Cool and eventually clear? Yesterday ended up clear but started with overcast and even a spattering of rain. By the end of the day it was quite nice, even hot in the sun. Today could be the same and I’d be happy. I just don’t want rain.
Did a pickup yesterday afternoon. Got three more gas powered heaters, some propane, but one at least natgas. It’s spring so people are buying air conditioners. I was buying them in the winter. The auction items are either returns from people who decided they didn’t need the heaters after all, or shelf pulls as stores change out seasonal inventory. I think these were all returns.
I got two more solar panels as well. And then I found a whole auction of panels, distro, inverters, batteries, etc. It’s in town, and it all starts at $5. I’ll be bidding, and I hope I can get some stuff cheap. This auction is decommissioned complete systems, so at one point it all worked together. Just knowing that gives me a leg up on putting a system back together. It would be nice to score some stuff in industrial quantities.
Florida blogger Divemedic is looking into solar for his backup energy needs. It definitely has an appeal, as long as you have storage batteries on site. Grid tied is not a backup. I think it has a place in everyone’s preps, at least enough to run a freezer or fridge, and charge phones and batteries… That is doable for not too much money, and it is quiet, and will last as long as the battery takes a charge. I’ve got electrically powered versions of most things to take advantage of solar after the liquid fuels run out. Now I just have to get the parts together into a system.
Along with all the other things I have to do…
I’ll just keep plodding along, with occasional bursts of effectiveness.
And stacking stuff. That’s the easiest part.
nick
Some days you get up and find that people have been working tirelessly overnight to make sure you start out behind.
What would we do without coffee?
https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/02/pennsylvania-lawmakers-to-appeal-bidenbucks-lawsuit-to-u-s-supreme-court/
Courts trying to dodge another issue due to “standing”.
Why Biden’s White House iftar unravelled amid Gaza war
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/2/why-bidens-white-house-iftar-unravelled-amid-gaza-war
Did the White House have an Easter dinner with Christian leaders?
A lot of murder, I imagine.
Had the chickens out earlier. They were running around, gobbling up the worms that the rain had brought up. It makes me wonder if I’m causing the robins and other wormivores to starve. There were a few drops of rain but the chickens didn’t mind and I read my Kindle while keeping them from going too far astray.
And then the rain came down. They didn’t argue too much when I told them to go home.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13265759/Pete-Buttigieg-mocks-Americans-electric-cars.html
– I guess it’s only fair, since Americans have been mocking him since he took office.
Love the “We’ll fall behind china” argument… “if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”
n
Maybe the message if finally getting thru…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13265379/Gen-Z-trade-school-college-debt-trade-work-jobs.html
n
Mayor Pete, Deep State Tool.
China has EV plants under construction in Mexico.
A few years ago people were pressuring me to get the clot shot – at work, every one of my co”work”ers had bowed to the corporate demand that we all had to get it (though most of them were eager to do so), some family members were doing so, some in the neighborhood were doing so. “Everyone else is getting it. Why can’t you just go along?”
I replied with “If all of my friends jumped off a bridge, would you expect me to?”
Oh, but that pissed off a lot of them, especially my department head at work, who was good on the technology aspects of the job but was a useless libtard on the people aspects as well as on his political and social views.
Extraneous redundancy
Its their livelihood.
That was the excuse I received three years ago from a friend whose wife worked in HR for a medium-sized company and was in charge of enforcing the jab among the reluctant.
Within a year, the management at the company, a manufacturer of commercial kitchen equipment whose sales declined during the Lockdown Kabuki, sold out to an Italian firm and everyone at the US HQ was out of a job.
There goes the livelihood.
Several people told me in 2022, on hearing that I’d refused the clot shot and had gotten a new job just ahead of being fired for noncompliance, “I wish I’d been able to do that.” Well, why couldn’t they? Too lazy to look for a new job? No skills which would let them find a new job? Wife would nag them relentlessly for being out of work briefly between jobs?
The company where I worked during the height of the dempanic is gone now. I’m pretty sure that my leaving was a major factor there. Most of the tech people put most of their time into producing reports from customer data and into doing machine learning on the data. It had become my job to clean up their code, get it running on machines other than their laptops, get it set up and scheduled on the servers, and keep all of the infrastructure together. I’d been asking for someone to be hired to at least do the infrastructure work, monitoring the databases and the cloud servers, keeping the security certificates up to date, and all that. Nothing ever happened. I tried training some of the other techs on what was needed and I wrote up procedures, but no one was much interested in doing it. They were la-di-da Data Scientists, most of them, and above such things. So be it. Not long after I left, things started going wrong and the automated report jobs had to be manually run and emailed to the various recipients. Several of the daily reports would each have been a full-time job to run and send to each of a couple hundred recipients, and they wouldn’t have been received by 0800 or whatever the contract called for. Well, not my problem. If not for the clot shot mandate, I’d likely have stayed on that job for a while longer, but the corporate bosses made their decision.
When I worked at National Bancshares Corporation the bank was in trouble. The IT department was sold, or outsourced, to MTech. MTech was an IBM shop, NBC was Burroughs. Nothing was compatible. My task was to write a conversion program for the Burroughs teller terminals so they would work on IBM, running on the IBM system in Dallas. A high speed link between San Antonio was being installed.
I knew the teller system, the ATM system, and the online system intimately as I had worked on those systems for years. I had developed a lot of custom code in those systems. I had written the PULSE interface from scratch and the bank sold that system to 3 other banks in Texas.
The Burroughs CRTs were going to be handled by a protocol converter being developed by a company in Austin. It was never going to work, and never did, as IBM used background characters to control form fields which took no screen real estate. Burroughs used physical characters which took screen real estate. A full screen line from the IBM system with 5 fields required 90 characters on the Burroughs CRTs. Something had to give. The result was ugly.
My work on the conversion program continued with some limited success. There were still problems. I had found a new job in TN and did not tell management. I had a house hunting trip scheduled and then management cancelled all vacations and time off. I went anyway. When I got back I was asked to resign, which I had already planned.
The next person that took over the conversion program was clueless and could not make it work. I was told by others that he made it worse. I like to think my leaving was a big contributor to the downfall of NBC as the IT structure was broken and would be extremely costly to fix. In reality I think the demise was already unstoppable months before I left.
Wokeness in Seattle: Public schools end their successful ‘gifted and talented’ program because it had ‘too many white and Asian students’ Harrison Bergeron come to life.
Our district threatened to cut the program in order to rile up the mommies against Gov. Abbott and his school funding plan. When they found out there was never a plan to cut G&T, and that they’d been manipulated and used, they were riled up for realz…. I hope that not one of our current board makes it thru reelection.
n
After I left bigcorp, it was only a few months before they shut down the group I worked in, and abandoned that line of business. I was the only thing keeping a major oil company as a customer… since I’d been working here in Houston for that customer before changing from cottageindustryinc to bigcorp.
HR and management at bigcorp never understood that people are DIFFERENT. They have different skills, needs, backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses. We were doing custom design/build and systems integration of some pretty complex stuff, followed up with field service and support, but they had a manufacturing mindset- all employees are widgets, working on the line, and no one is irreplaceable.
That last bit may be technically true, but it’s most often used as a threat, and while you can find a replacement, there isn’t any guarantee the replacement will be able to do the job. You can replace Baryshnikov but you won’t have the same dance…
n
The rain stopped so I was going to bring the chickens back out.
And then the hail started.
-sigh-
Well, at least we’re not having an earthquake. (He says, while taking things off the shelves just in case.)
>> But…but…it worked when they did the demo…
https://otter.ai/
Hi Alan, I am confused as to what the issue is. I did not watch the video as I have no interest in a bunch of 20 somethings going nuts. And in a bunch of marketing crap. And my audio has not worked on my home pc for over a year now (my wife is starting a slow boil but she has her own home pc in the dining room but I have a 55 inch tv in front of my pc).
@lynn, the product purports to be an AI ‘bot’ that joins a Zoom or Teams meeting and take meeting notes, produce a meeting summary and assign to-do items. No mention of the underlying technologies, if a LLM is required etc. Sounds like many whiz-bang software offerings that look great during the sales demo but then fall flat when you install it in your enterprise. If you work for some bigcorp and you want IT funding, it better be for “AI” and do the monkey tricks.
2022?
The Supreme Court had ruled about the mandate by that point, and Roberts threaded the needle fine to prevent mass resignations of the 20% who actually do something productive with their time.
Any company still firing for noncompliance at that point was asking for a class action lawsuit. Corn Pop was supposed to provide them cover for adhering to the agenda of eliminating Control.
OTOH, age discrimination is real, Woke was still a thing, and “Male and pale is stale” lingers even today.
I don’t talk about everything I did in response to the tolling company after the firing, but EEOC was definitely an avenue I explored. That’s really hard to do without money/time, however, since the state and local government anti-discrimination offices themselves are staffed according to quotas and set asides and not exactly sympathetic to a 50-something white male.
They’d given in and gotten the mandated clot shot in 2021, then in 2022 the subject came up and they expressed regrets at “not being able to” resist the mandate.
The tolling company definitely worried about EEOC since a waiver of ADEA was an obvious insertion into my otherwise-boilerplate severance paperwork.
Two whole weeks salary to give up my rights to sue!
No one should ever forgive the pinheads, including the Orange Man, without a serious mea culpa.
Looks like SA will be overcast for the eclipse. I hope it clears up. I’ve got a Dwarf II mini telescope with filters ready to go (and some certified eclipse glasses).
There will be about 95% coverage in my area. Having been through two eclipses before this will be a “yawn” event. I probably won’t even go outside. It never does get totally dark, just very dim as in twilight. And in the last one where I was in the middle of the path of totality, it only lasted less than a minute.
My brother lives just outside of Waco in Mill Valley, in the middle of the path. His small town has gone overboard in preparation for huge crowds. Based on my experience, the crowds were not large. Certainly more people than normal, but not anything like a UT football game.
XKCD had a nice graph of the awesomeness of an eclipse yesterday:
https://xkcd.com/2914/
And a thought on eclipses and clouds today:
https://xkcd.com/2915/
That is fairly accurate. Until totality occurs it is still fairly bright. People that are not at 95% or better will not see much. At that point is like the sun peeking out from behind a cloud.
Florida blogger Divemedic is looking into solar for his backup energy needs. It definitely has an appeal, as long as you have storage batteries on site. Grid tied is not a backup. I think it has a place in everyone’s preps, at least enough to run a freezer or fridge, and charge phones and batteries… That is doable for not too much money, and it is quiet, and will last as long as the battery takes a charge. I’ve got electrically powered versions of most things to take advantage of solar after the liquid fuels run out. Now I just have to get the parts together into a system.
Middle and Southern Florida has very few natural gas pipelines so natural gas is not a good option for whole house generators. It is weird because the Gulf of Mexico side of Florida has incredible amounts of natural gas (and crude oil) in shallow water water (less than 500 feet), medium water (less than 5,000 feet), and deep water (8,000 feet to 12,000 feet). All of the wells are built to produce as much crude oil as possible due to the incredible expenses of water drilling and production both. Each manned platform costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year EACH.
The Atlantic side of Florida probably has incredible amounts of natural gas and crude oil reservoirs in it. But, no one has been allowed to drill in the eastern seaboard since the 1930s ??? Because, it is so pretty and drilling rigs / production platforms spoil the view.
Mayor Pete, Deep State Tool.
China has EV plants under construction in Mexico.
I have been wondering when Tesla will close the Fremont, California plant and move it to Mexico.
https://www.tesla.com/fremont-factory
22,000 people work there for high dollars.
“Woman says judge refused to evict squatters in her house to avoid them being homeless over Christmas — while she was homeless”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/texas-squatters-boyette-tiktok
“Terri Boyette told NewsNation that she had left her home in Texas in order to go take care of her sick mother in Florida when her neighbor called her and asked her if she knew that someone was living in her home.”
“Boyette called police, but they told her that since the squatters had potentially been at the home for more than ten days that she would need to start the process of eviction.”
“That process took eight months, and when she regained access to the home, she said it was thoroughly trashed and her appliances had been stolen. She also realized that the culprits were people she had previously hired.”
Mesquite, Texas. An armpit paradise suburb of Dallas.
“Disney defeats activist investor Nelson Peltz in proxy fight”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/disney-defeats-activist-investor-nelson-peltz-in-proxy-fight-172400941.html
It is almost as if 75% of the Disney shareholders do not care about the wokeness of Disney running their customers away by the gross.
Maybe the message if finally getting thru…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13265379/Gen-Z-trade-school-college-debt-trade-work-jobs.html
Mom and Dad yelling “get a job and get out of my house”.
Squatters in Texas? Surely the castle doctrine applies. Go into your house, find home invaders, proceed as necessary.
Mind, I wouldn’t do it alone, but I have a couple of ex-marine cousins living in Texas who would be happy to help…
“Things are getting very dangerous in the Middle East”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/04/things-are-getting-very-dangerous-in.html
“I get the impression that the Biden administration has been not-so-gently informed by Israel that, if that country’s military operations against Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups are hampered by deliberately slowed weapons deliveries, then Israel will take up the option of stopping Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism at the source by converting it into a radioactive glass-topped parking lot. Whilst many Israelis might not want to do that, I think the Netanyahu administration is more than sufficiently determined to do whatever it takes to ensure Israel’s security; and I don’t see the Israeli military arguing against that option. Iran, and terrorists sponsored by Iran, are costing them too many lives.”
Things have always been dangerous in the Middle East for the last 10,000+ years. The Bible and detailed histories over the last 2,000 years (Josephus, etc) teach us that.
I see that the sale of the new F-15 EX has gone through with 50 of them for Israel. I am not surprised, should be a nice plane once it has been upgraded by the Israelis with their special avionics and such. I am hoping that the USAF buys a couple of hundred of them too.
But Israel has plenty of delivery platforms for heavy nukes today, starting with the Jericho ballistic missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(missile)
But dozens of windmills covering the tops of mountains are OK.
Squatters in Texas? Surely the castle doctrine applies. Go into your house, find home invaders, proceed as necessary.
Mind, I wouldn’t do it alone, but I have a couple of ex-marine cousins living in Texas who would be happy to help…
Note that the Mesquite Police Department refused to clear the house since the squatters had been in the house for over ten days. At that point, things got legal.
She should have had the house cleared before calling the cops. But, who knew ?
And her insurance company is refusing to pay for the damage. Sounds like the City of Mesquite is complicit in the damage also.
I am so glad we sold our rent house duplex in Garland which is next to Mesquite. This could have happened to us.
I was incorrect, my area is going to get about 90% coverage of the eclipse. About like a big storm cloud blocking the sun.
“Why Saudi Arabia’s futuristic city is a sign of major inflation to come”
https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/why-saudi-arabias-futuristic-city-is-a-sign-of-major-inflation-to-come-150337/
Just about everything uses the costs of energy as a direct multiplier in the cost to the consumer. If you think 15% inflation sucks, just wait until we get to 30% per year. I shudder to think of $100% inflation per year.
And since O’Biden has banned the building of new LNG export plants in the USA, worldwide inflation will increase as the world’s crude oil production continues to drop and nothing can make it up.
“Coal-to-nuclear transition can be an economic boon for communities: DOE”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/coal-to-nuclear-transition-can-be-an-economic-boon-for-communities-doe/712127/
“A 900-MWe nuclear facility could increase direct employment by 102 workers, including dozens of highly paid nuclear engineers and technicians, according to a DOE information guide released Monday.”
The DOE has figured out that their customers are going away so they want to build nuclear power plants at the closed coal plants. Makes sense to me.
Fremont is the former GM/Toyota NUMMI plant. Lots of taxpayer subsidies at the Federal, state, and local level are tied to continuing operations at that facility.
The Toyota Matrix (plural? Matrii) made there used to be easy to spot on the used market because they had lousy paint due to the environmental restrictions placed on the plant by the State of California.
“Ukrainian Drones Hit Russia’s Third-Largest Oil Refinery, Prompting White House Anger”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ukrainian-drones-hit-russias-third-largest-oil-refinery
“As OilPrice details, Ukrainian drones hit the primary refining unit of Russia’s third-largest refinery southeast of Moscow more than 800 miles from the front line, Reuters reported on Tuesday. Ukraine keeps striking Russian oil assets despite the Biden admin’s unequivocal demands for a hard stop, suggesting that diplomatic fallout is now imminent.”
“The Taneco refinery of Russian company Tatneft in Tatarstan, an industrialized region southeast of Moscow, was attacked by Ukrainian drones in the latest such attack from Ukraine on Russian refining infrastructure.”
O’Biden is having trouble controlling his proxy warrior who is destroying critical infrastructure in Russia. For those who do not know, Saudi Arabia is buying Russian crude oil and diesel products and reselling them as Saudi Arabian products in Europe. Saudi Arabia is making about 30 cents on the dollar doing this. That is really good ROI (return on investment).
Approximately 67% of Disney is held by institutions, leaving about a third of the stock in the hands of “retail” investors, most of them holding the stock for reasons other than looking at the shares as a good investment.
I doubt many of those proxy ballots were returned.
At $118 at a 72 PE with nothing promising in the pipeline except a hard ‘R’ “Deadpool and Wolverine” flick, I wouldn’t even suggest using your beer money.
Iger “winning” means he will get exactly what he wants moving forward.
Disney as currently constructed is doomed.
“Russian pipeline gas exports to Europe rise 4.5% in March m/m”
http://www.gasprocessingnews.com/news/2024/04/russian-pipeline-gas-exports-to-europe-rise-45-in-march-mm/?oly_enc_id=8020E7639790J0C
“(Reuters) – Russian energy giant Gazprom’s average daily natural gas supplies to Europe rose 4.5% in March from February levels and by almost 26% from the same month of 2023, Reuters calculations showed on Monday.”
“The calculations, based on data from the European gas transmission group Entsog and Gazprom’s daily reports on gas transit via Ukraine, showed that average daily pipeline exports reached 88.7 million cubic meters (mcm) last month from 84.9 mcm in February.”
I am betting that most of the natural gas is coming through the two pipelines in Ukraine. Maybe some in the Georgian pipelines. I doubt anything is coming through the Nord sea pipelines.
BTW, if that natural gas is not sold to Europe or converted to LNG, most of it is flared to the atmosphere. Very little is recompressed and reinjected into the reservoirs. Too expensive to do so.
Disney as currently constructed is doomed.
As predicted by Cory Doctorow, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”
https://www.amazon.com/Down-Out-Magic-Kingdom-Novel/dp/1250196388?tag=ttgnet-20/
I’ll be taking three (at current count) teenage girls up to see eclipse totality. It’ll be my third total eclipse so I probably wouldn’t bother if not for The Child. The kids will enjoy it. Me, probably less so. About four hours in the car with three teenage girls yammering away. Uuuuugggghhhhh. And the noise cancelling headphones don’t adequately block their voices – I’ve already tried that.
BTW, am I the only one who thinks it is time to build new nuclear bomb shelters ? I figure that Houston metropolitan area has at least a dozen mirvs targeted at it due to the two dozen world class refineries and chemical plants, NASA, Elliington AFB, and eight million people.
I figure that we will get 30 minutes warning at absolute most so that means your bomb shelter needs to be close to and accessible from your house. And your work place. Tough to meet those requirements.
I told the wife last weekend that I want to move to Victoria, Texas. That is about 100 miles southwest of here.
“For those who do not know, Saudi Arabia is buying Russian crude oil and diesel products and reselling them as Saudi Arabian products in Europe”
Oil fields have unique chemical footprints.
Nothing but a fig leaf.
“I told the wife last weekend that I want to move to Victoria, Texas. That is about 100 miles southwest of here.”
But is it upwind?
@SteveF
In a 9-passenger Olds Vista Cruiser they would fit in the wayback and you could put anechoic foam in-between.
“For those who do not know, Saudi Arabia is buying Russian crude oil and diesel products and reselling them as Saudi Arabian products in Europe”
Oil fields have unique chemical footprints.
Nothing but a fig leaf.
Everyone knows. There are a half dozen Saudi Arabian crude oil and diesel tankers going in and out of the big Russian crude oil sea port. Each tanker holds at least a million barrels of crude oil (panamax). Some hold two million barrels and are bigger than a USA aircraft carrier.
“I told the wife last weekend that I want to move to Victoria, Texas. That is about 100 miles southwest of here.”
But is it upwind?
Yes. The prevailing wind around here comes from the North (cold / cool front), South (Gulf of Mexico cool front returning to land with millions of tons of water in it), or West (Pacific wet front).
The wife wants to move to central Texas, Waco or Temple.
There is that old joke about this couple in the throes of passion. She tell her date to kiss her where it is warm and smells bad. He starts the car and starts driving. She asked where he is going. He says Beaumont, just like you asked.
“Down and Out” is one of the titles I had Cory Doctorow sign in Chicago five years ago since it is available for free (as in beer) from his web site. Or was.
I bought a paid physical copy to settle kharma, like I usually do with anything pirated … well, except new “Doctor Who”.
Ironically, Doctorow has contributed to the current direction of Disney as an occasional consultant to the current management.
And I have to disagree with his position on The Mansion of twenty years ago being perfect. The OpenGL enhancement of “Hitchhiking Ghosts” and Hatbox Ghost effect finally being perfected on both coasts are both very cool. Plus, the queue area in Orlando has seen some work which very subtly enhances the experience.
The change in The Mansion in Orlando which never should have happened is Lightning Lane, turning what had been a serious people mover into a time sink of an hour or more in the standby lane even on slow days.
Truth be told, not many people actually “get” The Mansion, and the two wildly contrasting artistic points of view melded into one piece of entertainment. These days, it simply notches a box on most tourists’ once-in-a-lifetime experience in the parks.
Temple/Belton has Fort Hood nearby, a major VA facility, the original BSW hospital with transplant unit, CGI Federal contracting, and several quiet DARPA manufacturing facilities scattered around. Eventually, I-14 will wind through Temple and Belton. The metro area would be a target.
Waco supposedly has The Real Life Tony Stark’s rocket motor facility, but who knows what really goes on in any of his buildings. Plus, I’m sure Baylor doesn’t lack for research projects.
Of course, not much of the current management at Disney “get” the various pieces of IP that they hold, starting with their own legacy franchises. That’s the problem.
I wondered how Microsoft was going to soak -er- support the big companies who will continue using Windows 10 beyond the EOL date.
Among other reasons for large companies to continue running the platform, Windows 10 is the last OS which Microsoft is contractually obligated to support with a VB6 runtime.
Visual Basic .Net is not Visual Basic in the classic sense.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-reveals-subscription-pricing-for-using-windows-10-beyond-2025-and-its-not-cheap
As for the hardware issues, Linux runs really well on “obsolete” PCs. I just installed the latest Pop! OS on my 2007 MacBook Pro, and a lot of outstanding compatibility issues with the hardware were resolved by Linux Kernel 6.8, once again saving the machine from EBay.
Tyler Durden cowardice updating The Legend Of Jeff, Family Man, Drives A Honda. Wears The Same Type Of Shirt To Work Sitting At The Door Desk Every Day.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/jeff-bezos-buys-his-third-mansion-floridas-exclusive-billionaire-bunker-island
And
MacKenzieLauren Drove theBroncoG Wagon …And, these days, MacKenzie also drives a G Wagon, but with her new husband, the science teacher, in the passenger seat.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/apr/03/mackenzie-scott-donates-millions-to-help-atlanta-i/
Any land south of Gainesville in Florida is swamp, with water just 12-15 feet down in many places along the coast. Maintenance of anything buried with the brackish water due to saltwater intrusion into the aquifer is tough.
Pre-Verizon GTE had terrible issues with salt water intrusion creating noise on the lines when they still ran traditional copper between St. Petersburg and Tampa through Oldsmar. As recently as the late 80s, a phone call of just a few miles could be routed long distance depending on where each end was located.
Even Republican Governors in Florida have not supported drilling along the Gulf coast because the potential cost to the tourism and real estate development industries from a BP-type spill is way too high.
Yeah but the BP spill was completely cleaned up years ago, and at some point you run out of “hey we’re keeping that nice” in favor of “these people don’t want to sit in the dark.”
——-
The WDW Mansion preshow area is awesome after the updates. Fastpass or whatever completely destroyed about 80% of the ambiance and immersive experience and turned the park into a slog from one ride to another, just like all the other parks in the world. Only the other parks have more “exciting” rides because they KNOW it’s just the ride drawing the punters. The other 15% was destroyed by the “all day every ride” passes. Once you COULD do everything for one price, everyone felt like they SHOULD do everything. “Park Hopper” passes encourage “sniping” the “good” rides, which leads to lines and a lot of running around.
The preshow areas were very important to the Imagineers, and did more than just let your eyes adjust or give you a place to stand indoors. Watch the “making of” show about the Himalayan roller coaster to see how important they thought the preshow area is. With that ride, they could have spent a few more design cycles on making the ride worth the wait, imao.
The preshow areas and maze were usually specifically designed for the time it took to transit them too, which is all messed up with Fastpass. FP goes too quickly, the plebes take too long.
n
I understand during the eclipse, Kankles sprouts leathery bat-like wings and horns. Just like she does when BJ is around.
Dude! It’s Fort Cavazos now. Report to ze re-education camp and follow on clot-shot.
WE…ARE…ALL…GOING…TO…DIE:
‘This could be 100 times worse than Covid’: Bird flu warning from scientists who say HALF of infections with H5N1 in people are fatal – as White House says it’s ‘monitoring’ the situation
Aren’t scare tactics too soon in the election cycle? WTF plugsy. FJB.
Engage masks!
Activate social distancing!
Dispersre mRNA bio-gas-mechano-gene-splicing “vaccine” via BootyJuice EV network.
The Avatar preshow is awesome. See it at least once before going right to the ride.
>> Squatters in Texas? Surely the castle doctrine applies. Go into your house, find home invaders, proceed as necessary.
Mind, I wouldn’t do it alone, but I have a couple of ex-marine cousins living in Texas who would be happy to help…
Or…just pay for his gas and probably we could talk @SteveF to take care of it…just to keep in practice (SSS).
>> Squatters in Texas? Surely the castle doctrine applies. Go into your house, find home invaders, proceed as necessary.
Mind, I wouldn’t do it alone, but I have a couple of ex-marine cousins living in Texas who would be happy to help…
Or…just pay for his gas and probably we could talk @SteveF to take care of it…just to keep in practice (SSS).
@lynn, hopefully your real estate agent is keeping an eye on your ‘For Sale’ house…making sure that during a showing that no one hides in a closet and sets up occupancy after everyone else leaves.
If you have a summer home or rental, you need to install security cameras. Ones that text you when motion is detected. Desantis signs a “squatters don’t have rights” bill and the PLTs label him Hitler. WTF is going on?
– unless, you know, they ‘ve been chemically castrated, or had their breasts removed…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13263725/trans-kids-change-sex-adults-study.html
n
almost half a million kids, and homeland has lost track of about 100K of them (from another article).
The kid in this article is not unique.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13269383/Migrant-smuggled-child-U-S-use-porn-lying-uncle-Republicans-say-horrific-stories-like-happening-Biden-doesnt-enforce-border-laws.html
Anyone who supports this open border nonsense is complicit.
n
Looks Like Payback: DHS Targets Texas, Florida with Secret Migrant Flights
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2024/04/03/looks-like-payback-dhs-targets-texas-florida-with-secret-migrant-flights-n3785854
“POTATUS Backs Out of Latest SPR Buy Cuz…? Hey! That’s *&%#’s Expensive!”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/04/03/potatus-backs-out-of-latest-spr-buy-cuz-hey-thats-and-s-expensive-n3785897
“Biden has DOOMED America. He has spent the last FOUR years DRAINING our Strategic Petroleum Reserve with the promise to refill it. Today, he canceled the refill plan because oil is too expensive. He is leaving America EMPTY.”
Everything that O’Biden touches, he screws it up.
California Media Outlet Takes a Real Look at State’s ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2024/04/02/california-media-outlet-takes-a-real-look-at-states-assault-weapon-ban-n1224401
The linked article is worth reading.
It gives an honest definition of the term “assault rifle” and the history of the bastard term “assault weapon”:
Like many such articles it is incomplete. One important question that could have been asked and researched: “How many ”California-legal AR15’s are sold outside of California?”
You’re Not Going to Believe How Screwed Up the Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament Is
https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/04/03/youre-not-going-to-believe-how-screwed-up-the-womens-ncaa-basketball-tournament-is-n4927870
A basketball goal is 18 inches in diameter. Possibly related?
DeSantis prevailed in the p*ssing match with Bob Iger. Disney settled this week for essentially what they would have won in court if they had not attempted to turn Reedy Creek into a free speech issue.
Of course, the lawyers got paid.
The media is dreading three more years of DeSantis who has very little to lose by continuing to make their lives hard in Tallahassee.
7-year-old liked to stop at grocery for free cookie while out riding his bike:
Parents Under Investigation for Raising an Independent Seven-Year-Old
https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/04/03/parents-under-investigation-for-independent-7-year-old-n4927861
I was eight years old when Wham-O’s latest toy caught my eye and my dad gave me two bucks to bike downtown and get one. It was a town of about 20,000 and the trip was probably half a mile tops.
I can’t swear to it, but I suspect the citizens and local police would have been a lot more comfortable with that everyday occurrence than they would at the prospect of letting a man identifying as a woman join their daughter’s sports teams and use the locker room. Pretty darn sure about that. Pretty sure that any school official trying that one would end up pounded flat into the pavement.
We live in an effed-up country and we’d better get busy un-effing it.
Not just sportsball, but women’s sportsball. In the locker room at the gym I go to, there’s an annoying TV playing ESPN nonstop. I keep hearing about record-setting scoring in women’s basketball. I suppose those records will now have an asterisk. Boo-hoo.
I’m sure there are people who care. I’m just not one of them.
I attended a Big 10 school for 4 years, and had access to student discounts on tickets. I attended the same number of baseball, basketball and football games: zero. I assume they had women’s basketball back then, but I wouldn’t know.
I remember the band marching past my dorm on Saturday mornings to the stadium and waking me up. (ok, it MAY have been afternoon; Friday nights were often quite late.)
“I keep hearing about record-setting scoring in women’s basketball.”
Iowa’s Caitlin Clark blew past Pete Maravich’s college scoring record March 4 and continues to add, including 41 points to get Iowa to the Final Four. The tv viewer numbers are setting records, and when she goes pro it will be a game changer for the WNBA.
But if it’s not your cuppa, no foul.
All the PLT’s need is one liar at a time:
https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/02/push-natural-gas-exports-ivy-league-cornell-howarth-biden/
I am not a sports fan anymore, not even the individual sports I used to follow when I gave up on team sports.
I don’t follow AMA Superbike like I once did, nor do I follow competitive rock climbing.
My day seems to fill up anyway.
n
“The Entire Push To Halt New Natural Gas Exports Traces Back To One Ivy League Prof And His Shaky Study”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/04/03/the-entire-push-to-halt-new-natural-gas-exports-traces-back-to-one-ivy-league-prof-and-his-shaky-study/
“A questionable study by a Cornell University climate scientist gave climate activists and the media ammunition to wage a pressure campaign against the Biden administration to take action against liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.”
“Cornell’s Robert Howarth authored the October 2023 study, which purported to find that lifecycle emissions associated with LNG exports are far greater than those attributable to domestically-mined coal. Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, amplified the study, and climate activists lobbying the Biden administration to kill LNG exports cited it as evidence to substantiate their position before the White House announced the moratorium on LNG export terminal approvals on Jan. 26.”
These flaky so-called climate “scientists” are worthless and should be vetted extensively before anything they say is believed.
Given the enormity of the actions and costs associated with them being wrong, let them put their lives on the line to support their “studies”. Bet we get a lot less academic fraud if punishments start with flogging and end with being fed into a wood chipper and composted.
n
>> Gen-Z is shunning college to take up traditional trades like welding and plumbing they say is far more satisfying and which doesn’t incur huge student debt
There has been a 16 percent increase in enrollment at vocational schools in 2023
Gen-Zers are entering the trades due to well-paying jobs and meaningful work
The median pay for new construction hires was $48,089 last year
More satisfying, much less debt and more money. $23/hour as an apprentice to do all the scut work, and learn on the job, and after five years you should be able to double your salary.
>> And her insurance company is refusing to pay for the damage.
Wait…maybe it’s covered by the squatters’ policy…yeah, that must be it…
>> I told the wife last weekend that I want to move to Victoria, Texas. That is about 100 miles southwest of here.
Yeah, but did you tell her yet about the new 12 gauge? Just chalk it up as a moving expense.
>> There are a half dozen Saudi Arabian crude oil and diesel tankers going in and out of the big Russian crude oil sea port. Each tanker holds at least a million barrels of crude oil (panamax). Some hold two million barrels and are bigger than a USA aircraft carrier.
@lynn, how long to pump out two million barrels?
>> I understand during the eclipse, Kankles sprouts leathery bat-like wings and horns. Just like she does when BJ is around.
I thought BJ was when BC and ML were around??
>> I am not a sports fan anymore, not even the individual sports I used to follow when I gave up on team sports.
I don’t follow AMA Superbike like I once did, nor do I follow competitive rock climbing.
My day seems to fill up anyway with YouTube shorts.
FIFY
>> There are a half dozen Saudi Arabian crude oil and diesel tankers going in and out of the big Russian crude oil sea port. Each tanker holds at least a million barrels of crude oil (panamax). Some hold two million barrels and are bigger than a USA aircraft carrier.
@lynn, how long to pump out two million barrels?
At least a couple of hours. Maybe half a day. It is amazingly fast.
It is multiple 24 inch or 36 inch pipes.