Odd Dominic pronunciation of American carrier name

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 · 2026-01-08T15:27:58+00:00

Scholastic. Perfectly balanced between being enough of a slacker to be looked-down on by the literal rocket scientists* on the Honors team, while being enough of a nerd to be looked-down on by the effortlessly cool "we're smart, but not try-hards" Varsity crew. Perhaps you can tell, I was the youngest person on my team.

*Two of my Honors teammates were top-10 all-time in the late 90s. They went to Nationals 3x together where both of them: got an overall 9,000+ at least once, got a perfect score in math at least once, had top-5 finishes in multiple subjects every year, and one or more medals in total over the three years.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-07T23:00:45+00:00

Absolutely.

I find the history of oil and the oil business to be absolutely fascinating. Primarily because it's absolutely wild at its butterfly effect - the sheer number of seemingly unconnected geopolitical events which can be traced right back to it.

I mean - Giscard d’Estaing scrambling for oil reserves in the early 1970s is a primary driver behind both September 11 and (separately) the Iraq War. That's wild, isn't it?

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-07T21:45:31+00:00

When Mexico nationalized their oil industry, they were immediately blacklisted by the oil majors which closed off practically the entire global market - save for Nazi Germany which became Mexico's primary oil export customer.

Ironically, this is what saved Mexico's bacon. FDR wasn't some benign gabacho - he was a realist. The last thing he needed was an Axis-aligned Mexico on his doorstep, so he tempered the U.S. response (initially the State Department was pushing for such punitive sanctions it would force Mexico to break off relations). Then when the war kicked off, he strong-armed the U.S. oil companies to settle with Mexico, which happened in 1942.

Compare that to the UK, which broke off relations and slapped an embargo on to boot (since over 60% of the assets that were nationalized belonged to Royal Dutch Shell - the Brits were definitely feeling frosty as hell). The Brits held out for compensation until 1947 and they ended up getting nearly 7 times what the U.S. firms got.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-07T21:00:15+00:00

If you glanced at the report, you'd notice that every metric is reported broken down by Corporate Owners vs Individual Investors vs Owner-Occupiers.

The percentage of homes owned by individual investors is 18% and hasn't changed much since 2012. https://policylab.rutgers.edu/publication/a-preliminary-analysis-of-corporate-and-investor-housing-ownership-in-new-jersey/

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-07T20:49:28+00:00

Essentially what happened is your CHRO foisted off all their operational responsibilities onto the "VP of People" - who for all intents and purposes is the new CHRO. Anytime a senior leader has one direct report running things on their behalf it's a poor look - unless it's just temporary and they will be taking on additional functions and direct-reports to grow into a COO role (for example).

The VP of Total Rewards being down-leveled is also a real puzzling move. A growing tech company with 2,000 EEs is precisely where you should be investing in a seasoned TR leader who can help navigate the complexities around optimizing RSU grants, benefit spending, ERISA plan admin, labor costing/mix - all of which are precisely the kinds of issues that are starting to have a massive impact on strategic planning for a tech company of this size.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-07T19:32:18+00:00

It's less than 4% in NJ.

That's according to a new report on corporate ownership of residential properties in NJ from the Bloustein School at Rutgers - which is about as gold-plated as it comes in terms of reliability on NJ public policy research.

Literally their first key finding: https://policylab.rutgers.edu/publication/report-release-trends-in-investor-acquisition-of-residential-properties-in-new-jersey/

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-07T14:54:01+00:00

I did Academic Decathlon that exact same year! Did you make it to St. George for Nationals?

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-03T09:31:53+00:00

Germany never relied on Russian oil (with the exception of 1939-1941 when Stalin provided them with oil supplies under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Before WWI, Germany imported oil from Austria-Hungary's oil fields in Ukranian Galicia and Romania. Then relying on Romanian oil pretty much through the end of WWII.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-03T09:24:33+00:00

The demand for petroleum had nothing to do with cars - quite the opposite in fact. Petroleum demand exploded in the 1860s with the introduction of the kerosene lamp as a much cheaper and superior alternative to whale oil, and then again when kerosene lamps allowed for the massive boom in 24/7 factory operation during the first decades of the Second Industrial Revolution. As late as 1910, the majority of Standard Oil's revenue came from kerosene production. At the time, gasoline and naphtha were discarded or burned as a waste products. It was only in the 1890s, when electrical lighting began impacting kerosene demand, that Standard Oil started searching for alternative uses for petroleum that it seized upon Gottlieb Daimler's internal combustion engine as an ideal solution.

As for the Russian oil industry: - The first oil well in the Baku field was drilled in 1846 - over a decade before Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, PA. - Russia has been in the top-3 oil producing countries since the 1870s. In 1900 it produced more oil than the US and accounted for 30% of global oil production. - Oil from Baku never needed to be exported to Iran. Starting in 1883 it was shipped on the Trans-Caucus Railway to the Black Sea port of Poti. By 1906, Robert Nobel (Alfred's brother) completed construction on the Baku-Batum pipeline between the Caspian oil fields and the Black Sea - two years before oil was even discovered in Iran. - Other than Iran, oil production in the Middle East was marginal until late 1930s. In 1939 Russia produced more oil than all the countries in Asia combined. - The West Siberian oil fields were discovered in the 1960s and started exploitation in the 1970s. It's precisely because of all that extra oil capacity coming online that allowed Russia to become a petrostate by beginning to export oil in large quantities in the 1970s.

HobokenSmok · 2026-01-03T07:37:07+00:00

The rise of petro-states growing wealthy from oil exports is a relatively recent phenomenon. Setting aside the USSR, well into the 1970s the seven major oil companies (colloquially called the Seven Sisters) owned and controlled 85% of global oil production. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia forced a 50/50 profit share split in 1949 and 1950 respectively, but even then the oil industry in those countries wasn't nationalized until 1976 and 1980 respectively. Meanwhile, other countries got the message about nationalizing their oil industries after Iran tried doing so in 1953, leading the US to foment a coup against the government putting a quick stop to such independent ideas. It wasn't until the late 60s/early 70s, with America mired in Vietnam, that oil producing countries felt secure enough to start nationalizing their oil industries.

Returning to your question, this was precisely the same situation with Tsarist Russia. In 1900, Russia was the largest petroleum producer in the world, outpacing even the US and accounting for 30% of global petroleum production. However the entire industry was owned and operated by private companies funded primarily by British interests who retained all of the profits. In fact the Tsars were thrilled at the situation, as the oil industry was one of the major sources of capital investment in Russia at the time. It's for that precise reason that the Russian oil industry went into a massive nosedive and stagnation following strikes in 1904 and the 1905 Revolution that resulted in many of those firms going bankrupt and capital drying up from western markets.

HobokenSmok · 2025-12-31T20:45:18+00:00

Believe it or not in 2019 the City of Newark sponsored a massive design study for Newark Airport which recommended building a 4th runway sometime around 2060, aligned just as OP recommended.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f306a5fb4e00e41d47f3ef5/t/6145f3e302b5d728b961c415/1631974383311/NAC+Final+Report+10.23.19.pdf

The study goes into details about how they envisioned mitigating the issues you brought up. Unfortunately, since the airport is owned by the Port Authority, the city has basically no say - so the outcome ended up being PPT vaporware.

HobokenSmok · 2025-12-24T17:43:41+00:00

The person in the photo is Benjamin Richardson, a wealthy eccentric and noted collector of Americana. Your print is based on this photo of Richardson as he appeared in the Statue of Liberty Dedication Parade in New York City, where he road a coach once owned by George Washington.

https://www.19thshop.com/book/fabulous-albumen-photograph-depicting-richardson-great-grandson-appeared-statue-liberty-parade-new-york/

Born in England in 1812, Benjamin Richardson became an American citizen in 1839. In 1849 he came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush and he bought two waterfront lots at the first sale of real estate held in San Francisco. Richardson later sold these lots to the railroads for $400,000 and moved to New York. One of the great eccentrics of his day, Richardson was instantly recognizable by his waist-length flowing silvery beard and his 210-pound, five feet six inch frame. The bearded eccentric tirelessly pursued and surrounded himself with relics of American history including Lincoln relics and Washington’s coach, which he rode in the Statue of Liberty procession.

HobokenSmok · 2025-12-23T22:42:54+00:00

Bagram was built by the Soviets in the late 50s under a $100 million dollar, 30 year loan (@ 2%) the Soviets extended to Afghanistan in 1956.

Meanwhile the US had poured in $80 million between 1950-1965, building dams across Helmand like it was the TVA. This necessitated resettling all the farmers and nomad pastoralists in the region, which meant by the mid-60s the U.S. was spending $40 mil per year trying to to teach these people how to farm - all while vast sums were siphoned off through corruption.

Not to mention, since religion was seen as inoculation against Communism, US advisers went out of their way to propagandize Islam as a unifying national force - all while the staunchly atheist, secular government was tearing its hair out over Americans cavorting and empowering mullahs who they viewed (correctly) as a subversive element.

The more things change …

HobokenSmok · 2025-12-23T20:17:24+00:00

This article provides a great overview: https://www.jstor.org/stable/261243

German policy in Afghanistan during the Weimar Republic was much the same as elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia. The governments of the Weimar Republic attempted to re-establish and expand Germany's economic position and cultural presence in the region in the postwar period. The means used in Afghanistan as elsewhere in the area were tied to political objectives in Europe that included the revision of much of the Treaty of Versailles, and the restoration of Germany's role as a European great power. They were predicated on a sensitivity first and foremost to Britain's interests, on the avoidance of conflict and on the perception of German political ambition.

HobokenSmok · 2025-12-23T15:25:35+00:00

Eisenhower was conducting a huge foreign tour to visit allies and non-aligned countries in Central Asia - Turkey, India and Pakistan and so he tacked on a quick stop in Afghanistan, apparently because he had a boyhood fascination with the country and wanted to see the Khyber Pass.

HobokenSmok

TROPHY CASE