When they send most of us to go form a bucket-brigade to empty computers out of various storage places, it's kind of hard to not let-on.

Possibly the biggest insult was when we lost some permanent storage, and they decided to rent a couple of mobile-mini ex-shipping-containers. I suggested that as we unload the permanent storage we use the opportunity to palletize (and inventory) stuff that needs to be kept (putting that inventory control sheet wrapped in with the contents on the pallet that it describes) and that we also make an effort to discard that which we didn't need to keep. We have mild winters here, and it was in late fall or early winter when this was to happen.

The response I got was, "pallets are hard to come by", which is crap, as I could have gotten all I wanted from Receiving. They might have been older, dirty, and splintery, but they'd have worked well enough for long term storage that doesn't get moved around much. Instead they bucket-brigaded everything to cargo vans, drove them to the containers, bucket-brigaded everything into the containers, then six months later in the heat of summer bucket-brigaded everything back out, then went through it to get rid of most of it.

No. If anything I left out a few steps, like going through and reimaging the same enqueued loaner stock two or three times over the course of six months, even though the new image being put down was the same as the old one, and a few instances where cannibalized machines were un-cannibalized before sitting a few months and being re-cannibalized again.

I made that argument more times than I could keep track of.

Part of the problem was that immediate supervisory-types could only barely do their own jobs, and saw just about everyone underneath that was more capable as a threat, so they actively discouraged us to play and learn.

They even got mad when I took an ancient box and loaded Linux on it to play. It was a friggin' Microchannel box it was so old, and they still panicked because it wasn't 'standard'. Nevermind that the IT department should be the one place in the entire organization that isn't standard, since it should be testing-out new devices to determine if they'll be widely deployed.

Sad thing is, no one at that employer in a position of management had ever been in the military, so it wasn't like they learned to do that in the service.

I expect it's just what bureaucratic organizations end up doing.

"Go take these old PCs we pulled from the field, upgrade the RAM, and reimage them so they could be redeployed at some point."

"Go take these old PCs that are in the redeployment pool and cannibalize them."

"Go take these cannibalized PCs and load them into this modular shipping container."

"Go unload this modular shipping container of old cannibalized PCs and load them in this trailer."

"Go unload this trailer of old cannibalized PCs and load them onto these pallets."

"Go break-down these pallets of old cannibalized PCs and load them into this modular shipping container."

It was like Cool Hand Luke without the eggs.

HOW they fight is very different. More passive-aggressive, backbiting, alliance building, etc. It's like watching some crappy reality vote-the-other-guy-off-the-island show. In some ways women's conflict tactics are even nastier than the ones men typically employ. Guys might actually try to beat the crap out of each other (physically or verbally) but women will try to exile each other from social groups.

Heh. What's funny about that is that those "womens' techniques" are the techniques that men usually use to be successful in modern society, where violence and even the threat of violence aren't acceptable behaviors or responses, and those are also the techniques of people on the Internet simply because of the lack of possibility of physical interaction.

I can attest to this. When I was hourly at a place where they weren't allowed to send us home early, they would find all manner of useless busywork for us to do if they caught us done without more work to do. It became an arms race, between trying to not get caught and trying to catch those not working.

And for those that want to argue that it's the employer's time, to use the employees how they see fit, one of the fastest ways to demoralize a technical worker is to make him do manual labor that doesn't even serve a purpose; most of us got into technical fields to avoid doing manual labor in the first place, let alone that which doesn't make a positive contribution.

I expect that the cartels have probably begun experimenting with torpedo-like designs for the last leg of their smuggling runs. If you think about it, a length of steel water-main pipe welded shut with a predetermined weight of contraband welded in, balanced for bouyancy a dozen feet below the average surface, with a simple electric battery powered motor and rudimentary guidance system would help ensure that the smugglers themselves aren't caught even if the merchandise is found, and it would also be harder to attribute it to anyone. A deepwater vessel could bring the torpedo in close enough for its final leg of the journey, point it toward a beacon left on by the recipient, and let it find its way in the last bit on its own.

Admittedly I don't really know much about how sonar works in the fairly turbulent water near the surface, so perhaps this wouldn't work so well as I think it would, but if there's no human aboard to get caught then there's no one to testify either.

Or the fish and other marine life that are puréed in the process...

Amusing, they appear to be from Colombia, the narco-submarine capital if I remember correctly...

Calling someone dumbass over a single letter typo, when you don't even know if english is his native language, huge fail.

However, calling someone a dumbass because they made a point of making their post stand out with styling and still failed on-style with a typo is fair game in my book.

at least "Aquanaut" as a word has been used before.

I think the best term they could have written their little diatribe around would have been "hydrodynamics" though.

In a more conventional war typically the targeted nation's shipping is seized, both flagged vessels and vessels under other flags owned by those from that nation.

If I remember right, there's a treaty in place that was the result of Ukraine's voluntary handover of its nuclear weapons where it was supposed to receive defense. I'm curious to see if it'll be invoked.

I'm actually considering putting a 12V Cummins into a truck that I have, since the 12V uses a mechanical injection pump instead of an electrical one. Theoretically once started, that truck could drive without an electrical system at all, though the lights wouldn't work.

Mac users ... fell silent.

I think that the movie you paid homage to was more realistic unfortunately...