Hot and humid with a side order of moist today. Same as yesterday, although “hot” is stretching it a bit. It all feels hot when you can’t retreat into the airconditioning.
Contractor got the old A/C system removed, pulled all the ducts, and set the new major components. Today he’ll run the rest of the ducts and commission the system.
I brought a small window unit home for the master bedroom, and a small freestanding unit for the hall and the other two bedrooms. They are a bit undersized for the job, but have knocked 5-8 degrees F off the air temp, and knocked the humidity way down. I’ve got the windows open (with screens) in the rest of the house, but used the A/C to make the humidity tolerable for sleeping. It was 89%RH outside and 50%RH inside when I went to bed. I have been picking up window units, and the freestanding units when they were cheap, because our most likely disaster involves cooling not heating to make a house comfortable. The freeze was an aberration, but I had temporary heat too, because I prep.
I could have brought a couple more units home, or the bigger units, but these were the easiest to get to, and it’s only for one night. I’m dumping the heat into the hall bath, where I have a box fan in the window to move the heat out of the house. I’ve discovered that I didn’t bring enough flex duct home for the exhaust side. This is why we USE our preps. Next time I’ll know better. BTW I like having multiple smaller units so that I can pick and choose capacity to match need, and available power.
Today’s plan is to pick up an item or two, mainly another couple of buckets of freeze dried emergency food. Yesterday I got a bunch of stuff for the BOL, including a couple of extension poles. I have several and use them for antenna mounts. I figured a couple more, particularly extra tall and sturdy ones, would be worth having.
My ridiculously heavy fence pipes were dropped off yesterday at the BOL. I need to set the corners around the garden this weekend. We’re supposed to head up there and work through Mother’s Day. One of my goals is to get something, anything, in the ground in the garden. Even if it gets eaten by deer, I need to see if stuff will grow there.
And that should be enough planning to tempt the fates…
Find a gap and fill it. Get your garden started. While you are buying seed, buy extra and stack it.
nick
Humid here, too, but rather different from y’all in Texas. We’re sitting in the middle of a cloud (so, fog), at about 10C (50F). I’ll probably have a fire this evening…
One of my goals is to get something, anything, in the ground in the garden. Even if it gets eaten by deer, I need to see if stuff will grow there.
The bigger problem at the start is always the weeds. It takes a few years for the weed seeds to thin out and stop being such an issue. It’s harder at a BOL, because you may not be around to hoe, before the weeds go to seed all over again…
Finally got all the “little” Spring projects finished. Time to start on the first terrace of my wife’s permanent veggie garden. So she’s in a provisional spot this year, and will have exactly that problem: weeds everywhere. I hope to have the first terrace finished mid-June, so she will still have time to use it for short-season crops this summer.
On the work front, I think I mentioned that I was getting “help” with one of my courses from a didactic expert. Had a meeting with him today. He hadn’t prepped at all, hadn’t even looked at the course, not at the textbook, nothing. So everything was “off the cuff”. Like: don’t put all the assignments on one overview page. Break them up into individual bits that the students have to click on, in order to see them. Wow, that will really improve usability. Or, instead of color bands to mark different course sections, how about little pictures from a generic picture library? Yep, that’s why they pay a guy with a doctorate in psychology to be a didactic expert.
The crazy neighbors were hanging around their building site yesterday. The town mayor visited us, to let us know they are fussing about our road again. It goes across their property, but we have an easement for exactly that. I can hardly wait to see what they come up with next…
@brad, ‘good fences make for good neighbors’ can’t always work, but jeez, you’ve had enough with these guys….
77F and 93%RH outside. 76F and 50%RH in my bedroom. I’ll take that for a win.
Slept ok, woke a couple of times. I’ve been hotter, which is to say that the preps worked. They made a situation where we had power but no A/C much more comfortable. If this was a long term or multi day event, I’d do it a bit differently, but it worked.
n
Local elections here in UK, today. I voted by post (see here for our procedure). It’ll be interesting to see the results, given “partygate” and “beergate” (for both of which, GIYF)
At these elections, I suspect that whatever I do, the Labour candidates will be elected – my borough is majority “red”. Note that: your political parties switched colours some years ago.
G.
Ruh roh. Isn’t this how the zombie apocalypse starts in some book/movie?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/pig-used-in-human-heart-transplant-had-virus-patient-looked-infected/ar-AAWWBlz
Read the dissertation if it is online somewhere. I’ve done that on occasion. Once I even went to the bricks-n-mortar library of the institution, pulled the paper copy, and spent an afternoon reading.
As our late host pointed out on several occasions in this space, doctorates in non-science fields are a relatively new concept in academia. It is a weak credential in many cases.
Super spreader event!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10783423/Secretary-Blinken-tests-positive-COVID-attending-White-House-Correspondents-Dinner.html
WTF is wrong with those people? How are they getting wuflu? ANd how many have symptoms, and not just a test.
n
Pretty much all academic degrees are valueless as predictors of competence for the last 30 years at least.
n
So this is SOP now. I’m surprised permanent walls haven’t been erected around there and the capital. And every other gov building everywhere.
Happy Cinco de Mayo/“Fast and Furious Remembrance Day”
Blower motor on my AC died Sunday night. Replacement has a built in variable speed controller, probably to meet the SEER requirements, even though my AV doesn’t USE variable speed. $900 fix. Fortunately my hurricane preps had a window unit, so we were relatively comfortable, 75F instead of 85F.
Re Women in engineering. I’ll start off by saying there is NO reason women can’t do engineering. I have worked with several, maybe a ¼ of my peers are women. The generally run in the same range of capability as my male peers and some have been VERY good.
But, many of them, perhaps as many as half, start off saying they will not travel or work overtime. Usually kids involved, so I certainly understand. But when it comes time for evaluations that has to play a factor in how gets promotions and raises. It’s hard to be a rising star when you punch a clock. The people that put in the extra effort ought to be rewarded for it, right?
The question is why are women predominately the caregivers? Is it cultural? Genetic? I think genetics have to play a large role, as women have been selected for that trait for about 200,000 years. 100 years of women’s lib will not change that much.
Of course studies that focus on pay disparity between men and women rarely discuss these factors. Or at least the news reports on them. Some of the difference must be these traits. How much?
Of course, by raising this I have proved I am a misogynist. And racist.
My son got a job for the summer. Last summer, he worked at a fast causal restaurant. This summer, instead of going back there, he’s working at a pizza place. It’s smaller, but he’s making 12/hour plus tips. In the interview, they said he’d be getting 15/hour (including tips). I made sure he understood that everyone lies. The 12 is guaranteed, nothing more. Still decent money for a summer job with 3 months previous restaurant experience, and considering the only expense he has is paying the $40/month increase in his car insurance from his little parking lot incident last year.
My wife thinks he will hate it. My take is, it’s good if he hates it. It will help reinforce that he needs to work at school to make sure he has other options.
That’s such a shame. I hope ya’ll can get it worked out so that they stop harassing you. My mother’s house and the one next door have an old fashioned shared driveway. Both houses use the front part to enter, then it sort of widens to enable each to park side by side, each on their own side. In the 55 years she has lived there, it has never been a problem. It was also never a problem, for the ~20 years that the current owners have been her neighbors. Those owners had family move in with them and suddenly, it’s a problem.
Despite explaining where the property line runs, they persisted in making it a problem. We’ve had a survey, which showed exactly what we’ve always known: they own ⅔ of the front of the drive, and less than ⅓ of the back half. Since it’s become a problem, my mom is building a new drive from the side street onto her property. She can do this because her house is on a corner. She has gotten zoning approval for this, and for a fence along the property line through the erstwhile driveway to prevent future issues. She would prefer not to have the fence, but if she doesn’t build it now, approval may be hard to get if the neighbors try to take further advantage. So they have really left her no choice.
The neighbors’ lot is too skinny to put a drive opening on their side. Their only option will be to come in through the alley and park behind their house, or on the narrow street out front. And all because their guest family didn’t want to share.
It’s a real shame because they didn’t used to be problem neighbors, and have allowed their guest family members to ruin a longstanding respectful relationship.
Our house has two Carrier units, and they are this way as well. A few years ago, the upstairs blower motor went out. Since it only serves the bonus room above the garage, I could take my time getting it fixed. I was able to locate a replacement on Amazon $210. That and a little of my time and we had a working system again. I just checked, and that was in Oct 2018.
After putting in the mini split in my garage (which involved flaring the lines and putting a vacuum on the system, testing for leaks, etc) I feel confident enough to troubleshoot most hvac stuff now. I might even replace the main house units myself when its time. Once again, having separate units means I can take my time. If the main house unit goes out, it will be annoying, but I also have a portable ac unit for the bedroom if needed and a gas fireplace for the winter.
On the system that is being replaced, I’ve replaced the condenser motor and fan, start capacitor, blower motor (huge pain in azz), control board (fixed with junkbox diode until could be replaced with generic from ebay), and tstat. We had a service call add freon three times, and replace a blower motor once. Oh, and start cap for the blower.
I won’t ever try to replace a condenser fan motor without also getting the fan after doing it several times. It’s just not worth the effort to preserve the fan.
The blower was a huge pain, and I never got it perfectly balanced. I’ll leave that to the service guy next time.
The system is actually a bit like “my grandfathers ax”, dad replaced the handle and I replaced the head….
n
And I’ve got the roll around unit blowing on my back as I sit here…. sweet cool air…
The situation is worse when the company practices the relatively new concept of “unlimited” vacation. Someone has to get things done.
(Don’t even think that “unlimited” vacation will work for you middle-age white man.)
One upside of the pandemic is that if you are actually capable of doing the work, you can find another job regardless of race/gender/preference/age and, if you are in a critical role, teach management a hard lesson about being stupid.
Increasingly, people view houses as potential “tenbagger” investments in places like Florida and Texas, and kids/nieces/nephews who haven’t amounted to much in life get hung up on elderly relatives real estate as their last chance at establishing some kind of wealth.
I’ve worked with good and bad, and race/gender/whatever don’t seem to be correlated.
After I was laid off from the last job, my manager (who knew everything) removed a backup system because it cost an additional $100 month, then had to fly someone to a remote location after he misconfigured equipment and lost access to it. Customers were down. If he’d left the backup in place he’d have been able to undo the mistake.
Wrt a/c units, it has started warming up in the California high desert, about 90f and humidity in the low teens.
I put the little Haier in the living room window, for now. It is quiet enough, on low, to be bearable.
The little GE unit that looks the same, that I bought last year, is much noisier, sadly. 2X?
I’m tempted to replace it with a Midea 12k BTU U inverter, which at 15 SEER is as good as it gets for window units.
What I’d like to do this year is upgrade the evaporative cooling: replace the decrepit and undersized 4400 CFM Tradewind with a nice two stage, variable speed, 7000 CFM unit.
None seem to be available right now though, locally.
I should also check the attics soffit vents on the upwind side: the previous owner (and builder) was a bit hit-n-miss on properly installing / completing things. Pushing 66 I’m reluctant to crawl around up there …
For now, technical degrees still mean something at the undergraduate level. Graduate level varies, but “professional development” Masters and, increasingly, PhD programs are a dangerous trend in engineering fields.
I got mine approx 30 years ago, and almost all of the coding tasks were group projects, except for the final exams, and then it was only 10%.
My BS Chem Eng was 60 years ago so it certainly quantifies my technical competence.
@ClaytonW
Re Women in engineering
Spot on observations. My husband I didn’t embark on parenthood until our 40’s (I was 41 when our daughter was born). Prior to parenthood I jumped at opportunities for travel and OT. These days, between parental responsibilities and parental induced fatigue, I don’t. I take my turn with the standby phone cheerfully, happily work OT related to big rollout projects as needed, but no longer seek it out.
Most of my IT career I was much in the minority, never noticed unless it was called to my attention. I was more tomboy than not growing up and semi-feral with old fashioned parents. I have more in common with men than women, though that has changed since the car crash and parenthood- my brain is a different beast today than it was 10 years ago.
I know a few women who are analytical and / or enjoy working with their hands and getting dirty. I enjoy their company very much. I’ve had two women I can recall who were IT mentors, half a dozen men who either mentored or tolerated incessant no doubt foolish questions.
Aside from knack / intelligence, the biggest two characteristics I -think- I possess over others is a willingness to fail, and a deep curiousity about pretty much everything. I’m a clever monkey as these things go but am certainly no genius. My constant learning sets me apart from peers who possess more raw intelligence than I. I can thank my parents for a childhood that grew these things. Our poverty (find a creative solution) and neglectful parenting (lots of free time to experiment) were the best thing that could have happened to me.
Group projects are a lot more important in STEM degree curriculum lately as administrations continue to pretend that under-representation in various fields continues to be an opportunity issue and not raw ability.
10% weight on a final exam means it isn’t a serious test of knowledge but an opportunity to go up a letter grade for those willing to put in the effort.
I’ll admit to having blown off 10% weight finals if I knew I was carrying an ‘A’ in the course.
Regarding schooling – as has always been true you get out what you put in.
I dropped out of college as a young adult. Post car crash I needed a more structured approach to keeping a steady demand on my neurons to promote brain healing. Wasn’t going to drop $50k on an IT degree in my late 40’s for a field I’d been in for decades.
My solution was a BS in Computer Science thru University of the People. Less than $5000 start to finish, and nearly all of that deducted on our taxes. I learned a lot, worked hard, endeavored to learn the material instead of just pass the classes. It was clear that wasn’t the methodology of many of my classmates. Cheating was prevalent and not particularly subtle. I reported all I encountered because their dereliction hurt the quality of the school and value of the degree.
How did those cheating cheaters think they were going to manage in real life? The mind boggles. From Greg’s reports I suppose their intent was to continue with the lying liar behavior and skate on other coattails. For another thirty years. Foolish and corrupt of morals.
As a member of very high performing teams I really enjoyed the work. That is very different from “group” assignments or a “team” where there is deadweight.
Fortunately, there was no room for deadweight in the fields where I worked, either entertainment, training, or installation. You either did the job, or you were not hired the next time.
My time in school was far enough back that “group” projects were rare. I put the scare quotes because it is very rarely anything other than one or two people do all t he work, and the rest coast. Two people is not a ‘group’.
n
@greg
“I’ll admit to having blown off 10% weight finals if I knew I was carrying an ‘A’ in the course.”
Just makes it easier for slackers to pull it out.
A government attached agency that does it right. Wife called to clarify whether the $1.00 senior rate for State Fair tickets included the concerts, as it did in the past. Not only does that hold true; but as we didn’t go last year because TV coverage showed few were following Covid guidelines and we are vulnerable, they still have our tickets and we can use them this year, our $1 tickets.
I am learning that I am not paranoid enough for this crowd. I am impressed. I don’t have any window units in case one of our two main systems at the house fails. Yet.
I did celebrate the beginning of hurricane season by performing a full blackout test of the whole house generator this morning. With no electricity at the house (I threw the 200 amp breaker on the transfer switch panel that comes from the electric), the generator started and synced to the house in 11 seconds. Enough of an outage that I had to reset the oven and microwave clocks but everything else has a UPS on it. Except the wife’s computer. I ran the generator for 15 minutes and synchronized / connected the house back to the grid. The generator automatically went into cooldown for ten minutes and then shutdown.
BC: SKWAK
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2022/05/05
Yup, that would be unnerving. Especially when it tried to eat you.
BTW, the learned ones are wanting to move hurricane season up to May 15 from it’s current June 1 date. The reason is … wait for it … you know what it is … global warming XXXXX XXXXXX climate change XXXXX XXXXXX climate disruption.
“Hurricane season may soon move up two weeks to May 15”
https://news.wgcu.org/news/2022-04-06/hurricane-season-may-soon-move-up-two-weeks-to-may-15
My bet: They want to expand hurricane season so that they’ll be able to say “This year’s hurricane season saw more storms than any previous year.”
Uh, ok. While you’re at it change the start of Winter to the first of October. Because we sometimes get a killing frost mid-October.
Fraudsters all.
Exactly.
TV ratings.
Hurricane season doesn’t really begin until Gulf temps are consistently in the mid 80s and the Summer high sets up over Bermuda.
Live on the Florida peninsula for 40 years and you learn a few things.
Holy bat ropes Batman. We are paying $1,000 a month for the wife’s medicine after her heart attack. That is with insurance. Going back over the receipts from Humana, without insurance the cost would $4,000 a month. That is enough to drain most into poverty. I have read stories about people choosing between medicine and food. I now know why. Some people would just have to do without, and die. That is wrong in a first world country.
Further to my comment about local elections earlier, and remembering that D1 used to count votes in the borough, I now find that she still does, despite living on the other side of Guildford, Surrey. I’m informed that she will be staying here overnight – for an arbitrary value of night. Counts tend to end in the early hours of the day after election day.
G.
@Ray:
Ouch! I entirely agree, one should not have to choose between health and food. Or, as is becoming increasingly common here in UK, heating and food.
I thank $DEITY for the UK NHS, which treated my cancer free, and is still doing so – follow-up consultation (albeit by telephone) with the surgical team earlier this week, and another follow-up with the oncologist in a week or so. Next CT scan at the end of September. Still no charge.
And it’s also providing diabetes and blood pressure meds – also free. Latest instance of that bi-monthly supply was last week.
G.
Something crazy is going on with ERCOT today: https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html
East Texas is at $1800/MWh and only a few miles away, prices are $-211/MWh
Everyone’s favorite not-a-sponge-brain current president thanked some US Olympians yesterday for winning “blobsled” medals. Could have been worse I suppose. He could have forgotten someone’s name.
Oh, I don’t know. He could have congratulated our Stunning and Brave Jamaican team. Yeah, you know, the trans-Jamacians. 🙂
Man, Amazon is down to $2,328 with today’s bloodbath on the street. I am very tempted to buy a few to add to my stash.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN?p=AMZN
Now, is it buy on the dip or if you buy now you are a dip ?
$2,328 per share? I’m happy that you have that kind of money to play with. Not being sarcastic at all.
Oh. that Discover whatever $14 excess partial share check? Yeah. Got the usual quarterly check from AT&T yesterday and same number of shares…. but not a $24.96 check. A $13.32 check.
Hopefully it will balance. Ain’t holding my breath.
AMZN is pretty ugly. Support for $2300 is very thin. Beer money.
Of course, not as ugly as NFLX.
https://news.yahoo.com/netflix-faces-lawsuit-shareholders-subscriber-151730536.html
$2,328 per share? I’m happy that you have that kind of money to play with. Not being sarcastic at all.
Oh. that Discover whatever $14 excess partial share check? Yeah. Got the usual quarterly check from AT&T yesterday and same number of shares…. but not a $24.96 check. A $13.32 check.
Hopefully it will balance. Ain’t holding my breath.
I ain’t playing. I am investing my IRA cash and my wife’s IRA cash into the future. I am going to be 62 soon and hope to work for another ten years. But, a lot depends on that. My wife is 64 and her crippled right arm may force her to retire soon.
I have been kicking myself for buying stuff from Amazon starting in 2000 ??? but not buying the stock until 2017 when I paid $976 a share for 20 shares. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I could have bought a thousand shares for $6 each back in the 2000s.
I see massive inflation in the future. Massive. Looks like the 1970s all over again. Don’t hold a lot of cash but have things that can be turned into cash when needful.
Plus I see Social Security in the USA being means tested in the future. Maybe not, my crystal ball is almost black right now. But, I figure I cannot retire if SS is gone.
The price of energy has doubled since Biden took over. It will probably double again in the next 12 to 24 months. Which, is causing and will cause a massive world recession with maybe a dip into a depression.
The wife got her Discovery Warner Brothers stock certificate the other day and was torqued. Now she likes it. Go figure.
No one foresaw AWS as the Hot Skillz of the 2020. Plus The Legend of Jeff. And MacKenzie drove the Bronco …
I sold $10,000 of AAPL to pay for the Vantucky misadventure in 2010. Do the math. At that time, no one thought that Blackberry would commit suicide or Microsoft would be content writing bad iOS apps to implement their mobile strategy.
Of course, given that kind of commitment, when I said I was done with the Northwest, the wife knew I was going south and east of Salt Lake City with or without her.
My car line mommy friend from the same high school I attended went back to Florida the year before without kids and husband.
Don’t kick yourself. I wanted to by $10.00 in Bitcoin when it was $0.02 per coin. Why I did not, I don’t know. I could have afforded to lose $10.00 if Bitcoin tanked. In some consolation, I probably would have sold when Bitcoin reached $100.00 per coin, certainly by $1,000.00 per coin out of greed and fear. You cannot 2nd guess the markets.
I have most of my funds with an investment advisor, majority very conservative. Some stuff is fairly well protected in a market crash. The principle cannot be lost but most certainly the gains can be lost. I told my advisor the priorities are in this order; 1: Protect the Principle; 2: Minimize the IRS hit; 3: Realize some gains.
I think I also had a chance to go to work for Microsoft way back at the start of the 70’s. Pay sucked, benefits did not exist, no relocation assistance, a really bad career move at that time. MS was competing against IBM, DEC, HP, CP/M and several other players. And with my luck if I went with Microsoft the company would have crashed. You all can blame me for Windows ME, Windows 11, and Microsoft Bob as if I had gone with the company the failure would have meant they never got created.
I had written an add-on module that patch MS-Basic to support the enhanced printing features of the Epson MX-80 with Basic commands (HPRINT, WPRINT, BPRINT, etc). I was selling the product and sold several copies. Someone got wind of it and called me. They asked if I wanted a job and was willing to move to Washington state. I don’t remember a company being mentioned in the call but I like to think it was Microsoft. May have been Bubba’s Saucy Software for all I know.
There has been some speculation here that the number of food processing plant fires have been increasing this year, leading some to posit that there is some evidence of conspiracy against the US food supply by unknown nefarious ‘actors’.
This report has a contrary report based on actual facts, not conjecture.
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/05/unfounded-claims-about-frequency-and-causes-of-food-plant-fires/
The article continues with refuting other claims that are related to similar speculation about this.
A couple dozen fires, not all of them serious, in 27,000 facilities is not much of a concern absent other context. And context is never given, just the raw numbers of “three more fires in the past week” or whatever. -yawn-
However,
Now do all-cause deaths in the United States over the past ten years.
Microsoft didn’t become “Microsoft” until Windows 3.0.
When I worked for the Egghead Software Ponzi in 87-88 and Christmas 89, the Office products were terrible, but because of the relationship between Gates and Egghead founder Victor Alhadeff, we carried the boxes in the store and were forced to use Windows 2.0 Excel to file daily sales reports.
The only way one of those Office boxes went out the door was a “trial” with a customer. They always came back within the 30 day return policy – full refund, no questions.
Flour is highly flammable. The big Bill Gates real estate project in Tampa finally convinced ConAgra to move their large flour mill at the edge of downtown out to a smaller building away from the new development.
The Tampa Wonder Bread bakery went away about 15 years ago as the gentrifying neighborhood around the plant got antsy about it being located there. The problem with the neighbors wasn’t so much about the fire risk as the noise from the train making deliveries three times a week form … the flour mill!
WRT Jenny:
It was just fine two years ago. If you are coming back down here again, I would appreciate a notice.
@CowboyStu
Thank you sir. Don’t know when but would like to. Next visit will probably be another funeral. 2019 seems a lifetime ago. And I had more fun at our brief coffee shop visit than I did with family -grimace-
@ray, I’d like a lexus/nexus search for news articles about food processing plant fires, collated by year. Then compared to this year so far.
Something can be statistically insignificant and yet massively impactful. MAEWEST or MAEEAST having a fire, while only one or two datacenters in a year, would be pretty significant.
Ditto if one of the structure fires was the Supreme Court building or the Whitehouse.
Most of the articles have noted that the fires did not do significant damage, and the TWO plane accidents did little. Still, I’ll like a comparison to previous years. How many planes hit food processors in a “normal” year?
n
If I’d have bought MS or apple stock, instead of radioshack computers, I’d be in a different place today.
A/C contractor is done. Air is on and blowing cold. Inspection sometime tomorrow. Did I mention it was $2700 more that the quote from a couple of months ago? $10500 instead of $7800, and we have settled for about 80% of what we originally wanted to do.
n
Don’t feel bad. We played hooky from my father-in-law’s funeral-related activities in 2005 and took my son to the Museum of Flight in Seattle.
She hasn’t seen “Naomi” on the CW, with the money line “10 is the new 16”.
I’ve seen the scene in question. There is no ambiguity about the context.
Hopefully Discovery continues cleaning house and tosses Ava Duvernay’s deal.
Uh, why me?
“A lot of people tell me they like the look of wind turbines,” he added. “They find them graceful.”
https://www.masterresource.org/wind-politics/fulton-township-mi-no-big-wind/
Yeah, that would be the same folks that welcomes halfway houses for Level 3 sexual offenders.
(As noted in the comments, Fulton County (MIchigan, not Nebraska) already has a bunch of wind turbines. Kind of sounds like informed dissent, eh?)
Uh, why me?
– sorry ray, meant RICK
n
Wind is picking up! Gusting to 7mph or more, and spattering of big drops…
Temp dropped 10F too.
n
Wife and kids are at the opening of the new marvel universe movie, with several other tweens, as an early birthday present for D1.
Kinda quiet here without them home.
n
And chilly. New tstat must be a bit different from the old one, 74F is chilly.
n
We went to our first baseball game, pro or minor, since 2019. My wife won free tickets from her work, so we just had to pay 10 bucks to park. It’s the local AA team, and they play in a new stadium. It was supposed to open in 2020, but that slipped a year. The park is impressive, think a scaled down major league park (a newer one, not Fenway). Our seats were 5 rows up behind home plate. Close enough to actually call most balls and strikes. It was also a good game, with the home team winning with a walk off single in the bottom of the 9th. Maybe I’ll relax my baseball boycott. I still don’t see me watching many games on tv – I just don’t want to dump 3+ hours into that. I do think we will start back to going to a Braves game every year.
Those numbers sound familiar. I believe the cumulative death number is similar to where it was last year.
J&J doesn’t fit the agenda being adenovirus based.
The people who haven’t been jabbed aren’t going to suddenly run out and get a shot at this point.
I’m not in a big hurry.
And I’m still waiting for the knock on my door.
Even if I did a Lexis/Nexis search, some here would not believe it, preferring to believe wild conspiracy theories.
I just referenced a fact-checking news article, which also had references and links to source articles. If someone bothered to read the whole article.
But conspiracy theories are more believable than actual facts. Apparently.
The problem is selection of facts, what passes as fact, and who is listing them.
Sloppy writing doesn’t help, because it looks an awful lot like misdirection.
I broke the statement up because they are two different things. The first numbers, are averages for each type of fire, across five years, without an average given for ALL STRUCTURE FIRES for those years.
The second, all structure fires in 2020. More fires in 2020 than the average for the previous 5 years? No way to tell from the numbers presented, thus no way to draw a valid conclusion.
What were the ACTUAL numbers for each category in 2020? Why use averages from the previous 5 years? And how does that compare with the 2022 numbers, are we on pace, or slow, or burning stuff down every day? Are fires up across all categories in 2022? Are the numbers within the range of normal variation?
And the data widget crashed when I tried to drill down myself. I did see this note at the bottom –-“Because the frequency of fires and losses varies widely, estimates have not been rounded. Users are strongly urged to round them in their reports. ”
I also see that they applied a fudge factor to their numbers (the ‘estimates’). And I hate averages. If the years were 1 fire, 1 fire, 1 fire, then 100 fires, 100 fires, the average would be 40 fires per year and would be COMPLETELY useless for comparison with the 6th year, and would be a mischaracterization of the typical fires in any year.
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So I’m not willing to accept a ‘fact checker organization’s ‘ glib statements on ANYTHING, without a whole lot of detail and complete transparency as to methodology, and funding as it pertains to any bias. Other than Snopes, the whole phenomenon of “fact checkers” came out of the political spin factories of the last two elections, which were some of the most partisan in recent history. They are all tainted by that, and Snopes has been shown to let their political bias influence their decisions too.
Oddly, if you said you did the searches, found x number of articles per year, and noted a trend, I’d be willing to believe it, because if I had access to the same info, I could do the searches, and presumably get the same results, and I’ve got long experience with you and your integrity. Even that wouldn’t be definitive though, because the search tool might be less than honest, or technically deficient, or the fires might not have been reported in searchable news articles.
It’s not that ‘conspiracy theories’ are more attractive, it’s that the glib assurances that they are undoubtedly false do not ring true anymore. We’ve seen too many ‘conspiracy theories’ be later revealed as truth to accept the assurances without questions.
n
To expand some more, using the royal ‘we’ and the general ‘you’.
The question should be simple.
“Are food processing facilities experiencing an unusual number of fires or other disasters/mishaps this year than a ‘typical’ year?”
You could follow up with “or is it just that we are already focused on food shortages and supply chain issues so we NOTICED more than usual?”
You could really chase the rabbit with “or is it that more incidents have been REPORTED this year?”
The bonus question could be “and if so, DOES IT MATTER?” especially given that most of the reported incidents had little effect on production.
The fact checkers don’t answer that question though, they start with averages, estimates, and arm-waving instead of straightforward factual statements like “it’s hard to be sure, the data doesn’t exist in one place, and averages are a terrible way to look at a ”typical” year, but NO, there don’t seem to be more reports of incidents than in most of the last 5 years.”
It’s possible that this is a question that looks like it should be easy to answer, but for some reasons isn’t- like not all fires get reported to the same place, or there isn’t a specific category for “food processing facility” on the reporting form, or some other reasons. Asking the question is the legitimate function of the press, and of a thinking person.
For that matter, is the NFPA the best org to ask? Why not ask the insurance companies? Or, since the question was driven by media reports, why not look at media reports?
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Now a more ‘meta’ response to the reply.
From a rhetorical point of view, when you use an appeal to authority, which is what citing a ‘fact checker’ is, that authority has to be beyond reproach and an actual authority. Snopes used to be such an authority for most people, but the quality of their research and their willingness to allow their biases to color their factchecking destroyed that. The newly spawned ‘fact checkers’, who sprung fully formed from the diseased loins of the political spin doctors, are not actual authorities, and are certainly not beyond reproach. Some people will automatically bristle at the idea of accepting them as an authority.
And, you can stand the last comment on it’s head and you’d have this – which certainly isn’t conducive to a dialog…
Flip that and you get-
So far there isn’t even a conspiracy theory, just the question.
n