> whose been affected by an organized crime syndicate
I can’t think of anyone I know who has been affected by holes in the ozone layer. Must be a fabricated government boogeyman designed to force me to buy an inferior fridge.
Law enforcement agencies have been quite effective in controlling them over the last few decades (that and they’ve been replaced by foreign drug cartels..). It was probably quite different back in the 60s or 70s
> I can’t think of anyone I know who has been affected by holes in the ozone layer. Must be a fabricated government boogeyman designed to force me to buy an inferior fridge.
There are many [1] counties in California that come immediately to mind - but I digress.
I'll readily admit that things have changed - organized crime was indeed a much bigger problem in the past - but I might argue that even then the fault lay not with a lack of enforcement, but the existence of really, really dumb laws (prohibition). I might further argue that what organized crime is still problematic, is also a legislative rather than an enforcement issue (current prohibition, which we euphamize as the 'war on drugs').
Even if it's enforcement that's doing the work of eliminating the effects of organized crime on actual citizens - the potential for harm is way bigger from an organization with a monopoly on violence, a state mandate, and practically unlimited coffers.
> YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.
There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.
> Yes, but this problem has only affected the city like this for the last 2 years or so (to this extent).
As someone pointed out with an infographic on Twitter recently, before the Clean Air Act really began to take effect, the air quality was always like this in California summers, fires or not.
> It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere.
Cars can cause it too. Long time Los Angeles residents can attest to that. The fuel efficiency and smog requirements in recent decades have made it much less likely though[1].
>OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.
"Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).
>Your reaction to this story will depend on whether you believe businessmen are mustache-twirlers who pollute rivers...or whether you believe that the kind of government that leaves potholes unfilled for years might jump into action to shift blame and point fingers rather than accept responsibility.
Experience has taught me to trust neither. The city's failure to fix a valve doesn't absolve a party's responsibility to not pollute. Was the valve clogged? Or was it spec'd too small to begin with? The town I live in has a plant (not a meat packer) that has the same problem, with the same result.
I'm loving the typical Texas politician response too. Noticed a business breaking the law? Make noticing things like that a crime!
I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state.
I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off.
The system may have started with good intentions, but it was mismanaged and abused so much that it became useless.
> For the US I really wish we could commercialize some kind of tracker that releases fart spray, honey, flour, ink, glue, and other annoying substances if stolen.
I assume you've seen this already, but just in case you haven't.
> If ICE simply did their job in a humane but effective fashion, I think conversation around the agency would be far different.
Somehow I doubt that. There was that whole "being made to drink out of toilets" fiasco, in which the activist (I forget who it was) was the best kind of correct: technically [0].
If memory serves, the contaminants in Flint were introduced after the water treatment, and could have been identified if the community had said "this is weird, come test it". That being said, if memory serves, there were also several points of corrupt/incompetent leaders who failed their leaders.
This is generally viewed as anomalous. To be clear, what happened to the residence of Flint ABSOLUTELY SUCKED. It should not have happened anywhere to anyone, and as someone who pays federal tax dollars, I'm very disappointed that my federal government let them down. I'm also suspicious that similar problems are happening in other places, but I'm not sure how to detect it.
>
I don't quite understand why the authorities can't hit these guys in the supply line. Make it impossible to shift a bare catalytic converter by cracking down on scrap merchants who would be buying them.
For the same reason that they don't shut down the pawn shops buying stolen goods right across the street from the payday loan place.
Because it requires actual police work, and because the people running them are 'local businessmen' with pull.
> Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.
Holy cow, US really is a bizzare place. With your level of wages and your low prices of gas, the value of the gas stolen was an equivalent of 2-4 hours of minimum wage labor? And yet someone went through this trouble and risked jail for it.
The insane thing is not your cat - cats are damn smart if they want to. The insane thing is that leak events happen multiple times a week and nothing seems to happen, or that residential zoning is right next to heavy industry in the first place. WTF?
> Often as these business shutdown they built offices and homes on top of the property, for the ones that happened in the 70s there was no remediation until much later. For the ones that happened in the 90s-00s there was a level of remediation but I am still not trustworthy of it 1) lasting and 2) the developers doing the best work.
There was a investigative story some time back, about somebody that had bought a residence on one of those superfund sites.
It wasn't after his (or her? I don't remember) family started getting sick, and after investigation that he discovered the housing project was built on a superfund site. And even after paying for air measurements out-of-pocket, and with results off-the-chart, the promoter and the town were all saying everything was fine, with nothing to see. And I believe they were also trying to sue him for libel, as you normally do...
I can’t think of anyone I know who has been affected by holes in the ozone layer. Must be a fabricated government boogeyman designed to force me to buy an inferior fridge.
Law enforcement agencies have been quite effective in controlling them over the last few decades (that and they’ve been replaced by foreign drug cartels..). It was probably quite different back in the 60s or 70s
reply