Seriously, though, what do CEOs actually do? How can one person (totally hypothetically) be the CEO of a car company and a rocket company at the same time, but spend all his time doing drugs, gaming, and destroying democratic institutions? What value does that add to the company? Or, say Walmart fired its CEO and didn’t replace him? How long would it take customers to notice, and what would they notice, versus firing store employees with an equivalent amount of compensation?

Personally, I’d go with the idea that the Democrats are the ones who fight for brightly-colored warning signs, guardrails, and PPE for the operators of the orphan crushing machine.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I believe in due process, so any Republican making a lot of noise about protecting children should in, a just world, at least be probable cause for a search warrant.

It’s the New York Post, though. 100% intentional.

ready and willing and even eager to mouth whatever he thinks will please whoever he’s desperate to please at the moment.

How much would you bet that that doesn’t apply to his wife, if you know what I mean?

Brilliant! Just put your pillow in the wash on spin cycle while cooking your risotto to save a lot of effort.

I’m no expert on whether it’s codified as a work safe practice, nor am I out to convince anybody to get on such a rig. For what it’s worth, I’m just sharing what I’ve learned as a sailor, and what I see here is a lot of folks certain that this is crazy because of their intuition that it’ll tip over easily. With that it of the way…

Based on my intuition, there was simply no way a 747 could even toodle around the tarmac, much less fly, just by blowing some air out the back. Big ones weigh 500 tons! Then, I learned the power of air and lift intimately by putting a specially-shaped piece of Dacron up a metal pole on top of a boat. Experience updated my intuition, and I’m not even slightly nervous about flying anymore.

Similarly, from the other direction, my intuition said that there’s no way a boat could stay upright with parts (mast, cabin, tuna tower, stacks of containers, water park and shopping mall deck, etc.) so high above the waterline, and so little hull beneath it. But I’ve learned intimately the effects of primary stability, and ballast. With my intuition changed, this setup looks fine.

I’ve had the experience, too, of working in a boat yard. At the end of the season, the owner drove the crawler crane onto a barge not much bigger than the one in the image, and we used it to yank boat mooring anchors out of the lake bed. Even a heavy weight on the end of the crane boom barely affected the trim of the barge. I’ve walked on many an EZ Dock section, and experienced that sections like this have immense primary stability, too.

Indeed, by my back of the envelope calculations, that 20’ by 20’ EZ Dock barge would take in the rough range of 75 tons of force to capsize. (Easier to submerge it!) Even with the 32’ lever arm of the scissor lift, that’s still more than 7 tons of lateral force needed to capsize it. I don’t know the numbers on what it takes to capsize the scissor lift itself, but given that I know that the barge is going to stay quite level, and that there’s no lateral force on the scissor lift platform in this scenario, it seems that they’d be fine even without the straps lashing the lift to the barge.

Anyway, I did a reverse image search, and did not find an original source. I have no idea how common this is, but I did find a comment thread from 4 years ago on the red site with comments from a user who said he called a local company that rents out Rotodocks (a very similar product) which claimed that they do it all the time.

Hope that is interesting, and yeah, absolutely, get the numbers from a real engineer before putting yourself in situations like this.

That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That’s just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!

EZ Dock is the brand name, and the company even markets its products for use as floating work platforms.

EZ Dock Floating Work Platforms

The manufacturer markets them for carrying equipment.

The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it’s really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.

It’s disheartening.

Usually, the answer is racism. In the case of HOAs, though, I’m going to guess that it’s probably racism.

ETA: I looked it up on Wikipedia. The answer is: racism.

I hear a lot of talk about guillotines, but I feel that wood chippers are the sleepers here.

It’s… still around, in a way. Apple bought NeXT Computer, and it provided the BSD Unix base for MacOS X, as well as all of those classes with the ‘NS’ prefix. Of course, Apple pasted on a totally new UI. 🙁

NeXTSTEP worked exactly this way, and it was glorious. Its window manager simply had the concept of “no current focus.” Programs could not steal focus, they could only gain focus either by explicit user action, or grabbing it when nothing else was focused. When you started an application, there would be no focus while it loaded. If you waited, the new application would grab focus. If you moved on to a different window, the new application would pop up in the background. New windows, dialog boxes, and notification-type events would put an indicator on the application’s icon in the dock.

Best President since Jimmy Carter is a low, low bar. We forget that Carter was a neo-liberal who threw labor under the bus. Because the Presidents since have been so right-wing, he looks like a leftist in the rear view. And throwing the working classes under the bus is one of the major reasons we’re here now.

Okay, no Linux, no Star Trek. Cool cool. But you’re a femboy furry, right?

Every new thing I learn about Florida makes it sound worse.

Medical staff do it routinely.

Can we start delivering those 2,000lb. bombs that the U.S. gives to Israel one by one, to Netanyahu’s house, by airmail?