The Last Bass Outpost

My apologies; I've been a bit on edge about a lot of this stuff for a while now though I will never reach a level of keying a tesla or anything like that.

As for further military escalations, I don't have high hopes. Trump ran on not getting involved in any more and yet he's threatening military use to take over Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, and also take over the Panama Canal.

Quote from: 4stringer77 on March 31, 2025, 10:29:16 AMI don't know exactly how the administration is trying to suppress the rights of college kids. The party previously in power would not have lost so much in the last election if the country was satisfied with the way things were going. The pendulum swings and so it goes.

Look up the case of Rumeysa Ozturk who is a Turkish national legally here on a visa studying at Tufts university. Masked individuals ambushed her and took her away in an unmarked vehicle. Her crime: she co-wrote an op-ed criticizing her school's response to what was happening in Palestine which many view as a genocide. She was exerting her freedom of speech as a person legally here in the US and they kidnapped her. They also sent her to Louisiana against court orders.

Freedom of speech only matters to the right when it's on their side. Muskrat bought Twitter and said his goal was to restore the freedom of speech to the platform and yet that notion doesn't apply if you say something he doesn't like. Trump would constantly make threats and call for violence but his cult loses their head if anyone on the other side does anything marginally close to what he does.

Do not think that the election was a landslide and Democrats lost a huge footing because people were unhappy. Less than half of Americans voted for this and the difference in a red win versus a blue win is about 200k total votes across 3 swing states.

Oh, and if you care so much about wasted spending from a bloated government, how do you feel about the 20+ million that's already been spent on golf trips since January 20th?

Quote from: 4stringer77 on March 28, 2025, 10:03:27 AMPersonally, I'm happy to see DOGE trimming down the bloated bureaucracy.

There is no doubt a lot of bloat in government but DOGE is taking a sledgehammer to walls and asking afterwards if they were in fact load-bearing.

Multiple times now DOGE has gone in and fired someone crucial without realizing it leaving them scrambling to try to rehire them. They're basically using an AI to go through and flag things they don't like which has lead to situations like the removal of Jackie Robinson's military records and the Enola Gay from government websites. Musk himself is going into departments he has clear conflicts of interest with and screwing with them like going into the FAA, canceling a contract that they made with Verizon in 2023, and replacing it with a contract with his own company.

There is a way to audit departments and companies for excess. DOGE is not doing that.

Then there are the people he hired to work for DOGE. A guy who has been given direct access to sensitive personal information of Americans was literally fired from a previous job for leaking company information. These people are not vetted. They do not have security clearance. This is a clusterf***.

Quote from: uwe on March 13, 2025, 06:32:20 AMCorrection: Like a family business.

A family business in the mafia sense of things.

Pretty much everything that tangerine 47 does is based on ego, money/power, and pleasing his Russian handlers.

Definitely a fan of Canada right now.

Quote from: Pilgrim on January 17, 2025, 11:53:08 AMI'm seeing news stories - some of them from near me in Colorado, where they had a devastating wildfire last summer - showing houses being built with new venting systems which are good at keeping embers out of the home's interior, and using more fire resistant materials.  They noted that the construction required added about 7% to the cost of building a home, which means an additional $70,000 per million in cost. That's a lot of beer and pizza money, and it's a fair guess that most of the homes which are replaced  in LA will cost in that range.  I don't think Altadena is going to have a low to medium income homeowner component any longer.

That kind of venting system is exactly what saved the one house I saw.

It is really going to be interesting to see what happens with Altadena. I'm inclined to agree that it's not going to be fitting for the income bracket it was prior to these fires. Between time and money, I worry that a lot of the homeowners will give up their land and move on to other places allowing new developments to go in. Neighboring cities have long had the trend of little houses being turned into big multi-family homes and I can see them getting put in there as well. I hope I'm wrong but we're stuck waiting on time to show us what happens.

I would actually expect any new houses to take into account the fires now. Some of the few that remain standing were indeed ones that were built with concrete. In one case, there was a house in I think Altadena that utilized a newer style that saved it. Most of the homes here were built with vents going into the attics and with the fires, the embers would just go up those vents starting the fires up there. The newer style that saved the house utilized a single vent that led to a inlet system in which an ember wouldn't survive long enough to ignite anything.

Anyways, we'll see what happens with redevelopment. The state government is already trying to make some changes to ensure that houses can be rebuilt quicker than it normally takes to build a single family residence and stop big development companies from scooping up the land. I think the goal is to fast track direct rebuilds of houses as they were prior to the fires.

That's awesome that he was able to be so helpful during the fires.

It's been absolutely insane out here. I'm personally closer to the other Eaton fire we had that took out a huge chunk of Altadena/Pasadena and while I don't think I know someone that has been directly impacted, there are a lot of people who know at least one person who lost everything.

Nice to see this place back online. Been ages since I've been active but I'd still check in from time to time and got worried when I saw it go down in August and stay down.

Quote from: gearHed289 on July 08, 2024, 10:19:59 AM
I love this. We are living in a very scary time here in the US. I would assume other countries as well. I'm pretty sure the "put religion in government and schools" crowd is in the minority, but they're still making some headway thanks to some seriously sh*t-headed elected officials. End of rant.

Definitely a a scary time in the states. Saw this quote the other day on this subject:

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries,"

—James Madison in 1803.

Quote from: lowend1 on June 07, 2020, 07:36:17 AM
I think that we might see a resurgence with all the "social non-distancing" of late.

I'm expecting that fairly soon so my patterns of keeping distant from people and washing/sanitizing my hands so much they crack won't be changing. While I may be a healthy 31 y/o, my mom is right in the high risk area of 60+ in addition to breathing issues that already have her doctor suggesting she be on oxygen 24/7. She's lucky if her O2 levels reach 95% so yeah. She's been in lock down and I've become even more hyper aware of what I touch than before all this.

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The worst thing I deal with now is intermittent shortness of breath and random severe fatigue

That should get better with time. This is one of those virus' that can just shock the system in a way that slows recovery a lot.

I hope everyone here is keeping as well as one can these days!

Quote from: Dave W on April 03, 2018, 09:21:07 PM
Darrol! Where have you been?

I like that tune.

Hey Dave. I was wondering if my resurfacing would be noticed. I kind of just fell off the grid in terms of visiting here as I haven't played in years.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qM7iLbFXQF8

The doors were welded shut so the way in is through the sunroof. I think it could work if they cut the bottom off the doors and made them into either gull wing or lambo style doors.

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