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What France Has Money For
A journalist sarcastically asked Philippe Martinez, the leader of a major labor union, whether the flood of donations was evidence of trickle-down economics. “Money doesn’t trickle down for everything,” Mr. Martinez answered, adding that the outburst of generosity from French billionaires only exposed the inequalities that divide the country.
Such gifts aren’t just a private matter; they cost the state, too. For one thing, and certainly in the eyes of some Yellow Vests, these philanthropists are offering only a small fraction of enormous fortunes they have amassed partly by avoiding taxes otherwise needed to fund basic public services. And since their proposed gifts are destined for France’s national heritage, the bulk of them could benefit from major tax exemptions — up to 90 percent if a proposed bill presented this week were to pass.
Notre-Dame’s Safety Planners Underestimated the Risk, With Devastating Results
Unlike at sensitive sites in the United States, the fire alarms in Notre-Dame did not notify fire dispatchers right away. Instead, a guard at the cathedral first had to climb a steep set of stairs to the attic — a trip Mr. Mouton said would take a “fit” person six minutes.
Only after a blaze was discovered could the fire department be notified and deployed. That means even a flawless response had a built-in delay of about 20 minutes — from the moment the alarm sounded until firefighters could arrive and climb to the attic with hundreds of pounds of hoses and equipment to begin battling a fire.
Brexit Tulip Bulb Stockpile
'Biggest' UK tulip grower stockpiles bulbs over Brexit
The UK's biggest outdoor commercial tulip grower has said it has been stockpiling bulbs as uncertainty over Brexit continues.
Belmont Nurseries, near King's Lynn, said the future of the UK's relationship with the European Union (EU) was a cause of major concern.
"We're very much UK based, but we do also sell to Europe," nursery director Mark Eves said.
Tulip futures.
arc flash protection
Over in lizardloop's journal I made mention of a snafu at my work place, regarding arc flash protection. https://soylentnews.org/~lizardloop/journal/4161
Allow me to emphasize first, that I am NOT an electrician. I don't have the in depth training, nor do I have decades of experience in the field. However, I do a lot of electrical work inside the plant. For those who wonder how that can be - in theory, I work under the supervision of a qualified electrician. However, I've never met this mysterious electrician. Long story short, there are loopholes in the law, which my (and most other companies) take advantage of.
So, what is arc flash? In the most simple terms, when an electrical circuit is shorted out, you can expect electrical energy to be converted into thermal energy, and it usually happens explosively. There are formulas to determine how much energy you might expect to be converted. The results are given as calories per square cm. For the most part, 110V probably won't do more than cause a sunburn-like burn within about a foot, 220V likewise, and most of our 480 is equivalent to a bad sunburn within 18 inches. That is, most of our electrical work involves circuitry whose energy can be protected against by wearing rubber gloves, leather gloves, and long sleeve fire resistant shirt, and a faceshield and safety glasses. We all wear jeans, and electrical hazard rated boots. So, we have always been protected from arc flash, at the levels at which we most commonly work, or at least I have been.
In recent years, the industry has been working out new procedures, regulations, and standards for arc flash safety. Those who care to, can read the standards online:
https://www.ishn.com/articles/107825-nfpa-70e-2018-standard-for-electrical-safety-requirements
https://arcflashamerica.com/nfpa-70e-2018-arc-flash-regulations
You will probably notice immediately the "2018" portion of the site addresses, as well as on the page in your browser. These standards went into effect just last year.
The company demands that we comply with the standards - BUT - we have a supposed safety officer who doesn't seem to understand diddly squat.
I need to stipulate that they hired an outside contractor to come into the plant, examine, and calculate the calorie rating of every single box, cabinet, receptacle in the plant. Few are rated higher than 8 calories. The protective clothing I have already described meets safety requirements for these low energy situations. Initially, the only thing we learned was that SOME of our boxes were higher energy than we thought, so we had to wear the coverall costume that the company supplies when we work on them.
Then, another edict - everyone MUST be dressed in 100% cotton. Blends of cotton were no longer permitted. No problem for me, because the Navy trained me for fire fighting, and I do not buy synthetic or synthetic blend clothing. The elastic in my underwear is the only synthetic in my clothing. Some of the other guys had to make changes, especially those who made use of the uniform service. Those uniforms are mostly nylon and rayon.
Next edict? Well, now we MUST wear arc flash rated clothing, while working on ANYTHING, or put the heavy-ass, hot costume on. Makes sense, don't it?
Go online, and start looking for AF rated clothing. Carhartts are my preference. I can buy a shirt and pants for about $70 bucks, and have been doing so for years. But, they aren't AF rated. Go to Carhartt site, and look for FR and AR rated clothing, you'll find shirts for $110, and jeans with an "AF rated button and closure" for $70. If you look, you will find two styles for a little less, but both are being phased out, with common sizes already out of stock. So - $180 for a shirt and pants.
https://www.carhartt.com/products/carhartt-men-big-tall-pants/Flame-Resistant-Relaxed-Fit-Utility-Jean-FRB004
https://www.carhartt.com/products/carhartt-flame-resistant-men-shirts/Flame-Resistant-Work-DryLightweight-Twill-Shirt-FRS003
(I've just clicked my own links again, and prices have dropped in the past couple of weeks - so I'll still complain about pricing, but it's not quite so bad. Maybe prices will continue to drop as production ramps up?)
Funny thing is, those AR rated items are 88% cotton and 12% nylon. "high tenacity" nylon? * It's nylon - it will melt before the cotton decides to burn.
What lizardloop was complaining about specifically in his journal entry, was idiot management people ticking off boxes, to cover their asses. And, this is what I'm seeing here. A new standard has been created, less for safety purposes, than to make sure everyone in the industry can cover their asses. The standard is lower than my own personal standard - but my standard won't meet the new industry standard unless it is certified. My standard is certified by no one, other than myself.
At my own corporate level - the safety people don't understand a DAMNED THING, other than they have to comply with a standard that they never heard of until this year. They are scrambling, to find clothing to meet the standard. And, they are coming up high dollar. Those who might be interested can do their own searches, and find work clothes that meet the standard, and cost two, three, even five times as much as these Carhartts.
(Paranthetically, my wife has found for me a few that are slightly less expensive than Carhartts, but I long ago rejected them for quality reasons. One top selling point for my Carhartts are seven belt loops, as opposed to five on most work jeans. I positively HATE to see men with their asses hanging out of their jeans, so I want those extra belt loops that actually keep my pants up over my ass, no matter what position I am working in. Dickies are out.)
So, I'm pretty pissed, both at the industry, and at my own employers. I wear out clothing pretty regularly, and between them, they have roughly doubled the cost of that clothing. And, this clothing will make me no safer than I have always been.
Bean counters and box tickers make life miserable for all of us.
* A couple searches reveals that "high tenacity" has nothing to do with the melting point of the nylon yarn, but the strength of that yarn. Nylon becomes "sticky" at temperatures as low as 200 degrees F, while cotton will not combust until it reaches 500 F. So, a cotton/nylon blend, subjected to an arc flash, is going to have some nylon trying to melt, then sticking to the cotton fibers surrounding it. That will leave behind a patch of fabrid that is stiff, and will crackle when flexed. One can only hope that none of the nylon threads will stick to the flesh beneath it. Note that this is a "flash" situation. A sustained heat source WILL melt the nylon, and that nylon WILL stick to the flesh beneath it.
Huawei P30 Pro Teardown
P30 Pro Teardown Proves Huawei's Flash Catch-up
Content from page 2 (pages 3-9 are images):
Periscope camera
Of all the units inside the P30 Pro, however, the biggest news is the periscope. Huawei placed a CMOS image sensor vertically and put a mirror angled at 45 degrees at the back to increase the optical path. This is the first time a 10x zoom – without any loss in quality -- has gone inside an actual smartphone, according to Elisabeth. He noted that at Mobile World Congress in 2018, Oppo showed a prototype 5X zoom, but never launched an actual product.Asked who put together a module for the periscope camera, Elisabeth said that System Plus believes Sunny Optical Technology in China did it by using IP from Corephotonics in Israel.
Changes in RF partners?
One additional System Plus discovery was that Skyworks no longer seems to be Huawei’s main RF supplier. P30 Pro uses Qorvo’s mid/high-band front-end module (QM77031). Skyworks now supplies only a low-band front-end module (SKY78191). Previously Skyworks provided three separate front-end modules to meet the needs of three different bands.In the following pages, we will share the teardown done by System Plus, revealing who got design wins for which slots.
Met a real sweety this morning
She showed her age, but that didn't stop me lusting after her. I walked around and around her, admiring her front end, admiring her rear end, and everything in between.
Old dude walks up, and asks, "You like what you see?" I ask, "What year is she?" "'77." That surprised me - she actually looked to be older than my '68 was.
So, 1977 Malibu Classic station wagon, 350 with a 750 carb, and a 350 Turbo 4 speed behind it. Something I've never seen before, were the fin windows in the BACK of the car. I've looked for images on the internet to link to here, and haven't found any back seat fin windows yet. OH! https://www.imcdb.org/i575959.jpg I'm pretty sure those are fin windows, at the rear of the back seat windows. Nice. What's missing in that image, is the chrome air scoop, that directs air from the roof of the car, down over the back window. It helped to keep dust from collecting on it. '68 Caprice image shows the air scoop nicely - http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTIwMFgxNjAw/z/8OQAAOSwdvpWDdQx/$_1.JPG?set_id=880000500F
All the while the old dude was telling me the specs on his '77, I was comparing it to my '68. I had a 327, with the (in)famous "3 speed slip slide" transmission, and a highway rearend. Nice pic here - http://smclassiccars.com/chevrolet/242061-1968-impala-station-wagon-6-passenger-chevy-chevrolet-patina-hot-rod.html
Most people look at these wagons, and think they are just ugly family cars. I looked at them, and saw beautiful working cars, adventure cars, and yes, even sport cars. Wagons usually had the same, or very similar, power trains as the sedan models they were built with. And, wagons usually only weighed a little more than the sedans. You could find some that were underpowered, but for the most part, they were more than adequately powered. In the case of the '68 Impala with the 327, it could run with the motorhead's hotrods. Couldn't beat them in the quarter, but given a longer run, it would pull alongside them. Somewhere around 1 mile, the Impala would smoke them all, because they all topped out starting around 70 mph, up to maybe 95 mph.
I said "adventure" cars? Two, three, four guys could easily toss camping, fishing, hunting gear in the back, and head out to the far horizons. Or, one guy could throw most of his possessions in there, and leave to never return.
Sedans are always cool, but wagons are even cooler. Does anyone here know how many GIRLS you can pack into a station wagon? A boatload, literally!
How many of you have fond memories of those old station wagons? Yesterday's equivalent of the SUV.
Dell's New Precision 7000 Workstations
Dell’s New Precision 7000 Workstations: Dual Xeon, Triple RTX, 3 TB DDR4, 16 TB NVMe
Launching in May, the new Precision 7820 and Precision 7920 machines will be based on one or two Intel Xeon Scalable ‘Cascade Lake-SP’ CPUs thus offering up to 56 physical cores supporting AVX512_VNNI instructions advantageous for workloads that use neural networks, which is why Dell emphasizes AI (and VR) in its announcement. On the graphics and GPGPU side of things, the new Precision 7900-series machines will feature up to three NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphics cards (no word on GV100-based GPUs, but it is highly likely that they will be offered as an option too).
The most hardcore Precision 7920 configurations will be able to carry up to 3 TB of DDR4 DRAM, up to 16 TB of PCI/NVMe solid-state storage (i.e., several M.2 and/or U.2. drives, depending on the configuration), and up to 120/96 TB of storage space enabled by ten 3.5-inch hard drives (i.e., Dell has certified 12 TB HDDs with the new system). Obviously, the workstations will support all kinds of connectivity along with 5.25-inch FlexBays (enabling ODD(s) and/or additional I/O modules for special purposes).
libya.hmm
A US citizen wants to overthrow a US-backed government in Libya. Here's why
At the heart of this is Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, now leading the current move by forces from the east of the country towards the capital Tripoli. Haftar is, to be polite, the ultimate pragmatist. He supported Moammar Gadhafi in his 1969 coup, then found himself in Langley, Virginia in the 90s where he gained US citizenship, before returning to overthrow Gadhafi in the 2011 conflict. Since then, he has been one of many strongmen claiming pre-eminence in the nation's descent into disarray, based in the city of Benghazi and exerting most of his control in eastern Libya.
US pulls troops from Libya amid a surge in violence
The United States military pulled a contingent of its troops from Libya on Sunday amid a surge in violence in the capital city of Tripoli, America's top commander for Africa said.
"The security realities on the ground in Libya are growing increasingly complex and unpredictable," Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of US Africa Command, said Sunday in a statement. "Even with an adjustment of the force, we will continue to remain agile in support of existing US strategy."
The American forces, who provide military support for diplomatic missions, counterterrorism activities and improving regional security, have been relocated temporarily in response to "increased unrest."
The root of all evil. No, really, I'm serious.
This is close. Very close. But it's only one specific case of a more generalized problem. I've referred to this before in a few posts as a sort of "moral priority-inversion bug," a very deep and insidious one that corrupts what you may think of as a person's moral elevator algorithms.
And what is it? Very simply, it's this: treating objects as agents and agents as objects. Or, elevating objects to or even over the status of other people, and objectifying other human beings.
The reason I call this insidious is that very often one is not aware that one is doing it, and the fact that ideologies and beliefs are part of this class of "objects" is why, as well as where, the majority of instances of this bug occur.
On this site, the most common manifestation I see of this particular bug is when someone asserts that their summum bonum is something nebulous like "freedom" or "liberty" or some such. This is one of the most difficult glitches to debug, because a) being for these things is always seen as a good thing, b) implying that one is against them is a powerful argument from emotion, c) much evil may be rationalized if one tells oneself that it is being done in the name of freedom and/or liberty, and d) at least in my observation, the kind of people prone to this bug in the first place are the type that are selfishly-oriented to begin with and not much for actual (as opposed to fake, self-serving) self-reflection.
What does this bug look like in practice? When you see someone who's so driven by a single ideal, let's say "freedom" here, that s/he starts making assumptions that are actually self-destructive of that ideal with a perfectly straight face, you have a good indicator that the bug is triggering. For example, "all taxation is theft" or "show me my signature on the social contract" in a discussion about the social safety net is a pretty good tell that the person you're talking to is glitching. When challenged on this, doubling down on the position and retreating to pedantic interpretations of one's value system in the face of observable reality is usually the next step. An inability, or an unwillingness, to separate de facto from de jure, in other words.
Specifically, when you point out to this sort of person that a starving, homeless, sick, frightened human is not a free human and you get back a blanket, emotional denial without so much as a "screw you, MUH PURITY!" you've run smack into it. One of the prime pathologies of people prone to this bug is, again, elevating ideologies over people. This is where that famous saying about "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to steal their bread" comes into play.
So how do you debug this? I have no idea. Short of pointing out that this is a dark antipattern that exists and making people aware of it, there doesn't seem to be much else that can be done. Like the proverbial lightbulb in the old joke, the bulb has to want to change, and as a consequence mostly of d) and partly of c), people may not be incentivized to do the debugging. You can't change someone's mind for them; true repentance, "metanoia" in the Koine, comes from the will within.
I hope that by pointing this out, I can get people to be on the lookout for this pernicious tendency, not only in others, but in themselves as well. Just pointing out that it's there to someone when they're displaying it may (or may not be, depends on the person) the first step toward preventing it from triggering.
Orange Corn
More nutritious, better tasting, non-GMO ‘orange corn’ launches in US markets
But where is my goddamn 50 lb sack of Golden Rice?
DNA testing for ancestry
We have a lady at work. Apparently a caucasian, with a little something extra thrown in, on the paternal side. She was always told that the something extra was "Native American". Not a bad looking lady, fairly smart, a little annoying sometimes, in that she's a dedicated "company man". Likeable, but not overly likeable. Typical sort of redneck woman, with a public school education.
The fact that this woman is married to a black man is relevant here. And, the fact that her daddy disapproved of the marriage is very relevant. White girls just DON'T marry black men in the south, of course.
She and her sisters wanted to find out more about their ancestry, so they sent off DNA samples to learn more about their ancestry. I guess one sister sent her sample to one company, another sister sent her sample to another, and the third sister used yet another service. Kind of a quality control check, there.
Results come back, and there is no hint that there is any Native American ancestry. However, there is a list of half dozen or more east African and central African tribes. Maybe an error? Possibly, but if so, why would all three sisters get same (actually, very similar, the lists of tribes weren't precisely the same) results from three different companies?
Sisters approach Daddy, and inform him of what they've learned. Daddy's reply, "I don't know what you're talking about."
I note that Daddy didn't outright deny the results, instead pleading ignorance. Funny, I think. Sounds like Daddy might have heard from Great Granny about some family scandal or something, but isn't ready to admit it.
No, I didn't inquire about the family's history during the slave days. I don't want to know the details, nor do I especially want to encourage a friendship with this woman. She is a rather annoying woman, remember. But, I find it amusing that a fine, upstanding member of the redneck community (the father, not the daughter who married a black man) has been found out as being part African. Gotta wonder if Daddy and/or any of his male relatives have been members of the KKK.
I also didn't inquire as to Daddy's relationship with his grandchildren. Can a bigoted redneck admit that he has half (or more than half) black grandchildren?
The woman in question can't exactly be avoided at work. I'm certain to hear more details in the coming weeks and months, whether I want to hear them or not.
Which suggests a question: How many Americans who claim to be "part Native American" are really "part former slave"? How about those who claim to be "part Hispanic"? How 'bout Pocahontas Warren?
