Flutterby™! : Dear Government 2013-10-03 03:00:43.984925+00

Dear Government

2013-10-03 03:00:43.984925+00 by meuon 3 comments

Today, several days after your "shutdown", I get two pieces of physical mail, delivered via the postal service from you.

A large card telling me I can buy stamps on eBay at http://allstamps.ebay.com
Another large card (openable this time) from FEMA, telling me I live near a flood zone and should consider flood insurance.

This makes me sad, because you wasted a lot of money on postage, paper and printing to tell a guy that is many hundreds of feet above the Tennessee river that he lives near a flood zone. When our house floods, no insurance companies will exist either. eBay could have told me about the postage for much less money.

This is my problem with all of this "digital surveillence": You can't use the easy information and technology effectively how do you think you will use the complex deep data? Or keep it from being mis-used, lost, mis-apprpriated, or jumbled up in potentially (to me) bad ways?

Please Unkle Sam, work smarter and stop wasting our money. Especially when you "run out" while mailing inane materials.

The folks in Jamestown, Colorado were several thousands of feet above the nearest river. But they flooded (and land-slood). I'm not sure what the topography is like around your house, but you could be in a bad spot in the watershed.

Besides, sending cards out encouraging purchasing flood insurance is much smarter/cheaper than paying out FEMA disaster bucks after a flood event. As for the post office, they have their own budget independent of the Federal Government. The shutdown is completely unrelated.

If the side of Signal Mountain "sloughs off", which is a theoretical possibility, we are screwed and am happy with those odds. I still find it a coincidence, I've never received similar mailings from a government agency that I can remember.

I doubt FEMA works this fast... But the Boulder Floods could have been a driving factor. It had been so long since Boulder had a real flood that everyone forgot what it looks like. Roadways that didn't completely wash away turned into rivers. And "rivers" which, in Colorado, normally look like what folks in Tennessee call a "creek" turned into "rivers" like what folks in Tennessee call a "river". Imagine, for instance, the North Chick expanding to almost a mile wide.

Sort of the same thing is going to occur when the New Madras fault shifts again. It's been over 200 years now. I doubt there is anyone alive today who personally knew someone who was alive when that happened. Major natural disasters ain't pretty.