The history of the US isn’t “fascist-adjacent;” we’ve had our heads ALL THE WAY UP THAT ASS since the beginning and ongoing. Most of the founding fathers were worried that an “excess of democracy” would be bad for business (season 4 of “Scene on Radio,” https://sceneonradio.org/category/season-4/page/2/).

The US’ crusade against all things vaguely left of center goes even deeper than I ever thought. It’s a bit surprising how many of the most dreadful dictators in the past 100 years were graduates of the School of the Americas and/or installed by the CIA. See: “The Jakarta Method” by Vincent Bevins.

Prunebutt is right here: the US was, at best, laissez-faire about Nazis until it wasn’t. Nazis were good for business. I’ve read a lot on the topic, but can’t find any good citations at the moment. This is an accessible, albeit lightweight entry point: https://time.com/5414055/american-nazi-sympathy-book/. But listen to just about year of “Behind the Bastards,” and it’s a deep rabbit hole of how closely tied to fascism the US had always been.

If my juggling of balls catches your fancy, you might also be interested to know that I also smoke meat, play the flute, and churn butter. 😆

Oh, throughout the whole thing, he and his employees were treated like garbage. He would get through security, go directly to the person’s office, and reassemble the pistol in front of the manager. And then my friend (or one of his employees) would get interrogated for hours on unrelated questions, like it was somehow my friend’s fault that the TSA failed their audits.

I travel a lot for work. US Customs and the TSA are absolutely a sick joke. I could easily write a novella on the extremely poor training of TSA employees. I have a small permanent retainer (read: braces); about 25% of the time, that is considered suspicious, and I get an enhanced inspection. “Ya know, I could just open my mouth and show you what’s in there.”

The TSA always determines that my juggling balls are suspicious, so I never pack them in carry-on anymore. I have NEXUS, yet I always get an enhanced inspection on return to the US. Literally every other country to which I have flown just waves me through, even before I got Pre-Check/NEXUS/Global Entry.

My partner had her rigging knife in her backpack on a flight out and back. She was unpacking and found it in her backpack after the trip. Good catch, TSA.

And the absolute frosting on the TSA shit sandwich: one of my close friends owns a private security firm. His company was approached by the TSA to assist in security audits at a major international airport. He and his team were contracted to “smuggle” fake firearms through TSA checkpoints, any way they could. The TSA repeatedly failed to detect the firearms for each of five audits. The TSA division (district? regional?) manager, frustrated at his group’s 100% failure rate, determined that my friend’s company must have specialized criminal training, and everyone who worked that contract were put on the no-fly list. It took him about 18 months to unfuck that mess for him and his employees.

I had written a few more paragraphs about TSA hassles, but I think y’all get the picture.

I miss lawn darts, but the ban made sense. Holy hell, people were stupid with those things.

Punch card stock makes amazing paper airplanes, both individually and laminated into larger stock.

It’s sofa king exhausting. Craft a cover letter and tweak the resume for each application. And still get crickets.

For the entirety of my engineering career (25+ years), I’ve been accustomed to getting an offer for every position to which I applied. This time around, something is way off. I’m at 78 applications, despite being a perfect fit for almost all of those applications. There have been only two responses, and those were for interviews, still in progress. The fake listings makes a lot sense, but I can’t help but feel that the problem is way larger than this article indicates.

Monterey sea lemon, Hood Canal WA USA

Ask and ye shall receive! Giant nudibranch, Sinclair Inlet, Bremerton WA USA

These nudis are very common on the docks where I moor my boat. This picture has the saturation punched up, but still fails to convey just how trippy they, and most other nudibranchs, look in person. The iridescence in the rhinophores and cerata is something that can be tricky to capture with imaging. Here is a different angle of the same species.

You and me both! 😆 We continued to live together and were besties for another four years, and she would never talk about anything relationship-related, even as her next three relationships imploded.

Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.

In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:

-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time

-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly

-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS

-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need

-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive

-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis

Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.

This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.

DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.

It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.

I had a partner for eight years. We met when we were both 31. She was my first monogamous relationship theretofore because I decided to give monogamy a try. She was utterly, screamingly boring in bed. There was nothing else notably wrong with the relationship, except for her unwillingness to communicate on anything beyond household, workaday topics. No oral (give or receive), no anal, not into foreplay, and she would just lay there. But no conflicts either. There was the advantage of she was always willing and ready to go without any foreplay or lube. She got off and claimed she was absolutely sexually satisfied. Sex wasn’t even fun in the context of Free Use, which is a kink I enjoy. I tried to engage her in all kinds of Gottman Method relationship work, but she bluntly and explicitly refused.

At one point early in our relationship, she moved and clamped her vagina in a way that was quite enjoyable. “Honey, that was great! Please do that more.” And for the rest of our relationship, any such complement was a sure-fire way to make sure it would never happen again. After eight years of nearly daily, invariably terrible sex, I stopped approaching her sex for three weeks. She never said a thing. On day 22, I broke up with her, and she was absolutely gobsmacked, claimed that I was throwing away eight years of great history. She hadn’t even noticed that there had been no sex for three weeks.

Any other country with that free access to high quality guns would have their politicians afraid of just fucking die. Republicans act as they were invulnerable demigods.

Total anecdote, so take the following with the Internet grain of salt that it is.

I was at a dinner party in the 90s. A Columbia University law professor, by way of long, meandering conversation, asked me (paraphrasing) “Why do you think we, the general populace, are allowed to own firearms?” Uh, I’m just a rural New York bumpkin. I just want to protect my livestock and keep the deer from destroying my small plot of crops. “Sure, JayleneSlide, that’s a great general reason. But in the US, it’s for killing cops and politicians.” 0_0

So, yeah, clearly not enough politicians in proper fear of the constituency here, despite their willingness to sell us out for the tiniest pittance.

I totally missed that. I completely agree and apologize for the oversight.

Stainless steel that gets coated is no longer stainless steel. Stainless steel requires exposure to sufficient oxygen in order to maintain the protective oxide layer.

These are rudder bolts from the same gudgeon on my sailboat. The black stuff is anoxic corrosion.

Maybe not exactly what you had in mind, but the Battle of Blair Mountain ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain ) is an excellent example of the dynamic between police, capital class, and labor.

Edit: fixing my stupid link; thanks for the heads-up!

One of my ex-GFs was fond of saying “Men are good for three things: heavy lifting, outdoor cooking, and sex.” Welp, two out of three ain’t bad.

Triple? In our galley, “1 clove” —> 1 bulb.