I put The Full Monty in a combo VHS/TV machine in a hostel a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked. Admittedly on, like, a 17" or 19" screen, but still. Turns out when you aren't trying to record 6 hours of video on a 2 hour tape from broadcast TV, the format performs pretty well. Yes, I lived through that. Star Trek marathons were the motivator for that.
My now-wife had her wisdom teeth pulled not too long after we met. The oral surgeon suggested music or an audiobook. She chose a Game of Thrones book, which was fine until it got to a torture scene as they were rooting around in her mouth. At which point she was unable to change it. Surprisingly, she still likes the audiobooks.
Just want to note that The Bitter Southerner ran two seasons of an absolutely outstanding podcast that sadly went defunct in 2020. Truly it's one of the best podcasts I've listened to, and I'm bummed that they quit making it.
> Would you nationalize factories but leave them idle?
Yes. Historically, these would be the national armories, Navy Yards, and Air Force plants. You know, Springfield Armory (of .30-06 Springfield fame, now a museum), Watertown Arsenal (now a fucking Home Depot, among other things), Charlestown Navy Yard(Boston, now largely a museum), Philadelphia Navy Yard (redeveloped? not my area), Air Force Plant 42 (near LA, still in use by Skunk Works among others), and others.
Having the capital idle/underutilized but maintained and a core group of people with the institutional knowledge ready to pass on during that rapid scaling up is what would make the factories able to scale up. Gun barrels (of all sizes) are relatively specialized from a manufacturing standpoint. Nobody is seriously arguing for having capacity to scale up to build 16" guns for battleships, but 5" guns are extremely common in naval use and 155mm guns are common for artillery. Being able to surge production of those without having to go through a learning curve would be a really great ability to have.
Interestingly, Goex, maker of black powder, is located on a military facility (Camp Minden) because that process remains both hazardous and surprisingly relevant to modern military use.
Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts.
Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
Also the DoE having to figure out how to make Fogbank again (a classified material used in weapons which they lost the manufacturing documentation for)
On the other hand, I'm impressed that a company is owning up to the problem. Is it a dumb problem to have? Definitely. Are they the only ones to have it? Almost certainly not.
People are going to use the tools at their disposal, and they aren't all going to learn their tools at a high level. Think of every insane misuse of Excel you've ever heard of, for instance.
IT has the choice in this case to mitigate, or limit the access to the tools. Choosing mitigation prevents the growth of shadow IT and helps ensure that IT remains a trusted partner and not an obstacle to be worked around. This reflects well on the company, especially if they then go and provide better training to their users as well.
Yeah: I can usually tell from public information when a company has problems like this, and that makes me disinclined to want to work for them. Seeing how they deal with those problems, though? … Well, in this case, it shows that the company doesn't know how to deal with these problems properly, and thinks ChatGPT is appropriate for write-ups, so I still might not want to work there – but I might bother interviewing there, just to check how deep these problems go. (If they're just a case of "they didn't know better, but they're happy to learn", then I might actually take the job offer: an environment where others are willing to learn without fear of losing face is an environment where I can learn without worrying about that either.)
Better blades go a long way towards not splintering your workpiece. The Bosch ones are excellent if you get the "clean cuts in clean wood" ones. Note that there are two incompatible shank styles: T and U. Get the ones that work with your saw.
For sure. Couple other issues, one, the blade tends to wander, leaving not-perfectly-straight sections. You can mitigate by going slow and careful. Second, it needs a straight edge guide offset to the blade, which is harder to set up than direct.
All in all when I needed a one-off cut I used a box cutter knife, and when I needed a series I used a circular saw with a plywood blade. The setup is similar (needs an offset guide) but the cut is much straighter, faster, and less error prone. I think the only time I'd use a jigsaw is for making non-straight cuts like some curved artistic shape or something.
I could see dumber things happening.
reply