tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post3402176646709447532..comments2024-03-28T18:25:51.357+00:00Comments on The Ranty Highwayman: David Cameron is a disingenuous git!The Ranty Highwaymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17361350433158148025noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post-67017177974242110462014-01-02T08:30:19.710+00:002014-01-02T08:30:19.710+00:00Of course, what happens here is always tiny compar...Of course, what happens here is always tiny compared to the suffering in other parts of the world and I think it gets forgotten. But, any standby arrangement comes with a cost and it is mostly there for sheltering people and cleaning up after the event.<br /><br />Minority Report? I have a book of phone numbers!The Ranty Highwaymanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17361350433158148025noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post-13328624033665058692014-01-01T15:48:10.333+00:002014-01-01T15:48:10.333+00:00Lest we forget, this story is being reported by th...Lest we forget, this story is being reported by the same journalists who seemed surprised (and critical) that the Philippines government hadn't managed to reach every corner of their affected regions by the second day, after they were hit by the typhoon earlier this year. (As per every other natural disaster they report on anywhere in the World).<br /><br />This is the C21st goddamit! Surely all it takes is someone in a control room somewhere to wave their hands over a screen in a Minority Report/James Bond stylee in order to identify each problem and then simply task the individual who has spent the last 360 days on stand-by in their van, waiting for just for such an occasion, to go to the scene and repair it?<br /><br />If not, just what do we pay our taxes for?! ;-)<br /><br />ARAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post-54188796376992671392013-12-30T19:29:21.721+00:002013-12-30T19:29:21.721+00:00Quite right. Despite many people being fed up with...Quite right. Despite many people being fed up with how they are treated, paid, regarded etc, when the chips are down and things go wrong, they are up there wanting to help. Politicians keep seeing a way of promoting themselves.The Ranty Highwaymanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17361350433158148025noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post-14917766219717325792013-12-30T18:03:12.424+00:002013-12-30T18:03:12.424+00:00Thing is that in the event of a major crisis like ...Thing is that in the event of a major crisis like the power cuts, even though the LAs and utilities are running a skeleton service with on-call for out of hours, they can and will drag people in to assist, and 99% of those asked will roll up sleeves and chip in. (I provide on-call for acute hospital IT and we have pulled together in exactly that manner for single system outages, let along a major disaster)<br /><br />The storm obviously caused a lot of damage to the local power grids as well as all the flooding, and with the best will in the world it takes time to clear the debris to get to the outages and then to repair them.<br /><br />Cameron like most politicians is a greasy slimy git (actually more than most) who will avoid doing anything but will make all the right noises.<br /><br />If only he'd had the balls to say that the authorities were breaking their backs (sure they will have been) and repair does take time, then I would have had some small respect for him. Gazza_dhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00648167302912969102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post-24786074200094277402013-12-29T22:28:21.184+00:002013-12-29T22:28:21.184+00:00Those Dutch *shakes fist*. The sad thing is that w...Those Dutch *shakes fist*. The sad thing is that we were getting our act together and indeed "managed retreat" in giving up land for tidal and fluvial flooding has been going on in the UK. My point was that behind the photo op, the PM must know the score and as a LALO, it got to me!The Ranty Highwaymanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17361350433158148025noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1828166865647185633.post-380733868120285272013-12-29T22:13:57.755+00:002013-12-29T22:13:57.755+00:00Appropriately enough, the Dutch have gotten this w...Appropriately enough, the Dutch have gotten this worked out, too. After the 1995 Rhine floods a program of infrastructural measures (what else?) was instituted to mitigate the effects of high water in the Rhine and Meuse delta. €2.5 billion was spent on things like sacrificial farmland that can be flooded to reduce the pressure in other areas and moving dikes back to create larger uninhabited flood plains.bz2https://www.blogger.com/profile/12501944795613124511noreply@blogger.com