Puerto Rico Got The Power Turned Back On

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/puerto-rico-electricity-power.html

And it only took 11 months! Great job, Trump administration! Mission accomplished!! Are we tired of winning yet?????

 

With the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in PR, I am surprised ANYONE was able to make it happen in even eleven months.

 

Find the most extreme case and present it as if if were representative of the whole population.

 

So, marginal success in other cases excuses the huge blunders committed in the extreme case?

 

11 months, Jesus Fuckballs, can you imagine it?
Longest I ever went was 3 weeks after Hurricane Gloria, and that was a nightmare.
You're pretty much flushing your shit with bottled water into the toilet tank, and if the bottled water stops? You're fucked.
And you just know Trump has burnt into his little walnut brain that Puerto Rico is another country, and not part of America.
You could explain it to him until blood comes out of your throat.

 

For him it does. Remember, this is Paladin. He's kind of cool with this shit.

 

Nothin' but net.

 

Well, silver lining time.
Electricity means internet.
Internet means exposing the horror to sunlight.
Hopefully, justice follows.

 

Oh, uh, you are not allowed to tell such truthes as it offends the snowflakes. Watch out or the idiots will start call you racist for pointing out truthes they wish to ignore.

The sad thing is they can figure out when rightwingers do this (see denialism of human caused climate change) yet then turn around and do the exact same thing. Such extremists always seem to be hypocrites.

 

I wonder if PR's state owned and completely mismanged electric company would have been less of a disaster if 50% of the population hadn't been stealing electricity and not pay for it for decades prior to the hurricane putting the final nail in that broken and bankrupt system? Or maybe if fully half of the houses weren't illegally built squater houses built on stolen land without paying any property taxes... maybe PR wouldn't have been bankrupt? If PR didn't literally have worst in the nation 3rd world rates of corruption and cronyism then maybe they wouldn't have been so badly mismanaged or so completely bankrupt?

Sure, Trump remains incompetent but you sound like an ignorant fool who has not even the slightest clue as to just how fucked up, incompetent, and corrupt PR is and always has been.

 

Unlike you, I am actually at work, pedo pony boy. I got back from lunch and saw WF had its head so far up its own ass it needed to be told a few hard truthes.

 

And you sound like you have absolutely no empathy for these people. They are American citizens. These are OUR people. And they spent 11 months in the God damned dark. That isn't America. Fuck, that isn't even Mexico.

 

That's because he HAS no empathy for these people. They might as well be dirty immigrants as far as he's concerned. He's more like Trump every day, he just doesn't realize it.

 

I don't think thousands of innocents deserve to suffer as pawn sacrifices to my schadenfreude to corrupt officials like you.

 

Tough love is the absolute best way to handle situations like this. Enabling bad behaviors to continue is the single worst. Idiocy, mismanagement, and corruption had brought NYC to its knees in the 1970's, they literally went bankrupt, and were begging for bailouts to continue their bad behavior. The best thing to happen to NYC in the last half century was not getting those bailouts because it made them take a hard look in the mirror and realize they had to clean up their own mess. It took time but it worked.

That is what needs to happen to PR. Help them with advisors, give them a nudge here and there, but they are the ones who need to make those fundimental changes which will not happen if you coddle or enable them. In the end even the idiots in places like Venezuela will learn about what a bad idea it is to vote for authoritarians or buy into economically illiterate political theories.

 

Yeah, Ebenezer Scrooge wasn't a villain, he was Supply Side Jesus!

 

Ahhh....the old "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" philosophy. Hard thing to do when you don't have any boots.

 

If there are particular blunders, they can and should be discussed, but the facts are that Puerto Rico's power grid was in pretty bad shape before Maria, and that the bulk of the repair work done in the past year has put it in better shape to handle another one. Even the "most affected" woman profiled in the article says that things are in better shape with the grid. And much of the adversity that she faced had nothing to do with the efficacy of government operations to restore the grid.

Given Puerto Rico's rife corruption and the general ineptness of government operations, things seem to have been restored and improved rather quickly. The article notes that 50% of Puerto Rico's generating capacity had been restored by last November. If a hurricane knocks down your ramshackle power grid, you can't just whip out a spare one.

 

Actually, most of the power was restored long before 11 months but it did take 11 months to reach the most remote areas largely because the state owned power company was completely bankrupt and its electrical system was widely out of date even in the 1950's and it has only gotten worse since then. There were routine blackouts on a daily basis even before the storm.

Personally, I'd offer cash for reforms especially privatisations, deregulation, and massive cuts to government workers especially pensions where workers retire yet get a pay boost. No more of your average government worker making 5 times what the general population does (when benefits are included).

The illegally built squatter settlements get raised to the ground and replaced by new legally built housing built by private investors with proper drainage, utilities, and flood control. The hammer needs to be dropped on anyone caught stealing electricity or cheating on taxes. It needs to be absolutely draconian and unwavering to break PR's culture of criminality. Oh, and don't get me started on the crime and violent crime issues there.

 

Welcome to Wordforge, Donald.

 

They have a ton of resources all of which are currently mismanaged and or stolen just like NYC in the 1970's. That said, you are right that it is not easy to make such fundamental changes but they can do it if they want to and have the proper motivation.

We are not talking about some poor individual but a state level entity which has tax powers and multi billion dollar budget decisions at its disposal. Yes, they do have resources but they need to make better choices. Why you are too stupid to understand something so basic is a mystery.

 

You should have your place of employment fix that 'n' key on your keyboard. Otherwise, everything just comes up sad igger and immigrat, and who's got time to figure that shit out?

 

Stolen from who, champ?

 

The only folk who ever say shit like that are the fuckers who could have used ONE good spanking from their doting parents, but never got it.

 

Indeed. "Tough love" is most often cited by those who prefer exercising a little bit of authoritarianism over other human beings.

 

yes, because Trump had free reign to just take over with an unlimited budget with no input from or interaction with the PR leadership/people.

 

We're all racist to think otherwise, isn't that right @Amaris ?

 

We're all a little bit racist. Period.