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Comment Re:"they shouldn't email you?" (Score 4, Interesting) 232

Employees often feel that they can't say "no" to the expectation that they have to be available via email even while at home off work hours.

People just need to make it clearer that you will be unreachable. My managers stopped when they insisted that they needed a way to get a hold of me in case of emergency since I would be well out of cellphone range. My response was a trained tracker and a team of search dogs. I told him about where I was going to be leaving my car and said to start searching there as I would be somewhere up in the north woods of Minnesota.

Comment Re:What kind of fish? (Score 3, Interesting) 180

I like my method of turning carp into something delicious better:
1. Catch the carp
2. load up ~100lbs of carp in the back of the jeep in a big plastic tub
3. dig a big hold in the garden
4. bury carp in the garden
They make a wonderful fertilizer. I also do the same thing with the little crappy bullheads from the pond that is full of sheep field run off near my house.

Comment Re:Money pit (Score 1) 322

That it has. The current gen are impressive machines, as are the old ones, and kids love seeing them. It is like a Tonka truck dream come true, or as my 3 year old put it shaking with excitement "They have a super dump truck and a super super dump truck!" when he first saw the 100 ton and 240 ton truck up in Virginia, MN.

Comment Re:Money pit (Score 1) 322

I was just countering that somewhat implied point that they weren't using massive machine. At the time they were using the largest available but those don't hold a candle to the current monsters that are used in mining the largest ever removed ~220 cubic yards of material at a time. Or for an actual shovel instead of a dragline there are these electric monsters which I have seen similar ones in action.

Comment Re:Money pit (Score 5, Interesting) 322

Well at the time they were using the most massive equipment available to the point that a whole new class of steam shovels was created specifically for the project. They were rail mounted 105 ton (US tons and that is the vehicle weight not capacity) steam shovels. You can see one of the 6 prototypes for the project here. It has a 2 1/2 cubic yard bucket instead of the original 5 cubic yard one (changed because the iron ore was substantially denser) and was also converted to crawler tracks to run in the iron mines of northern Minnesota but is the only remaining one of the prototypes. While this shovel never worked on the Panama Canal the only other surviving example of this type of shovel that may have is in much worse shape and exists in upstate new york. They were built on a 40' railroad box car which houses the boiler with an additional 8' added on to the back for a coal hopper with the boom and arm attached to the front.

Comment Re:So 60% positive ? (Score 1) 256

Using your groups the actual numbers would be more like .00001% of the people on the list are in group C, .00002% of the people on the list are in group B, and the vast majority 99.99997 fall into group A (these number are at least within a couple of orders of magnitude of the actuals). This isn't a list of terrorists, but people with ties to terrorism with what ever criteria the rather incompetent government uses for defining ties to terrorists. I would be willing to bet it assumes 2 degrees of separation at least so you know someone who knows someone type of thing means you have ties to terrorism.

Comment Re:So 60% positive ? (Score 1) 256

That assumes that the general probability of any random person has a 50% chance of having ties to a terrorist (I leave it to the reader to figure out what in the hell that actually means). In reality depending on how having ties to a terrorist is defined the list is either phenomenally accurate (nice tight definition where 80% of the general population meets the definition).

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