Posts tagged USA
Jann Scotts Journal: OMG techies text walk talk and crash into everyone
Jul 31st
I noticed BPD is targeting crosswalks.
Have they, also, thought about enforcing jay walking laws for distracted walkers who text or talk. on moblie devices
CBS this Morning had an excellent piece on it. A few police departments around the USA who use Jay walking to reel in people who text , walk , run into people, get hit by cars, bikes etc.
Deaths by distracted walking are up 4% nationally. ER admittance are up too.
In tech Boulder I see people walking out into traffic all day long.
In one city they painted signs as you step off curb onto crosswalk that say in yellow: “look Up”
where people trip over themselves in crosswalks
Jann Scott
Boulder Colorado
US fire fighting Air Attack fleet terribly inadequate
Jul 7th
In the 1990s and early 2000’s America used old WWII bombers to fight fires. Many of them crashed. In 2012 the US has less than 250 aircraft contracted and some of them sit while fires rage across America. They sit because the US Forest Service refuses to pay them. In other cases Air National guard C-130s now sit because of the poor training given guard pilots to fight forest fires. They have been crashing too.
The US has thousands of big airplanes capable of being retrofitted to carry water and retardants to wild land fires,but the government has completely lost it’s way.
Sitting here typing at a computer in a smoke filled room in Boulder Colorado, this week I have seen first hand the devastation cause by forest fires to Colorado cities. Where was the air attack in the early hours of these fires? Parked in hangers 1000’s of miles away.
The US needs at least 100 air tankers It has 32. They need them on the tarmac in Denver ready to in 10 minutes not two day latter after the fire has destroyed 100’s of homes as happened in Ft Collins Colorado in June. We need another 300 air attack panes of all sizes. We need 400 helicopters ready to go. We need an air fleet of 1500 aircraft capable of carrying water to fight fires. We have 232. Just terrible.
What’s left when the air attack does not come. America is burning and our government has let us down. Shame on them.The Department of the Interior, FEMA USFS, Congress, Senate, Air force, National Guard have all let America down. This is Katrina all over again and it is happening on president Obama’s watch. It is also happening in my state and I am sick of watching it burn. Obama needs to take responsibility and get us the air fleet we need. End all the buck passing.
from fire ravaged Colorado
Jann Scott
Boulder, Colorado
The Boulder Twitterverse
Dec 7th
Who are they ? Tweeps are 18-34 year olds. 55% female 45% male In Boulder they are all white, rich, educated, Liberal, office workers, house wives or students. They sit in coffee houses, on their phones in their cars, or at work and stay connected to the twitterverse which they see as the universe. Except it isn’t. Boomers except for me don’t use twitter. Xers don’t use it either. the Yers who do represent less than 50%. In Boulder Twitter is reserved for a special group of people who, look, think and act alike. It is a closed culture.
Twitter cyber Attacks If you don’t fit into that culture ( I don’t… 65, white, short , bald, opinionated, not liberal and I have a sense of humor…not allowed on twitter.) At least in Boulder, if you don’t fit the above mold, you will be attacked. Since I have a cable and internet talk show, write this column, have my own thoughts, take risks and question the staus quo , I am often attacked by Boulder tweeps. I don’t answer back on twitter anymore though. I answer back on television for the larger community to see. Boulder twitter is like the Russian mafia: a gang of thugs who want to rule the world. I intend on standing in there way.
Nonsense In the larger scheme of things Twitter does not really matter. It is a good tool for communicating breaking news which eventually gets to the rest of us. But how important is it? Really? The language is so short and curt, it is not only rude, it is idiotic. People are reduced to blithering.
Boulder is so Weird Of course we have our little twitter culture here in #boulder, but other areas are completely different. There is a whole world of Hispanic Tweeps who dominate twitter nationwide. There are popular culture tweeps who make up twitter in the USA. Thye are into popular TV shows, pop music, gossip magazines…. not intelligentsia. In that sense Boulder is weird.
OK it’s gossip Twitter is 100% gossip tot he mass world population. There are occasional pieces of good information that come out. I use it to net cast stories like this. We use it to post news and features from Boulder channel 1. But we also use, Digg, linked in, email, Google, the internet. face book my space, keywords, meta tags, tags and categories 20 times a day by 10 different posters. We use you tube, vimeo, BC1 and finally we use the king of all communications Cable Television. Cable is still king even if 20% of the 18-34 year olds in Boulder (approximately 10,000 out of our 220,000) think they are the community. the truth is most people in our city have know idea who they are or what their scene and they don’t care.