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Comment Re:4 Days? (Score 1) 250

They were talking about a train car loaded with heavy canned goods. Wasn't the stuff you were loading pretty light? That's usually the reason something is not palletized - stacking pallets would crush the product. A railcar can be three to four times the capacity of a container, so I can easily see it going on for three shifts. I know I've sat up to ten hours waiting for my 53' trailer to be unloaded by hand. That was a record, for sure, but it never took less than four hours.

Comment Re:4 Days? (Score 1) 250

“With a 40-foot container, it could take two lumpers four to eight hours to unload it, whereas on pallets, we could unload it in 30 minutes.”

I've been on the other end of it - a truck driver - and that's about right. Seeing an unpalletized load would make my heart sink. I've sat anywhere from four to ten hours, waiting for unpalletized loads to come off. I have no problem believing it took days to unload a railcar by hand. I believe a railcar is approximately equal to four truckloads, so that could easily work out to three shifts.

Comment Re:Like many inventions ... (Score 1) 250

Right, and don't forget, everything in the shipping container is on pallets. At least, you hope it is. Unloading a container, or a trailer, goes by pretty fast if everything is palletized. Takes hours when stuff is not.

Comment Says I Can be Tracked (Score 1) 160

But most of my "uniqueness" seems to be about the fact that I'm a Mac user, using Safari. They also extracted a lot of fonts. What I wonder is, how useful is this information if I'm blocking ads and trackers, tossing cookies regularly, and using a VPN? To whom would it be useful?

(I'm not being rhetorical)

Comment It's My Computer (Score 1) 699

I'll decide what gets downloaded onto it. I really wish these commercial sites would just stop cluttering the internet. They just make it harder to find the good stuff.

I think I'll kick in a few more bucks to AdBlock, today. I'm happy to donate to people like that, (although I wish Wikipedia would've given me a cookie when I donated, but ok, maybe they did, and I deleted it).

Comment Re:We'd have less of this with better sound reprod (Score 1) 244

Yeah, if you listen to Jazz or Classical recordings from the fifties, they can be quite amazing. It seems it took some studios a while to figure out how to record amplified instruments, so there are a lot of bad sounding pop recordings from the early sixties. The Beatles don't belong in that category, though. Also, a lot of songs were mixed to "pop" on car radios, which at that time consisted of an AM radio, and one cheap speaker, so if you listen to them on an actual hifi...ouch! Certainly you can tell the difference between a modern recording, and an older recording, but much of this difference is due to differences in production techniques, rather than recording quality or ability, per se.

Comment Re:We'd have less of this with better sound reprod (Score 1) 244

IDK, it still sounds like, "kiss this guy" whether I'm listening with my McIntosh, or my MacIntosh. But certainly it's an improvement over the six-inch car speaker, powered by an AM car radio, which I first heard it on.
There are a lot of Stones songs, in particular, whose lyrics I never would've figured out without the internet. And I've had high fidelity equipment all my adult life. Not that learning the lyrics has helped - the mondegreens have been burned into my brain for decades now.

Comment Re:And the lawsuits (Score 1) 244

Now *that* is some fine A++ wegyu-grade irony, there. I'm not familiar with the song, but reading the lyrics which can easily be found online...

Indeed they can - now. You have to remember, grasshopper, the internet did not exist for most people until the late nineties/early two-thousands. Comprehensive lyric sites came even later. So for most of rock history, if the lyrics weren't printed somewhere on the album, you were left to figure them out yourself, as best you could.

Comment Re:California (Score 1) 720

Simply because there are laws against types of discrimination, doesn't mean employers don't discriminate. If you're looking at two résumés, both equally qualified, some kind of discrimination is going to come into play, whether regarding race, gender, criminal history, etcetera... You simply can't be overt about it, and I suspect much of it is unconscious, anyway.

Comment Re:America, land of the free... (Score 1) 720

Right, many companies rely on applicants assuming they'll spend the money for a background check, when in fact, many don't. My advice is to lie if you think they'll look askance at your record. Either they check, and you don't get the job, or they don't check, and you do get the job. If you're honest about it up front, it's likely the same outcome as "they check." As I say, this can depend on what type of company you're going to apply to - are they a buttoned-down corporate type of place, or rather hip? Is security a big concern for the employer? What are your convictions about? Drug convictions will be less of a problem than theft or violence convictions.

I once had to take a pre-employment "lie-detector" test, and was asked about drugs. When I answered that I had used them, he asked which ones. Since he wouldn't take "pretty much all of them" for an answer, I had to sit and list every drug I'd ever tried. It was a very long list. I got the job, and my test results got big laughs with my new bosses and colleagues. They were, (rightly), concerned about theft, not how I spent my free time. So, if it's only a bunch of drug-related misdemeanors, (or felonies), take heart!

I now have a job where a very dim view is taken of this sort of thing, and I never say a word about it, even though I have some arrests and minor convictions. It's not come back to bite me.

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