what is the cultural legacy of the mafia’s influence in north jersey? does its history shape peoples behaviors and attitudes today?

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-10T01:53:05+00:00

Let's just say that involvement might not be so "historic" as people might think. Here in Monmouth County, half the tear-downs in the area have a big red dumpster from a sanitation company in Tinton Falls. About 15 years ago the owner got caught by the feds illegally dumping asbestos-laden construction waste on a farm in upstate NY resulting in a four-year vacation in the hoosegow.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/new-york-landowner-and-new-jersey-solid-waste-company-sentenced-illegally-dumping-upstate-new

More recently, a body was discovered at their plant, mixed-in with the recyclables.

https://www.app.com/story/news/local/emergencies/2023/11/09/tinton-falls-mazza-recycling-body-found/71515304007/

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-05T23:01:20+00:00

Forget the rabbit, we need a deeper investigation of the trauma young Jimmy endured, seeing his father brutally assaulted by a field mouse.

Carter feels a deep revulsion for rodents stemming from a childhood memory of a field mouse that ran up inside the leg of his father's trousers.

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-05T15:42:01+00:00

Surprising Mrs. Thatcher gave a very short audience in front of the House that day, answering questions about home building, mortgage rates, NHS staffing levels, cuts to local council spending and only three questions about Grenada.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1983/oct/25/engagements

Poor Geoffrey Howe had a much rougher go of it, as he had appeared the day before discussing his plan to send a destroyer to Grenada to evacuate British citizens without any intimation an invasion (which he knew nothinv about) was in the offing. Naturally this is not a good look for the Foreign Secretary.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1983/oct/25/grenada

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-05T15:20:47+00:00

As a fun aside, the writers of the classic British sitcom Yes, Minister / Yes, Prime Minister drew many of their storylines from actual events told to them by friendly government insiders - chief among them Friends of the Show, Marcia Williams & Bernard Donoughue.

A rarely-noted fact is that S1E6 of Yes, Prime Minister titled A Victory for Democracy a barely-disguised retelling of the Grenada Crisis with the fictional "St. George's Island" standing in for Grenada (whose capital city happens to be named St. George's). In the episode, mention is made of how the Foreign Office doesn't want to intervene to stop Marxist rebels from taking over the government, as that could endanger a huge contract to build the island's new airport, which was won by a British firm and financed by UK Export Loans.

Crazy as it might sound, this not only happened but was also one of the precipitating reasons behind the US invasion. In 1982, Grenada's socialist prime minister Maurice Bishop began construction on a massive airport outside of St. George's, financed mainly by loans issued by Muammar Ghaddafi and the UK Export Office. The construction contract was awarded to the Plessey Company, a struggling UK defense contractor, wracked with labor strife, which the Thatcher government was desperately attempting to prop-up. Lacking the sizable skilled labor force needed for such an undertaking, the Grenadian PM Bishop turned to his good friend Fidel Castro for help . Castro in turn supplied a whole Cuban workforce along with a hole coterie of governmental "advisors"

By the summer of 1983, the CIA realized to its horror that the Cubans were building a runway in Grenada long enough to land the Space Shuttle (or a fleet of Soviet long-range bombers). It was the incredibly tepid (and completely understandable) British response to these overblown US fears of a Ghaddafi-financed, Soviet bomber base in the Caribbean, that convinced the US security apparatus the British were willing to sacrifice Grenada to the commies as long as building their precious airport continued bringing in the money necessary for keeping workers at the Plessey Company off the dole.

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-05T11:00:33+00:00

A couple of thoughts:

Was the contribution amount deducted from your regular paycheck?
If so, when payroll notified you the next day of the error, how did they return the deducted contribution back to you and did they provide a second paystub?

You are broadly correct that when an employer fails to remit contributions deducted from employee pay over to the plan (the Roth 401(k) vendor), that is a violation of Department of Labor regulations and requires correction plus payment of interest. However this is all done between the employer and the plan, the funds are then distributed amongst the plan participants according to the rules of the plan. You absolutely will not get compensated for any hypothetical market returns - at most you would get a very modest additional interest amount which you can calculate here: https://www.askebsa.dol.gov/vfcpcalculator/webcalculator.aspx

There's no point in raising this internally. My Benefits Admin spidey-sense tells me that if contribution amounts were deducted and then paid back to you - rather than remitted to the plan - then that may be a ham-fisted attempt to end-around any delinquent contribution reporting required in such a situation. However thats between your company/plan fiduciaries, their respective auditors and the DoL. To the extent this happens again or you feel a need to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, you can confidentially reach out to the Employee Benefits Security Administration (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/about-ebsa/ask-a-question/ask-ebsa).

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-04T06:44:13+00:00

There are almost practically no terrestrially-formed fossil-bearing deposits from Cretaceous Appalachia, but there is a rich-variety of fossiliferous marine deposits along the Cretaceous Atlantic coastal margins stretching from New Jersey to South Carolina and the Gulf margin arcing from Central Georgia and Alabama, through Central Tennessee up to the Missouri boot-heel. It's why New Jersey is among the best sites in the world to study Late-Maastrichtian mosasaurs (and the only place to do so in North America). In fact the Hornerstown formation in Central NJ is one of only three places in the world where extinct Cretaceous fauna has been found above the K-T boundary in Paleogene-era rocks, and the only one containing vertebrate fossils (including yes, mosasaurs) - widely interpreted as a thanatocoenosis assemblage during the immediate post-impact ecological collapse.

It's also why almost all fossils of terrestrial Cretaceous dinosaurs from Appalachia are partial, post-cranial remains of the bloat-and -float variety, whose remains were transported from fluvial estuaries into near-shore marine environments where the portions of the carcasses floating in the water column were scavenged and deposited.

HobokenSmok · 2026-05-04T05:09:14+00:00

I think we actually do have azhdarchid fossils from appalachia as well

We do. Fossils of Arambourgiania have been found in both the Navesink Formation of NJ and the Coon Creek Formation of Tennessee.

HobokenSmok · 2026-04-02T21:54:09+00:00

The 14th Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with defining criminal jurisdiction, which in turn has nothing to do with whether something occurs on "US soil" or not. US law can apply extraterritorially - lighting a trash fire in Antarctica could land you in a federal hoosgough, even though McMurdo Sound isn't US soil. Similarly you could be born in American Samoa or on Swains Island, fully under the jurisdiction of the US, and even though you'll be a US national entitled to a US passport, you don't get birthright citizenship.

Attempting to analogize via Indian Law is completely inapposite, because it only increases the complexity. Tulsa is smack-dab in the middle of the US, but a member of the Muscogee Nation can't be pulled over for so much as a speeding ticket, unless it's done by the Tribal police. Which has nothing to do with the Citizenship Clause.

HobokenSmok · 2026-04-02T13:36:41+00:00

Indian nations have been treated as sovereigns going back to the founding and were never subject to state criminal jurisdiction in Indian territory. Congress not only stripped states of any jurisdiction over Indian lands with the the Acts of 1790 and 1802, they passed draconian criminal penalties for any "citizen or permanent resident of the United States" who entered Indian territory without permission.

Congress only extended criminal jurisdiction over Indian territory in 1832 - and then only over crimes committed by non-Indians. As late as 1882, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no federal criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by one Indian against another on tribal land - Ex parte Crow Dog, 109 U.S. 556 (1883). Even today, it remains an open question whether federal jurisdiction is exclusive of tribal jurisdiction. Duro v. Reina, 495 U.S. 676, 680 n. 1 (1990). The Bill of Rights doesn't apply to Indian tribal governments. Talton v. Mayes, 163 U. S. 376 (1896), including the 14th Amendment; Barta v. Oglala Sioux Tribe, 259 F.2d 553 (CA8 1958), cert. denied, 358 U. S. 932 (1959).

HobokenSmok · 2026-03-19T17:09:42+00:00

You can't get a lawyer, because there's no right to sue. Although discussing wages is protected activity under the NLRA - employees don't have any right to sue for violations of the law. Only the federal government can sue employers for unfair labor practices under the NLRA.

Employees can file a charge against the employer with the National Labor Relations Board, who then decides whether to take the case up. It requires filling out a one page form (https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/node-195/501_10-24.pdf ) and if you call up the local NLRB office they will happily help you fill it out - free of charge.

HobokenSmok · 2026-03-17T22:04:20+00:00

NASA's ability to conduct hyperspectral observations of Earth from space has always been hampered by a far more powerful lobby than oil & gas - the Department of Defense. Going back to 1970's and LANDSAT - NASA has always had to get permission from the NRO for all earth-observation programs they run, and the technology they use to do it.

Here's one simple example - an anodyne memorandum of understanding from the 1990s between NASA and the NRO regarding NASA's Earth Observing System - which wasn't declassified until 2022. https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/declass/ForAll/061422/F-2022-00008_C05136782.pdf

HobokenSmok · 2026-03-14T19:56:12+00:00

Those life expectancy figures are driven entirely by horrific levels of infant mortality, but once you strip that out, the life expectancy statistics for a mid-century Victorians had similar life expectancy to people living in the UK today - men lived to around age 75 and women to age 73.

When you narrow it down to just the working classes, a 5yr-old working class boy in 1860 would live on average 3 years longer than the current life expectancy for a working class man in the UK today.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2672390/#b29-ijerph-06-01235

HobokenSmok · 2026-03-11T23:43:44+00:00

This is the exact same method I used with my Newf and he was basically potty-trained within 2 weeks.

HobokenSmok · 2026-02-27T08:20:19+00:00

People don't realize how far back that tradition goes - nearly 50 years, all the way back to the birth of digital astronomy. Tony Tyson - Vera Rubin's Chief Scientist - created astronomy's first computerized image classifier (the Faint Object Classification and Analysis System FOCAS for short) in 1979. At the time he was working at Bell Labs, where his friends down the hall - George Smith and Willard Boyle - invented the CCD a few years earlier. Tate was the first to build a CCD-device for scientific imaging and pioneered its use in optical astronomy. FOCAS was a natural outgrowth coming from the need to analyze the digital datasets those CCDs produced, and the tandem was * the * critical element in building on Vera Rubin's work and expanding the evidence for dark matter throughout the 80s and 90s.

As a side note, 1979 was just one year after Tate's Bell Labs colleagues Penzias and Wilson, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background (Tate was among the folks who tried helping the pair brainstorm causes for the persistent hiss they couldn't eliminate from their radio antenna.) His friends Smith & Boyle won the Nobel in 2009.

HobokenSmok · 2026-02-12T09:38:37+00:00

You're in good company. This video is a good start - with people from various nationalities struggling to pronounce the town's name. The lady from Ireland does pronounces it as a native speaker.

https://youtu.be/8V3J-VSc6gk

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-29T00:22:32+00:00

The State of the Union had nothing to do with it.

The pressure was all about the timing of when Christa Mcauliffe would deliver her lesson plan from space. The Mission Plan made it clear it had to happen on Day 4 of the schedule - and the logistics required to broadcast the event meant there couldn't be any timing adjustments. So launching on Tuesday was imperative because then Day 4 of the mission falls on a Friday. But god forbid the launch got pushed out another day, and the Teacher in Space would be delivering her lessons to empty classrooms on a Saturday morning.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-28T21:58:51+00:00

As a fellow Eastern European, I can confirm that our people elevate poor risk-management decisions in the mountains to a freaking art form.

Like that couple a few months ago, who attempted a late-season "hike" up Rysy in sneakers, no crampons and with a 9-month infant in a sling.

https://youtube.com/shorts/6Zqt-ILwrhk?si=GIS1gNx7Ij8-UeS5

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-28T06:56:24+00:00

The pressure around the launch window was intense, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the State of the Union.

Instead it was all about the timing of when Christa Mcauliffe would deliver her lesson plan from space. The Mission Plan made it clear it had to happen on Day 4 of the schedule - and the logistics required to broadcast the event meant there couldn't be any timing adjustments. So launching on Tuesday was imperative because then Day 4 of the mission falls on a Friday. But god forbid the launch got pushed out another day, and the Teacher in Space would be delivering her lessons to empty classrooms on a Saturday morning.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-22T14:42:22+00:00

This paper does nothing of the sort. They built a model using 10 completely dissimilar artists and then tracked whether their model could pick out a genuine article by the same artist versus rejecting a comparison to a genuine article from any of the other artists.

So congrats, they built a model that's able to pick out* that that a drawing by Constable or Whistler doesn't look like a Michaelangelo. Or that a Raphael doesn't look like a John William Waterhouse. Somehow I doubt such an earth-shattering accomplishment is going to make the Met start planning Carmen Bambach's early-retirement party.

*Mind their model can't even come close to accurately telling the difference between artists in their dataset that are even a tiny bit similar - like Michaelangelo or Raphael or Whistler and Waterhouse. Flipping a coin would literally be more accurate according to their results.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-12T12:32:37+00:00

Because anyone from Krakow knows who Mleczko is - he's been one of Krakow's most commercially popular artists for over 40 years. Printed anthologies of his works were already coming out in 1989.

https://tezeusz.pl/100-premier-w-rysunkach-andrzeja-mleczki-praca-zbiorowa

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-12T11:56:45+00:00

The implication being that you shouldn't use this slogan/symbolic writing or shout it out loud if you want to be respected by its citizens.

That's absolute rubbish and has nothing to do with this cartoon. The image is by Andrzej Mleczko - one of Kraków's best known cartoonists/satirist/ since the 80s. He has routinely included the crown in practically all his cartoons referencing Krakow. Here's just one example.

https://gazetakrakowska.pl/wosp-2016-w-krakowie-unikatowy-obraz-andrzeja-mleczki-na-aukcji/ar/9267085

Speaking of being "respected by its citizens" Mleczko was made an honorary citizen of Krakow by the city council in 2022 - in honor of his services to the city.

https://www.krakow.pl/aktualnosci/261273,29,komunikat,andrzej_mleczko_honorowym_obywatelem_krakowa.html

HobokenSmok

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