A flash flood in Texas has become a political issue the same way hurricanes sometimes do. (3 Viewers)

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SamAndreas

It's Not my Fault
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The flood in Texas was almost as bad as the Big Thompson flood was in Colorado back in 1976. Both were caused by about 10 to 11 inches of rain. The death toll in Texas is around 60 people now, in Colorado 76 there were 144 deaths, which is gross.

The New York Times published this and that makes it an official political issue. Oddly enough they lifted the paywall at least for me, you might be able to click and read it as well:


The premises is that Trump caused vacancies at the weather forecast office such that those poor folks didn't get a warning, as thus they didn't seek higher ground, as thus they died.

The question is it trumps fault
 
From a NYT gift article that I saw on Blue Sky.

“Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.

Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.

The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

…...

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.”

Here is the post containing the gift link.

 
The death toll of this flood has been going up all day long, they keep finding bodies, it's up to 81 now. I did read that one girl 13 was rescued from a tree.



There is more:

People are blaming the weather service, after reading the following, evaluating the many sources used to generate the report, even spot checking a couple sources just to be sure, I think they should be blaming the Texas Authorities more than the weather service. They had enough warning, they failed to get the word out after getting the first warning, what looks like several hours before the flood.

A person with ten minutes of warning time could have walked to high ground, and would not have died.

Those girls at that camp could have been evacuated had the Texas authorities gotten off their bottoms and done something.



Gemini produced this report using 9 major news outlets in the US, and 1 reasonable paper of record in India.

The recent devastating flood in Texas heavily impacted Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp located on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas. Sorting out the timeline of warnings versus the arrival of floodwaters reveals a very rapid and, for many, surprising escalation of the disaster.

Here's what the reports indicate:

Flood Warnings Issued:

  • Thursday, July 3rd: The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a flood warning for the region. AccuWeather and the NWS reportedly issued warnings about potential flash flooding hours in advance of the devastation. Early week forecasts had flagged heavy rain potential, with messaging by Tuesday-Wednesday mentioning a Thursday flood risk.


  • Early Friday, July 4th (Pre-dawn): The NWS sent out a series of flash-flood warnings. A Flash Flood Warning was specifically issued at 1:14 AM on Friday, July 4th. Flash Flood Emergencies (a rare alert notifying of imminent danger) were declared around 4:00 AM Friday in Kerrville and nearby areas as over 10 inches of rain fell.

Floodwater Arrival at Camp Mystic:

  • Early Friday, July 4th (Pre-dawn): The floodwaters surged with extreme speed. The Guadalupe River rose by 22 feet in just two hours (Times of India) or 26 feet in just 45 minutes (AP News, Texas Tribune, Al Jazeera) before dawn on Friday.

  • Campers reported being woken up by the raging storm just after midnight Friday. Some accounts mention water pouring into homes and cabins as early as 3:30 AM.

  • The water rose so rapidly that a river gauge in Hunt recorded a nearly 30-foot rise before it stopped functioning. One survivor described the water coming up "a foot a minute."

  • The floodwaters reached catastrophic levels in less than an hour overnight, leaving little time for the camp staff to move hundreds of girls to safer ground in the dark. Younger campers, housed in cabins situated closer to the riverbanks, were the first to be impacted.

  • By the time emergency services could reach the camp, the area was cut off by washed-out roads, and there was no power, water, or Wi-Fi. Texas Game Wardens reportedly reached the camp and began bringing campers out a little after 7 PM on Friday, hours after the initial surge.

    In summary: While general flood warnings and flash flood warnings were issued hours in advance and in the early hours of Friday, the speed and magnitude of the floodwaters' rise at Camp Mystic (22-26 feet in under an hour) caught many, including camp officials and local residents, by surprise. The rapid, pre-dawn inundation left very little time for effective evacuation or for warnings to be received and acted upon by those directly in the path of the most catastrophic surge.


We had a flash flood her in the mountains i guess it was five or six years ago now, two of our county residents were swept away and they didn't find their bodies for months. We got about three hours of warning. The two deaths were not in anyway connected to failure of the warning, those people who were swept away knew about the danger and went out anyway.

I went out anyway, and I saw for myself what it looks like to have four feet of water over the highway where the bridges were located. I also got on TV that afternoon because I was waiting for the waters to drop to a safe level at the same place a TV crew were also waiting. We only got about 7 inches of rain in about 25 minutes.
 
From a NYT gift article that I saw on Blue Sky.

“Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.

Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.

The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

…...

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.”

Here is the post containing the gift link.


People are about to find how just how much these "government too big and waste of money" services keep them safe and allow them to have the life they have. The avoidable physical suffering and death won't be limited to weather. The firing of people who keep our food, water, air, and drugs safe is going to avoidably hurt and kill people too. Taking the governors off of shipping trucks so they can drive as fast as they want, will lead to avoidable injuries and death as well.

This is criminal level of depravity and there will be a reckoning for those behind it. Don't know when or how, but it's coming.
 
  1. Chat AI's provide a high level of false information, all of them. That's a studied and verified fact. It's not an opinion.
  2. Spot checking some of what a chat AI says does not mean anything they say is true.
  3. Saying that facts were spot checked to be true, doesn't mean facts were actually spot checked.
  4. AI responses can be cherry picked for some truths to give a false impression that everything else in the response is true.
  5. I recommend being skeptical about anything directly quoted from any chat AI response. In my opinion, it's the smart and responsible thing to do.
  6. SaintForLife used to spam the board by quoting sources known to provide a high degree of false information. Spamming the board with content from a chat AI, which are all known to provide a high degree of false information, is just as bad as what SaintForLife did, in my opinion.
I recommend reading the links below to form your own opinion on whether chat AI's can be trusted to give true information. I recommend you don't take my word or anyone else's on the matter.

"A bombshell study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has exposed a major flaw in AI-powered search engines: they’re terrible at citing news accurately. After analyzing eight AI search platforms, researchers found that over sixty percent of responses contained incorrect or misleading citations. Some AI chatbots performed better than others—Perplexity had a 37% error rate—but Elon Musk’s Grok 3 was the worst offender, generating incorrect citations a staggering 94% of the time."​


"We found that…​
  • Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
  • Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
  • Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
  • Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
  • Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.
Our findings were consistent with our previous study, proving that our observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested."​






 
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People are about to find how just how much these "government too big and waste of money" services keep them safe and allow them to have the life they have. The avoidable physical suffering and death won't be limited to weather. The firing of people who keep our food, water, air, and drugs safe is going to avoidably hurt and kill people too. Taking the governors off of shipping trucks so they can drive as fast as they want, will lead to avoidable injuries and death as well.

This is criminal level of depravity and there will be a reckoning for those behind it. Don't know when or how, but it's coming.
Where do you get these ideas like they're taking governor's off of trucks? I've seen none of that. The governor it part of the fuel injection system. without the governor a diesel engine can run away, and when that happens it turns the engine into slag.

The most I've seen insofar as monkeying with the governor is something a few idiots do to small pickup engines, doing so caused them to blow black smoke when the driver forces the engine into a low gear and the driver pressed it at or near red line,

The way that smoke blowing is done is they get in front of a Prius or some other "greeney" electric car, and they do that to irritate the environmentally conscious person.

I see that here, one of them did it to me when I was driving our electric car last year. After that episode of road rage passed I had to use the washer fluid and wipers to clear my windshield.

I'm going to find you a video of a runaway diesel, not one which the governor was removed, one where the governor failed.

 
Gemini produced this report using 9 major news outlets in the US, and 1 reasonable paper of record in India.
Please provide direct links to any and all reports/articles from those 10 news outlets that Gemini used as a reference for the response/report it generated that you quoted. I'd like to read all of those reports/articles for myself. Thanks.
 
  1. Chat AI's provide a high level of false information, all of them. That's a studied and verified fact. It's not an opinion.
  2. Spot checking some of what a chat AI says does not mean anything they say is true.
  3. Saying that facts were spot checked to be true, doesn't mean facts were actually spot checked.
  4. AI responses can be cherry picked for some truths to give a false impression that everything else in the response is true.
  5. I recommend being skeptical about anything directly quoted from any chat AI response. In my opinion, it's the smart and responsible thing to do.
  6. SaintForLife used to spam the board by quoting sources known to provide a high degree of false information. Spamming the board with content from a chat AI, which are all known to provide a high degree of false information, is just as bad as what SaintForLife did, in my opinion.
I recommend reading the links below to form your own opinion on whether chat AI's can be trusted to give true information. I recommend you don't take my word or anyone else's on the matter.

"A bombshell study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has exposed a major flaw in AI-powered search engines: they’re terrible at citing news accurately. After analyzing eight AI search platforms, researchers found that over sixty percent of responses contained incorrect or misleading citations. Some AI chatbots performed better than others—Perplexity had a 37% error rate—but Elon Musk’s Grok 3 was the worst offender, generating incorrect citations a staggering 94% of the time."​


"We found that…​
  • Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
  • Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
  • Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
  • Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
  • Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.
Our findings were consistent with our previous study, proving that our observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested."​






OK, I clicked and read every one of them, and every one of them which would load, I would toss in the trash for being excessively shrill.

Been tossing articles like that into the circular file for 35 years. I have higher standards. BTW one of those gave back a 303 forbidden response. The third or fourth one.
 
Please provide direct links to any and all reports/articles from those 10 news outlets that Gemini used as a reference for the response/report it generated that you quoted. I'd like to read all of those reports/articles for myself. Thanks.
Sure, happy to, there are 9 of them.










BTW Times of India is a good source. Sky.com is the worst source here
 
Where do you get these ideas like they're taking governor's off of trucks?

"The U.S. Department of Transportation has scrapped a rule mandating speed-limiting devices on heavy-duty trucks, allowing them to race along the nation’s highways at top speed.​
The devices in question, also known as governors, place a limit on the maximum speed at which large trucks can travel by preventing their engines from running any faster than a preset number of revolutions per minute."​


"Solution: USDOT is withdrawing the proposed rulemaking to mandate speed limiters so professional drivers can operate their vehicles safely."​


I know where you're trying to go with this, because I had family and friends who were truckers going back a couple generations. You're technically right, the governor doesn't actually get removed, but that's not the whole story. The governor can be set and locked to place an upper limit on the maximum speed of a diesel truck.

The requirements that are being dropped are that the governors be set to limit a truck's top speed at anywhere from 55 to 70mph. The governors won't be removed, but the DOT is removing its requirements that the governors be set to keep the truck from driving above 70mph.

I'll take a page out of your "folksy talk" explanation as to why I know this. It was 1976 at my pawpaw's funeral. I was an eleven year old ti kigh-nigh (phonetic) . I was sitting with my other pawpaw who was talking to nonc Thom, nonc Deigo (sp?) and a friend their age, ti Guidry. Now, ti Guidry was quite a colorful man who was a long haul truck driver. He told us about how one of his couyon co-workers done went and did something stupid, as couyons are known to do. That couyon got fed up with not being able to drive his truck as fast as he wanted, so he done went and pulled that governor out his truck. Then he fired up that enjun and ooh-wee that smoke started a'flying ever'where. Then the gros chien came a'chargin out from his office a'cussing and barking.

So, yeah, we all know things.
 
OK, I clicked and read every one of them, and every one of them which would load, I would toss in the trash for being excessively shrill.
Quote specifically what you think is shrill and provide third party supporting evidence of why that specific finding is shrill or show counter-findings that aren't just your opinion.

If you don't do that, then in your own words you are "arguing from authority, a fallacy of logic" and arguing only based on your opinion and not based on a consensus of expert finding through research, evidence, and/or experimentation. You're just giving your authoritarian opinion that they are wrong just because you say they are wrong.

And you just belied yourself. You've claimed at least two times prior to this post of yours that you had already read the articles. Yet, here you are just now saying that you just now clicked on them and read them.

 
Quote specifically what you think is shrill and provide third party supporting evidence of why that specific finding is shrill or show counter-findings that aren't just your opinion.

If you don't do that, then in your own words you are "arguing from authority, a fallacy of logic" and arguing only based on your opinion and not based on a consensus of expert finding through research, evidence, and/or experimentation. You're just giving your authoritarian opinion that they are wrong just because you say they are wrong.

And you just belied yourself. You've claimed at least two times prior to this post of yours that you had already read the articles. Yet, here you are just now saying that you just now clicked on them and read them.


Naw, I put what I think is trash, in the trash. I've been doing it for 40 or 50 years, I'm not going to change because you're spouting "Authority" in my ear.
 
Sure, happy to, there are 9 of them.










BTW Times of India is a good source. Sky.com is the worst source here
Would you happen to know which of the timing claims came from which articles. That's the thing I want to key on, because everything I read have read said that the chronology and timing of events are mostly anecdotal and unconfirmed. I'd like to see what Gemini thought was solid enough to feel certain about the chronology and timing of events.

I suspect you don't know which articles allegedly support each specific thing Gemini said regarding the chronology and timing, but if you do, that information would be helpful.
 
Naw, I put what I think is trash, in the trash. I've been doing it for 40 or 50 years, I'm not going to change because you're spouting "Authority" in my ear.
Whelp, thanks for being honest and revealing how you truly are. You put your opinion and beliefs above the research and studied opinions of a consensus of experts. If you disagree with their findings, you immediately throw them in the trash.

What do you have to say about the fact that you had previously claimed you already read all those links at least twice before, and then just claimed that you just read them?

I'd love to hear your excuse for that slip up. The fact that you just mentioned for the first time that one of the links wouldn't open is the final nail that shows you weren't being factually accurate the previous two times you said you read all the links.

You're acting in bad faith, bruh. You didn't used to act that way, so something changed with you or your account.
 
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Biden's fault

Screenshot_20250707-060052.png
 
Mexican rescue service members crossing the border to help like good neighbors...


It is beyond inexcusable they made it here before the President. He was still making speeches at alligator alcatraz.

I was a mere child,but I remember when the Ms. coast was devastated by hurricane Camille in 1969. President
Nixon was here the following day.
 

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