Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "Plainly Difficult" channel.

  1. It sounds like everyone was on autopilot in the whole place. They had a toy train that didn't really go anywhere and they were just collecting paychecks.
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  2. Clearly a man born to be in the Air Force.
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  3. Increase the scale of anything and then it's not so simple anymore.
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  4.  @paul6925  makes you think how bad things could be. We need to be thankful for what we have. I bet they're thankful if they find anything. Most people just don't quit.
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  5. If you've been to the state fair once it's enough. How many two headed cows do you really need to look at anyways?
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  6.  @SnakebitSTI  I don't think anyone trained those knuckleheads to space out. But in their defense the system they were operating in could have been better. Apparently everyone from the top down was doing the barest minimum to get by. Collectively it wasn't nearly enough either.
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  7. The fact that anyone thought unanchored K rails were in any way an adequate anchoring is shocking to me. Those things are regularly moved around. Maybe a huge pile of them might have worked? But just a couple here and there and run guy wires to them? Yeah I don't think so. That's called a looks good job. Looks good unless anything happens.
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  8. It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback.
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  9.  @davidconner-shover51  It was an amusement park ride without the amusement park. I don't think the track was anywhere near where anyone wanted to go.
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  10.  @mcarrowtime7095  that still doesn't mean the wood can't be put to better use than burning it for an exhibition. Just because they're offered for free does not mean they lack value.
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  11. I can remember riding into NYC on the train back in the 1980s and on a hot summer night there were these red glowing cracks in the ground we'd go by. Then one day we saw these guys in them bunny moon suits out there kicking at the dirt. We didn't know what was going on. But it sure looked like something was up to us. It might have been somewhere around 40.743889, -74.128358 ? If I had to guess today. We were on the Erie Lackawanna line. We could see it from there. It was creepy.
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  12. Beetles are bugs where I come from.
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  13.  @matsv201  I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
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  14.  @ProHobbyjogger  New York City had many music stores. It's New York City. I was at a flea market in New Jersey the weekend after the blackout and there were hundreds of vans there that day selling electronics. They all had New York plates too. It was a bit unusual. Englishtown flea market is a big flea market. Least it was back then.
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  15.  @Tatsh2DX  I saw it with my own two true blue eyes. Hundreds of van loads of hot electronics after the blackout. Row after row of them. They took it all to Jersey to sell. Because of course they did.
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  16.  @jasonleigh4938  it is a crowd of 70,000. But yeah as a woodworker seeing that much hardwood being burnt is hard. A lot of it does look knotty and twisted to me though. Still, it is a lot of wood. But I get why they do it. Bonfires are a tradition with football. Everything has to be bigger in Texas too. They're just jerks like that.
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  17. The phones worked because the phone company has their own electrical grid. When the power goes out they have backup generators that kick in. I used to live next door to a phone switching station and a few times they started up the generators they had on site.
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  18. Our state fair is in the middle of the summer. It seems like they pick the hottest week to have it on. The week of the state fair you just know it's going to be hot. Like no one in their right mind would be outside hot. Not if you didn't have to be and not for fun. Mad dogs and Englishman weather. But one year it wasn't too bad one day so I went. I never knew there were so many different kinds of cows. They packed a huge barn full of all kinds of different cows. No two were alike. The competitive horse riding was fun to watch too. There were some pretty phillies there. The horses weren't bad either.
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  19. I thought for sure they were going to scrap the whole stainless containment tank. But what they did was nearly as bad so not disappointed.
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  20.  @Dinnyeify  those are valuable materials indeed. But only if you know what you're dealing with.
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  21.  @dsan8742  things are tough all over. The Philippines has their challenges.
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  22. Joe Biden's America.
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  23.  @stanley3647  well, it's not like they choked the life out of them with their bare hands. It was just a simple mistake is all.
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  24. Adjusted for inflation it is $73,000
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  25. It wasn't the weather. That stage was built totally inadequately. They anchored it to movable concrete rails. It may have looked good from afar but it was far from good. The guy wires were basically lip service. Yeah, yeah we put them up. No, you didn't.
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  26.  @saintuk70  when everyone says the same thing just go with it.
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  27.  @jasonleigh4938  milled and dried wood is expensive. Trees, not so much. In fact a lot of sellers are pretty unhappy at what trees are fetching on the stump these days.
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  28.  @blxvkpxndx  the looting certainly happened and all of those goods definitely ended up somewhere. I saw mountains of it myself the weekend after the blackout at Englishtown flea market. It looked like just about all of it ended up there. Cash is untraceable after all.
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  29. Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
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  30. ​ @elilla331  I lived right next door to a big building full of switch racks. They had big windows and you could see right inside the place. During a blackout they'd fired up the generators they had in their basement too. I could hear them running. The phone company don't mess around. I wonder what's there now? Hmm according to Google maps it's still there as of Aug 2021.
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  31.  @elilla331  it was a very long time ago when I lived next door to that place. We didn't lose power often either. I only remember them having to run their generators once. But it may have been more than that? If it was I just don't remember it. But it was like living next door to a racing locomotive when they did fire those generators up. So it's good it didn't happen often.
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  32. They knew the storm was gonna hit, but they didn't know the structure was going to collapse. I'm sure up until it did collapse everyone thought it'd be just fine. They just turned out to be wrong. It does happen. Mistakes were certainly made. And I think chief among them as you point out was using movable concrete barriers as anchor points.
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  33. If you want to see flames look up Edison Natural Gas Explosion - Durham Woods, There's video of that here on this site. Now that's some flames. I was about 20 miles away when that happened and I could see it from where I was.
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  34. You can easily pause the video.
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  35. Indiana is in fly over country. It's one of those states in the midwest that no one can keep straight. But at least it's not one of the square states. I'm pretty sure Indiana is the state shaped kind of like a spear point? Or is that Illinois? I always get those two confused. Ah OK Indiana is next to the one shaped like a spear point. I was close.
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  36. Take that you commie tree!
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  37. I worked for Filthy Phil Berkowitz the 44 caliber electrician. No relation, I don't think? There was a bit of a family resemblance though. Around the beady eyes.
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  38.  @squidcaps4308  If you're setting K rails with a machine it's pretty obvious then that the things are mobile. You don't anchor anything to them but stray puppies. Certainly not 48 foot tall structures. Maybe one with 10 more on top of it for weight. But one here and there with guy wires going down to them? No.
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  39. I never heard of it. It looked like the building had plenty of steel reinforcing in it. I'm surprised the building looked so old considering it wasn't old.
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  40. If you think that's something check out the interstate transport line gas main explosion of 1994 in Edison New Jersey. That pipe was 36 inches in diameter. The flames shot a mile in the sky. I could see it from my house. I lived in a different county.
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  41.  @xenevlillil6392  the same human behavior still applies.
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  42.  @r0x0r-p4t  I've heard of weird stuff that goes on in China. Time is money in the racket. So everyone has an incentive to finish jobs quickly, unless it's time and materials. Then we take our time.
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  43.  @daleviker5884  ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
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  44. When your job is to pump gas you pump gas.
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  45. Space flight is inherently risky. It's just dangerous. That's not likely to change any time soon either. We just weren't born to go mach 21. That's the fact.
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  46. I don't think it is quite that hot there. In fact the hottest is is predicted to get is just half that hot.
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  47. It seems like a teachable moment to me.
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  48. I think you could have filled the whole bingo card up with this one. Including shift change. I'm not so sure about recently inspected though.
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  49. They were just in a critical phase of the mission with no latitude for changes. It was going to work or it wasn't. In their case it didn't.
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  50. Ramming speed!
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  51. Did the guy that dropped the socket get a medal too?
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  52. That's a matter of opinion. The CCP takes a different view of the matter.
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  53.  @seanhartnett79  everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
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  54.  @seanhartnett79  find someone that cares.
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  55. This is the first I'm hearing about this. I'm not saying it wasn't national news but just I didn't hear about it myself.
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  56. Red means race!
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  57. The reality is spaceflight is inherently difficult and dangerous. That's why not everyone does it. Even those most prepared sometimes can't quite make the grade.
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  58. It wasn't a software issue. It was many software issues.
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  59. They may have been singing about the 68 blackout.
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  60. I think it grounded space exploration in reality better. Everyone that climbs aboard one of those flying bombs is a lunatic hero. We should never lose sight of that fact either. People are too easily jaded.
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  61.  @Farm3rT  Tornadoes are notoriously unpredictable. They can follow a pattern but there's nothing insisting that they do. Which did cause one disaster once. When a tornado headed in the opposite to the usual direction. Everyone thought they knew and they turned out to be dead wrong. Tornadoes go wherever they please.
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  62.  @RT-qd8yl  there's reasons why most tornadoes do follow the north east track. But there can also exist circumstances when they don't. Weather is a complex system and we don't always completely understand it. When I left my other comment I think it was referring to the El Reno storm. It did double back.
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  63.  @Farm3rT  I've gone down the tornado video rabbit hole a few times. It's crazy stuff. Vehicles flying around. That's messed up. Some tornadoes can tear asphalt up off the ground. That's crazy. Basically air bulldozer. Coming through!
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  64. You obviously don’t know how YouTube works. But thanks for playing and have a nice day.
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  65. The 2003 blackout took out the whole northeastern grid. So like a quarter of the USA and part of Canada. Because both countries are on the same grid. Or they were at the time. There's maps online of the power grids in North America. I think this channel did a video about it?
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  66. Even moar salt.
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  67. Sue those buggers until they squeal.
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  68. We were just trying to toughen you kids up to reality.
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  69.  @Tatsh2DX  if you accept that then you also have to accept that all of that loot ended up somewhere. No one had a case of remorse and just threw it out. When I saw it if I had some cash and interest I'd have probably bought some myself. Neither happened to be the case for me at the time though.
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  70.  @Spacestation-r4z  the last former slave died 5 years prior to 1977 so no one was there that was entitled to any reparations. No one deserves reparations for anything they did not endure themselves.
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  71.  @Spacestation-r4z  I do not know what you are driving at.
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  72. Sounds like semantics to me. It looks like it blew up.
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  73. I was at the Englishtown flea market the weekend after the blackout. Let's just say there was an unusual number of vans with New York plates there that day selling electronics at discounts. It was memorable.
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  74. Well, there is a crowd of 70,000 spectators. So that scales things and offsets resources some. But I do agree it does seem like quite a waste nevertheless. People need to be entertained though.
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  75.  @mcarrowtime7095  I don't drink soda or use wifi either. So I agree with you. Hardwired with Cat 5e baby yeah!
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  76.  @mcarrowtime7095  there's no better cause than me. I'm my favorite charity.
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  77.  @terrorbirds9835  I've met some Texans. Not my favorite people. At least the ones that can't stop from carrying on about Texas aren't. The ones I don't know are from Texas are OK. Look buddy, you're in New Jersey now. None of us will ever go to Texas. We have an aversion to clodhoppers here.
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  78.  @Tatsh2DX  he didn't need to steal it himself. He could have bought it off someone else that stole it. People that steal that crap don't steal it for themselves. They steal it for money.
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  79.  @v-1nce  you'll never find a guilty man in prison either.
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  80.  @v-1nce  if you cannot follow things that's your failing.
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  81. I got to see the looted haul after the blackout. They took a lot of it to Jersey to sell. So a couple days afterwards they went to the Englishtown flea market with van loads of electronics.
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  82. Half of the shuttle missions were classified for the military. Says something about the future, don't it? We were putting a lot of spy satellites in orbit then. And God knows what else. Well, God and Kubrick.
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  83. It's no Who concert festival seating. Now that I do remember.
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  84. That's weird because they took it all to Jersey to sell.
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  85. It could not have ended up much worse. Nuclear warheads don't go off accidentally. It is pretty difficult to set them off. Plus the folks that make them take care to make sure they don't just go off. We're not talking about fireworks here.
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  86.  @davidtoddvlogs3486  how do you figure? The missile blew up. The silo blew up. That's about as bad as it was going to get. The nuke was never going to detonate.
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  87. See, that's why you lost the war. Before you could get that gobbly goop out of your mouth it was over already.
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  88. Actually the space shuttles were the deadliest space vehicles ever made. Everyone dying every 66th time is pretty bad.
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  89. Note to self: do not live downwind of a chemical plant.
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  90. How about that, spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Who knew? Hey what color were Christa McAuliffe eyes? They were blue. One blew this way and one blew that way!
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  91. 17:32 https://youtu.be/FJTSmLqg6iE?t=79
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  92. Being exploitive is what got our species to the top of the heap.
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  93.  @juliefore  yeah I looked at it on the map. I did have Indiana confused with Illinois. I forgot that illinois is wedged between Indiana and Ohio. Someday I'm going to have to make it west of Alabama. It's on my bucket list. I think I'm actually going to move out west someday. Not way out west but just westerly. I've spent my life on the east coast so far. I've been all the way up and down the east coast. Just never struck out west very much. There's nothing I'm interested in there really. If you've seen one corn field then you've seen them all.
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  94.  @juliefore  Indiana is a flyover state.
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  95. They live in tornado alley and someone has to tell them how bad weather can get? I'd think they learned that at a young age. I don't live there and even I know how bad storms are in the midwest.
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  96. Usually an odorizer is added so you can smell it. Because if you don't that could get spicy.
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  97. Smell is added to gas. Not all gas has an odor. Or the odor that you're familiar with. Which is methyl mercaptan. That's so you can smell it. But adding the smell costs money. So it isn't always done. Especially in commercial operations.
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  98.  @SeanHartnett-t8c  It was somewhere between the Newark and Hoboken stations. I gave the approximate geographic coordinates as best as I can remember it. You can copy paste those numbers into Google and it'll show you on a map. We did not have Google maps or smart phones back then. I don't remember civilian access to GPS either. So we never knew exactly where we were. It was a different time.
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  99. A smell is added to gas. It's called an odorizer. They use methyl mercaptan. So you can smell it. But they don't always. Because adding things costs money. There is a price to pay if you don't too though.
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  100. What is the world coming to when a kid can't even build his own breeder reactor in his Mum's garden shed?
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  101. Harold was quite the trooper.
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  102. Well, there is Rafał Gan-Ganowicz's stance on the matter. When he was asked what it was like to kill a human he replied, "I wouldn't know, I've only ever killed Communists."
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  103.  @squidcaps4308  even if it was all done to a higher standard things still could have gone wrong. There's no guarantees in life. No one could have known what was going to happen. It's all a trade off between what's practical vs what's ideal. 99.99% of the time it would have been fine. There's just that 0.01% of the time that you're going to get it anyways.
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  104. How is the builder at fault? They're only doing what their customer wants.
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  105.  @Smedley1947  that's not how it works in the commercial building trades. There is no builder. There's a general contractor. The customer will have already hired an architect to draw up plans. Of course they're never right. But with enough revisions and T&M work it'll get figured out eventually. Builders exist in the world of Mickey Mouse with smelly housewives.
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  106.  @krashd  builders exist in the residential space. The building here is a commercial structure. Maybe some commercial contractors refer to themselves as builders but I've never heard it. But that doesn't mean it isn't happening. I only worked in the nexus of the Universe, not the boondocks.
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  107. The gas may not have been odorized. That costs money to do. This was clearly an operation running on the cheap.
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  108.  @CoastalSphinx  methyl mercaptan is used as gas odorant. That's why gas always smells the same. They always use the same stuff to make it smell. Otherwise we wouldn't know it's gas. We wouldn't have the association. If it was sulfur it could just be a sewer leak. Someone burning a match. But methyl mercaptan has a unique odor to it. It's gas! The world we live in is a lie. But that's a useful lie.
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  109.  @Smedley1947  it certainly did. I'd have guessed that building was at least 70 years old by the way it looked. It looked extremely bad for its age. I'm thinking the concerte used was substandard. It has a soft and powdery look to it in the fractures. I don't see any large aggregate in it either. Was probably poured like soup. Bad slump. On a spec pour there's a funnel you fill up and then you take the funnel off the mix and it's supposed to stand up a certain height. That height is the slump. An eight inch slump would be good. But that is a stiff mix. It's hard to work with. You need big strong construction workers. Not little malnourished Bangladeshis.
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  110. The Soviets weren't as open about their space program. They only showed what they wanted others to see. Even at that we still do know about some of their biggest cockups though. Like the time they blew their entire space program up in one launch. Something like that is hard to hide. See the Nedelin catastrophe.
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  111. The Reds just didn't have a Neil Armstrong.
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  112. Like you told your parents right away when you broke the cookie jar.
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  113.  @DankDungeon  no one likes to admit fault. Plus they may not have even known right away. There's no reason getting folks all excited over nothing, now is there?
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  114. You'd think that someone spinning wrenches on an ICBM would be a bit more careful. Hey Jim-Bob you know this thing can put a 9 mile wide crater in the ground, don't you?
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  115. In the event of a nuclear exchange it'd be the end of civilization so getting another missile is unlikely. There'd be nobody alive to install it either.
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  116. A construction company can only build what their customer wants. They're not responsible for the design or what the structure is used for after it is done.
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  117. Why would you? It happened in NYC. It was on the news though. I went to Englishtown flea market on the Saturday after the blackout and saw all the hot electronics for sale. There was stacks of the stuff. As far as the eye could see.
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  118. ​ @haveahappyday1749  yes we did. I watched the blackout on TV. Rodger Grimsby reporting on Eyewitness News. Although how they were reporting I've no idea. I guess they had their own generators? Because their news room was right in NYC. At the time it was big news but not really surprising. So if you were ignoring the news cycle for a couple of days it was easily missed.
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  119. An audio recording of the train engineer interview https://youtu.be/yrCuMPeSu9s?t=95
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  120. By the looks of the wreckage I'm amazed anyone lived.
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  121. Estonia won't be out slaved by anyone.
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  122. Safety is a luxury the poor cannot afford.
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  123. I loved the 80s. A bit too much in fact.
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  124.  @gantmj  that's what the guy were were supposed to do. If the guys wires had held the structure wouldn't have collapsed. But the guy wires has no chance of holding being as they weren't properly anchored to anything and they were also inadequate to begin with.
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  125.  @pothos489  no space is inherently hazardous to us. As we did not evolve to survive there. We have to travel significantly faster than 500 MPH in order to get to space too. So it is an extremely difficult engineering problem. As of yet we have not had the time to solve the problem adequately either.
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  126.  @cambridgemart2075  no spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Space is a hazardous environment. There's no air, no pressure, high hard radiation, the list goes on and on. You would be dead in a second in space if something went wrong. Freeze dried and gone.
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  127. @JimAllen-Persona flying is pretty risky. Flying in space is even more risky.
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  128. They had one job. What cock ups.
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  129. When stuff gets destroyed by riots it stays gone. Because no one will invest there anymore. There were bad riots in the late 60s and decades later there was still just rubble on sites. That's how it was in Newark NJ. People don't want to just throw their money away.
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  130. Socket to me!
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  131. They just have come to Jersey to buy it then because that's where it got sold.
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  132. The 2003 blackout was way bigger. A quarter of North America was blacked out then. I think it only lasted a few hours though.
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  133.  @calci2679  and if they didn't play everyone would have complained then too. They came to play! Everyone showed up to see them play. The show must go on. They should have taken to the stage anyways. We're here to rock! Get these stiffs outta here. Now who left wants to have a good time!
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