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At this point I doubt we will ever really know what happened in Western North Carolina. An oral tradition might appear describing how FEMA's incompetence (at best) caused hundreds of excess deaths. Stories of people dying of exposure, dehydration and disease because FEMA sat on their hands, and didn't allow anyone into the sparsely populated mountain/valley they lived in.
All the official statistics will be weird side stepping non sequiturs. X number of personnel were allocated. Y number of dollars were spent. They compare favorably to the X number of people and Y number of dollars spent in supposedly comparable natural disaster. Therefore all complaints have been debunked. Shut up.
And everyone will talk past each other forever. One day a politician might take up the torch of what really happened after Helene, but all those investigative resources will mostly get funneled to deep state cogs who will merely look at the aforementioned statistics about X and Y and declare the government innocent, after having pulled down fabulous salaries for a bloated staff that took excessive years to tabulate their report.
I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked jeroboam.
What could possibly convince you otherwise?
Deaths. I expect there will be much haggling over the narrative. But if there are more post immediate flood deaths from dehydration, disease and exposure than not, FEMA irredeemably fucked up, no matter what the experts claim.
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Yeah, this is a perfect example of "Seeing Like the State". In the eyes of many people, solving problems is as simple as allocating resources.
Want people in rural areas to have broadband? Allocate $45 billion.
Want to build a network of EV charging stations? Allocate $7 billion.
Want a high speed rail in California? Allocated $inf billion.
And in a high trust society with high state capacity that's exactly what would happen. But, of course, that's not the society we live in. No rural citizens were connected to broadband, and almost no charging stations were built, and 16 years later California doesn't have a rail system.
We have a government competency crisis.
It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.
You can sometimes see how well this works in practice. It's like when you've a cashier that can't make change and you try to give them 2¢ so you get $1 and not 98¢ in change.
It's Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity," and it's one of the top reasons why I want "modernity" destroyed. Go back to the personal leadership of @Stellula's "high agency people" and away from the tyranny of "idiots with checklists," to borrow from @AvocadoPanic, and away from Arendt's "tyranny without a tyrant" created by the bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility.
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It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.
It's not just that the employees are less skilled, they're less capable.
Seleting for someone higher skilled may also select for someone capable of stretching. A competent person can be competent in many situations and scenarios with minimal training.
School used to do a better job of selecting for competence, graduation rates were much lower but graduates could pass competency exams.
I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.
And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.
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This is the essence of modern management theory. It can be done, but probably not for disaster recovery or any other task where every situation is significantly different.
The difficulty is the 'decision makers' have often moved on before the pigeons come home to roost.
Even highly repeatable processes will often have edge cases / or odd failure modes that while rare if the process is very frequent will throw errors often enough to cause problems.
Also these jobs tend to suck which presents other challenges.
I'd rather interact with someone competent than an idiot with a checklist. I'm sure there's an appropriate Idiocracy clip.
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