That’s why I don’t run the opossums off. They eat a lot of spiders and will also actively hunt snakes. I’ll gladly trade a little cat food and chicken scratch for the extermination fee lol.
"It is also an absurd amount of money, coming in at a whopping $58,000 per kilogram launched to low Earth orbit if the expected payload weights are to be believed...."
" But to anyone who doesn’t directly benefit from the largesse sloshing around these rocketry contracts, it simply looks like the government is spending billions of dollars on a rocket that is already obsolete before it ever even leaves the ground.
That is because the SLS has a huge weakness that hikes its single launch cost up into the billions – it is expendable. After launch, the main stage is lost to the ocean, never to be recovered. That is a stark contrast to another well-known launch system that happens to be run by a much more agile firm without a cost-plus contract. Starship has a potential payload capacity almost 30% larger than SLS’s – and it’s reusable, potentially bringing the cost per kilogram launched down to $10."
"
Drug design can be twisted into weapons
When a pharmaceutical company tried to see whether their artificial-intelligence (AI) tools could be used to design biochemical weapons, the results horrified them. They used a machine-learning model that penalizes dangerous toxicity and inverted it to pursue compounds similar to the nerve agent VX, one of the most toxic chemical weapons ever created. In less than six hours, the system designed VX, many other known chemical-warfare agents and molecules predicted to be even more toxic. The frightening ease of the experiment should be a wake-up call for the AI drug-discovery community, argue Fabio Urbina and three colleagues at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals. “By going as close as we dared, we have still crossed a grey moral boundary,” they write. “We can easily erase the thousands of molecules we created, but we cannot delete the knowledge of how to recreate them.”
I, for one, will be glad of the time I don't have to dig up the automobile manual to find out how to set the clock on the dash.
Except that the last time it was made permanent, back in the 70s, the clock took a beating again the next year.
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
Instead of changing the time, setting the clock forward and backward, why don't we just adjust our schedules? In the winter we're working from 9 - 5, in the summer we'll work from 8 - 4 so you can have more time to do things while it's light out. That way, businesses, schools, etc., can decide for themselves what schedule works best for them. Right?
Oh, wait. Duh. That would involve people solving their own problems and making their own decisions. How absurd of me not to know that only those in Ivory Towers can do those things.
Sorry. My bad.
Carry on as ordered by the overlords.
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
@Amos_Umwhat said:
Instead of changing the time, setting the clock forward and backward, why don't we just adjust our schedules? In the winter we're working from 9 - 5, in the summer we'll work from 8 - 4 so you can have more time to do things while it's light out. That way, businesses, schools, etc., can decide for themselves what schedule works best for them. Right?
Oh, wait. Duh. That would involve people solving their own problems and making their own decisions. How absurd of me not to know that only those in Ivory Towers can do those things.
Sorry. My bad.
Carry on as ordered by the overlords.
I kind of like your idea, Amos. It brings to mind the idea of living with the seasons and nature in general.
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
An old Native American was told of daylight saving time and had this to say: "Only the Government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket".
DETROIT – First came the beeping alarms and the dashboard lights warning that something had gone haywire. Then the driver’s side windows suddenly and mysteriously rolled down. Kendall Heiman’s Volkswagen SUV then pulled the scariest stunt of all: It abruptly braked for no reason.
Heiman, a clinical social worker in Lawrence, Kansas, was driving her 15-year-old son to a class Jan.5 when her 2021 Atlas Cross Sport went bonkers. The malfunctions turned a normally routine 2-mile round trip into a white-knuckle ordeal.
'It literally feels like the car is possessed,' Heiman said. 'I’m not feeling like I’m driving my car. My car is driving me.'
Since late 2020, 47 VW owners have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about the same glitches in their 2020 and 2021 VW Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport SUVs. Some drivers reported that they narrowly escaped collisions, though a review of the complaints found no reports of crashes.
In a statement, NHTSA said it has been gathering information from VW about the problem and is monitoring complaints and other data sources. The agency hasn’t opened a formal investigation. It would have to collect and analyze additional data before it could seek a recall.
Complaints about unexpected braking involving the VW SUVs began in September 2020, eight months before Heiman bought her SUV, NHTSA’s records show.
In a statement, Volkswagen said it is working on the problem but stopped short of saying it’s recalling the affected vehicles.
'VW is aware of concerns involving faulty door wiring harnesses in certain Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport vehicles,' the company said. 'We are working closely with NHTSA regarding the next steps towards identifying the affected vehicles.'
After her SUV’s unexpected braking, Heiman initially kept driving, figuring that the problem was a 'bizarre fluke.' The SUV and a VW app flashed malfunction alerts, she said, but neither displayed a message to stop driving the vehicle.
Her Cross Sport braked unexpectedly a few more times that day, but she was able to override it with the gas pedal. Heading home with her son the same day, the SUV abruptly braked and came to a complete stop, Heiman said, and another SUV narrowly missed rear-ending her. She shut the engine off and restarted it to override what she thinks was a malfunction of automatic emergency braking.
Jan.5 was the first time she had encountered the problem with the Cross Sport, which she bought new in May 2021.
Heiman called her dealer’s service department and got an appointment the next day. On the way there, she said, the SUV braked again while exiting a two-lane highway.
'They didn’t tell me it wasn’t safe to drive to the dealer,' she said.
In the shop, a mechanic detected a problem with a wiring harness in the driver’s door, but she was told there weren’t any parts to fix it. (Electrical shorts in wiring harnesses can cause multiple problems in vehicles, including brake activation.)
After discussing the safety risks with her, the dealership arranged for a rental car, Heiman said, and eventually the use of a new all-wheel-drive VW SUV.
The same day, Heiman reported the problem to VW in an online chat and was referred to a regional manager who was of little help, she said.
VW declined to comment on Heiman’s assertions.
On Jan.12, Heiman complained to NHTSA but said she never heard back from the agency. (NHTSA says it reviews all complaints but in most cases doesn’t respond directly to them.)
For more than two months, Heiman said, her burnt orange Cross Sport, which had 12,600 miles on it and had cost $45,000, sat at the dealership waiting for the part. But late last week, after a reporter contacted the dealership, Heiman received a call telling her that the part had come in and that her vehicle had been repaired.
Others who filed complaints with NHTSA wrote that dealers told them they were out of loaner cars and that they should keep driving their vehicles.
'They also could not guarantee that my parking brake would not engage again while the car was in drive, but did not want to offer me a rental car because Volkswagen doesn’t consider it a ‘safety issue,’' one unidentified owner from Sidney Center, New York, wrote in a complaint.
Heiman’s experience with Volkswagen made her worry about others who have encountered the same problems with the same VW models. She wonders why the automaker and government safety regulators haven’t recalled them.
If there is a recall, it’s not clear how many vehicles would have to be repaired. In 2020 and 2021, VW sold 203,000 of both models combined.
Many owners wrote in complaints that the automatic emergency braking system had abruptly stopped their Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport SUVs. Safety advocates say the new technology, which uses cameras and computers to detect obstacles and stop or slow down if a driver doesn’t react, shows great promise to prevent crashes.
But the technology is also causing concerns for automakers. NHTSA recently opened investigations into unexpected braking by the systems in some Honda and Tesla vehicles.
Kendall Heiman of Lawrence, Kan., received a loaner car she drove for two months while waiting for her Volkswagen 2021 Atlas Cross Sport to be repaired after it began abruptly braking for no reason. Charlie Riedel/AP
Doesn't surprise me. The more "beneficial " technology they add to cars the worse off we are. As soon as they started adding automatic anything, we were screwed.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
Heard a report yesterday about a law suit in California. Didn't get all the details but someone was killed by a Telsa that was in auto-drive mode. Their defense is that they weren't driving the car was.
Don't let the wife know what you spend on guns, ammo or cigars.
Yep, that's Caliphornia for you. Working hardest to ensure that the serf mentality remains intact in the subjects. The overlords will be pleased.
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
We have had the same thing in this area before. A man that owns three gas stations keeps his gas lower than everyone else’s because he owns his own tankers. He has people already on his payroll that drive and deliver fuel to his stations. They are already paid by the hour so he saves money on the haul bill. His gas is usually around $0.20 cheaper than the chains. He has faced a couple lawsuits over it that I know of.
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
Comments
If only the new spiders had an appetite for devouring brown recluse spiders and fire ants.
That’s why I don’t run the opossums off. They eat a lot of spiders and will also actively hunt snakes. I’ll gladly trade a little cat food and chicken scratch for the extermination fee lol.
That reminds me, one opossum eats 5000 ticks a year. They eat almost all the ticks that try to hitch a ride on them.
Unlike the old wives tale, opossum's are cold blooded and their low body temperature can't sustain rabies.
These gas prices even got Tom Brady going back to work.
this is not good news:
Wisconsin flock of 2.75 mln chickens to be culled as bird flu spreads in U.S.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-detects-highly-lethal-bird-flu-wisconsin-egg-laying-chickens-2022-03-14/
"It is also an absurd amount of money, coming in at a whopping $58,000 per kilogram launched to low Earth orbit if the expected payload weights are to be believed...."
" But to anyone who doesn’t directly benefit from the largesse sloshing around these rocketry contracts, it simply looks like the government is spending billions of dollars on a rocket that is already obsolete before it ever even leaves the ground.
That is because the SLS has a huge weakness that hikes its single launch cost up into the billions – it is expendable. After launch, the main stage is lost to the ocean, never to be recovered. That is a stark contrast to another well-known launch system that happens to be run by a much more agile firm without a cost-plus contract. Starship has a potential payload capacity almost 30% larger than SLS’s – and it’s reusable, potentially bringing the cost per kilogram launched down to $10."
https://www.universetoday.com/154957/according-to-a-us-auditor-each-launch-of-the-space-launch-system-will-cost-an-unsustainable-4-1-billion/
Government, twice as much and twice as long.
MOW badge received.
Oh, this is just great:
"
Drug design can be twisted into weapons
When a pharmaceutical company tried to see whether their artificial-intelligence (AI) tools could be used to design biochemical weapons, the results horrified them. They used a machine-learning model that penalizes dangerous toxicity and inverted it to pursue compounds similar to the nerve agent VX, one of the most toxic chemical weapons ever created. In less than six hours, the system designed VX, many other known chemical-warfare agents and molecules predicted to be even more toxic. The frightening ease of the experiment should be a wake-up call for the AI drug-discovery community, argue Fabio Urbina and three colleagues at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals. “By going as close as we dared, we have still crossed a grey moral boundary,” they write. “We can easily erase the thousands of molecules we created, but we cannot delete the knowledge of how to recreate them.”
Nature Machine Intelligence | 11 min read"
With half the results. I don't see how anyone that graduated 6th grade can't see how totally incompetent the government has become.
Don't let the wife know what you spend on guns, ammo or cigars.
The Sunshine Protection Act (who concocts these wonderful names) will make Daylight Savings Time permanent!
I, for one, will be glad of the time I don't have to dig up the automobile manual to find out how to set the clock on the dash.
Except that the last time it was made permanent, back in the 70s, the clock took a beating again the next year.
Not looking forward to sun up at 8:00 AM.
Don't let the wife know what you spend on guns, ammo or cigars.
Instead of changing the time, setting the clock forward and backward, why don't we just adjust our schedules? In the winter we're working from 9 - 5, in the summer we'll work from 8 - 4 so you can have more time to do things while it's light out. That way, businesses, schools, etc., can decide for themselves what schedule works best for them. Right?
Oh, wait. Duh. That would involve people solving their own problems and making their own decisions. How absurd of me not to know that only those in Ivory Towers can do those things.
Sorry. My bad.
Carry on as ordered by the overlords.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
I kind of like your idea, Amos. It brings to mind the idea of living with the seasons and nature in general.
"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
An old Native American was told of daylight saving time and had this to say: "Only the Government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket".
don't you just love computerized safety features
Tom Krisher
ASSOCIATED PRESS
DETROIT – First came the beeping alarms and the dashboard lights warning that something had gone haywire. Then the driver’s side windows suddenly and mysteriously rolled down. Kendall Heiman’s Volkswagen SUV then pulled the scariest stunt of all: It abruptly braked for no reason.
Heiman, a clinical social worker in Lawrence, Kansas, was driving her 15-year-old son to a class Jan.5 when her 2021 Atlas Cross Sport went bonkers. The malfunctions turned a normally routine 2-mile round trip into a white-knuckle ordeal.
'It literally feels like the car is possessed,' Heiman said. 'I’m not feeling like I’m driving my car. My car is driving me.'
Since late 2020, 47 VW owners have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about the same glitches in their 2020 and 2021 VW Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport SUVs. Some drivers reported that they narrowly escaped collisions, though a review of the complaints found no reports of crashes.
In a statement, NHTSA said it has been gathering information from VW about the problem and is monitoring complaints and other data sources. The agency hasn’t opened a formal investigation. It would have to collect and analyze additional data before it could seek a recall.
Complaints about unexpected braking involving the VW SUVs began in September 2020, eight months before Heiman bought her SUV, NHTSA’s records show.
In a statement, Volkswagen said it is working on the problem but stopped short of saying it’s recalling the affected vehicles.
'VW is aware of concerns involving faulty door wiring harnesses in certain Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport vehicles,' the company said. 'We are working closely with NHTSA regarding the next steps towards identifying the affected vehicles.'
After her SUV’s unexpected braking, Heiman initially kept driving, figuring that the problem was a 'bizarre fluke.' The SUV and a VW app flashed malfunction alerts, she said, but neither displayed a message to stop driving the vehicle.
Her Cross Sport braked unexpectedly a few more times that day, but she was able to override it with the gas pedal. Heading home with her son the same day, the SUV abruptly braked and came to a complete stop, Heiman said, and another SUV narrowly missed rear-ending her. She shut the engine off and restarted it to override what she thinks was a malfunction of automatic emergency braking.
Jan.5 was the first time she had encountered the problem with the Cross Sport, which she bought new in May 2021.
Heiman called her dealer’s service department and got an appointment the next day. On the way there, she said, the SUV braked again while exiting a two-lane highway.
'They didn’t tell me it wasn’t safe to drive to the dealer,' she said.
In the shop, a mechanic detected a problem with a wiring harness in the driver’s door, but she was told there weren’t any parts to fix it. (Electrical shorts in wiring harnesses can cause multiple problems in vehicles, including brake activation.)
After discussing the safety risks with her, the dealership arranged for a rental car, Heiman said, and eventually the use of a new all-wheel-drive VW SUV.
The same day, Heiman reported the problem to VW in an online chat and was referred to a regional manager who was of little help, she said.
VW declined to comment on Heiman’s assertions.
On Jan.12, Heiman complained to NHTSA but said she never heard back from the agency. (NHTSA says it reviews all complaints but in most cases doesn’t respond directly to them.)
For more than two months, Heiman said, her burnt orange Cross Sport, which had 12,600 miles on it and had cost $45,000, sat at the dealership waiting for the part. But late last week, after a reporter contacted the dealership, Heiman received a call telling her that the part had come in and that her vehicle had been repaired.
Others who filed complaints with NHTSA wrote that dealers told them they were out of loaner cars and that they should keep driving their vehicles.
'They also could not guarantee that my parking brake would not engage again while the car was in drive, but did not want to offer me a rental car because Volkswagen doesn’t consider it a ‘safety issue,’' one unidentified owner from Sidney Center, New York, wrote in a complaint.
Heiman’s experience with Volkswagen made her worry about others who have encountered the same problems with the same VW models. She wonders why the automaker and government safety regulators haven’t recalled them.
If there is a recall, it’s not clear how many vehicles would have to be repaired. In 2020 and 2021, VW sold 203,000 of both models combined.
Many owners wrote in complaints that the automatic emergency braking system had abruptly stopped their Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport SUVs. Safety advocates say the new technology, which uses cameras and computers to detect obstacles and stop or slow down if a driver doesn’t react, shows great promise to prevent crashes.
But the technology is also causing concerns for automakers. NHTSA recently opened investigations into unexpected braking by the systems in some Honda and Tesla vehicles.
Kendall Heiman of Lawrence, Kan., received a loaner car she drove for two months while waiting for her Volkswagen 2021 Atlas Cross Sport to be repaired after it began abruptly braking for no reason. Charlie Riedel/AP
Doesn't surprise me. The more "beneficial " technology they add to cars the worse off we are. As soon as they started adding automatic anything, we were screwed.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
Heard a report yesterday about a law suit in California. Didn't get all the details but someone was killed by a Telsa that was in auto-drive mode. Their defense is that they weren't driving the car was.
Don't let the wife know what you spend on guns, ammo or cigars.
really? Another move to make people less responsible for their own behavior:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/california-bill-would-hold-tech-companies-liable-for-kids-social-media-addiction-11647383929
Yep, that's Caliphornia for you. Working hardest to ensure that the serf mentality remains intact in the subjects. The overlords will be pleased.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
The CROWN Act
Ukraine Immortalizes “Russian Warship, Go **** Yourself” on a Postal Stamp
https://hyperallergic.com/717760/ukraine-immortalizes-russian-warship-go-****-yourself-on-a-postal-stamp/
Priorities.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/19/japan-loneliness-rent/
Rent-a-stranger: This Japanese man makes a living showing up and doing nothing
So do i.
Trapped in the People's Communits Republic of Massachusetts.
https://www.newsweek.com/competitors-sue-gas-station-setting-prices-too-low-1689785
We have had the same thing in this area before. A man that owns three gas stations keeps his gas lower than everyone else’s because he owns his own tankers. He has people already on his payroll that drive and deliver fuel to his stations. They are already paid by the hour so he saves money on the haul bill. His gas is usually around $0.20 cheaper than the chains. He has faced a couple lawsuits over it that I know of.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4aw8dm/lube-and-condom-company-denied-insurance-hartford-company-paradise
It's just workers comp insurance! What's wrong with people?