Fake News Friday

The Electral and Oedipal Society of Southern California is passing around petitions to legalize, um, conjugal relations between parents and children.

"The ancient and barbaric prohibitions against intimate relationships between parents and their children are unnecessary in our enlightened times given the efficacy of modern contraceptives.  The government should not be in the business of censoring any form of love."

Windows in the deer blind

The blind on Salamander's farm where I intend to be hunting.  Kubota always sits on the left because it has better shooting.  I sit on the right where it is always windy.  I decided to do something about that this year.

Not very fancy engineering.  Pieces of acrylic sheet screwed to lengths of 2-by-2.  Then attached to the inside of the blind with hinges.  Sheets swing so they can be pushed up when needed.

The tamarack is pretty this time of year.

A boy named Bro-ham

I grew up on the west side of Lansing, Michigan in a neighborhood that was mostly Catholic.  The kids were named after saints and angels and Notre Dame football coaches.

It was a time of innocence.

When I was in the fourth grade, sometime in the late 1960s, my mom decided that I needed to take a class at "the Y" to round out my education.   That is where I met Bro-ham.

Other than the sissy shirt with lapels, this kid is a dead ringer (or dead singer) for Bro-ham.

With the disarming lack of dissembling common to clueless kids, I commented that I had never met a kid named "Bro-ham."  I knew bushels of Mikes and Joes and Pats and Marys, but not a single Bro-ham.

I asked him what country Saint Bro-ham came from.

Bro-Ham expanded my horizons when he told me that he had been named for his Daddy's favorite car.

Thinking furiously, Cutlass?  Nope.  Delta?  Nope.  98? Nope.  Vista Cruiser? Nope.  The closest I could come was Jimmy and nobody I knew in Lansing drove one.  We were an Oldsmobile town.

Did I mention that I was not very wordly when I was in fourth grade?

So I asked, " 'N what kind of car is that?"

"You know." Bro-ham said.  A Buke Duece-inna-qwadda Bro-ham."

Seen through that lens, Kubota's name is not all that original.

Shaking my head with disgust

For about half of my working career I worked in Product Engineering.  In the other half I worked in Manufacturing with an emphasis on quality.  Because my employer manufactured products that people sometimes misused and died while using, and because they were perceived as having deep pockets, they were a frequent target for litigation.

The company responded by sending many of us to a class titled "What every Engineer should know about Product Liability."  Some of the information stuck.

One of the restaurants in Eaton Rapids was recently remodeled.
I went in to check it out.

One of the additions was a bar that is about 42" above the floor.  Instead of chairs they had tall stools; stools with a narrow footprint and willowy structural members.

Looks can be deceiving so I up-ended one of the stools to see what was beneath the hood, so to speak.

The problem with warnings

Posting a sign "Vicious dog.  Jumps fence and bites people." does not protect you from litigation.  For one thing, the pedestrian is in peril if they are close enough to read the sign.  Another thing is that the sign is evidence that you know that you have a dangerous dog and that you are a weasel who tries to scrape the blame off on innocent pedestrians.

This sticker reads, "Do not sit in this chair without all four legs on the floor."  Hmmm!  How many customers will read this sticker?  Zero would be my guess.  How many customers will lean back in the chair?  More than zero, would be my guess.

Another line on this sticker reads "Inspect this chair...at a minimum of once every four months, for:
Instability due to bent legs (!!!) or unevenly worn glide(s)
.
.
.
Broken welds or similar signs of stress of abuse
  -The chair feels wobbly when sitting on it.
  -The legs can be easily flexed side to side."

One presumes that they have a history of bent legs and broken welds.

Just out of curiosity, let's look at those welds.  Out of a sample of three stools, multiple defective welds were found.  The most photogenic are shown in the next three images.

Porosity.  Porosity at the end of a long weld is less troubling than porosity at the end of a short weld.  In this case, the porosity compromises 25% of the length of the weld. 

Off-position.  It might be a nice weld but it is not joining the two piece of metal because it is in the wrong place.  The portion of the weld that appears to have fused to both pieces of metal has porosity.

Cold-lap.  The weld did not fuse or melt into one of the two pieces.  They might as well have used toothpaste to join the two parts.  The sticker attempts to claim that broken welds are "stress of abuse" but this weld was shipped this way from the factory.  Weasels.

But wait....the restaurant is not off the hook...
Presumably some executive at the restaurant's national headquarters OKed the purchase of these stools.

That means the restaurant, a national chain, bought into  "Inspect this chair...at a minimum of once every four months"

• Can the restaurant prove, in a court of law, that the company trained people to perform the inspections?
• Can the company produce test results that validates the effectiveness of their training and verify that their inspectors can properly identify defects?  
• Can the national chain document that the only people who inspect stools received the training?  It is not enough to have a manager, who was trained, sign off on inspections done by untrained people. 
• Can the restaurant chain produce records documenting when the inspections were done at each store?  Can they identify who did the inspections?  
• Can they identify the number and types of defects found at each inspection?  
• Can they document the disposition of the defective stools and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defective stools did not re-enter service until repaired and re-inspected?

It would be nice if this line of furniture was pulled before somebody gets hurt.

My guess is that some fat kid is going to topple over backwards out of one of these stools because the welds will break.  They will whack the back of their head against the tile floor and become a vegetable.  I also predict that a moderately competent lawyer will take the restaurant chain to court and procure a $6M settlement.

I also predict that the restaurant chain will assume it is a fluke and not pull the stools from service.  They will quickly find themselves fending off twenty or fifty similar suits in short order.  Stupid hurts.

If there are any lawyers or engineers out there in my readership I would love to have you comment.

New truck owners say the darnedest things

"Hey, Big-D, I think we can get this in one trip.  There is room here for another forty bags of see-ment, easy."

***

"Hey mom, I need money for gas.  I don't have enough gas to get home from school."

"No problem.  I will come and get you."

"You don't have to pick me up.  You can just get a gas card on the way to the high school."

Silence.

"I was picking you up to bring you home.  I have five dollars worth of chores that need doing.  That should be enough gas to get you home (four miles)."

"Wow! Look at that!  I turned the key and I have PLENTY of gas to get home."

When did resilience become synonymous with socialism?

I carry a link to "Resilience: Building a world of resilient communities" on my side-bar because they have an interesting article every once in a while.

They also are dyed-in-the-wool socialists who have little use for capitalism.

This post is a communication to them even though it is unlikely that anybody from the Resilience website will ever read it.

The Tragedy of the Commons
Garrett Hardin wrote an essay in 1968 and The Tragedy of the Commons was a small part of that essay.

Let me retell the story in just a few words.

A village has a common pasture available for the ten families of the village to graze.  The pasture produces enough grass to produce 200 pounds of milk per day.  Each family has one cow on the pasture and harvests 20 pounds of milk (200 pounds/day divided by 10 cows).

As rational economic actors each family realizes, independently, that adding a second cow will almost double the amount of milk they get each day.  (200 pounds/day divided by 11 cows times two cows = 36.4 pounds/day).

Each family increases the number of cows to two, or three or four.  The pasture is quickly grazed down to the roots.  With no blades of grass intercepting the sun there is nothing for the cows to eat.  The cows die and the topsoil washes away.

 The benefits are "privatized" while the costs are "socialized".  That is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

The allure of socialism
The writers who espouse socialism envision an economy run by a benevolent dictator with a deep, deep understanding of the environment.  As you read their articles you cannot help but think that the benevolent dictator they envision are exact clones of themselves.

Friedrich Hayek wrote that people are drawn to the new because mastery of the old is difficult.  The only requirement to be in the vanguard of the "new" is a poor memory.

The myth of the 'benevolent dictator'
The fatal flaw of the writer's assumptions involves the nature of dictators.  Dictators are rarely benevolent because the playing field selects for the ruthless, single-minded pursuit of power.  Consider Stalin, Mao, Pol-pot...even recent US politicians as we tip toward socialism.  Homework assignment:  Watch the movie Sophia's Choice.

The utopian community sketched out by the writers might as well require unicorns for leaders as unicorns are about as common as benevolent dictators.

At least with capitalism the owner wants to protect his blood, sweat, toil and tears.  The owner must live with the consequences of his actions.

But there are places where socialism DOES work
Places like the family.  Places like very small tribal units.  What is the difference?

The difference is that families are bound by customs and taboos that are incredibly strong.

Those are the same customs and taboos that most of the writer's peers are dedicated to destroying.  The irony is delicious.  The only examples that can serve as a template for the future envisioned by the "futurists" are being destroyed by those same "futurists".

It begs the question:  Which do they want more, the utopia they spin with their words or naked power?

The last rose of summer