59F and damp this am.
I see more an more evidence every day that the decline is well underway and may be accelerating.
Venezuela took only ten years to completely implode, and the last five were pretty sudden…
We have crumbling infrastructure in most of our major cities, with no plan or money to replace it. Major crimes were decreasing steadily but now are on the rise again. Social fabric is being eroded daily by the constant influx of literal barbarian hordes. Polarization politically and socially continues to increase among the people. Radical political ideology is becoming commonplace.
Worldwide geopolitical changes are underway. Populism and maybe even nationalism is on the rise all over the place. Long simmering grievances are getting new airing. Russia took over Ukraine AND NO ONE DID ANYTHING. Taiwan is next.
Look at the return of diseases once conquered here. Typhus in city hall in LA. Hepatitis in LA, San Diego, and San Francisco from people sh!tting in the street. Measles. Polio- “like” disease throughout the midwest.
There is a general breakdown of morality and social norms. Deviant sex is now commonplace. Mental illness is everywhere you look. Crazy people roam the streets, beggars are everywhere. Parts of downtown look like Tijuana with all the lumps of people sleeping in the open and all the beggars. Drug use, destructive to life, is now also widespread, making inroad to the remaining middle and worker classes.
We’re the frog, and the pot is getting warmer every day.
Stack it high. Learn new skills. Put money somewhere inflation won’t erode it’s value in a few years. Look for income streams that don’t depend on things getting better. Start building ‘tribe’. If it gets really bad, it will be you and your neighbors. Better have some good ones.
nick
Thanks for the first aid commentary.
I had probably heard all that’s wrong with the tampon for bullet wound idea.
I got a few bleeding stoppage sponges and stuff, not long ago, when a new local store had sale prices. Also got Israeli bandages.
The bleed-stop bandaids might not be life-saving, but they are nice for preventing a disgusting mess, for those who take “blood thinners” especially.
You’re welcome. The tampon idea is widespread, and better than nothing, but as aesop says, you can buy the real thing and it works better.
N
Was it here?
I saw somewhere a discussion of an odd Ford battery connector terminal clamp with multiple connections. Look at Amazon # KDVZMHY for a Ford OEM part that might do the trick, $17. This particular part might fit some GM applications, too. The page also has links to other freakish battery connectors, and some potentially useful comments.
Brands of the blood clotting products include QuikClot and Adventure Medical Kits Trauma Pak and Celox.
@spook – that part number has no results on Amazon.
Did you mean one of these? https://amzn.to/2G59jME
@rick, that page is 404 too.
n
@spook, re. the battery terminal
It was here, I think Lynn had a story to tell….
n
About that decline,
Inside the hell of ‘communist heaven’: Corpses dug up for jewellery, children jailed and a gangster regime that has looted billions. Read this searing dispatch from a Venezuela on the brink of revolution
protests don’t solve anything. You can stomp your feet and make ‘demands’ but all that is likely to get you is a police record, a 3 letter agency file, an injury, and sore feet.
“One week after a Yellow Vest organizer was “handicapped for life” by French police, protesters dedicated Saturday’s demonstrations to denouncing police violence – only to be beaten and gassed by said police.”
n
Correction!
Ford battery terminal = Amazon B07KDVZMHY
Ford number BT4Z-14450-AA
@Spook – correction for me too ! https://amzn.to/2WL6bL4
Was it here?
I saw somewhere a discussion of an odd Ford battery connector terminal clamp with multiple connections. Look at Amazon # KDVZMHY for a Ford OEM part that might do the trick, $17. This particular part might fit some GM applications, too. The page also has links to other freakish battery connectors, and some potentially useful comments.
Sorry, I could not get this to work.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/KDVZMHY?tag=ttgnet-20
I ended up using a $4 battery terminal clamp for my 2005 Ford Expedition back on Jan 1, 2019. It has worked beautifully. I bought some backup battery terminal clamps if necessary but it works just fine. I get a very good start on a 34 F morning (lowest we have gotten to since then).
Correction!
Ford battery terminal = Amazon B07KDVZMHY
Ford number BT4Z-14450-AA
Cool, that would be a better solution. Thanks !
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KDVZMHY?tag=ttgnet-20
Is it the same as what came on the truck?
I don’t have such a Ford handy…
Is it the same as what came on the truck?
I don’t have such a Ford handy…
Nope. It was a Rube Goldberg battery clamp that used a bolt to tighten the clamp on to the battery post. I cut it off and bolted the cables on to the new el cheapo battery clamp.
I don’t have such a Ford handy…
Going by my experience with my Mom’s 2004 Freestar van, and the two other Fords I have dealt with, you should stay far away from Fords.
Yes, it runs well. It should, it has just 40K miles. I had to replace a front wheelbearing unit at 30K miles. No “just replace bearings” anymore. The passenger door window tends to bind if closed all the way. Mom and Dad had it to the dealer…. no problem found. So all the way up and a bump down is the fix. There’s no adjustment in the mounting holes. Now the computer says the EGR valve is bad. Ugh. It might be sooted up. I’m going to try to clean it before replacing it. I do think the vacuum switch that tells the computer the EGR isn’t working is the actual problem. That they have it right on top of the engine where it is easy to replace says things to me.
The cute little solenoid that prevents you from taking the car out of Park without your foot on the brake was very annoying. It’s still there as far as the computer is concerned.
The most annoying thing is the power locks. They always lock. Pretty random on un-locking. Which, if the tailgate, where I have all of my groceries stashed, had a key lock, I wouldn’t care. I’m not a fan of crawling in through the sliding door to crawl over a seat to unload groceries. Maybe I just have a bad attitude.
It’s not a horrible vehicle.
Not like that early 70’s Subaru that seemed to delight in flinging the passenger door open while making a left turn. Fun times!
I’ve always been a Mopar guy. Yeah, I know they have made a lot of crap just like Ford and GM. But I understand the Mopar stuff and can fix most of it.
So this is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to ask RBT, missed every day….
I always assumed bleach, like a jug of Clorox, froze like plain water.
Why pour bleach on the guy? If you really want to mess him up a quart of gasoline and a match is much more effective.
Smollett said the mysterious MAGA men poured bleach on his head but bleach freezes at 18 degrees.
The weather on Tuesday was a low of -9 degrees.
Frozen bleach will not pour.
“Bleach contains sodium Hypochlorite in water, usually 3 to 6%”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleach
According to
http://hillbrothers.com/pdf/Product-Profiles/Sodium-Hypochlorite-Solution-Strengths.pdf
Approximate Freezing Points of Sodium Hypochlorite Solutions
Weight Percent NaOCl Freezing Point (°F) Freezing Point (°C)
4 24.0 -4.4
6 18.5 -7.5
8 17.0 -10.0
10 7.0 -13.9
12 -3.0 -19.4
14 -14.0 -25.6
So according to that table, 6% bleach should freeze at 18.5 F.
But if the bleach was in a warm house or a warm car, it would take a while to cool down to 18 F.
That guy’s story sounded like BS from the get go. It’s falling down faster than [insert inappropriate and sexist comparison here.]
Like the ‘poisoned Halloween candy’, these racists think that attacks like this are so commonplace that no one will even look twice at the facts. In reality, there isn’t any poisoned Halloween candy, and saying your kid OD’d on some is a sure way to get your house searched for YOUR stash. Violent racially motivated attacks seem to be MOSTLY the other way around, when they happen at all. (not talking about name calling or vandalism) EVERY allegation of an attack is going to get CLOSE scrutiny. This one stinks and is getting stinkier every day.
n
Smollett said the mysterious MAGA men poured bleach on his head but bleach freezes at 18 degrees.
The weather on Tuesday was a low of -9 degrees.
Frozen bleach will not pour.
True dat, BUT the bleach may have been in a warmer area–the supposed assailants’ vehicle, say–just prior to being poured on the “victim”.
But yes, Smollett’s story seems to be fraying rapidly around the edges.
“If you really want to mess him up a quart of gasoline and a match is much more effective. ”
We’ll know the insurrections are real when they start burning each other. Five gallon bucket dropped off a rooftop into an antifa crowd, followed by a road flare is serious. A garden sprayer and a road flare against the mounted po po is serious. Hell, just the spray, no matches, would be serious enough. Mist a crowd with anything that smells like gasoline and stings on contact and you’ve got an end to the riot… or the SWAT team stacked up outside your front door. (specifically illegal in TX by the way, no noxious chemicals to be used against people here) Just use ammonia the first few times… then gasoline after.
Mythbusters showed pretty well how a few gallons of powdered coffee creamer, dispersed into the air, and followed by a spark would be pretty effective against a crowd. Wouldn’t be too hard to refill a fire extinguisher…
So far it’s all been chest thumping and chimping out. I hope we never get to the next stage, but I’m not sanguine about pulling back from the brink.
n
@Nick :
Mythbusters showed pretty well how a few gallons of powdered coffee creamer, dispersed into the air, and followed by a spark would be pretty effective against a crowd.
Something similar to that was on the McGyver show last night. Although he used powdered sugar. Made for a pretty impressive (probably enhanced) flame effect.
“Donald Drains the Swamp”
https://www.amazon.com/Donald-Drains-Swamp-Eric-Metaxas/dp/1621579387/?tag=ttgnet-20
It is getting weird out there.
Mythbusters showed pretty well how a few gallons of powdered coffee creamer, dispersed into the air, and followed by a spark would be pretty effective against a crowd. Wouldn’t be too hard to refill a fire extinguisher…
Something similar to that was on the McGyver show last night. Although he used powdered sugar. Made for a pretty impressive (probably enhanced) flame effect.
Food is energy. Food has a lot of carbon in it. Carbon wants to be Carbon Dioxide real bad, so much that the mixing of carbon and oxygen in a very surprising wide range of amounts will result in a huge amount of energy being released, an exothermic reaction. Don’t be there when it happens in an uncontrolled manner.
That guy’s story sounded like BS from the get go. It’s falling down faster than [insert inappropriate and sexist comparison here.]
Ratings for “Empire” are down, Sweeps started Thursday, and Black History Month began Friday. There was also talk of AT&T unloading TMZ once the Time-Warner merger was settled. The timing is one of those things that make you say hmmmm.
In a few weeks, when The Best Movie Ever Made fails to get Best Picture, look for more stunts allegedly perpetrated by rednecks in MAGA hats. Harvey Levin will have film at 11 … or whenever TMZ airs in your market.
Something similar to that was on the McGyver show last night. Although he used powdered sugar. Made for a pretty impressive (probably enhanced) flame effect.
They probably didn’t mention the Potassium Nitrate oxidizer. Just like the Mythbusters used to conveniently omit the SKUs from Home Despot which could make thermite.
We used to make smoke bombs with the suger/KNO3 recipe in college. We did things back then that would probably have us in jail these days. In the 80s, the campus police just watched the nerds from a distance and got a laugh.
I was just thinking about when I was learning about stage pyrotechnics. We were setting off mortars in the theatre parking lot. Big booms in a concrete canyon. And doing columns of sparks with various black and smokeless powder mixes. Making our own squibs. Making our own electric matches…
All good fun, with NO supervision and no issues. The 80s were an awesome time to be (relatively) young. Sex, drugs, and music, everyone was making money, and the future was so bright, you had to wear shades.
n
Lot of good radio tonight on the lower bands.
Get out the shortwave and tune around from 4.5 and up…
n
Ford, well, GM too… My mother always insisted on driving American cars, but…seriously?
The problem is pretty simple: I remember reading an article that broke out the costs of create a new vehicle. According to that article, GM and Ford pay something like $5k more per car in labor costs. Since they have to compete on price, that difference comes out physical quality. So when my mom bought herself a $25k new Buick Regal, she was actually buying a car worth maybe $20k by anyone else’s standards.
I was trying to find that article online, but couldn’t. Instead, I found articles saying that it only takes about 40 hours to build a car – but that’s just final assembly and testing. That doesn’t count producing the parts being assembled, supervision, factory management, or any other indirect labor costs.
Anyhow, it comes down to union rules. I’ve seen the inside of several unionized factories, and the work rules are just nuts. Joe can get the wrench out of the toolbox, Bob puts it on the nut, and Fred actually turns the wrench. I exaggerate, but not by very much – there’s a huge amout of inefficiency very deliberately built into the rules.
– – – – –
Racism… I always figure this is hugely exaggerated, because I rarely see any. Discriminating against groups of people for actual reasons is not racism. For example, objecting to large-scale African immigration to Europe: the race of the immigrants is not the point, it’s the incompatible cultures and almost complete lack of education/skills. Thousands would integrate, but tens of millions will not.
Ok, so… We were talking to a couple of real estate agents who want to sell our house. They delicately tried to ask under what circumstances would we refuse to sell the house, assuming the buyer will pay our price? Huh? It took us a couple of minutes to get the issue out on the table: It turns out that they have had more than one case where people wanted them to “sell our house, but not to an X”.
Geez. Apparently there really are people like that.
During the Carter Administration, I worked at a car assembly plant for longer than I care to say. It was the bribe of the month club. Our hourly rate was almost twice what other unskilled jobs paid. Although the cars came by 90 to an hour relentlessly, the work was more tedious than difficult.
For various union reasons I effectively had a 4 day work week. Besides holidays and vacations ~25 days/year, there was the summer shutdown weeks for retooling, a days pay for a birthday (paid to everyone once a year), 7-11 days “personal paid holidays”, COLA (about 20% of annual pay, paid quarterly) and “Supplemental Unemployment Benefits”; pay equal to 90% of base pay for the difference between government unemployment during shutdown or being laid off up to 6 months.
One story: There was a fellow who did your job when you took a 26 minute “break” per half shift. He rotated between 6 or 7 employees so the line didn’t stop. I mistook my turn and wandered off. At the time, I was installing one of 9 steering wheel models. When I leisurely returned, I found the foreman in a tizzy installing wheels as more than several cars had reached the end of line without a wheel making the cars a bit difficult to drive away. I apologized and that was the end of it.
The problem is pretty simple: I remember reading an article that broke out the costs of create a new vehicle. According to that article, GM and Ford pay something like $5k more per car in labor costs. Since they have to compete on price, that difference comes out physical quality. So when my mom bought herself a $25k new Buick Regal, she was actually buying a car worth maybe $20k by anyone else’s standards.
*Retirement* costs are the bigger problem than straight labor expense. I worked in a drug store in FL in the mid-80s, as the WWII generation started retiring, and we had a binder in the pharmacy just for dealing with GM retiree healthcare plans.
I’ve noted before here that if you want to see the problem with 70s era GM cars in a nutshell, find a copy of the bootleg “Star Wars Holiday Special” floating around the Internet and pay attention during the commercials. The GM spots shot on the assembly line in 1978, and the on-camera soldering done by one union goon on a Cutlass Supreme is exactly where rust killed all of those cars within 7-8 years.
I don’t think we would have that time capsule if Lucasfilm hadn’t been so embarrassed by the show, effectively a two hour toy commercial deemed necessary after missing the 77 Christmas season.
(For trivia buffs, the Holiday Special introduced Boba Fett.)
I remember touring a GM assembly plant as a kid, maybe late 70s, and guys were sleeping under tables on the line, while the tour went thru.
chutzpah.
n
Not making excuses but it is mindnumbing work. Think “I Love Lucy” in the chocolate factory. A third to a half of the line workers are high on something, more after “lunch” break when you could visit your car in the lot.
Foremen (Management) aren’t immune. One had 3 heart attacks before age 38 from his speed habit. Another collected speedo cable covers (little plastic tubes) for his cocaine side hustle. A high seniority line repairman I knew kept half pints of Lord Calvert in his cowboy boots. During the midweek, featherbed jobs, “break” or “absentee” pool, were in low demand.
Security guards manned the gates in squads to prevent collusion, were paid way better than line workers, and eyeballed us thoroughly at shift change but no scanners or xray belts. Think TSA with attitude.
Not a happy place.
At the car factory, “repairmen” were stationed every 100 feet of line. If you didn’t complete your task, you’d mark it with a nice big tag that said “Safety Item” which really meant “Defective Work”. The repair guy would try to fix what you’d missed before it got to the next repair station. Good idea to learn and do your task quickly and well before you earned his ire. Mostly they wore out the seat of their jeans.
There were “Inspectors” about the same interval, working in pairs. A QC guy with a clipboard came by twice a shift to torque check a couple of steering wheels and adjust my air tool once in a great while.