Open Bar: Fake News, Fake Bar

[Trivial]

I have discovered a fun new thing, inspired by Titus on Kimmy Schmidt.

1. Find a group full of young sprightly neckbeards
2. Wait for a thread in which someone mentions IQ
3. Talk about having a very high IQ
4. Argue that the IQ scale only goes to 100 and everyone who says they have an IQ over 100 is either lying or too dumb to understand how it works
5. Enjoy

[00.dusk]

First incidence of shitpocalypse in the wild *may* have just happened in the Ukraine.

That's /impressive/ to look at. The street just... disintegrates.

I want to know more about this now.

Do you really?  Will your life be better or worse for knowing how your toilet will one day kill you?

Anyway, this was the "not enough water" version, not the "too much ammonia" version.  You can tell because everyone didn't suddenly puke up their lungs and die.

ETA:  This shouldn't really have happened for another 5 years or so, but Dave and I should get another bonus anyway.

Oh, I'm not connected to a water treatment facility. I live in humble Central Florida, where we put our poo in the ground and pull our water out of it.

Incidentally, I drink only bottled water for that reason. You can smell the micro-organisms when you turn on the tap.

"Not enough water" causing such a spectacular explosion is incredible. I'm not sure how much detail you can go into, but I really, truly am in fact curious. The shitpocalypse is nigh and I simply must understand its terrible secrets.

It's been known for decades - since the advent of factory farming - that shit that doesn't move starts to exotherm (google "pig farms horrible bubble shotgun" for laughs).  In pipes, there are two things to keep in mind: If water is pushing shit faster than the speed that the exothermic reaction occurs, then all is well with the world.  If there is enough water to soak up the heat, also good.

If the shit is moving too slowly and there is not enough water to absorb the heat, then the heat climbs in a curve that looks like an inverted logarithm...ie, loads of heat really fast, then a very slow continual increase.  The point where the reaction begins reaches the boiling point of water, and then more or less flashes into steam.  This spreads both directions in the pipe, with the pressure growing as the cube of the volume, with all the heated shit expanding as well, until either it reaches a release point (ie, your toilet), or the pipe explodes.

It's worth noting that the shit in the center of the explosion would be intensely hot, but most of the moving mass would be less than 40C.

I've spent a couple days thinking on this. All I can think of is that I /wish/ I had your job.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

First incidence of shitpocalypse in the wild *may* have just happened in the Ukraine.

That's /impressive/ to look at. The street just... disintegrates.

I want to know more about this now.

Do you really?  Will your life be better or worse for knowing how your toilet will one day kill you?

Anyway, this was the "not enough water" version, not the "too much ammonia" version.  You can tell because everyone didn't suddenly puke up their lungs and die.

ETA:  This shouldn't really have happened for another 5 years or so, but Dave and I should get another bonus anyway.

Oh, I'm not connected to a water treatment facility. I live in humble Central Florida, where we put our poo in the ground and pull our water out of it.

Incidentally, I drink only bottled water for that reason. You can smell the micro-organisms when you turn on the tap.

"Not enough water" causing such a spectacular explosion is incredible. I'm not sure how much detail you can go into, but I really, truly am in fact curious. The shitpocalypse is nigh and I simply must understand its terrible secrets.

It's been known for decades - since the advent of factory farming - that shit that doesn't move starts to exotherm (google "pig farms horrible bubble shotgun" for laughs).  In pipes, there are two things to keep in mind: If water is pushing shit faster than the speed that the exothermic reaction occurs, then all is well with the world.  If there is enough water to soak up the heat, also good.

If the shit is moving too slowly and there is not enough water to absorb the heat, then the heat climbs in a curve that looks like an inverted logarithm...ie, loads of heat really fast, then a very slow continual increase.  The point where the reaction begins reaches the boiling point of water, and then more or less flashes into steam.  This spreads both directions in the pipe, with the pressure growing as the cube of the volume, with all the heated shit expanding as well, until either it reaches a release point (ie, your toilet), or the pipe explodes.

It's worth noting that the shit in the center of the explosion would be intensely hot, but most of the moving mass would be less than 40C.

I've spent a couple days thinking on this. All I can think of is that I /wish/ I had your job.

All Dave and I did was proof of concept.  Someone else gets to do the actual chemistry with regard to fixing the problem (seriously, who does that?)

What else I do:  Deal with operators who are all, in one way or another, freaks.  One is so butthurt that he didn't get my job when the last guy quit that he's decided that insubordination is the answer.  It isn't, of course.  Another one is a bona-fide genius who gets continually frustrated when he gets pulled off of one job and handed 3 more (welcome to infrastructure maintenance, big guy!), and of course the old time who has been there forever and knows the plant like the back of his hand but nobody has ever been arsed to ask him anything until now.  And my neckbeard keeps wanting to not document his time (he's hourly) because he's been yelled at for years for actually trying to collect overtime.  "Oh, I just fixed that on the weekend.  I didn't bother logging it because it was only 6 hours on Saturday night."

Other things:  Get given problems I know nothing about, and go hire people who do know.  Then keep everyone else from SGitR-ing on them while they figure out what I hired them to figure out.  I have recently adopted the strategy of hiring people on the other end of the country and then not giving their contact information to anyone other than the accountants.  Ever.  Nobody needs that shit, and nothing they or I can do will do anything other than fuck the experts up and get in the way of the answers. 

In many ways, it is the dream job.  Right now our cooling towers are stuffed full of legionella, and we can't kill it with chlorine because the mud in the bottom is too thick.  I can't have guys come in and muck them out, because legionella.  So now me and the guys have to figure out how to do one before the other, without disturbing the muck while the tower is in operation (or we'll have dead American Legionnaires stacked up to the main gate).  And we can't just shut them off because of heat making the shit wander around, too.

I love this shit.

[00.dusk]

They're going to /fix/ it? That's a waste of a perfectly good toxic filthsplosion.

It's a good thing I'm not in charge on second thought, because my solution to the legionella problem would be "Buy some disposable Racal suits with external air supply and set up a positive pressure entryway for the muckers." Bonus: you now have spare kit lying around if something nasty forms or you have a real horrible chemical start leaking.

But that sort of thing tends to make news crews terrify the locals with outright lies.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

They're going to /fix/ it? That's a waste of a perfectly good toxic filthsplosion.

It's a good thing I'm not in charge on second thought, because my solution to the legionella problem would be "Buy some disposable Racal suits with external air supply and set up a positive pressure entryway for the muckers." Bonus: you now have spare kit lying around if something nasty forms or you have a real horrible chemical start leaking.

But that sort of thing tends to make news crews terrify the locals with outright lies.

The thought had crossed our minds.  (Hell, OSHA only requires a dust mask, but this is a special case on account of neglect allowing the legionella to develop an advanced, space-faring culture.)

But it's 106F outside, and the guys in the suits would die of heat stroke long before the job was done.

So we're probably going to slam the towers with live steam one at a time and then test the muck, then clean them out, THEN drown everything in bleach.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Found this today.

It is absolutely guaranteed to burn down any facebook page you post it on.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gen-x-ruined-the-world-too

[Eater of Clowns]

Found this today.

It is absolutely guaranteed to burn down any facebook page you post it on.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gen-x-ruined-the-world-too

Shitting on Empire Records alone is enough to send probably half my friends sputtering.

[LMNO]

That was a wonderful read.

However, I do have a question:  Do African-Americans born around 1970 consider themselves "Generation X"? I'm not sure I've seen an essay or cultural artifact about GenX that isn't about privileged white people. 

I mean, I know that the so-called 'golden age' of hip hop* happened during the GenX heyday, which (as the article points out) also benefitted from the unusually good economy; but apart from ironic appropriation I'm not sure that 'typical' GenX culture and the black culture at that time ever really mixed.

Then again, seeing as how I'm a privileged white GenX-type person, there's a good possibility I'm simply blind to it.







*I consider pre-Biggie/Tupac/Puffy to be more of a "Golden Age", to be honest.  The explosion of the hip hop industry seemed to overshadow acts like Public Enemy, KRS-One, the Native Tongues collective, Ultramagnetic MCs, etc.  Then again, I was a punk boy, and never really liked grunge all that much so I'm guessing my hipster is showing.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have discovered a fun new thing, inspired by Titus on Kimmy Schmidt.

1. Find a group full of young sprightly neckbeards
2. Wait for a thread in which someone mentions IQ
3. Talk about having a very high IQ
4. Argue that the IQ scale only goes to 100 and everyone who says they have an IQ over 100 is either lying or too dumb to understand how it works
5. Enjoy

Oh.

Oh, this is brilliant.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That was a wonderful read.

However, I do have a question:  Do African-Americans born around 1970 consider themselves "Generation X"? I'm not sure I've seen an essay or cultural artifact about GenX that isn't about privileged white people. 

I mean, I know that the so-called 'golden age' of hip hop* happened during the GenX heyday, which (as the article points out) also benefitted from the unusually good economy; but apart from ironic appropriation I'm not sure that 'typical' GenX culture and the black culture at that time ever really mixed.

Then again, seeing as how I'm a privileged white GenX-type person, there's a good possibility I'm simply blind to it.







*I consider pre-Biggie/Tupac/Puffy to be more of a "Golden Age", to be honest.  The explosion of the hip hop industry seemed to overshadow acts like Public Enemy, KRS-One, the Native Tongues collective, Ultramagnetic MCs, etc.  Then again, I was a punk boy, and never really liked grunge all that much so I'm guessing my hipster is showing.

Yes, black people of the same age range do consider themselves Gen X, though of course their interactions with culture were very different especially given that era was the height of the War on Black People Drugs.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Unfortunately, while that article touches on some absolutely factual aspects of the experience of being the "forgotten generation", its critique, ironically, entirely revolves around the very upper-and-middle-class culture values of self-absorption that the poorer members of generation X felt so disillusioned by. If one pays attention, the cultural narrative of GenX is that it was the first generation that simply could not expect to do better, economically, than their parents, as well as, simultaneously, feeling voiceless in the wake of the much larger and more powerful Baby Boomer generation, leaving them directionless in the limbo of meh. It was a time during which it seemed that idealism was hopeless, that no one would ever listen and we couldn't change anything. I think it's the (fairly understandable) combination of hopelessness and powerlessness that is the defining characteristic of GenX, and it's that which meaningfully influenced the direction of Millennial culture. Millennials care, but instead of trying to change the world, they try to change a tiny sphere in which they live.

[LMNO]

Thanks for that analysis, Nigel.  I'm only now remembering that the book "Generation X" even contained something to that effect.

[Cain]

I do find it ironic that the complaint about millenials is being brand obsessed, when I can plug "millenials killed X" into Google and get back about a billion hot takes on industries millenials are willfuly and maliciously destroying by not buying things (definitely not because they don't have money). 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I do find it ironic that the complaint about millenials is being brand obsessed, when I can plug "millenials killed X" into Google and get back about a billion hot takes on industries millenials are willfuly and maliciously destroying by not buying things (definitely not because they don't have money).

Yeah, casting millennials as a brand-obsessed consumer culture seems a bit uhhhhhhhh projective.

[Cain]

Millenials killed soap, for fucks sake.