Meaning That You Need To Parse Long Documents Before Spending Money
Especially anything to do with the Trump Crime Family. There's a lot of commentary flying around at present about the 'Trump Mobile Phone', which looks as gaudy and tasteless as you'd expect anything originating from Don Snoreleone. Art!
590,000 of the Maga cult faithful shelled out $100 to pre-order these and waited for delivery. And waited. And waited. Deadlines came and went for over a year, and outside observers pointed and laughed, because in the terms of the pre-order contract which these bafunes signed, they were told 'NO refunds'.
Oooops. As of Wednesday there is a claim on the official Twitter website that they are now being shipped, except Comments have been turned off, implying that the admins are worried about people asking for tracking and delivery data before shelling out the other $399.
Nor is that all. As you ought to know by now, Conrad detests the Devil's Digital Devices and has as little to do with them as possible, so I take this assertion as being gospel truth.
The phones appears to be a reskinned T-Mobile REVVL 7 Pro 5, an out-of-production 2024 model phone that retails on Amazon for $126.
It's also made in China, not South Canada. ALWAYS READ THE SMALL PRINT! Art?
The naked article bereft of tacky gold plate
We shall see if they ever turn up.
ANYWAY that part of the Intro was completely impromptu, as what I intended to begin with was another from 'Be Amazed's Youtube channel item 'Most Expensive Mistakes In All History'. This one was about the Mars Climate Orbiter, the NASA mission to send a satellite to - you may be ahead of me here - orbit Mars and send back telemetry about the climate, way back in 1999. Art!
MCO with puny humans for scale
The spacecraft cost $380 million to construct and launch, and took 10 months to reach Mars, where it promptly burned up in the atmosphere and fell apart.
Ooops. BE points out that the budget would, adjusted for 2026, come to $500 million.
What was the cause of this verrry expensive mistake? O I thought you'd never ask! Because the two design teams involved, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and Lockheed Martin, used different measurement systems. JPL were using metric Newton-second measurements, and LM were using PROUD IMPERIAL measurements of Pound-seconds. Neither one realised that they were using two different systems that required conversion. Art!
End result
One feels they must have felt Led Zeppelin'd, you know, communication breakdown.
Which brings us to another sorry tale of manglement and Malicious Compliance. Art!
Sorry to be technical. Here we have a multi-kilovolt phase-3 backup generator, a very, very expensive piece of kit. Stick a pin in this and we'll come back to it.
The tale begins when a new management company took over the running of an industry associated with defence in South Canada, where the workforce remained. They were mostly old-timers who were very experienced yet were thought of more as a workfarce by the new manglement, who were determined to Do Things Right. Art!
Ignore the writing! Ignore the writing!
First, the Standard Operating Procedures were going to be re-written in order to comply with the business's model. Thus I shall dub them Stupid Obtuse Plonkers. The narrator of this tale I shall dub Grizzled Experienced Monkeywencher, hereafter GEM.
SOP brought in technical writers to re-do the manuals concerning running the plant, but they had no experience of the plant and - defence contractor, remember? - they had no security clearance to visit it, as it would take at least nine months to get certification.
Then came proving the pudding. A test simulating a power outage and the critical back-up generator response was going to be run in one part of the plant operating with toxic, corrosive and flammable chemicals. GEM and compatriots were brought in to follow the new SOP SOP. Art!
I exaggerate but slightly. GEM and his fellow building engineers, with over 100 years of experience behind them, warned that the SOP SOP was missing inform-
'SOP'S SOPS ARE FINE! RUN THE TEST!' was the intemperate response.
The back-up generators made loud, expensive noises, there were electrical arcs that fortunately fried nobody, and Hay Pesto! two giant lumps of inert scrap metal that cost $1 million to replace.
Ooops.
SOP believed that, somehow, by telekinesis or black magic, GEM and compatriots had sabotaged the generators, so for the next test each building engineer had a manager looking over their shoulder to see they were following the SOP SOP to the letter.
They did, to exactly the same result: $1 million dollars-worth of scrap metal.
Manglement then swallowed their pride and asked/begged/pleaded tearfully <delete where applicable> what went wrong?
A vital step had been missed in the SOP, a paragraph detailing that both generators had to be In Phase before going online. GEM and compatriots had tried to warn about this and been silenced. Art!
The SOP was re-written and the third test went swimmingly. I bet a few manglement heads went rolling after unnecessarily costing the business $2 million of entirely avoidable expense. The devil is indeed in the details, especially when they're missing.
The Secret's Of Donold's Hair Helmet Revealed
Here's an hideously unflattering photo of DJ Tango outside in a stiff breeze, which I harvested from Twitter this morning. Art!
Clearly, the wind speed has exceeded the shear strength of his hairspray, and now you can see how bald he really is (sorry for the ghastly turkey neck wattles). Doubtless he will call the person who took this photo a traitor, as well as the Tweeter who posted it, and especially Conrad for promoting it.
He seems to be having trouble opening his eyes, which is odd, as the shadows indicate he had his back to the sun. Tired, perhaps? Posting 155 Truths until 5 a.m. will do that.
I Could Have Told You That
Your Humble Scribe was intrigued by a Youtube thumbnail from 'Johnny Johnson', who covers all sorts of military kit. Art!
This is the Dodge WC Weapons Carrier, which is a little confusing as 'WC' was Dodge production code for a truck produced in 1941, although it did indeed become a weapons carrier, also nicknamed the 'Beep' as a portmanteau of 'Big Jeep' since it massed 3/4 of a ton. What you're looking at here is the artwork depicting one of them in action. Art!
JJ narrates that they were used in all theatres South Canada fought in, just in limited numbers as they weren't very effective. The gun was only 37 mm, meaning it was obsolete as soon as it came into service, and could only fire through 180º, nor was the truck armoured in any way. These faults mirror those of the British 'Portée' vehicles in North Africa, which were also unarmoured, could only fire through a limited arc and were a large, vulnerable target. Art!
Nobody consulted me about the WC WC.
Here's One From 10 Months Ago
Ol' Vatnik Soup was playing a clip of Ruffian milblogger Maxim Kalashnikov, who was stating that the Ruffian summer offensive of 2025 would be it's last before economic collapse. Well, the orcs spring offensive was a total failure with them losing more ground than they gained, and with losses averaging over 1,000 per day. Overall the front lines have hardly moved and, of late the Kozaky medium-range drones are now actively hunting Ruffian vehicles - 200 kilometres behind the front lines. The orcs cannot manage to accumulate troops for any kind of local attack, let alone an offensive, as any mass of soldiery is immediately spotted and FPV'd.
Of course - obviously! - Conrad had to get his Comments in. Art!
Roll on July. I bet DA has blocked me by then.
Finally -
I may have to venture to Sainsbo's on Saturday, supplies of Darjeeling Loose Leaf are getting dangerously low.
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