It’s tornado season here in Ohio.
This afternoon as a few funnel clouds were forming miles from my house, I received a call from my mother living in Florida. Seems she was not about to wait for her son to make his yearly Mother’s Day call as she had urgent news. CNN and other news outlets were reporting funnel clouds and tornados in central Ohio, with my county noted as a likely target. This was sometime before 2:00. I turned on the TV and hit the web for detailed updates. Luckily, the storms passed overhead without even a significant touchdown.
With the menace long gone, I received another phone call; an automated call from the county 911 department notifying me of the tornado warning. This was 2:25, with the warning to expire at 2:30. And, more importantly, with the storms no longer in the county or even a threat to adjoining counties.
Then I learned that Franklin County — just to my south — also had a delayed tornado warning because “Franklin County EMA deputy director Jim Leonard said the communications room is not manned during weekends and holidays, but there are two people on-call at all times.”
Do I complain to management? No way. Those folks are looking for complaints as a means to justify additional funding. Do I keep my mother happy? You bet! Her warning was neither delayed nor costly.
Remember mom, and not just on Mother’s Day.
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It is obvious there was not funding to have someone there. This means no taxes were levied for this purpose so each person had the money in their back pocket to purchase storm warning alerts on the ‘free-market’…but how many ever did?
Seems like they only have themselves to blame.
Perhaps most people don’t want automated storm warnings by phone. Considering radio, television, and the internet are all able to alert you of impending storms for no additional cost.
Owen, this is about your 81st post that displays a caricature of the naive observer of all matters concerning politics and the state. I think most of us are at the point of encouraging less posting and more reading, simply because your posts are no longer provocative; they are now just depressing. If you are ready to start your education in order to understand the point of Fedako’s post here, you might consider the Misesian argument about economic calculation under bureaucracy.
Owen, it’s novel to have a statist (if I may call you such) blogging among us anti-statists. If nothing else, you provide an inviting target for the rest of us. Your presence stimulates us to stay on our toes, and to remind us of what a small minority we really are.
As to “no funding for someone there,” that is not obvious at all. At least as likely is that those receiving the funding made their own decisions as to allocations of the funds across different purposes. Applicable (government) union work rules no doubt rendered it considerably less cost-effective to provide the same level of coverage on weekends as at times specified as “straight time” in the union contract.
This decision, I further confidently surmise, was announced to users either rather quietly or quite likely not at all. But with or without the knowledge of thinner weekend coverage, the government no doubt made it as well known as it could that there WAS coverage, at least at other times. In doing this, they greatly diminished potential demand among users for subscription warnings, in effect pre-empting the market by making it too small to service.
But I agree that anyone who imagined that the government coverage would be effective, much less as good as commercial coverage would be, is to be faulted on grounds of judgement.
Those “unmanned” rooms can still be expensive. You’d have to look at the budget, assuming that was calculated correctly.
What are the consequences of ignorance of the forces of equilibrium? If we think about economics we can see how equilbrium operates. The further from equilibrium the more drastic the changes that occur in the process of ‘return.’
Why are we to assume that reality is compartmentalized into the economy in one, and other aspects of the world like weather and geologic forces are in another compartment, as if independent of each other?
The extreme imbalance and distorted economic condition is a sign, it is an indicator of the institutionalized ignorance that holds back the swing of the pendulum. But the equilibrium forces are mounting and the foundations of the institutions are buckling.
When humans stop intervening in the economy there will be significantly less of these other bursting conditions also.
It just goes to show that it doesn’t take a village…just a loving and devoted mom.
I hope that you sent her a thank you gift that was appropriate for the mother of a libertarian…something in gold perhaps???
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