DeSantis Declares Emergency Over Floods After Cutting Stormwater Funds

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 692 points –
DeSantis Declares Emergency Over Floods After Cutting Stormwater Funds | Common Dreams
commondreams.org
120

I’m not sure if gay marriage causes hurricanes, but it looks an awful lot like hate and fascism cause floods.

It's almost as if ignoring a problem, doesn't make it go away.

Have you tried praying on it?

I hear that when these things happen, it's like Jesus spanking you for being naughty...someone must have said a gay word or something.

Im reading Yojou Senki and all I can think from seeing your post is an incomprehensible rant that can be best summarized as something something fuck you Being X.

Hah, tell that to my student loans!

Why? I have it on good authority from every bank hired economists and neoliberal on earth that if you have a student loan it is because you are a privileged multimillionaire who just doesn't feel like paying them, also if we give you a break the inflation will be so bad we will be BBQing human babies for food.

CATO's main funding sources are banks that service student loans and CATO sued the federal government to not give debt relief. Their argument was, and I shit you not, that if student debt relief is given they will have to pay interns more.

He knows democrats will bail him out because they do the right thing. Insurance agencies won't, though. The writing is on the wall when your insurance premiums skyrocket. Or worse, they drop you.

How many insurance companies are actually left in Florida? I thought a good percentage of them have pulled out of the state entirely citing climate change. I know the premiums offered by the remaining companies have to be insane and it's not going to get any better.

Massive flooding of whole cities is simply not an insurable thing. Not even with all the reinsurers in the world can you pay out a city of millions. Most sane countries don't even try.

I live about 5m under sea level. Should de dikes breach and my polder flood (and I don't die horribly), the insurance company pays fuck all. The Dutch state has a giant mountain of cash sitting by for cases like that.

Of course, handing DeSantis a giant pile of emergency cash would just mean it instantly gets turned into bribes, so that wouldn't work for Florida.

Fun fact, the biggest point in Florida is currently 345 feet above sealevel. (it’s somewhere near the ballsack.)

The average is like 100

It’s a very bad state to ignore climate change in.

(Edit fixed the stats.)

Coincidentally, I posted this in Political Memes yesterday-

Mar-A-Lago will become the first course exclusively comprised of 18 holes of water hazards.

And the fraud was off the charts too. Roofers going door to door offering free roofs: “oh we can put in a claim…”

My insurance is dropping me because I had the audacity to try to use it. We had one claim that paid for some damage after a flood, one to pay for a water heater, and that's it. They decided that means we will probably ask again the next time something goes wrong, so why would they want to keep insuring us?

Insurance is a scam, and it pisses me off that we're still tolerating their bullshit.

The concept is good. But the way it is run right now is just taking money and fight tooth and nail to pay as less as they can gey away with it.

I would argue that the concept is flawed. The base idea is that you calculate statistics on how much you would be likely to have to pay out, then set premiums such that you'll always be ahead of payouts. Essentially, everyone pays so that the unfortunate few who need help can get money out of the common pool to help.

This is just taxes, basically. We already do this with fire departments and such. However, insurance adds a profit motive on top because it's a company, so the amount they take in must always be significantly higher than the amount they pay out. And if it's a publicly traded company then the amount they make above and beyond the amount they pay out must always be higher every quarter.

Like at a certain point, why not just do taxes and better disaster relief? As an added bonus, the government would have an extra incentive to care about things that may make the payouts increase, like poor infrastructure or climate change.

Many people are ideologically opposed to taxes and cooperation.

Reminds me of when right-wingers accidentally reinvent like buses or socialized health care under a different name.

In short, people are emotion driven and many of them are stupid on top of that.

Taxes and disaster relief is a form of insurance, I agree with you there. When I say the concept is good, I mean people pooling a little bit in a big fund and then if something happens, the money is taken from the fund.

Insurance companies in the current system will nickel and dime you and deny your claims.

We already do this to an extent. It's called FEMA.

I am not against the government growing it's role in this sector, I just would be concerned about the perverse incentives and subsidizing the very wealthy. Why should I have to pay for your nice house on the river that exceeds 8x or more my annual gross income? You couldn't get private insurance because everyone knew this was a really bad place for a McMansion so you went to the government and got a free lunch. Also you are pretty much asking renters, who are usually poorer, to give money to homeowners who are usually richer.

Maybe if it was structured more like FDIC. The government provides insurance but there is a cap on how much. If you want more go to the free market.

I was mostly focused on how irritating it is that there's yet another way that basic necessities are monetized, rather than on the actual implementation details.

The government already tracks average home and property values for determining property tax and also for determining what is a reasonable mortgage for a given area. I was kind of thinking that it would just be in addition to property tax so based on your home value, so those with very large houses would already be paying proportionally more into it.

If it weren’t a way to extract profit and the money stayed in a fund. It would secure society, Almost like social security. Just stop building in flood zones ffs.

Just stop building in flood zones ffs.

I don't want to live in the desert or badlands. Plus I thought we were trying to encourage people to move to cities so they wouldn't have to drive as much.

I've had friends get fucked in the ass by their insurance company that refused to let them buy flood insurance even though they weren't particularly close to a body of water. When the "once in 500 years" (not) flood came, their house that they had owned for years was destroyed. Insurance that they paid for picked up none of their $100,000 damages.

They rebuilt it out of pocket and are selling it and moving to a place that is more ecologically stable. Fuck insurance companies.

I mean…. It sounds like the insurance company knew it was going to flood. Being close to a body of water has nothing to do with likelihood to flood…

Seems like your friends should have moved before the flood, if they couldn’t get insurance for it. Why were they even searching for flood insurance if “they weren’t particularly close to a body of water”?

Sorry but this definitely sounds like your friends’ fault. They knew they needed the insurance because it would flood, the insurance company knew with high certainty it was going to flood, and then it did flood.

Same boat. I can't get flood insurance. All I can do is really hurt my life by moving or just accept that one day I am going to lose a lot of my stuff. I have accepted the latter.

In May, DeSantis signed a bill that removes most references to climate change from state law and streamlines fossil fuel development projects—"Don't Say Climate Change," the bill's critics have called it, including a meteorologist who spoke up against it on air. On the day he signed the legislation, Key West was a record-setting 115°F.

"If we stop people from using the words 'climate change' that means we won't have any more flooding or hurricanes. I'm the smartest." - Meatball Ron

"If walk on the track and I close my eyes, the train won't hit me!"

That's not true at all!

You also need to put in headphones so you can't hear that pesky whistle.

To be fair you'll never know it hit you.

I mean, it'll be pretty obvious that's what's happening even with your eyes closed. Just like it's pretty obvious what's happening in Florida.

It’s not a hurricane. It’s a combined air/water relocation event.

  • Ron

Congress should force him to add the references back in before giving himself the money.

And make sure all the people who really need the help know why.

Aren't they just moving on to calling it climate apocalypse cause climategeddon was already taken.

Republicans are idiots

Remember reading about the starving that went on in the early USSR. How their mismanagement led to crop failures while their neighbors had great years of food production.

I kinda want to get out of infrastructure work. I see how cost disease is ripping it all apart, and I keep thinking that if I stay in the field I am going to be dealing with disasters that are coming. With all the tools I need to fix things but not legally allowed to do anything as the floods kill us all.

I am on a liferaft trying to get us to safety while people are cutting holes and all voted to ban my patch kit.

Driving out everyone in Miami is part of the point here.

DeSantis cuts state funding for thing then demands the federal government pay for it.

That's just being conservative. If you don't have to spend money, you're saving! /s

(But seriously on some level, probably the tactic. Why spend state money when you can ignore and then plead for money from the Federal government? It's so perfectly grifty. Lives don't matter, only votes enough to stay in power.)

I lived in a Republican suburb. While I hate car dependent design, that's what we had. One particular intersection would be backed up for miles during rush hour. What did the city do? Ignore the problem until it became a "traffic emergency" so they could use federal funds to expand the intersection. To assholes the emergency designation is just another tool to get ahead in life.

Local city government cuts funding for sewer/storm drain repairs, then demands DeSantis pay for it.

I think the difference here is that floridians at local and state level want to cut funding, so they're welcome to do that. The issue is, if that's what you vote for and enact, don't then turn around and ask for government money and/or turn down other states when they ask for federal money (like after Sandy).

Don't worry, I'm sure he'll find a way to blame Democrats for this somehow

"If those dang Democrats would have stopped my decisions, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

I’m almost positive that Mitch McConnell has used that exact defense before.

That was literally the republican response to their anti-vax movement. If Democrats hadn't pushed for vaccines and social distancing, our base would have been more willing to take precautions and fewer people would have died.

These motherfuckers knee-jerked so hard it launched them into a volcano.

God is sending floods to stop the gays, duh!

I still wonder about that. If you believe in skydaddy wouldn't you also believe that skydaddy could launch a precision strike? Skydaddy doesn't want gays? All of them vanish tomorrow. It doesn't need to make a hurricane ever so much stronger any more than I would need an ant to carry a small bit of dirt for me.

Biden drew up this storm path on a map...WITH A SHARPIE

See? Now I'm not sure if you're joking or not...

So now the Democrats will use the ignorance, evil and hypocrisy of these clown to highlight what happens when you elect GOP, right? Right?

I mean yes, but Republicans literally do not care. They will still vote for Rhonda Santis just because he pisses off Dems. Not because they like his policies or think he's a good candidate.

Now Democrats will assert that this is Ralph Nader's fault, because he stole all those Green votes from the other big in-bed-with-fossil-fuels party. Meanwhile, it will still be incredibly important to reach across the aisle and work with Ron DeSantis on bipartisan solutions.

I mean, it kinda is, especially in Florida of all places.

Had even half his voters, just in FL, gone to Gore in 2000, it wouldn't have even been a question who won. The world would be a wildly different place.

So yeah, thanks Nader voters.

And somehow we still have people preaching abstinence or a third party this year in their arrogant quest to make perfect the mortal enemy of good.

Had even half his voters, just in FL, gone to Gore in 2000

If half of his voters had gone to Gore and the other half gone to Bush, there would have been no difference. And Nader was quite popular among liberal Republicans (my own Sierra Club loving fiscally conservative father, included).

Past that, it was Pat Buchanan who had an unrealistically large number of votes in Florida, largely due to the construction of the "Butterfly Ballot" and the placement of Gore's name on the ticket. The whole argument over mispunched holes and hanging chads boiled down to whether a bunch of Gore votes were under-counted thanks to crooked Republican-aligned election workers.

And even if we scrape all the third-party candidates off the ticket in a straight up one-v-one contest, Al Gore's real sin was losing conservative Democrats to George Bush Jr by a 12-to-1 margin relative to Green defectors. He got Southern Strategy'd in the same way dozens of his down ticket Democrats got got during the 80s and 90s, and then again as the country lurched hard right in favor of Palin, Gingrich, and Trump in the run up to 2016.

And somehow we still have people preaching abstinence or a third party

The lesson that Democrats took away from 2000 was that you never actually have to appeal to progressives in your own party. Always, always, always sell out to corporate interests, and then just make "Compassionate Conservative" sounding noises to shut up your liberal base. Kerry, Obama, Hillary, and Biden all learned from the Gore playbook and adopted a purely rhetorical electoral strategy, while spending their working hours bailing out banks and big businesses, force-marching more troops across the Middle East, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America, and privatizing all of the essential New Deal / Great Society social programs of the last century.

When Joe Biden's platform is to the right of Ronald Reagan's, what the hell is a progressive to do? Keep voting along with the pack, so Biden's successor can lose to Ron DeSantis/Ted Cruz ticket in 2028?

Have you heard Ron? Do you really think that demagogue would listen to common ground?

I'm old enough to remember when Chuck and Nancy took Congress in 2018 and tried to have a bipartisan negotiation with Donald Trump.

I fully believe the liberal dorks in Florida would do the same if they had any chance of taking one of the comically gerrymandered legislative houses.

Well maybe all the police and gun owners of florida can shoot the water away with guns since they nixed building pipes and ponds to deal with it.

Maybe they can nuke the floods away.

Ok, maybe I’m stupid for it, and I wouldn’t deploy one to do it for damn sure, but I can see why someone would think nuking a hurricane might work.

I don’t think we have ever made one that powerful, maybe tsar bomba, but I will admit I wondered if it would work when I first heard about it.

Besides, everyone knows that a hurricane's natural predator is a black magic marker

Random dude on the Internet thinking "hey, maybe..." That's fine. But the president should not be getting his ideas from Sharknado movies.

Even the Tsar Bomba is a little candle in the wind in comparison with a Hurricane.

All you would get would be a radioactive Hurricane.

So, you're saying we need to build a much, much bigger bomb.

/s because its' 2024 and sarcasm is dead

I will admit there is a morbidly curious part of me that wonders what could happen if we add energy to a hurricane.

It wouldn't work (I should have added /s); it would introduce new problems, not to mention the issue of radiation poisoning.

Sharpies, though, solve all problems.

4 more...
5 more...
5 more...

Yo get what you vote for.

Maybe tell him the stormwater projects will "wash the gay away" and Desantis and his followers will be all over it.

I'm going with God is punishing them for their treatment of the gay community. Throw their shit right back at them.

Oh, here we are again in the hands out, crying for help and funds portion of the "no guv'ment!!!" and "we're gonna sucede!!!!" crowd.

Is your raised truck not high enough for you to take shelter from the floods in? Can't you hang your wet clothes to dry from the "rolling coal" pipe you have? Can you use those 27 trump flags made of asbestos as a blanket to warm you?

Maybe as you're waiting for the "guv'ment" to come rescue you like a frightened fairytale princess, feed you with taxpayer dollars and repair your uninsurable without "guv'ment" help homes.... Maybe you could just float on your back in the water while you wait and think about your stance on climate change?

And remember, as your elderly neighbor's dead body floats by next to you, you can always use all your left over "Joe Brandon, I DID THAT!!!" gas pump stickers to put over their eyes and mouth to keep them closed.

Wow, scathing! I love it. They deserve and need to hear it.

I look forward to seeing the cost of insurance in flood prone areas go up and up and up. No way to get people to move preemptively due to climate change other than to make them go bankrupt first. STOP fucking bailing them out, STOP making US citizens pay for the shitty decisions of red states.

fyi it isn't "just" houses. I am waiting for the annual calls from local governments about what got trashed this year.

Water-proofing stuff makes it run hotter and often makes it, counterintuitive I know, more likely to have fire/explosion issues. Hotter stuff doesn't last as long or work as well. Organic matter releases methane both in the ground and above it. Add this to total fucking inability of civil engineers to do a site visit and acknowledge that the former non-flood zone is a flood zone now and you get yearly problems.

Not doing it this time but I almost got sent across the US to deal with a single pumping system that is browning out and dying this week. Local person is handling for me and I will be on the phone. So there is my Monday.

It's fine, the peasants will just suffer and die, there's always more peasants.- ol' Meatball Ron.

I'm so glad his focus for the last two years was on terrorizing queer people instead actually fixing anything. /s

jesus and the sky god and their special ghost friend are all we need! you all must be a bunch of evil woke transgenders if you don't realize desantis is the only thing protecting our great maga country from a giant woke rainbow of destruction

But but but...he completely eliminated climate change from Florida just last week!

In the press conference he said that this was a typical storm that just happens. You could just feel him lying.

"Nothing to see here!"

All this christofascist virtue signaling backfires.

Ban books? Bible gets banned. "No, not like that!"

If a typical storm causes rampant flooding, maybe it would behoove you to invest in infrastructure and tighten building codes.

You know, the job of local government.

No meaningful infrastructure project in the US is solely funded by local government.

What if we had pipelines built to pump Florida water to Texas or California dessert?

Write that down 👇

Let's all LOL that stupid idea off! 😂

Anyway, how are those more important and useful oil pipelines going? Thousands of them as I understand, some coming from Canada. The Canadian pipelines are specially easy because you just have to go dig the dirt for tar, then you just dissolve it and pipe it up. It's not like water where you would have to do all sorts of crazy things like look at it to make sure it's still liquid, and like put the pipeline inlet where the water is and then have to actually pump it. It's an incomprehensible amount of impossible engineering work. Like for example for tar, it's pretty easy because it cakes on the wall so you send a pig plug to scrape the inside. But for water, man! It probably has fish it in and you might need to scrape it but also, who knows what the fish are planning. Definitely impossible to do.

Texas, no, but he'd consider Cape Cod.

California checking in. We aren't on fire any more, mostly, we are having flooding issues. No more water please. Or at least stagger the deliveries out over the entire year, not just late Jan - May.

Other nations have invented this weird technology where they dig holes. I think we could use that technology to dig holes and then maybe look at the holes 🕳️ for inspiration. Maybe someone, one day could figure out what to do with holes so that a huge amount of water could be stored locally. It's just so difficult. I mean, holes! Who knew....hold on the exopresident is still talking....yeah and Obama.

Ironically were looking into ways to refill our aquafers this way.

I don't know this reference. Is this a play on Miss South Carolina?

Yes and the education of kids is very important to get them educated with education.

That guy is the king of wrong. Every move just guarantees more pain and suffering but those idiots keep voting for him.

Desantis and the like are just like shitty villains in a bad super hero story.

Gawrsh Ronnie, good thang yew got them shahny whaahte galoshers.....

lol Florida really is the Bavaria of the US. The same exact thing happened there

Are Bavarians as stupid as Floridians? Voting for morons every election cycle?

"Weatherz are woke libz!!! Rain is a Chinese Jewish CRT and if you ingest the water, Hunter Biden did the chemicals in it so you're a trans! If trump could diarrhea in this water, even up high from his gold helicopter, floods would all melt and turn into enough nachos for everyone and beer and we'd have a second super bowl, but instead DEMZ locked him in prison for being Jesus and making a most BEAUTIFUL phone call!!!" My penis don't work guud and it's frustrationing cuz I want to use it for gay and not tell anyone else at church!!!!"

DeSantis's disaster response was good. He did an excellent job the last few hurricane seasons, including when Ian hit us, and he's cognizant of how crooked the insurance companies were, among other things.

Say what you will about everything else (and I have a lot to say, trust me, I would not vote for him), but y'all are just demonizing him because he's a Republican. And, quite fairly, for some destructive party line policies.

Also... y'all haven't seen anything yet. I was in this rain, and again, it's nothing compared to Ian or the upcoming season.

His party voted against disaster relief funding multiple times. What did he actually do? Throw toilet paper for a PR stunt like Trump?