(no subject)
I'm really starting to get frustrated with all the people from more northerly states who are talking about how people in DC and Philly are wusses for how we reacted to the snow. I was just watching Rachel Maddow, and she was talking about how stupid people in Washington DC are for not having the equipment required to clear the snow, which meant that they had to ask for help from Boston. What people like this need to realize is that Boston can expect large amounts of snow on a yearly basis, and therefore can justify spending huge amounts of money on equipment that will sit idle for three-quarters of every year. Philly and DC, on the other hand, have never had close to the amount of snow that they've seen this year. We might get the occasional catastrophe of 2 ft. or more, but we often go years without so much as a ten inch storm in between. It's one thing to spend millions on equipment that you'll use routinely for three months out of the year, it's another thing entirely to spend that money on machines that you might use three or four times in a decade. We've barely had any snow at all in the last five seasons, and we may very well go five more before getting another year even close to this one. It's better to suffer a little through the occasional catastrophic storm instead of wasting needed resources on something that you don't really need.