday between two men bearing empty gas cans when one of the men filled his pick-up truck with gas after topping off his gas can. Shortly after he finished, the computer controlling the pump went dead, and a long line of hopeful customers was turned away.

Rivaling the demand for gas was the scarcity of D batteries, the kind most flashlights use. Virtually every store in New Jersey, New York City and Long Island was cleaned out, and there are reports of them selling for as much as $5 apiece.

At Lowe’s in Orange, N.Y., a manager said he and other employees – many without power in their own homes – have stayed in nearby hotels just to keep the store open and running.

“You see the worst in people at a time like this,” he said. “We’re trying to be there for them, but they get angry when they can’t get batteries or flashlights. I tell the staff not to take it personally – people are hurting.”

Other targets of frustration are the utility crews working to restore power. With the daunting task of repairing nearly half of all service in New Jersey and as much as 80 percent on Long Island, local power companies are getting help from out of state. But that doesn't stop angry calls to company offices and even occasional confrontations on streets - when utility workers can even be spotted. The Long Island Power Authority advised customers angry at a lack of visible LIPA crews that many working to restore electricity to Long Island have come from out of state and are using personal vehicles.

[Riverwind (imported)]

OK, lets see if I understand the problem,

There is the biggest storm ever seen heading your way, so you

don't buy candles for the electricity outage,

don't buy gas for the generators,

don't fill your cars up to the top before the storm hits,

don't check that your emergency kits are up to date,

don't double check everything to make sure your ready for the storm and the several days after,

and

you don't forget to take your stupid pills before the storm so you don't do any of the above.

No P, it does not shock me that people are stupid, look at the Bounty II, knowing the storm was coming, need I say more.

Years ago about 30 we got rain, and more rain, finally things started backing up, the water table was at about 3", yes, the police said if we got anymore rain we would need to evacuate, then came the question, "are you ready?"

We had a travel trailer that was packed with a weeks food and cloths for all of us, I only had 4 kids at the time, all we had to do was hitch it up and we were gone.

That was the time in my life were we kept about 6 months of food goods on hand.

As it turned out the rain finally stopped, 4 months later in Aug of that year the water table was still 3" you could stand in the yard and if you did not move you were soon standing in water.

Even today on my limited income I am ready, I always have at least a months supply of food, for not only me but my pets. The oil lamps are ready and primed. I am always ready for the storm or at least I try to be.

River

[Losethem (imported)]

I once had a coworker that had a wife who didn't change her driving habits one bit after the Colonial Pipeline from Louisiana was shuttered following Hurricane Katrina. We were running out of fuel where we were and the news was reporting to expect that for a week. She called and complained to her husband how much of a crisis it was.

I asked her husband if she adapted to the present reality of little fuel being available. Was she combining her trips and leaving home, driving a route in as much as a circle as possible and making it one trip instead of going back and forth from each destination back to the house and then repeating.

He said no.

I said her lack of adaptation wasn't a crisis. She could have avoided the situation, mostly. Sure, she would have run out of fuel as all of us would have, eventually, but she did absolutely nothing to adjust to reality.

What did I do? Just as I explained. I combined trips and drove ONLY to work, and did the combination on that trip by going to the store or services I was needing on the way home while I was already out in the car instead of going home first.

Amazingly, I used 1/3 of a tank of fuel in one week while waiting for the pipeline to come back online. She probably would have gone through 3 tanks of fuel.

Stupidity is not an emergency. *shrugs*

--LT

[cheetaking243 (imported)]

To be fair, there was a huge scramble for supplies right before the storm as well. There were a lot of places that were completely out of gas and batteries a couple of days before the storm hit, so a lot of people probably tried but gave up.

Another problem could be the fact that this was "only" a category-1 hurricane. This storm was technically the same category as Hurricane Irene from last year, which while it did cause a lot of damage, spared most of the coastal northeast. So a lot of people expected that Sandy was going to be no worse than Irene because it was only a category-1. Only the hurricane-savvy really knew the true damage potential of this storm based on NOAA's storm surge prediction numbers, with a lot of commonfolk from the NJ/NY area likely saying "oh, it can't be that bad." IMO, the National Hurricane Center needs to make these new Powell scales much more public. In this modern era of hurricanes that are getting larger and larger, the Saffir-Simpson scale, which only measures a hurricane's top wind speed, is looking woefully out-of-date. This hurricane made that readily apparent.

(And by the way, this was officially the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, with a gale diameter of 945 miles, beating the old record of 2010's Hurricane Igor by 25 miles.)

[Dave (imported)]

Thinking back to times when I Was young...

I remember one year at Thanksgiving there was no cranberry to be had because some fool doused the cranberry crop with pesticide and made it poisonous.

Now the Secretary that worked with my Mother was a clueless sort and never listened to the TV news or read much of the newspaper... And no, she wasn't blond.

She went to the Supermarket and upon finding no canned jelly or bagged cranberries she cornered the manager and demanded that he sell her cranberries. Well when he said why do you want them she answered "for my ex-husband who's visiting" and the manager called the police on her.

It took a while to figure it all out but they all finally had a good laugh.

PS - this was not modern times. Think around 1964 or 1965, something like that.

[Paolo]

She must have taken the Nancy Astor/Winston Churchill quote to heart?!

[Ernie of Maine (imported)]

:-\ O.K. Paolo I'ill bite which one Ernie

She must have taken the Nancy Astor/Winston Churchill quote to heart?!

[Dave (imported)]

oh good great maker and all that exasperative commentary...

Here's the quote. It's rather famous for its biting wit.

Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”

Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.”

[Paolo]

Sorry Dave, I thought everyone knew this one...

[Dave (imported)]

So did I.

Winston Churchill had a rapier for a tongue and used that wit often and with deadly results.

Like:

Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.”

Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”

And on Clement Atlee: Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.

Dorothy Parker is another wit with a wicked reply.

She was the one that said "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think"