Jump to content

PTINS

Burnt Ends
  • Posts

    1061
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by PTINS

  1. RIP Mike Leach. A national treasure gone too soon.
  2. The Anschutz family has been in oil & gas and real estate since the 1900's. Philip Anschutz bought out his father in the 60's, and invested in stocks, railroads and real estate, including 9,000,000 acres along the Utah-Wyoming border. Amoco discovered oil on the Anschutz Ranch in the late 70's, which eventually became a billion-barrel+, with a "B", oil pocket, the largest oil field discovery in the United States since Prudhoe Bay in 1968. His railroad interests included downtown real estate and warehouses in Denver, and other midwestern cities that became very lucrative in the downtown revitalizations in the early 90's. He used his railroad right-of-ways to lay fiber optic cables across the country (Quest Communications). Anschutz has two private cars at the end of the Ski Train from Denver to Winter Park. Phil was one of those guys who made "fuck you" money everywhere he looked. Anschutz and the string of heirs have many ties to Colorado, Denver, and CU. The CU student population has been full of trust fund babies for many years and while that wealth may or may not manifest in the university endowment, it is there. We lived outside of Boulder from '93-97. Bronco's and Buffs winning = Exceptional football atmosphere. I like Deion. He will do well if he listens to the football people around him. And Ralphie is in the top tier of football mascots.
  3. Austin Venues Armadillo World Headquarters, (used to sell more beer than the Astrodome) Original Schlotzsky's
  4. When visiting San Antonio, Gerald Ford thought he would be go local and eat a tamale w/ his hands. Nobody told him to remove the husk first. Among the many things that cost him the election.
  5. Rylanders (grocery) Minimax (grocery) Nickerson Farms (hiway food) Ritters (gas stations) Saigon eggrolls (food cart on the drag) Schlitz Screaming Yellow Zonkers (Glazed popcorn)
  6. 104 rushing yds in first qtr
  7. Wow, Q stepped into a throw
  8. 2 first qtr rushing TD’s. Who woulda thunk?
  9. Not the same, but I remember the first time I moved back to Texas from Oklahoma. Crossing the Red River and seeing "Welcome to Texas", surrounded by Texas license plates, and the Longhorn shaped rest stops. A stress or burden you never knew was there is just lifted off your shoulders, lifting your spirits because you are home. When someone says a foreign invader, I used to think of Mexico or Canada. Typical American. That concept changed when we went to Manderscheid, in Rhineland, Germany. Two castles ~ 1,000 years old about 1,000 feet apart, separated by a shallow valley with a wooded creek in the middle. Still hard to grasp that Eurasians have been fighting over the same "dirt" for thousands of years. But it's not just the dirt, it's the descendents of generations of dead soldiers, raped women, murdered parents, and orphaned children. Fuck Russia.
  10. I saw this guy 4 days in here at the house.
  11. This. I love America not so much for what it is, but for what it aspires to be. Sell the promise? That happened long ago ..., the internet amplified it. The daily freedoms we enjoy that so many take for granted are recognized around the world, not so much for the scars and warts we have, but as a contrast for what many around the world don't have at all, and want. The simplest of things, basic freedoms. "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson It seems the next step is to wreck the Crimea land bridge supply lines. Once the rail is compromised, Russian supply & logistics is fubar, and the Russian territory will eventually collapse from within like a black hole, similar to Kharkiv, Izyum & Kherson.
  12. Great day for some football. See y'all in a few hours.
  13. Great news on your mother. That dwarfs any sports related event! That said, my Saturday was pretty okay: Sunrise at Thunder Creek Ranch, Utopia, Texas Son got him a 10 point buck at sunrise Aggy loses ugly, again... I Lee Harvey'd ~ 150 lb wild pig at sunset, fresh venison & pork Texas beats K-State on the road (really happy to see Coburn find the beast within) Houston Astro's (Go 'stros!!!) spanked the Phillie's and are World Series Champions, again .... I don't usually get sprinkles on my ice cream, but the other losers on Saturday, OU, Tech, Okie State, and Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee & Clemson
  14. Growing up in the late 60's-early 70's, I made a personal judgement that Democracy works for an educated populace. That was also premised on a belief that an educated populace, when given a choice, will do the right thing. It's hard to admit how flawed my thinking was. I confused education w/ making reasonable and logical choices. We have an "educated" society that doesn't have the deductive reasoning to spell cat if you spotted them the the "c" and the "a". Unfortunately, that's not the worst part. The realization that so many people will make a conscious choice to do what they know is "wrong" is ... um ... sad.
  15. FIFY Really? "There are no absolute truths in science, so yes there are such things as multiple truths, we just may not know it yet." That is probably the most ignorant thing I have ever read. Multiple truths? I'm guessing you weren't a science major. Taking selective information that supports a preconceived notion, while ignoring other information that refutes that preconceived notion, is not science. That flawed thinking and reasoning is why ill informed people believe there are versions of the "truth".
  16. Call it what you will, but the market cap of the just the FAANG stocks has risen almost $3 Trillion in ~ 20 years. A significant portion of that value increase is shared by the majority of pension funds, 401k's, and numerous individuals who have chosen to invest in these particular stocks. Those "obscene corporate profits" have resulted in a proportionate increase in stock value, meaning each individual investor has realized a proportionate increase in their investments. One share of Apple in 2006 was ~ $35/share, and has split 7 for 1 in 2014 and 4 for 1 in 2020, giving you 28 shares from your original 1 share. Your $35 original investment in 2006 is worth over $4,000 today. Perhaps characterizing a 100 fold increase in value as a trickle is not the correct term.
  17. I'll play. First post on CR, I think, and I only read the last 3 pages... What happened in 2000? I used to think that Y2K was the reason for so many ills in our economy in that it gave the IT community access to the highest levels of corporate America. Over time, I realized that innovation and riding the tech wave increased our efficiency in damn near everything, resulting in much higher productivity and ultimately, corporate profits. I never saw the cost/benefit of paying 4X for an Apple computer over a Microsoft based clone. Still don't. I took my high school age son shopping at the Apple store in 2006, and was overwhelmed by so many happy people who couldn't wait to tell me about their great products. Didn't buy anything that day, but I bought Apple stock the next day. Ding, Ding, Ding!!! WINNER!!! Over the last 10-15 years, I migrated from investing in Oil & Gas (my profession) to high tech ($$$). Apple was making train loads of cash with iphones (no risk) v. O&G, which is arguably the highest risk profession there is. Taking Oil & Gas, boosting it to high pressure, and putting a fire under is the definition of risk. Fast forward, and over time, my salary, the "Labor Share" on the graph, was secondary to my investment earnings (savings, 401k, IRA, Roth, etc.), the "Profit Share" on the graph. That statement probably holds true for everyone who is not dependent on a government paycheck. Every pension fund, not government related, his heavily invested in the stock market, and every contributor to every pension fund is by definition, invested in the stock market. Corporate Profits are not a bad thing. Those profits trickle down to individual investors and pension funds, who pay their share of taxes. So, the solution is call the Tech company management before congress, and ultimately, kill the geese that were laying golden eggs. Well done. Re: stimulus checks. Lets see, Covid disrupts everything, people can't/don't work, supply chain issues, same amount of people chasing fewer goods and services, supply and demand fundamentals go to work, and prices start rising. Some people, those forced out of the workplace, needed help. I get that. But a lot (most?) of people didn't, they were able to work remotely. But everyone got a check, whether they needed it or not. Inject Trillions of $$$ into a supply challenged economy, and now we have a whole lot more money chasing good and services that were already in high demand, superheating the economy, and inflation explodes. Combining those two events, crushed profit margins and out of control inflation, and we went from our best economy ever to dogshit in a few short years. I got a few $ from my stimulus checks in return for my life's savings getting crushed. Whoppee shit! I think that applies to most of America.
  18. In my opinion ... I would agree that the Nordstream explosion appears to be internal rather than external. Explosion as in man made detonation and not a "natural" leak/rupture followed by detonation. I have seen "normal' pipeline failures and explosions but am not familiar with the details of a pipeline intentionally blown up. The "missing piece" of pipe on Norstream is more indicative of an explosion that cut the pipe in a circumferential direction rather than a longitudinal direction, maybe in two different places. With easy access, this could be done from the outside. The deep water location is not easy access and would require time and equipment, first to expose the buried pipelines lines just to gain access, and then to place the explosive charges. That type of activity would have been noticed. If there was a valve assembly of sorts above the sea floor, an external explosion becomes more probable. Nordstream 2 is huge, two pipelines with a total capacity of 5.3 BCF (Billion Cubic Feet) of gas per day, roughly half of the US LNG capacity. Each pipeline is made of 100,000, 12m-long individual steel pipe joints, with 24t (tons?)in concrete weight. The internal diameter of the pipeline is 1,153mm (45 in) and the wall thickness is 41mm (1.6 in). Not quite a "gun barrel" pipe, but that's a big ass piece of iron. Pipeline leaks/ruptures look similar, with the initial cause of the leak affecting the appearance. A corrosion related leak starts with a pinhole; once the integrity of the pipe is compromised, the leak propagates until eventually there is a catastrophic rupture. Whether or not there is an explosion will determine what the site looks like. Without an explosion, the pipeline still has continuity, there is just a big gap in it. A mechanical failure, like a bad weld at a pipe joint, looks different, like the pipe was simply cut in half. Similar action; a pin hole leak at the weakest point, with the leak/crack propagating circumferentially along the weld, until it separates and ruptures. This is a really cool picture! Bernoulli's fluid principle: PV=nRT. A rapid drop in pressure has a proportional rapid decrease in temperature. I remember a similar pipeline rupture w/o an explosion on a natural gas liquid pipeline; I could feel the temperature dropping as we got closer to the pipeline, and we didn't get very close!!! Same principle as a thermobaric weapon. Explosions are ... the most exciting thing to make the evening news. Big orange fireballs. Gas will leak until the leak is stopped, disperses, or until it finds an ignition source. The explosion itself will rip the pipe wide open, so you have a full diameter pipeline leak at pressure, ~ 1,OOO PSI (lbs/square inch), burning with enough heat to melt steel and turn dirt into glass. Nordsteam appears to have had an explosion that ripped the pipe in pieces, but didn't have a fire that would have melted the steel. Hard to imagine an explosion that could rip apart a 1.6" thick, concrete coated, pipeline. Pipeline "pigs" were used initially just to clean out pipelines, commission new pipelines (use a pig in a pipe to separate the fluid in front of the pig (water or nitrogen) from the fluid behind the pig, the fluid paying the bills (oil, gas, gasoline, diesel, etc.), or to just separate two different fluids . Over time smart pigs were developed in the 70's-80's with instrumentation to measure metal thickness, corrosion, etc. (I have no idea how far technology has progressed since my training program.) Suffice it to say that it would be relatively easy to rig a very complicated bomb, place it in/on a pig, move it where you want it, and blow it up.
  19. Thanks for posting.
  20. That's ~ 15 miles of trucks lined up.
×
×
  • Create New...