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

  1. Harold was quite the trooper.
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  2. 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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  3.  @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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  4. How is the builder at fault? They're only doing what their customer wants.
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  5.  @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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  6.  @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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  7. 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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  8.  @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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  9.  @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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  10. 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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  11. The Reds just didn't have a Neil Armstrong.
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  12. Like you told your parents right away when you broke the cookie jar.
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  13.  @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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  14. 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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  15. 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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  16. 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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  17. 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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  18. ​ @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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  19. An audio recording of the train engineer interview https://youtu.be/yrCuMPeSu9s?t=95
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  20. By the looks of the wreckage I'm amazed anyone lived.
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  21. Estonia won't be out slaved by anyone.
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  22. Safety is a luxury the poor cannot afford.
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  23. I loved the 80s. A bit too much in fact.
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  24.  @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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  25.  @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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  26.  @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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  27. @JimAllen-Persona flying is pretty risky. Flying in space is even more risky.
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  28. They had one job. What cock ups.
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  29. 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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  30. Socket to me!
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  31. They just have come to Jersey to buy it then because that's where it got sold.
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  32. 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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  33.  @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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