“is collapsing” is part of the title but not the link. Tucker is toxic Mr. Roberts.
Reverting to my old pessimistic self. From multiple reports this morning it looks like the Republicans are caving on the shutdown. Related is a column by VDH about how the Ds strategy of sowing chaos helps to point the blame always at the GOP.
The left never stops. Just as they look subdued, they come roaring back. Sigh….
Physicsguy: Interesting. I had not heard that. I heard that some Republican Senators and Democratic Senators were negotiating a stopgap measure that would be voted on later today and if it fails to pass, the Democrats will suffer the consequences.
My question is what are the Repubs giving to the Ds? I’m skeptical about the whole thing. Then couple that with VDH’s interesting column on the D’s tactics which certainly seemed to have some effect on the elections last week.:
Geez, if the GOP caves on the shutdown . . . that’s gonna leave a mark. A big mark.
Buck Throckmorton* at Ace’s place has a post up about Goodyear’s Chief Digital Office choosing to contract with a huge, IT firm in India.
I can attest, from first hand experience, that this is a BIG problem in the U.S. and has been for some time.
This, and H1B visa shenanigans has had and is having a huge impact on U.S. citizens trained in Engineering and IT to find work and earn appropriate wages.
And there is A LOT of corruption on the foreign, outsourcing side. U.S. company hires well qualified CIO/CTO who happens to be an Indian educated at an American University. The CIO/CTO uses his connections in India to outsource IT work to Indian consulting firms. Indian engineers are able to work at a lower wage than American engineers due to the immense cost of living disparity between the two countries. (And, the founder of the Indian consulting firm just happens to be the CIO/CTO’s brother, uncle, brother-in-law, friend… and money is deposited in the CIO/CTO’s overseas bank account in gratitude for the business.
If this was happening in the legal profession or the accounting profession in the U.S. Congress would have passed a litany of laws to stop it.
Buck:
So how did corporate America thank people like me for unburdening them from unions? They spit in our faces by proceeding to offshore every possible job they could. And for those jobs they couldn’t offshore, they aggressively imported a low-wage, H1B workforce that is effectively a form of chattel labor. Absolute betrayal.
*I, Rufus T. Firefly, personally disavow the words of anyone so disreputable that he publishes his thoughts on the Internet without using his real name.
RTF…a lot of lower-level accounting work *has* been offshored…as has a lot of the analysis of medical imagery.
There’s rightly been a lot of concern about the offshoring of manufacturing jobs–some have argued that it doesn’t matter because ‘services’ are our future…but a lot of services tasks are actually easier to outsource than manufacturing work, because transmitting information is now very cheap and the speed of light is much faster than even a jet freighter. See my post Telemigration:
The company I worked for had contracted with an Indian engineering company to do overflow work. The engineers couldn’t/wouldn’t find enough work for them, so we, in the Publications office were asked to send them work– mostly in illustrating parts manuals. I was getting ready to retire, and while others in our section felt they were training their replacements and resented sending them work. None of us were engineers and while many had graphics design training or technical writing skills, it was cheaper for the company to have Indian engineers do the work our office was doing.
I retired and within the next year, the Publications office was closed and all the parts manuals were done in India.
During my tenure, I had to work with engineers in China, Italy, India and South Carolina. The company finally gave up on my writing for the Chinese facility, and they had their own group. All the engineers in India spoke English, most of the engineers in Italy spoke English, and a few of the engineers in SC spoke English.
physicsguy: The ultimate chaos strategy was COVID, especially the lockdowns that took down the economy. In February 2020 the economy was strong, we had no significant foreign entanglements and the Dems were in disarray. Trump’s re-election prospects looked very good. Then, well, you know …
RE: The Challenger disaster
They say that you learn something new every day.
Well, here are the two key, unexpected things I learned today, according to the YouTube video linked below.
Number One—that, the night before the launch, “horrified” engineers from the Morton Thiokol company–which manufactured the giant rubber O rings, which separated the individual sections of the booster’s stacked, external, solid fuel tanks—had an emergency teleconference with NASA officials, warning these NASA officials that they shouldn’t launch, because their rubber O rings lost their absolutely essential flexibility–and would fail–at anything below a temperature of 53 degrees F.
Despite this warning, NASA officials (who, this YouTube video says, never told the Astronauts about this warning)–arguing that it was essential that the Shuttle program moved forward–went ahead and OK’d the launch, even though the temperature on the pad at the time of launch was 26 degrees F.
A few seconds after launch, a jet of fire shot out of the side of the rocket when an O ring failed (given the sensors available back then, did NASA officials even know that this had happened?) and a minute later–when things looked OK–NASA control ordered “full throttle,” and then, at 46,000 feet–at the moment of greatest dynamic pressure–the rocket blew up.
Number Two—NASA led the public to believe that, when the rocket exploded, it also instantaneously disintegrated the crew cabin, thus, the seven astronauts died instantly, and felt no pain.
However, NASA searched for, and 6 weeks later found the fairly intact remains of the crew cabin in the ocean at a depth of 100 feet–Astronauts all still buckled in their seats–and examined it.
What they found was that, after the booster rocket exploded, the extremely heavily built crew cabin survived, broke away from the disintegrating Orbiter, even kept moving upward, reaching 65,000 feet in altitude, then, it started to fall, taking two and three quarter minutes to fall those 65,000 feet, finally crashing into the ocean at an unsurvivable 200 mph.
Despite being initially subjected to G-forces which might have been as high as 20 Gs—during this long fall some, or perhaps even all of the crew were apparently alive/or perhaps conscious, or intermittently so, their commander even able to record the exclamation “Uh.Oh,” when the Orbiter—wings ripped off–started to break apart as the rocket blew up, and three Astronauts being conscious enough to reach behind their seats, and to manually flip a switch activating their individual Personal Egress Air Packs.*
P.S. I am aware that, at some point, some of these crewed rockets had a little tower like structure on their tops.
Rocket systems which were theoretically able to pull the crew cabin up and away during the first few seconds after a bad launch, and then to deploy parachutes?
But, the question is why didn’t the Challenger crew cabin have a system of parachutes that they could deploy, to give them some chance of survival?
Impractical, too costly or time consuming to develop, or their development perhaps seen as unacceptably holding up the main thrust of the program?
James D, Watson has died, aged 97. RIP, O seeker.
om on November 7, 2025 at 10:18 am
Thanks for the Don Surber link.
It may have been The Heritage Foundation’s hill after all :
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/after-40years-the-heritage-foundation
“is collapsing” is part of the title but not the link. Tucker is toxic Mr. Roberts.
Reverting to my old pessimistic self. From multiple reports this morning it looks like the Republicans are caving on the shutdown. Related is a column by VDH about how the Ds strategy of sowing chaos helps to point the blame always at the GOP.
The left never stops. Just as they look subdued, they come roaring back. Sigh….
Physicsguy: Interesting. I had not heard that. I heard that some Republican Senators and Democratic Senators were negotiating a stopgap measure that would be voted on later today and if it fails to pass, the Democrats will suffer the consequences.
I prefer my source to yours.
F,
Here’s the article from Fox on the situation:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lawmakers-budge-ushering-government-shutdowns-potential-end-beginning
My question is what are the Repubs giving to the Ds? I’m skeptical about the whole thing. Then couple that with VDH’s interesting column on the D’s tactics which certainly seemed to have some effect on the elections last week.:
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2025/11/06/does-the-democrats-chaos-strategy-work-n2666095
Geez, if the GOP caves on the shutdown . . . that’s gonna leave a mark. A big mark.
Buck Throckmorton* at Ace’s place has a post up about Goodyear’s Chief Digital Office choosing to contract with a huge, IT firm in India.
I can attest, from first hand experience, that this is a BIG problem in the U.S. and has been for some time.
This, and H1B visa shenanigans has had and is having a huge impact on U.S. citizens trained in Engineering and IT to find work and earn appropriate wages.
And there is A LOT of corruption on the foreign, outsourcing side. U.S. company hires well qualified CIO/CTO who happens to be an Indian educated at an American University. The CIO/CTO uses his connections in India to outsource IT work to Indian consulting firms. Indian engineers are able to work at a lower wage than American engineers due to the immense cost of living disparity between the two countries. (And, the founder of the Indian consulting firm just happens to be the CIO/CTO’s brother, uncle, brother-in-law, friend… and money is deposited in the CIO/CTO’s overseas bank account in gratitude for the business.
If this was happening in the legal profession or the accounting profession in the U.S. Congress would have passed a litany of laws to stop it.
Buck:
*I, Rufus T. Firefly, personally disavow the words of anyone so disreputable that he publishes his thoughts on the Internet without using his real name.
RTF…a lot of lower-level accounting work *has* been offshored…as has a lot of the analysis of medical imagery.
There’s rightly been a lot of concern about the offshoring of manufacturing jobs–some have argued that it doesn’t matter because ‘services’ are our future…but a lot of services tasks are actually easier to outsource than manufacturing work, because transmitting information is now very cheap and the speed of light is much faster than even a jet freighter. See my post Telemigration:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59860.html
The company I worked for had contracted with an Indian engineering company to do overflow work. The engineers couldn’t/wouldn’t find enough work for them, so we, in the Publications office were asked to send them work– mostly in illustrating parts manuals. I was getting ready to retire, and while others in our section felt they were training their replacements and resented sending them work. None of us were engineers and while many had graphics design training or technical writing skills, it was cheaper for the company to have Indian engineers do the work our office was doing.
I retired and within the next year, the Publications office was closed and all the parts manuals were done in India.
During my tenure, I had to work with engineers in China, Italy, India and South Carolina. The company finally gave up on my writing for the Chinese facility, and they had their own group. All the engineers in India spoke English, most of the engineers in Italy spoke English, and a few of the engineers in SC spoke English.
physicsguy: The ultimate chaos strategy was COVID, especially the lockdowns that took down the economy. In February 2020 the economy was strong, we had no significant foreign entanglements and the Dems were in disarray. Trump’s re-election prospects looked very good. Then, well, you know …
RE: The Challenger disaster
They say that you learn something new every day.
Well, here are the two key, unexpected things I learned today, according to the YouTube video linked below.
Number One—that, the night before the launch, “horrified” engineers from the Morton Thiokol company–which manufactured the giant rubber O rings, which separated the individual sections of the booster’s stacked, external, solid fuel tanks—had an emergency teleconference with NASA officials, warning these NASA officials that they shouldn’t launch, because their rubber O rings lost their absolutely essential flexibility–and would fail–at anything below a temperature of 53 degrees F.
Despite this warning, NASA officials (who, this YouTube video says, never told the Astronauts about this warning)–arguing that it was essential that the Shuttle program moved forward–went ahead and OK’d the launch, even though the temperature on the pad at the time of launch was 26 degrees F.
A few seconds after launch, a jet of fire shot out of the side of the rocket when an O ring failed (given the sensors available back then, did NASA officials even know that this had happened?) and a minute later–when things looked OK–NASA control ordered “full throttle,” and then, at 46,000 feet–at the moment of greatest dynamic pressure–the rocket blew up.
Number Two—NASA led the public to believe that, when the rocket exploded, it also instantaneously disintegrated the crew cabin, thus, the seven astronauts died instantly, and felt no pain.
However, NASA searched for, and 6 weeks later found the fairly intact remains of the crew cabin in the ocean at a depth of 100 feet–Astronauts all still buckled in their seats–and examined it.
What they found was that, after the booster rocket exploded, the extremely heavily built crew cabin survived, broke away from the disintegrating Orbiter, even kept moving upward, reaching 65,000 feet in altitude, then, it started to fall, taking two and three quarter minutes to fall those 65,000 feet, finally crashing into the ocean at an unsurvivable 200 mph.
Despite being initially subjected to G-forces which might have been as high as 20 Gs—during this long fall some, or perhaps even all of the crew were apparently alive/or perhaps conscious, or intermittently so, their commander even able to record the exclamation “Uh.Oh,” when the Orbiter—wings ripped off–started to break apart as the rocket blew up, and three Astronauts being conscious enough to reach behind their seats, and to manually flip a switch activating their individual Personal Egress Air Packs.*
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjwDA9euytQ&t=10s
P.S. I am aware that, at some point, some of these crewed rockets had a little tower like structure on their tops.
Rocket systems which were theoretically able to pull the crew cabin up and away during the first few seconds after a bad launch, and then to deploy parachutes?
But, the question is why didn’t the Challenger crew cabin have a system of parachutes that they could deploy, to give them some chance of survival?
Impractical, too costly or time consuming to develop, or their development perhaps seen as unacceptably holding up the main thrust of the program?
James D, Watson has died, aged 97. RIP, O seeker.
om on November 7, 2025 at 10:18 am
Thanks for the Don Surber link.
How should colleges use ai? Fundamentals, thinking without ai, and max ai use on projects. No mushy middle.
The barbell strategy.
https://inexactscience.substack.com/p/university-education-as-we-know-it
Students want minimal mental work.
Thinking is much harder than feeling.