Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

Hoo, boy. What a season-ender! And what a controversy! I suspect your position on that one is likely tilted toward whomever you wanted to win the championship. There's certainly no limit to the opinions on the matter. During that whole last lap my loudest thought was, “Well, Netflix is certainly happy.” I'll give you this: both drivers drove championship races. Both teams masterfully played the hands that were given to them. Your feelings - and they are feelings - on how the regs were managed throughout that race are very likely biased - colored - by your champion preference. We can reasonably debate the decisions made at the last F1 race. But we have the luxury of hindsight, and most importantly a lot of time - nearly forever time - to think about options and their potential outcomes. The Race Director did not have that luxury. Therefore, any criticisms should be done in context. I, as a some-time steward and driver advisor, have my opinions on how well or not the regs were ap

You remember 2020. World shuts down in March, and a very large chunk of society goes into hidey holes. I'm an office worker (and all that that implies) in Info Tech. Once my company told us to stay home and start working remote, it was an easy transition for me. Couple screens, some cables, a laptop, done. But boooooring. Wake up, grab coffee, sit in front of a screen all day. Pretty much same as before but no commute and no interruptions about "last night's game" (I actually kinda miss those now, even though I didn't watch last night's game). My buddy Ed is a hands-on guy. Blue collar, hard worker, madz fabrication skillz. So even though he was still working at the shop, they pretty much kept to themselves. Both of us (as well as most of the world) were getting cabin fever come the summer of 2020. Sure, we ventured out on occasion for take-out -- gotta keep those fav restauarants and breweries in biz! -- but we all just wanted a reason to GTF out of the house

Inflation, supply chain issues, bare shelves...who coulda predicted this? Well, just about any rational informed person, actually... I don't consider myself prescient just pragmatic, realistic. Cynical, even. In April 2020, when all this was spooling up, I noted on social media that, paraphrased, "We better be real careful how we shut down this economic engine, because none of us has the starter battery and know-how to do it." Sadly, I was right. It's not that we are not smart; in aggregate, as a whole economy, we're remarkably intelligent. The things we're able to do as a collective macro-economy is incredibly immense : how is it that, prior to March 2020, anything that we could ever want was available to us on the grocery store shelf or even available as soon as same-day or (at worst) two-day delivery? How was that possible? Who designed that? "Who designed that?"  Well, no one. An economy is not a "who" but a "what".  And

Spoiler: The "Family Tower" in Louisiana has partially collapsed. Below are links to some 2018 UAV videos when it was still standing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejGSR2GLaks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8jbxfcGEDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdZl453YveQ 2023 UAV video of the remnants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ir_nqAUtCE The Story Post-COVID 2020 Christmas week, we hitched up the "Cajun Edition" RV to head to Louisiana to visit family. We arrived at mom's house after dark, parked the RV, and mom invited us in, handed me a beer (love that woman). She sat down with me with a serious face, and said "honey, I've got some news". OK, I'm thinking...did someone die? "The tower fell down." I'm shocked. " What?? " I stepped outside to see for myself...of course, it's pitch-dark in her area at night and with no moon I couldn't see a damned thing. And it probably wasn't a good idea to be wandering aro