Chewbacca Defense

Actually I think they are already having problems with rust.

Both my kids have strong political voices, and my wife and I have both told them we think protests are stupid (we used softer wording), but we also did mot mince words that if they engaged in protests that in any way interfered with average citizens being able to go about their lives that there would be absolute hell to pay. And we used the very point I highlighted in your comment to back our point. We had some whack-a-do professor from WWU got a bunch a people to chain themselves across the freeway here In Bellingham over a proposed pipeline in the Dakotas. It ended up causing a 5 car injury accident. A doctor my wife worked with got caught up in the traffic jam, along with a vanload of elderly folks who were in pretty poor health. The doctor was near them went over to keep an eye on them. A few of them ended up soiling themselves. Dignity is already pretty hard to come by at that stage of life, nothing like a bunch of selfish twatwaffles to add insult to injury. I think the doctor was on his way to a funeral for close relative (aunt or uncle), and missed most of the service. We used this situation as a clear "this is what we are talking about" follow up discussion with our kids

Another pic 5 minutes or so later

Interesting contrail situation….

Awesome! Looks like fun! I like doing that type of stuff and I hope I will be able to do more in the coming years. Right now it's all about catching up on deferred projects on my own house.

*light* drizzle this morning and 46

Yes. The winds usually have a pretty healthy sustained element here in Bellingham with us being on the water and I guess as for how gusty it is, it depends on the type of storm and location. Frasier outflows are definitely mostly sustained winds where I am, where as the fall windstorms are more likely to be gusty at my location. I would say that 3-4 times a year we go from calm to trees bent over in an instant. The places I play soccer at are both very open and exposed, and they tend to see more sustained winds in a storm, but again, they are closer to the water. Another time that is inevitably windy here is when we have the ski to sea race out here Memorial Day weekend. I've done the canoe leg a couple of times, and by early afternoon there is usually a decent south wind coming off the bay. The tail end of the canoe leg is out in the open, flat part of the county and is getting blasted those winds. There were times we literally were not moving...our paddling force+push of the river current=the force of the wind. Abso-f*cking-lutely sucked. We would have to hunt to find the sweet spot in the current or a break in the wind. It was a 20 mile canoe leg, and this happened in 3 or 4 spots over the course of the last 3-5 miles. I've since moved on to the kayak, and I can usually make pretty good headway even in a strong headwind. Worst I've been in was about 10-15 knots sustained. They cancelled the leg soon after I got out on the water because they were having to do too many rescues. I made it, but passed a lot of people who were getting fished out by the Coasties and the local Sheriff & Fire boats. Its always a south wind, one of these days the gods will smile on us and give us a north wind. Being able to surf the swell would be a hell of a boost to race times!

Anyone want to put odds on Trump firings his lawyers between now and Monday? Classic last minute delay tactic, and based on how his other appeals in the NY election interference case has gone, I'm guessing the judge will tell him to pound sand.

I enjoy a good heavy drizzle, except if I am caught out in it unprepared (for the reason you mention). You don't hear the classic rainfall sound, just the sound of water dripping from the trees. Heavy drizzle while playing soccer is kinda lame, I have to wear glasses to play and I have a harder time with fogging and not being able to see through all the water on my lenses.

My experience is that *most* of the time, the strongest winds of a classic "PNW" windstorm hit with no rain, and typically a mid to high broken cloud deck. It's when we have a strong front pass through that we get the sideways rain and dark clouds, but that is usually pretty brief, maybe an hour tops.

Ah crap and I just put my snow shovel back in summer storage....

Made me LOL!

That was me last Sunday, only worse. I got a hair clipping in my eye, and it got all kinds of swollen and pissed off. I got an abrasion on my cornea thanks to said hair clipping, and it is finally returning to normal, finished antibiotic eye drops this morning. The plus side, I had an eye patch and my wife "let" me talk like a pirate. The only problem was I was feeling pretty crappy (also had a cold) so I wasn't really in the mood to talk like a pirate.

I could not help but LOL when he did that. Par for the course... We had an eclipse in Atlanta when I was in 5th or 6th grade and it was the exact opposite. We all went out side with strict instructions to not look at the sun, and all the teachers had pinhole cameras and pointed out how you could see the eclipse in shadows cast by leaves on the trees. I didn't really think too much of this one until I realized that this is the last eclipse I can reasonably expect to see in my lifetime. I'll be in my 70's then and while I sure as heck hope I'll still be walking the earth then, that's getting on up there. So with that, I had a little FOMO, but it sounds like it is going to be an absolute sh*tshow with traffic, no doubt all the rude "me first" jackwagens will be out in full force, so I'll just go about my day here at home.

That almost sounds like....group think....

I struggle more than most in reading a writer's true intentions on social media, and I have struggled to figure out if you are a hard core troll or really believe everything you are saying. I now realize you have gone full potato.

Probably because it is a straight up bullsh*t story to pander to people like you and Andrew. This policy has been in place for DECADES. But hey, any little thing to stir the conservative pot and keep your panties in a bunch.

Low of 38 this morning, and we got .39" of rain out of last night's system

That really sucks man, I'm sorry you are going through this. Insurance companies are so ridiculous. When I was in urgent care this weekend for my eye the MA who took my vitals happened to be the MA for my Primary care Doc. We were talking about my insurance issue, and she said it seems like all they do now is fight with insurance companies. Hopefully someone at some point will recognize a year's worth of your prescription is less expensive than a hospital stay!! I doubt it, insurance companies are too f*uckin' stupid.

I went the redneck irrigation route. I bought the Hinter pop up sprinker heads, mounted them on a sprinkler spike base with an adapter, and daisy chained them together. I used a wifi faucet timer, and hid the whole set up in the landscaping. It worked really good last year for the front yard. I need to figure out the backyard this year as I'll be completely redoing the grass back there in the next few weeks. In the fall I drain the hoses, roll it up and throw the set up on a hook in the garage. It cost me $100-150 or so with the most expensive part being the wifi timer. It will probably cost me about $200 or so for the backyard.

Looks like things got pretty entertaining on the forum yesterday.. I got a hair cut Saturday and ended up with a hair clipping in my eye. Said eye got extremely pissed off, and I now officially have permission from my wife to talk like a pirate thanks the abrasion on my eyeball and eyepatch I am now wearing. Anyway, felt like crap yesterday and couldn't really read up on things. Ended up being a lot more cloudy up here Saturday and Sunday than I had anticipated, though it was nice and sunny the first half of Sunday. We had frost Saturday and Sunday morning, and we did make it up to 65 on Sunday though. 42 this morning under cloudy skies.

Your post is amusing. We do live in a world where there are a lot of bad actors. Granted immediately jumping to the conclusion that it has to be a bad actor is out of hand, but I think it should always be at least a part of the discussion. Hopefully, 9.9 times out of 10 it is a 30 second to 2 minute discussion (literally) and then the subject is put to bed and investigators move on. We of course know that terrorism is very real. Cyber attacks are also very real. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/attack-colonial-pipeline-what-weve-learned-what-weve-done-over-past-two-years https://www.aha.org/news/perspective/2024-02-29-supporting-hospitals-and-patients-after-cyberattack-change-healthcare https://www.securityweek.com/canadas-rcmp-global-affairs-hit-by-cyberattacks/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-06/dutch-intelligence-blames-chinese-state-for-cyber-espionage-in-the-netherlands Here is a fun little list for you (some of the ones above are in this list: https://www.csis.org/programs/strategic-technologies-program/significant-cyber-incidents I could not find anything of machinery or equipment being "hijacked" yet, but I have no doubt they are trying to figure it out. Did you know that this is happening? https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2024/03/12/your-driving-data-may-be-sold-to-insurers-general-motors-reveals/?sh=45c7451856ef Some automakers already download software over wifi/cellular, and I believe Telsa is a major user of that functionality. I believe commercial aircraft can download their flight plans wirelessly. With that being said, please tell me how there is no risk of modes of transportation potentially being corrupted by a bad actor.

Absolutely, and I would be more than a little disappointed if they did not run down that line of investigation. That said, I think the chances, while not to the level of a "black swan event", are extremely small. Everyone working in and around the port has to have a TWIC card, which requires a TSA background check. So, there is some level of screening for all employees in and around sea ports. Heck, when I did my brief stint working in the refinery business, I would have been required to get a TWIC card to go on the refinery property. It had a dock for unloading crude off of tankers, and was technically a "sea port"

I hate to say this, as it kinda feeds into the tin foil hat theory... Major ports and waterways have travel lanes set up just like a road for us land dwellers. The tides and currents are pretty well known and predictable, and that is in fact one of the reasons they require harbor pilots on the ship. Those pilots know all of the nuances of the local waters, and they get paid insane amounts of money...they start at $73k and can easily go upwards of $200k, and in some cases up to $400k. I'm guessing the Columbia bar pilots that handle the mouth of the Columbia River fall in the "north of $200k" pay range. When I ran jet boats on the Willamette river, you had to take a certain line through parts of the river because of the currents, or steer in some correction to get the desired track through a cross current or up-welling. it's no different with the big boats. On the Washington State Ferries you can sometimes feel when you are going through a big eddy or up-welling. Even docking a boat, a lot of times you are using power up to a certain point then cut power and drift into the dock, and if you know what you are doing, you can do it so you run out of energy right as the side of your boat is kissing the dock. Bearing all of that in mind: Hypothetically....I think an experienced mariner could determine a point along the journey based on a time/current *could* in theory make something like this happen. I've let my marine map/current tracking apps expire and I am no ready to start them up again, but here are some screenshots off the app store of information you can get on your smart phone. The thick magenta line at the top of the first image is a traffic lane. The other image is showing the currents and strength of the currents

Definitely a possibility, but for the claims to come out within six hours....on "TwitterX" and Andrew Tate being one of the sources....not buying it for one second. *IF* it were a cyberattack, the Government would be keeping it under wraps as long as possible while they tried to understand who did it and how they did it, and how to prevent it again. If we start seeing/hearing about new security protocols being rolled out for the maritime industry, then we know something is up. I started working in Commercial Aerospace in 2003, specifically retrofitting commercial aircraft interiors. After 9/11, the company I work for and all of our competitors got into a very heated race to get a ballistic flight deck door to market. Unfortunately, my company was in the process of being sold, so there was an unwillingness to front the development costs and we lost out. I sat in a few secure briefings between 2003 and about 2008-ish where we were informed of measures the "bad guys" were trying to take to get a repeat of 2001. Those meetings were pretty chilling. It was all about trying to stay one step ahead of the "bad guys" as we worked on new designs for interiors. I've never seen or heard mention of the topic of these meetings in the public domain which is pretty impressive. I would anticipate the same thing would happen in the maritime industry. It may be a lot trickier though, as most of the ships are registered/owned by countries with very lax regulations. I believe the FAA can dictate regulations on foreign flag air carriers wanting to fly over US airspace (i.e. requirement for a ballistic cockpit door, maintenance and security requirements), but its a little easier in that area because basically 1/2 of the aircraft in the air are made in the US or Canada, and almost all of the other half are made by Allies/trade partners of the US. Not sure that is the case in the shipbuilding world.