That would be a smart move, given who they deal with.
That would be a smart move, given who they deal with.
Maybe not a real monopoly, but a sufficiently big player that usually has no problems of using their buying power to squeeze the blood out of their suppliers.
Said one quasi monopolist to the other…
Like one accident that was in the news here some time ago: A truck smashed into a stopped truck without any traces of it breaking (They assumed later that the driver had fallen asleep), and it took a moment for them to notice that there actually was a small car completely crushed between them.
There was something like that in the local newspaper a few weeks ago. A drunken woman (IIRC) had “bounced” 19 cars parking left and right of the road.
I have not seen the accident itself, but…
I was working in the XRay department as a clerk back then, when the EMT guys brought up a customer straight from ER. This was the first unusual thing, because that is normally not the job of the EMTs. The second unusual thing was the order form for this patient - basically any standard XRay-job on the form was selected.
And then, I was called in, too. Absolutely not in the book. Both EMTs, one of the two radiology assistents, and I had to don lead and hold this guy down. He had taken drugs, left his group, and hugged a driving trucks’ front. He had broken about everything you can have broken without croaking on the spot, and was so far away that he tried to hit and kick with his busted limbs at the people who were trying to help him. Imagine four men holding down one guy without damaging him even further.
Faithful at the Pearly Gates: “Lord, why didn’t you help me?”
God: “I had people send you evacuation orders, wasn’t that enough?”
Tonight is movie night in Tampa Bay! They are showing “Gone with the Wind” everywhere…
If they have not been hit for a century, it remains to be seen how well the existing kinds of flood defence will work out. Have they done anything to strengthen or at least maintain them since then?
Especially true for those rightwing religious nuts. Their book tells them Hosea 8:7: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”