A Tale of Two Packages
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only
But I digress.
Back to the main story, Dickens can wait. I ordered two items on the same day within minutes of each other, one was shipped from India, the other from England. The Indian package went DHL the other Royal Air Mail (USPS equivalent of Priority or FEDEX 2 day air). The Indian package shipped from Mumbai a day earlier and made it to the UK within 16 hours of the order. Both left London on the same day within an hour of each other. As Dickens would say, it was the spring of hope…to receive these packages within 72 hours of ordering and one from the other side of the planet no less!
The DHL package was delivered within 72 hours. Amazing. I had it in my hands on Thursday. And…well…the package being handled by USPS that left London and arrived in NYC within minutes fo the DHL package…well, it left La Guardia within an hour of the DHL package on Wednesday…yet now it sits in the main Post Office Distro Center 7 miles from here, it’s Sunday. It was in the hands of USPS Wednesday 530 miles from here. NYC to PGH is an overnight ground sort with a hub stop in the middle of PA, I know, I worked for UPS and FEDEX back in the day. It’s mindlessly easy.
So…private competitive industry gets a package here form the other side of he world in 72 hours for a nominal fee. For that same fee, the USPS (government) cant get a package 530 miles from one major urban center to another in 5 days…the winter of despair and incompetence…and some folks want the Government to run EVERYTHING.
Enjoy yinz’s Sunday, N’at!
Yeah, government postal services are the worst at times. Here in Canuckistan, letter carriers won’t deliver packages if they are feeling lazy. All they will do is drop off a card telling you where to pick it up because they “missed” you. Don’t know how many times that has happened to me while I have been sitting at home!
Good morning. This is a good read and a cautionary tale of government involvement.
It would be a tragic error to turn over health care to them.
It will involve long waits and fdiminished services.
Public unions will drive the system, minority set asides for professional care etc,
Don’t do it, re-elect Trump.
To be fair, I’ve had UPS just dump stuff on the front porch when I’m sitting in the living room. They might knock on the front door, but you sure as heck don’t sign for anything these days.
My favorite thing is when they leave it in front of the door. Then they ring the bell to let me know it’s there.
It’s a neat trick. Because altho I can see it, I can’t actually open the door to get it, because, you know, it’s IN FRONT OF THE DOOR.
I’ve figured out that they ring the bell just to get me to the door so that I’ll try to actually get the pkg. They’re watching me from the truck and I’m boredom relief. “Oh, look at the old broad trying to push the door open, ha ha ha. Oops, there goes the garage door up, better scoot!” as I exit thru the garage, to walk around the front yard to the front door and pick up the package.
I know this is the game because when it’s an envelope they never ring the bell, they just dump it on the front porch wily nily where not only does it not block anything, it’s laying flat so is invisible to the casual pass-by.
Yep, hate ’em all. Which reminds me. I ordered a new area rug. It was supposed to be here yesterday.
RIX wrote:
not to mention
The Permian Basin Is Now The World’s Top Oil Producer. The US government spent decades and a fortune trying to break our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and the private sector just up and did it
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/04/05/the-permian-basin-is-now-the-worlds-top-oil-producer/#399656533eff
And nobody needs me to point out that part of the gov’t’s effort to ‘break’ our dependence on M.E. oil involved taxing us to subsisdize b.s. renewables, screwing up our cars and our gasoline, and distorting the ag markets by growing food for fuel. Nope, nobody needs me to point that out. But I’ll do it anyway.
What the Grabberment does best, is to break things that aren’t broken. They do this out of necessity because… If their were not unbroken things that they can break and then tax the fuck out of everyone to pretend to fix all while breaking them even more, then nobody would ever agree to any tax increase that they tried to pass.
Congress would be forced to sit on their hands and pass laws like “National black and white spotted cat with one green eye and one blue eye Day”. No damned sociopath congress person is ever going to become a millionaire that way.
doriangrey wrote:
Hey, we don’t have a cat that looks like that. We’ve got a feral white cat with some black on him up at the new house, but I don’t think he has one Blueeye and one green eye.
How to survive driving your car off a cliff at 100 mph.
Hint: carbon fiber
this is seriously impressive
https://www.menshealth.com/technology-gear/a26990660/mclaren-supercar-crash-safety/
RIX wrote:
Another good illustration — the DMV. Go to the DMV for anything, driver’s license picture, license plates, transfer of title and you are going to be there at least two hours on a good day. We have a place called DMV Express, a private company that has been licensed by the state to do many of these same things. Walk into a DMV express, tell them what you need, and for a nominal fee above the state fees, you are out within 10 to 20 minutes.
Government run health care will be the DMV
BOOK ALERT!
Yinz know ‘Spengler’, right? David Goldman? He’s been writing about China for a long time but gets the feeling people aren’t really taking the threat seriously. So, he’s written a book. It’s fiction. Available on kindle now but he’ll be serializing it for free on PJ Media
The Quantum Supremacy
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-quantum-supremacy-a-novel/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q18S6MW/pjmedia-20
@ AZfederalist:
The gubmint can foul up. anything. If Fed Ex and UPS could deliver first class mail the post office would be a ghost town.
https://www.usatoday.com/videos/travel/2019/04/07/surfers-rescue-great-white-shark-south-africa/3394172002/
@ USA Today
Aaaaaand the Darwin Award goes to……….
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/04/08/amazon-is-on-a-digital-book-burning-spree/
Amazon is purging ‘right wing’ authors, saying it is under pressure from activists. Amazon IS the left wing activist. The ARE the pressure. Erase the past and shape and distort the present.
At least his divorce cost him a bazillion dollars.
yenta-fada wrote:
And the way it’s being done is typically left wing. Getting rid of things because they are “racist” while ignoring other things that are blatantly racist. Eliminating things because of pressure, while allowing pedophile books even though there is far more pressure to get rid of them. Typical leftwing scumbags.
https://saraacarter.com/nunes-global-leaks-and-conspiracy-8-criminal-referrals-ready/
Ready to start naming names. I believe him.
@ Deplorable Martian Overlord:
Well stated. Normalizing perversion while censoring healthy individual and group behavior.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/51532599bb927e2c8b208f928d083ccc9e6ecf3d02f1f3daf9847a8f23e2bdbb.jpg
DIVERSITY! The twilight in England’s caliphate.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6897169/Teacher-London-secondary-school-read-write.html
@ yenta-fada:
Amazon is definitely the 600 lb gorilla in book markets currently. This is one reason why I DIDN’T go exclusively with them for publishing.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6900151/Trump-fires-Secret-Service-director-amid-Homeland-Security-bloodbath-ousted-Nielsen.html
Maybe some of yinz who use twitter would tweet Dan Bongino and ask him to offer consulting time to President Trump? Bongino may actually know suitable patriots for the job!
The head of the Secret Service was just canned. Think it might have something to do with the Mar-a-lago breach? Just a guess, I have no idea. Dan Bongino will probably have some thoughts.
@ yenta-fada:
After the Chinese lady incident at Trump’s Florida estate, Bongino made the role of a secret service agent very clear. They do not vet an invitee in any way. Their job for checking people who are admitted is to inspect them for weapons and check ID. Someone carrying a thumb drive with malware would not be discovered.
eaglesoars wrote:
Replied in advance! 🙂
How’s Mia doing?
PaladinPhil wrote:
The death of bricks and mortar book stores is a very sad thing. Bookstore owners were generally performing a labor of love. Hubby’s family always does Christmas gifts with Indigo/Chapters gift cards. Our closest store shut down. Even though the selection is far greater online, losing bookstores is a cultural decay imo. Amazon seems to have cut down its connection with independent home book sellers.
yenta-fada wrote:
oh hai! checketh yer mail. I’m drugged. vicodin is very nice. mia has been diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. more later as coherence isn’t available to me right now.
The populist ‘yellow vest’ movement is too scary and hate groupy for Facesnook.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network called the targets of today’s bans the “tip of the iceberg.” It said that groups which have made even worse comments remain on Facebook.
“Next we are calling on Facebook to remove the Yellow Vests Canada page, which shares hundreds of examples of overt racism, death threats and white nationalist sentiment,” reads a statement from executive director Evan Balgord. “We are still calling on government to enforce the Canadian Human Rights Act against social media companies, which are providing their services in a discriminatory manner.”
Asked whether it would be looking at banning other groups, such as Yellow Vests Canada, Facebook told CBC the work of determining whether posted content violates the platform’s policy on extremism is “ongoing.”
Funds for alt-right research
Last month, the Liberal government announced a special fund for research into right-wing extremism. Through it, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology got a three-year grant of $366,985 to conduct interviews with law enforcement, community anti-hate activists and former and current extremists to gain a better understanding of the beliefs, motivations and activities of extremists.
ok, here’s something. Did you know Nelson was a protege of Gen Kelly’s? She was HIS CoS before he went to the WH. And the Daily Mail is reporting that the head of the Secret Service that just got fired, Alles, was appointed to the position at the insistence of Kelly.
Also, Alles will not be missed. Everyone thinks he’s an asshole. His idea for saving money was to withdraw protection from the Trump family.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6900449/Secret-Service-agents-say-good-riddance-director-proposed-no-protection-Trump-family.html
Pope Francis weighs in on the eeeevil white people for killing children. All due respect to Catholics, you have a New World Order totalitarian Pope.
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2019/04/08/pope-francis-blames-europe-u-s-a-for-death-of-children-in-yemen-and-syria/
@ yenta-fada:
Brick and mortar book stores is something else entirely. Saw somewhere a few weeks ago what the profit margin was for most book stores (independent and used mostly). I think it was something like 10% profit margin a year? Definitely not enough to survive on unless you had massive sales and most small book stores don’t have that kind of sales to say it’s a good margin.
@ PaladinPhil:
Ah, my mistake it wasn’t 10% it was 2-2.5% Big difference.
Found the blog post btw.
https://www.thepassivevoice.com/why-are-new-yorks-bookstores-disappearing/
@ eaglesoars:
I bet Michelle, Obama, Clinton, and Bush get more than their fair share of protection. Trump is not only the sitting President, people are being encouraged to hate him all over the world. You need protection for wearing a MAGA hat or t-shirt for crissakes.
Divide and conquer still working, and we KNOW the left is far more violent than the right. Progressive is no longer the opposite of Conservative. Conservatives are all extreme right wing white supremacists.///
Control the language, control the masses.
PaladinPhil wrote:
Barnes and Noble is still going but barely. What killed Borders and will probably kill B&N is their leasing arrangements for the space. Borders had TEN YEAR leases and couldn’t renegotiate. So when Amazon came along, they had zero flexibility
@ yenta-fada:
The whole thing makes me re-evaluate Kelly. I used to like him.
Steven Miller is being cited as a big influence in the WH staff shake ups. So, the brilliant Ilhan Omar tweets
Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. The fact that he still has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage.
https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1115352166179508224
who wants to tell her he’s Jewish?
eaglesoars wrote:
Because he’s Jewish is why this Sharia twit hates him.
yenta-fada wrote:
This Pope is a disgrace. Do your job and keep the priests away from the alter boys. And I am Catholic.
eaglesoars wrote:
Why does nobody call that Omar witch a muslim supremacist? Because that is EXACTLY what she is. (ooo that would be hate speech) The only haters are white. Except for muzz and Hispanics who are light skinned and look white. Freaks are the new normal.
Quebec wants to ban the wearing of religious symbols at place of employment. Cue muzz protesting and declaring harmony between all faiths. *horse pucky* taqqiya bs
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/protest-in-downtown-montreal-denouncing-bill-21/vi-BBVI48w?ocid=ientp
eaglesoars wrote:
She’s Muslim and to the Muslim eye all of those ‘white nationalists’ look the same!
🙂
RIX wrote:
Never fear.
There is a MASSIVE push back coming fast.
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/steve-bannon-funded-think-tank-takes-on-massive-project
Smart, financially sound and conservative and traditional and it’s like the retribution Express roaring down the line to a station near you.
🙂
yenta-fada wrote:
Does wearing my brown scapular under my shirt count?
🙂
HEH!
@ Aussie Infidel:
Sneaky but unbowed. 🙂
https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/with-corn-farms-still-flooded-more-coming-what-now
This terrible flooding throughout the Midwest continues. The msm avoids this topic like the old Pravda. The old Soviet Union renews like a zombie.
This new body of evidence favoring the faithful may not be enough to convince hardened cynics, which underscores the old adage that for those who believe, no explanation is necessary, and for those who don’t believe no explanation is possible.
https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4421-latest-on-shroud-of-turin-science-finally-catches-up-with-faith
Whatever works for you mate!
🙂
@ yenta-fada:
@ RIX:
He’s a pinko commie POS, a hand picked infiltrator to destroy the Church…. I have/had 5 aunts and an uncle that were Dominican nuns/priest on my dad’s side… My mom also has a couple of cousins that were nuns….. The pedo-priest scandal broke in the little town my mom grew up in and the church her family attended in Henry Louisiana…. I’m kinda surprised the ‘priest’ didn’t just disappear in the swamp….
Aussie Infidel wrote:
No one has come up with a way that thing could have been faked given the technology at the time. I don’t need it to be proved ‘true’, the fact is no one can explain how it could possibly have been falsified.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a person of faith or not, facts matter, and they don’t have any.
@ Aussie Infidel:
oh, Aussie, before I forget, you probably didn’t see it. There’s a new book out you might like, an espionage thriller called Quantum Supremacy by Spengler, aka, David Goldman. He’ll be serializing it for free on pjmedia but it’s on kindle now for $6. I started it (along with Paladin Phil’s book A fall of Dust, which I also recommend) and it is very very good.
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-quantum-supremacy-a-novel/
I’m still woozy, time to go to bed, nite.
Thanks Eagles.
I’ll go research it.
This should make you feel better.
Fingerprints all over the Benedict XVI resignation… and they are NOT pretty.
Seems Frank is an AntiPope after all
🙂
https://fromrome.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/the-vatican-has-known-all-along-that-benedicts-renunciation-was-invalid-as-written-and-heres-the-proof/
@ Aussie Infidel:
Thanks, bookmarked for when my reading comprehension returns. I left out a word regarding the book I recommended, Quantum Supremacy. CHINA. It’s about China. Goldman wrote it because altho he’s been writing about the danger China poses to the west since forever, he doesn’t feel people are getting the message. So he fictionalized it to draw in more readers.
I stopped by to post this:
Exxon Plans for $15 per Barrel Permian Costs
Exxon plans to deploy 55 rigs in the Permian this year, by far the most of any driller, as it aims to increase output in the region fivefold to about 1 million barrels a day by 2024. Its strategy also includes building its own takeaway infrastructure from separation tanks to pipelines, and it’s even joining a giant conduit project to make sure its oil doesn’t get stuck in bottlenecks that have depressed prices in West Texas.
https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/exxon_plans_for_15_per_barrel_permian_costs-14-mar-2019-158380-article/
@ eaglesoars:
That’s going to make the frackers cry as they need about $35-40 bbl to make a buck.
🙂
https://lp.hillsdale.edu/constitution-101-enroll/?utm_content=ID5657956&utm_campaign=con101&utm_source=share_campaign&utm_medium=referral
A chance to take a class through Hillsdale.
@ right_wing2:
Should be mandatory for all newly-elected members of Congress
@ Aussie Infidel:
no, no, that’s $15 bbl COST to the extractor, not the bbl PRICE. The lower the cost, the greater the profit. They’re going after economies-of-scale.
eaglesoars wrote:
Yup, I know that. What I’m working about is fixing the Permiam retail price lower than the mean fracking price forcing the frackers out of business. Surely the US suppliers should agree on a reasonable price that keeps the vast majority of US fracking producers in the marketplace. The spin-off is a large collateral gas production that doesn’t directly compete with the liquid fuel marketplace.
If the Permian producers add some more profit to their bottom line that allows the frackers a position in the energy marketplace surely that is a win-win.
🙂
Aussie Infidel wrote:
I don’t think that’s how it works. Oil is a commodity priced by the market. If the market finds lower production prices, it will price the offering for crude to match that supply price with a bit of margin for that producer until there is not enough of that supply, then will price for the next lowest production price.
Maybe I should replace my scope with this one:
Life is strange, even stranger when you look back on your life.
Trying to put together my resume and having to think about the past.
Around June/July 1981 I had the chance to go and work in South Africa to train local technicians to repair computers. The big ones, not silly little desktop things but real ones.
Went there with my girlfriend. We had been together about four years.
It was a six month contract, paid enough she did not have to work and she spent most of her time while I was at work at the library or rehearsing with her “musical” friends. She played the clarinet.
Well, I was really fooled by the fact she was practicing with her “music” friends!
One day she told me she would be gone for a couple of weeks. I said “where are you going? ”
She replied, “on tour, I am the lead clarinet for the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra”
Those were happy days……
Possum wrote:
nice.