cleetussnow

JHC I just was waiting on a train platform up here and sweat beads were instant. 10 min train delay metro north.  At least the trains work.  I picked the wrong day to host a dinner in the city.  Damn. 

1 hour ago, FPizz said:

Wow, nyc has trees around its station, never heard this mentioned before. 

Yep. Those trees block the snow too.  So they say.

51 minutes ago, Lava Rock said:

lol, me too. Wife still too scared to try it. I keep telling her you'll never use TP again other than for the quick 'dab' at the end.

Yep. TP is disgusting.  I hate hotel travel because most don’t have bidets.  So I got an RV. I literally drag my toilet behind me.  

20 minutes ago, Lava Rock said:

I'm sure kevin could provide some TP for you

Bidet.  Always.  I've even got one in my RV.  

6 hours ago, klw said:

Stowe this morning:

So bucolic I could just shit.

7 hours ago, Snowedin said:

I pulled a small tic off my ankle earlier and man those little ones cling to ya like super glue! It must’ve latched on when I was strolling through a muddy trail yesterday. Wish I took a shot of the sunset earlier too..that damn smoke was thick today. I hope we can clear this crap out for the midweek.

I got bit this weekend by a small one.  I'm going on Doxy today and getting a collar for the dog.  He had one seizure last year while one bravecto, collar, and permethrin in the lawn.  We are cutting bravecto and the permethrin and hoping the collar on its own doesn't cause seizures.  

I got with a deer tick yesterday.  Going on Doxy today.  Damn.

16 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

omg, how do you and your poor dog deal with it?

this seems to be a really bad season for ticks.

I wonder if it's because of all the rain followed by very warm weather?

 

Ticks are insane. The small ones esp.  Up until this year it was not a problem for the dog because he used to be able to have a collar or take meds.  Never had seizures before then BOOM he had one.  Vet says no more tick meds or collars.  Leash walks now only in the neighborhood.  We may try another tick topical product and see what happens.  

3 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

tick season is here we can't go to parks anymore they said a deer died at a park because over three dozen ticks attacked him and they even killed a mallard duck....

don't they have chemicals they can spray to kill all these ticks?

Two things I want exterminated from the planet are ticks and mosquitoes they serve no purpose in nature except to hurt everything else so let's make them go extinct.

 

Permethrin will kill them, and all the other bugs - including bees which we don’t want to do.  I’ve seen literally dead giraffes in Africa die from ticks so dead deer is no surprise.  Sad .  I pulled 14 of my dog after one woods walk.  No more of that.  He can’t use tick meds or collars because of seizures.  Can’t use bug spray either.  Sucks.

2 minutes ago, WestBabylonWeather said:

Once we have fully safe nuclear power plants with safeguards in place to prevent a meltdown even during a natural disasters will solve a lot of our problems. 

The new ones have failsafes that work no matter what the circumstances are. No human intervention needed.  Esp. The micro plants that Amazon and Google are using soon.  

1 minute ago, weatherpruf said:

nuclear reactors are catastrophically expensive, take 20 years to build, no one will insure them, and they are almost entirely dependent on government subsidies. and no one can solve the waste issue. and we are far behind on shutting down fossil fuels. does this site tend to attract the wingnuts, or what?

not in France.  Its the cheapest energy source in Europe by a wide margin.  The operation and cost of fuel per kilowatt hour is cheap even compared to many fossil fuels.  Its the regulation that is costly.  This is changing in many states however.  
 

As far as waste, France uses about 20% of its nuclear waste to produce more electricity!  They lead the world and show us how it's done.  

1 minute ago, weatherpruf said:

 

yes, why can't we be like france...universal healthcare, paid family leave, paid childcare, free school lunches, free university, generous paid vacations, not one bankruptcy due to medical bills....sign me up. right now. oh, and better soccer, if that's your thing. did you ask about scientists coming here? is that a serious question? we are gutting science programs, because scientists discover and teach things some people don't like......we were on the cusp of an mrna vaccine for hiv, but it caused hives, a minor reaction that can probably be tweaked, and shows the vaccine was likely working. but it's been shut down. 

As an approved wingnut, don’t get me started. Lol. We gave up on science decades ago.  Technical schools have been disappearing since the 70s. College has become more about social status than anything.  Marketing and money.  Oberlin isn’t teaching anyone how to split the atom safely.  Sure is hard to get into though!  What does that 300k get you?  You can say you went to Oberlin!  And the rest of us get high electric bills.  Thanks Oberlin!  

3 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Food in France and Italy is much better but that's a different story, they don't use the crap artificial ingredients we use and are also healthier overall.

Preach on man.  Neither country is paradise of course but the food…amazing.  

1 minute ago, LibertyBell said:

and let's not dismiss the corruption of the aptly named *Con* Edison, these companies need to be closely regulated and monitored and prosecuted as soon as they go off the rails, as that company has done throughout its sordid history.

True facts!

1 hour ago, Dark Star said:

Another problem are homes becoming more efficient.  The power producing companies have to make a profit, so it doesn't how much you decrease your electrical efficiency, they still have to make the same amount of money...

Look at the bill.  2/3rds is not electricity cost.  At least.  They get their money or the lights go out.  

1 hour ago, Sundog said:

Electricity wasn't even that bad up until 2020. Then we decided that we need to get rid of nuclear, shut down fossil fuels too quickly, depend on slow to be built and expensive off shore wind farms, etc. 

What can go wrong!

NY isn’t off fossil fuels by any means, we just buy it from elsewhere.  We produce clean energy - but thats not what we use by and large.  NY has utterly lost control of energy prices despite having one of the largest last untapped clean energy sources in the US.  The propaganda is if the smoke came out of a stack in another state, it didn’t happen.  We believe it nonetheless.  

France has 60+ reactors running, with over 70% of their electricity production.  Amazing. Why cant we be like France.  Nice food too.  They are also the closest country in the free world to a fusion reactor apparently.  Adding - they are also the leading exporter of energy in the world.  Guess who the biggest customer is?  Their neighbors (the always effervescent and affable Germans) who closed ALL of the their nuclear plants a few years ago.  Sound familiar?  Yes - they produce clean energy (shhh coal is not clean) but they use nuclear anyway.  If the reactors in France blow up, Germany will be fine!  Oh wait…no.  
 

I think nuclear return to the US though in a relatively short time in many states (never here). We just need to find scientists who will leave their countries and work here.  We don’t have strong nuclear programs in universities anymore.  (We do have strong gender studies programs though). The only nuclear engineers we have work in the Navy and they will be busy fighting China in a few years. 

1 hour ago, dendrite said:

Those Ditty parties are wild. Especially when he brings out the oak dongs. 

Same ones we've been getting shafted by these last few winters.  

On 5/20/2025 at 11:06 AM, cleetussnow said:

Djf

Lets go ahead and add May.

2 minutes ago, Sundog said:

That's news to me. March and April were above to well above normal. And so far so is May. 

Djf

43 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

you cold lovers have a long 4 months ahead of you

They had a good run so far this year.

14 hours ago, Sundog said:

Who cares about wind. 

NYC was getting 20% of its power from a clean source immune to global price shocks that provided baseload power 24/7. 

But no! We had to shut that down!

My bills are pushing DOUBLE what I paid 5 years ago. And I got much more efficient heat pumps installed mind you! 

Don't get me started. 

 

Started. The wind farm out in LI was contracted to charge 300% over spot energy rates…which are terrible to begin with.  Who's getting that money?  A foreign company thats who.  Who’s paying it for it?  Subsidized by NY and federal tax payers who don’t even use that power.  Its a disgusting deal. The other power source is in another country - Canada - who hate us - dumb dumb dumb.  So we have the second highest electricity rates in the US and there is no hope of that changing that unless we can fleece federal taxpayers into subsidies.  NO WAY will NY ever build more power plants. Impossible.  Except subsidized wind farms.  

4 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Btw ... we're entering the solar maximum.   for the next 92.change days we'll be doing caucasoid chromosomal damage controls ..

in other words sunscreen and installs

23 hours ago, Dark Star said:

There are, but you may not like how they are run...

Sweden tried socialism back in the last century.  They really had that utopian vision of paradise everyone dreams about.  Then, they (the people) realized how quickly they were going broke and how unsustainable it all was.  They were on the brink of collapse.  Luckily they were still a democracy and were able to turn away from the failed experiment and avoid the police state and gulags. Swedes don’t have the stomach for real socialism it turns out.  

We do have this new breed of socialist now…lightweight socialists.  They tend to like or even own vineyards and drink Prosecco.  They’ve never once set foot in a socialist country and have no clue what socialism looks like.  I am likely one of the very few people on this board who's been to any socialist states.  Multiple, pre wall socialist states.  The real thing. There was no Prosecco. 

5 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

The Soviet Union was horrible but they weren't even remotely close to socialism. China is also pretty bad but not anywhere close to the system I envision.

The Nordic nations are at the top of every benchmark, including life expectancy.  Those are the best, and they don't use corrupt crony capitalism like this cesspool of a nation does.  A mixed economy is the best system.

The US is very mediocre in every way.

If you’re not afraid of socialism, you can’t be afraid of anything.  Humans don’t do well under socialism. People have different desires, whims, goals, tastes, religions, etc. and socialism doesn’t allow for that, so you get concentration camps and gulags.  Like in China and North Korea.  Everyone is supposed to be equal (poor), or more equal (the communist party members).  
 

there is a lot of heavy industry up there in the nordics, and Norway is as much a petro state as any with few peers. The largest gas rigs on esrth are norwegian. Also, Sweden has the second highest per capita murder rate in Europe.  Behind Albania.  Paradise is elsewhere.

15 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

extreme capitalism becomes oligarchy (as we are seeing now).

every system becomes corrupt eventually and needs to be cleaned out and a reboot becomes necessary.

The main problem with a for profit system is it does not address the harms that corporations do to the environment or to society as a whole.  Benefit capitalism addresses that by making companies accountable not just to shareholders but to the environment and to society as a whole.  The Nordic nations do that well and have a longer life expectancy and far better health and environment because of it.

Uh...you should see what socialism does to the environment...Chernobyl anyone?  I'vealso seen eastern Europe prior to the wall coming down and - and China are not exactly Thunberg adherents.  The State comes before all else and no fs given about climate.  They are building coal plants still like no other place on earth!  its gross in China.  I've been there too.    

2 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

The problem goes back to the population of course.  We never should have let it hit 8 billion.

But on a side note, I've been reading up about more efficient ways to do farming to where we can feed more people without damaging the environment.  It would have to be a transition of course.

It involves no till farming and advanced nutrient retention methods that limit runoff.

A lot of 'industrial' farming has gone no till actually.