We're storing up stupid in case Florida accidentally a drought.
Taken from a conversation (rant) I had with someone in chat:
Quote
Mobile was the first capital of Louisiana. It's a shame this city doesn't embrace that.
The history is soooo similar and there's a lot of beauty and potential here but the NIMBYs fuck it all up.
When you hit downtown, you see it in the architecture.
People here would rather wave the rebel flag and TALK about how "diverse" we are.
The shame of it is, Mobile is probably one of the last (if not THE last) fertile, open coastal/port cities with potential for upwardly-mobile growth but the uber-republican, pro-corporate regime here would rather sell and give all the opportunities to private interests than do some real urban planning for the people.
So we're just getting raped. The opportunities are eroding with every giant conglomerate to come in and buy up port access and coastal reserve.
In Mobile, every bit of anything worth a good goddamn is already slated to go to some defense contractor, oil interest or chemical plant before we even hear about it.
Our Senator, Governor and Mayor all pushed to build this goddamned Carnival cruise terminal, for instance, with absolutely ZERO contract with Carnival to actually USE the thing. They just hired the contractors and built the thing with the promise to Mobile that it would bring tourism dollars.
Carnival hemmed and hawed about USING it so there it sat, over $40mil worth of concrete and channel. The city actually BORROWED $20million to finish the project.
Just as the natives were getting restless about a huge, piece-of-shit, corporate parking-lot on the coast, lo and behold! Katrina blows through! And guess what? New Orleans couldn't get their shit together long enough to remove the fucking power cables obstructing their terminal. WHOOPEE.
So Carnival parked their shit here for two years at a discount with still NO CONTRACT with the city for long-term use.
Meantime, what did Mobile do to encourage Carnival to stay? Did enhance tourism? Attract good cuisine? Fix the 15-mile-away airport problem? Gentrify neighborhoods, fix up the sights or get rid of some of the ugly fucking Dollar Trees and Payday Loan places in favor of mid and hi-range hotels?
NO! They enacted curfews downtown, prohibited drinking after 2AM or on Sundays without a private club license and outlawed sex toys statewide!
The largest-scale of raids on tourism-related nightlife interests went on while Carnival was in town.
The Old Guard resisted "establishments of intemperance" like a CRUSADE.
All of the gay clubs along the "fruit loop" were SHUT DOWN except for ONE...and that one's owned by Old Money.
People lost their liquor licences and got hit with irrecoverable fines that put them out of business.
Carnival didn't leave, they were THROWN out of here...and the Old Guard fucked the horse they rode in on up the ass.
And now, the taxpayers OWE $2.2million a YEAR on the empty cruise terminal. Do you know how much the city made off that disabled ship that's there now for the hospitality? $73K.
And the city just raised our sales taxed to 10%. We pay more than MANHATTAN. We have NO mass transit, NO social services and a piss-poor Parks & Rec department.
maybe a pention?
or :?
Welcome to the 21st Century. That isn't Mobile, that's AMERICA.
And Florida isn't The Source. Florida is, like Arizona, a destination. Squiddy was wrong about that...Things don't START in Florida or Arizona, things RETIRE here. And they bring their small-town Midwestern bullshit with them, their terror of all brown people, and their determination to punish said brown people for infractions that largely exist only in the heads of said po'buckers.
Imagine your city as a river of shit. Florida and Arizona aren't the headwaters, they're the delta. The headwaters are in every small town in America.
And what of that "LAWD JESUS IT'S A FAAR" diasbled Carnival ship? Where's it at right now? Howcome we only made the equivalent of a down payment on a house off that shit and nothing more for port fees?
BECAUSE THEY MADE A PRIVATE CONTRACT DEAL WITH BAE AND HAD IT TOWED TO BAE's PRIVATE PROPERTY. I mean BAE OWNS part of the Port of Mobile. To themselves. Alone.
So all the repairs, all the docking, all the MONEY goes to a CORPORATION. We get to clean up all the chemicals and pollution the thing is invariably spilling into the bay...pollution which will no doubt be blamed on taxpayer usage somehow when the local government FINALLY decides to listen to the EPA and the Baykeepers and we'll be taxed for it. And the whites will believe it...because thousands of gallons of fecal and chemical waste is TOTALLY secondary to black people dumping their fried chicken grease down the drains.
:fap: :horrormirth: :fap:
Also, whenever there's a $40 Mn boondoggle involving concrete, some of that money stuck to someone's pockets. If your press was worth a fuck, some people would be run out of town with an angry mob of scooter-bound landwhales behind them.
We had a similar situation here, only it involved a "no stink" sanitary facility placed between two large neighborhoods. You can smell the fucking thing 5 miles away, more in the summer.
Our paper actually published all the gory details. The company that did the work had, of course, flown by night long before the shit, if you'll pardon the expression, had hit the fan. The people who took the kickbacks, though, were quietly and quickly ruined. One to prison, one killed himself, and three that decided that the time had come to "run for the border".
No mob, though. It's a bazillion degrees and we're all choking on poomp gas.
Quote from: navkat on March 04, 2013, 08:57:26 PM
And what of that "LAWD JESUS IT'S A FAAR" diasbled Carnival ship? Where's it at right now? Howcome we only made the equivalent of a down payment on a house off that shit and nothing more for port fees?
BECAUSE THEY MADE A PRIVATE CONTRACT DEAL WITH BAE AND HAD IT TOWED TO BAE's PRIVATE PROPERTY. I mean BAE OWNS part of the Port of Mobile. To themselves. Alone.
So all the repairs, all the docking, all the MONEY goes to a CORPORATION. We get to clean up all the chemicals and pollution the thing is invariably spilling into the bay...pollution which will no doubt be blamed on taxpayer usage somehow when the local government FINALLY decides to listen to the EPA and the Baykeepers and we'll be taxed for it. And the whites will believe it...because thousands of gallons of fecal and chemical waste is TOTALLY secondary to black people dumping their fried chicken grease down the drains.
:fap: :horrormirth: :fap:
What part of "America" are you not getting? This is the unalloyed BEAUTY of the FREE MARKET. Not that it's free to YOU. Don't be silly. It's free to the "job creators" (HAW HAW), just like always.
And in this case, that was a concrete company. The rest of you can just drink your diesel-flavored water and LIKE it.
LOOK GRATEFUL.
Where'd Nav go?
Probably saving someone's life, against their better judgement.
Here! I had to pick up Alex and then started to reply and the phone rang: someone needed me to shove an Oropharygeal Airway device in their caek-hole. They needed me to.
Quote from: navkat on March 04, 2013, 10:51:46 PM
Here! I had to pick up Alex and then started to reply and the phone rang: someone needed me to shove an Oropharygeal Airway device in their caek-hole. They needed me to.
That sort of sounded Doktor Howl-ish.
Howl is one of New Girl's daddies.