Search Results for: the band the weight

March 1, 2018 10:06 pm Update

Parked my big jacked up truck on the grass at my apartment in preparation for heavy snow to make easier for landlord to plow.❄ I’ve parked there for 5 years now in severe winter weather.🅿

All the sudden as I started to park, I felt the ground collapsing. 😧😧😧I through the truck was starting to sink in the mud, so I threw it in drive, just in time. By the time I was parked on the black top a 3 feet round by 5 foot deep hole opened in the ground! If you fell in the you need a ladder to get out.

Landlord thinks long abandoned septic tank collapsed under the weight of the truck and the lack of frost in the ground. Doesn’t smell like sewage and is mostly a big empty hole as it’s been inactive for decades. 🚽He’s going to investigate in the morning and if it’s that after the snow storm backfill the hole.

America’s Television Graveyards

America’s Television Graveyards

"Years after most Americans switched to flat-screens, we're just now beginning to deal with the long-term ramifications of sustainably disposing of old cathode-ray televisions and computer monitors. This dangerous, labor-intensive, and costly undertaking will have to be done for each of the estimated 705 million CRT TVs sold in the United States since 1980. CRT processing, as it's called, happens at only a handful of the best e-waste recycling centers in the United States. In many cases, your old TV isn't recycled at all and is instead abandoned in a warehouse somewhere, left for society to deal with sometime in the future."

"At ECS, televisions affixed with Post-it Notes labeling each unit's weight have been arranged in a line, ready to be hammered, crowbarred, and sawed back into their component parts. There are old Sony Trinitrons, wood-paneled RCAs, and huge plastic Toshibas. Plastic TVs weigh up to 80 pounds, but larger, rear-projection CRTs can weigh as much as 500 pounds, and surely, in better days, had prominent spots in family rooms around the country."

"Demanufacturing the televisions is hard manual labor that works as a reverse assembly line, as the components from these old TVs are separated by hand and moved down a conveyor belt. First, they use a crowbar to remove the back case. They cut, strip, and sort the power cords. They remove internal screws with drills. What's left of the TV is then hammered, to separate the front screen from the cathode-ray vacuum tube. They strip the wires for copper. Wood will eventually be composted or turned into sawdust. Plastic is put through a shredder so that it can be melted. A handheld grinder spews sparks as it separates the screen from whatever is left of the tube. Then, more smashing—this time, the glass. "

December 28, 2016 8 AM Update

Snow flurries and 36 degrees this morning on the bus ride in. Most of the regulars are back on the bus this morning. Four degrees above normal. Going to be cloudy for most of the day with near constant temperatures, then some clearing for a while tonight, with a low of 26 degrees at 5am. Snow pushes in tomorrow, now they’re calling more for about four inches of snow locally. Maybe a quarter inch for the morning commute, with the worse roads around the evening commute. More of a nuisance then anything else.

Today we have the first 4:30 PM sunset in a while. Not that you will notice with the clouds making it look dark earlier.  Dusk tonight is around around 5:02 pm, which is 46 seconds later than yesterday. Today will have 9 hours and 5 minutes of daylight, an increase of 34 seconds over yesterday.

There are 9 weeks until March 1st when the sun will be setting at 5:46 pm with dusk at 6:14 pm. On that day in 2016, we had rain and temperatures between 38 and 21 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 39 degrees. We hit a record high of 61 back in 1991.

Last night I was watching the 1994 PBS special, Moon Shot about the Appollo missions, interviewing the original astronauts. It’s both amazing and sad that the United States went eight times to the moon between December 1968 and 1972 then abandoned it after four years. After 1972, man kind has never gone beyond low earth orbit 250 miles of the ground. The moon is around 250,000 miles away from the earth’s surface.

You can make the argument that the moon landing was fake, but it seems difficult to think that half a million Americans could be in on an conspiracy over flight to the moon. People like to talk and brag. The more likely explanation is that man kind got bored with going to the moon and with the inflationary times brought on by excessive government spending and the oil crisis it was no longer seen worth while. Each moon flight burned through half a million gallons of rocket fuel each launch. In a country that burns through 400 million gallons of oil a day  that isn’t much but it had to be seen as fuelish during the gas crisis. The moon is a boring wasteland of rock and human dumped space debris. 250 miles away from earth where the International Space Station is located gives man kind a much better view of the earth and its environment and gives man kind a chance to experience weightlessness and outer space like conditions.  So that’s what I’m thinking about this morning.