The leaking regulator on this air tank will prevent it from being used in event of a fire.

Situations like this can be particularly hard on volunteer stations, which typically have only a small number of firefighters available at any time.  Aaron Gibbens, a volunteer at the Goshen Fire Station with more than 30 years of experience in the fire service, says that mutual aid calls have gone up recently.  “Last month a neighboring department didn’t have the people to put a rescue rig out for a medical call and we ended up responding two miles outside of our district, as the only response unit.  So that’s kind of scary because in that situation, there went two thirds of our available volunteers.”

Responding to calls outside of their home districts can stretch many volunteer stations thin, as many of them only have a small number of volunteers available at any given time.  Chris Anderson, the training officer for the Santa Clara Volunteer Fire District in North Eugene, says that the current economic climate can limit the ability of the station to find volunteers.  “With the economy people need to work more, so they have less time to volunteer.”

However, despite the budget cuts that many Oregon agencies face in the present economy, most volunteer fire stations in the state have so far managed to avoid drastic reductions in their budget.  However, recent increases in fuel prices and potential cuts to federal fire grants could stretch the stations’ budgets and limit the ability of stations in Oregon and across the country to replace worn-out equipment in the future.

Maintenence of a fire stations equipment is a large part of what keeps firefighters and EMTs effective.

“We don’t get a break because we drive firetrucks,” Gibbens says, “We pay the same price as everyone, so increases like the ones over the past year, it’s like there goes 30% of our budget.”

Fire stations across the country, including many Lane County volunteer stations, rely on federal grants to supplement their stagnant income, and these may be on the chopping blog as Washington scrambles to find ways to reduce the deficit. “A lot of volunteer departments depend on grants for equipment upgrades and personnel training, and as the federal reserves drop with the economy, so do the grants,” says Gibbens.

The Oregon Fire Chief’s Association currently has an open letter from its president Tay Robertson on their website, in which Robertson discusses proposals to cut the Department of Homeland Security’s FIRE and SAFER grant programs by more than half.  In the letter Robertson says “In past budget years, the fire service has managed to escape some of the deeper cuts; however, there is a sense this year may be a far tougher battle.”

Gibbens, who represents the greater Eugene-Springfield area in the Oregon Volunteer Firefighter’s Association, says that decreases in revenue would mean that stations must continue to use equipment that needs to be replaced.  “Typically, what winds up happening is deferred repairs and differed maintenance.  Equipment wears out. Eventually you reach a point where it’s not in the budget to affect the repairs.”

Without replacement and proper maintenance then the equipment that is necessary for firefighting and medical calls may be less effective and firefighters may be hindered in responding to emergency calls.  “Eventually,” Gibbens says, “you end up with equipment that doesn’t have the capability or the reliability to do the job.”

Gibbens also says that the current economic climate has been hard on many volunteer stations, which can limit their ability to train new volunteers.  “If we can’t put the training dollars together to get you that 8-10 weeks training then you don’t go inside that structure, which means you are squirting from the outside, which is only half as effective,” Gibbens says.  Firefighters, even volunteers, need a lot of training to be effective first responders and this usually represents a large investment in time and resources by the station.

Cuts to federal grants could end up harming volunteers the most, who often serve as a way to gain professional experience that can lead to a career in fire service.  People seeking a career can benefit by volunteering to gain experience, training and, at some stations, even a free place to live while in paramedic school.  Volunteers like this benefit the communities they serve because they often have more training and availability to respond to calls than volunteers who have careers outside of the fire service.

This Mohawk Valley Fire Department volunteer is being timed as he suits up in his breathing apparatus.

Jimmy Loverro, a live-in volunteer at the Goshen Station is one such firefighter.  In addition to the shifts that Loverro works for the volunteer station in exchange for lodgings, he has paramedic classes at Lane Community College, an internship with Springfield’s Fire Department and clinical duties at Sacred Heart’s RiverBend Medical Center.  He says that his combined duties take up what feels like “every hour that I’m awake.”  If the Goshen Station didn’t have the resources to keep live-in volunteers then Loverro would have a much harder time completing his training, and he would not be able to respond to as many calls for the volunteer station.

Anderson, of the Santa Clara Fire District in North Eugene, says that volunteers like Loverro are necessary for volunteer stations.  If federal grants are cut and volunteer stations are less able to dedicate the resources to train aspiring professional firefighters, then it may lead to reductions in the numbers of the highly skilled and motivated volunteers for stations in Oregon.

For right now, volunteer fire stations in Oregon are still able to effectively serve their communities, but Gibbens says that if one station develops problems then it can often affect other stations, such as in situations with the Line-X fire, when stations are called in to cover areas outside their own district.  “If I only have twelve guys then I can only count on half being able to show up at any given time, and that’s not enough, which means I end up calling in help from Oak Ridge or South Lane County, to tap into their resources and then their departments are spending dollars and man power to cover our loss.  It cycles out that way.”

We decided to pause our party celebrating both events that afternoon to visit the awards ceremony.  The organizers had made some computer error and a few hundred of the slower runners times had not been entered yet, so the organizers went into “killing time mode” for the next hour and a half, instead of just telling everyone to come back later.  They had long impromptu speeches about the history of the race, showed of old race t shirts and raffled off trinkets no one wanted.  Worse, when the results did come in they kept pausing to raffle  off more stuff.

Making people wait around for your organization to get it’s act together in a poorly air conditioned basement on an 80 degree day is not good PR.  What should have been a fun celebration for the runners quickly turned into a grueling punishment for everyone involved.  If any common sense had been used at all, then the organizers would have realized that keeping people happy was more important than keeping everyone in the room.

The ultimate diss of the flubbed awards ceremony came at the end as I was leaving, as I heard more than one runner say they wouldn’t be back next year.

He discusses a variety of problems that he blames on his generation.  Well, Mr. Moyers, from what I’ve seen of my generation we seem to be on course to be the most reckless consumers that the world has ever seen.  People who are not young often give platitudes like this to people who are young.  To me this is passing the ultimate form of passing the buck because when this generation stops being young they’ll look around at the same problems you identify, and they’ll look to the people who are young then to fix it.  This pattern will probably continue as long as human kind exists.

I admire the sentiment of things like these, but my feeling is that we, as a culture, need to stop procrastinating and get a move on our problems today.  But making the changes we need to make is not easy, so I’m going to put money on my generation not getting its act together.  Maybe the next generation will fix all the problems we created.

In my opinion, any content producer who expects for people to pay for content must make selling their product better, easier and, more importantly cheaper, than their alternatives.  In many cases this means that you need to give your product away for almost nothing.  The only company that I can see that is doing this right is Netflix.  People who want to can still download, or even stream, movies and TV shows illegally, but in almost all cases, consuming media legally is easier than stealing it.  Before Netflix, many more people were willing to work around DRM and other protections because the cost of buying and renting DVD’s was so high that going to the hassle of pirating movies was worth it.  Netflix’s offer of unlimited streaming content on a variety of devices in the home and on mobile devices for just $8 a month changed the equation.  At that price, many more consumers became willing to pay for content because the hassle of pirating was a bigger cost to them than a measly eight bucks a month.

Now, all of you content providers out there are starting to salivate.  Wipe the drool of your chin because here’s the hitch: your content (all  of it) is worth no where near $8 a month.  Netflix can charge $8 a month because they have hundreds of thousands of hours of entertainment for people.  If publishers today want to do the volume of business that has allowed Netflix to become profitable, then they need to drastically lower their expectations about what they can charge for their products.  I think the New York Times could probably make a profit by selling digital subscriptions at about $2 a month.  If iTunes dropped the price of an MP3 to 10 cents then the equation for consumers would change, just as it has in the movie industry.  Profits on each sale are significantly lower but they can make it up with volume.

People today consume a phenomenal amount of content online, but no one has yet figured out how to make much money at it.  The cause, in my opinion, is that publishers are too stuck in the pricing structure that made them a lot of money in the print era.  This is not fully unjustified, papers and magazines have managed to survive with their dwindling subscribers and they don’t want to cannibalize their traditional  profit areas.  If a major newspaper like the New York Times would charge just a penny for an article view, then their are probably a lot of people who wouldn’t mind paying.  The numbers would add up over time, without people even realizing what they were paying.  Those pennies would add up pretty fast.

However, in my opinion, the panelists fell short of really hitting the essence of why people like Stephen Colbert and John Stewart have captured the attention of my generation.  I’m part of a generation that doesn’t really remember a time before Fox News.  For us, journalism has never looked objective.   We’ve watched “journalists” kill the truth and defecate on its corpse.  Colbert and Stewart are heroes to people my age because they fight back, and don’t make pretenses at objectivity.  Waging an ideological battle against the likes of Fox isn’t easy, and a lot of times it feels like journalists hide behind objectivity as an excuse to never take a stand that parts of their audience might disagree with.  Objectivity often seems like it’s a ideological backing to be so milquetoast that news outlets can appeal to the maximum number of listeners, and in reality, trying to please everyone has led to news outlets pleasing no one.

Colbert and Stewart didn’t get to their level of status by having panel discussions about changing ethical frameworks.  The objective model has seen it’s day and Colbert and Stewart recognized that, but they are using the voices they have to mix it up, instead of fighting fire with bland.  I’m as big a fan of academia as anyone,  and I enjoyed the speakers, but I feel like academia’s reasoned analyses often lag way behind reality.  A rational discussion of changes to media ethics is all well and good, but I think a lot of the younger people in the room had already accepted that times had changed, and wanted to hear more about how we can move forward from here.

But maybe that’s just my own biased and non-objective opinion.

The story got weirder when it was revealed that the “source” worked for a PR firm that Facebook had hired to draw attention to Google’s new “Social Search” functions.  As the story unfolded, it became apparent that Facebook is upset that the new Google tool is gathering information – from Facebook.  Facebook makes a lot of it’s user’s data publicly available, and Google is using that data in it’s new search algorithms.

This story represents the latest round in a war about who will store your data online.  Google and Facebook both want to be the first place people go with their information – mostly because that data is incredibly valuable to advertisers.  As much as I enjoy the services of both companies, it’s not apparent to me that either of these companies have the best interest of their users in mind.  Whether it is Google or Facebook, both are corporations and they are mostly interested in making money.

I wish I could end this post with words of wisdom.  Even words of protest or indignation would be good.  Both of these would be insincere though.  I’m not going to stop using either service.  I worry about my privacy, but Facebook and Google are too much a part of  my life for me to protest, or even get really indignant about it.  I really can’t imagine my life without them.

I’m gonna go look at Google’s news feed, and then check my Facebook wall.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

I enjoyed the quote because it represented a feeling that I really identified with.  I accepted it without question and moved on, and repeated it at least once to another person.  However, several days later I saw an interesting story, that argued with real evidence, that King had never said any such thing.  Further, the article points out that the quote wouldn’t make sense coming from MLK.  Who would the thousands of lives be?  Who would the enemy be?  It makes sense in the time after bin Laden’s death, but it has no contextual place in MLK’s life.

Through examining tweets using the timeline in Google’s Realtime search, the site’s authors were able to track down the original source of the quote to uncover that it a was a statement by a blogger that was accidentally attributed to MLK through Twitter retweets.

To me, what is interesting is how easily I accepted the statement as having come from MLK.  It’s easy, with hindsight, to think that people who believe false things should be able to see through to the truth, and not be take in false information so easily.  In fact, the realization that I had so easily been fooled into believing that the quote was from MLK had a humbling affect on me.  I normally see myself as a rational skeptic who is immune to being fooled by false information.  Apparently, I needed to realize that I’m just as easy to fool as anyone else.

There is no error checking on the internet, and things can move amazingly fast.  Within 24 hours of being tweeted, the fake MLK quote had been retweeted 10,000 times.  Tweets can transform a small mistake into common knowledge almost instantaneously.  In this case it appears that there were no malicious intentions on anyone’s part, just honest mistakes.  However, in a some ways this situation is scarier.  If there were direct sources who were deliberately misinforming people it would be pretty easy for people to avoid the liars. However, in this media landscape things move so fast that even reliable sources can make mistakes.  This propensity should inspire people everywhere to make the effort to be more critical of information they get.

Oh, and people are still retweeting the quote and attributing it to MLK, so beware that once a false idea has caught hold it doesn’t fade away quickly.

I’ve decided to follow the post up with one that is equally as timely, relevant, and emotional: that’s right, I’ll be doing a write-up of a video chat with a guest speaker in one of my journalism classes from nearly a week ago.  My sarcasm over my lackluster follow-up to a piece of my own writing that I felt was successful aside, the video chat with Stephen K. Doig really was interesting.

Doig is a journalist and pioneer in the field of power journalism, which for the many (very many) of you who haven’t seen my past posts on the topic is the use of tools such as database analysis and statistics to augment reporting.  Doig won a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of Hurricane Andrew for the Miami Herald.  His most successful pieces involved the use of statistical tools to prove that the worst damage had occurred in newer homes because of weakened building codes and lack of inspections and enforcement of building codes.

Doig’s discussion was interesting to me for two reasons primarily: A) because he talked about how people with the proper skills can still find work in the journalism field, and B) because he talked about how much power journalism has changed in the nearly 20 years since this story broke.

I was interested in the first for purely self-centered reasons, so I’ll just skip right on past that for the benefit of people who may be reading this to, you know, learn things.  According to Doig, the biggest change to power journalism in the past 20 years is how much easier it is now.  This should not be surprising, computers have come a long way since then, so it would be a big deal if computer-assisted reporting hadn’t also progressed.  Doig says that it doesn’t take specialists to do this kind of reporting anymore and any journalist should be able to do it.  The reason why the increased ease of power journalism is so interesting to me is because it seems like news today is often too shallow to use investigative tools like power journalism.  If power journalism has become this easy it makes it all the more disappointing that our media have decided that it’s more important for me to know what type of pudding was served at Prince William’s wedding than how much money various businesses spend lobbying, or finding ways that the state government mismanages its funds.

I suppose though that the situation is more complicated than that.  The computational tools available are better than ever, but they can’t do anything if you don’t have data to work with.  Equally bad is the public’s own disinterest in serious news stories.  The fact that our country is currently involved in two and half wars is also shockingly under-reported, but I guess that is because people eventually become numb to the tragedy of it.

I set out to write what I thought would be a fairly simple summary of Doig’s discussion, but I somehow found my way back to the conflicts in the middle east.  I guess that shows you where my mind still is.

Now the breaking story of the night is that bin Laden is dead.  America’s boogeyman for the last ten years is gone.  I haven’t thought about bin Laden much in the last few years, but I’m really surprised by my reaction, given how much I, like many others, learned to hate him after 9/11.  I feel hollow.  I think I was much like the rest of America in the first weeks and months after the attacks.  We wanted to get him. When we started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there seemed to be an undercurrent that we would go in, kill the bad guys like bin Laden, and leave, victorious.

The subsequent years have gone somewhat differently.  We’ve watched thousands of American soldiers die.  We’ve dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the wars while we’ve seen unprecedented cuts in spending on health care and education.  As a country we’ve committed torture and abandoned the rights that we declared inalienable at our founding more than 200 years ago.  We’ve watched American influence wane and the foundations of our economy falter.  We are now facing what is very likely the end of the American era.

Think of what it has cost us.  Billions of dollars are just the start of it.  Even the abandonment of our fundamental values like habeas corpus and the Eight Amendment are only a piece. In the wake of that and the sheer human costs of war, the death of Osama bin Laden does not feel like a win.  It’s empty.  The fighting will keep going on.   Soldiers, insurgents and civilians will keep dying.  The troops aren’t all gonna come home tomorrow, and when they do, what will it have cost them?  What has it cost America?

I’m reminded of the old adage that things are always worth just a little bit less than what you give up to get them.  I’m guessing there will be some general celebration of this news over the next few days.  I won’t look down at anyone who does celebrate.  I’ll probably even return the high fives and join in the celebration.  However, I hope that we all take a moment to ask ourselves if getting our revenge was worth what it cost us.

For more information:

Cost of War

iCasualties

Amnesty International – Guantánamo Bay

For me there is a joy in learning, new ideas are to me, almost comparable to a drug.  Yesterday, I got a crazy information high.

The chain of events was kicked off by me watching the RSAnimate video I linked to yesterday.  After finishing my post, I watched a few more RSAnimate videos.  Then I watched some TedTalks on hulu.com.  Then I watched got caught up watching Nova on PBS Video.   From there I fell down what Urban Dictionary calls a Wikipedia hole.  This is when you go from one article to the next, following link after link to sources and subtopics and articles on related subjects.

Before I even knew what was happening, 3 hours had passed.  I’d moved from Geothermal energy all the way to the Eugene Saturday Market and then I strangely transitioned back to the environment in the form of Carbon Offsetting, by way of the article on Nike.  After this my path fragmented hoplessly into a dozen different directions.  (Complete Path from environment and back: Geothermal Power>Kola Super deep borehole> Well to Hell Hoax >Weekly World News History > Elvis Presley Phenomenon > 24 Hour Church of Elvis > Portland Saturday Market > Eugene Saturday Market > Nike Corporation > Carbon Offsetting)

The moral of the story was that this was an extremely enjoyable Sunday afternoon.  I learned some useful stuff and a lot of less useful stuff, but it was extremely fun.  I encourage everyone to get lost in learning new stuff today!