Now imagine that the hawks with razors were the first hawked electric multicopter razors. Many paragliders and balloonists will know what it is to be sliced in the depths of the rotors that day, I can tell you.
Harry Jones: If you work out of the home, put your name on the house. Now you’re upper class. I am sitting in an executive office chair as I type this. It’s a crappy one from a bargain store with peeling fake leather and it squeaks. (I’d buy a better one but too many high cost items turn out to have shoddy materials in them. Buy cheap and you can’t get ripped off as badly.) It’s all signaling. There’s costly signaling, cheap signaling and fake signaling. Quality is...
Harper’s Notes: Lead and choosing your food sources. (Second comment) The Environmental Protection Agency was largely gutted at the start of the Reagan Presidency in 1980, and those sympathetic toward working with Nader’s Raiders and similar activists were let go. They replace the people at the top with pro-business administrators who probably all grasped the revolving door principle. Then they crashed the dollar to increase exports in order to compete better against Japan in automobiles and in...
Harper’s Notes: From reading about the Flint Michigan lead problems and various authors over the years I have learned that it’s probably a good idea to never use water from the hot tap for any kind of ingestion and even for the cold water it’s probably a good idea to run a bucket first to drain out the old stagnant pipe water between the kitchen and the reservoir. I’m getting old and most of those readings are, hmm let’s see, forty years ago, so I don’t have cites so much....
Lu An Li: Many of those potions as given by South Asian healers contain lead or arsenic. American pharmacists will not fill such order for those concoctions.
Bob Sykes: Both the lead and the chromate portions are highly toxic, and chromate is a known carcinogen. Lead chromate is insoluble, but the trace amounts it releases are a problem. Stomach acid might enhance the solubility. Lead used to be widely used in plumbing, because it oxidizes slowly and has a low solubility. But it seems every review of lead toxicity by the EPA leads to a reduced concentration in the water quality standards. Water companies now must produce a drinking water that lays down a...
Jim: Working class: Your name on your uniform Middle class: Your name on your desk Upper middle class: Your name on your office door Upper class: Your name on the building World class: Your name spoken in hushed tones among the conspiratorially inclined, baselessly rumored to be shareholders of some or another central bank, the beneficiary of unregistered common-law trusts of unknown size that may not be spoken of
Ray: A variant on the article: A working class alcoholic is one who drinks more than his social worker. A middle class alcoholic is one who drinks more than his doctor. An upper class alcoholic is one who drinks more than the distillery.
Bob Sykes: Paul Fussel’s book Class includes a top class that is invisible and unnamed. And yes, the guys with their names on their uniforms, like my father, built this country. But since the 1960′s, the Unnamed have reaped all the economic growth that has occurred, and have even clawed income away from the builders.
Altitude Zero: People with their names on their uniforms (like my father) built this country. People with their names on buildings destroyed it.
Lucklucky: Agreed, Goober. It is interesting how culture more than market forces shapes salaries. Since most people don’t want to clean bathrooms one would expect those people would get a very large salary.
Goober: That’s fine, but we really ought to do better as a society about making values statements about this sort of thing. They’re right. But then the next step always seems to be to sort of have this snooty, haughty air of disdain for the people wearing their name on their uniform. You know, the people who’s skillset is absolutely required to make our society run and operate? Yeah, those people. You can turn your nose up at a Sanitation worker if you want, but to me, that’s...
Bob Sykes: I believe that in the bare-knuckle era, championship fights went 45 rounds.
Gandydancer: Sounds like the beef is with the visual effects vendors who are staffing their projects at a level which would give them a profit despite their under-bids if only they could bring them in without paying excessive overtime or otherwise throwing additional resources at the effort. And you can scarcely blame Marvel for taking advantage of a tendency to under-bid or fall blacklisting a firm that falls on its face. Pushing back a rollout is bound to be disruptive and expensive.
Kunning Drueger: How are we supposed to incorporate any of these tips if they don’t list the key combos or keystrokes needed?
Goober: DJB, the issue is that they’re talking about every pollutant except CO2 in that article. Regardless of efficiency or emissions systems, and car will make X amount of CO2 for X amount of gasoline burned (with slight variations for slight reasons, but that’s unimportant). Even the most clean, most emissions-free ICE car makes the same amount of CO2 per gallon burned as the old clunker down the street. The only way to reduce CO2 is to increase MPG, but a 20-year-old car gets pretty close...
Eli: A sure way to breathe life into rail is to convert it to a system that combines efficiencies of air and interstate travel. The federal government buys up railroad rights-of-way (and adds to them), and then sells rail time to commercial and private operators similar to how the FAA sells access to skyways and terminals. This can initially get freight off the interstate system in autonomous hauling units and eventually expand to passenger service. When operators are free to innovate in the manner...
Wang Wei Lin: “One problem is to figure out the optimal amount of carbon emission reduction.” The biased answer is built into the biased assumption that carbon emissions need to be reduced. The charter of the IPCC assumed ‘global warming’ was happening before the research was done. This after years of warning us of global cooling by the same people. These parasites will say anything. If you look at geological time many periods had high ‘carbon’ and were verdant beyond...
DJB: Only a small fraction of cars, mainly the oldest and most poorly maintained, cause the majority of the automotive pollution. See, for example, https://www.boston.com/c ars/news-and-reviews/201 5/05/14/study-most-car-r elated-air-pollution-com es-from-only-25-of-cars/ Another study done in California (I couldn’t find the link) said something like 10% of the cars caused 90% of the pollution. Regardless of the precise numbers, forcing the dirtiest cars off the road would drastically reduce the...
Just imagine if the hawks had razors attached to the leading edges of their wings, and were trained to attack the suspension lines of the chutes.
Now imagine that the hawks with razors were the first hawked electric multicopter razors. Many paragliders and balloonists will know what it is to be sliced in the depths of the rotors that day, I can tell you.