In the 18th century, planners did not have to worry too much about ships smashing into bridges because ships were small and made of wood, while bridges and seaports were massive and made of stone. If a captain made an error and hit a bridge support, his ship would be damaged, but the bridge would be fine. The worst case is it would take a few days to clear the debris of the ship from the waterway. In other words, the seaways were somewhat error resistant.
The news of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse is an obvious example of how this is no longer the case in the modern world. That ship is massive, relative to anything that existed a century ago, much less the 18th century. The bridge, in contrast, was a slim wisp of thing compared to bridges in the past. When it was completed half a century ago it was the third longest truss bridge in the world. Now, of course, it is a pile of scrap iron after having been knocked off its moorings.
People will naturally rush forward with their favorite pet theory about how this could have happened. None of these claims are about the accident or why it happened, but rather a way to use the event to promote their favorite theory. Steve Sailer has decided to avoid the usual answers and instead go with an insane theory about bombs being squirrelled away on the ship. No doubt the usual suspects are working on a plot where Putin is responsible for the accident.
For those who know how ports operate, especially an inland port like the Port of Baltimore, the most likely answer is more mundane. These ships are piloted by a harbor pilot in and out of the upper bay. These are men who know every inch of the waterway and rely on a large support staff to pilot the vessel. That means the cause is a failure of that system, most likely the ships navigation systems. It lost power and the crew was unable to restore power before hitting the bridge.
Putting that aside, the port is the ninth largest seaport in the country and has certain specialties like the import of cars, which cannot be easily replaced. Until the bridge debris is cleared from the waterway and the waterway is inspected, the port will remain closed, which will create supply chain problems throughout the year. Of course, the bridge is a vital part of the local ground transportation system. Baltimore is surrounded by a beltway system and this bridge was a key part of it.
Replacing the bridge has been debated over the last ten years, but the will to do it has never been enough to overcome the sclerosis that plagues state politics. A project that will not be done until most of the people voting on it are dead or retired is never going to get a lot of support in the modern age. The things that get pols trending on social media is what gets the support, even if the reason to be trending on social media is the ghetto has just lost track of one of its simpletons.
Now they will have no choice but to replace the bridge, but that will take years to debate and then years to get approval and then more years to build. The people who make the economy work will figure out ways around this new obstacle in the meantime, so there will be no sense of urgency to address the bridge problem. In fact, it is entirely possible that the bridge is never replaced. A generation from now people will look at the remaining pillars the way people look at old Roman aqueducts.
If you want to contextualize this accident into something bigger, the best approach is from the angle of complexity. Like everything else in the American economy, our ports have become extremely complex systems with many points of failure. There are millions of people with the word “logistics” in their job title who make sure that some point of failure does not fail in the complex system of moving goods in and out of the country and around the country to your store.
One reason for that is the berserk quest for efficiency. Every manager in the system dreams the dream of that box of Cheerios arriving on the shelf just at the moment you decide to reach for it. Everything in the economy is now geared to reduce the shelf time, warehouse time and transport time of every item. Every bit of extra is cut from the system to maximize profit, but the result is often fragile systems that work well when there are no problems but fail miserably in a crisis.
The complexity problem is turning up in the Ukraine war. Russia, with its massive industrial base and redundant systems, now outproduces the West in terms of military supplies at a fraction of the cost. Western countries with massive GDP’s are faced with impossibly complex economies that cannot be quickly modified to address the need to make even simple things like artillery shells. Like the now collapsed bridge, solving this problem will probably never happen.
That is the other angle to this accident. That bridge was built in 1976 and was out of capacity twenty-five years ago. A second span should have been started at the turn of the century with a third span or another bridge up stream in the works, but these sorts of projects are not popular with modern politicians. Half a century ago, the political class was not obsessed with media attention, so they could think longer term about projects that would benefit those who followed them.
It is popular to blame “democracy” for our present ills, but our political system has not changed in fifty years. If anything, we are less democratic today. What has changed is the explosion of media. We now live suspended in a media solution. As a result, even the lowest person measures himself by likes, follows and media exposure. This has warped the political class the most, turning them into ridiculous carny acts that do nothing but find ways to get attention in the mass media.
In the end, none of this matters. The bridge story will dominate the news for a few days this week, but then the media will be onto the next thing. By the end of the summer the port will be reopened, and the bridge will be forgotten. The bridge is a symptom of a much larger problem for which no one has any answers, at least not answers that get you trending on Twitter. Maybe the remains of the bridge will one day be a warning that a people that does invest in its future has no future.
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care to comment on this video?
https://twitter.com/NewGloryComith/status/1772621946246545906
yes. its ridiculous.
this bridge demolition expert disagrees.
he sees the results of thermite shaped charges and explains why as he walks you thru it in the first 5 minutes.
https://stateofthenation.co/?p=219912
Here is a good video without any hyperbole. Includes the collision and the bridge collapse, and an educated opinion of why the ship wallowed as it did.
https://youtu.be/qZbUXewlQDk
It looks like an engine fire. Lights all went out, then black smoke starts belching from the stack. Collision itself just after the 5 minute mark.
The NYTimes has a blow-by-blow that was pretty good for a while (later entries succumbed to OMGism) and reports were the pothole repair crew working on the bridge got word the ship was in trouble and had closed the bridge to traffic. Eight workers landed in the water, of those six are still missing. The vehicles lost were clearly parked, not moving, so presumably belonged to the repair crew.
Black smoke plume was from the engine being re started. not a fire
This website seems to have some good info and is being updated as new information comes in. The latest is that the ship warned the shore and police did start stopping cars. 6 construction workers are still missing.
https://gcaptain.com/
Baltic Shipping is reporting the boat captain is Ukrainian:
https://www.balticshipping.com/vessel/imo/9697428/seafarers
Maybe this was a Uke op because they’re mad about the $61 billion being held up in Congress?
The ZH post that has been getting periodically updated has one more recent update beyond the one at 1423ET in which this information was revealed. In tlhe succeeding one at 1508ET, Gen. Flynn says that it is too early to dismiss the possibility that this event was not merely an accident, and possibly a planned happening. This seems prudent.
But then, FedGov seems eager to preempt these sorts of speculations, don’t they? Consider their announcement immediately on the heels of the event that the Crocus City attack was absolutely ISIS-K, and certainly had not a thing to do with Ukraine.
Hold your horses, there.
As always, when the Power Structure says one thing, believe the opposite.
For Gods sake people , sometimes a ship hitting a bridge is just a ship hitting a bridge. Boats are crashing into each other all the time. Trucks hit bridges..trucks hit Trains. Im waiting for a train to hit a ship …its probably happened at least once. LOL
“Y’all don’t wanna be talkin’ ’bout diversity to me, especially comin’ from that side of the aisle.”
In Antebellum days she might, maybe, have made it up to the big house as an occasional belly warmer and scullery maid but it would certainly have been contingent on her keeping that satchel mouth (satchmo) firmly shut.
The replacement bridge will become a huge grift machine. Publicity, drama, economic impacts, no penny will be spared on environment impact studies and trade studies and the bridge planning – where some of the great money is soaked up by the grifter class – will go on for years. And they’ll pay for it with…more tolls!
Honestly, if you’re a grifter, this wreck is a gift from god.
The economic efficiency angle is an interesting take. I think the bigger issue is how much of our economy is on auto pilot. We are but one good power outage away from total catastrophe. If a power loss was to blame (the lights clearly go out twice), that it happened at 1:30am is nothing less than a miracle. Thousands might have been killed in a rush hour version of that wreck.
We walk a very thin line with modernity. We saw glimpses of this during Hurricane Sandy, years ago.
The US military, unable to take out that bridge in Crimea, might want to take some notes. It is fascinating that despite thousands of years of technology, “taking out the enemy’s bridges” is still a highly effective strategy.
Every penny spent will increase GDP!
Every swinging Johnson will be trying to sell Baltimore a new bridge in the next few days
😂😂😂 Nice! 👍
I had a visual of that old Buggs Bunny skit, where he turns that shyster Brodie something or other, inside out, and sells him the Brooklyn bridge.
Only substitute the cartoon version of Shaq!
Mel Blanc, Early Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Blanc#Early_life
The veneer of civilization is thin indeed.
As a former Baltimoron I’m very familiar with that bridge. It’s one of the 2 ways that the city’s 12 remaining White people can use to go from, say Essex, to Glen Burnie. Essex is a run down suburb to the east of town and GB is a run down suburb to the south. The other way to make the trip is the Harbor Tunnel. Even when I was there 25 years ago and with the Key bridge taking at least half the traffic the tunnel was prone to backups. I can only imagine how much worse that’s going to be now. Of course you *can* just drive on surface streets through downtown Baltimore. For a variety of reasons, all of them black, this is ill advised.
I actually wonder if this is going to be Baltimore’s “Portland moment”. After the Coof hysteria and the summer of Luv, basically everyone with any kind of business left Portland. What remained were giant murals of St. Floyd of Fentanyl and hobo tents – like a whole parallel city of hobo tents. Actually, in the case of Baltimore, the Portland moment might be hardly noticeable. Portland at least had a somewhat functional economy and was (mostly) safe before the Passion of the Floyd. Baltimore rotted down to the bone decades ago so the bridge collapse might hardly be noticed.
Still, it’s shocking somehow to think of that bridge being gone. Maybe Z can go down there and pour out a 40 on the bridge pillars for all of us who remember it.
Wondering if they still have the horse and carriage rides around Camden Yards?
In my youth I was briefly an Oriole’s fan during the Cal Ripken era, and they would frequently show that on pre game, before the ball games.
Has a brotha ever car jacked a horse and buggy there?
Seems easy and obvious.
I’m picturing the homies wearing top hats and holding their old-timey flintlocks sideways as they shout “stand and deliver” at the buggy driver.
That’s some funny shit right there! 😂
Brotha’s be “pimpin” to steal the classy ride!
Adam and the Ants has something to say here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4B2a6l6wM2k&pp=ygUjc3RhbmQgYW5kIGRlbGl2ZXIgYWRhbSBhbmQgdGhlIGFudHM%3D
Stand and Deliver!
“Where dey rims at, muhfugga?”
For those of you who need some good bridge news, the Detroit to Canada Gordie Howe bridge is near completion. That’s the second one to go along with the Ambassador bridge that has been there for many decades. How long will that name last though.
They are naming a bridge after Gordie Howe? Awesome!
Anyone want to take a guess on what name is given for the replaced Francis Scott Key Bridge is, if that in fact ever happens?
The Freddie Gray Social Justice Memorial Bridge. It will be made of crack pipes and rubber bands.
I’ll take a stab. If it is built within 10 years, it will be the Jasmine Crockett Memorial Bridge (fentanyl-laced extensions, so tragic). If it takes longer, it will be the Xi Jiping Triumph Bridge.
An attempt at parody that will prove to be a prophecy.
The Malcolm X Ray Charles Barkley Youngblood Bridge ‘N Sheeeeit
Is it shaped like an elbow?
Michigan is only mostly, rather than completely lost.
That said, Gretch’s new $500 per illegal you take in plan is likely to finish the job, particularly in the more remote areas with low incomes and lots of retirees on fixed incomes.
Whoever thought up this initiative is truly evil.
True… Michigan hasn’t yet reached Kathy Hochul levels of insanity.
Maybe Gretchen and Kathy should meet for brunch , and Hochul can give Gretch the wretch some pointers on how to destroy a state over mimosa’s! 🥂
They are just horrible women. How did they ever become governors?
At the other end of the lake, a replacement/additional span for the Peace Bridge between Buffalo and Ft. Erie has been wrangled over for, oh, 3 decades or so now. And nothing gets done.
Being from Buffalo, I briefly worked at a steel company that bid on the contract for the steel to build that bridge. It was not Bethlehem steel, can’t remember the name. I believe they went out of business not long after.
Fighting was over where the steel was coming from, “country of origin” what to name it, and who was going to pay to fund X percentage.
My grandfather used to go over every Sunday to buy Italian bread from the Ontario bakery. Used to go over to get my hockey equipment every year, and play a few hockey tournaments. When I turned 18, NYS changed the drinking age to 21, we used to load up the car, and go over to party at Crystal beach, and Don Cherry’s because drinking age was 19, hit a few strip clubs too. 😁
Used to be an easy, nice ride to cross the Peace bridge. Good traffic flow. That was in the 80’s. Last time I tried a few years back, took over an hour. Before…. getting grilled by Doug and Bob McKenzie! 😂
Americans went over to shop because of the exchange rate, Canadians came over to buy cheaper gas and we had a lot of Bills and Sabres fans from Ontario.
Win win for both economies.
Now you need an enhanced license or passport to cross.
“Papersss please” anyone?
These bastard politician’s destroy everything they touch!
NY went from 18 to 19 to 21 in quick succession. My sister got hosed twice as they didn’t grandfather you in. But yes, in H.S. beer runs over the bridge were common. No passports, no ID needed. Just “where ya goin’? For how long?” and Bob’s your uncle.
Coming back:
“citizen of what country?’
“US”
“Where were you?”
“Went to King Eddies and then stopped at Brewers Retail for some Molson Stock Ale”
“Get outta here”
No lie
Western Lake Erie still gets some cross-country Canada-US boating traffic, but the nonsense with passports is not fun. Also, cell phone reception is poor.
The Coleman A. Young Municipal Center provides a map as to how long the bridge will retain that name, i.e., as soon as some prominent Detroit-based vibrant dies.
Christ, how the hell did that one sneak by? Brotha’s running Detroit to the south, and woke as fuck self loathing Canucks to the north.
Glad to hear it!
Too bad I’ll never get close enough to take a ride over it in honor of the great, Gordie Howe.
“Baltimore.”
You could have stopped there.
And for those who missed that, it will be cleared up after Rep. Jasmine Crockett gets her hair and nail extensions complete properly done and appears on television to provide her insights into the engineering challenges.
Baltimore.
Memphis.
Atlanta.
Detroit.
St. Louis.
Birmingham.
Oakland.
Such a mystery.
What could it be?
Can’t put my finger on it…..
As a former Baltimoron I’m very familiar with that bridge. It’s one of the 2 ways that the city’s 12 remaining White people can use to go from, say Essex, to Glen Burnie. Essex is a run down suburb to the east of town and GB is a run down suburb to the south. The other way to make the trip is the Harbor Tunnel. Even when I was there 25 years ago and with the Key bridge taking at least half the traffic the tunnel was prone to backups. I can only imagine how much worse that’s going to be now. Of course you *can* just drive on surface streets through downtown Baltimore. For a variety of reasons, all of them black, this is ill advised.
I actually wonder if this is going to be Baltimore’s “Portland moment”. After the Coof hysteria and the summer of Luv, basically everyone with any kind of business left Portland. What remained were giant murals of St. Floyd of Fentanyl and hobo tents – like a whole parallel city of hobo tents. Actually, in the case of Baltimore, the Portland moment might be hardly noticeable. Portland at least had a somewhat functional economy and was (mostly) safe before the Passion of the Floyd. Baltimore rotted down to the bone decades ago so the bridge collapse might hardly be noticed.
Still, it’s shocking somehow to think of that bridge being gone. Maybe Z can go down there and pour out a 40 on the bridge pillars for all of us who remember it.
Shit, I double posted. Sorry about that. Please delete this one.
Jack
The proper vernacular is “gets her hair and nail extensions did”.
Clearly you are not well versed in ghetto speak.
Such a joke — with eyelash extensions!
The greater the complexity and fragility of the system, the greater the number of black swans that are circling above. As Zman points out, our modern technopolitical system is so intertwined and tuned that it wouldn’t really take much to bring it screeching to a halt.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that even a 1,000 motivated and competent people with minimum arms could bring this country to its knees in weeks. Perhaps that is the rough beast slouching over our borders as we speak.
Hasten onward, o rough-hewn beast!
I imagine Yeat’s rough beast reading Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” to commence the Second Coming.
Leonard Cohen:
Too early for the rainbow
Too early for the dove
These are the darkest days
This is the darkness
This is the flood
This has been studied exhaustively for decades. The following is for educational purposes only.
It would take less than 50, a low eight digit budget, almost all material and equipment could be purchased or rented legally, and could be achieved almost entirely off-line.
No one would have to get killed or caught. The initial damage would be to infrastructure and to topographic features at infrastucture pinch points.
It would take months to scout, plan and recruit, weeks to train for, 72 hours to put into place, and could be executed in less than 8 hours.
Ten three-man teams
Ten controllers over the teams
Four or five controllers over the controllers
One to say go, sometime in a late August to late September window
Ports in New Orleans and Long Beach
Interstate bridges/overpasses in Louisiana, Virginia, Texas, and Washington
Locks at Peoria and St Louis
Passes in NorCal and SoCal
Half these could be missed and hundreds of thousands would die in the US due to chaos and product scarcity. Tens of millions would die outside of the US as a result of all of this, but mostly from the resultant market failures, financial collapse and eventual global famine.
The more autarkic and redundant a regime is, the better it will fare in this scenario.
My two cents;
The “spaghetti bowl”, which connects the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Dan Ryan and 55, just west of the loop, would lock up Chicago for a looooong time, if someone was creative.
Just south if there, the busiest east/west corridor in the country, I80, at the Illinois/Indiana border, would bring the country i a standstill, if someone was creative.
The route is always backed up/slow as molasses.
(Just before the Coif, my daughter and I were going to NYC, and decided to avoid traffic by going through that stretch at 1:00 AM.
We were stopped from 1;00 to 5:00 AM due to a fatal crash.
We turned off the car and slept.
It’s amazing how fragile this place is.
Or flip a hydrogen tank-truck in the Southbound lanes of Interstate-5 in Southern Oregon.
This happened in December 2023, if I recall correctly. Both directions were closed for hours.
We’re all F-35s now.
Ah. So that’s why I feel the way I do some days, good for an hour or two, then need a couple weeks of maintenance. I thought it was just that I was getting older.
Wait til I tell Mrs. Steve it’s that because I’m an F-35.
“The people who make the economy work will figure out ways around this new obstacle in the meantime…”
———————————————-
Gah! I didn’t need those links to that lip-flapping boon and Steve Sailer so early in the morn, Z. Rather unsporting of you, don’t you think? 🙂 I think I’m constipated now…
Col. MacGregor turned a phrase that really summed our Elites. I paraphrase: “Liars create truth bombs – and they are starting to explode everywhere…”. Hell’s bells – this blog is one of the biggest and it goes off damn near every day, HAR HAR HAR! And it is only one of many.
Money talks. And – speaks loudest to our ruling elite. Their bottom lines are starting to be hit by stuff like this – and it can only get worse. You can entrench all the political correctness you want… you can make virtue signalling mandatory by law…in the end, the market always speaks. Just ask Anheuser Busch… or the NYT or the other bastions of liberal faggotry – they are watching their markets evapourate. Let us not make these guys into unkillable bullet proof demons or something they’re not.
Fixing things is as simple as sweeping these people aside.and replacing them with men that get chit done. It’s happening as we speak. As a former marketing guy with a rep for getting stuff done, my question here is “Why are we importing cars? Americans invented the damn things, and have built some of the best machines on the market. Why aren’t those cars being built by Americans, for Americans? What else can we learn from this? What other things are we importing that we need to make right here? Why is it not feasible to produce them here – with all the redundancies necessary…?” Then, I’d sit back and listen. The guys that make excuses get fired, en masse. The ones that explain the situation and the fixes required stay. Twitter is an excellent example – Elon Musk fired 70% of the chair warmers without a single burp in service.
This isn’t rocket science.
Is this post satire? I do not believe so. The elites’ bottom line is not being hit, when you look at the truly elite. The NYT is simply another plaything for the rich, not essential to their status. As NYT drops revenue, one of their online counterparts increases. Further, I do not know where this workforce comes from? Or where the power to fire en masse the insipid and lazy.
85% of the American workforce (employed and unemployed, and women) are worthless for the vision you propose. What is it called when 15%, the ones you want to lionize, are supporting the 85 percent?
Further, if you think the 85% will be complacent and starve to death in your fabulist, invented world, I would suggest look to South Africa.
Nonsense.
Are the banks mere playthings of the elite? Dirt people almost entirely finance their cars through banks. Shrug that off, Schmuelly! Drive the people into penury so they can’t afford cars, homes, or anything else…and they stop spending money too.
As for the NYT being replaced by online versions…like the Daily Beast? Like Yellow Times? Like Slate? The HuffPost? Don’t make me laugh. The only people trusting the media today are clueless geriatrics or idiots.
Not saying there will not be a reckoning or painful adjustments. Not saying these guys will all vanish either… I’m saying that the current state of affairs holds because WE tolerate it. Until that changes… yeah, things are going to get worse.
They have student loans to replace cars. Rent to replace mortgage. Massive conglomerate banks to syphon up any small failures, and the Fed to bail out any larger issues. Some of the managers, sure, they will suffer, but the truly elite, the ones that meet at places like the Bank of International Settlements, they are more powerful and wealthier than ever.
Perfect example is the Bud Light. All people did was buy their other products. Bud Light went down, Modelo went up. The old idea of Coke and Pepsi being owned by the same group. Protesting of one just funnels the masses into the arms of another – apologies for the mixed metaphor, but I am sick.
Hope you are right. That ad campaign, “You will own nothing and be happy” didn’t get anywhere near the pushback I would have hoped for.
Based on people’s reactions, I think we will likely go through a phase where eating the bugs and hot-racking of apartments becomes a thing.
Nah Shit hits the fan I got lots of boys in my territory Yeah we’d start small but get er done And anyone who would fark with that..
Filthie: First you proclaim that religious belief trumps biology and thus blacks who claim to be Christian are and always have been good people. Now you insist the magic market will prevail over virtue signaling and ideology. Plus you have been insisting for months that White people are on the move and waking up, so the clouds had better be afraid.
I generally refuse to waste my time engaging in such fantasy, but I thought I’d make one general example today – this is how dissident blogs become laughingstocks.
Whether acknowledged or not, and mostly it is not, the mass interstate/intrastate white migrations indicate there is an “awakening” of sorts. That isn’t the issue–the lateness is. That delayed response likely will prove dispositive to how it shakes out, unfortunately.
This is the problem mass migration solves. In a relatively recent time, I moved my family to a less diverse area, far, far away from the border. But guess who just had some Afghans and Spanish speakers come to live?
When I moved to current locale 6 years ago, nary a mestizo to be seen. Even the landscapers were white. Now I see them every time I go out.
That’s certainly the plan, but the locusts will go to the gibs fields eventually, which tend to be large cities. States that have turned down Medicare expansions and so forth just aren’t that attractive to the parasites in the long haul.
As a response to that last, privately owned refugee/illegal alien encampments have popped up in the boondocks. The subsidized hovels may keep ’em down on the farm a bit longer. Colony Ridge in Texas is one example. If that sort of thing fails, and I think it will, there will be so-called “legal” attempts for force them to stay in place, including mandated Medicare and Section 8 expansions. And if that doesn’t pan out, look for legislation to require immivaders to remain in states where they are dumped.
…blacks who claim to be Christian are and always have been good people.
What’s kind of sad is that to the extent that the United Methodist Church has anything at all to do with the “faith of our fathers”, it’s because of a small number of flyover white congregations, a much larger number of black churches, largely in the southern states, and pretty much the entirety of the United Methodist – Africa conference.
The way whites split into such a high degree of shitlibbery makes a pretty good case that biology is not as determinative as one might think.
Please do not put words into my mouth 3G.
Hrmmmm. I never meant to infer that religion trumps genetics… but I might in fact embrace the notion. Let us explore it: can we agree that blacks were much better behaved in the past than they are today? If so…I’d feel safe attributing much of their growing bad behaviour problems to the collapse of Christian family values. (And for whites as well). But in the case of blacks – we also enforced harsher punishments for them in the past and understood the need to do so. There’s probably other factors that come into play. It’s a big subject.
I stand by the fact that people are waking up. Perhaps I base that on anecdotal evidence… but it’s hard to ignore. Even in the heart of Conservative Inc you’re seeing it. The rat faced Ben Shapiro had to fire his pet negro – Candace Owens – because she noticed jewish perfidy and talked about it. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh as the dancing monkey’s dance routine dissolves into feces flinging…😂
There is panic and chaos in Washington and even in Ottawa. I believe that if they are panicking, it’s because their donors and bosses are panicking too. Regardless whether I’m right or not, the wheels are coming off, the seams are cracking and there is no hiding it.
You are right not to take me seriously, I’m afraid.
“Western countries with massive GDP’s are faced with impossibly complex economies that cannot be quickly modified to address the need to make even simple things like artillery shells”
Well, one of the first problems is that the GDPs are massive because they are fraudulently pumped up or pumped up by net destruction. The next and fatal GDP inflation mechanism is going to be mass invasion in order to implement the Toilet Paper Fallacy at scale and massively increase the GDP. We are bigger than China! Yes, but uh , China is still China, and America is ???
Speaking of ships from our native Motherland and the 17th century and harbor shipwrecks there is an incredible museum in Stockholm dedicated to the Vasa. It is a must see and a tribute to hubris, human folly and what happens when nobody is willing to tell the Emporer he has no clothes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
At least 40% of GDP is government expenditures, including salaries and pensions..We are vastly outproduced in many areas by Russia and China…
The whole narrative of the Key bridge sounds like an intro to Planet of the Apes…
The GDP metric is like a football team with a strong running game deciding that running TDs are worth 12 points now instead of 6. It was a metric that was developed and refined to make our economy look better relative to other countries. For many decades, the American economy really was so much bigger and stronger than the rest of the world that it didn’t matter, the GDP number was practically a formality, and we were benchmarking it relative to ourselves. But when the elites decided we didn’t need manufacturing, and we could replace it with paper pushing, and the GDP will go up because they determined paper pushing is more valuable than making stuff, the metric was cooked. The DEI admins at colleges are making $400,000 a year and all their economic activity is counted towards the GDP – how much value are they really adding to our economy, how much stronger is it? To say nothing of government spending which as a percentage of GDP is higher than it has been since World War 2.
It’s a very strange way for a whole sector of professions/disciplines to behave.
Everyone knows the big three of mediagenic macro “metrics”—production, inflation, unemployment—are lies by design, reformulated again and again to get ever closer to total dishonesty. Only obscured or unused numbers reflect reality. Nerds cite them to no effect.
We assume that insiders know what’s up and have the “real numbers”—that economics is Straussian—but what do economics’ insiders do? Clip the coin of productivity (whatever that is). That isn’t “knowledge work.” It’s just stealing.
Economics: wrong or nonexistent? Punch a libertarian to find out!
Where economics really goes astray is trying to assign numbers to everything. One can say he prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, but only an economist would say something stupid like he prefers chocolate to vanilla by 20%.
Preference has no cardinal value, and one cannot give it one by aggregating or applying statistical techniques that cost at least one degree of freedom.
The $400K a year and up DIE admins are not just adding nothing. They are part of a project that has destroyed the fabric of society along with the rest of The Left’s social fabric shredding ideas. It isn’t just a net nothing economically they represent, it is a net destruction. And, once you tear the fabric of society, particularly on racial lines, it can’t be rebuilt.
GDP is also measured in $$$, not actual quantity of goods valued in different currencies.
The thing with GDP is everyone does it. Last time I looked, government spending at all levels was about 1/3 of the then GDP of 20T. There is all kinds of shenanigans and tomfoolery in the GDP, but the same is true of other countries as well.
China has no shortage of problems either. It is a fundamentally corrupt society with fraud and cheating from top to bottom. This is a country that installs fake drains and fake fire hydrants and where 90% of the water is unsafe to drink. Just google Tofu Dreg construction. Their real estate industry, which is 40% of the Chinese GDP is collapsing. Vanke, Countrywide and Evergrande are all in serious trouble. They have “ghost cities” all over the place. Once a year on March 15th they have a TV show highlighting some of the fraud in Chinese society. One of the items featured this year was fire extinguishers which, when you spray them on a fire, makes the fire bigger. Another was fake fireproof glass. They have a saying that says “if you can get away with it, cheat”
It continues to surprise me that the chinese are corrupt. The stereotype about asians is that they are orderly, conformist rule followers. Where does the corruption come from?
Similarly, I am surprised that they love gambling so much. Many of them understand probability, but they can’t stay away from the casinos.
I watched many old chinese people cut in line when a bus arrived in San Fran.
The Chinese shills say it’s the CCP that instills a culture of corruption. Hong Kong and Taiwan are both filled with ethnic Chinese people and supposedly have a lot less corruption. But I don’t really know that for sure. I try to listen to both the haters and the shills.
Supposedly there is a ton of graft, especially in RE involving party officials. Bribes have to be paid and that leaves less money for the project and so short cuts are taken. But this does not explain the amount of corruption they supposedly have in day to day life. Even buying food is a gamble. Maybe the food is what they say it is, maybe it was fried in new oil, or maybe it is filled with counterfeit stuff and fried in gutter oil. Just the fact that something like gutter oil even exists is incredible. They literally will suck used oil out of sewers and gutters, then “clean and treat” it and put in a bottle and sell it as new oil. No CCP officials in this chain. Or they “recycle” used water bottles and refill them with tap water and put new locking caps on them and then charge the brand premium. Again, no CCP officials involved.
I think there’s a case to be made that the thorough cultural cleansing of the Mao years, especially the obliteration of the Buddhist/Taoist and familial beliefs of your everyday Chinese, made the mainland particularly prone to creating people with no scruples. If online videos are to be considered representative, it seems that the Chinese boomers are the worst examples of unbridled greed, while the younger generations have clawed back some modicum of trust.
I still have bruise marks from an army of 80+ granny’s fresh off the Zen of TaiChi exercise pushing me aside at the base of Chinatown. I can’t remember if it was the 22 Sutter or the 1 California or something like that. I would routinely get pushed aside for 3 buses in a row at rush hour. I got bowled over by ancient grannies waiting in an orderly line to order a pork bun only to learn that there is no such thing as an orderly line.
I know enough Japanese people to understand the betting thing. Gambling is rule-following. Obey, anticipate reward; if denied, obey again. Fools who “have a system” think they’ll win by following the rules even harder—or by discerning the secret intent of the rule-makers, a message sent only to the most obedient. “Fancy” Asians are uniquely susceptible, like injuns to alcohol.
The Chinese use the concept of guanxi to calibrate their relationship with other humans. It’s loosely translated as “connection” or “relationship”, but of course that doesn’t fully capture the connotations of it. With the usual caveats, with no guanxi there exists no obligation to consider the impact of your behavior on others. I was recently talking to an otherwise considerate Han who’s lived in the States for 15 years and she told me that it took a decade of concerted effort to learn to say “excuse me” when briefly passing through the space of others. She’d been trained to see unfamiliar people as objects to be negotiated.
From videos I’ve seen (I’ve never been to China), the most shocking thing is how nobody helps a stranger. An old person falls down the steps and everyone just walks around them. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of people. Another video I saw was a traffic light cam video showing an old man collapsing in the middle of the street. Pedestrians just walked around him and cars drove around him.
On the flip side of this is people throwing themselves at cars and then laying on the ground shaking to do a shakedown of the driver. Or throwing themselves down steps and then suing the first person who stops to help them. Supposedly the reason nobody helps anyone is fear of falling for one of these lawsuit shakedowns. To me, it just exposes two sides of the same corrupt coin.
Perhaps it is just the ultimate expression of “guanxi” as you say.
Another translation might be “through the back door,” as in having a special connection with someone.
Line: It’s not just corruption; it’s a totally different way of thinking. My husband was just talking about this the other day, regarding a couple of Asians he had known since high school. He said even when/if they didn’t outright cheat, they always set things up so they would have an edge. Because why wouldn’t you? It was hardwired in them.
Same story from my daughter who spent some time at college proctoring exams from a bunch of middle-easterners. They actually filed a grievance with the university that my daughter was anti-Islam. (To be fair, she is, but that’s not why she called them out for cheating.)
My son, finishing up college at a big midwestern university after 4 yrs as an enlisted Marine, told me, 25 yrs ago, about the Asian kids there cheating. I had a hard time believing this back then, thought they all just worked “harder” than the white kids.
This one hits close to home.
As an example of over complexity and redundancy, just the other day my girlfriend, who is an import / export agent for Fed Ex, told me about these extra forms she had to fill out for the shipment of a single guitar. She thought it would be of interest to me because I was in the custom guitar biz years ago. She said the forms had to do with “species of origin” for the woods the guitar was made of.
I told her ebony, used in the making of guitar fingerboards, is tightly regulated due to it being on an endangered species list, and if someone were caught using that ebony to make a guitar, ship a guitar, or buy the guitar, they’d be looking at federal prosecution, and heavy fines / jail time.
In fact, when I was making custom guitars a decade ago, the Gibson guitar factory was raided by the men in black, on suspicion of a contraband shipment of ebony from Africa.
I mean really… Gibson?
My story here is to point to the accuracy of Z’s assessment on the ridiculous complexity piled on top of complexity of even the simpliest of things like making and shipping a guitar.
Z alluded to what’s called “lean management,” regarding his Cheerios example. When I was a supervisor at a facility that made C pap masks, myself and the rest of management had to take a week long course on the concepts and purported advantages of lean management. My department that cut the material on CNC machines, was required to make just enough and a few extra in case of mistakes, cloth mask shells, for them to be taken to the plant across the street to be sewn together to the plastic face cups by little old dot Indian ladies on second shift.
They wanted nothing more than a few days worth of inventory to be ware housed. This put a lot of pressure on myself, my crew, the machine repairmen / programmer “me” and quality control. Should one of the machines go down, and we didn’t have parts on hand to repair them common due to you guessed it, “lean management.” There would not be enough material to be finished into completed, ready to ship product that day. And heads would roll!
Beyond… beyond… stupid!
I shortly after quit, took the last of my savings, bought machinery, equipment, and supplies, including “ebony,” and started making custom guitars. Luckily, I was never raided by the men in black! 😂
the Gibson guitar factory was raided by the men in black, on suspicion of a contraband shipment of ebony from Africa
—-
That was the cover story, though as I recall (I cannot track down a source, sorry) Obama’s DOJ took a keen interest in such regulations after some run-in with some anti-regime crimethought on the part of Gibson.
It would not surprise me at all.
Those good ole boys down there in Tennessee makin them there geeetars!
Would this not be around the same time Gibson moved to Tennessee from Kalamazoo Michigan?
The backstory is telling. Nashville is a typical shitlib, leftwing city albeit a whiter one, but the Gibson owner was a conservatard who donated to McCain. Everything the dude owned was seized for a period and the DOJ really tried to bankrupt the company. The statute allegedly violated never had been enforced, and a Chinese company was ready to buy out Gibson at one point.
This type targeting would play out again and again with other businesses in other cities. I can’t recall where and the details, but this same thing was tried with another one of the few remaining independent guitar makers, too. The Gangster State has been here a long time.
The DOJ succeeded. Gibson filed for bankruptcy in 2018 and was acquired by a private equity outfit later that year.
Didn’t know that, Jeffrey, but is was likely inevitable. One more great institution destroyed.
Was it a (((private equity firm)))?
Big Jim, why yes it was now that you mention it, Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts (all 3 jewish), a huge conglomerate with its fingers in a million pies
Do you still make custom guitars? Have a website?
Unfortunately no.
Business was good up till the ‘08 crash, customers world wide; USA, Canada, England, France, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Japan, Australia, had a popular metal band in Sweden who were artist endorsers, then suddenly few wanted or could afford to drop $1800 – $4000 on a custom guitar. So orders fell off.
I had all along been doing repair, restoration, and modification of guitars and basses as well as tube amp modification and repair in addition to making guitars. A lot of people started bringing in cheap Fender, Gibson, ESP, Charvel / Jackson etc, imports and having me modify / upgrade them, pickup swaps, bigger frets, fret leveling / crown, tuning the nuts for better action, custom paint, etc… So I kept my head above water, but age started creeping in and I wanted a job with health bennies and pension / 401k.
I never had the capital to get out to NAMM and set up a booth and network. Got close once, just before the crash.
I still have all my templates and fixtures, so I may get back into it down the road.
Thanks for asking brother!
I “know” somebody who owns a few rarewood Gibsons. This person received them from an uber famous musician who was touring when the Gibson raid occurred (coincidently, I’ve been given a VIP tour of that factory which smells so right). The musician asked for a small charitable contribution and shipped the guitars which are being played privately this very day. I mean, the trees were dead already so is playing them wrong? Or should the feds get to keep them? If you can smell what I’m steppin’ in.
That must have been cool touring the Gibson shop! And I know that smell well… It’s heavenly!
I have to ask as it’s implied… Was this famous musician dumping these guitars, for fear of an early morning raid by a fed Swat team? Not implying anything shady on his part, just covering his ass which is a wise move.
Can you picture Elvis back in the day, being taken out in cuffs after a concert because he was playing a Gibson? 🤪
It’s all off the freakin rails brother!
Very insightful. It was an emergency, quiet dumping off of illicit contraband. He’d toured all over with those things because he could get away with just about anything until that raid. Some lowkey person, perhaps a lawyer who really doesn’t fear jack squat, which can be a liability, obliged the artist and owns them for a pittance. Thing is, I’m “told” the rare woods are hypersensitive to the weather and can sound brilliant or kinda terrible if you have a good ear and aren’t playing to a crowd.
FWIW I’m pretty handy with a J-45.
Ebony has a bright tone, it’s a very hard wood.
The harder the wood, brighter the tone.
Combined with a softer, porous body / neck wood like Mahogany, you get the classic “Les Paul” tone. Warm with some “bite.”
Interesting and cool story.
It’s been so long I can’t remember if Gibson was found in violation.
I guess your friends story confirms they were on some level.
Zman, or other residents of the area, is it feasible to dig a tunnel rather than build a bridge? Could there be another Big Dig project, like the one in Boston?
You mean the Big Dig that took decades, and was so corrupt that the Feds pulled out of financing it? One of the greatest boondoggles ever…
Big Dig = Ted Kennedy’s aborted baby… Had his hands all over it! Amongst other things.
It looks like they need to dredge a channel as it is for shipping so a tunnel probably wouldn’t be workable.
There already is a busy tunnel nearby. A lot of folks preferred it to the bridge. Now they have fewer choices.
If one is conspiracy minded on this incident, then I think looking at Putler is looking in the wrong direction. Baltimore is the #1 AINO port for importing and exporting vehicles. Right when the regime is dead set on eradicating ICE vehicles from existence.
I saw a video on youtube the other day about the “fragilization of the grid”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrWBLtna_yw
It’s a very interesting video. There’s a cottage industry forming around power stability. “Renewables” are decimating the reliability of the grid. The guest points out that even a minor power problem can shut a manufacturing or other high tech plant down for 1/2 a shift or more. 3 phase electricity moving out of time.
The Washington Post has an article up about all the new data centers in various stages of planning and construction and how there isn’t enough capacity to power them. (“Amid Record High Energy Demand, America is Running out of Power”)
They don’t even get into the problems of EVs and replacing all the natural gas and oil residential and commerica heating systems with heat pumps. (basically the electrification of heat)
They want to electrify everything that can be electrified all while shuttering coal and nuclear. All the renewables are causing gas plants to run at vastly diminished capacity for good portions of the day. This is untenable because it makes the gas plant unprofitable. OTOH, the grid will not function without these gas plants.
Bad times ahead.
I watched the governor of Maryland speak for 10 minutes about absolutely nothing. “We’re Maryland Strong. We’re Baltimore Strong. We’ll get through this stronger than ever. Reach out and hug someone today — they need it.”
I don’t know what to say any longer about this country. It’s so cooked that I felt like cracking open a beer listening to that stupidity. I’m old enough, like Z Man, to remember when serious men would be standing at that podium. Now we have grade school counselors. It’s beyond depressing. I see no way out.
Oh the other hand, the Governor of Maryland is prescient. His campaign slogan and his acceptance speech was a thinly veiled call to racial arms and racial triumphalism. I believe it was, “It Is Our Time Now.”
Given that the bridge collapsed, it seems like a perfect opening salvo to usher in their time.
Who was the captain of the illustrious vessel? Maybe Dwayne Elizondo Camacho Mountain Dew…
“We’re Maryland Strong. We’re Baltimore Strong. We’ll get through this stronger than ever. Reach out and hug someone today…”
He actually said this? Look, that’s certainly typical vapid boilerplate language for a politician, but FFS. Are we sure he’s not really a woman?
Woman? Man? Who can distinguish the two these days? Every adult in power, whether possessing a schlong or a vajayjay, behaves like a pathetic little mouse and is proud to do so.
Only a biologist supposedly can make that distinction, according to the latest Supreme Court justice, but even that is very doubtful.
Cargo cult. The people incapable of creating civilization believe that if they stand around in suits giving speeches then they will get the same results as the creators. They cannot comprehend what was done before them and what is required now.
But nature is not moved by the empty rituals and her response will be without mercy.
We wait like a person who must endure the amputation of a diseased limb to have any hope of survival.
That ship was certainly Maryland strong, I’ll give him that
And they have made sure there is no way out…Hence the looming breakup of the States, in the next 2 decades…
AINO is a deranged, depraved and debased freak show. No sensible person could view the country with anything but the profoundest contempt. What is dumbfounding is greasy fast rapidity of the collapse in human capital. I’m not saying Americans in 1994 were a body of Pattons, Copernicuses and Descartes, but they certainly weren’t the vapid simpletons, icky fruitcakes and nauseating carny barkers who rule the roost today.
Yeah, even the humor potential is dissipating. Even as recently as the vast white-supremacist conspiracy against the Jackson, Mississippi water system, a good laugh was possible, but the exponential rate of collapse has denied us even that minor benefit.
At the current rate AINO will be completely dysfunctional in less than 10 years. I’m constantly varying how long I think the husk can continue shambling, but events of the last year or so have caused me to move up the timetable. Wasn’t so long ago I though AINO might have another 35 years. That now seems impossible.
Arguably AINO is mort now. Semantics aside, at a minimum we are deeper into collapse/death twitches than it seemed just a few years ago even to people as blackpilled as me. A hot war with the vibrants at the helm at DOD and JCOS really would put paid to it, which may be why that has been avoided (and that may require more self-awareness than is warranted). We are living through it now.
The only way “out” is for the whole putrid system to collapse. That sounds nihilistic, and as a father of kids, it terrifies me. But it’s the only way we’re going to be able exorcise the current madness. Anyone who disagrees is free to carry on voting and hoping.
This incident is yet another warning sign of how fragile our society has become. We no longer possess the robustness of our ancestors and its reflected in artificial world we have constructed around us. And we cannot pretend our way back to robustness by garnering likes on social media; only a trail of tears and its extreme hardship can accomplish that goal. Which is why a collapse is so necessary.
And there are essentially two ways this can occur. The natural way is a gauntlet of incremental challenges that culls the weak over a long period of time, but still allows for routine reproduction and fitness enhancement. The alternative is a hard slam to the bottom followed by mass violence, mayhem, and immediate culling of the weak and stupid.
The elites are setting us up for the latter. You need to plan for that contingency. And no, there will be no cavalry coming over the hill to save you.
“ The elites are setting us up for the latter.”
One can hope.
I fear the former, the slow stable decline into mediocrity where no one is left alive to remember that it could be much better.
These seems too purposeful to be an accident from the info so far. Just at the right time it turns to hit the part of the bridge that will bring it down and the power goes out?? Really?
The videos shown are deceptive. Sped up. It is intentional and because people would not sit and observe that long a video today. I would guess you are watching 3 to 5 minuets in 1m 45s. A ship of 95000 tons does not turn on a dime.
So it was more of a slow drift towards the pylon as opposed to a sharper turn?
I agree with you. There was a lot of open water to the right of that ship… Either it was deliberate or blatant stupidity.
Even if the power was lost and guidance systems knocked out… Look out the freakin window!
Watching the collapse on y tube, it makes for a bit of metaphor. Happens very slowly, the ship approaches a pier, seems to collide, and nothing much happens. Then all of a sudden, boom, fall down! Gradually, slowly, then all at once. Or so we might think.
“ Every manager in the system dreams the dream of that box of Cheerios arriving on the shelf just at the moment you decide to reach for it.”
If I recall correctly, we first heard of this “just in time delivery” method from Japan. It works there because of the close, patriarchal even, system of interconnected businesses. Everyone has responsibility to everyone else for the end product. It is “shameful” for one to fail the “family”, and conversely for the family members to fail to help one another. This Oriental mindset cannot be replicated by Occidentals. We try to replicate such an efficient system, but Western capitalism has too much dog eat dog, and too little reciprocal obligation outside of specified contract. Hence such process becomes too brittle and subject to breakage.
Maybe. Don’t underestimate the effect of being something around 1/10th the area. It’s one thing to have a logistics hub that serves a hundred miles. It’s another thing entirely when coastal production centers are a couple thousand miles apart.
I believe it’s not the ship distance per se. Hell, you can often fly essential parts in. It’s a matter of priority for those you have relations with. Quality, scheduling, priority in delivery, etc.
I’ve read that these companies, particularly the major ones help the smaller suppliers with both money and expertise if push comes to shove. Just like you’d loan your cousin money if he asked, but not dump a dollar to a side walk beggar.
Flying essential parts in works if we are talking silicon chips or other materials with a high value per weight/volume, but not steel girders or precast concrete or hazardous chemicals.
Interestingly, Walmart will handle logistics for small companies. While they prefer long-term contracts, I used them for a few months during the covidiocy when a lot of the LTL outfits were shut down.
This bridge can be quickly rebuilt. Negroes are extraordinary steel workers. Their concrete skills are the finest in the world. Negro architects are surely at work at this moment designing new spans. The young negro mayor of Baltimore is hard at work organizing the construction.
Most of the scrap metal from the old bridge will be quickly stolen by negroes. This will help clear the river. Negro gangs will quickly remove the metal and any valuables from the ship.
In a year you will see a new bridge entirely constructed by Baltimore negroes!
Or conversely, Baltimore will do nothing except beg for a solution and funding from the Fed’s. 🙁
Wonderful sarcasm however—well done.
LIAR!
How about that overhead walkway that collapsed a few years ago in Florida that was designed by an all “you go girl” female architecture company. 🙄😂
Now think of how awesome future public works projects would be if the brotha’s and white sista’s worked together on design and construction?
Would make the great Greek and Roman architectural achievements seem like shit by comparison!
With respect, I’m not certain that’s true. You can look it up. The bridge might well have held up, but was damage in the (improper) installation. There’s a lot of writing on this fiasco and enough blame to go all around—twice!
Yes, it was never determined if the problem was design or construction…
But the joke was set up nicely for me.
I’m told the new bridge will be built in Wakanda and made entirely from a single atomically perfect piece of vibranium. It will then be dropped in from an orbiting Wakandan starship.
You jest, but if somebody circulated that drollery in deepest, darkest Bawlmer, in short order 75% of the resident nuggras would believe it with the deepest possible conviction.
When the bridge named after the author of a nation’s national anthem collapses, that would be God telling that nation something. Not to rule out mechanical and human factors, to be sure. But it is a hint and I’m not guessing.
Kinda like when a nation’s national flag is ripped in half by the, er, wind. Or when the presidential insignia unaccountably falls off the podium while the president is speaking (hi Barry!). Or when two total eclipses bisect the nation with the space of seven years, junctioning at Little Egypt. Dayum Barry even looks like some dead old fay-row.
Or when West Point changes its motto from “Duty, Honor, Country” to “Army Values”.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1238617877/west-point-usma-duty-honor-country-mission-statement
Having been engaged in international logistics for…a long time…the best source of info / the players / implications / etc. I’ve seen so far on this incident is http://www.theloadstar.com
“It was ISIS Maryland!” – some State Department lackey.
Steering is controlled by a HPU, once that goes down you lose steerage and rudder is locked to last position. Power went out twice. Back up genny will only power lighting/comms on a separate circuit. Had just dropped tugs and bow thrusters wont operate above three knots (was going 8.5 at impact) 100k ton displacement so do the physics. Likely tried to go full astern (from funnel smoke) but you also lose steerage when you do that. No idea what tide, wind conditions were, but container ships are really prone to wind conditions. This is from my kid who has done 4 refit/conversions on LNG ships in 300m range in last few years. And a continuous truss bridge with little protection to the pier. As with most engineering failures, multiple things piling up at the wrong time.
No expert, seems to me pretty fast for a ship that size to be moving through a waterway that size.
There is a trade off between speed and maneuverability in ships that size. There was a considerable NE wind so once out of inner harbor may have chose a couple extra knots to make ship more responsive to helm. I’ll have to ask the kid.
Agreed mostly, except that true engineering failure is (or at least was) rare. What happens is that operating conditions differ from the design assumptions. In the case of I-35W in Minneapolis, the highway department specified the maximum weight that bridge would ever see. The bridge “failed” when subjected to weight way in excess of design. Well, duh.
Similarly, as Zman said, this bridge was a quarter-century out of date. Had it been designed after the Tampa bridge failed under similar circumstances (1980?), the lessons learned there would have been factored in, the kinds of pylons and riprap used around the Tampa bridge trivial in terms of price relative to the costs of losing a bridge. But as Zman says, there’s no glory in pols spending money to prevent something like this that would probably never happen anyway.
I was living in Los Angeles 30 years ago when the Northridge Earthquake took out many of the freeway overpasses. The Major and Governor (both Republicans -hard to believe now) put together a reconstruction program that paid huge bonuses for work done ahead of schedule. Not many months later I was cruising down the Santa Monica Freeway again.
Meanwhile, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake it took eight years to replace the collapsed section of the I-880 in West Oakland and twenty-four years to replace the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. The latter replacement was found to potentially have some structural weaknesses.
Then there’s the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, a rickety thing that’s reminiscent of the Key Bridge. It was retrofitted a few years ago but they should have just replaced the thing.
Sclerotic government from the local to federal level is the absolute rule these days, unless of course it involves some sort of DIE initiative. Fifty years ago in my city, the rapid growth was moving west and northwest. However, to get to many of those places, you had to cross the busy SP railway. Did our visionary city council look to the future and decide an overpass on the major artery in that area was needed? Hell no. Only after 45 years of increasingly large traffic jams did the job finally get done – of course to the massive inconvenience of the huge population that now live out that way. There are just too many stupid people infesting politics (among other areas) these days.
In a related aside, I watched a show last night on the history of Grand Hotel on Makinaw Island. It is a substantial structure that was actually built in 90 days back in 1887. Can you imagine anything like that in this day and age? The old American, and male, “can do” spirit evaporated a long time ago…
The Empire State Building (IIRC) was built in Manhattan in 18 months and under budget. That’s what a Depression will do wrt motivation.
“…planners did not have to worry too much about ships smashing into bridges.”
Not entirely true. The Tower Bridge in London was specifically built to accommodate tall masted ships which is why it has a fixed public walkway over the traffic bridge which can be raised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_1E2auYKg&ab_channel=FredericObrien
Methinks you misinterpreted the comment. I believe the intent of that statement was that planners of 250 years ago did not have to worry that a ship smashing into a bridge would bring down the bridge. Back then ships were small and bridges were big.
I believe the real meaning of this is as a metaphor for our society. Watching the video, it is clear that bridge was doomed well before the video begins. Massive disaster, impossible to stop, slowly, slowly making its way to the pylon. Then it’s gone in just a flash.
Lovely to see, for those with a certain approach to things.
“How did your civilization collapse?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Sclerotic government from the local to federal level is the absolute rule here days – unless it involves some DIE/lgbtqz initiative. Fifty years ago in my city, the rapid growth was moving west and northwest. However, to get to many of those places you had to cross the SP rail line. Did the city council visionaries look to the future and decide to build an overpass on the major artery in that area? Hell no. It took another 45 years of increasing traffic jams for it to finally dawn on their pea brains. There are simply too many stupid people infesting politics these days – and evidently have been for quite some time.
In a related aside, I was watching a show last night on the history of the Grand Hotel on Makinaw Island. It’s a rather large structure that was actually built in 90 days back in 1887. Can you imagine anything like that in this day and age? There is just no “can do” spirit anymore.
The Grand Hotel is amusing, as they import all their labor so it’s a group of rich white people being served by diversity. Real old south feel.
I work in an industry that has automated what were human functions. It works fantastic, until it doesn’t. When something goes wrong with the system it tends to cascade into a disaster that is difficult to correct in a timely manner.
When i think of software driven robots producing stuff today i think of comparing our modern complex systems to a factory in 1941. That factory could produce cars one day but because of the flexibility of the humans on that assembly line could be producing tanks or planes in short order.
Now today that factory and all its software driven machines would need modified and reprogrammed, an almost impossible task.
Russians probably kept in place a less complex system and therefore its more easily modified or turned up or down in production.
G-
I’d only add that there would also be a huge integration and test burden that would be incurred by those reprogrammed machines. You’d need to do weeks, possibly even months of those activities to ensure you had a line that wasn’t constantly dropping.
To me, it’s amazing how much inertia is created by all these incredibly complex automated systems.
Remember those “accidents” in the Asian seas a few years ago? We contracted with terrorists to take out innocent Russian people. In my opinion it is highly likely that we should expect payback. Could Russians have simply jammed the navigation systems? I don’t pretend to know a lot about shipping but the timing seems to be suspicious.
Oh man. Think of what a hash are all those old legacy systems are, mixed with constantly updated Version 8.6 this and Version 14 that.
With hardware conflicts and wiring problems (rats peeing on the cables, etc) on top of that.
I met a couple electronics pro’s, who had crawled out from between the walls at a Rio Tinto mine factory.
Two guys, one black, one white, so covered in dust, cobwebs, grease, and bug goo they looked like raccoons after they took took their goggles off. They had learned electronics in the military and were doing maintenance on the factory electronics.
I told ’em they were my heroes. If only I had chosen another life, I would’ve been a tweenwaller. Something deep in the guts of this marvelous modern spectacle.
I was struck by the same old scripted rush to jump in front of the cameras by the Negro mayor of Baltimore and the negro governor of Maryland with their cast of serious faced background actors and fat National Guardsmen like happens every time a hurricane or a train derailment or some other natural or man made disaster happens. You could swap out the obsolete farm equipment in Maryland for Rollin’ Greg Abbot putting on a show for the cameras down in Texas and it’s all exactly the same. NOTICE ME! is the underlying imperative for scumbag politicians.
“NOTICE ME! is the underlying imperative for scumbag politicians.”
And all Americans. See: Social Media.
To be fair to the scumbags (they don’t deserve being lumped in with politicians), this is a media driven country. All politicians are just actors and entertainers at this point. Been that way since, bare minimum Ike, and arguably since the advent of the radio star.
Your local community hospital used to keep 2-3 months worth of supplies on hand. Now, your local hospital is run by a mega-corp headquatered in another state, and keeps at most one week’s worth of supplies. Good luck in a catastrophe.
The Kerch Bridge must go!
Who must go??
Holy Schnikes, but has that guy gone off the deep end! I haven’t even read VDare in years because they let Sailer spam the site with so much COVID hysteria that it became literally impossible to find anything worth reading there between his 1384th and 1385th daily post on how COVID was going to kill us all. Next up I guess – the 723rd article of the day on how lizard people are hiding bombs and mind-control rays in foreign shipping! I have to speculate as to whether there’s some object lesson to be learned here about dissident-adjacent writers.
I was going to attend his book tour stop in Miami next month. Now I’m probably not. $75 to hear a crank is not a good ROI.
I listened to him on a podcast once, it was unbearable. He sounds like a robot.
Nah, Steve’s got the Shohei Ohtani “Betting Scandal” so he good.
Remember:
– Baseball
– Golf course architecture
– Graphs (“Really, this one will FINALLY convince them!”)
– A Certain Demographic sure does act crazy, don’t they?
Ole’ Steve clearly knows nothing at all about simple physics. A ship that size, even moving quite slow, has an incredible amount of force–no explosives needed.
My frustration with SS is the same with any pundit who knows nothing of the physical world. How can I take a person seriously who hasn’t a clue how anything actually works?
You’d think some obvious things would be intuitive to just about everybody, but I guess not.
Sailer is obviously declining mentally and his previous objectivity on issues has given way to more emotionally driven opinions (yesterday he declared the H-you-know-what-acaust as the most evil thing ever in history).
Coincidentally, one of his loyal sycophants actually ventured out of the Sailer bubble and engaged Ron Unz briefly in the comments of another article. Unz revealed that Sailer’s traffic has declined precipitously in the last 4 years, and this is no doubt correlated to Sailer’s disappointing (or plainly obtuse) opinions on Kovid, Ukraine, his bizarre concern for feral negroes while at the same time ignoring the deliberate persecution and destruction of the white working class, as well as his sympathetic takes on individuals who clearly promote anti-white, anti-US policies, like Biden, Obama, LeBron James, Ketanji Jackson, Raj Chetty, etc. etc. His most recent exercise in excuse making is for the Japanese sportsballer Sho Ohtani, who pretends to not speak Engrish in an effort to avoid answering tough questions about his apparent gambling problem and his interpreter engaging in all sorts of financial shenanigans. But, Sailer loves Ohtani, compares him to Babe Ruth regularly, and most importantly, he’s a LA Dodger, and that means he is granted honorary diplomatic immunity.
It’s the mindset of a young child, and it’s pretty sad.
Well said. You outlined why I stopped hanging around Saliers blog a year ago.
That and his unshakable, regardless of facts “know it all ism.”
We just organized a terrorist act in Russia using the CIA created ISIS, so why would payback be so implausible? Could the navigation systems have gotten electronically jammed somehow? I don’t know, but the timing makes me wonder.
If there’s any payback from the Rooskies it’ll be the helluva lot more impressive than tumping over a flimsy bridge in Bawlmer. Like maybe Bawlmer just ceases to exist altogether.
I immediately thought of the Russians too. If this is payback for Moscow they’re probably just getting started. Someone else mentioned that they thought it was the Ukes being pissed off about their “aid” money getting held up in Congress. That’s the problem with the GAE though. When everyone in the neighborhood and all your relatives wanted you dead, solving your murder is complicated.
Sailer did good work for a long time, but in this critical juncture, he’s decided to go small and focus on useless trivialities. I mean, FFS, he made a post about pretend Indians a few days ago – nobody cares about Liz Warren anymore, Steve! On the few posts where he does talk about the important things, the things he built his career and name on, he lets trolls and (self-identified) Jews hijack and misdirect the discussion away from the topic and towards more trivialities. I am not sure if it is because of age, he’s just tired, he feels like he put in the work, which is fine, but guys like Jared Taylor are still cooking.
Perhaps he thinks the clampdown will be coming, will be brutal and epic on the lines of Rwanda, and wants to be “safe” and not sacrifice his family which depends upon him?
I cannot blame the man for that, if that is the case. All those young, unattached military age men recruited from South American prisons are not here by accident. They were deliberately brought here for a reason.
I believe you are referring to the crème de la crème of trolls,
“Jack D.”
Jewish lawyer extraordinaire…
Who Sailer would allow to completely derail a thread, while taking his sweet ass time posting comments by others who had something useful to add to the conversation.
Oh, fuck yeah. That asshole was one of the chief reasons I stopped wasting my time at Steve’s blog.
To Unz’s credit, he did offer the facility to “ignore this poster” ,which I never took advantage of because these prolific bastards such as Jack D were omnipresent, and deletion of their posts would chop up the continuity of a thread unmercifully. The only solution would seem to be to just flat out suspend their posting priviledges, and that would bever happen. Also, the more clever of these trolls played to Sailer’s vanities, particularly during the coof, when they would give Sailer unsolicited tongue baths.
Bad money drives out good money.
Except that’s not what Sailer is “going with”, if you click through to actually read the article.
He simply said don’t jump to conclusions about the cause but ended saying “So, I’d imagine the most likely cause is some catastrophic accidental failure on the ship leading it to drift into the tower.”
That’s a pretty far cry from going with the claim that it was a bomb squirrelled away onboard. Pretty disappointed in the Z Man over this one…
Things I am sure of:
1. We had nothing to do with Kerch bridge.
2. We had nothing to do with Nordstream pipeline.
3. The Russians had nothing to do with 695 bridge.
4. The Clintoons had nothing to do with (fill in dead person’s name.)
5. Donald Trump peed on a hooker’s bed.
What am I sure of?
Best comment I’ve seen so far is “tick tock, the clock has started as it took Russia only two months to fix the bridge going to Crimea”.
GAE would have to desperately squeeze every ounce of competence it has left to get the thing replaced at all, but I doubt they have it in them (someone ask Transportation Secretary Buttigig about it).
(BTW, thanks for the “hot” news post Z).
Two months from now they’ll still be talking about what might be done about it. In contrast, the Russians had men on the job.
Get girl boss out there leading the way!
Not to worry, Shawama Bethuba is on the job like it was a KFC bucket
I’ll be surprised if the GAE has even begun clearing the wreckage in two months.
I mean, that’s not nearly enough time to complete all the EPA-mandated environmental impact studies.
Am I the only one who thinks it will be quite amusing to watch all the various black politicians trying to “solve” these problems? It will be like watching a bunch of apes trying to type out the works of William Shakespeare. There will be a lot of noise, but nothing of substance.
More typewriters, more apes….that’s the ticket…
The most pithy description of the government/democrat grift that I have ever read till date.
The very essence of DIE in a nutshell.
Bravo!
pithy /pĭth′ē/
adjective
Precisely meaningful; forceful and brief.
“a pithy comment.”
For what it is worth, a major bridge in Philadelphia was fixed up in a couple months, way ahead of schedule, after it was damaged by, I believe, a tanker explosion. It is proof that they CAN be competent, even today, when they want to, but so often, they choose not to. Imagine the amount of wasted energy and resources that go into making this an intentionally dysfunctional and incompetent country, all focused towards elevating our worst and holding down our best.
I don’t wish to discuss specifics but Big City A that I lived in has been debating changing out a major bridge for the entirety that I’ve been alive (and I’m not young), but when I moved to Big City B they needed a similar bridge replaced and it seemed like the thing was swapped out in a weekend (in actuality it was only little more than a year, but it was a huge project). Interestingly the only difference between the two cities is that B has people actually interested in infrastructure, which is the exception not the rule (i.e. demographics was not the issue in ‘A’).
Res ipsa loquitur. Competently managed crews don’t lose steerage at a crucial turn which, it appears, the Dali experienced. The river pilots only had to aim for a blinking red light. This was engineering by incompetents, and we’re going to live through hella more of engineering incompetency to come unless you’re killed by the fallen door of a commercial airliner. Then you just won’t live but the incompetency will continue for the rest of us. No standards, no accountability, no justice. You are here now.
They were headed for Sri Lanka or someplace. Total system failure before leaving the harbor, but planning on a global journey.
Very on-brand for our entire way of life, I’d say. lmao
I am old enough to recall the Bhopal Disaster. Same punjabis behind the curtains. We’re going to experience more Bhopals as these goblins nepotize and colonize. DIE is needed because out of 1.5 billion-plus they still cannot find enough competent engineers to achieve a position on merit.
We use Bhopal as a cautionary tale in engineering. It’s not that it was improperly designed, but rather that it was not built as designed. Specifically, instead of fail-close valves (they shut off flow if you lose power) the installers used fail-open. It’s why engineering firms now insist on having someone on-site overseeing the tradesmen who are doing the build.
Just curious DaBears, have you ever spent any time on ships? Ever been on one when it loses rudder or engine control?
I have on a similarly sized ship and he’s correct. If helm communication is lost then the steering gear can be manipulated on site manually by “trick wheel”. Rudder position indicators and true bearing indicators were at the station, in voice contact with the bridge. In the total failure of electrical power to the steering hydraulic rams, they could moved by manual pumps. Which in my case meant four men rotating this thing until their lungs flew out, then replaced by four other men. One team for each rudder and you’re moving an incredible amount of weight/force, each rudder unit had four 12” hydraulic rams.
TLDR: Machinist Mate USN, stood aft steering watch when Noah still sailed.
Infrastructure is the base of a society. A people on the rise seem to love building infrastructure. Heck, the Chinese seemed to have built way too much infrastructure. Sure, it’s wasteful, but you develop skills and capacity that, hopefully, can be used for useful projects down the line.
A society that neglects infrastructure is obviously a society on the decline. The reasons vary, but the trajectory is clear.
Z also makes a good point about GDP not exactly being measured correctly. The combined GDP of the US and EU is ~$40 trillion, compared to Russia’s $2.2 trillion. Supposedly, the US and EU have a combined economy that nearly 20X that of Russia.
I don’t care what kind of military-industrial system Russia has in place. If Russia’s economy was truly 5% of the size of the US and EU, there would be no way that it could outproduce the West in any manufactured good that the West also produces – and we definitely produce military hardware. And if somehow Russia was outproducing in something; we should be able to quickly overtake them with a combined economy 20X the size.
Sure, we’ve hollowed out our manufacturing, but Germany didn’t and we still produce a lot of stuff. No. The truth is that Russia’s economy isn’t 5% of the West. Russia’s economy is a lot bigger that what our metrics show and the West’s economy is a lot smaller.
You talk as if cutting checks to invaders shouldn’t count towards GDP 😉
gdp minus govt spending would be a much more useful measure of the economy. Better yet would be gdp minus gov spending minus counter productive monkey motion caused by idiotic policy (immigration, dei, agw, lawyering …)
It’s because GDP is a useless, financialized metric that measures money churn and froth, rather than real, valuable economic outputs like steel and aluminum production.
God, I remember in 1975 flying back home from Fort Benning to visit the folks in Sedona and reading about that bridge in a magazine I bought for plane ride. Don’t even remember the magazine name but it was some fluffy profile piece on Baltimore and the surrounding area. Things were certainly brighter back then, and that’s saying something relative to the mid-70s.
One problem with the Key Bridge was that it had no dolphins (circular concrete structures that absorb ship impacts and protect the piers of the bridge). That was a tragic oversight considering the ship channel’s location and the amount of traffic that crosses it.
The Sunshine Skyway in Florida, which was also hit by a freighter that had an engineering casualty and collapsed in 1980, was replaced by a new bridge with dolphins guarding all of the piers.
Ships have mechanical and electrical casualties. It’s not a diversity issue, but as these container ships get larger, they are even more formidable battering rams.
It seems like the more we complicate the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
Respectfully, photos do show modest dolphins protecting both sides of the FSK Bridge, center span. They wouldn’t slow down a loaded container ship much.
This failure to adapt to changing situations puts one in mind of The Grid. Taxed by the demands of massive server farms, the expectation that it will be able to handle charging mass numbers of electric vehicles, and all of these idiocies while shutting down power generation capacity that can respond quickly when the base load demand surges, and living in Cloud Cuckoo Land expecting solar and wind to rake up the slack? The disasters are predictable, and would be orders of magnitude more crippling in comparison to a localized, albeit serious, disruption to transit and commerce.
I was also thinking about the Skyway this morning…that was the last major bridge disaster I think.
Currently the Tampa-St. Pete area is building new bridges (added lanes) across the Bay. There’s certain states I trust for infrastructure improvements and Florida is one of them. (They also got the Brightline high-speed rail going without much fuss – compare that to California.) Can Maryland build a bridge in less than a year, like China can? We all know the answer to that.
I suppose it’s one of those times to remind ourselves that there are good states and bad states to live in. This isn’t the “United States” as much as the “Discrepancy States”.
Replacement of the Tappan Zee bridge literally took decades. I was actually shocked when the new bridge got close to finished. I had come to assume that the bridge and surrounding strip of 287 was just a permanent make-work project in NY.
It is a diversity issue, though. Not that this specific thing was definitely caused by a DIE hire screwing up somewhere – though quite possibly, if you check our Maersk’s diversity page – but the fact that very complex systems require that the people who manage them are drawn from some pool with certain abilities on average.
If the Roman systems became too complex for other Whites to manage, what do you imagine is going to happen here?
Just saying…There are most definitely dolphins around the bridge. New ones, even, in the channel. I have passed between them hundreds of times.
Looking at some pre-collision photos, there are some dolphins on the Key Bridge, but not as many as the Sunshine Skyway. Those cost about $120 million in today’s money, expensive, but a lot cheaper than buying a multi-billion bridge.
Also, some of those dolphins could’ve been used for mooring barges or possible navigation beacons.
Also, how long before this accident is deemed rayciss? I give it a few hours.
“Nobody is running into bridges in majority White cities! Bridge collapsing accidents disproportionately affect peoples of colors.”
WE DEMAND SHIP-BRIDGE COLLISION EQUITY!!!!!!! 😠✊
Since the ghetto has lost an idiot, Ima start the voting right now!
Kween Crockett, for:
1. President
2. Department of Transportation
3. Supreme Court Justice
4. YOUR NEW BOSS
5. Harbor master
6. Ship captain
7. Financial Officer Steelworkers Local #773
8. Toll Collections Dept., Thurgood Marshall Bridge, 2024-2028
9. Book Author, “Rise Above: Overcoming Obversity In A White Woman’s World”
Recall the horrific explosion in Beirut with the fertilizer or whatever. It was crazy big with a lot of knock on effects and nobody talks about it now. Sorry to say, but we are living in ‘Idiocrasy” in a big way.
It’s a good thing we didn’t invest any of our trillions in printed paper on infrastructure! That money was better spent on racist highways, removing White makes from society and elevating retarded black kweans into high positions.
Isn’t it just sickening to watch this parade of totally incompetent and unqualified people just get handed managerial, executive, C-suite, and even board level positions across the collective West?
This is why I support welfare or UBI, at least above other options. It’s the cheapest and least destructive way to hand out gibs. Instead, we put these people in positions they cannot handle, which imposes a far larger cost on society than just their paycheck.
We cannot have a high IQ economy. Far too many people don’t have a high IQ. We have to stop pretending that we can educate low IQ people and magically turn them into high IQ people. Giving someone a diploma doesn’t make them good at math like it does in the movies.
You are making the incorrect assumption that by giving them this UBI and welfare that they will be placated and that will be enough. Nothing will ever be enough so this won’t prevent any of the things you think it will.
Further, UBI requires even more takings from those who produce to give to those who do not. That is not going to improve anything.
Cet par, productivity gains lowers prices, like used to happen from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution and especially the Industrial Revolution, clear up until the creation of the Fed and other central bank scams, which were designed to skim off these productivity gains and hand them over to the finance guys. Get rid of that, and people really could live for less.
So what are we supposed to do with these people if we want to have a high IQ economy without anywhere near enough jobs for the lower half of the IQ curve?
I absolutely do not support treating them poorly in any way. IQ does not make the man. There are plenty of high IQ people who are not fit to live in any moral society and plenty of low IQ people who live honorable and honest lives.
BITD, we had an economy that allowed the lower 1/2 of society to live happy and productive lives. This doesn’t really exist anymore, at least not enough to employ the vast majority of them. Much of the employment which does exist does not pay well enough to survive without assistance.
If you say ‘well, we have to have a real economy,’ sure, I agree with that. But that state of affairs does not exist right now. The armies of drug addicts, homeless, drug dealers and other criminals are what you get (more of) when you have an economy where large sections of the population are excluded.
These people were not driven out of the economy by progress or technology, but by policy. Closing our factories and chasing low cost labor and lack of regulations across the globe enriching our so-called enemies, was deliberate policy. NAFTA was deliberate policy. The special economic zones of China and later the entry of China into the WTO were deliberate policies. We did this to them by choice, by slow deliberate action over decades of time. We sold them out for coin. Our leaders are EVIL.
@Steve
The Fed, as bad as it is, is not responsible for most of the problem. The free trade ideology is to blame.
US workers cannot compete with foreign workers who have the same equipment, the same management etc. Many of our factories that were closed down had all the equipment boxed up and sent to China. The same management team continued the manage everything. When you can move production equipment and expertise around the world, you absolutely have no advantage no matter how advanced your economy is.
We simply cannot compete with a country like China, or now Vietnam and India. They have much lower costs of living. They have much lower electricity. They have far fewer environmental and worker safety regulations. They don’t enforce what little regulations they have. This has held back their economy because they didn’t have Western expertise or production equipment. But now they have OUR equipment. They have OUR management and finance too. They have all the Western advantages plus all the third world low costs.
Do you want these people to just die? Just what do you want to do with the lower half of the former middle class? Without manufacturing, there is little they can do that is productive enough to provide a wage that can support them.
It’s amazing to me that people who claim to support White people and the fair treatment of these people throw them right under the bus when money is the issue.
“Fixing” the money problem is not going to fix these other problems. In fact, it is likely to make everything worse, particularly in the short-medium term.
@Tars, So what are we supposed to do with these people if we want to have a high IQ economy without anywhere near enough jobs for the lower half of the IQ curve?
1. Why would we want “jobs”? Apart from a shrinking number of people who wake up excited to get started on another day working, what’s the point? Haven’t you seen all those videos and memes of people who hate their jobs?
2. Why would one fear not having enough low-IQ jobs, whatever that means. Lots of people hire out their lawn care, whether mowing or ChemLawn or whatever. Back when people had more disposable income, even middle class could afford a cleaning lady, or a maid, or maybe even a cook. Upper middle class could also afford a gardener, driver or pool boy, if desired.
3. You can do whatever you like. I’m pretty sure I could find something for a few of them to do.
UBI is a terrible idea. At least if they are out cleaning up the road ditches, they produce something of value. Why not put them to work doing things we are told American’s just won’t do, like growing their own food?
@Tars, @Steve
The Fed, as bad as it is, is not responsible for most of the problem. The free trade ideology is to blame.
The free market has an airtight alibi — it wasn’t anywhere to be found.
US workers cannot compete with foreign workers who have the same equipment, the same management etc.
Time was when we didn’t have to. Being in a relatively free society, with a stable regulatory scheme, a legal system which, if not exactly fair, was at least more or less predictable, and an economic model where rags to riches stories were not uncommon made America the destination of choice.
In a lot of respects, it’s that success that puts us in the situation we are now. We became rich, and people all around the globe want to be here just for that. Then someone gets the brilliant idea to sweeten the pot with free housing, free cash cards, welfare, and now UBI?
I support Logan’s Run, based on IQ
I hope you’re just being funny, because that would be evil and certainly not a society I would want to live in. Plus, it would be a dysfunctional society.
That’s a good point. Maybe we should just enslave them again. That would keep them out of trouble. Seriously.
Who is this “them” of which you speak? Look in the mirror. You have a projected future on Klaus Schwab’s latifundia, and nowhere else.
Another way of viewing our national debt situation is to have an honest accounting of underfunded infrastructure, deferred maintenance and obsolescence. I’d bet that everyone here can name a massive infrastructure problem near them that would take billions to fix. Amazingly, the Civil Engineer society says our infrastructure improved a little recently, with the ports (!!) leading the way. You can judge for yourself I suppose.
https://www.waterwaysjournal.net/2021/03/05/asce-infrastructure-grade-improves-to-c-report-card/
Between broken sewers/watermains and old bridges, tragic electric grids and potholed highways, we probably face trillions of unfunded and unreported liabilities. As the white guys who build/repair all this stuff retire (or get displaced by gov’t DEI initiatives), I would suggest it’s impossible that we can maintain our infrastructure without a massive privatization effort.
Any privatization effort is going to have to include strict standards on time schedule completion and cost overruns. In Toronto, the public transit system bought new streetcars from Bombardier in Quebec and when delivery was delayed, massive fines were imposed, as per the contract.
That’s because Bombardier was stupid.
Waay long ago, when I was a naive sapling, we were completing a building for the department to move/grow into.
Just before scheduled building completion date, the subcontractor for the communications aspect of the building was grossly behind his completion schedule. Obviously, communications for a department such as ours was a show stopper for move in. We took the subcontractor to task and informed him, we would be exercising the $300 per day penalty for failure to complete on schedule..
*Within a day*, we were called by the campus police that a fire had broken out in the building and we should come over to help them assess the damage. The fire started in a storeroom used to house components for the communications wiring and transmission equipment. It was small fire and fire was quickly “detected” and put out. The subcontractor stopped by later on and claimed ignorance as to the cause and then said none of the equipment could be used due to possibility of smoke damage and would need to be “recertified” by the manufacturer.
So the end result was a force majeure exception to the contract penalties *and* extra cost added for the recertification! That’s how you do it folks in America!
The old quote comes to mind. Once upon a time the ships were made of wood and the men were made of iron; now the ships are iron and the men are wood. It’s just a variation on the old observation that “Tough times make tough men who make soft times, which makes soft men,” which is where the problems really come in. I never thought it would get to the point where times got so soft that the men started thinking they were women, but here we are.
It’s crazy to think of it, but even with GPS and mastery of low earth orbit we still have more trouble navigating certain places, like Tierra del Fuego, than those using cruder instruments or even dead reckoning back in the day of iron men.
The bridge story, though, shows why you really can’t accuse those of us who abstained from the vax for doing so. I’m not antivaccine any more than I’m anti-bridge or anti-airplane. I simply don’t trust the level of human capital involved in making our vaxxes, planes, or bridges enough to take the risk at this point. If I thought that the smart fraction had some oversight, or even any say in managing the dummies, I might have a little more trust. But they don’t. Most of the smart white guys have either dropped out, gone completely independent, or even been lured overseas by countries who will reward them for their hard work and don’t hate them for the color of their skin.
I’m staying here, but I’m staying on the sidelines until the people who stole our toy break it completely. And this time when we fix it, they can’t play with it, or even look at it, for that matter.
joey: Precisely. I’ve noted before that my husband and I no longer fly – and we both first flew in the early 1960s and spent a few decades traveling the world. Now? Between TSA, diverse passengers, and DEI in building, servicing, and flying the planes, we do not trust the modern transportation system and will not use it.
We both drove over the Key Bridge multiple times in years past, and give no thought to what could go wrong – far more to the engineering skill that made such a bridge possible. Now, we always consider possible choke points or catastrophic infrastructure or system failure. I worry every time my husband must travel for work – it will be Chicago in a few months – and the crime and third-world population – not to mention that he cannot go armed – make me worry more.
Our dirt/gravel road is better maintained than were the DFW paved roads (it helps that a neighbor half a mile down said road works for the city public works department) with far fewer potholes. When the simple wood structure holding up our mailboxes out on the paved road was damaged by someone, another neighbor bought the wood, got his tools, and replaced it in a few hours. No muss, no fuss – just doing what needs to be done, because that’s what White men do.
We seriously considered moving to Europe a number of years ago – even started to collect the documents to get husband citizenship and passport – just for a ‘what if’ scenario. But we dropped it because our sons, as legal adults, wouldn’t have been automatically included in said citizenship, and their future is our major concern, not our own.
Every day we are more grateful that we moved rural. We know it’s merely a stopgap until it all comes crashing down, but it’s still so much better to live White for now. And all my husband’s friends – who stuck with their government jobs and sent their kids to top-name colleges – remain confident that their government pensions, plus social security, plus private annuities, will keep them comfortable and safe from klown world for the next 25-35 years.
Who knows? They could be right, and we could end up being the suckers. But we’ve chosen to bet differently, and are preparing for the disaster of a future we see coming, rather than the future we would have preferred.
Life is a game of chance. I think rural and white is increasingly a better bet than urban and sophisticated
@3g
I love that you’ve found happiness in your rural setting. For my wife and I, our main thing is being around other Whites. I have been paying less attention to the goings on because I was making my wife miserable, and I just can’t allow that. Life is for living, so I am living to be happy regardless of the insanity going on all around me. Yes – I still have bouts of rage, but I’ve surrounded myself with other Whites, I spend my time with mostly like minded folks and I try to focus on the many blessings I have.
I hope you and your husband can enjoy your later years and that your sons find their way through the nightmare.
“Tough times make tough men who make soft times, which makes soft men,”
There seems to be no escape from this cycle of history. Men living in hard times want to make life easier for their descendants and make sacrifices.
If the good times finally arrive, the people invent disco and superhero movies, which can be a lot of fun, granted. Eventually it always converges on sex with children, which is what we are seeing today.
Can we rise above Spenglarian cycles with awareness of the cycle? I’m not aware of any example from history.
One of the most interesting questions, if you can escape that cycle. There are no examples of escaping it because the West, more specifically America, was the last to peak and older advanced civilizations like Europe, India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia etc, evidently did not. Europe has had at least two peaks, probably three (Greece, Rome and Renaissance to WW1). But the question is very fascinating. Like finding a cure for macro cancer or even aging
It was probably an actual accident but you have to wonder how hard it is to hack the computer controlling the rudder from the bridge or the navigation system. Would they be encrypted? The FSB had 72 or so hrs to get their man in position if in fact it is payback for Crocus or a warning that patience is getting scarce in Moscow
(Shhh. What we were all thinking, Simba.)
MyS-
Things is, I’d bet the Russians are superb at covering their tracks.
I’d be shocked if they left any breadcrumbs the Obiden regime can use as receipts.
I don’t think it was Russia, sure they could and get away with it but I could see them doing something that wouldn’t kill innocent people. Say something like a tanker taking off from Andrews accidentally crashing into a large government building somewhere in that area.
My money would be on accident but if the Russians did it, we’d probably never know
This collapse fits with two large narratives.
First, America is falling apart. Maybe it pushing efficiency too far. Or falling IQ intersecting with complexity. Or the DEI chickens coming home to roost. Or a combination of all three.
Whatever, this is just another in a series of failures of post modern tech that we just didn’t hear about much at all thirty years ago. Back then, this would have been a major story and scandal. Now it’s just another drip.
Secondly, America’s economic measurements are completely broken. The gauges aren’t connected to the machine at all. We’ve been talking about investing in infrastructure for at least twenty years. With periodic surges of hundreds of billions of dollars. Remember Obama’s shovel ready jobs in 2010? The money is getting spent. To no effect. The infrastructure continues to crumble. We all know it will take at least a decade, maybe two, to get this bridge replaced. A hundred years ago the golden gat bridge was built in half that time. Another example of this os the HSR in CA. $50+bn spent already without a single mile of operable hsr.
The Minneapolis bridge that collapsed over the Mississippi River in 2007 was rebuilt in 14 months. That is a much shorter distance than this one and done in a city and time of great competence. We would just be guessing to say any more than much longer than that.
And I can counter that: Back when I lived in Silly-nois there was an old center pivot bridge at 135th St. in Romeoville, IL. The bridge spanned a shipping canal and was built in 1899. Because Com-Ed built a big coal fired power plant next to the canal, the old bridge had to pivot open to allow barges to pass at least five to ten times a day. So in 1990 Romeoville and the State of Illinois got together to replace the old pivot bridge and build a more modern, higher bridge to allow barges and tugboats to sail underneath.
1990. Remember that.
The new bridge opened in 1998. And was nowhere near as big, as long, nor as high as the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. Oh, and they swung open, and eventually removed the old 135st street bridge, so for eight years there was no bridge over the canal at 135th street.
And this is in a town that was mainly White people.
Causeway bridge to Sanibel rebuilt in 2 weeks after Hurricane Ian. DeSantis kicked a**.
Just as long as no one was hurt…
I don’t know about it taking years to debate the rebuild. Biden loves Baltimore and has some family history there. He will mostly likely push to have the construction process started this summer with progress that is visible by Election Day. He is going to view this as an opportunity to show he can get things done rather than an obvious sign a decay attached to the decline of a once great city that is now a third world dump. The Minneapolis bridge that collapsed in 2007 took 14 months to rebuild, so there is no way they can have it open by the election, but Biden will not want nothing to have happened by then.
I also expect a push to change the name, so it is no longer named after slave owner Francis Scott Key. Harriet Tubman would be the obvious choice, but they may choose someone more obscure an overtly anti-white. Maybe they will go with Ray Lewis as symbol of the seriousness of our age.
The system is too sclerotic. The EPA studies will take years to complete. Then you have the issue of funding, which will take years to finalize. This all assumes the locals want to rebuilt the bridge. Powerful interests will want to bridge at another location. That was part of the problem ten years ago when they debated this topic.
They will clear the debris this summer, for sure. The bi=ridge may never be rebuilt.
But isn’t the easier way just to rebuild it in the same place? If the bridge gets built – big if, though I think it will – There’s already easements/rights of way established. I wound think that our decreasing-IQ political class would not be able to navigate the legalities of a brand-new location. So dey jus’ puddit back wheres dey found it.
100% agree with Barnard. The Key Bridge is dead. Long live the Thurgood Marshall Bridge.
Marshall is mostly unknown to young blacks like the current mayor. They will want named after someone they admire which was why I suggested Ray Lewis. Maybe some rapper from Baltimore would be a more likely choice though.
The new bridge will be named The Kurt Lidell Schmoke Bridge.
Think bigger. Diddy Combs, shining exemplar to the community, currently bein’ railroaded by White Supremacists.
Z man, you forgot we’ll need to make sure there are plenty of “Women/Minority Owned” construction and engineering firms to work on the new bridge, a la my memories of old Chicago politickin’. 😏
Palms, they will be greased!
Eff the rebuilding part, it’s the re-naming part that brings the trending and the money. This will end up a Congressional appropriations bill.
Snoop ‘Diddy’ Dog Causeway.
While it is true that infrastructure suffers from neglect, the root of the problem is harder to ascertain.
It may be that because bridges and roads are in the public sphere — a sphere that is notoriously inefficient — the quality simply isn’t there.
Somehow, if the private sector could be brought on board in planning AND management, you’d be likely to see better results. But the public is leery about handing over the keys to the kingdom to impersonal corporations — their loyalty to their shareholders set in stone.
In the end, a mixed private-public endeavor may be the way to go.
Are you for real, dude? I feel like I was having this conversation in 1994.
“I’m Ronald Reagan and I approve of this message “
The only question in my mind is as follows:
Q. Will there be more of this kind of thing going forward, or less?
A.
One nitpick Z. Steerage systems are mechanical/electrical, that’s engineering, not navigation. But rest assured all the crew had masters degrees from the VahrahmShiva Technical Institute so the mundane, such as planned maintenance, was well looked after.
Horatio Hornblower and Slocum himself could have been on the wheel but without electricity to move the rudder gear it was too late.
Meanwhile in Lagos –
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/baltimore-implodes-police-force-collapses-only-three-officers-patrolled-major-district
Lagos bridge is falling down, falling down
Logas bridge is falling down, just like Haiti!
*Sung to Mary had a little lamb.
The Zman has been gone from Lagos on the Chesapeake for less than a month and the whole place is going to heck.
Who’s to say this wasn’t willful destruction by him on his exit strategy. As zman invades WVirginia , thwart the pursuers.
“Curse that Z Man! He is too clever for us.” 😡
Civil War II: The Head of the Snake
“Breaking developments tonight as Appalachian breakaways flock to the Z banner!
*VDare Castle targeted by drone, ISIS-K suspected!
*Dreamer’s Army unit suffers heavy losses in savage ambush by MAGA Mountaineers!”
Indeed. He’s removed his deep, calming baritone voice from their midst and the denizens of Lagos have lost their anchor. And their crap.
And their bridge, and probably harbor
A man can only endure the sound of a basketball hitting the sidewalk for so long.
Apes, however, cannot get enough of it.
“No doubt the usual suspects are working on a plot where Putin is responsible for the accident.”
Believe it or not, I have seen that suggestion at many places. The guy is so smart, he can crash bridges, hack elections, make Boeing doors fall off, cast spells on world leaders, but so incompetent that he cannot stop weirdos shooting around his town 🙂
I prefer to stick to rising incompetence. That is the most parsimonius explanation of things falling apart around this part of the world.
I agree accident is the more likely but it is also the answer suggested by normalcy bias. A major port, especially suited apparently for importing cars, would presumably also be perfect for shipping out heavy military gear like tanks and artillery. Just a thought. I’d say 2:1 accident over sabotage
Putin?!?! How can they blame Donald Trump?
“The glare off his hair blinded the pilot and the ship hit the bridge. IT’S A FACT, PEOPLE!!!”
Well, Zman always said he lived in Baltimore because he wanted to see the future…
I wonder if the harbour pilot was a diversity hire?
Unlikely. The port jobs are controlled by the two locals and the political class. There are no DIE programs. That and Baltimore never embraced BLM or the diversity cult. What would be the point?
I don’t know about that:
https://twitter.com/ycfederation/status/1772555077036691952
I haven’t heard word of there being harbor pilot on board. It’s one of those things where you’d think there would be, but….
Granted, this was a while ago, but I had a friend, since passed, who was a Delaware River pilot out of Lewes , DE. Their organization was a coop- the members of which had a vested interest in the competency of the pilots. He also, and I could be wrong, gave me the impression that they were immune from political pressures.
As someone who once navigated ships, I can tell you for certain that the Harbor Pilots I dealt with were always the ultimate professionals. It is one of the most coveted jobs in the maritime world and nearly impossible to get. You have to have your unlimited tonnage license, many years of experience on all sorts of vessels, and (like our host said) know that harbor, its currents, tides, etc, like no other person on earth. You also needs the brass balls to be able to get on and off a moving ship in some crappy weather.
I will always have the utmost respect for those people.
The problem you run into with DIEversifying the harbor pilots is persuading the 300 lb kweans to climb those ladders from the tug to the freighter
They aren’t going to do that, of course, but they will push to replace the white guys with either their friend, family, booty call like Fani, or at the very least someone not white, male, and heterosexual.
Or if the harbor pilot had a sudden myocardial infarction…
Dey mite git dey weeves cott inda riggin
Hard to say, but word has it that tanker had dolphin-feelers, gold spinners on the conning tower and a bumpin’ system with a woofer the size of Linthicum.