Ugh, what a weekend. I’m feeling MUCH better, practically human again, but it was not a pleasant time for this chick. Hope you all are well and didn’t miss me too too much!
Russian Updates:
Putin rules by showing strength. Russia’s crisis exposed his weakness.
https://wapo.st/3Xo5pTK
Every week we learn about different and horrible ways to die
Texas airport worker dies after being sucked into Delta jet engine
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/25/texas-airport-worker-dies-after-being-sucked-into-delta-jet-engine
Infrastructure week is back!
Montana officials testing Yellowstone River water at site of rail bridge collapse
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/25/montana-officials-testing-yellowstone-river-water-at-site-of-rail-bridge-collapse
National Parks strike again
A man and his stepson die after hiking in Big Bend National Park in 119-degree heat
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/25/us/big-bend-national-park-deaths/index.html
Queue the Curb Your Enthusiasm song
Awwwww
Have a great day!
Welcome back to the land of the living!
That bulldog video was great. My Ravenous Hound would not have been nearly so sporting. He would have crossed into my line of snacks before I had a chance, and then crossed back and wolfed down everything on offer. I don’t know why this is, but we’ve had four dogs, all from shelters. The two males (including my current Ravenous Hound) are/were both chowhounds, and would gobble down anything you put in front of them. The two females, though, would kind of sniff their food and nibble/snack on it when they felt like it. Another one of the Thousand Canine Mysteries I have been unable to solve.
Any chance that your boys were the runts of their respective litters?
I *know* this was why Lil was suuuuuch a garbage-gut!😉😆💖
When she was a very wee-pup, still living with her momma and her litter-mates, she was one of 5 puppies, annnnd the smallest. Also, they only fed them Old Roy (one of the cheapest/worst brands at Walmart. .)
She *always* got regular meals, once my roommate picked her out, but her food-hoovering lasted the *whole* rest of her life!😉
Infrastructure Week is forever!
Speaking of, I-95 in Philly reopened after less than two weeks of being out of service, a project that was originally expected to take months to repair: https://6abc.com/i-95-bridge-collapse-live-stream-philadelphia-repair/13417623/
I’ll just note that the same people who say necessary infrastructure projects are “too big” or “too expensive” are making a choice to do so. The reality doesn’t always line up with those predictions, and clearly we could do it if we wanted to!
What will be super awesome is over the next year or two when the money from the federal law finally starts flowing and projects all over the country get started…and all of the fucking knuckle draggers in flyover states will think it was Trump’s program because we wouldn’t stop fucking talking about it while at the same time not being able to stop interfering with his own people in Congress to actually get it passed.
I think we’re past the era of people caring about what their team actually did with their political power while in office. Mango Unchained said he built the wall; that’s gonna be good enough for them.
To be fair, most infrastructure projects are “big and expensive” because they have to work around the current crappy route, and have to keep things flowing. Case in point: 95 is now moving, but a permanent fix to that area of highway and corresponding exits will take a considerable amount of time and money.
See also : https://www.state.nj.us/transportation/commuter/roads/rt295/#:~:text=At%20present%20the%20I%2D295,with%2035%20mph%20speed%20limits.
There is a documentary on that Larry David story on Netflix or HBO. It’s pretty incredible how overzealous the prosecutor was, and how much research and work the lawyer did.
**SPOILER ALERT**
Even AFTER the lawyer found the video evidence of him being at the ballgame, the prosecutor STILL DIDN’T BELIEVE HIM, and tried to prove he committed the murder.
Ninja edit: Also, LOLmets
My point is not that the work isn’t big and expensive — it is, though there’s a lot of margin-stuffing that goes into those costs — but that we simply choose not to prioritize it and the funding for it and then get people to complain that it’s “too expensive” so governments side-step the problem until it becomes an emergency. (It’s also a wider question about what infrastructure we prioritize, but that’s probably a separate issue).
Infrastructure requires a second level of investment in people like engineers, skilled workers and urban planners, and there are huge economies of scale when countries make that kind of investment too. So it gets a lot less expensive when you invest in people too.
Where I live there end up being a lot of bottlenecks in road projects because there are a very limited number of large scale contracting companies, and the capacity of the state to oversee projects is limited.
There’s a silly overemphasis on tech tracks at the high school and college level to the point where it’s not even on the radar of kids that things like surveying and physical project management are even a career option.
I don’t think it’s tech tracks, honestly — in high school it’s just college in general and in college it’s “whatever the school has.” That’s definitely an issue that schools and parents and guidance counselors need to work on. But in fairness to them, companies whine about not being able to find people but don’t want to spend a nickel (or five minutes) on training people to do the jobs they can’t find workers for too, so it’s not a one-sided problem either.
Suffice to say, most parents want their kids to do something awesome with a degree in hand, but you know what job will always be around and needed? Plumbers. Ain’t never gonna be a world without plumbers.
My kids graduated from a STEM high school and I can absolutely say that large scale physical projects aren’t on the radar for most schools like that. There are a lot of practical learning opportunities, summer learning/internship spots, and career sessions in STEM fields, but they are overwhelmingly focused on things like biomed, consumer tech and software development.
It would make sense if infrastructure projects were on the scale of subjects like aquaculture or forestry, but they’re much, much bigger.
It’s true that a piece of it comes down to upstream hiring decisions by big employers. But at the level of what kids are learning, a huge share of the funding for career-related programs comes from foundations, and they love throwing money at microscopes and microhips — my daughter got a big trip out of it. Water projects and mass transit — there just isn’t much there.
I would suspect a “STEM high school” is more self-selecting than a regular high school in terms of tech-related jobs. My son is too young to be there, but I have friends with older kids and they’re slowly (begrudgingly) trying to point more kids toward the trades than they did when I was young.
Also to your point, you mentioned water projects: Everything I’ve said about road infrastructure is tripled-down for sewer work, which is frankly even MORE important to the baseline standard of living, and nobody ever wants to spend a dime on that. Even the greasiest pol has a hard time cutting a ribbon on a new sewer pipe.
If I could do it all over again, I would be an electrician. I’d be swimming in Scrooge McDuck money by now.
/shudders/ As a dept/workforce safety rep, I always have to be reminding folks to pay attention to their surroundings especially when there is the potential for operating equipment around.
I wouldn’t ever go anywhere near a turbofan intake even if it wasn’t running. That is why we have stuff like lock out/tag out.
Unfortunately, sometimes people are really unlucky or once in a while the dept space cadet walks into a hazard.
The article speculates it may have been suicide, which would explain how that could happen. I’ve never been close to a jet intake but I would imagine that you have to start feeling the pull before you’re really close. And obviously, if the jet is running it’s not exactly quiet. There just seem to be a lot of warning that you’d get that you’d have to ignore.
Hell, once in a while, even upper-level command/officers accidentally walk into them, too!💔
Even in that last month, when Dad’s dementia & kidney disease had taken *so* many of the last 50+ years of his memory, he was *still* carrying the grief & hurt, of one of his commanders–whom Dad looked up to, as a favorite Mentor & role model–annnnd who had *somehow* managed to forget exactly where he was on deck, one day, when the slingshot released, as one of the planes took off from the deck.💔
Luckily, I’d *heard* that story (and another, about a younger sailor who forgot *his* deck position & stepped backwards into a different terrible accident) years before–in those times up at the hometown bar when I was *very* young, and Dad and the rest of the then-young Veterans were having lunch & forgot i was there….
I was able to find a way to say the right thing & offer him some comfort about it–which does make the trauma of *hearing* those difficult stories a bit lighter, ngl!
Dad’s Ship/Tour yearbook is dedicated to two men… I haven’t yet had the time/energy to make *sure* of it, but I’m pretty certain that those two–the officer and the young sailor, are the two whose memory he carried ’til those last days💖💞💝
Tragic, horrific accidents just *happen* once in a while. I hope that the family of that Airport Worker finds the memories of their loved one to be a *great* blessing, and I *also* hope that their loved one’s death results in increased safety for *all* workers in that field, and SEVERE fines & future *outside* oversight for the company, for allowing policies which allowed that sort of accident to occur.
/shudders again/ I’m guessing the Florida trio didn’t bring enough water with them or any kind of cover/hat to keep the sun off their heads or never actually hiked before.
Save us from the rank amateur idiot hikers who think hiking is just like a walk at the mall.
I’ve seen that before, even from folks who claim to be excellent hikers. This is something my former housemate would have done in the past.
1. Despite what Gatorade claims, the best refreshing liquid is water. Sugar slows down water absorption. Dipshit former housemate filled his camel pack with iced tea… jeesus! I ended up having to share my water with him to keep him hydrated.
2. On a hot 119F day, you need to bring a lot of water with you. A single 500ml bottle of water isn’t enough (again I’ve seen someone do this… fortunately not idiot former housemate.)
3. Wear a hat. Not only does it provide a little shade, but slows down water loss from perspiration.
4. Be aware of the signs of dehydration. I’ve had heat exhaustion before so I know but I suspect these guys didn’t put much thought into the hike or never actually hiked before.
Limited water is almost certainly correct. Florida’s humidity averages around 85%, and we are NOT used to low-humidity environments. Unless you’re aware and prepared, a low-humidity location will suck you dry in a fraction of the time it takes here. I take a two-mile walk almost daily, and have no trouble making it without water even at high noon (that’s not ideal, let me just say – I typically take some water with me). The problem with Floridians in low humidity is that you feel great — wow, this is wonderful, I haven’t even broken a sweat yet. And you’re rapidly turning into beef jerky.
I think part of the problem is far too many people have lost their awareness of thirst. The marketing to drive people to constantly drink isn’t helpful, because for most people who are indoors and not active there just isn’t a need to drink that much.
But there is constant nagging telling people to drink before they’re thirsty and treating thirst as some kind of dangerous thing to avoided, like a heart attack.
And when people aren’t drinking in response to thirst, but drinking tons of water preemptively, they lose their ability to know what their bodies are telling them when they actually need water.
And so you get the weird phenomenon of recreational athletes who can’t be trusted to go on hikes or bike rides in the summer because they aren’t capable of managing their water. They’ll overhydrate before they start, pee it all out, then blow through their thirst because they don’t recognize it.
Can’t imagine how the 21 year old feels having carried his brother back to the trailhead (and the brother still died) and the stepdad drove off a cliff and died.
Speaking of hiking, human remains have been found near where Julian Sands went missing. It hasn’t been confirmed yet that it’s him.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/25/1184208307/julian-sands-search-human-remains-found
So climate change causes MAGAts?
https://www.psypost.org/2023/06/new-research-links-climate-change-to-shrinking-brain-size-in-modern-humans-165988
Maybe his campaign is not a failure after all?
https://www.axios.com/2023/06/25/tim-scott-senate-democrats-judges-confirmation
The candidate we need!!!
https://crooksandliars.com/2023/06/rainbow-2024
I would vote for Randy Rainbow for President. I may write him in once our Presidential primary rolls around. The DNC swears we won’t be having any, but I think with RFK, Jr. polling at 20% (!) and pulling in a lot of support from non-Democrats I think they’ll be forced to hold them.
Bad news for Jim Jordan, good news for former wrestlers he coached:
“Supreme Court lets lawsuits over team doctor’s sexual abuse proceed against Ohio State”
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-ohio-state-abuse-richard-strauss-57b547932ffeaa015c6f85a994276e32
The fact that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn the lower court ruling that the case could continue isn’t a surprise. They get a ton of filings to throw out rulings and only a hear a fraction.
This doesn’t mean Jordan will become involved in the case. OSU may well settle before that happens. But at least he’ll be back in the news while these cases keep going.
Gym Jordan