ArtieShaw

Far as I know it’s just the one song by Vincent E.L. And it’s, uh, not serious. But kinda fun.

Fuck the fire department
Dropping by unannounced just to fry your apartment
If they can’t find a fire they’re like “Why don’t we start them?”
I’m tired of arson
Fuck the fire department

I cry out in bargaining, eyes to the garden
Begging release from the fire department
I might get a pardon if I do what they ask of me
Act passively
And don’t do anything drastically

Clap at their pageantry, bow and scrape
Say it’s sour grapes from people out of shape
You’re here for our sake
And we’re grateful for all you do
You’re still gonna burn my house down, aren’t you?

I’m out of house, home, and every single possession
Out of the frying pan and into depression
Escaped physical aggression
Into fiscal oppression
Still don’t know what they meant by
“Let this be a lesson!”

We’re living in an infernocracy
Things are not how we
Think they ought to be
It’s a mockery but I ain’t laughing
My world’s on fire and I’m dying gasping

For me, it was an accident. I had a degree in a hard science, but realized that academia would drive me mad. My first job was in a relatively small industry and I just kept on with it until I knew the requirements to making a safe and quality product.

The fear of being fired exists, but you have to know when and where to ask those questions. I ask our vendors whether their employees have a right to form a union if they want one, for example. I also know that our plant managers are deeply opposed to our own employees having that option.

Eventually that question is going to come up. It’ll probably come from a consultant that we hire to evaluate us. It won’t be me unless there’s a situation where it would be awkward not to ask about it. For example, if an HR rep is dumb enough to tell us we’re perfectly free in that regard, I’d be sorely tempted to ask when that policy changed.

ES&G (Environmental, Social, & Governance) policies are starting to become a common thing. They seem to have started at large corporations and they, in turn, drive their smaller partners to adopt similar policies. They want to present a face of sustainable and accountable practices, free from corruption, blah blah blah.

I work for a medium to small company and it has become part of my job to ask awkward questions of our vendors. Our corporate customers are pressing us on our practices, and we press our vendors as part of a “sustainable and ethical supply chain”. Not all companies are well prepared to answer these questions, but some are. In general, the US lags behind Asia and Europe when it comes to this. At least in my industry. So that’s a big caveat.

How do we know they’re not lying? One tool is that independent third party auditors can assess a company and gauge its strengths and weaknesses. (Ecovadis is a name I’ve seen many times during these discussions, but there are others.) These auditors live or die by their reputations, so they have an interest in staying honest.

In the case of these nitrogen vendors (one of which is used by my employer), this is an easy ES&G win. The amount of nitrogen sold to executioners is vanishingly small, whereas we buy it by the tanker. It’s definitely on the short list of awkward questions I would ask them.

The term ‘greenwashing’ will come up. And trust me, because I’m a cynical bitch with a hair-trigger bullshit meter, I’ve used it myself. But I’m cautiously optimistic that questions like this can move companies in a better direction. Part of that has to do with the look of confusion and horror when I visit vendors in deep red states and start asking questions about labor, safety, and the environmental impact of their operations. They don’t want to do waste or emissions remediation, but they also don’t want to lose our business. (I’m honestly enjoying this new direction my work is taking.)

Good guess. The golf course isn’t doing any irrigation in February.

He was truly a Superb Owl.

@superbowl

In the US I’d count action by the national guard. We had one of those in 1970, but the kids didn’t put up much of a resistance so it wasn’t a prolonged battle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

There may be others, but this springs to mind.

I fly a lot for work and I also do a fair bit of failure point and risk analysis as part of my job, so this is interesting to me in a couple of ways. Airports and airlines honestly do a decent job of checking that the people on the plane are the ones who are supposed to be there. A failure like this is reasonably unusual.

• she got through physical security (baggage and carry-on checks)
• to accomplish that, all she had to do was dodge the ID and boarding pass check.

That seems pretty feasible. If she was dressed vaguely like an employee it might have helped, but that’s just speculation. We’ve all seen the gorilla walk through the ball game - after we were told to look for him - so it’s not strictly necessary.

I have a harder time understanding how she could have boarded through the passenger line where they scan the passes.

I also have a slightly harder time understanding how she could have found a plane with open seats. I can view a seat map 12 hours ahead of boarding and see a plane with 10 open seats. When it comes time to board they’re completely full. But - part of this is because the airline shuttles regional pilots to their main hub via any available seat and they do it at the last minute. And here’s my further speculation: a flight from Nashville to LA is a long haul so this shuttling probably wouldn’t come into play. If she checked seat availability in advance, it probably would have been accurate and she could probably help herself to a seat that appeared open.

The final hurdle seems to be the one that caught her. The article doesn’t say exactly, but it says that authorities were waiting on the ground. Stewards have a flight manifest that lists every passenger by name and by seat. On rare occasions I’ve seen them checking the manifest as passengers board - for example, on overbooked flights where they’ve sold steward seats for take off and landing to passengers and they expect stewards to squat in the aisle. I’ve also heard anecdotally that if you’re acting like a weirdo they’ll look up who you are.

tldr: I could (and do!) give zero fucks about who won Sunday’s sports match, but can conceive of why it might be news, of of interest, to some people.

What made the difference for me was buying a really nice reusable bag. There’s a brand called Flip and Tumble. They’ll hold an absurd amount of stuff (something like 35lbs, if I remember correctly) and fold down into something smaller than a tennis ball. I keep two in the bottom of my purse and never need a bag. They are expensive (about $18 US), but I’ve had mine for almost 15 years.

This happened during street festivities for lunar new year, so a lot of people are connecting the dots. They don’t mention that the car was aggressively trying to drive through a crowd, but it seems like it was trying to make its way through a crowd.

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/why-did-a-san-francisco-crowd-light-waymos-driverless-vehicle-on-fire/

Multiple witnesses said Waymo’s navigation technology became confused by festivities and fireworks that were lit to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Witness Anirudh Koul said the driverless car “got stuck immediately in front.”

Another witness said the car’s presence in the middle of Chinatown’s celebrations triggered frustrations in the crowd. “You could feel the frustration when people were just trying to celebrate,” she told KRON4.

Thanks for digging into this a little further. It seems like small town news stories that get national attention don’t always paint a full picture, particularly when there’s an obvious moral high ground and an obvious victim or villain. I had several questions, because the story wasn’t adding up.

What sort of monster would object to sheltering homeless in a cold snap? The entire city government, including the fire department?

There’s an established shelter next door. Why did no one object to that? <thanks for answering this one, btw>

Since when did small towns in northwest Ohio start persecuting churches for no apparent reason? (for anyone out of the US, this population tends to be deep red GOP, very devout churchgoers, etc.)

This isn’t the first time there has been a cold spell. It happens at least once a year in January or February. Do the homeless in this tiny town just freeze to death every year?

There’s clearly a lot more to the story, but with national coverage like this I’d guess they were able to take in enough donations to cover basic repairs to the property.

Oh - these were the three friends found dead after being missing two days. And the homeowner didn’t know that they were in his backyard.

It was strange for sure, particularly as there was no obvious cause of death when they were found. I mean, if three people show up dead together in a backyard, that’s going to make the news.

On the other hand, it’s a really bad idea to be locked into a single source for your raw materials. It sounds like Tran was trying to mitigate that risk in a fairly reasonable way. If he can buy and sell from other farmers, there’s a buffer if the OG farm can’t deliver. And he could also continue to use the OG farm as primary supplier, while selling off excess chilis to other producers.

All of this is why supply contracts and backup supply chain plans exist. Risk mitigation is normal. Like they said near the end of the article, businesses sometimes need to have an adult in the room.

Oddly enough, there’s an established homeless shelter right next door to this church. Based on their sign and name, they’re also faith based. Were they full? Did they turn some people away for reasons of their own?

I’m just very curious to hear more.

If it came down to figuring out the three dodecahedrons or using the communal sponge on a stick, I’d take the risk with the dodecahedrons.

No, they don’t cause damage on their own. Birds get a windfall of big nutritious bugs. Humans might be a little creeped out.

There was a televised special about this guy, and it’s wild from start to finish. He comes across as a weird mix of clever and dumb, charming and disgusting. Mostly the latter and the latter, but I have the benefit of knowing about him beforehand. His victims didn’t.

If I remember correctly, it was his absurdist need to fake (and publicize!) his own death that led people in the US to him. He literally reached out to multiple news orgs in his home state to say that he was 100% dead, even though no one had asked. I guess the moral is that if you’re going to dangle something that weird in front of reporters, expect them to follow up.

Thank you.

I don’t have the patience or tact to offer thoughtful and gentle explanations (as you did) when it’s “pointed out” that many people from the region could be considered Semitic.

It’s very much the sort of argument my clever nephew might make. He’s a smart kid, but he hasn’t gotten to the point where he can understand that a clever fact is not necessarily in any way relevant to a complex problem. And certainly not a devastating argument that can simply stop everyone in their mad mutual desire for destruction.

“Well, shit. We were all Semites the whole time???”

In any case, thanks.

A colleague of mine claims to be friends with some game officials. He also claims that they will privately acknowledge that there’s a small native population of cougars in areas south and east of the Great Lakes. They are strongly dis-incentivized to acknowledge this publicly for a number of reasons.

1. Cougars in Ohio? That probably means that they’re some sort of sub-species with endangered status.
2. Scary for locals? Sure. But the odds of an attack on human by a privacy-liking predator (who have plenty of tasty deer to eat) are vanishingly small.

Basically, it just means a lot of paperwork and hassle for them with little to no positive effect.

In the unlikely event one is killed and the carcass can’t be denied, it’s always a “rogue male who wandered out of their native habitat in the UP or Canada somewhere.” (Somehow swimming solo across lakes Michigan and Eerie, or maybe hitching a ride on a ferryboat seems more reasonable than the obvious conclusion that there is a small breeding population).

ETA - On one hiking trip in Ohio we found a deer’s spine and pelvis up in a tree, about 8 feet off the ground. Maybe a human put it there, but I can’t think of any animal (that’s supposed to be here) that would have. Weird shit.

Anecdotally, the people I know who bitch about this sort of thing are usually the people who no one wants to interact with.

I mean, maybe if you weren’t a screeching harpy who can’t let anyone finish a sentence, you wouldn’t find this to be a problem, Noreen. (Noreen is the_worst_.)

It’s funny how small towns offer a sense of security, even if it isn’t really warranted.

We moved to a small town about 15 years ago. It was right after a fairly brutal murder of a local teen. And it was just a few years after the murder of a local man by his roommate. That one didn’t get as much coverage, but he murdered him with an ashtray in a fit of anger. Locals were still happy to tell us that no one locks their doors.

Since then, we’ve had two double murders, a SWAT situation where four neighboring police forces came to town to help local police kill the guy barricaded inside his home, and a sad story of a young man who went missing in December and was found murdered the next spring. There was also the time a local man randomly attacked two out-of-town women with a baseball bat and was stabbed with a screwdriver by a neighbor. And I feel like I’m forgetting one more.

Even after all of that, police had to call everyone in town and tell them to lock their damn doors after a rash of burglaries. The thieves were just walking around trying doors at random and being very successful.

Granted - my town is unlike the one in the article because it seems like the attacks in Nebraska were both random. That would be unnerving. What I do find funny (in the WTF sense) is that every time my town has another murder, double murder, or riot, the people seem to forget all the ones that came before. For a town of 3000 people our per capita murder rate must be pretty high, but everyone feels totally safe.