HR occasionally does score a success. One of the Falcon and Snowman spies was told by his Soviet contact to apply for a job at a major US aerospace company. His credentials were a shoo-in for getting it and stealing all kinds of sensitive secrets. The company HR department managed to lose his job application, so he never got hired.
The Reader suggest that removing 90% of HR will just allow the tumor to regrow. Remove 110% to be sure. No company needs a ‘Human Resources’ department – the one thing they never do is treat employees as useful resource.
Just go back to the “benefits” department (which was often just one person). Employees like benefits, and they at least got along with the person who administered them.
In 30 years KCLS from a Personnel / Benefits section of a Business Office, they speed ran ditching the service ethic, abandoning their constitutional bulwark mindset, and ended up with Board Meetings where they had to defend hiring literal sex-offenders to work with kids.
Many years ago, I worked at a Retail company (in Data Processing) and one of the company’s slogans was “Retail is a people’s business and we value our people”.
One of the jokes going around was that we weren’t people, we were Associates. (Our name tags read “Associate” not “Employee”). [Very Big Twisted Grin]
While the Reader agrees that that the HR usage of resource views employees as interchangeable and consumable, he is awaiting the theory of economics that starts with the first principle that the only economic ‘resource’ is the human mind.
Mind winds up being a trade-space where a lot of economic choices are concerned. To really avoid the body-enables-mind dispute, you would need to be able to conclusively demonstrate minds with no bodies. (So a possible post New Jerusalem state of affairs might be equivalent to waiting for the New Jerusalem. )
Feels like this quibbling of mine is similar to the something-like-priority dispute over theology versus psychology versus computer science. When testing for the detection of cybernetic minds, is it more important to model it mathematically within computer science, or non-mathematically within whatever it is that looks at, entopic or Fortean phenomenologies. Or using a combination of reproducible logic, with non-reproducible observations?
The ice/sleet/donut meme is even better with the context. It was originally posted by a police department, with a disclaimer that they really just chose this example at random, and they had no special knowledge about different types of donuts.
They’ve literally done it. Several examples in history. Several more buried by history. Their spiritual siblings have been doing it in industrial counts for centuries.
I have many inappropriate jokes to make. Hopefully I will allow the impulses to pass through me, and leave me, and I shall refrain.
The serious thought is that the belief or confidence in peace are a lot of different mental things coming together. Such as methods of dispute resolution, and views on how tightly the circumstances of others are related to your own.
This stuff of x dollars in national debt, or y dollars in fraud in whatever governments budget, or whatever, those are downstream of coupling almost everyone into a common interest in government run business.
I’m mellow on this stuff, for the moment, because I had my very angry phase years ago, and the new estimates of quantity are not a real qualitative change for me. In the circumstances I must navigate from, my own mistakes are the major problem for me.
The idea of peace only really naturally occurs when someone thinks that others can do well for themselves without necessarily being a problem for that one. Endemic warfare shit, of the worst of the third world tier, comes from figuring that if your neighboring village catches a break, they will hurt you in the future.
Lots of things are ‘only ideas’, but ideas do shape how people think, thus act, and actual actions do have consequences.
But those were not committed in the execution region of Poland, those were sparkling lynchings.
(The decision of the Democrats and the communists to join their political causes together was mistake. Politics has capital and it has technical debt. They merged the capital, but they also merged the technical debt. )
The only want to shoot the ones who make noise and cause them to notice how wrong they are. Like the old saying; ‘It’s the squeaky Wheel that gets greased’
You know, that moving a mouse from one computer to another to copy and paste ought to work. Except for the unplugging part, I discovered that feature by accident and it is amazing. I have my CMS/media server next to my main workstation, and one day I thought, boy, it’d be nice if instead of having to switch mice and keyboards every time I switched focus I could just move the mouse from one screen to the other like this… and I flicked the cursor off the right of the screen on my main computer and saw a bulge on the left of the screen on my server. I continued moving the mouse over… and the cursor came out the other side. That also meant the keyboard now worked on the server.
You can set that up on purpose; I had a setup like that back in the early ’10s. The trick is that both computers are running software that links them together across the network, and when you move the cursor off the “main” screen (defined as the screen connected to the computer the mouse is plugged into) it starts sending both mouse movement and keystrokes to the “secondary” computer. Hopefully you set up an encrypted connection to send them over, otherwise anyone on the network can see your passwords, one character at a time.
I used to use this a lot. These days, I have two laptops sitting side-by-side (one running Linux, one Windows) and I just scoot my chair over a bit and switch keyboards, because it doesn’t feel nearly as good to use a trackpad on another screen. But I used to use this feature quite a bit. I had to set it up by hand back then, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had made a way to set it up automatically, and that was a feature you didn’t know about on your media server. But since one wouldn’t want that to be set up automatically without any user input at all (what if the computer next to yours doesn’t belong to you? You don’t want to be accidentally typing your passwords into the computer next to yours at the coffee shop), I suspect that this is a feature that got set up at install time with a bit of input from you, but you’d forgotten about it by the time of the incident you mentioned and you were rediscovering it.
The only good Harambe meme is the one where he’s telling the kid, “I have information that will lead to the arrest and imprisonment of Hillary Clinton…”
I may be inferring wrong things from knowing the artist from other works.
Was maybe some sort of inflection point, or obvious difference in perception. It was famous, and clearly, there were a lot of people who left their brains turned off.
I prefer it when Gorillas are shot, because it would suck so much to be left with using strangulation or conventional melee weapons on problem animals.
Oh dear Lord. i don’t think that’s what it’s suggesting. It’s a joke about the world having gone awry since Harambe was shot. LONG running job, partly fueled by people confusing Harambe and Hamurabe.
What Sarah said. Ain’t no lie. Except, it might’ve had some roots back with Ogg and Brogg, the two protosapient hominids that schemed against each other constantly for rulership of the tribe.
Back when the pre humans first develop skulls enough to allow social brains, there was a mesopotamian or korean queen named Harambae.
Harambae became a man, and invented female inferiority.
Is the Harambae hypothesis absurd? Yes.
Is the Harambae hypothesis supported by any archeological evidence? No, it is not.
Is the Harambae hypothesis a rude and useless example of ‘scholarship’? Yes.
Is the Harambae hypothesis an invalid or unfair critique of seeming trends in modern scholarship? Maybe, that is really for posterity and or other thinkers to judge.
My sampling of the modern scientific literature, and of actual populations of graduate students and faculty are necessarily sparse. I have a few estimators, but those are also easily explained by a majority of scholars who feel they need to keep their heads down, and fear losing the opportunity to research what they love if they spend time fighting the crazies over disputes that have not been their most exciting research interest. That would also not be what we thought we were getting from academia, but it now seems like nothing could have delivered what we thought we were getting.
‘What we should do about academia’ is largely going to be a problem for people who are not me to make decisions on.
The Reader suggests it started when these critters disturbed the CO2 equilibrium in Earth’s atmosphere.
Cyanobacteria – These ubiquitous bacteria were the first oxygen producers. They absorb visible light using a mix of pigments: phycobilins, carotenoids and several forms of chlorophyll.
Amelia catching fire like she did has been amazing. I hope the Brits are able to turn things around in their country. It would be hilarious if the symbol for a successful voter revolt was a fictional woman created by moron bureaucrats who were trying to suppress males acting independently of the government.
From my less than extensive experience with Germany, my guess is that Maria* was created in Bavaria. At least in the 90s and Aughts, they prided themselves as more conservative than the average Hans.
(*) And the epinomyous song from West Side Story is now an earworm. Wrong hemisphere, brain!
I’m not surprised. AfD gets more votes than any other party these days The reason it doesn’t get control of the government is because all of the other parties join together to block AfD, meaning that AfD will need an actual majority in order to take control of the government.
In theory, not likely. But as frustration keeps building…
Heh. When I saw my first Amelia video – these hijacked versions of Amelia used by the British patriots and people who love traditional British culture – the first though was actually that hey, violet hairdye, think of all those poor leftist women who now have to fast change their preferred dye color to something else, or horror, maybe stop dyeing their hair completely (probably not).
But that is one of the best ways to you fight your enemy on the ground of images and ideas.
Yankee doodle dandy.
Don’t complain about their attempts to mock you, or portray you as some caricature, don’t try to “explain” their accusations away, embrace that image, find a way to own it and then make it YOURS.
But that’s the point. They don’t feel that they need the support of the livestock. They are, after all, the True People. Many of them probably feel that the disapproval of the livestock means they’re making the right decisions.
The propaganda is necessary to keep the livestock pacified until the True People are ready to dispense with them. Which they currently are not.
sounds superficially like it would work, and might be easy
Well, it might not work, and if it did it would not be easy.
First, patents were never the most complete form of the recorded recipe. Additionally, the recorded recipes are less available, except for enthusiasts.
Anyway, a truly complete machine recipe from 1940, 1950, 1960, or 1970 is not gunna be ‘crank it out, and get producing’ for most current day would be manufacturers.
Stupid trick example, VT fuses from the 1940s. Those apparently were a serious production quality challenge, back then. These would not be easy to do, but also there is almost no one who would really want to get fresh examples and have them actually work. I mean, yes, if you had a very autistic artillery engineer, he might think the exercise could be educational, but I doubt the existence of one who could persuasively make the budget case for doing it, especially compared to other alternative educational experiments.
The general problem in replicating decades old manufacturing processes is materials, labor, equipment, and engineers skilled in applying the methods used on those drawings and documents. Given how engineers age, and the weird personal interests they can have, you might be able to find the small numbers of engineers needed for some of these things, and they may donate their work for free. And somebody somewhere has studied how to repair the equipment and continue to operate it, but not necessarily the specific machines you are interested in. The materials and the skilled labor are the real killers.
Anyway, washing machines, refrigerators, sewing machines, toilets, etc., I really do think I prefer a lot of the older designs, and would like to make more fresh. Of course, survivor bias. (I have been watching forgotten weapons, and, well, I’m a freaking moron on firearms design, and would not have an easy time managing those sorts of manufacturing quality issues. But, design space exploration and manufacturing space exploration are not completely trivial.)
Unfortuneately, I am a stupid lazybro, and my ambitions are routinely exceeding my displayed ability by a wide margin.
re: dragonball Z meme, modern women 19th century
The manga is really weird setting wise. Dragonball was based on Journey to the West.
The Earth that it is set on has literal animal people, and might not specify a lot when it comes to the ‘where’ on earth. Also, it was written in the 1980s. Anyway, the period is also not specified. (Generic space future, at setting start, with the minor exception that there seems to be absolutely no one with an interest in engineering space vehicles. Bulma later gets into spaceships.)
Chichi is basically the Ox King’s daughter, and married Son Goku after a showing at the the big world martial arts tournament when they were sixteen, pretty near the epilogue of dragonball.
Before then, a lot of the series happens when they are ten or so. (Goku was younger than his monk friend (IIRC Krillian), and younger than Bulma (the Sanzo analogue)).
Anyway, there is a huge timeskip between Dragonball and Dragonball Z, and basically Chichi’s new character is established as more or less a stereotypical housewife from Japan of that era. She directs and psychologically dominates her husband, and is very Tiger Mom towards her children.
So the meme is funny on a surface reading, but. This isn’t a feminist in the public sphere being that way towards an unrelated man. This is wife who is a weird mixture of a traditional Chinese wife, and a 1980s Japanese wife, in the private sphere with her husband.
It’s funnier when you know that Chichi basically in universe would not care about gun control, or the second ammendment, or probably feminism, but basically has expectations that are a weird mix of sound and screwed up when it comes to trying to raise her sons. She was a motherless orphan, raised by her father, and a tomboy. Goku is literally an orphan in several ways, grew up pretty wild, and the closest to maternal exposure was Bulma, whose own parents were wildly permissive. Dragonball’s Goku is also a bit of a monomaniac for fighting, and basically did not feel traumatized at the violence he grew up around. So she wants her boys to have a safer environment than she did, or he did, but he absolutely does not fully grok why. And she is responding to her understanding of what women in her culture think is safe, and not so much to the lived reality of her or her husband.
The power scaling in the dragonball setting is wild, notoriously wild, and I literally have no idea whether Chichi is invulnerable to bullets, car wrecks, etc.
I should have an extremely narrow and shallow view of manufacturing. Both for the now case, and for the then cases.
Almost certainly, my ignorance means that I have overlooked and was entirely unaware of many many points of relative stability in manufacturing, points where ease of manufacturing and improvements in production quality are relatively indifferent to when a design was prepared, and how fully it was documented.
also also also
many fairly systemic errors in how I estimate and evaluate stuffs. :D
PPPPS (metal 3d printing may be entering the stage of development where what I learned twenty years ago is absolutely no longer valid. I haven’t kept up enough to tell, and saw some cool details on new stuffs recently. )
The Reader offers that manufacturing knowledge often resides where you don’t expect it. He worked in manufacturing of defense electronics for a lot of his career. An example – early in his career (he was a test engineer at the time) he was assigned to get a new test running for a large order of spares for a microwave feed horn that was a part of a radar antenna, from back when those antennas were dishes. He got the test running without issue, but none of the product would pass the test. The Reader knew the test was good because we had retained one production unit and it measured what it did 15 years before. The Reader involved several design engineers, who concluded the parts looked like the drawing and didn’t know what to do. At that point the Reader asked around the old timers in the factory to find someone who might have built them in the past. He was finally pointed to a retired factory tech who graciously agreed to come in and work with the operators for a shift. It turned out that there were ceramic tuning elements whose exact placement was undocumented but critical, and that the adhesive used to attach them had to be minimized below what QC normally accepted for an adhesive bond line. He got the line running and we delivered all the parts, but when the Reader reviewed the data at the end of the run we hadn’t made one anywhere near as good as our retained sample.
ChiChi is superhumanly strong, though nowhere near the level of her alien husband. I guess they used ChiChi because many fans find her annoying and domineering. And she was stupidly ridiculous towards her super-powered son:”I dont care if the Earth is destroyed-our son will not fight he needs to study!” I always just thought it was funny she wore the pants in her family and everyone was terrified her when her husband and sons eventually gained the power to blow up planets-but they still obeyed her.
As a tangent aside, it looks like a twist on the old trope of extremely competent woman who is adamantly housewife and mother.
See, for the chickadees not so as ancient and withered by time as you and I, women used to be put upon a pedestal. I mean, not literally, but that was what one did as a man. Respect, honor, protect and provide for.
For those of us in more rural areas, the farmwife worked constantly to support the farm. Food, cleaning, child rearing, a garden plot, chickens, and so on was quite a bite more than a twelve hour work day. Even the more urban types did not have it so easy. Women had respect because it was earned, down to the last littlest detail.
Every woman? Oh heavens no. Not even close. But that was the ideal that many, even most would aspire to. Men had their own version of this. Hyper competent, tough, competitive, charitable, inexhaustible stamina, unbreakable willpower, always there to lend a hand, always ready to defend what was his be it philosophical points or with fists or pistol at need.
The trope of the useless and rather pitiable man was a similar twist on the earlier stereotype, I believe. One that got so big it somehow got lodged in the common consciousness. Men want to give their wives respect, and for said wives to be that ideal as well. While also recognizing that we human beings are fallible, and we ourselves fail every day in some way, though we always strive for better.
I have no idea who Amelia is or what all those memes refer to, other than a vague notion that the UK is trying to make it illegal to say unkind things about certain favored population groups.
It reminds me of the Christmas speech by the Dutch queen some years ago, in which she boldly asserted that there is no right to offend. Oh? Even the pseudo-Constitution used in Holland appears to protect a right of free speech, though it does say “subject to everyone’s responsibility under the law” — which could be seen as “void where prohibited”.
Amelia Watson was a vtuber with Hololive. Character was a blonde Sherlock Holmes/Timelord. Portrayed by some sort of American with a fake English accent, I understand.
She graduated some time between the game coming out, and the game really exploding as a meme. Graduation is a term for retirement from the Japanese idol industry. Distances them from the industry once they age out of becoming jailbait. (It can also be used for retiring when they get pregnant, but that falls into the category of outside of my knowledge, and speculation.)
Anyway, vtubers graduate, and that may be actual retirement, and it may be rebranding under a different name, style, and visual identity.
Bands that employ teenage girls can at times last long enough for the girls to be mid twenties, which is obviously long enough to be a huge change in how they think about theirselves, and their life preferences. I could find it pretty comprehensible for a woman in her twenties to go ‘I have made money from this business, but I kinda really care more about marrying and starting a family’. Five years alone, for me, as an older person, could have that sort of shift for me. Ten years, can definitely see that happen.
This whole thing may be entirely unrelated to the Amelia from Pathway/etc. kerfuffle that the question relates to.
Get batter. I mean better, not chocolate brownie batter. That’d be rather childish. (he says, whilst manfully deciding not to make brownies in the new-to-me oven YET).
Long version short, UK gov decides to go woke and say how great having immigrant “diversity” is by having a slow witted white boy be turned to the dark side by a attactive purple haired villainess. Naturally, they selected a terribly woke and dimwitted studio to make a flash game and made it a required activity in UK schools. Teenage boys rolled their eyes and did what they always do: they mocked it mercilessly and subverted it. Hence, Amelia.
The UK government created a very bad game to warn teens about the dangers of being radicalized. In it, for instance, if you run across a claim that immigrants are getting housing instead of veterans, you should just ignore it. If you share it, you are very bad, and if you research it, you are still bad. (Note that the game does not claim it’s false.)
In it, the villain was a purple-haired girl named Amelia, a classmate who tells you to do Bad Things.
I believe that the game itself only had Amelia being supportive of Charlie and angry at how he was treated. The thing is that the fanart is so widespread and so often aping the original — down to describing it as such — that it’s really quite hard to tell.
It appears that the overall program was called “Prevent”, and is part of an effort led by the British government to keep boys from becoming toxically masculine, or joining the so-called “far-right” (aka what we would refer to as “moderates”). Prevent seems to be part of the same general push that produced that awful Netflix series that got hyped a year or two ago.
This specific part of the Prevent program was an on-line visual novel (basically a picture book on your computer; usually with multiple choice decisions about paths that you want the protagonist to take that lead to different endings to the story) called “Pathways”. It’s focused on warning schoolboys about the dangers of “extremists”, and basically encourages players to mindlessly accept everything that the government tells them (not kidding; as mentioned by Mary, one of the options that leads to a “bad ending” is taking some offered “extremist” material home and researching it yourself instead of rejecting it out of hand as the government would encourage you to do). Amelia is a purple-haired girl who offers the protagonist the “extremist” materials that are basically anti-immigrant tracts.
Amelia from UK Anti-Radicalization Game Becomes Patriotism Mascot
Last updated 17 hours ago
Released in 2023 by Shout Out UK with Home Office funding, the game Pathways features Amelia trying to sway a teen protagonist with anti-immigration arguments like protests against grooming gangs. Players were meant to reject her, but memes, fan art, AI videos, and posts turned her into a mascot for British patriotism, with clips showing her rallying heroes or decrying migrants. Elon Musk boosted the phenomenon by sharing content and prompting his Grok AI for more, while the game’s site now shows errors. Supporters see it as validation of migration concerns amid UK debates, as critics call it far-right fantasy.
Information warfare ran amok. It seems to have backfired.
Because the wackjobs hired sycophantic wackjobs, who failed to account for not preaching to the choir.
So the UK national bureaucracy did the sort of outsourcing job that they apparently do for some information warfare and for some IT products. It delivered to the internet some years ago, and was fairly quiet for a time. (And the big brains from UK universities, UK politics, and UK bureaucracies apparently wonder why they can’t be per capita equivelant to the USA in IT/computer chips. Then they again decide that they really need to run IT choices through the government, especially in order to compensate for weaksauce information warfare on behalf of $currentRegime.)
Anyway, does not seem to have caught on fire as a game. So it was memed, but mainly visible among a) immigration stans b) that subset of gamers who are violently allergic to crappy games, and who follow the crappy game news very closely. Then some American, I think one of our radicals trying to profit from politics, allegedly used grok to make a video. And or the UKs government got around to making the extremes of censorship more visible, and or the censorship pissed off Americans, and or Preston Byrne unfairly radicalized Americans against our very special friends the British.
Could all be a twitter tempest in a teakettle, caused by Musk manipulating his algorithms because he is butthurt about all the business that the EU is going to be able to take away from him with W.
Anyway, from the outside perspective, it was not that topical, so it didn’t take off. Until it was more topical, and network effects, and it did take off.
Maybe it really could be an elaborate conspiracy against law graduates from the university of LEeds. You could even explain it as a conspiracy, without trying to invoke Jewish conspirators especially angry at Starmer because the BBC wants to support Team Jew Hater.
Nomenclature opsec. Awesome! Every company. Yes. “We can’t give you more hours but we’re hiring more people so we can give each of you even less hours.” I’ll go with the racoon attitude, yes. …but no cigar. Carp away! When can we fund that startup? Hey, nothing stops you from being unstable AND unstoppable!
On those 1950’s appliances — microcontrollers are much cheaper, more versatile and more reliable than the old clockwork multi-pole switches. So, build them with open-source controllers, like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
Or rather, how I met Nastycat. He decided to share his dinner of half eaten fat rat with me, and followed me home. Head tilting crazycat has been the instigator of shenanigans ever since.
A ravine! How cushy! Why in my day we had to swim up from the bottom of the Marianas Trench every morning, then, sopping wet, climb Mt Everest and stand there, shivering and gasping with altitude sickness and the bends, waiting for the Nepalese Garbage Service truck to roll by so we could jump on and ride on the garbage to the dump, so we could rummage for scraps, then back again to the bottom of the Trench before curfew, or we’d be in real trouble.
If you can’t come up with a military joke about “tank museum” and “monkey world,” I mean, damn.
No flip off from the school bus? Kids are going to get faces rekt by the world. We had gladiator combat in grade school, ten foot monkey bars without nets, lawn darts, potato guns, cow tipping, and nominal supervision. Soft doesn’t survive the snowpocalypse alone.
The guy that taught me business actually did have his own business and made good money at it, too. My phys ed teacher was a medically retired vet that could still punch out a bear if he wanted to (dude was ripped as hell). They must have lowered standards somewhere along the way.
Water cannons on protestors + blue ink = genius. I support this plan.
Single men do everything for themselves and then some. We volunteer, help strangers and extended family, show up early and stay late. No kids or wife, so we’re able to respond 24/7. For the same reason, we aren’t much afraid of dying on the job because what we’ve got left is covered. Without single men, many things would become much harder.
Also random hillbillies in Appalachia: “It goes a lot faster and easier without officials demanding permits and inspections every five minutes, too.”
Moral right/loaded machine gun: based. This should be the basis of our foreign policy decisions.
Only certain people to vote? I demand inky fingers and paper ballots! Don’t let the zombies steal another election, you must have a pulse and exist as a citizen!
It could be reasonable also to copy and paste from otherwise separate machines if a) you replace the mouse PCB in your mouse with a custom PCB that also includes a USB hub and a flash drive b) you write some sort of program (perhaps similar to malware) to allow the hardware to work as intended.
Anyway, that is my TED talk on getting the federal government to abandon USB mouses, and maybe go back to PS2 or some such crap.
… and not claim to live in a hive with eleventy-nine others, or claim to live in an empty lot, a park, a public toilet or under a highway bridge (that last is reserved for trolls,, of course).
Longer version: It’s my husband’s birthday today, and we got to have a stressed out kitty doing things like distressed noises, trying to find secluded places to curl up in, and making pained sounds when sides of belly were pressed. Actual symptoms were vomiting, not using the box properly, and sensation of something hard in belly.
Kitty is male. For those of you following along, yup, urinary tract blockage.
The reason I’m posting this is because this is a don’t wait situation, and while we haven’t got the labs back yet, they’re pretty sure his potassium wasn’t badly out of whack because his heart rate was good. So we got it early because we paid attention. Yay.
So yeah, happy birthday, honey, here’s a scary vet bill. (We’re not in financial distress at this time. Still scary.)
We got lucky in that our first introduction to kitty urinary blockage and symptoms was a female. Which, while still expensive, is less dire. Thus, with subsequent male cats exhibiting symptoms, they are gotten to the veterinarian health assessments a lot quicker. One thing we do is spring for more expensive, not prescription until required, food, kibble or canned, to lessen the likelihood of occurrence. These days, more likely to see kidney functions start to fail in our elder kitties (which is a matter of when, not if, even with better ingredient food).
Gigancat had so many urinary stones (cat of duditude) that he got, ahem, replumbed and straightened out. Lived ten more years, large and in charge. Apparently he was genetically predisposed, in addition to being male.
We have them on the urinary health non-prescription wet food due to the other boy kitty having the same issue several years back, but not getting caught as early. They’ll be evaluating his mineral & hormone levels to see if a prescription version is indicated.
I shoveled half the driveway, will do the second half and walks later. 2” and not too wet, for which my shoveling muscles are grateful. The low tonight is -5F. Not looking forward to that, I assure you, since I have to be at Day Job at 0700. Battery in vehicle is charged, but it doesn’t have a block heater. (Can’t get them down here, “because there’s no need for them.” Idjits.)
Woke up this morning and it was 14 and snowing. Not much, but enough to cover the ground for a few hours and enough to sit by the dining room windows and watch the glittering flakes come down.
Our “exchange student,” Avrim T. Dragon III, is upset because he prayed for snow. Enough snow to make snowballs to throw at the church matriarch. And all he got was a little pretty white stuff. The Lord has a sense of humor.
(Avrim is the puppet alter ego of my beloved at our tiny church. The matriarch has a wicked sense of humor and gives as good as she gets. And I’m the straight woman who usually gives the actual children’s message. We improv.)
Currently at Chez Phantom we are having what I am pleased to call a Proper Ontario Snowfall. Not enough that you can drive a snowmobile over a cow fence, but enough that it’s worth plowing the driveway. Have to get the gate open, y’know. If the wind gets up there will be some big drifts.
In Tennessee and places like that I’m sure this would be called a catastrophe. I was watching the guy that fixes the big busses on YouTube, he was very concerned that the 1/2 of ice storm plus the five inches of snow forecast would have his power knocked out for a week or more. Apparently his county has two (2) snow plows. Which seems sketchy, really. It isn’t like it -never- snows in the South, just not every year. Snowed a ton in Florida last year.
Even Arizona gets snow, I recall when it snowed in Scottsdale there were crowds of people who drove up there to see it. ~:D
January ’69. Eugene and Lane County, have more than one snow plow. Or at least private, if not governmental, vehicles that can be affixed with a blade for side street snow removal. In 1969, that wasn’t enough to keep the contractually required “military roads” open, let alone anything else. There was *rumor of snow coming, finally showed up. Then it really went to town snowing. Before it was done, over 4′ fell. The county kept I-5 open, what there was of it, through the county. Top of mountain passes open (Cascades or Coastal), only because that was where most of the snow plows were kept/stationed. But River Road? Hwy 99? Territorial Hwy? Any of the city or neighborhood roads, city or county? Not one road was plowed. Everything shutdown for a week, until snow had melted (went fast when it did). OTOH we had snow around the house through the next May. It’d been compacted from the piling the snow shoveled off the flat roof of our house, which was high enough for dad to jump off the roof into. Just dad. Twelve-year-old me wasn’t allowed to. Unfair!
What is the snow plow setup now? I doubt any better. We get snow. We just do not normally get snow like “the big snow of ’69”. The neighborhoods still do not get plowed or sanded. Main roads do, but neighborhood roads do not. It’ll happen again, another freak storm.
(*) Rumors of snow is all the valley gets. Even when it actually snows, we’re shocked if it is accurately predicted before it hits.
Toronto got 20″, so it is reported on the news. The whole city is shut down. Because as ALWAYS, they don’t have enough plows or enough places to put the snow. You would think a city in Canada would handle this better, but you would be wrong.
Because Lefties can’t think of snow unless it is up to their backsides and they can’t move their Tesla.
By contrast, my podunk back road out here in Hooterville was plowed twice during the snow, and again this morning. All the roads are clear and mostly dry.
“Scotland’s most loved” vegetarian haggis? Let me guess, it’s loved by all of two people out of the entire country? Whereas all other versions of vegeterian haggis are loved by either one person, or none?
The Merlin’s Rest pub in Minneapolis used to (BC) run a Burns’ Night dinner featuring that reekie pudding. Since my church’s evening service was dismissed, I should check to see if it is still a thing.
my guesso is that Trump could have had intel on PLAN intent to take Taiwan this spring, and that Maduro kidnapping also served to head that off. Strieff is a big brain, so maybe there is a reason that can’t explain the alleged purges.
(Streiffs redstate posts this week are an interesting cluster. I tend to assume that he is calculating, and talks to other retired officers. so him having such stories to peddle at red state means that some number of officers have done some thinking, and are trying to send a message to someone, or lay ground work for something. )
I don’t know.
at this point, either someone is trying to frame an lt governor, or I really don’t want to taint all of the jury pools. It is not impossible that we are simply looking at very stupid people.
I don’t think I will have any reliable information on this for some time.
According To Hoyt 
Re: “Fire 90% of HR”:
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HR occasionally does score a success. One of the Falcon and Snowman spies was told by his Soviet contact to apply for a job at a major US aerospace company. His credentials were a shoo-in for getting it and stealing all kinds of sensitive secrets. The company HR department managed to lose his job application, so he never got hired.
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The Reader suggest that removing 90% of HR will just allow the tumor to regrow. Remove 110% to be sure. No company needs a ‘Human Resources’ department – the one thing they never do is treat employees as useful resource.
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Just go back to the “benefits” department (which was often just one person). Employees like benefits, and they at least got along with the person who administered them.
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Indeed. Get rid of Human Resources, as I am not a resource. Bring back Personnel , because I am a person.
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⬆️⬆️⬆️ This.
In 30 years KCLS from a Personnel / Benefits section of a Business Office, they speed ran ditching the service ethic, abandoning their constitutional bulwark mindset, and ended up with Board Meetings where they had to defend hiring literal sex-offenders to work with kids.
Convergence kills: never give them an opening.
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I’ve done both benefits and HR. Send payroll to accounting, split off benefits into its own department. Ship disputes and discipline to legal.
Just like so many other things, HR exists because of government regulation, reporting requirements and red tape.
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They say no one wants to be friends with HR.
But a lot of people would want to be friends with benefits.
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Do you like fish? The carp cannon just got your location from drones. Watch for incoming.
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“Primary arming master switch to Arm1”
“Manual safety pins pulled.”
“Barometric pressure fuse charged.”
“Internal power charged”
“Master release to armed”
“Open bay doors.”
“Doors open.”
“Weapon nav spun up and hot.”
“Final safety to Arm.”
“Weapon tracking in all respects.”
“DROP DROP DROP!”
“CARP away!”
“Doors closing”
“Initiate escape maneuver. Engines to emergency power. Close all flashcovers.”
“Where’s Major Kong?”
(FREEFALL MEGAWEAPON WHISTLING DOOM)
“YAAAAAAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOO!”
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https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia1.tenor.com%2Fm%2FwCrZqAL1cWMAAAAd%2Fspinning-fish.gif&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=ae8e0c2471543a51cc2b269868ba47d9f68900ef7aa794ba055dc4c1fef9fc48
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I know what to do after reading that.
Left Click – Highlight Text – Copy – Paste – Send
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“Resources”… like COAL, and OIL, and GAS… things that get burned up.
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Many years ago, I worked at a Retail company (in Data Processing) and one of the company’s slogans was “Retail is a people’s business and we value our people”.
One of the jokes going around was that we weren’t people, we were Associates. (Our name tags read “Associate” not “Employee”). [Very Big Twisted Grin]
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While the Reader agrees that that the HR usage of resource views employees as interchangeable and consumable, he is awaiting the theory of economics that starts with the first principle that the only economic ‘resource’ is the human mind.
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Bodies matter a bit.
Mind winds up being a trade-space where a lot of economic choices are concerned. To really avoid the body-enables-mind dispute, you would need to be able to conclusively demonstrate minds with no bodies. (So a possible post New Jerusalem state of affairs might be equivalent to waiting for the New Jerusalem. )
Feels like this quibbling of mine is similar to the something-like-priority dispute over theology versus psychology versus computer science. When testing for the detection of cybernetic minds, is it more important to model it mathematically within computer science, or non-mathematically within whatever it is that looks at, entopic or Fortean phenomenologies. Or using a combination of reproducible logic, with non-reproducible observations?
I dunno.
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The ice/sleet/donut meme is even better with the context. It was originally posted by a police department, with a disclaimer that they really just chose this example at random, and they had no special knowledge about different types of donuts.
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ROFL.
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Thought that it looked familiar.
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Elsewhere a Liberal said that the Democratic Party is too wimpy to execute political enemies.
That’s isn’t a joke and made me wonder if he wanted to execute political enemies. ☹️
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they’ve wanted it for a while.
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They have been openly lusting for it for a while. Witness the celebrations when Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
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Which is maybe grounds for optimism, but my view maybe must necessarily be wacky.
Lots of stuff gets priced into my priors, and so I see a failure to source more shooters for follow on strikes.
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They’ve literally done it. Several examples in history. Several more buried by history. Their spiritual siblings have been doing it in industrial counts for centuries.
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I have many inappropriate jokes to make. Hopefully I will allow the impulses to pass through me, and leave me, and I shall refrain.
The serious thought is that the belief or confidence in peace are a lot of different mental things coming together. Such as methods of dispute resolution, and views on how tightly the circumstances of others are related to your own.
This stuff of x dollars in national debt, or y dollars in fraud in whatever governments budget, or whatever, those are downstream of coupling almost everyone into a common interest in government run business.
I’m mellow on this stuff, for the moment, because I had my very angry phase years ago, and the new estimates of quantity are not a real qualitative change for me. In the circumstances I must navigate from, my own mistakes are the major problem for me.
The idea of peace only really naturally occurs when someone thinks that others can do well for themselves without necessarily being a problem for that one. Endemic warfare shit, of the worst of the third world tier, comes from figuring that if your neighboring village catches a break, they will hurt you in the future.
Lots of things are ‘only ideas’, but ideas do shape how people think, thus act, and actual actions do have consequences.
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It’s not accurate either, not unless you only look at the past 50 years or so. After all, the KKK was the terrorist arm of the Democratic party.
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But those were not committed in the execution region of Poland, those were sparkling lynchings.
(The decision of the Democrats and the communists to join their political causes together was mistake. Politics has capital and it has technical debt. They merged the capital, but they also merged the technical debt. )
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The only want to shoot the ones who make noise and cause them to notice how wrong they are. Like the old saying;
‘It’s the squeaky Wheel that gets greased’
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(Looks up from sharpening Gladius)
“Careful of what you wish, tiger.”
ssskkkkkkrrrrrriiiiiitchh
sssssskkkkkkrrrrriiiiititttccchhhhh
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You know, that moving a mouse from one computer to another to copy and paste ought to work. Except for the unplugging part, I discovered that feature by accident and it is amazing. I have my CMS/media server next to my main workstation, and one day I thought, boy, it’d be nice if instead of having to switch mice and keyboards every time I switched focus I could just move the mouse from one screen to the other like this… and I flicked the cursor off the right of the screen on my main computer and saw a bulge on the left of the screen on my server. I continued moving the mouse over… and the cursor came out the other side. That also meant the keyboard now worked on the server.
This is apparently a feature in modern computers.
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You can set that up on purpose; I had a setup like that back in the early ’10s. The trick is that both computers are running software that links them together across the network, and when you move the cursor off the “main” screen (defined as the screen connected to the computer the mouse is plugged into) it starts sending both mouse movement and keystrokes to the “secondary” computer. Hopefully you set up an encrypted connection to send them over, otherwise anyone on the network can see your passwords, one character at a time.
I used to use this a lot. These days, I have two laptops sitting side-by-side (one running Linux, one Windows) and I just scoot my chair over a bit and switch keyboards, because it doesn’t feel nearly as good to use a trackpad on another screen. But I used to use this feature quite a bit. I had to set it up by hand back then, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had made a way to set it up automatically, and that was a feature you didn’t know about on your media server. But since one wouldn’t want that to be set up automatically without any user input at all (what if the computer next to yours doesn’t belong to you? You don’t want to be accidentally typing your passwords into the computer next to yours at the coffee shop), I suspect that this is a feature that got set up at install time with a bit of input from you, but you’d forgotten about it by the time of the incident you mentioned and you were rediscovering it.
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You know, I hate, hate, hate, with a purple passion, memes that suggest that the life of a gorilla was worth more than the life of a black kid.
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Hear, hear.
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The only good Harambe meme is the one where he’s telling the kid, “I have information that will lead to the arrest and imprisonment of Hillary Clinton…”
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I don’t necessarily infer that from the meme.
I may be inferring wrong things from knowing the artist from other works.
Was maybe some sort of inflection point, or obvious difference in perception. It was famous, and clearly, there were a lot of people who left their brains turned off.
I prefer it when Gorillas are shot, because it would suck so much to be left with using strangulation or conventional melee weapons on problem animals.
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Oh dear Lord. i don’t think that’s what it’s suggesting. It’s a joke about the world having gone awry since Harambe was shot. LONG running job, partly fueled by people confusing Harambe and Hamurabe.
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this, to be frank
also
hammurabi?
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”How did it get this bad?”
”It all started with Hammurabi …”
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Right? It’s actually true.
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(Singing, deep bass)
Gonna hammurabi in th’ mornin’…. Gonna hammurabi in th’ evenin’….
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What Sarah said. Ain’t no lie. Except, it might’ve had some roots back with Ogg and Brogg, the two protosapient hominids that schemed against each other constantly for rulership of the tribe.
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Back when the pre humans first develop skulls enough to allow social brains, there was a mesopotamian or korean queen named Harambae.
Harambae became a man, and invented female inferiority.
Is the Harambae hypothesis absurd? Yes.
Is the Harambae hypothesis supported by any archeological evidence? No, it is not.
Is the Harambae hypothesis a rude and useless example of ‘scholarship’? Yes.
Is the Harambae hypothesis an invalid or unfair critique of seeming trends in modern scholarship? Maybe, that is really for posterity and or other thinkers to judge.
My sampling of the modern scientific literature, and of actual populations of graduate students and faculty are necessarily sparse. I have a few estimators, but those are also easily explained by a majority of scholars who feel they need to keep their heads down, and fear losing the opportunity to research what they love if they spend time fighting the crazies over disputes that have not been their most exciting research interest. That would also not be what we thought we were getting from academia, but it now seems like nothing could have delivered what we thought we were getting.
‘What we should do about academia’ is largely going to be a problem for people who are not me to make decisions on.
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Another of her arrangements on the barding of Blessed* Rudyard?
¡Me gusto!
*but by all accounts not much of a Saint.
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I’d say the first one out of the primordial ooze was the real troublemaker.
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The Reader suggests it started when these critters disturbed the CO2 equilibrium in Earth’s atmosphere.
Cyanobacteria –
These ubiquitous bacteria were the first oxygen producers. They absorb visible light using a mix of pigments: phycobilins, carotenoids and several forms of chlorophyll.
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Sounds like something the second one out of the primordial ooze would say. Little sisters are always tattletales! Evolution says so.
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it easy if you’re a democrat, or racist, basically the same thing…
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Amelia catching fire like she did has been amazing. I hope the Brits are able to turn things around in their country. It would be hilarious if the symbol for a successful voter revolt was a fictional woman created by moron bureaucrats who were trying to suppress males acting independently of the government.
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I saw there’s a German lass now along the same lines, blonde in an October fest-type dress.
I was surprised the krauts had it in them.
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From my less than extensive experience with Germany, my guess is that Maria* was created in Bavaria. At least in the 90s and Aughts, they prided themselves as more conservative than the average Hans.
(*) And the epinomyous song from West Side Story is now an earworm. Wrong hemisphere, brain!
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“eponymous”. Tyops ‘r us.
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I’d associate the name with The Sound of Music:
“How do you solve a problem like Maria? / How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”
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I’m not surprised. AfD gets more votes than any other party these days The reason it doesn’t get control of the government is because all of the other parties join together to block AfD, meaning that AfD will need an actual majority in order to take control of the government.
In theory, not likely. But as frustration keeps building…
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This is how to start taking a culture back.
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Here’s another
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One more, in the form of a cutscene for the end of the Pathways game after Charlie makes all the “bad” choices – I love the sad music:
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Are you sure that’s not a parody by the Babylon Bee? 🤣
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Babylon Bee is not the only parodist in the world.
To be sure, some of them are making it impossible to tell their work from the original. Not that the original made it difficult.
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Heh. When I saw my first Amelia video – these hijacked versions of Amelia used by the British patriots and people who love traditional British culture – the first though was actually that hey, violet hairdye, think of all those poor leftist women who now have to fast change their preferred dye color to something else, or horror, maybe stop dyeing their hair completely (probably not).
But that is one of the best ways to you fight your enemy on the ground of images and ideas.
Yankee doodle dandy.
Don’t complain about their attempts to mock you, or portray you as some caricature, don’t try to “explain” their accusations away, embrace that image, find a way to own it and then make it YOURS.
That works, and it can work spectacularly well.
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I saw the tweet-video of Maria, Amelia’s German counterpart. (With subtitles for the Deutsche-impaired.)
Yes! (or, rather Jawohl!)
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If you put that in a story, no one would believe it.
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If regular folks supported their shit, they wouldn’t need the relentless ham-fisted propaganda.
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But that’s the point. They don’t feel that they need the support of the livestock. They are, after all, the True People. Many of them probably feel that the disapproval of the livestock means they’re making the right decisions.
The propaganda is necessary to keep the livestock pacified until the True People are ready to dispense with them. Which they currently are not.
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SFBS!
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re: start up
sounds superficially like it would work, and might be easy
Well, it might not work, and if it did it would not be easy.
First, patents were never the most complete form of the recorded recipe. Additionally, the recorded recipes are less available, except for enthusiasts.
Anyway, a truly complete machine recipe from 1940, 1950, 1960, or 1970 is not gunna be ‘crank it out, and get producing’ for most current day would be manufacturers.
Stupid trick example, VT fuses from the 1940s. Those apparently were a serious production quality challenge, back then. These would not be easy to do, but also there is almost no one who would really want to get fresh examples and have them actually work. I mean, yes, if you had a very autistic artillery engineer, he might think the exercise could be educational, but I doubt the existence of one who could persuasively make the budget case for doing it, especially compared to other alternative educational experiments.
The general problem in replicating decades old manufacturing processes is materials, labor, equipment, and engineers skilled in applying the methods used on those drawings and documents. Given how engineers age, and the weird personal interests they can have, you might be able to find the small numbers of engineers needed for some of these things, and they may donate their work for free. And somebody somewhere has studied how to repair the equipment and continue to operate it, but not necessarily the specific machines you are interested in. The materials and the skilled labor are the real killers.
Anyway, washing machines, refrigerators, sewing machines, toilets, etc., I really do think I prefer a lot of the older designs, and would like to make more fresh. Of course, survivor bias. (I have been watching forgotten weapons, and, well, I’m a freaking moron on firearms design, and would not have an easy time managing those sorts of manufacturing quality issues. But, design space exploration and manufacturing space exploration are not completely trivial.)
Unfortuneately, I am a stupid lazybro, and my ambitions are routinely exceeding my displayed ability by a wide margin.
re: dragonball Z meme, modern women 19th century
The manga is really weird setting wise. Dragonball was based on Journey to the West.
The Earth that it is set on has literal animal people, and might not specify a lot when it comes to the ‘where’ on earth. Also, it was written in the 1980s. Anyway, the period is also not specified. (Generic space future, at setting start, with the minor exception that there seems to be absolutely no one with an interest in engineering space vehicles. Bulma later gets into spaceships.)
Chichi is basically the Ox King’s daughter, and married Son Goku after a showing at the the big world martial arts tournament when they were sixteen, pretty near the epilogue of dragonball.
Before then, a lot of the series happens when they are ten or so. (Goku was younger than his monk friend (IIRC Krillian), and younger than Bulma (the Sanzo analogue)).
Anyway, there is a huge timeskip between Dragonball and Dragonball Z, and basically Chichi’s new character is established as more or less a stereotypical housewife from Japan of that era. She directs and psychologically dominates her husband, and is very Tiger Mom towards her children.
So the meme is funny on a surface reading, but. This isn’t a feminist in the public sphere being that way towards an unrelated man. This is wife who is a weird mixture of a traditional Chinese wife, and a 1980s Japanese wife, in the private sphere with her husband.
It’s funnier when you know that Chichi basically in universe would not care about gun control, or the second ammendment, or probably feminism, but basically has expectations that are a weird mix of sound and screwed up when it comes to trying to raise her sons. She was a motherless orphan, raised by her father, and a tomboy. Goku is literally an orphan in several ways, grew up pretty wild, and the closest to maternal exposure was Bulma, whose own parents were wildly permissive. Dragonball’s Goku is also a bit of a monomaniac for fighting, and basically did not feel traumatized at the violence he grew up around. So she wants her boys to have a safer environment than she did, or he did, but he absolutely does not fully grok why. And she is responding to her understanding of what women in her culture think is safe, and not so much to the lived reality of her or her husband.
The power scaling in the dragonball setting is wild, notoriously wild, and I literally have no idea whether Chichi is invulnerable to bullets, car wrecks, etc.
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also also
I should have an extremely narrow and shallow view of manufacturing. Both for the now case, and for the then cases.
Almost certainly, my ignorance means that I have overlooked and was entirely unaware of many many points of relative stability in manufacturing, points where ease of manufacturing and improvements in production quality are relatively indifferent to when a design was prepared, and how fully it was documented.
also also also
many fairly systemic errors in how I estimate and evaluate stuffs. :D
PPPPS (metal 3d printing may be entering the stage of development where what I learned twenty years ago is absolutely no longer valid. I haven’t kept up enough to tell, and saw some cool details on new stuffs recently. )
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The Reader offers that manufacturing knowledge often resides where you don’t expect it. He worked in manufacturing of defense electronics for a lot of his career. An example – early in his career (he was a test engineer at the time) he was assigned to get a new test running for a large order of spares for a microwave feed horn that was a part of a radar antenna, from back when those antennas were dishes. He got the test running without issue, but none of the product would pass the test. The Reader knew the test was good because we had retained one production unit and it measured what it did 15 years before. The Reader involved several design engineers, who concluded the parts looked like the drawing and didn’t know what to do. At that point the Reader asked around the old timers in the factory to find someone who might have built them in the past. He was finally pointed to a retired factory tech who graciously agreed to come in and work with the operators for a shift. It turned out that there were ceramic tuning elements whose exact placement was undocumented but critical, and that the adhesive used to attach them had to be minimized below what QC normally accepted for an adhesive bond line. He got the line running and we delivered all the parts, but when the Reader reviewed the data at the end of the run we hadn’t made one anywhere near as good as our retained sample.
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Yes.
The trend of university trained folks weighting the utility of sitting through class over other sitting around listening to old people?
Is a trap when it comes to not listening to technicians, operators, or etc.
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ChiChi is superhumanly strong, though nowhere near the level of her alien husband. I guess they used ChiChi because many fans find her annoying and domineering. And she was stupidly ridiculous towards her super-powered son:”I dont care if the Earth is destroyed-our son will not fight he needs to study!” I always just thought it was funny she wore the pants in her family and everyone was terrified her when her husband and sons eventually gained the power to blow up planets-but they still obeyed her.
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As a tangent aside, it looks like a twist on the old trope of extremely competent woman who is adamantly housewife and mother.
See, for the chickadees not so as ancient and withered by time as you and I, women used to be put upon a pedestal. I mean, not literally, but that was what one did as a man. Respect, honor, protect and provide for.
For those of us in more rural areas, the farmwife worked constantly to support the farm. Food, cleaning, child rearing, a garden plot, chickens, and so on was quite a bite more than a twelve hour work day. Even the more urban types did not have it so easy. Women had respect because it was earned, down to the last littlest detail.
Every woman? Oh heavens no. Not even close. But that was the ideal that many, even most would aspire to. Men had their own version of this. Hyper competent, tough, competitive, charitable, inexhaustible stamina, unbreakable willpower, always there to lend a hand, always ready to defend what was his be it philosophical points or with fists or pistol at need.
The trope of the useless and rather pitiable man was a similar twist on the earlier stereotype, I believe. One that got so big it somehow got lodged in the common consciousness. Men want to give their wives respect, and for said wives to be that ideal as well. While also recognizing that we human beings are fallible, and we ourselves fail every day in some way, though we always strive for better.
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Eh, I’ve always been more a Bulma/Vegeta fan anyway…
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I have no idea who Amelia is or what all those memes refer to, other than a vague notion that the UK is trying to make it illegal to say unkind things about certain favored population groups.
It reminds me of the Christmas speech by the Dutch queen some years ago, in which she boldly asserted that there is no right to offend. Oh? Even the pseudo-Constitution used in Holland appears to protect a right of free speech, though it does say “subject to everyone’s responsibility under the law” — which could be seen as “void where prohibited”.
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Someone will tell you the story. I’m not functioning super-well.
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Amelia Watson was a vtuber with Hololive. Character was a blonde Sherlock Holmes/Timelord. Portrayed by some sort of American with a fake English accent, I understand.
She graduated some time between the game coming out, and the game really exploding as a meme. Graduation is a term for retirement from the Japanese idol industry. Distances them from the industry once they age out of becoming jailbait. (It can also be used for retiring when they get pregnant, but that falls into the category of outside of my knowledge, and speculation.)
Anyway, vtubers graduate, and that may be actual retirement, and it may be rebranding under a different name, style, and visual identity.
Bands that employ teenage girls can at times last long enough for the girls to be mid twenties, which is obviously long enough to be a huge change in how they think about theirselves, and their life preferences. I could find it pretty comprehensible for a woman in her twenties to go ‘I have made money from this business, but I kinda really care more about marrying and starting a family’. Five years alone, for me, as an older person, could have that sort of shift for me. Ten years, can definitely see that happen.
This whole thing may be entirely unrelated to the Amelia from Pathway/etc. kerfuffle that the question relates to.
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Get batter. I mean better, not chocolate brownie batter. That’d be rather childish. (he says, whilst manfully deciding not to make brownies in the new-to-me oven YET).
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Long version short, UK gov decides to go woke and say how great having immigrant “diversity” is by having a slow witted white boy be turned to the dark side by a attactive purple haired villainess. Naturally, they selected a terribly woke and dimwitted studio to make a flash game and made it a required activity in UK schools. Teenage boys rolled their eyes and did what they always do: they mocked it mercilessly and subverted it. Hence, Amelia.
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Give the studio some credit. They did realize that a teenage boy isn’t likely to be turned to the Dark Side by a plain girl.
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The UK government created a very bad game to warn teens about the dangers of being radicalized. In it, for instance, if you run across a claim that immigrants are getting housing instead of veterans, you should just ignore it. If you share it, you are very bad, and if you research it, you are still bad. (Note that the game does not claim it’s false.)
In it, the villain was a purple-haired girl named Amelia, a classmate who tells you to do Bad Things.
It backfired.
Here’s an article:
https://thatparkplace.com/amelia-takes-over-the-internet-uk-government-ai-avatar-ruins-internet-nanny-efforts-out-of-europe/
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This one’s my favorite, I think
https://x.com/SuttonHearsAHoo/status/2009941113428115607?s=20
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Right. Amelia leads to the ‘bad ending’ where Charlie marries her and raises a happy British family. 🤣
Apparently the gummint has ‘upgraded’ the game so that track is no longer available. ☹️
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So we have to make our own. Here’s one of her and Luce:
https://substack.com/@natewinchester/note/c-202634083?
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I believe that the game itself only had Amelia being supportive of Charlie and angry at how he was treated. The thing is that the fanart is so widespread and so often aping the original — down to describing it as such — that it’s really quite hard to tell.
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It appears that the overall program was called “Prevent”, and is part of an effort led by the British government to keep boys from becoming toxically masculine, or joining the so-called “far-right” (aka what we would refer to as “moderates”). Prevent seems to be part of the same general push that produced that awful Netflix series that got hyped a year or two ago.
This specific part of the Prevent program was an on-line visual novel (basically a picture book on your computer; usually with multiple choice decisions about paths that you want the protagonist to take that lead to different endings to the story) called “Pathways”. It’s focused on warning schoolboys about the dangers of “extremists”, and basically encourages players to mindlessly accept everything that the government tells them (not kidding; as mentioned by Mary, one of the options that leads to a “bad ending” is taking some offered “extremist” material home and researching it yourself instead of rejecting it out of hand as the government would encourage you to do). Amelia is a purple-haired girl who offers the protagonist the “extremist” materials that are basically anti-immigrant tracts.
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Amelia from UK Anti-Radicalization Game Becomes Patriotism Mascot
Last updated 17 hours ago
Released in 2023 by Shout Out UK with Home Office funding, the game Pathways features Amelia trying to sway a teen protagonist with anti-immigration arguments like protests against grooming gangs. Players were meant to reject her, but memes, fan art, AI videos, and posts turned her into a mascot for British patriotism, with clips showing her rallying heroes or decrying migrants. Elon Musk boosted the phenomenon by sharing content and prompting his Grok AI for more, while the game’s site now shows errors. Supporters see it as validation of migration concerns amid UK debates, as critics call it far-right fantasy.
See also X – https://x.com/i/trending/2014248293992448005
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Information warfare ran amok. It seems to have backfired.
Because the wackjobs hired sycophantic wackjobs, who failed to account for not preaching to the choir.
So the UK national bureaucracy did the sort of outsourcing job that they apparently do for some information warfare and for some IT products. It delivered to the internet some years ago, and was fairly quiet for a time. (And the big brains from UK universities, UK politics, and UK bureaucracies apparently wonder why they can’t be per capita equivelant to the USA in IT/computer chips. Then they again decide that they really need to run IT choices through the government, especially in order to compensate for weaksauce information warfare on behalf of $currentRegime.)
Anyway, does not seem to have caught on fire as a game. So it was memed, but mainly visible among a) immigration stans b) that subset of gamers who are violently allergic to crappy games, and who follow the crappy game news very closely. Then some American, I think one of our radicals trying to profit from politics, allegedly used grok to make a video. And or the UKs government got around to making the extremes of censorship more visible, and or the censorship pissed off Americans, and or Preston Byrne unfairly radicalized Americans against our very special friends the British.
Could all be a twitter tempest in a teakettle, caused by Musk manipulating his algorithms because he is butthurt about all the business that the EU is going to be able to take away from him with W.
Anyway, from the outside perspective, it was not that topical, so it didn’t take off. Until it was more topical, and network effects, and it did take off.
Maybe it really could be an elaborate conspiracy against law graduates from the university of LEeds. You could even explain it as a conspiracy, without trying to invoke Jewish conspirators especially angry at Starmer because the BBC wants to support Team Jew Hater.
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It was catching fire before the grok video. I followed it early, and there were a lot of memes before that one.
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It looks like she’s getting some real traction. Because they think they have to notice.
https://archive.is/20260125112637/https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/25/ai-generated-british-schoolgirl-becomes-far-right-social-media-meme
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Nomenclature opsec. Awesome!
Every company. Yes.
“We can’t give you more hours but we’re hiring more people so we can give each of you even less hours.”
I’ll go with the racoon attitude, yes.
…but no cigar. Carp away!
When can we fund that startup?
Hey, nothing stops you from being unstable AND unstoppable!
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Mitra (persianmama111) must have gotten herself ratioed from here to eternity and back as her tweets are now protected.
Couldn’t have happened to nicer evil person. Heh.
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What Batman and Mrs. 45/47 said.
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On those 1950’s appliances — microcontrollers are much cheaper, more versatile and more reliable than the old clockwork multi-pole switches. So, build them with open-source controllers, like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
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I feel, “rising like a raccoon from a dumpster.”
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that’s my life. On repeat at that.
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Or rather, how I met Nastycat. He decided to share his dinner of half eaten fat rat with me, and followed me home. Head tilting crazycat has been the instigator of shenanigans ever since.
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The Huddle House has a dumpster cat. The female servers have adopted her.
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Rising from a dumpster?! Luxury!
Back in my day we had a ravine out in the back 40 we had to claw our way out of. Then crawl a couple miles back to the home place.
Kids these days. They are so soft. If we’d of had a cushy dumpster we’d still be back on the farm.
🤣😆🤣
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LOL
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A ravine! How cushy! Why in my day we had to swim up from the bottom of the Marianas Trench every morning, then, sopping wet, climb Mt Everest and stand there, shivering and gasping with altitude sickness and the bends, waiting for the Nepalese Garbage Service truck to roll by so we could jump on and ride on the garbage to the dump, so we could rummage for scraps, then back again to the bottom of the Trench before curfew, or we’d be in real trouble.
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I rather like the Amelia as Cecil Rhodes image. Some interesting historic resonances. (“From Cairo to the Cape” is on the original.)
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If you can’t come up with a military joke about “tank museum” and “monkey world,” I mean, damn.
No flip off from the school bus? Kids are going to get faces rekt by the world. We had gladiator combat in grade school, ten foot monkey bars without nets, lawn darts, potato guns, cow tipping, and nominal supervision. Soft doesn’t survive the snowpocalypse alone.
The guy that taught me business actually did have his own business and made good money at it, too. My phys ed teacher was a medically retired vet that could still punch out a bear if he wanted to (dude was ripped as hell). They must have lowered standards somewhere along the way.
Water cannons on protestors + blue ink = genius. I support this plan.
Single men do everything for themselves and then some. We volunteer, help strangers and extended family, show up early and stay late. No kids or wife, so we’re able to respond 24/7. For the same reason, we aren’t much afraid of dying on the job because what we’ve got left is covered. Without single men, many things would become much harder.
Also random hillbillies in Appalachia: “It goes a lot faster and easier without officials demanding permits and inspections every five minutes, too.”
Moral right/loaded machine gun: based. This should be the basis of our foreign policy decisions.
Only certain people to vote? I demand inky fingers and paper ballots! Don’t let the zombies steal another election, you must have a pulse and exist as a citizen!
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Ahem! Must be a citizen of the United States of America.
I’m going to stop saying illegal aliens and just say “citizens of foreign nations.”
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It could be reasonable also to copy and paste from otherwise separate machines if a) you replace the mouse PCB in your mouse with a custom PCB that also includes a USB hub and a flash drive b) you write some sort of program (perhaps similar to malware) to allow the hardware to work as intended.
Anyway, that is my TED talk on getting the federal government to abandon USB mouses, and maybe go back to PS2 or some such crap.
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… and not claim to live in a hive with eleventy-nine others, or claim to live in an empty lot, a park, a public toilet or under a highway bridge (that last is reserved for trolls,, of course).
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and, just like that, more stupidity in the news this week.
I’m not surprised at ICE operating when very cold, our infantry allegedly has those and other tricks.
I am a little surprised at the anti-ICE activists. But, they have been active in January, and maybe not that much colder there, for there, today.
Is maybe not surprising that activists may have been extra stupid operating while cold, we already knew stupid or ill-trained.
but, the usual of 48 hour rule, and more information to develop.
(I heard about a fresh shooting today from instapundit just now.)
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They have special garments, etc. being provided.
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To start off with: The kitty is okay.
Longer version: It’s my husband’s birthday today, and we got to have a stressed out kitty doing things like distressed noises, trying to find secluded places to curl up in, and making pained sounds when sides of belly were pressed. Actual symptoms were vomiting, not using the box properly, and sensation of something hard in belly.
Kitty is male. For those of you following along, yup, urinary tract blockage.
The reason I’m posting this is because this is a don’t wait situation, and while we haven’t got the labs back yet, they’re pretty sure his potassium wasn’t badly out of whack because his heart rate was good. So we got it early because we paid attention. Yay.
So yeah, happy birthday, honey, here’s a scary vet bill. (We’re not in financial distress at this time. Still scary.)
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We got lucky in that our first introduction to kitty urinary blockage and symptoms was a female. Which, while still expensive, is less dire. Thus, with subsequent male cats exhibiting symptoms, they are gotten to the veterinarian health assessments a lot quicker. One thing we do is spring for more expensive, not prescription until required, food, kibble or canned, to lessen the likelihood of occurrence. These days, more likely to see kidney functions start to fail in our elder kitties (which is a matter of when, not if, even with better ingredient food).
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Gigancat had so many urinary stones (cat of duditude) that he got, ahem, replumbed and straightened out. Lived ten more years, large and in charge. Apparently he was genetically predisposed, in addition to being male.
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We have them on the urinary health non-prescription wet food due to the other boy kitty having the same issue several years back, but not getting caught as early. They’ll be evaluating his mineral & hormone levels to see if a prescription version is indicated.
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I was today old when I learned where the Amelia memestream originated.
Chef’s kiss!
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The Marco Rubio job memes are killing me. So awesome in such an understated way.
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Me too.
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Sarah, thank you for the needed humor as I’m buried in snow.
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We got one day of ice skim (enough to make staying inside look very reasonable). Then after dark,it got warmer and rained all night. Still raining.
I didn’t want an ice storm, but a few inches of snow, enough to look pretty for a few days, would have been nice.
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We have another round of snow coming in and then we get sleet and ice. The next few days will be interesting.
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I shoveled half the driveway, will do the second half and walks later. 2” and not too wet, for which my shoveling muscles are grateful. The low tonight is -5F. Not looking forward to that, I assure you, since I have to be at Day Job at 0700. Battery in vehicle is charged, but it doesn’t have a block heater. (Can’t get them down here, “because there’s no need for them.” Idjits.)
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Woke up this morning and it was 14 and snowing. Not much, but enough to cover the ground for a few hours and enough to sit by the dining room windows and watch the glittering flakes come down.
Our “exchange student,” Avrim T. Dragon III, is upset because he prayed for snow. Enough snow to make snowballs to throw at the church matriarch. And all he got was a little pretty white stuff. The Lord has a sense of humor.
(Avrim is the puppet alter ego of my beloved at our tiny church. The matriarch has a wicked sense of humor and gives as good as she gets. And I’m the straight woman who usually gives the actual children’s message. We improv.)
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Currently at Chez Phantom we are having what I am pleased to call a Proper Ontario Snowfall. Not enough that you can drive a snowmobile over a cow fence, but enough that it’s worth plowing the driveway. Have to get the gate open, y’know. If the wind gets up there will be some big drifts.
In Tennessee and places like that I’m sure this would be called a catastrophe. I was watching the guy that fixes the big busses on YouTube, he was very concerned that the 1/2 of ice storm plus the five inches of snow forecast would have his power knocked out for a week or more. Apparently his county has two (2) snow plows. Which seems sketchy, really. It isn’t like it -never- snows in the South, just not every year. Snowed a ton in Florida last year.
Even Arizona gets snow, I recall when it snowed in Scottsdale there were crowds of people who drove up there to see it. ~:D
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January ’69. Eugene and Lane County, have more than one snow plow. Or at least private, if not governmental, vehicles that can be affixed with a blade for side street snow removal. In 1969, that wasn’t enough to keep the contractually required “military roads” open, let alone anything else. There was *rumor of snow coming, finally showed up. Then it really went to town snowing. Before it was done, over 4′ fell. The county kept I-5 open, what there was of it, through the county. Top of mountain passes open (Cascades or Coastal), only because that was where most of the snow plows were kept/stationed. But River Road? Hwy 99? Territorial Hwy? Any of the city or neighborhood roads, city or county? Not one road was plowed. Everything shutdown for a week, until snow had melted (went fast when it did). OTOH we had snow around the house through the next May. It’d been compacted from the piling the snow shoveled off the flat roof of our house, which was high enough for dad to jump off the roof into. Just dad. Twelve-year-old me wasn’t allowed to. Unfair!
What is the snow plow setup now? I doubt any better. We get snow. We just do not normally get snow like “the big snow of ’69”. The neighborhoods still do not get plowed or sanded. Main roads do, but neighborhood roads do not. It’ll happen again, another freak storm.
(*) Rumors of snow is all the valley gets. Even when it actually snows, we’re shocked if it is accurately predicted before it hits.
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We got a bit of snow this morning. Oxford, MS, about 3 hours away, got a couple of inches of ice and is shut down.
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Toronto got 20″, so it is reported on the news. The whole city is shut down. Because as ALWAYS, they don’t have enough plows or enough places to put the snow. You would think a city in Canada would handle this better, but you would be wrong.
Because Lefties can’t think of snow unless it is up to their backsides and they can’t move their Tesla.
By contrast, my podunk back road out here in Hooterville was plowed twice during the snow, and again this morning. All the roads are clear and mostly dry.
Same snowstorm.
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More Minnesota memes.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rwmalonemd/p/sunday-strip-trigger-warning?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Apropos of not much, except that many of y’all will appreciate it:
Happy Burns-Night!
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Och, laddie! Ma eeyes, they barn!
Vegetarian Haggis is a gastronomical oxymoron like Jumbo Shrimp.
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“Scotland’s most loved” vegetarian haggis? Let me guess, it’s loved by all of two people out of the entire country? Whereas all other versions of vegeterian haggis are loved by either one person, or none?
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The Merlin’s Rest pub in Minneapolis used to (BC) run a Burns’ Night dinner featuring that reekie pudding. Since my church’s evening service was dismissed, I should check to see if it is still a thing.
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Apropos of not much, except that many of y’all will appreciate it:
Happy Burns-Night!
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‘Minorities’ are majorities in 80% of the world. Why should it be 100%?
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strange times in China. Don’t believe it, but don’t entirely ignore it either.
we’re on our way to a foot of snow, happens every year but now storms have names and advertisements can be sold so …. Snowmageddon.
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my guesso is that Trump could have had intel on PLAN intent to take Taiwan this spring, and that Maduro kidnapping also served to head that off. Strieff is a big brain, so maybe there is a reason that can’t explain the alleged purges.
(Streiffs redstate posts this week are an interesting cluster. I tend to assume that he is calculating, and talks to other retired officers. so him having such stories to peddle at red state means that some number of officers have done some thinking, and are trying to send a message to someone, or lay ground work for something. )
I don’t know.
at this point, either someone is trying to frame an lt governor, or I really don’t want to taint all of the jury pools. It is not impossible that we are simply looking at very stupid people.
I don’t think I will have any reliable information on this for some time.
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As an aside, I’ve been watching the Pale Moon patch notes.
I think that one of the recent ones implies that they fixed the crashing issue with word press, and the crashing issue is apparently fixed.
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N.O.! Nomenclature Opsec when dealing with suspected fae… BWAhahahaha!
That’s a great one. ~:D
I’m such a nerd…
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Exquisite bumper crop today. Have stolen an armload, thanks.
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I am saving that ‘if only everybody’ one…
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