Brainiac

One has to wonder whether Bone Spur Samurai has even an ounce of grey matter left? So, once again, he's insulting real heroes and praising a couple of rich Jewish donor-class geezers (one dead and gone). And, of course, he lies

[I]t's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It's actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that's soldiers. They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead.

There's so much wrong with that, and the whole remark is worser. The main point being that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a perk controlled by the President's discretion. He gives it away to those he favors; if that's his ploy.

any person recommended to the President for award of the Medal or any person selected by the President upon their own initiative.
-- the wiki

It is NOT, as Bone Spur Samurai asserts, the equivalent to the (Congressional) Medal of Honor. You know, for those shot up or dead soldiers. Award of the Medal of Honor is NOT a door prize for shipping lots o Bongo Bucks to a broken down politician. It's equivalent is the Congresional Gold Medal, the other Branch's highest medal. Bone Spur Samurai really needs to use what's left of his Alzheimer's addled brain and consider: if he keeps at this, somenoe who knows how to shoot a M16 is going to put him in her sights. Bank on it.

They's Gold in Them Thar Shills

We've already seen Just Dumb Vance^©. So, why not Just Dump Vance^©?

I should sell rights to both: the DNC and the RNC, who're widely reported to be sick of The Guy already. Who would blame them? With all those ads and prints and such on both sides, I'd have enough to get a boat next to the Busted Flush. Ah, Florida Man.

But, thoughts of vast wealth streaming through my artificial brain made me reconsider why it is that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 would hang such a pair of concrete overshoes off his bone spurred patent leathers? And, as a bolt out of the Blue, it was clear. If, by some subterfuge, he did get back in the White House, impeachment will be just a wink and a nod away. How to build a moat? And, of course, the answer is simple: a Veep that is so far more unhinged, that not even AOC would go the distance. The Devil you know is better than the Devil You Don't. Impeachment insurance.

By The Numbers - part the sixty fifth

Someone needs to clue Just Dumb Vance^© into some history and demographics. "Me, teacher! Me, teacher!!".

Humbly, I leap into the breach. Just Dumb Vance keeps prattlingly on about the glory of breeding. More people, preferably fishbelly White, not cows and pigs. As most of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, he is either blythely ignorant or just dumb. Mother Earth is in no need of more humans. Mother Earth has a finite caring capacity, full stop. We're perilously close to that carrying capacity today; his kids will live in a world beyond that. Their kids will live in poverty hell. Hot and burning kind, not the ice at the bottom of hell as Dante wrote. The 1% will only notice that something has gone wrong when all their amassed wealth can't buy them clean water, air, survivable temperature, and abundant energy stocks. Way past too late, buddy.

So, where does mass breeding myth come from? Well the Judeo-Christian Bible, of course. Specifically, Genesis and the tale of Onan. And it ain't what the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want you to think.

This act is detailed as retribution for being "displeasing in the sight of Lord". Onan's crime is often misinterpreted to be masturbation but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

Of course, levirate marriage no longer exists (the wiki), outside of Shithole Countries. Or, may be in Appalachia it still happens. Just Dumb Vance could tell us. The point being that this "spilling seed" prohibition is written in Genesis, about 400s BC. And, if you read, it really says nothing about demanding mass breeding, at all. But the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts try to enforce it that way.

So, how low was the people meter back then?
-- 100 to 162 millions
So, how high is the people meter these days?
-- 8,162 millions

And, of course that mantra of the social Darwinist cabal remains true: "the rich get richer and the poor have kids". There's even a long essay in today's (dead trees version) NYT about how crypto has been taken into oligopoly land; no central control? Not hardly. Didn't take long, now did it?

It doesn't pay to contradict the ultimate truth:
The world is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D. [math stats, Iowa State]/1980

Ingrates - part the second

Yet again, we find some on the Mealy Mouthed Left trying to suck the dicks of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts. This time it was cancelling "Morning Joe", on the putative reason that MSNBC would have first-chairs wall-to-wall coverage of the failed wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 kill shot.

Didn't happen, and once again The Brass at NBC News look like ineffectual MAGA dick suckers.

Not to mention yet more reporting on the ingrates in the MAGA Red States taking credit for the IRA support these shitkicker counties are getting. It's just stupid to be nice to folks who've been ingrates since FDR. They're not going to change, or vote Blue. When the USofA goes to hell in a handbasket, some charismatic Darkie Democrat will be dragged into cleaning up the shitstorm just like always?

"Since House Republicans have no record of accomplishments, they are trying to falsely take credit for ones that aren't theirs," said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for House Democrats' campaign arm. "This is exactly the sort of hypocritical behavior that the public hates, and the DCCC will be sure to remind voters of Republicans' do-nothing agenda between now and November."

And, by the bye, it was 104 in DC a couple of days later. As Billy Joe Bob, a close buddy of mine says, "dey ain't no such a ting as climate change! God said he won't flood the earth again, and I guess dat means he won't fry us like a Tanksgibbin turkey, either!" Gotta love Billy Joe Bob. The wonders of Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts education.

Billy Joe Bob doesn't read or see much news that isn't Fox or Newsmax, so I guess he's not heard about Houston.

"Areas that fail to protect local quality of life in the face of extreme events will suffer a 'brain drain' as people and jobs will migrate to relatively safer areas," one of the authors of the study, Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of Southern California, said in an email.

Well, no shit Sherlock. Yes, it does cost more to have competent governance. And yes, that governance is almost always funded on a progressive structure because just soaking the poor isn't fruitful enough. Did you know that the first federal income tax was on only the top 10%?

In 1894, Democrats in Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman tariff, which imposed the first peacetime income tax. The rate was 2% on income over $4,000, which meant fewer than 10% of households would pay any.

With the 16th amendment, the result was about the same. The Red State ingrates!

Damn Lazy Bureaucrats!

It likely comes as no surprise that I live in the True Blue Northeast. On the other hand, the Shithole County that I actually live in is dripping blood Red. It's tons of fun. It happens that Wifey has a nearly lifelong friend who is a whisky heir in Canada. There are lots of them, going back to at least Prohibition. Had it not been for that rank stupidity, Canada might still be a frozen shithole country.

We've been granted adoption should wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 succeed. Well, I dug out my passport, and Yikes!! Expired Aug. 2019!! Well, that gives five years to renew, which is nearly gone. So I trundled off to the Post Office, expired passport, picture, paper, and check in hand the end of July. The clerk asked if I was traveling soon, and I said no. Couldn't risk saying the real reason, of course. I asked how long it takes, and he said four to six weeks for the new one, and the old one returned a week or two after. I said, fine. As long as it's before November. Which it would be. Off it all went.

Well, boy howdy! New passport the beginning of the week and old one yesterday!! How could that be? It appears that State does triage, on renewals at least. While I got the application in some weeks from the deadline, the new passport has an issue date the beginning of August. I surmise that the new issue date has to align with expiration date + 5 years, not that the date of application has to align and the issue date is whatever the processing makes it to be. So, rather than send the pile back and forcing me to get a brand spanking new passport, they did the smart thing and process renewals (at least) in time to fit the date window.

These damn bureaucrats are such lazy idiots!! Right?

Water Madness

It was just over 3 years ago that water diversion became a topic in these here parts. Well, so it is again.

This go-round seeks to divert Great Lakes water, rather than Mississippi river, to water the Central Valley of California. Which valley is said to produce 25% of USofA's agriculture. I suspect the midwest cereal farmers might dispute that, but that's another episode. The Central Valley is mostly truck farms. Some big, but not staple foods.

The author points to, among other crops, almonds. It turns out that almonds (mentioned before in these essays) require a prodigious amount of water. Hard to see where it goes, given that almonds are more like rocks than tomatoes. So, an alternative to shipping Great Lakes water to CA, is to cut down all those fucking almond trees. It isn't as if almonds are a staple food, now are they? They are, by and large, an upper-class candy. We need a one-day dictator to raze those almond farms! You can have more people or more almond trees; ya caint have both. In due time, neither more.

If you look closely, the author is in one of those Desert States that covet thy neighbors' water. I guess all that sun, and no shade, turns people Red. These thoroughly Red States are always taking from the Blue States, since they are 'growing' and deserve others' resources. Not that it ever made sense to populate deserts and haul water in from great distances in the first place. I saw "Chinatown". Did you? FDR might have done the country a better long-term solid by killing Hoover Dam and the stupidity of building cities and farms in goddamn Deserts. It gets tiring after a while.

For comparison, the Colonial Pipeline runs from Houston, TX to Linden, NJ. I can't find the end-to-end distance, only system pipe total length of 5,500 miles. But map programs show that to be ~1,600 miles. So, that's the current state of the art.

So, let's spitball the problem. The easiest way to move the Great Lakes to the Central Valley is to backfill the Colorado; just use the river's right-of-way. The straightline distance from Chicago (not that we'd start the pipeline along Lake Shore Dr., of course) to the headwater is 989 miles in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not that we could go like a flying bird. The current driving distance (which is a decent surrogate, since the highway folks had to work around messy spots, first) is ~1,000 miles. Since, I'll guess, the map programs use Interstates as much as feasible, we might speculate that this pipeline could be built, largely, in the median of said Interstates on stanchions just like oil pipelines.

Mother Nature does offer up a problem: hydrocarbons don't freeze at 32^°, but water does. The oil pipes are heated and massively insulted, since crude does slow down a bit if it cools. So, we'll need the engineers to optimize speed (moving water doesn't freeze at 32^°, but somewhat lower depending on thermodynamics) versus heating the water. This assumes, of course, that the pipeline is above ground. Burying such a large pipe below the frost line the whole way is another option; cost and time difference are likely to the moon. And, of course, the engineers will take into account the properies of water vs. oil.

Now for something completely different. Who pays? The pipeline itself will be Socialist just as Hoover Dam (and most, if not all, of the many other dams on the Colorado) was. But how much should the Blue states soak the Red state fools to water their lawns and golf courses and swimming pools? Lots o Bongo Bucks is my suggestion. Enough to force them to choose among golf courses and almond trees and more houses for more rednecks.

The author belies an ignorance: all surface water is groundwater. Those rivers and lakes and streams and ponds are fed by groundwater. It's called a "headwater" for a reason. Yes, intelligent states (mostly Blue) have reservoirs supported by watersheds, which do what the word implies: send rain into the reservoir. But that's just a faster way to claim the water. Absent the watershed structure, rain percolates down to the watertable and, voila, groundwater.

There's one final issue. Not all underground water is equal. Some (many? most?) aquifers store what's called paleo-water. The most well known is the Ogallala. Such water sources aren't easily, or at all, replenished in real time, due to the geologic cap on the aquifer.

The aquifer is composed of unconsolidated alluvial deposits. Groundwater in this aquifer has been dated to have been deposited in the humid time following the last glacial maximum. In much of the aquifer's area, an impermeable layer of calcrete prevents precipitation from infiltrating. In other regions of the aquifer, some relatively small rates of recharge have been measured.

You don't miss your water until the well's run dry.

Some Assembly Required

Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly line method of manufacture, that was about 1853, but Henry is the avatar for its use. The Boeing door plug saga is a lesson in doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Or, may haps, doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

Years ago, Volvo among a few others, tried building cars in situ with a dedicated cadre of workers who did most of the assembly tasks as a unit. The effort was abandoned rather quickly.

If all goes as planned, the plant will be organized into work teams - each of which will ultimately assemble a complete car by itself.

Now, it can be argued that the assembly line method is the most efficient way to build widgets.

Ford was inspired by the meat-packing houses of Chicago and a grain mill conveyor belt he had seen. If he brought the work to the workers, they spent less time moving about. Then he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the Model T into 84 distinct steps. Each worker was trained to do just one of these steps. Ford called in Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific management," to do time and motion studies to determine the exact speed at which the work should proceed and the exact motions workers should use to accomplish their tasks.
[my emphasis]

For what it's worth, Taylor is infamous for the art of de-humanizing labor.

It can be argued that assembly line manufacture really only works when the widget is actually made in an in situ linear process, the widget moved step by step to the next task. Today's autos are built with an even more capitalized assembly line. The key to success is that each task point is limited and specific. The 737 has an estimated 500,000 individual parts. A car about 30,000. And, of course, a car can be assembled in a traveling assembly line.

One might wonder whether aircraft assembly is amenable to the method. Based on today's reporting (and earlier similar), Boeing's method rely heavily, if not exclusively, on ad hoc manual reporting, "paperwork", to keep track of the status of a plane. That's not really assembly line method.

As it happens, I am addicted to a Canadian series, "Air Disasters", which tells the stories of airplane crashes (you thought it was about mahjong games?). More than a few incidents are driven by maintenance work which didn't keep proper paperwork and let the aircraft crash. Maintenance isn't done in an assembly line fashion, and when the work exceeds a shift and/or team, paperwork must follow the plane. No paperwork, no task completed, no part installed. It appears that aircraft manufacture has the same issue.

What happened with this 737 is that, according to the existing record, the removal and replacement of the plug door was done by multiple groups doing a single task; single from the outsider's point of view. In particular, hard to believe, is that the group which put the plug door back in the fuselage, wasn't tasked to bolt it in. Now, the assembly line method is based on reducing the work done in each task to the minimum possible. But here we find a case, if true, that the following group(s) can only know to replace the bolts if there's paperwork in the flow to tell them to. It's not clear from my reading of the record whether the replaced door plug was such that the missing bolts were not viewable; that is, was the interior panel set in place at the time the door plug was re-fitted?

Deming said that the best policy is to do it right the first time. From the report, we get this

To avoid the problem in the future, Boeing is considering adding a warning light in the cockpit that would alert pilots if the door plug moves even a little bit — well before it could blow out in the kind of accident that occurred on the Alaska Air flight. Since it is a known phenomenon that aircraft fuselages flex during pressurization cycles, won't such an alarm fire every flight?

Given how the door plug eventually failed, after ~150 flights, one might wonder whether such a warning light would do any good? If the plane is at 35,000 feet, and the warning light flashes, how much time would the pilot have to get the plane back on the ground before the door plug flew away? A second? A millisecond? Stupid.

It would appear that calling aircraft manufacture an "assembly line" process has led the industry to complacency. Since it's an assembly line, then we must know that a plane can't get from Step X to Step X+1 without Step X being completed, by definition. Guess not.