And they have been painting away on the new water tower. Not done by a long shot, but some progress. The rain for the next day or so isn't going to help. And that remnant of Hurricane Patricia coming through in few days will for sure shut everything done.
I watched a National Geographic special on Williston North Dakota today. It is called "Fracking Hell". Think that was were about 1/2 of the Elected Officials in Wood County went to learn how to deal with the explosion of people due to Fracking going on there.
This show was on the collapse of the drilling in the first few months of this year. Wonder if the boys and girls should not make a return trip now to see what happens when things go South. About the only thing going balls to the wall now is the meth problems there and its cost. Average all over they said was $110/ gram. There is $220/ gram. The police there said the average life expectancy of a meth user was five years. I did not know that?
Folks are stealing everything not red hot or nailed down to support their habits. Copper and other construction material is of course high on the list.
Had to have their resident pimp on the show talking about the hard times he was having and his poor working girls. Use to make $90K month; he got $60K. And now down to less than 1/2 of that. One gal who was an independent contractor out of her home via the internet said she could not cut prices because it was so expensive to live there. A one bedroom apartment with one bath was $1K/ month. Makes me wonder what the new condos and apartments across Rosemar are going to go for if things ever take off here? Same or more I will betcha.
As an aside, it was noted that the Oil/Gas companies many times did not do background checks on the new hires. Lots of drug problems among the crews.
I mentioned in one of the City Council meetings months ago when this ever so necessary trip was being touted as such a necessity that the whole thing was really going to boil down to three things. Booze, Broads and Battles. The documentary sure supported those issues. What is really bad is the biker gangs that moved in to run so many of the problems. Such as the extortion, drugs and other crimes that are secondary sources of bucks.
If this thing ever takes off here, the local Police better watch for the same problems and be proactive, not reactive. By then too late it seemed to be up there. I am of the opinion our boys will get their heads handed to them here if this happens. It is one thing to allegedly roust a 70 year old man around; little different when 15-20 bikers are drunk/ stoned.
Notes where our former County Commissioner- Mr. Dunn is a member of the Citizen Climate Lobby. He and his pal Mr. Ambrose can not seem to understand that the secret is NOT to shut down the coal mines; but do Research and Development to clean up the coal.
That leaves jobs with decent wages/ benefits instead of the epidemic in drug usage. They are not saying much about that however. Guess as long as the Drugs are made with Green Energy, they are okay?
Reading an article on the huge influx of immigrants into Texas from other States. But what was especially interesting was the comment that of the 11.5 million Illegals in the U.S., 1.3 million were Asian. Now this is suspect to me as there are supposedly 1 million Illegals in the U.S. from the Philippines alone. So only 300,000 from the rest of Asia? Two things here the numbers of Illegals is bogus to start with, i.e., many, many more or folks sneaking in from China, Vietnam, and so forth are really miniscule. I do not believe that number at all.
It also said that the Asians are very well educated, which of course almost goes without saying when you add in the numbers of Indians coming here. And also said that Asians were far more likely to move from one area to another than say the Mexican ones. Now please note, the article was about Immigrants not just the Illegal numbers up above. And I think the 1 Million number I used was from a Philippine News source a few years back?
Article also went on to say that language problems with other than Spanish were making it hard in areas such as schooling and healthcare. Too bad people move somewhere and are adamant will only speak what they spoke in the old country. I am all for people being bi-lingual and better yet multi lingual. But in the Public domain, should be English. 'nuff said.