March 16, 2020

I'm about to board a flight from Bakersfield to DFW...

And then on to Jacksonville, FL

Into the teeth of the beast!

March 14, 2020

He LIKES being president. He's no bloody good at it, but he likes doing it....

Of that there can be no doubt.

Notice how often he flies on AF1? It’s almost every fucking day. Finding actual hours he flies is not easy, but I would bet that in the 3 years he has held the office, he has put more hours on Marine 1 and Air Force 1 than Obama did in his entire 8 years. If not, its fucking closing in fast.

A significant amount of the time he interacts with the press is when he stops to talk to the “gaggle” on his way walking to Marine One on the South Lawn.

HE. FUCKING. LOVES. BEING. PRESIDENT.

It is a role he is playing. A role in which he has found that he gets to write the script, do the editing and control the lighting and post production as much as he possibly can. It infuriates him when things spiral out of his control. According to numerous sources and books, he goes ballistic when he feels he is being made to look bad. His skin is thinner than the film between layers of an onion.

That’s why when things like this come along, he feels absolutely ZERO shame or problem with blaming someone else.

He is utterly incapable of taking or assuming blame for ANYTHING. It’s always someone else’s fault, NEVER HIS, and if you have the temerity to question him about it, you’re asking a “Nasty Question”.

Donald Trump is currently living out his ultimate dream; To be in charge and to do what he wants and get away with just about anything. He gets to fly anywhere he wants, on a whim, on the worlds ultimate private jet - a fucking fleet of them in fact, and while doing so, he has a shitload of people who are required to address him with more dignity and respect than he has ever been able to command in his private life. He absolutely ADORES the fact that people call him “Sir” as a default, thinking he somehow deserves it, instead of it simply being the trappings of the Presidency.

If he gets re-elected, and that is a DISTINCT possibility, this country is fucking doomed, plain and simple. We will devolve into a conservative Utopia, which means basically FUCK YOU to anyone not making a quarter million a year or more, screw your healthcare, your vagina is a factory and you had better learn to live with it, you will worship the approved god and if you talk back to anyone with a gun and a badge, you get what’s coming to you, so help me god bless ‘Merica

If he is defeated in November, it will take this country decades to undo the damage he and McConnell have done.

Decades. If we survive it, that is.

February 6, 2020

Remember the ship that capsized off the Georgia coast? They're gonna start cutting it up.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/giant-crane-cutting-chain-saw-230201775.html


MV Golden Ray has been on its side in shallow water off the coast of Southern Georgia since September 8th, and now salvage crews are getting ready to begin the removal operation, which will take several months.

This accident and recovery is not without precedent, as 2 similar Auto Carrier ships sank in the North Sea in the last number of years.

The MV Tricolor and the MV Baltic Ace both sank in very busy shipping lanes and were salvaged, but with a total loss of cargo.

The Golden Ray has at least 4200 cars still onboard.

The Golden Ray;



As she presently sits, just outside the entrance to the Port of Brunswick, Georgia;



They have apparently removed all her fuel and as much of the lubricants in her main engines as possible, according to stories I have read over the months, but each individual car still has a few gallons of gas and of course, engine oil on board.

They're basically going to cut it up into chunks and haul it away, cars and all!


I hauled cars out of the Port of Brunswick a bunch of times, and I wouldn't be surprised if I carried units that were discharged from the Golden Ray. Brunswick is unique among deep water ports in the US, as it is almost entirely an automobile and rolling stock/heavy equipment port or "RO/RO" ("Roll on/Roll Off" ). The only other ships that call there are bulk cargo vessels, like those that haul grains and other large tonnage, bulk commodities. No containers are trans-shipped at all, as is so common in almost every other port in North America.

If this at all interests you from an engineering perspective, here is a 3:40 minute video of how they removed the MV Baltic Ace from a busy shipping lane near Rotterdam back in 2012;



And a 26 minute vid of the removal of the MV Tricolor off Dunkirk, France;

December 18, 2019

Aviation enthusiasts; Curious where all the 737 Max's are parked? (Pics)

I've known that Boeing has used Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, WA as a transition and training airport for years. They can fly there from either of the big plants in Puget Sound in short order and the airspace in that area is apparently fairly free of traffic.

So I was curious if there were any photos of the grounded 737's parked there. I know they were storing them at the plant in Renton, as well as Boeing Field in Seattle and Paine Field in Everett, but there are a shitload of them grounded (387 that were in operation worldwide and almost 500 total are grounded which includes production up to the halt announced yesterday) so I looked for shots of them elsewhere.

I wasn't disappointed.

Moses Lake. This is a former Air Force Base (Larson AFB until 1966) and for those unfamiliar, this feature is a "Christmas Tree" which is a ready alert staging area for bombers that can be found at most US Air bases that had B-52's and other strategic bombers on constant alert. I count 66 aircraft in this photo;



Here's the Christmas Tree at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana with B-52's at the ready, just to show the original purpose of that staging complex;


Anyway...another shot of the aircraft stored at Moses lake:



This is a shot of Boeing Field, south of downtown Seattle. Wa. They have so many there that they have taken over a portion of an automobile parking lot.






Another group of Max's, these painted in Southwest livery, at the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, CA.



Here's a few at the Renton, WA assembly plant still wearing the green protective lacquer coating applied for the assembly process.



A Google image search of "Stored 737 Max" will give dozens more shots. This represents over 60 billion dollars in stationary inventory, not to mention the lost revenue for all the operators worldwide. It seems to me this episode is unprecedented in the history of aviation, with so many grounded going on 10 months now and no end in sight.

Amazingly, Boeing stock has not plummeted, trading in the $330 range. It did drop ten bucks a share on Monday on the news of the production shutdown.

October 14, 2019

What's wrong is that "these people" have finally found cover to come out.

I am pretty sure you and I are of the same generation, maybe only a few years apart, so we both know who “these people” are;

They are the same 30 to 40% of the electorate that would have followed Nixon to the gates of hell.

The same ones that fought tooth and nail to resist the Civil Rights movement in the ‘60’s

The same ones that thought McCarthy was spot on in his endeavors.

The same ones that thought the British should handle their own squabbles in Europe

The same ones that thought John Thomas Scopes should have been burned at the stake.

The same ones that thought the participants in the UAW Sit Down Strike should have been shot.

The same ones that thought the Suffragettes needed to be jailed.

Who are these people?

The same ones that that thought King George III was getting a bad rap and that those assholes in Philadelphia needed to keep it down.

The ones that think that no one should be allowed to stand in their way, regardless of who it is they are following, as long as that person hates the same people they do.

You know who these people are.

The same ones that have been standing in the way of human progress since time immemorial and think they are right, no matter the time or place.

They are the ones we have been disagreeing with our entire lives.

They are the ones that WE keep dragging, kicking and screaming, into the future.

Just imagine if we didn’t have to drag them anymore.

May 23, 2019

One is the driver and the other is an engineer

Since it is a new program, the presence of an engineer shouldn't come as a surprise.

And FWIW, I do this exact same sort of work - driving trucks transporting US mail intercity and interstate. I physically handle the mail about 10% of the time. All of it is loaded into transport units that are on wheels or palletized.

One of the most common pieces of equipment looks like this, called a "GPC" or "General Purpose Container" ;


Note the yellow device with the round hole at the top. This is a hitch so several can be hooked together and pulled with an electric Tug. The opposite end has a small length of pipe of slightly smaller diameter that the round hole fits onto.

The Tug looks like this, though this is a brand new unit and most in current use are much older designs, but they look very similar;




Others include "BMC" (Bulk Mail Container), Wire baskets (Simply called "Wires" ) and Canvas Hampers.
Here's 3 of the primary and most common containers in one photo;



"CIN BMC" would stand for "Cincinnati Bulk Mail Center". If you look carefully at that aluminum container, you can see a handle that has a mechanism hanging straight down from the center of it, with a pin visible at the bottom. That is a locator pin which can be used in the Distribution and Sorting centers that have in-floor conveyors, basically a chain that runs just under the floor level that is accessible via a channel. The pin is dropped through the channel and a hitch will grab the pin and pull the container along to the various sorting stations it might need to go to.

The mail hauled in the trucks mentioned in the OP travel from one sorting center to another, and is then sorted for street delivery. More often than not, the driver either places the trailer against a doc and drops the trailer or places it in a numbered parking space and a yard jockey truck comes along and places it on a dock.

April 16, 2019

So who did you drive OTR for?

Or did you spend your entire career driving tractor trailers and using a CB in the only county in the country where calling another truck driver a “Good Buddy” is NOT considered an insult?

So....was it flat or van? If flat, step? Skateboard? Drop? Low boy? Gooseneck? Or were you in the Parking Lots? Lift gate? Or tanks? Smooth bore or baffled? Maybe you did wiggle wagons? Bed bugger? Bulk? Coal bucket? If van, dry? Reefer perhaps. Or was it Hot shots? Did you stay on the big roads or were you most often running through the woods? Being as well versed in trucker vernacular as you clearly are, I’m sure you know precisely what each and every one of those terms refers to without the need to Google them.


You said:

Which is, for such a short statement, loaded with ignorance.



Using that expression in an off hand way as you did is tantamount to calling a complete stranger a “Faggot”. THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS. “Referring to the 1970’s use of the term” means you are clueless as to how the term has evolved and is currently used, PERIOD. It wasn’t a derogatory term until the movie “Convoy” came out and the popularity of CB’s soared. Then every schmuck with a radio in their car thought they were “The Rubber Duck” and the rest of the industry got sick of it. It took all of 6 months for the meaning to universally change. Using that saying in the way you did, without proper context, displays an understanding of Trucking culture and CB slang as deep as a mud puddle.



Except that’s not what it means to every truck driver in the country older than 45, which is the vast majority of them.



That is not only selective editing, it is inaccurate and shows you didn’t really do the research.

Googleling the term “Good Buddy” gives a shitload of results that clearly explain that it is most assuredly a pejorative.





Yeah. In the seventies.. Do you often make references to disco as if it is common or something that everyone regularly participates in?





Keyword “out of style”. Yeah. No shit. By at LEAST 30 years. “23 Skidoo” and all.



Actually, you DID mention those, as I highlited above;

“Do they still use CB ham radio?”

There is no such thing as a “CB Ham Radio”. CB and Ham are 2 different radio types, using different frequencies. A Ham radio can call around the planet, basically. A legal (unmodified) Citizens Band will barely reach 5 miles. If you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, at least try and get some understanding of the subject matter.

I took issue with this because I, like millions of other professional drivers, are sick and fucking tired of people thinking that throwing around the term “Good Buddy” makes them sound as if they are in the know, when all it does is display a profound ignorance of the industry and culture shared by over 4 million of your fellow Americans.

If you still think I’m wrong, and that the term is harmless, go to any large truck stop, get on a CB and ask “Are there any good buddies around?”

Try it. I dare you. You’ll get an earful you won’t soon forget.

March 29, 2019

Aviation Enthusiasts! NASA Snaps pictures of Supersonic shockwaves of 2 T-38's VERY cool!

From here









Here's the NASA Website story;
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/supersonic-shockwave-interaction.html

March 23, 2019

1st, the scene wasn't in the Stock Market, they were in the New York Commodities Exchange

( A minor aside; In the movie at the beginning of this scene, the boys are seen walking in front of the World Trade Center, with the twin towers off their right shoulders. This would mean they were walking East, toward Wall Street and the NY Stock Exchange. The scene to follow takes place ostensibly in the New York Mercantile Exchange where commodities are traded, which is located on the Hudson River, basically behind them. In other words, the movie shows them walking the wrong way, away from the building which houses the trading floor!)


So here's the gist;

The Duke Brothers thought they had information that the Orange harvest was going to be slim, and when that would be announced, the price would spike - simple law of supply and demand.

So they tell their "Pit Trader" to BUY all the FCOJ he can right from the opening bell, thinking that they were going to be able to buy OJ at a lower price initially and after the news report from the Agriculture Department broke, they would have a large position at a lower than market price.

Essentially, they were trying to "Corner the Market" by buying up as many contracts as their trader could. This created a buying frenzy, as the rest of the pit wants to follow the lead of such a well known willing buyer (Bearing in mind the Duke Brothers own a very large commodities trading brokerage. What they do affects everyone else). This causes the price to rise. Simple supply and demand; Lots of buyers, only a few sellers, price rises.

With each buy order, the Duke brothers are laying out real cash from their own account, so they are dependent on the information they have being correct and the price of each contract continue to go up........

BUT....we know it ISN'T correct, and so do Lewis and Billy Ray.

So they wait.....and Billy Ray gets anxious....and they wait....until....

Lewis sees the price get to the level he wants and shouts out that he is selling April contracts at "142!"

Now there is a new seller and the whole pit goes nuts. But do Lewis and Billy Ray actually OWN the FCOJ contracts they are selling? No. They don't. They are "Selling Short" meaning they are selling that which they do not own, but can, or will either borrow from someone else temporarily (which can actually happen when you sell short on the stock market) or the sale is covered before the end of the trading day via a "buy to cover".

With each short sale they make, they are padding their account. Each and every sale is real dollars to them, even though they don't own a thing yet.

The price begins to fall. More sellers than buyers now, so the law stated above is reversed. They want to sell as much as they can as fast as they can because they know the crop report is going to be announced soon and they want as much cash as they can possibly gather because they KNOW the truth and it is the opposite of what the Duke brothers think. This is where the Duke Brothers realize "That's not right" and see our heroes in the pit, selling like mad. They realize the info on the crop report is wrong and hurry down to the pit to get their trader to stop buying and start selling. But alas, he is not successful.

So the announcement comes and the pit goes silent as they all watch the television.

The INSTANT the agriculture rep says "The cold winter has apparently not affected the orange harvest" the pit goes wild again because everyone that had bought at high prices knows now that those prices were too high and they have to unload them or they will have bought FCOJ for way more than market value.

So a selling frenzy ensues. Lewis and Billy Ray fold their arms. They're done selling. The price plummets, because everyone is trying to sell overpriced contracts and there are virtually zero buyers. Lewis watches the price fall to a point he likes (around 46 or so) and says "Buy em'" and now they are one of the only traders in the pit willing to buy what everyone else is desperate to sell.

The price plummets even more all to their advantage. BTW, This is where the money Ophelia and Coleman gave them comes into play, because even though they have all the cash from the short sales from before, now they have the extra cash the other two gave them to buy even more contracts.

A side note pointed out on one blog I read long ago;

In order to really make this hurt the Dukes, at this point the boys would SPECIFICALLY AND PURPOSEFULLY NOT BUY from the Duke's trader or the Dukes themselves. They want to stick the Dukes with a shit load of overpriced contracts, so the entire time they are buying, they are ignoring the Dukes.

And they did. The boys basically did what the Dukes thought they were going to do; Corner the FCOJ market.

The closing bell rings (BTW This was ostensibly an entire trading day of say, 6 hours or so, much longer than the 5 minutes the scene takes) and the boys look up at the board, showing the closing price of 29. They started selling short at 142. The difference is all profit to them.

And then the shit hits the fan.

"Margin call, gentlemen.

Why you can't expect...

You know the rules. All accounts to be settled at the end of the day's trading, without exception.

You know perfectly well we don't have three hundred ninety four million dollars in cash!

I'm sorry, boys. Put the Duke brothers' seats on the exchange up for sale at once, Seize all assets of Duke & Duke Commodity Brokers, as well as all personal holdings of Randolph and Mortimer Duke.....


We're ruined!"


If one were to assume all the losses stated by Randolph ($394,000,000) went to the boys, and that's a good bet and more, adjusted for inflation, $394 mil from 1983 to today comes out to just under a billion. $999.94 million, according to this inflation calculator.

There are several real world issues with this entire scenario of course, the least of which is that it could never happen today because of trading curbs and likely couldn't have back in 1983 either.

But it's a fun scene, and one of my all time favorite movies.

Hope that helps a little.

February 25, 2019

Flatter me all you like, the answer is still no

::::Looks frantically for the rule that requires me to accede to your silly whims:::::

Nope. Nothing there





::::sniff::::: That’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me all day. The answer is still no.



A good guess on a coin toss is not only incredibly pedestrian, it will not get you what you want, so please stop asking






Not only do I not know enough about you to construct a reasonable prevarication, I have virtually zero interest in remedying that situation





Again with the kindness, the flattery and the utterly remarkable insight. Also, putting “friend” in quotes doesn’t make you look sincere. It makes you look dubious.

Still....nope. Not gonna happen.

A HERETIC I AM
Happily trifling with DU neophytes for 15 years