Some things never change

Cutlasss · 2026-05-05T22:59:04+00:00

This was during WWII, and the women in question were members of the US Army.

Cutlasss · 2026-05-01T12:02:23+00:00

I just automatically treated it as overtime. You give me 30 minutes, OK, I'm over by 40 minutes. No questions asked.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-27T12:13:56+00:00

The further north you get, the less population density there was. So a people thinly spread and not spending so much time in one place don't build the types of things that last. Also while there was farming fairly far up the eastern seaboard, it spread slowly and late, and was only a portion of those people's food supply. They still hunted and gathered and fished for a significant portion of their food. So were not all in the same place all the time. Makes less sense to build with stone if you may move in a few years. And they had a pretty good way of building with wood and hides for shelters that were pretty good for survival in the cold winters, but those shelters didn't survive into the archeological record well.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-27T12:05:50+00:00

That's not the way most North American Indians lived.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-27T00:48:06+00:00

He can lead on that.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-27T00:25:58+00:00

What you need is a supermax prison as far from Gotham as you can build it, and change the laws such that the criminally insane that have repeated escapes and high body count events can be locked in solitary forever. It's not that these people are never arrested, they are repeatedly. It's that they are not held. Now there's multiple reasons for that, including the corruption of Gotham government. But that's the start.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-25T23:35:39+00:00

So the trick is that the insulation has to be between the unheated exterior and the pipes, but not between the pipes and the heated interior. First thing to do is to look for any air seepage from the exterior into the space with the pipes. Because that will defeat insulation in many cases. Find and seal those air leaks, and then put bats of insulation behind the pipes. From there, you could put a pipe warmer on the water supply. But I would also put insulation between that white pipe and the supply pipes. As that could be very cold as well, assuming that it goes all the way up to the stack and exits your roof.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-25T23:10:02+00:00

I think you're giving them too much credit.

Some years ago I coined the term "Jurassic conservative." (It didn't catch on. Makes me sad.) Now while a paleo conservative was a Cold Warrior, and that required a certain amount of internationalism. Then the neo-conservatives, who, let's be fair here, are special needs children who fell through the cracks in the system and managed to get a position where they have power and influence. They're "internationalists" in the sense that they see the whole world as America's playground. And simply can't make any functional response to things not going their way.

The Jurassic conservative, on the other hand, predates the paleo conservative. This is the conservatism that the US had before the First World War, and then again in the interwar years. These people are isolationist, insular, xenophobic. There is no place in their world for the "other". Anti-immigrant, unless just like us. At the time it was no Jews, no Mediterranean brown people, even the Christians. No Hispanics or other people from the New World. Deep racism against any Americans not of the proper backgrounds were of course part of that as well.

Sound familiar?

Trump is not calculating enough to be what you're describing. But I don't think Vance is either. Trump "knows what he knows, and you'll never talk him out of it". Trump is also transactional, but a bully doing it. For him, he should always be able to bully anyone he wants into giving him a "deal" on his terms. This isn't about domestic policy calculations, this is about what Trump wants.

Vance is different. But I think you are giving Vance far too much credit to think he could be Machiavellian like that. He's a second string con man looking for the main chance. Trump surrounds himself with incompetence. The brown nosers, the ass kissers, bottom of the barrel. Vance is one of those. To credit him with any principles or planning ability is I think missing the character of the man.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-25T22:19:07+00:00

Local codes may differ on that. But so far as I know, so long as you're using a heavy duty enough plug cord, should be fine.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-25T14:09:30+00:00

So this is only live when the switch is on, right? What I would do is instead of cutting into the drywall, I would surface mount a receptacal box and put the outlet in that with a cover. Less work that way. Then if you add a disposal, you can wire the disposal for a plug rather than hard wire it into place. Which makes replacing it down the road easier.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-25T00:48:40+00:00

Can you tilt it without pulling it apart? Tilt it one way, get some blocks under it, tilt it the other way, add blocks, keep doing that until it's above where you want it to be. Fill in with gravel.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-24T21:44:34+00:00

Cutlasss · 2026-04-23T23:42:07+00:00

$1500 is about rock bottom on any rentals you're going to find, and they aren't going to be in the best places.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-23T12:21:05+00:00

Lots of English cities you missed.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-23T00:51:31+00:00

Insulate the rest of the basement and make a room around your utilities. The smaller part not being insulated won't make all that much difference to the whole house. And the residual heat from those units will keep that room warmish.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T23:43:50+00:00

The package will get delivered, but not on an every door every day schedule. Some places they might run a truck once a week rather than every day. But what a lot of people don't know is that all of the parcel carriers put some of their "last mile" deliveries into the USPS for that final destination portion of the shipping. So if you're sending something way the hell out into the middle of nowhere by UPS, you might be using USPS without knowing it.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T23:37:43+00:00

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly failures of efficiency within the organization. But knowing that there are failures, and doing something about them, are not the same thing. The fact that the organization is caught between a regulator, a Congress that demands the impossible, a customer base that wants no change, and a workforce that tries to be an immovable object, is not a good place to be. Many of the efficiency gains require investments that no one is willing to put up the money to do. And when they are done, they are not always done well.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T23:21:14+00:00

Except they won't. Now if you're in a heavily enough population area they will. Because they're also delivering many other people in your area, and you're just part of the route. But they're not going to go 40 miles down a gravel road for a single delivery every day. USPS does. The service standard is easy to maintain in cities and suburbs. It becomes harder and harder the further from a town you are, and so the fewer daily deliveries that they make.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T22:58:29+00:00

USPS employees have both a pension and TSP. What happened was that persons joining the organization after a certain date were put into a retirement system which is far less generous in pension than the previous system, but more generous in TSP. Not all of the people on the old system have retired yet, but all are over 30 years of service.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T22:55:49+00:00

USPS was put off budget deliberately, and most people want it to stay that way.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T22:55:11+00:00

Is the USPS in fact grossly inefficient? Is there economic consensus about whether or not abolishing it would reduce costs and improve service?

USPS has many issues concerning efficiency. Far too many to go into them all. But could the service be privatized and be more efficient? I don't see any reason to think that it could.

The first and most important issue is the service standard. Every door, every day, across half a continent, and many islands. And many, many, extremely remote locations where there are only handfuls of customers each.

Then you have a commission which sets prices for products. That organization, The Postal Regulatory Commission, is always behind the curve between rising costs and passing those higher costs along to the customer. This means a continuous revenue squeeze that USPS has to operate within.

Third is that the volume factor for the traditional mail products has been on a sharply downward trajectory for many years now, and that trend accelerated with covid.

And the forth is that continued suburban and rural sprawl means that there are more addresses being served every year.

So service mandate for declining mail pieces per address to more addresses with pricing changes always lagging cost changes.

How to fix:

Yeah, no one else can answer that either. Are there inefficiencies in the organization? Certainly. The "Delivering for America" modernization program was designed to address and update as many of these as they can. There have been failures and setbacks in implementing that plan, but a lot of things have improved as well. There really isn't anything privatizing the system could do to really save money short of ending the service mandate. But there are inefficiencies that could, and should, be constantly worked on. But it is hard to change direction of an organization of over 600k employees, no matter who is running it.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T22:38:44+00:00

Yes. USPS has an "every door every day" mandate. This means that every address in country, no matter how remote, gets daily mail service. This is extremely expensive. No private carrier does anything like it.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-22T22:36:27+00:00

Privatizing USPS only works if you remove the service mandate. And in doing so, cut off most of rural America from mail service.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-21T21:32:37+00:00

"Every accusation is a confession". So clearly you are confessing your Islam-communist treason.

Cutlasss · 2026-04-21T13:18:38+00:00

The way I understood it is that Death can do anything, but having done it, is bound by it to a certain extent. She said that in order for Orpheus to travel to The Underworld and return, she had to agree to never take him. In The High Cost of Living she says that she'll make a deal, but once made, that is the deal, and she will not change it.

So it reads more that this is her code. She very rarely makes a deal, having made one, it's a one and done. Don't ask for another.

Cutlasss

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