From r/libertarian…
I live just outside DC, and have a lot of furloughed friends. But have any of you seen any negative signs of the shutdown?
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As someone following the space program, it’s pushing back the sign-offs needed for the first Commercial Crew test launch. But, from Canada, that’s about all I’ve seen so far.
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It’s always good to remember that birbs are dinosaurs!
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My sister and her husband are both furloughed but should get paid when it is resolved.
I know on one of the last shutdowns it really screwed up some projects she was on as she was supposed to fly out to the west coast and had to deal with all the last minute cancellations.
Last I knew they could weather no paychecks for a while. But if it goes on too long, my sister will retire while furloughed, so I’m sure that will be interesting paperwork.
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Yeah, the Feds don’t do anything. Let’s just shut it down completely. /s
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My interaction with the federal government is limited to me writing them quarterly checks, and them helping with my Obamacare premiums.
So far, nothing has changed for me. I assume they won’t have a problem cashing the check I send this month.
Except emotionally, I feel really bad for the low income folks on furlough. I’ve got a cushion these days, but I spent most of my adult life in really precarious financial situations, so I know from experience that the stress of this must be incredible. Beyond the logistics of income loss, the emotional stress of being a pawn for rich assholes (who give no fucks about your suffering) has got to be intense, and I don’t even know for sure how that feels.
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My wife uses a site called NextDoor … it’s a community bbs, basically. And there’s a woman nearby who is throwing a fit about a pothole on the GW Parkway (which is federal land). She’s hit it twice now. You’d think she’d remember not to hit it again, but our two congressmen have responded to her, and left messages for the appropriate people, but the pothole crew won’t be fixing it until the government reopens.
And I know that the US Park Service closed the entire length of the Blue Ridge Parkway in western Virginia … all 469 miles of it. It’s also parkland. Closed.
The last long shutdown closed the park where I run, but it’s open this time. None of the bathrooms in the park are open, and it looks like private individuals are keeping the trash cans empty and the trails free of debris. I cleared a fallen branch myself, but I would have done that anyway, government closure or not.
I talked to one guy I know who works for the USDA, and he’s coping with the shutdown better than he expected. He got paid just before the shutdown happened, but it looks like he’ll be dipping into savings to keep getting by the longer it goes on.
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Fucking libertarians. I’m not even in the US, but I know if the government stays shut down:
- the air traffic controllers are going to have to stop doing their jobs voluntarily and find other employment
- more parks will have to close
- any paperwork which is not 100% automated will start to mount up
- anyone with something halfway through a bureaucratic process will start to feel impacts
The reason why it’s been kind of quiet so far is it’s only 7 January. As everyone gets back into full gear for work, the issues will accumulate.
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r/MildlyInteresting that they used Bill Murray and Groundhog Day for the meme.
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Medical device manufacturers tend to get a little antsy when the FDA is closed down and reviews are put on hold. Things like that will build up, but its hard to say whether it will move any of the toxic orange mold in the White House to do anything.
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Scientists on fellowships aren’t getting paid. Graduate students with external committee members in the USDA, USGS can’t do their prelim exams (which means they can’t finish their MS). Several friends can’t publish research since they have collaborators who are federal scientists. A couple folks I know are “non-essential” at the CDC, and can’t ship out strains for research in industry and universities.
But hey, did anyone really need vaccines, medicine, and environment?
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This will include tax-time: even if the government is back open, the backlog will remain and people expecting refunds won’t get them any time soon.
If it drags on… Like you said, people will end up leaving to find other employment. Mortgages don’t accept promises. So, even when it opens up again, services won’t be there at the level they used to be.
People need to hammer on that point, too. Because most people will wonder why the government isn’t instantly fixing all their problems again, and assume government is incompetent.
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Not really an assumption anymore is it? Seems quite obvious that some of 'em are or we wouldn’t have this problem.
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Let me be clearer: I mean the civil service. Which does remarkably well considering that they have to deal with not getting paid, have to deal with hearing their own bosses constantly talk about how expensive they are and how they need to do the same level of work while jobs and budgets get cut. The ones who have to deal with the inane policies handed down by people who have never directly dealt with the public.
Would you show up to work if you weren’t being paid? Because government workers do. Essential services are still happening. If you’re American and you’re not seeing a noticeable effect, it’s quite possibly due to someone working without a paycheque to make that happen.
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This didn’t match my memory, so I looked a bit more into it. It seems maybe the prevailing wisdom was that chickens were the most numerous; I found an NYT article (yeah, I know) that quotes that, with an estimated 24 billion of them. But the deep ocean is big and surprisingly uniform and can do a lot better.
The most abundant fish are the bristlemouths hidden well below the surface. There’s a bit of cheating in the comparison, since there are 30 species of them and chickens are just Gallus gallus. But if there are indeed hundreds of trillions of them, as this and other sources estimate, at least one must win hands down.
It isn’t at all relevant to that topic, but this is the sort of thing I’m interested in, so thought it would be worth adding here. People breed and control most of the land animals, but we don’t quite own the whole world yet.
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I stand corrected.
But what do these fish taste like?
I bet they taste like chicken.
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That’s a lot of fish! Reminds me of Nematodes. Live everywhere from the mountain peaks to the ocean trenches and 12,000 ft deep in the bedrock; can survive unprotected atmospheric reentry from space.
In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings, there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.
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I’ve always wanted to go to this festival, but it has never worked with school breaks: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/01/photos-2019-harbin-ice-and-snow-festival/579607/
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That’s amazing! Built with very large blocks, as I’m sure the workers are aware. You could have convinced me those were translucent legos from the first picture.
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This is one of the more interesting flight videos for a certain kind of person, of which I’m one. It starts with behind-the-scenes looks at the flight operations center, crew briefing and aircraft walk-around for an A350. (Interesting because the other videos I’ve seen don’t usually show that much context.) They also give a glimpse of the crew rest areas, for the pilots at 35:00 and for the attendants around 51:00.
Apparently these aircraft come with several cameras on the outside. I was wondering if there was justification for the cost beyond promotional videos, but you can see they’re used in the cockpit, where warning bars are superimposed on the image to show if you’re about to hit something with the tires or sides of the fuselage. (Shown during taxi around 23:30.) The cameras also help the pilots see the movement of control surfaces during pre-flight checks or during flight I suppose.
The pilot gives his very candid views of what it’s like to fly this airplane starting at 1:14:48. It’s a little shocking after living in the blizzard of lies from our politicians to hear someone telling the unvarnished truth as they see it.
When I’m done being fascinated, I should remind myself that this is a top-10-percent high-carbon-emissions lifestyle on display. What’s not to like? Who doesn’t want to have a nice career and feel good and have access to the finer things? It’s wonderful, if you don’t think about the future.
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