That's when they do their heavy drinking.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Printable View
That's when they do their heavy drinking.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Yeah, they drink like a fish.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
I just heard a weather junky say that January 2018 saw very similar weather patterns that ended in some serious mudslides in California. It sounds like part of a regular cycle of wildfires followed a bit later by heavy rains for a short interval producing slides in the denuded hills.
Yeah, though I'm not sure it's entirely novel.
The odd behavior of rivers and streams out here was one of the biggest differences I noticed when compared to the east. We have blow outs. How these happen isn't clear, as it doesn't take particularly excessive rain. Any given thunderstorm can cause one, though if we DO get excessive rain, then they become pretty much certain. In a blowout, a stream that may have been running without incident for decades, will suddenly scour down into the ground, moving vast quantities of mud and rock down the hills.
Blowouts can move enough mud and rock to dam significant rivers. I was chatting with some rafters one time, when one of them told a story about rafting the Middle Fork Salmon River, a whitewater stream that is so famous that I heard about it being world famous while I was growing up in NH. It's not a small river, though not Grand Canyon size. This rafter was moving down the swift river when he hit a lake. That river doesn't have any lakes, so hitting a lake surprised him considerably. Once he rowed across it, he found a few other rafters looking at the debris field brought down by a blowout that had completely dammed the river. Of course, that wasn't going to last, and once the river topped the debris field, it would start scouring down. That would result in a new, steep, rapid that would be changing almost by the minute. Rather an interesting challenge for the rafters.
We have been putting much better satellites up for weather analysis - especially in the area of finer details like water vapor content globally.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
I've known about pineapple express weather patterns probably since 1994 - geek 101 going on here, lol!
The atmosphere is vaping.
If that is the blowout I am thinking about, Outdoor Idaho had a segment on that one. The Forest Service wound up using a minimal amount of explosives to blow up the logjam and allow the rafters (quite a few groups, actually) to proceed down river.Quote:
Blowouts can move enough mud and rock to dam significant rivers. I was chatting with some rafters one time, when one of them told a story about rafting the Middle Fork Salmon River, a whitewater stream that is so famous that I heard about it being world famous while I was growing up in NH. It's not a small river, though not Grand Canyon size. This rafter was moving down the swift river when he hit a lake. That river doesn't have any lakes, so hitting a lake surprised him considerably. Once he rowed across it, he found a few other rafters looking at the debris field brought down by a blowout that had completely dammed the river. Of course, that wasn't going to last, and once the river topped the debris field, it would start scouring down. That would result in a new, steep, rapid that would be changing almost by the minute. Rather an interesting challenge for the rafters.
Well, after all it is high above us!Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
It's been hitting the iPot again?
What's going on with car washes? I normally do a spray down and rinse in a coin-op high pressure stall place near me.
A few days ago I opted for an oil change at a place that used to be part of a major chain but seems to have been sold to an independent operator. With a promo coupon it was far less than I normally pay, and afterward they gave me a receipt good for a car wash in the next 30 days.
It said it was for a "Super Duper" wash and wax, but when I rolled up the greeter asked if I wanted to upgrade to "Cosmic" for 2 dollars. I figured, why not? And then it got weird from there.
This music started, and 4 guys came out with buckets and squeegees to do an initial soap and rise of the windows. Then one guy guided me into the conveyor and yelled "put it in neutral and take your foot off the brake" and things really got weird. The music switched to something between hard rock and a circus tune and colored lasers started providing a show as my car moved through the tunnel.
I know I live in the sticks, but the absurdity had me laughing through to the end. Is this just new local weirdness, or a normal thing urbanites yawn at?
I can imagine people with little kids bringing them along for the show as a sort of mini theme park ride.
Sounds like your not their target demographic. lol
I've heard music at car washes before but usually once your inside the wash the machines drown out the music. Never seen lasers at a car wash. Was it a "Cosmic" experience??
All I could think of the whole time was a Family Guy meme they used to use from time to time with Stewie Griffin dancing in some gay disco club. I think they also had one where an airliner was "gay jacked" to Miami.
Found it:
https://youtu.be/tsN4u5UZqno
Pfffft. If they didn't give you mushrooms with that, they weren't really trying.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
I'm still not sure if this carnival atmosphere is common elsewhere and just coming here now... or whether the guy operating this place is just hazing new hires to get them to demonstrate a work ethic as they train part time to work the oil change pits.
On a slightly more serious note, this does seem to be a trend, and I don't understand it, either. I'm used to the simple car washes attached to gas stations where you get an option for a discounted car wash when you fill up. However, there are also a bunch of places that sound a whole lot more
That's as far as I got with a reply before my computer got bricked by an update. Now it's hours later, Dil managed a response in-between, but I might as well finish the thought.
What I was saying was that there are a bunch of places out here that sound a whole lot more like what you described. They tend to have a 50's vibe to their outside, but there's lots of neon lighting and vibrant colors. I have no idea what that's about, though I did try one and got an exceptionally clean car out of it. I screwed up and bought more than I expected. In fact, they ended up taking a couple hours to the point where I had to interrupt and say that I absolutely had to have the car back so that I could get to a meeting two hours away. They gave me a rain check to finish the cleaning. When I redeemed the rain check, they cleaned the whole car again. I think they must have spent over five hours total cleaning that car. The result was a car that was probably cleaner than the day it came out of the factory.
No laser show, though.
Never had that round my way. I'm kinda jealous.
What annoys the heck out of me is one of the car washes that has a revolving cylinder at the top of their sign, which has their name and logo on it. This is by a lengthy stop light, so one gets an opportunity to contemplate it. That just gives a petty annoyance time to grow.
The annoyance is that the cylinder is revolving backwards. It should be rotating in the direction we read, so that the name is progressively revealed, but it's rotating backwards such that the end of the name shows first, followed by the rest of the name.
On a totally unrelated note, predictive typing is getting kind of amazing. This whole post resulted from typing a single letter.
That's an exaggeration, but it was feeling that way. I got to the 'totally', and got the 'unrelated note' for free. The preceding post was even more absurd.
Am I that predictable? In fact, with that, once I typed the 'Am' I was offered 'the only one' for free. I did not accept.
Your experience sounds more like an "auto detailing" operation to me. I was just talking about $5 to $10 car wash & wax. They also have self-serve coin-op vacuum cleaning, but nothing where they do your nails and fluff your bottom while they clean inside your car. I'm not saying those aren't around here somewhere too, I just haven't been there.
We got a new food truck licensed to open daily in a vacant storefront parking lot. Some sort of chicken and pizza from the flyer stuck in my door.
That makes two now. I assume that is coming from the razing of our little business district to put up blocks of retirement cells, er, apartments. Zoning policy seems to have gone mad.
My experience WAS a detailing one, but the same place does the wash and wax option that you described, as well. That particular place has an inside lobby where you can watch your car go through the process. They offer fuller service than that. In fact, they had a range of options, and I just chose the wrong one. They sure did a good job, though, so I got my money's worth.
That almost sounds like something that could be combined with an adjacent shopping experience. Maybe something like the dollar store variants that sells items closer to $5. Throw in a light dining option like a burrito bar and coffee shop and you have everything that EV owners are claiming public charging centers will be offering.
The public charging thing seems to be getting weird. Some of them are having problems with people leaving cars beyond an 80% charge or even 100% charge, though few are charging a penalty for tying up a slot yet. Almost makes me think there is room to add valet charging to the wash-o-rama mini-malls I described. Shop and consume and lounge until they text you, etc.
That makes sense. If they aren't charging a fee for leaving your car at the charging station, they've essentially created free parking with a benefit.
The place where I got the detailing has a Mongolian BBQ attached to it, so getting a meal while you wait is certainly an option.
I was almost in a minor air traffic accident on Monday. A plane went off the runway in Boise. Nobody was hurt, and the thing is a bit of a mystery, since the temperatures were above freezing and the ground was dry, but it happened. I was going to be on that plane, except that I got an earlier flight.
On the one hand, I would have had a good story. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have gotten home until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Glad I missed that.
The post race was sinking too far down the page, I had to bring it back up without talking about unicorn farts.
Oops.
Predictive hyping?
Fake news
I was sure I had something clever and pithy to say, but I guess I dreamed that. I remember being able to fly too, so maybe it was all the same dream.
Lol - thank you for that!Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
My level of I-don't-give-a-s#at is so high right now! Attached pic something I find funny and post online - probably making my friends and relatives think I'm nuts. Who cares...
Is this funny to anyone else? Or am I crossing some line here? I've got way worse...
Who is that? If knowing who it is is part of the joke, I guess I'd have to know who it is, and I don't.
I had a dream that I got bitten by a carnivorous deer. That was strange.
That's Greta Thunberg. She is a tool of the elite used to promote environmentalist propaganda.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
So are you, though not environmentalist propaganda, just another kind.
When I was in grad school, most of the graduate students were in some form of toxicology. I was going to be studying heavy metals, till I switched to just plain fish. As it turned out, most of the grad students were looking at PAHs, in one way or another. PAH stands for Poly-Aromatic Hydrocarbons. This is a class of organic compounds characterized by multiple benzene rings. They're created in a variety of fashions, including through the flame grilling of animal proteins. They're also carcinogenic.
We didn't grill a lot of meat.
I heard she used a toaster once.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
Supposedly, according to Greta Thunberg, rain is created by cow farts, and gas stoves are the devil. :bigyello:Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
The burger Nazi says, "NO Whopper For You"Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
I could have lived out the rest my life happily with ever knowing that. Well, I will anyway. lol
lol.....shows you just how little the elites think of us if this is the best they have.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jacob Roman
Those 'elites' how many times can you think of where they pushed somebody to demand that they change? How many times can you think of where they pushed to maintain the status quo? I can't think of any of the former, but plenty of the latter.
Seconds, how many times did the elites pay their supporters to support their cause? How many times did they just motivate them by suggesting that the other side was out to get them? I can think of a few of the former, and lots of the latter.
Based on those two, I'd say that you are more likely to be a tool of the elites than some teenage gadfly.
Most people are not ready to accept that our entire reality is crafted by a select few powerful families, governments and corporations. Everything we like, everything we hate, what we consider to be right and wrong are all in one way or another influenced by them through institutions and through the media. A lot of what most people hold to be true are in fact inventions of these ruling elites. Very few opinions in the wild are naturally occurring. They were manufactured and programmed into us from birth.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
We are all tools of the elite whether we want to be or not. The only difference between us is that I see it and you don't and there is nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is meant to see it. It's just the way it is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Yeah, the 'puppetmaster' theory. That's pretty far down the rabbit hole.
Another difference is that I don't believe there is ANYBODY pulling the strings. Whether you believe it is some guy living on a cloud or some shadowy elites, it's all religion. You want to believe that SOMEBODY is in charge and that they have a purpose. It's not a very great distance from your elites to the Greek or Hindu pantheon. All you have to do is substitute supernatural beings for your elites.
It arises by chance. There is nobody in control. The elites that exist are just as surprised at creation as you are, and are trying to figure it out as well.
All we are good at is recognizing patterns. Look into the research around chess if you'd like to see more of that. If you use your intelligence to play chess, you'll be terrible. If you have played so much, and studied so much, that you can recognize patterns in the pieces, and use that ability to play chess...well, then you'll probably also be pretty bad, but some such people make up ALL the grand masters.
We are good at pattern recognition, and that's all we are good at. So, when we look at the world we assume that there must be a pattern. There must be a reason. With that assumption, we try to figure it out. It's what we are good at.
I was working on an AI that I abandoned, but which showed pretty well that there need not be a pattern. It showed that there could very well be a god, but that god could very easily not need to even know we existed for the world to look the way it does.
I suppose that another way to look at it is that there are too many elites. If nobody is in control, then everybody is in control. If the world we are living in emerges from the sum of our actions, then we are all the elites. None truly control the pattern, but with all influencing the pattern, then those who are aware they are influencing the pattern might be able to tug a bit harder to shape the pattern to their liking.
That doesn't make them elites, though. That would be like pulling on one thread in a tapestry of billions of threads. That pull might distort the pattern in locally recognizable ways, but overall, the sum of a billion threads pulling in a billion directions won't be predictable.
Furthermore, people can pull quite hard without doing so deliberately.
Even setting aside the character of the motives behind them, organizations like the WEF do actually exist. And they develop and implement plans for your life without asking your consent or even making much effort to inform you.
There are a lot of calm and thoughtful people of education and experience who have also lost any enthusiasm for your "puppet masters." Indeed, those "masters" and their gatherings and stated objectives are now spoken of sarcastically just in passing by such people.
This isn't a matter of belief. There is no argument over facts. These are not theories, but objective truths.
Do people tend to get a little hyperbolic when mentioning "them?" Sure, it's called gallows humor.
The existence of these groups is fact. What impact they have on the world is theory. Even they don't really know.
Every group that has ever formed, from your local PTA, your local churches, to the gathering in Davos, the US, the WEF, and everyone else, is attempting the exact same thing: To enhance their ability to tug on the threads by combining forces to amplify the tug they exert.
Do they work? Well, they certainly do SOMETHING. Is it what they want? Sometimes it must be. Other times, it is not. If your local church rallies people to ban some book, it sometimes gets the book banned. Sometimes it makes the book FAR more popular. Sometimes it does both. Were they right or wrong to rally people? That depends on perspective. If you don't agree with that church, then you probably think they were wrong. If you can get enough people together to disagree with the church, then you've amplified the tug that you provide counter to theirs.
All of this works at the local level, the national level, and the international level. It works to the same degree, too. That's why I don't like people talking about being 'controlled by the elites'. It's a tapestry of many strings, some you hold. If enough people act against your interests, and there aren't enough people acting for your interest, then yeah, you're going to lose out. Being passive just makes you a pawn. In most things, we're all fine with that. No person, no matter who they are, has the capacity to be able to know what they want in all decisions that impact their lives. You simply can't be fighting every fight to your best advantage. Heck, you won't even know about all of them until after they are long past.
The problem is that if five people pull hard on one issue, and you are busy on something else because there aren't enough hours in the day to pay attention to everything, then you might be impacted by that pull against your wishes. That happens. You want everything to go your way, but it doesn't. You want everybody to agree with your point of view, but they don't. They aren't passive, though. They also want things to go their way, and they have their own point of view. If they are willing to exert the effort to push that forwards, and you aren't willing to exert the effort to push back, or are unable to, then you get what you get.
One thing about being unable to: People think, "those folks are too powerful". That's what makes them the 'elites'. That's fundamentally untrue. Sure, at this time, in this place, they happen to have a greater purchase on some particular thread than you do. If your view was shared by enough people, then they wouldn't get anywhere. The problem isn't that their too strong, or that you're too weak, it's that most people don't agree with you. They either feel differently on the topic, or are indifferent.
The whole point of propaganda by some group is to hold power by pushing the population into either feeling different or indifference. If everyone is fat and happy, they aren't going to get riled up over much of anything, so those with objections are howling in the wilderness. If they have all been told that there's a guy on a cloud who will punish them for eternity if they don't aggressively push their views on you, then they aren't going to agree with you when you say you don't want their views aggressively pushed on you.
You have agency, you simply lack the capacity to use that agency in all the areas that you care about. That's true of everybody else, as well. There are no elites, there are just localized, temporary, consensus.
And that was WAYYYYY too long a post.
There's nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman.
Man, the Philadelphia Eagles killed the New York Giants.
That game was never close.
The Bengals' win over the Bills wasn't really close either, but at least it still had some action.
It's also hard to catch a greased pig.Quote:
Originally Posted by homer13j
So what happens when a greased Scotsman tries to catch a greased pig?
I felt that this was the most disappointing game of the weekend. The Giants never had all that much talent. They just performed really well at times, and that could win games. The Eagles are very talented all over the field, and they played like it.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
On the other hand, both the Bills and Bengals were really talented. That should have been a closer game. Instead it pretty much sucked. I really didn't care who won it, as I feel about the same about both of those teams, but I was expecting a thrilling game. It did not meet my expectations.
I'd like to see Purdy win the super bowl. I'm not optimistic that he will.
All I know is that I'm glad the Cowboys beat the Buccaneers and the 49er's beat the Cowboys. Now I could careless about who wins the NFC, but ultimately I'm cheering for the Bengals.
It's Joey B. and Ja'marr Chase... come on!
I'm glad that the 49er's beat the Cowboys. I'd have been shocked if the Cowboys hadn't beaten the Bucs...or if the Bucs had beaten ANYBODY they faced in the playoffs.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
I'm kind of rooting for KC over the Bengals just because KC has to be considered the underdog in that particular series. As for the SB...I'd be happy with any of the four teams, currently, so I'm just hoping for a good game with a lot of scoring.
I don't think KC is an underdog. If they were playing in Cinci they might be but not at home. I'm very curious what kind of shape Mahomes is going to be in. Yes, he finished the game but I've had a sprain like that and I walked around for hours afterwards. But the next morning the swelling and inflammation had set in. Yikes!!!!
I don't know what to think about the Cowboys. One week they look invincible and the next they look inept. Dak threw two more interception, should have been three. He looked bad, or was it the 49'ers defense that made it look that way. I'm not sure. The Raiders scored 30+ on the 9'ers.
I'm looking forward to both games. I don't watch a lot of Philly games so I'm not sure about them. They seem to be the real deal. I live about 85 miles from the 9'er so they get lots of coverage around here. My ideal out come would be a Philly/Cinci Super Bowl.
Oh man, the Eagles look unstoppable this year. It reminds me of the Colts with Manning under center.
What? No report on curling? Or doesn't Vandal Doofbook accept bets on that yet?
Hurry hard!