All very interesting and alien to me, since my concept of a "valuable" is "something that encourages someone else to rob you". But then, I grew up with Silent Generation parents so I think there's a huge amount of cultural influence on me as well.
I'd wager it's more cultural than generational. My grandfather (1928-2016) was from the Silent Generation, but he was also a third-generation American who grew up in an Irish immigrant community in New York City. After he died, we all spent several days cleaning half a century's worth of accumulated stuff out of the house, which included numerous little envelopes of cash and loaded firearms stashed in various hidey-holes.
I don't run my own business, so I can't speak to pricing/bidding issues, but I will say that in 10+ years working in the trades, I've never seen a client tell someone to run out the clock in order to "get their money's worth." It's been my experience that people just want things finished (and not necessarily finished well, just finished in general). Maybe it's just a West Coast thing?
That said, I honestly can't think of a single example of a time where a job I was on got finished substantially early. It's like a law of physics-- jobs finish on time, or late, and if you're starting to run a little ahead of schedule, the universe will rearrange itself until you're running behind schedule again.
This week's selection of odd custom Iowa license plates:
3FKNKDS (a touch of resentment, perhaps?)
HAFACAR (on a Smart Fortwo, so fairly accurate)
TR09DOR (the fact that there are numbers in the name means this probably isn't the first "Trogdor" plate in the county...)
ANUSTRT (I pray to god this is supposed to mean "a new start")
Just had an unexpectedly pleasant and fruitful phone call with my local internet provider's tech support.
Had thunder and lightning all day today, which caused a power surge, and even though it was plugged into a surge protector (along with the modem) the stupid EERO "mesh WiFi" router got fried, which knocked out my internet. After I explained the situation to tech support, instead of trying to sell me something or using a bunch of technobabble to disguise the fact that he couldn't fix the problem, the guy just said "the EERO? Oh, you don't actually need that, I can just remotely set up your modem to send out a wireless signal," which he then spent about 15 minutes setting up.
After getting everything fixed, he told me it was only his second day on the job, and he was terrified that his fix wouldn't work. You're gonna be fine, bud.
When I was a kid, I loved white chocolate. As I grew older, either my tastes changed or the quality declined (I suspect the latter) and now I don't care for it. I don't loathe it, but I prefer not to eat it.
Chocolate should be bitter and rock-like. White chocolate might as well be a stick of butter with some sugar in it.
Possible but hard to tell apart from the general druid aura that will cause electronic malfunctions.
I've got something similar, though I'd guess it's more pure chaos energy than druid powers-- electrical wiring, electronics, and motors tend to destroy themselves whenever I'm around.
Today, we introduced the new guy on the crew (I say "new"- he's got pretty much the same experience I do, he just switched over from a different company) to a time-honored tradition when doing grading or excavation work:
Me: "Hey, Kid, I found you a new wrench."
The Kid: "Sweet, just gotta soak it in some rust remover, then I'll put it in my toolbox."
New Guy: "What's that all about?"
Me: "Me and The Kid have a deal going-- if we find any tools, they're all his, and I get to keep any silverware we find."
New Guy: "Y'all are some weird-ass white people..."
"It was a hot night in the City of Angels when a leggy blonde walked into my office. She had 13, maybe 14 legs. Way too many. "That's a lot of legs for a dame," I suggested to her eldritch form. She glanced my way, and rolled her eyes at me. I picked them up and rolled them back."
Another combination Pathfinder/UFC night. Started off OK, but one of the players had a family emergency, and people's kids were bouncing off the ceiling, so we called it a couple hours early.
"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones [...] Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."
- Umberto Eco
"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors [...] We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others."
- C.S. Lewis
As I may have mentioned before, Iowa is the land of custom license plates. Today's sighting was a guy who passed us on the interstate with Iowa plates that read "GDAYCNT." I'm guessing he's a transplant from somewhere a little further south.
"The Historia Augusta is a very interesting book. Unlike most Roman histories, it's dense with primary sources: extracts from letters, speeches, pronouncements. It’s also packed with quotes and references from other histories, some of which are unattested in any other source. The only problem is that it seems to have been written as a piece of vicious revenge against all future historians. A few of its emperors are described issuing decrees or holding councils on dates when we know they were otherwise occupied being dead. Other people described in the Historia Augusta never existed at all. Neither did the other books describing them, or the historians who supposedly wrote those books. It points to whole libraries of unreal texts. Like a book that fell into our world from a parallel universe. Also, the six authors all write in exactly the same style, and their Latin is the Latin of at least a century after they were supposed to have been writing. (Imagine a Victorian novel in which characters all greet each other with ‘wassup.’) It’s all a big prank. But annoyingly, some of the material in the Historia Augusta is accurate. It’s just that when there are no other corroborations, we can’t know which parts. Whoever actually wrote it is a personal hero of mine."
- Sam Kriss
Car companies these days can't reliably make functional tire pressure sensors. Why would I trust them to make sensors that are supposed to drive the car?
Landscaping season has started as of yesterday. Myself and the other two "really old guys" (read: in their mid-thirties) actually stayed in shape over the winter, while all the young kids just hung out and partied. And... it really shows. We've been running circles around those guys.
While I understand that Americans' understanding of geography is a constant source of ridicule, and those on opposite coasts frequently get things ludicrously wrong (when GothBard was a child she accused a friend of lying because he claimed he was going to drive across three states in a matter of hours), I expect the New York Times to do better.
I once got into an argument with a native Iowan who flatly (no pun intended) refused to believe that there are mountains in New York State.
Between Toys R Us and my current job I've spent too much time with zero accountability and complete artistic freedom to even consider joining a union.
I fully respect what they've brought us as far as worker's rights and everything but I feel like how they are currently it's outdated and probably unnecessary.
Of course I say that as someone with zero education on the matter so correct me if I'm wrong.
It's hardly a political flamestorm to say the obvious: As usual, as soon as unions became powerful, those who wanted that power and money took over and they became (arguably nearly) as corrupt as the corporations they opposed. And as usual, small, honest unions pop up from time to time, but just like corporate takeovers they are quickly subsumed by larger, more corrupt unions.
** spoiler omitted **...
Spoiler:
Pretty much. In order to be effective, unions have to have some kind of leverage over the corporations, and due to various reasons (I would argue largely due to both increased globalization/outsourcing and government agencies taking over roles historically filled by unions), they've lost pretty much all of it. So, instead of fighting an uphill battle against the corporate-government partnership over stewardship of their members, a lot of union leaders have decided to either stop worrying and love the bomb, or else just get in and get theirs while the going is good.
And don't get me started on the level of counter-productive competitiveness I've seen in the lower levels of union membership, mostly taking the form of either "Oh, you only worked 60 hours last week? Well, I worked 85. Beat that, scrub!" one-upmanship, or "We shouldn't let that guy get a slice of our benefits pie. He ain't even from 'round here!" exclusivity. These days, it's less "Solidarity!" and more "divide and conquer."
I'm a big fan of the idea of unions, but there are few things I loathe more than unaccountable bureaucracy and petty schoolyard politics, and the modern trade union environment (again, in my personal experience) has both in spades.
The Kid has a remarkable talent for finding s@#@ inside walls. For example, last winter, he found an absolutely pristine late '90s-era DeWalt angle grinder. No such luck on this job, though. However, he did find something, which prompted this exchange between him and "Old Timer," the site foreman. Overheard from behind a pile of debris (edited for clarity):
The Kid: "Check out this cool old pop can I found!"
Old Timer: "That ain't old, ain't even got a ring pull."
The Kid: "Look at the date on it, though-- this one's from 1997. I wasn't even born yet!"
Old Timer: "Yeah, that don't make it old, it just makes you really young."
The Kid: "I'm almost 25."
Old Timer: "You heard me."
I lost all respect for unions when the state had a budget surplus so it gave an extra 15% permanently to schools and our union's "negotiations" resulted in a 17% raise for administrators and a 6% raise for teachers. If you can't even break even, you're not negotiating worth a darn.
Yeah, that checks out. I've been a member of two unions over the years (Teamsters and IBEW), and my personal experience has been that union leadership will bend over backwards for the organizations they're supposed to be protecting their workers from in exchange for an attaboy, or otherwise just look after themselves and a small in-crowd of buddies, and leave everyone else swinging in the wind.
There are two dumpsters on the job, one for concrete and one for garbage. My helper, "The Kid" picked up some pieces of trash that one of the other crews (probably one of the masons) put in the wrong dumpster. "I don't know why they just throw this stuff in the concrete dumpster," said The Kid. "It could be worse," I replied, "they could have thrown it in the abstract dumpster." He didn't get the joke.
And yeah, California had a natural buffer for decades: The black bears heavily populate the Sierras and the foothills are covered with cattle ranches. The bears come onto the ranches and that's all she wrote. Pretty much every rancher has a "shoot on sight" permit for bears. As the population has increased some suburbs, especially east of Sacramento, have made the mistake of extending past the ranches and they do indeed have bear troubles. But it's a relatively modern thing, and only in the newly-build suburbs that are too close to "traditional" bear country.
Very similar to downstate NY. There are still some really rural areas just north of Rockland and Westchester counties, but as property taxes and cost of living went through the roof, a lot of the farmers packed up and left while property developers moved in. Now you've got a patchwork of farms, second-growth forest, and suburbs all through Orange / Dutchess / Putnam counties. Perfect foraging ground for bears and coyotes.
Even though California's gun laws are some of the strictest in the country, once an animal is on your property and causing damage they're remarkably reasonable. You're supposed to get a permit first, but if a bear's tearing up your deck and you shoot it, you'll most likely get a, "Tut tut! Don't do it again!"
In that case, there wasn't really all that much my grandparents could do. They would have been in their mid-70s at the time, and my grandfather had to quit hunting and shooting in his 60s due to crippling arthritis.
NobodysHome wrote:
I appreciate it when those who enforce it practice discretion, and those who handle animal shootings around here seem to be sensible folk.
You're lucky then. It's been my experience that a not insignificant number of people in the position of enforcing the law are either incompetent, on a power trip, or both.
In the case of the bear and the tour van, we were a bunch of 20-something musicians. Even if any of us owned a gun at the time, we sure as s+%# weren't going to be packing heat in suburban downstate New York on account of bears. Imagine explaining that if we got pulled over...
This is the part of me that would be playing a Sensate in a Planescape game asking, but, uh, for the unenlightened, dare I inquire what's so unpleasant about bear meat?
It's just kind of gristly and greasy. The taste itself is pretty bland.
Pathfinder canceled again this weekend due to UFC pay-per-view. Next week is another side job for the demolition company, so it'll be at least a 60-hour work week.
But with a 60 hour paycheck. I mean, it's hard on a person to work that much, especially if it's primarily physical labor, but that does make it a tiny bit more worthwhile lol.
It's split between two jobs, so it's all straight time.
Pathfinder canceled again this weekend due to UFC pay-per-view. Next week is another side job for the demolition company, so it'll be at least a 60-hour work week.
"Today, new technologies can sweep through society so fast we have taken to calling them “disruptive”. Even the word, “disruptive”, has acquired a positive connotation, which is a bit like suggesting that frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are good for gardening."
- Peco Gaskovski
"Why is it that we can no longer be ‘anti’ something without wanting to ban it? I’m anti many things: smoking, cycling, grime music, veganism, to name a few. I’ll argue against them all day after a few beers, but at no point do I ever feel I have the moral authority to ban anyone else from doing them."
- Brynjar Johansson
Landscaping season starts on the 18th, so that leaves another week and a half at the factory. As I was leaving today, I noticed a box marked "FORMER EMPLOYEES" that was full of defective gloves and scrap leather. So, if you don't hear from me by April... you can draw your own conclusions.
