MangoCats

So, through my lifetime that "Work 8 hours" somehow evolved into:

Leave for work at 7am. Show up for work by 8am. Get an hour for lunch, unpaid. Leave work at 5pm. Get home approximately 6pm, if you don't stop to buy groceries or something.

I suppose commuting and lunch are supposed to be part of those "8 hours of play"?

I believe all such programs were defunded a few months ago...

To such an extent that I wonder if there is back-channel influence flowing out of the US pushing for this...

people have been living in Europe for ages. We are one of the countries with the lowest corrupt, we do pay a lot of corrupt nations/people though, but that is a different story.

Netherlands specifically did a pretty significant reboot after WWII, and again in 1983? even if the base Constitution was established in 1814 / 1848. The US has been screwing around with a women's rights amendment to our Constitution for over 100 years and we still can't get that done - which I attribute to all kinds of entrenched interests blocking change for the better for most people because the special interests might be a little inconvenienced.

It is hard for people in the US to make a choice other than support these companies, mom and pop stores are an alternative. In Europe, I am seeing a trend that we are more focusing on EU based alternatives or even better national based alternatives. (or open source, even better imo)

My grandparents' generation (born in the 1910s, formative young adult years during the Great Depression) pushed a strong "never spend a cent you don't have to" ethos on my parents, and my parents pushed that hard on me. That ethos is pervasive throughout rural America, and when a Wal Mart Supercenter opens they undercut Mom and Pop stores by just enough margin to push that "can't pass up a better deal" ethos in the local population. Mom and Pop stores usually go unprofitable and close within a year or two of a WalMart opening anywhere within 100km. The customers could afford to still patronize Mom and Pop and ignore WalMart, but that "save a penny whenever you can" ethos wins out. Of course once Mom and Pop are out of business, WalMart goes on to raise prices higher than Mom and Pop used to charge - big data analysis tells 'em just how much they can charge for each of their tens to hundreds of thousands of items to achieve their customer acquisition / retention goals. Meanwhile, Mom and Pop still had stick-on paper price tags on their merchandise when they went out of business.

In common usage they're equivalent to small and big. In practical terms, all nukes are strategic - use of a nuke has profound global diplomatic repercussions.

Fuel requirements could get to astounding levels, even with ambient air and water temperatures below 0C any "hot stuff" onboard (engines, lights, radios, people) would have to be offset with some kind of refrigeration system, which requires: more fuel to be burned. I'm sure you can "stay ahead of things" in some environments, but it won't be cheap on the fuel side of things.

It has been around in some form since there has been manmade concrete.

Personally, I bought a box of chopped fibers for inclusion in a concrete project some 30 years ago - sold labeled for that specific use.

What I'm talking about is abuse of those complaint systems which is only rectifiable via lawsuit. The abuse lies in the low cost (50€?) of filing a complaint, the corruptability / apathy-indifference of the complaint handling agency, and the relatively high cost of seeking justice vs un-just complaints. In theory, complaint processing at the agencies should filter out frivolous, harassing and otherwise improper complaints - but that's very frequently not how things run, not all the time.

just corruption shining through, something like that (samples) should only be done in set intervals f.e. Man, the US really sucks.

Yep. I'm thinking more and more what "made us great" in the past was the relative youth of our institutions. The longer these things run the further from ideal they tend to become. I would be very much in favor of institutional reform to attempt to continually improve these situations, but of course "institutional reform" is often a cover for fast-track corruption enabling.

A lot of the money from massive companies doesn’t end up inside the US government’s treasury.

Dystopian future stories about global corporate rule making governments irrelevant have been around for a long long time - the US is continuing to develop in that direction, but we do have at least a little further to go before we completely get there (even with recent accelerations in some areas.)

It's still a very new area, will continue to be debated and evolve over time. What we think is "ideal" today will not be what people think is "ideal" in 20 years.

Yeah, that's how it should work. We have personal experience of a bogus complaint being filed by a big player with a regulatory agency, the agency coming around and interviewing / intimidating us, and subsequently sending us paperwork finding that the complaint was "substantiated" - something we consulted with a couple of lawyers about and they said "this would never, ever stand up in any kind of hearing or trial or other official process, but... to get it reversed will effectively cost you a couple of thousand dollars out of pocket and a lot of time and hassle - better to ignore it." Of course the real issue is that the big player was guilty of everything in the complaint and more, this is just them "getting in front of the problem" before we complained about them - which we actually had no intention of doing...

The restaurant example comes from a friend who was running a restaurant when he decided to run for political office. His incumbent opponent was directing health inspections of his restaurant at about 10x the normal frequency of inspections... Again, you can fight it, but even if you have the resources to win, what do you get for your troubles?

Meanwhile, the bad actors in the above scenarios repeat their bad actions over and over for marginal advantages. Maybe someday they'll be taken down for it, but usually not.

There was a "etch your VIN in your car window glass" campaign around here years back, they had a liquid solution of HF that they were wiping across printed stencils to do the glass etching. The fact that its natural state is a gas just makes it all the nastier to handle - and possibly even more effective at diffusing through the cracks to cause hydrogen embrittlement of any steel reinforcement it may come into contact with.

My first thought is actually getting the corrosive substance onto enough of the concrete would be difficult

Yeah, if the concrete is 40' thick and they're only getting 10' of penetration with the explosives, then this isn't going to do much. But if it's 20' thick and they got through the first 12 with HE, the remaining 8 are going to have a lot of cracks to admit slow liquid death.

I have zero information on what the reinforcers are in the concrete, so shot in the dark is about right. Glass might be tough - unless you could deliver hydrofluoric acid effectively. Metals - we're not going to want to wait for iron to oxidize, looks like hydrogen embrittlement with HF again - so maybe that's the magic sauce. Nasty stuff, but that's what weapons manufacturers are good at handling and packaging: nasty stuff.

2000 lbs of HF poured on the surface isn't going to do much to the buried chamber, but 2000 lbs of HF delivered into the freshly stressed and heavily cracked concrete layer under all the dirt - that could be a problem for future use of the facility.