Bob_Church

When I worked at the phone company it was obvious that most bosses became bosses so they could boss people around. It was a world of assholes. When I then went to Ohio University I found myself working for bosses who were only bosses because the paperwork said so. They didn't want to be bosses and I made it a point not to bother them. It was great.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure there have been reports of chunks of frozen human waste falling out of the sky in the past. These planes fly as high as 41K feet or so. Maybe they changed that practice. But weren't those always blamed on leaking seals or something? The stuff leaks, freezes up, breaks off and becomes a blue bomb. But not intentionally.

I keep pinching myself but I don't wake up.

In the old pre-dereg days this wouldn't have been a problem. They could have just used the ice buckets for the champagne as toilets.

Le Carre’ last few books have been take it or leave it with the possible exception of The Pigeon Tunnel, his autobiography. It all leaves me yearning for the good old days of Smiley and Peter and the lot. Well, they’re back, all of them. 'A Legacy of Spies' is right up there with 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' and in fact is intertwined with it. What happens when the "Whatever it takes" days of the Cold War meet the litigious 21st Century where lawyers are scarier than Stasi agents? Check it out, it’s great stuff especially for these bitter cold nights.

Up until recently (for some of us and certain values of recent) women had a huge disadvantage due to the equipment. It was very very heavy and in some ways took a lot of strength to use. Those days are over now, modern gear is too small and lightweight to hold you back and the truth has become apparent. Women are inherently better skydivers than men.

Since I don't do tandems I'd often be hanging around and notice activity at manifest. I saw some t/m being egotistic jerks to the manifest people and some who were nice. I was amazed at how the jerks never seemed to catch the correlation between who got who as tandem students.

Help us Senator Pelosi!!! Who? Me?

Sort of off topic but I have to wonder how much grass roots support DACA lost with this downright embarrassing fiasco. http://kron4.com/2017/09/18/young-immigrants-shout-down-democratic-leader-nancy-pelosi-in-san-francisco/

Even then, the page is so crude it looks like something whipped out just to test the functions, where nobody went back to design the "real" page before the system was rolled out. I kept thinking it was a page from the system log, but nope.

Since there are several alerts there, and I wouldn't want to be the person who sent out a false alarm for a tidal wave either, I think they should have a sign next to it with a word that has to match the condition you've selected. incoming missile alert selected. enter MISSILE to confirm. Tidal wave warning selected. enter BIGWAVE to confirm and so on.

Good point. Agreed. (I like Spam, BTW) We ate way too much government cheese and government meat when I was growing up. I got sick of spam and velveta almost before I ever had spam or velveta. Every time Union Carbide was on strike or had a layoff we got boxes of those shiny metal cans.

Good point.

And a lot of the problems of privatization aren't limited to privatized prisons. Even state prisons are contracting out things like food services and health care with pretty much the results you'd expect. Food services, for instance. By hiring an outside company you now feed the inmates while turning a profit which means something has to give. That something tends to be the food itself, which is sort of like an old joke in that it's not fit to eat and there isn't enough of it. Inmates go hungry so they they use the money the earn or is sent to them to buy snacks from the prison at prices that make truck stops seem cheap. So the prison saves money on food services then makes money selling the inmates junk they buy to keep from going hungry. In West Virginia they serve a lot of meatloaf, but a serving is the size of half a slice of white bread. Meals used to be the one thing they looked forward to.

And aside from the inmates being farmed out, they do just about all of the work in the prison from cleaning, doing the prison laundry and the big one of course, cooking and serving the meals. It can get complicated when they refuse to work.

I was wondering because threatening to hit the West Coast or the mainland in general is one thing, but Hawaii is a small spot in a huge ocean.

I wonder what NK would use for navigation. Is the Pentagon standing by to mess with GPS if they detect a launch?

My first wife's parents were military and one way you could tell was her Mother serving spam several times a week.

There's not a lot to go on but it looks as though NK has a knockoff of the W80, which makes sense after that fiasco with Lee. So we're talking about a thermonuclear weapon with the potential, depending on how good a job they do copying it, of 150kt that weighs less than three hundred pounds and fits into the nose of a cruise missile. With a little grunting a person could pick one up and set it in the passenger seat of a VW bug, so it's a real threat.

Didn't Johnston Atoll hit ITSELF with missiles a few times? Or at least had a few that blew up on the pad. Thor missiles if I remember correctly.

It will be interesting to see, if they ever tell us, how long ago they switched from analog to digital. "Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.” He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert."

I don't think so. By the time he consulted his aides and found out that, yes, Hawaii is in the US they had it worked out as a false alarm.

As to how this happened, this is my guess based on having seen the results of way too many just out of school, first real job, techs. You know, the ones who always wear polo shirts and a sneer. Boss being shown around "and down here is where our emergency alert is, all you do is flip up the toggle then push the button, uh, wait, what's all this?" New Tech "that button system? And, give me a break, but a toggle? What is this, the 60s or a museum? No, I've installed a new system where you not only don't have to push a button or, for god's sake, flip a toggle. Use the app, I put a copy on our server, didn't you read my email, but using the app I wrote you can activate this from wherever you are, see you would just.. uh, oops." Boss "oops, what do you mean oops?" New Tech "well sir, there are always going to be some delays and bugs with any new....." Boss "what do you mean OOPS?" New Tech "Sir, I don't think it's fair to condemn the entire system over one error."

If you happen to need a Quasar 2 manual I have a digitized version I can put up for you.

I've sworn that the next time I move it will be to a retirement home that only allows one suitcase.