mbperrin
mbperrin's JournalBelieve it. Those guys did more than pump gas - they checked tires, fluids, cleaned windows, vacuum
the floorboards, but a dumb 16 year old like me didn't appreciate that - hey! I could save 2 cents on gas and only pay 6 cents a gallon instead of the horrible 8 whole cents! Thank gawd we did that, or gas might be THREE DOLLARS a gallon! Um, I mean, oops.
Now when my 86 year old mother in law who lives 150 miles away in the Panhandle goes to the station, who pumps her gas in subzero wind chills? Yep, she does. Check her tires and all that? Nope. Well, what could go wrong?
These new checkout lines don't even pretend to give you a discount, and they provide no service like bagging, price checks on bar codes that don't scan, and the like. Our Albertson's here took them out after 90 days. I and a whole series of other geezers got onto the manager there ( a former student of mine) and told him that we disapproved of doing someone else's job for free, and that I wouldn't be back until they were gone. He called me at home at the end of summer to let me know they were gone.
This is not new technology, either - it's the same barcode scan a living employee would use, the same bags, the same weight scale. You just do the work, instead of them. And one more thing - when your purchases were taken to the car, every basket came back with the carryout person, ensuring they're all in all the time.
Now huge trains of baskets being pulled by a small tow vehicle gets some of the baskets in, but leaves tons of them out there to be stolen or damaged. Now please show how any money is saved there. Service is going to count for even more as we baby boomers age.
Do you teach?
I do. I teach inclusion classes at the senior high school level, economics and government this year.
What this means is that I have "regular" students, special ed, deaf, wheelchair, blind, 504 (dyslexic and other conditions not special ed which require modifications), 5th year (up to 8th year) seniors who are now overage 19-22 years old, exchange students, students on probation or parole, English Language Learners, with an average of 32 in the classroom, which has 3 student computers and a smartboard for technology.
I have a special ed inclusion teacher for 5 of my 6 classes every day, and I have a deaf interpreter one period.
The room is 22' x 24', and is part of the 1946 addition to our 1909 high school, renovated in 1988 to include air conditioning.
Here's the sum total of my rules for handling 32 students and up to three teachers at a time:
Special note on classroom behaviors and etiquette:
Mutual respect is the key to civilized behavior. We will all use normal courtesy when dealing with each other at all times, such as saying “Please” and “Thank you” and by listening attentively when others are speaking and by having something to say when talking. “Content-free” comments are a waste of everybody’s time.
In addition, I have no problem with bringing drinks to class, provided that all trash ends up in the trash can at the end of the period. Please, no food. No one, including me, will be excused during class to purchase snacks or drinks from any source, including vending machines and the cookie fund-raiser across the street.
Absolutely no hats or electronic devices will be permitted. They are unwelcome distractions to our learning environment.
Cheating is unprofitable, and therefore, will not occur.
Please just throw out all the rules there that you find stupid. Thanks.
(Oh, I forgot to mention that 85% of my students graduate each year and have for 18 years now.)
The real problem is for the students who need the structure and can't operate well in a chaotic
environment with people talking, taking phone calls, texting, eating, walking around the room, and otherwise disturbing any chance of a routine.
And of course, you can coast for a while on previous knowledge, but there is going to come a time when you will really need to know how to closely read for meaning, take efficient notes for recall without having to do the whole sequence again, and learn how to work with other people.
The idea that results can be divorced from process is stupid, really.
Process is all we have in the end, because simple "facts" change often in our lifetime as new analyses are done, new discoveries made, more curious questions answered. I give this program three years at the most. It'll take a decade to straighten out the mess it leaves.
Easiest thing would be to prohibit the corporation as a business organization.
Adam Smith didn't think corporations should be allowed to exist. Neither do I. They're a dodge to avoid personal liability for economic crimes.
Anytime you have a chance to lose everything you own, pauperize your family, and/or go to jail, you get a bit more responsible, a little more law abiding, and somewhat more interested in customer service.
The corporate form of business is at the root of all economic problems in the world today by creating a way for business to make money other than their actual business - stock manipulation.
So kill corporations and enjoy the benefits.
So no amount of research will help.
Well, that's it, then, we're all doomed.
Nothing to be done. Pack it in. Might as well kill ourselves now and save the suffering.
Let's call in a nuclear strike on everyone, including ourselves, since we're all dead anyway. Might as well put those weapons of mass destruction to some good use, eh?
It's a damn shame we can go to the moon and back multiple times, but we can't pump water uphill, nor can we remove the salt from it. Damn shame.
Well, I'll be going now, since all is hopeless, and do myself in. I suggest you do the same, instead of pooping around on the Internets.
Gloom, despair and agony on me....
Well, yes, corporations do make shit up and have been for a long time.
For instance, let's use the law of averages to solve poverty. Let's get the 100,000 poorest people in Michigan to sit in the stands of the stadium at the University of Michigan. Perhaps their average income per capita is $14,000, a good bit under the federal standard of $18,500.
Now let's have Bill Gates take a seat there. His $60 billion will raise the average income by $600,000, putting them all into the wealthy class!
Except of course, in reality, what you have is one very rich guy sitting in a stadium with hundred thousand poor people.
And so, when I think of the DDT spraying that was done in our county for decades growing up with the mist being chased by neighborhood kids, and when I think of us being downwind from White Sands, and I see that we have one of the highest rates of thyroid cancer, brain lesions, glaucoma, and melanoma in the entire US, well, I really don't care that we don't have an exact measure on that - I'm glad we quit nuclear testing aboveground and quit spraying DDT on little kids.
Similarly, I never thought it was a good idea to make ethanol - burning your food in a car seems stupid on the face of it.
And when oil companies tell me don't worry about fracking chemicals, and when people put melamine in our food, I'm against all that.
But what do I know? I didn't let my kids eat rat poison to establish some baseline for death, either. If there's shit on the floor, clean it up.
The good part is that if there really is an extinction event for humans, the bastards that caused it will die, too, and I will laugh and make fun of their suffering until the end. Because the one real fact we need - everything is connected, and sooner or later, effects will set in.
I worked in the wellhead industry as a manager for 10 years, and this is definitely a
Susie Sunshine CYA piece.
How about some shale gas FIRES?
Explosion Rocks Natural Gas Drilling Well in Marcellus Shale, Workers Seriously Injured
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-10/explosion-rocks-natural-gas-drilling-well-in-marcellus-shale-workers-seriously-injured
Explosion at West Virginia natural gas well site injures at least five
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/08/us-antero-fire-idUSBRE9670Q420130708
Explosion, Fire At Marcellus Shale Gas Well Site Under Investigation
3 Workers Injured In Fire At Chesapeake Energy Site
Read more: http://www.wtae.com/Explosion-Fire-At-Marcellus-Shale-Gas-Well-Site-Under-Investigation/-/9681798/7714474/-/aprc0b/-/index.html#ixzz2b8rvJh7c
3 injured in gas well fire during Marcellus shale drilling
http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20120817/NEWS01/308170021/3-injured-gas-well-fire-during-Marcellus-shale-drilling
plus another 1,620,000 hits from search "shale gas well fire"
Proven technology? NOPE. Old name put on new process.
Texas Association of Business must be Mooslem terrists!
EVERYbody knows that gubmint spending is B-A-D!
Everbody knows it! I been hearing it from Texus politicos my whole life!
"Shouldn't we spend more on schools?" NO! That's socialism!
"Shouldn't we spend more on old folks?" NP! They're useless eaters!
"The environment?" ECO-terrorism!
"Women's health?" On those hags?? NEVER!
So don't come sneakin' 'round here lookin' for money for roads!
Plus it's still coming up. This is not a classic wellbore leak.
They have overpressured the formation to fracture it, and this time, they fractured it all the way to the surface. So when all of the injection materials AND all of the natural gas pressure are zero (30-50 YEARS from now), they will finally know how much they actually have to clean up. They can't plug it - it's the same as making an earthquake stop in the middle. It will stop when IT's ready.
They are selling this as proven technology and nothing new. It's extremely new and totally unproven. This has nothing to do with setting off a shaped dynamite charge in a wellbore to knock holes in the bore and loosen up the formation for a few dozen feet around the shot.
This is the total destruction by acid and hydraulic pressure of the natural formation so that it gives up all the petro within. NOBODY knows how far they crack, nor have any calibration to find out.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it. " - Upton Sinclair.
I was in the wellhead business for more than a decade in a management position, and what these people are doing is totally unconscionable.
The reason they don't know how to stop it is because it cannot be stopped.
Think of petro products as being contained in a pinata. You could make a little hole in the pinata, put a pipe in it and empty the pinata that way, which is how conventional wellbore technology has worked for about 150 years.
Or you could pump high pressure into the pinata and make the pipe flow faster. This is what conventional fracking did - loosened the immediate (several dozen feet) area around a perforated borehole. That's been done for 50 or so years.
Now put in so much pressure that the pinata explodes. How will you contain it? You won't. When 100% of the candy is on the ground, it will stop.
That's precisely what today's greedy buggers have done - they've overpressured these formations without knowing exactly where and what is being fractured. This current insult will not quit until all the pressure in the entire formation is exhausted, because the product is not coming through the borehole, but through actual cracks in the ground all the way down to where the petrochemicals are.
Hopefully, this will bankrupt these companies so that this uncontrolled and uncontrollable technique stops.
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Member since: 2003 before July 6thNumber of posts: 7,672
