CrowTankieRobot [he/him]

And that especially includes the radtrads/tradcaths, who are some of the most performative “Christians” I’ve ever met.

That’s actually going on even in this country. The outsourcing trend started when the airlines contracted out their maintenance to anti-union states like OK (Tulsa is a big hub for this). Pretty soon, labor-intensive maintenance had left the US entirely for places like El Salvador and China. I’m pretty sure that Delta does most of their “D checks” (where the plane is pretty much disassembled) in El Salvador.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_maintenance_checks#Offshore_Maintenance_Facilities

Except that Trump even got that wrong, as I recall. There was plenty of spray-on asbestos on the girders of WTC 1 and 2–except on the floors where it was blown off by widebody jets flying into the buildings at 500 mph! The spray-on fireproofing was never designed for that kind of impact, and I doubt that any fireproofing would survive such an event. People and service animals got very sick and died from the asbestos and other toxic materials that were released from the collapse of the towers. As usual, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about.

Didn’t that have something to do with the original World Trade Center buildings? As I recall, Trump also got it wrong (what a surprise)…the issue was the spray-on asbestos fireproofing that was applied to the girders and related support structures of WTC 1 and 2. I can’t remember all the details anymore…maybe the fireproofing companies were mobbed up?

IIRC, there were a couple additional issues with the Pinto. There was a problem with the filler tube that connected to the fuel tank (I think it was welded to the body or something), and this could cause a rupture and subsequent conflagration. The fuel tank was much too close to the bumper, and there wasn’t enough of a buffer zone around it; there were lots of structural items nearby that could cause punctures. Ford actually had the option to license a self-sealing “fuel bladder”, a design that came from the aviation industry, but the bean counters nixed that. The doors tended to bind and jam in a collision, trapping occupants in a burning vehicle. And finally, '70s-era Ford was really making some lousy cars, especially small ones. The Pinto is yet another case of “the hard way is the easiest to learn”. (I think there was an episode of Engineering Disasters that covered the Pinto fiasco in great detail).

The diagram you posted below shows what a defective design it really was. It’s almost as if they shoehorned in the fuel tank wherever they could, like it was an afterthought.

Reminds me of that scene in Office Space: “Planning to Plan”.

pic here: https://old.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/akv6x2/in_office_space_the_board_in_the_bobs_meeting/

At least one of the charter schools in one of the smaller MN cities had to build an apartment complex next door to attract teachers. AFAIK, the apartments are reserved just for teachers and their immediate families. The charter school salary and benefits are crappy enough that without cheap (and good) housing, no one wants to move there to have a teaching career. I found out recently that this strategy has been given the rather euphemistic name “workforce housing”. IOW, they have to build housing as a sort of charity project.

Yeah, and it’s definitely a dogwhistle when Eloon is all over the internet posting memes from r/Frenworld. What can you even say about a billionaire industrialist who posts Nazi frogs from an obscure Reddit group that got yeeted more than four years ago?

Can’t wait for this article to hit the chud sites accompanied by the inevitable comments about “eating the bugs” and “living in the pod” for the millionth time.

Another example of this, maybe less important but still notable, is the defiance of many states over Federal scheduling of cannabis (a C-I drug, therefore “totally illegal”). While the FDA claims jurisdiction over all drugs, probably using the Interstate Commerce Clause (be advised, IANAL), the states have looked at cannabis as a states rights issue. Right now, I think they are avoiding really big legal trouble by using a few loopholes (e.g. MN is deriving its delta-9-THC and other cannabis products from industrial hemp, a fairly inefficient process). Outside of Native American reservations, I’m not sure that any state is actually selling anything like cannabis flower. But it is real defiance on the part of many states, since delta-9-THC and other cannabinoids are the substances which are actually scheduled and regulated by the FDA, and they have really pissed off the Feds with their actions. I don’t think you would have seen this at an earlier time in US history, and it’s an interesting development.

Then there’s the Covid response, or lack of it, mostly thanks to the chuds turning it into another front in the culture war. That’s also one for the history books.

Americans really love their signifiers of negative freedom (“freedom from”) and negative identity, and they turn those into religions just as much as any religion they might actually practice. So the tradcath thing is partly a silly aesthetic pose (e.g. Dasha from Red Scare), but it also usually serves an actual need, even if it’s something really neurotic. As the evangelical Protestants have become so perniciously anti-intellectual and backward, the tradcath option looks more appealing to those who value education and at least a minimal amount of intellectual content to their spirituality. It also has a big performative aspect (lots of costume dress-up for the clergy, Latin Mass zealotry, etc.) that allows one to differentiate from the evangelicals (negative identity). My guess is that’s why you see so many high-profile converts lately among the power elite.

Oh, yeah, back before YouTube or even the commercial internet, there were various crazy political groups that would send their videos to cable-access stations around the country. You would sometimes see their stuff played on late-night cable TV. I vaguely remember one that had to do with old rail yards being converted into FEMA detention camps or something. There was even an X-Files episode or two that riffed off of this stuff…it had quite an impact on '90s culture. The “FEMA camp” nonsense was even featured on Jesse Ventura’s ridiculous TV show.

Finally…an example of “jury nullification” for the left. Every other time I’ve heard that term, it’s always been from a MAGA chud. Too bad the incident (and court case) happened in the UK, though, not here.

Won’t have to hope for too long…just leave the Cybertruck out in a rainstorm for an hour and it should start corroding away quite nicely. That’s what happens when your company is run by King Bazinga, who can’t be bothered to listen to the metallurgical engineers about how “stainless” doesn’t always mean “rust-proof”.

So many cultural minefields to cross…anyone remember the George HW Bush incident with the grocery scanner? That was blamed in part for his loss to Clinton.

It’s also nice to see that years after Roger Ailes toppled down the stairs to his demise, his successor(s) at Fox “News” still have the fetish for newsreaders from the Blonde Fembot Factory.

That’s rather ironic, since the right-wing economists at Stanford’s Hoover Institution would normally consider anathema any mention of “national industrial policy”, even if it was dressed up with all sorts of niceties about “public-private partnerships” and similar nonsense. The careers of so many there (Sowell, etc.) are predicated on a near-religious belief in the old Thatcherism “there is no such thing as society”. Similarly, for Hooverites, “there is no such thing as the public sector”, or at least there ought not to be.

Dr, Harris may live inside ivory towers and ivy-covered walls, but he apparently doesn’t understand that he’s a lot closer to the old plantation than he realizes. Something tells me that his heterodox “progressive market theory” (or whatever he would call it) is tolerated more because of his Third World background than for any other reason.

Don’t think so. Are you thinking of Dasha Nekrasova? She’s one half of the Red Scare podcast. They were somehow affiliated with Thiel (I remember there was something in the press about that).

And before this stunt, he was re-tweeting (or should I say, “re-Xitting”) Pepe frog Frenworld memes. He literally reposted plagiarized Frenworld content, just like an incel basement dweller.

After the raids in 2006, the company needed to replenish its work force fast. Swift executives set up a war room where they posted maps on the walls and circled target cities for recruitment. The company’s H.R. team advertised on the radio and in local newspapers. They bought space on billboards. They sent representatives to job fairs and set up a recruitment station at unemployment offices. But few workers would bite. Finally, Swift started offering free bus service to Cactus from Amarillo. Somali refugees began to apply, and in 2007, after JBS acquired Swift, it stepped up the hiring of refugees to maintain production.

It’s surprising that this story actually reveals one of the key problems of industrial agriculture, the vertical integration and monopolization which has grown exponentially since the '80s–particularly through M&As and finance capital buyouts. The working conditions in these plants are often beyond description, and the article only obliquely mentions the latest work hazard: Covid. A family member lived in Sioux Falls, SD during the worst of the pandemic years, and they told me of the panic that spread through the community as workers at the Smithfield plant there got sick and died. It turns out that Covid spreads best in cold, damp conditions, which makes meat processing plants uniquely dangerous. Then there was the spectacle of Donald Trump insisting that the plants stay open during the worst of the pandemic, which resulted in huge spread of Covid outside of the confines of the plants and the predictable deaths of workers from the virus.