Be INFORMED

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Another Day In The Life…

… and I’m not to sure that I can take much more of the Tampa, Florida lifestyle. At least, not the kind of life that I am living here. Most hourly workers here in North Tampa would think that I have it made because I can work when I wish to, and I can stay at home when I wish to. All that I hear from my co-workers is that Mike’s got the money and all of that crap. Which I guess that I do, for the most part. The only reason that I live better than most of my friends here is because I chose not to drink my cash away, as they do daily. I do better than they do because I chose not to smoke all of my cash up into crack, or to become one of the many pain medication addicts that are prevalent here.

   Yes, the employment sucks down here. I do not work a forty hour week because there are very few hours like that through the temp services. In fact, I’ve been working only two days at the most for the past month! That sucks up the ass! I’m not broke yet because I do not waste my money on dumb shit.

   Once, when I was living out in the streets, one of my homeless friends asked me how I could be out of doors and not drink or do drugs. I simply told him that it was the drugs and the drinking that was keeping himself and others out in the street. In many cases, a combination of the two had put some of them outdoors in the first place. Some of them work at least 30 to 35 hours per week, and have been for a few years, and they are still living outside! Those bad habits will keep them there for a very long time. A few of them will die there. A of them that I’ve known in the past have died during the six years that I was away from here. Most of them from drinking to much.

    This is not a problem exclusive to Tampa, I know. I think my main hassle with the Tampa area is not  with the city itself, but with the people who live here. I’m sorry to have to say it, but the people here are by far the most ignorant, stupid, and uneducated group of individuals that I have ever run into. You can thank the area government for a lot of that, as well as the state hoods up in  Tallahassee.

    One of the problems that I have with the folks down here is that they seem to think that they have all of the time in the world to do something. They seem to run on two speeds here, “ snail slow “ and “ stop.”

    For instance, just yesterday I sent a woman out to do something pretty simple for both her and myself. Go to an Amscott to have a power deposit and a past bill sent to the local power company. This was so that the power would be turned on at her new place of residence. By public transit, it takes about ten minutes to get there. She also had to fax a copy of her driver license to Equifax in order to verify her identity. Five hours later and she still was not finished. The fax machine would not accept her id card. Well. of course it wouldn’t! So, two days later and that little task still has not been finished. She did manage to get the power deposit and her late bill sent into the power company.

   Like i told her though, we could have taken the id to my office and made a copy of it and faxed it on my fax machine. all in under half an hour! I had something else that I had to do at the time.

    This is not just a problem with her and the way that she does things. this is an outbreak infecting many of the people in the Tampa Bay area. They do things without thinking things through, and then when things don’t work out for them, it becomes someone else's fault. What makes me laugh the hardest though, is that instead of doing things differently, they will do it the same way and then cry when they get the same result as they did the last time. No one here seems to understand that you cannot do the same thing the same way and expect to get different results. It doesn’t work that way!  “ Dumb as a box of rocks “ phrase had its birthplace in Tampa, I’m sure.

    But wait! There’s more!

Monday, July 26, 2010

Gulf Coast Oil Problems…

… are nothing new, but, apparently there have been more than reported.

    According to an article in the St.Petersburg Times,

there have been quite a few that were worse than we thought that they were.

One big spill was 160,638 barrels in 1967 when an anchor tore a hole in a corroded pipeline operated by Humble Oil, a unit of Exxon; it leaked for 13 days. In 1969, a blowout on a Union Oil well spilled 80,000 barrels, killing 4,000 birds and seeping for four years after being plugged. In 1974, a Pennzoil pipeline break spilled 19,833 barrels probably because an anchor was dragged across the submerged line. Another anchor tore open an Amoco pipeline in 1988, spilling 15,576 barrels. A Shell pipeline leak in 1990, discovered when a helicopter noticed a heavy oil slick 25 miles by 15 miles, spilled 14,423 barrels.

    Oil executives and a few of our politicians assert that newer technology has made oil drilling more safer. As proof, they point us to hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

"I think people are reassured that not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in 2008. "Those rigs in the gulf, there was not a single incident of spillage that anyone reported."

But while the overwhelming majority of safety valves did work during the two hurricanes, the MMS reported that there were five modest-sized spills, each between 1,000 and 2,000 barrels. There were also 125 small spills, many from riser pipes or storage tanks on platforms. Altogether, they added up to 16,302 barrels, almost a quarter as big as the 1969 spill off Santa Barbara, Calif., that helped give rise to the modern environmental movement.

    Anyway, the article goes on speaking of some of the less known problems with our wells and the pipelines that run under the Gulf.

    Read it all right here.