In honor of election day, I’m re-using a bunch of political yard signs to build a small outdoor shed. The Coroplast used for high-end campaign signs is far too good to be tossed out just because somebody lost an election.
I’ve decided on the following method of construction:
It’s every bit as complex as it sounds. Continue reading Post #1897: Re-using political yard signs. Composting shed, Part 2
Today is the day when a whole lot of campaign signs go straight into the dumpster. Along with the political aspirations of half the recent candidates,
Which is a pity, really. (The signs, I mean.) The best of those signs are made to last a long time. We really ought to do better than treating them as a single-use disposable.
So I suggest that the first Wednesday following the first Monday in November be declared Campaign Sign Recycling Day. In keeping with that, today is a good day for me to make something useful out of some dead political yard signs.
This post is the theory. Next post is the actual assembly.
Source: Coroplast, Inc.
Campaign yard signs come in several varieties.
Cheap campaign yard signs aren’t re-usable in any obvious way. Some are coated cardboard, on some sort of stick. Some are a printed plastic sleeve that fits over a three-sided wire frame. For both of those, the metal frames (if any) can be recycled. But the signs themselves aren’t good for much. Far as I can tell, once they’ve served their purpose, they’re trash.
By contrast, high-end campaign yard signs are Coroplast(r). That is, corrugated plastic sheets — two sheets of plastic bound together with thin plastic channels. As pictured above. Effectively, they are built like corrugated cardboard, but plastic.
These sheets — typically made from polypropylene — have a surprising amount of structural integrity. Much like corrugated cardboard, they are quite resistant to bending or folding across the corrugations. This means you could use a single thickness of Coroplast to build light-duty objects, and multiple thicknesses to build heavy duty objects.
These also stand up well to being used outside. The ones forming the sides of my oldest raised beds now have more than five years of cumulative outdoor exposure (first as yard signs, then as raised bed sides.) Only this year did they begin to show brittleness from all that sunshine and weather. (And if I’d cared to keep them painted, I probably could have avoided that, as most of the damage is from exposure to the UV in sunlight.)
I’d say that the biggest downside is that these can’t be glued together. (Or, at least, not well, or not easily, using conventional glues). The underlying material (typically, polypropylene) just doesn’t stick to much. And the ink coating — the printed message — further complicates things.
Near as I can tell, most people who make DIY projects with Coroplast sheet opt for some sort of mechanical fastening. That can be as simple as cutting slots and tabs, so that sheets fit together. Than can include melting sheets together, in places, to form a sort of plastic rivet. Or can include using actual metal fasteners (bolts, washers, nuts) to hold the plastic parts together. Or staple or nail them into a wood backing.
(The big exception being model airplane enthusiasts, for whom gluing coroplast is the only practical option. That said, after having read one or two sites discussing that use, I’m convinced that gluing up Coroplast is not something that you’re likely to get right the first time.)
There are chemical methods that might, in theory, hold these sheets together. Some are specialized glues specifically designed for this sort of application. All of those appear to cost an arm and a leg, at least for the quantities that would be needed to build (e.g.) a piece of furniture. And then there’s solvent-welding the polypropylene (PP). That is, finding a solvent that will dissolve PP, dissolving some pieces of PP in that solvent, and then using that as if it were glue. I strongly suspect that either approach — specialized glue, or DIY solvent-welding — requires a nice clean PP surface, involving a lot of complicated surface preparation, and that the ink firmly bonded to the typical campaign sign would interfere with that.
Dare I say this? Even duct tape is iffy. The same factors that make it hard for glue to stick, make it hard for tapes to stick. And surface preparation for taping is not easy (e.g., lightly torching the PP surface). All told, taping or gluing this stuff seems like a lot of work, on the off chance that you can get something to stick firmly.
The upshot is that I’m going with mechanical fastening only.
I find most plans for upcycling or recycling of materials to be of little value. Most involve using small amounts of materials. Most involve creating something for which there is a very limited demand. The results tend to be more of a novelty than a way to divert significant amounts of material from the landfill.
Contrast that with using campaign signs for the sides of raised garden beds. That used up a lot of material, slowed down the inevitable progress toward the landfill by years, and avoided consuming considerable amounts of virgin materials.
In this case, I have a stack of roughly 35 campaign yard signs, or about 100 square feet of Coroplast sheet. Pre-cut into neat 2′ x 1.5′ pieces. So I’m looking for a project that will use up just about that amount of material, and give me something useful in return.
Source: Google search
In Post #887, I did up a quick summary of the various construction methods used to create corrugated cardboard furniture. I’d guess that just about anything you could build as corrugated cardboard furniture could also be built out of Coroplast.
So if you are stuck for ideas, you can look up cardboard furniture plans. As long as they don’t depend critically on glue, they ought to work with Coroplast.
As I see it, the main approaches to creating weight-bearing structures for cardboard furniture are:
Simple stacked sheets.
Source: Homedit.com
Folded beams
Source: Time, inc.
Structural grids (with or without surfacing materials):
Source: Planet Paper
Source: Storage Techniques for Art, Science, and History
It seems worth mentioning that a lot of lightweight commercial bins and totes are made from folded and fastened sheets of Coroplast. It’s such a common use that there’s even a market for used Coroplast bins and totes.
You can find lots of different plans on the internet for constructing Coroplast totes, bins, boxes, and so on. They all boil down to folding a sheet into a box shape, and then somehow fastening it together at the corners. In the example pictured above, the author constructs a sort of “rivet” out of hot glue, and uses that to fasten the corners mechanically (reference).
Here, I’m shooting for something larger, to use up more Coroplast signs.
Source: Builder Bill
I’m going to turn my pile of used Coroplast into some structural integrated panels or SIPs. In this case, the SIPs will be flat, rectangular wooden frames, faced with coroplast sheets, and filled with … probably scraps of insulating foam board.
Like a hollow-core door, if you’ve ever dealt with the insides of one of those. The entire frame around the rim is solid wood, and so has enough strength to hold fasteners and hinges. But the broad flat surfaces are just thin, rigid sheets backed by some hollow, honeycomb-like structure.
As long as those rigid face sheets stay firmly in place, the entire unit ends up being quite strong, given the light weight. Far more than you might reasonably expect. This is why (e.g.) you can easily use a hollow-core door as a table-top, even though the individual face veneers are far too flimsy for that use.
I think this takes good advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of Coroplast. And it allows me to connect the Coroplast to the structure using a (hardware) staple gun, which is about as fast and as lazy as it gets. But all the connections subject to high point loads — the sort of connector that would pull out of a thin plastic sheet — can be made through the solid wood edges.
And it’s generic. I’m going to use this to build a little knock-down insulated shed for my composter. But nothing would stop you from (e.g.) building furniture this way. Bookshelves. A larger shed. A lightweight travel trailer. Anything that can be made from rigid flat panels can be made this way, within the strength limitations of the materials.
At this point, putting the composter cover together is just a matter of connecting the panels made in just above.
Ideally, I’d like to have “knock down” construction — something that can be easily disassembled and re-assembled without tools. (That way, I can store it away easily during the off-season). But in the end, this is only going to take four long screws to hold it together. So I’m just going to screw it together.
How this actually goes together is going to depend on what scraps of lumber I build it out of.
In this post, I figured out how I’m going to use up a lot of 1.5′ x 2′ Coroplast campaign signs. My proposed method is to build a bunch of “structural panels” out of those signs. That is, thin wood frames faced front and back with Coroplast sheets. And then use those rigid panels to build a structure.
This approach:
All I have to do now is to make that happen.
I’m now going to test that, by building a winter cover for my composter, using that “structural panel” method. Assuming all goes well, the construction of that should be documented in my next post.
This is a quick review of home testing for airborne mold.
Bottom line: I’m going to start with some $3-a-pop agar plates (Amazon). Despite numerous drawbacks.
We’ll see what develops.
Note: Results are shown in Post #1898.
I want to check a few areas of my home for an excess of airborne mold spores. This is a shot in the dark, so I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, if I can avoid doing that.
I could hire a pro to do that for me. But, cost aside, do I really want my tester to be somebody who’s primarily in the business of selling mold remediation services? Particularly when you can expect to find some level of mold more-or-less everywhere.
So, I’m scoping out the test-at-home market.
Here are my notes. I knew zip about this, as of two hours ago. Here’s what I’ve learned in two hours.
The first split in the decision tree is whether you are testing for surface mold or airborne mold.
Surface mold is … mold growing on a surface. With those, you swipe a surface, then test the swipe in some fashion.
That’s not what I’m looking for. I want a test for airborne mold.
Airborne mold is mold spores suspended in the air. (For all intents and purposes.) Mold spores are reported to range from about 3 to 30 microns in size, so some of those will float long distances/stay suspended for long times, in air. Some will not. (The cutoff for “airborne” particles is conventionally taken at 5 microns.)
The first thing I learned about airborne mold tests is that the price of the test typically does not include the price of the lab analysis of the test. A typical lab fee is $35-$40 per test, and most places say that you need a minimum of two — one outdoors, one inside — to test for excessive mold.
What, exactly, the “lab test” does, varies from type of test to type of test. For the agar-plate-style tests, they identify the types of mold that are growing. For the air-sample tests, I’m pretty sure they give you a count of spores found.
Petri-dish agar tests: Crude, and cheap if read them yourself. (Amazon example) One type of test is a Petri dish coated with sterile growing medium. Take a sterile dish, uncover it for an hour, in a room where the air has been undisturbed for a while. Then cover it up for a couple of days, in a warm place, and see what grows.
These seem to be sold as either read-it-yourself or send-to-the-lab tests. Read-it-yourself boils down to counting the number of mold colonies that have formed, regardless of size. Most common rule seems to be that four and under, for a one-hour exposure, visible after two days, is OK.
So the test is crudely quantitative, in the sense that you may see few mold colonies, or you may see a lot. But there’s no direct link between the number of colonies you see, and the actual amount of mold spores in the air.
As I read it, a lot of factors can partially compromise these tests. Mainly, there are several ways in which you can get false negatives (no mold on agar plate, when unhealthful levels of mold are present). And, based on photos, it’s surprisingly hard to count the mold colonies.
I view agar plates/Petri dishes as a form of one-way testing. If you end up with a plate dotted with mold colonies, after the one-hour-exposure/two-day-incubation routine, then you’ve found something. If you don’t get that, or don’t get it clearly, then it’s not clear what you can conclude. In other words, they may sometimes tell you that you have a mold problem. Plausibly, they are not reliable for indicating that you don’t have a mold problem.
Around $3 a plate if you just buy agar Petri dishes yourself. Around $40 a test if you want ones that you can send to a lab, and have the lab read them. For lab-read tests, it looks like a minimum of two tests — one outside your home, one inside.
Air sample testers: Quantitative, must be lab read, pricey. (Amazon example.) A second type of test uses an air filter and a fan (air pump). This is lab-read-only, but it has two big advantages. First, the in-home portion of the testing is done in under ten minutes. (Versus having an open Petri dish sitting around for an hour). And the test is quantitative — the lab reading will give you some idea of how much mold was in the air.
I only found one on the market, and that rounds to $300 for three usable indoor tests. Minimum of two tests — one outside your home, one inside.
Plus, at the end of it, you’re left with yet another useless battery-powered device to get rid of. In this case, it’s the “air pump” used to draw a known quantity of air through the filter medium.
Dust swab: Like a COVID test. (Amazon example.) Yet a third type of test asks you to swab the dust in a room, and test that for mold. That looks very much like a COVID test, so I assume there’s a reagent there that reacts to some surface compound commonly found on mold spores.
There’s some chance that, like a COVID test, the results are a simple yes/no. Yes, mold is present in the dust. No, it’s not, or not at detectable levels. So I’d call this a non-quantitative test.
Around $40 a test.
PM 10 air quality meter: No. I already own a meter that monitors airborne particulates (so-called PM 2.5 and PM 10). A quick back-of-the-envelope convinced me that a PM 10 air quality meter probably wouldn’t function well as a mold detector. (Independent of the fact that all kinds of non-mold material could be in PM 10). Near as I can tell, there’s just too little mold in the air, at the limit of what’s considered healthy, to trigger a PM 10 meter.
I bought 10 sterile agar-coated Petri dishes, at $3 each, from Amazon. Unless I want to ship them off to a lab to be “read”, this seems adequate, at least for an initial check.
That, despite their lack of … well, pretty much everything you want in a test. But the bottom line is that, under the right circumstances, this will send up a warning flag if excessive amounts of mold are present.
This whole exercise is a shot in the dark. And I’m not even sure what “normal” mold levels would look like, on any of these tests. So this seems like just about the right place to start.
I’m still looking for loopholes. Hence, three remaining questions:
After reading the end-notes on the detailed tabulations of the NY Times/Siena College poll, my main remaining question is: What is the L2 file?
Survey respondents were chosen (in a sophisticated-but-neutral way) from persons on the L2 file. That file is the “universe of observations” for the survey.
Based on the U. Penn description, the L2 file contains public information on about 200M persons who recently voted. And, about 95 million cell phone numbers.
The file itself was developed by L2.com. Having dealt with mailing-list vendors before, I recognized much of the subsidiary information that they merged onto the publicly-available voter records.
But if that’s an accurate description — 95M cell phones, 200M voters — then roughly speaking, a bit less than half the L2 file had phone numbers attached to the voter data.
Did this survey draw from persons on the L2 file who had a phone number listed? Or did it draw from all persons on that file. The documentation simply says:
The survey is a response rate-adjusted stratified sample of registered voters on the L2 voter file.
I’m pretty sure they meant response-rate-adjusted, that is, they adjusted the likelihood of being sampled based on some prior estimate of likely non-response rate.
In any case, if the U. Penn description is correct, then this is a valid question to ask. Along with the obvious followup: If it’s persons with listed cell phone, could that matching process — the process that added the cell phone number to the voter record — possibly have induced a bias?
The other thing not stated was the response rate. They said that 94% of the people they called “were reached” on the phone. Like this:
Overall, 94 percent of respondents were reached on a cellular telephone.
But you’re left guessing as to what the actual response rate was. At least, as far as I could tell, from the documentation cited above. (The “reached” figure speaks more to the validity of the added phone data, than to the response rate. You can reach me, and I can say “no thanks”.)
That said, the big advantage this survey has is that it shows a modest win for Biden in these states, in 2020. That is, it corresponds to the actual 2020 results.
Whatever their methodology goes, it accurately shows that Biden won the popular vote, by a small margin, in 2020. It’s hard to say that the 2024 projection is hugely biased in some fashion, when you can see that no such bias exists for the actual 2020 results (as estimated from this poll).
Then I got to wondering: Don’t people lie, after the fact, about having voted for the winner?
The problem is that if I Google anything near that topic, all I get is stuff about the 2020 election. So any answer to whether or not this is material — if people tend to say they voted for the winner — will have to wait until I figure out some better way to find an answer to that.
I find myself grasping at straws, trying to explain away the NY Times/Siena College polling results showing Biden soundly losing to Trump in 2024.
This survey predicts Trump taking five out of six swing states in 2024: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada. But not Wisconsin. Source: This
Having spent some time down in the details, let me summarize: A poll that correctly reproduces the 2020 Biden win (in six swing states) now calls for a big 2024 loss.
Worse, it’s a good poll. By which I mean, a well-executed poll. I saw almost nothing in methods that I strongly disagreed with. (And I used to be in the statistics biz.)
I have to admit that I woke up just totally pissed off about this poll. After my wife clued me in on it yesterday. Her response to the results was “people suck and I hate them all”. Seems like a valid viewpoint.
I just plain wanted it to be wrong. That’s not science. I looked for obvious errors, and didn’t see any. So far. FWIW. It’s the gold standard — the best available estimate of how these swing states are likely to vote.
Here’s my take on the main message:
Biden’s too old.
And other stuff, sure.
Weirdly, the main writeups seem to skirt this issue. But to my eye, this is something that everybody agreed on.
Separately, smears work, disinformation wins. Seemed like more than half of everybody think Joe Biden’s dirty, and has taken payments from China and Ukraine. Which, as far as actual evidence goes? In any case, one President makes his tax returns public, one does not, I’m gonna stick with the one who does.
And now, from the Democratic side of things, comes a string of “yes, buts.”
There’s some nuance to it, but I think I can boil them down as:
Yes, Biden’s too old. But if my only alternative to Biden is Trump, then “too old” doesn’t exist. If Biden’s breathing, I’m voting for him.
And I have some reasons for preferring Biden. In no small part, it’s fair to expect Biden to assemble a far more competent team than Trump. Fewer cronies, fewer toadies. Fewer of his own children, for that matter. And for sure, with Biden, we’ll likely have fewer Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs mockingly threatened with execution.
So you can “yes, but” it to your heart’s desire. Yes Biden’s 80. But Trump’s 77, fat, and his dad died following a period of dementia.) Yes, Biden sometimes does old-guy stuff, but Trump rarely utters a coherent sentence. If I gotta listen to one old fart ramble, please let it be Biden, and not Trump.
And there’s that whole fate-of-the-Democracy thing. We got one joker in the Senate, saving up military appointments. Hell, what worked for McConnell for the Supreme Court sure ought to work for the military. Given how much Trump admires dictators, the idea of a military run top-to-bottom by Trump acolytes does not appeal to me.
And I mean Joe Biden.
Is there any way that Biden could withdraw from the race? I’m not seeing it.
Wouldn’t he then be obliged to support his vice-president, as the Democratic presidential candidate?
Do you think that America is ready to vote for a Black woman, to be President? Separately, do you think Harris is a good candidate?
My answer is no and no. I don’t see Harris as a viable winning Presidential candidate. So Biden’s stuck there. If he drops out in a normal and reasonable fashion, then the Dems lose in 2024.
So he can’t agree that he’s too old. Even if he thinks he is. And he can’t drop out, for that or any other reason. He options are to fight one more election. Or to lose. No reasonable person can expect Biden not to fight for it.
Normally, about this time of year, I’d start burning my way through two cords of wood, over the course of the winter.
This year, I’m not.
It’s complicated.
I went through the biggest global environmental problem in heating with wood back in Post G22-058.
In a nutshell, when I burn firewood for heat, the C02 that goes up my chimney came out of the air an average ten years ago. For that reason, firewood is very close to a carbon-neutral fuel, when viewed over (say) a decade of time. Over that time period, atmospheric C02 is neither increased nor decreased by the process of growing wood, then burning that wood.
As opposed to say, burning natural gas. Typically, that was produced some time in the last half-a-billion years or so, and trapped underground. The C02 from that source definitely adds to the current level of atmospheric C02.
But along with wood burning comes soot. And even though that soot resides in the atmosphere for just a brief period (typically, two weeks), soot is incredibly effective at capturing the heat from the sun. Dispersing a microscopic black powder through the atmosphere allows the atmosphere to absorb more light energy? Who would have guessed that?
Source: Myhre, G., D. Shindell, F.-M. Bréon, W. Collins, J. Fuglestvedt, J. Huang, D. Koch, J.-F. Lamarque, D. Lee, B. Mendoza,
T. Nakajima, A. Robock, G. Stephens, T. Takemura and H. Zhang, 2013: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United
Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
Back in 1995, nobody quite knew what the net effect of soot was. Even through 2014, estimates were uncertain enough that the confidence interval around the point estimate included zero.
That said, you have to go with the most recent evidence. Based on the 2014 5th report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I estimated that the warming effect of the soot from my wood stove was just about large enough to offset any benefit from wood burning. That’s the gist of in Post G22-058.
And that’s why I skipped the firewood purchase this year.
The IPCC sixth summary report was released in its entirety earlier this year. So it’s worth taking a peek at that, as the estimate for black carbon involved a lot of uncertainty.
(First, though I have to note how different the public debate is now, for the IPCC 6th report, compared to nine years ago, for the 5th report. For the IPCC 5th report, climate-change denialists went over it with a fine-toothed comb and found an actual substantive error, in a sentence, in a section of the technical portion of the report. This had to do with the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers. And, as is their habit, the climate-denial industry then proceeded to play the game of This Changes Everything, So Believe Nothing You Have Heard. For the sixth report, by contrast, the release was uneventful, and nobody tried to fabricate some made-up stink about it. It’s almost as if everyone with sense now realizes that climate change is real, man-made, and causing problems. And so there is little value in trying to generate new disinformation, because those who still deny that climate change is a real threat are more-than-satisfied with continuing to believe disinformation that was debunked decades ago.)
Interestingly, they’ve revised their estimate of the warming impact of soot way downward, compared to the 2014 report. (Though still within the 95% confidence interval of the 2014 report).
The best estimates of ... attributed to ... black carbon is substantially reduced. The magnitude of uncertainty in the ... due to black carbon emissions has also been reduced relative to AR5. (Section TS.3.1)
Source: Page 42, IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 2391 pp. doi:10.1017/9781009157896.
And, in fact, it looks like the estimate of the warming impact of soot is back about where it was in 1995. Which is about when I decided it would minimize my global warming footprint if I burned wood for (at least some of) my home heating.
Source: Page 92, reference cited just above.
Without getting further into the details, at face value, the upshot of this most recent change is that heating your house with wood, in a modern air-tight low-emissions wood stove, probably offers significant net benefit in terms of global warming footprint. Based on this most recent estimate of the impact of the resulting soot. Assuming I did my calculations correctly last year.
This year’s air pollution alerts from Canadian forest fires have made me a lot more sensitive to the issue of air pollution from wood fires. In the past, I’ve just turned a blind eye to that, mostly because as far as I can tell, I’m the only person within blocks that actually burns wood for heat.
Air pollution from an isolated wood stove does not have the same public health implications as air pollution from Canadian forest fires. That’s because you have to be in the exhaust plume from my stove to be affected by it. By contrast, you were breathing Canadian soot no matter where you were, and no matter when. It’s the difference between a brief exposure, walking past my house (say), and breathing it 24 hours a day.
So, really, it’s more a question of what I’m doing to the air that I and my neighbors breathe. And for that, the key question is how particulates generated by my wood stove, at my property line (i.e., entering the public domain) compare to the particulate levels we saw during the Summer 2023 air pollution alerts?
I suspect that the only way to tell, with this one, is to measure it. Which I will, the next time I light a fire in my stove.
For now, let me work through the basics, given that this stove is EPA rated to produce no more than 2 grams of soot per hour. A good round number for “too much soot in the air” is, say, 100 micrograms per cubic meter for total particulates. That would trigger an “unhealthy” reading for PM 2.5. To get down to that level, an hour’s worth of soot from my stove would have to be diluted into … 20,000 cubic meters of air per hour.
Or about 333 cubic meters of air per minute. In order to dilute the smoke from my wood stove down below the “hazardous” level for particulate matter. That’s a cube of air roughly 18′ on a side. That seems like a high-but-plausible rate of dilution.
There is also a sense that if you can smell wood smoke, you are breathing in pollutants. And that may well be true — the smell must come from somewhere. That said, a quick look at some scholarly papers suggests that there isn’t a tight correlation between the smell of smoke and the density of particulates in the air. (As evidenced, I guess, by the Canadian forest fires, where there was no smell of wood smoke in the air, but particulate levels were high).
So, before I even lay my first fire of the season, and get out my recently-purchased air quality meter, I’m guessing that this is an open question. I can surely smell wood smoke, at ground level, at least part of the time that I’m buring wood. The next step is to measure it and see if I’m pushing unhealthy levels of particulates out into my adjacent neighborhood.
I knew that DC Metro ridership was down during the pandemic, and hadn’t really recovered. But I was still shocked when I parked in the nearly-empty lot at the Vienna Metro, on a weekday morning last week. Continue reading Post #1892: Vienna Metro has lost its groove.
At what point is an on-line deal so good that you decide not to buy it?
And if so, why?
In the modern U.S.A., with markets dominated by cheap Chinese goods, is there still any such thing as a price that’s too low to be believable?
I have to write this one fast, as this amazing deal I’m looking at won’t last long. I must order now, or I might miss out on the deal of a lifetime. Continue reading Post #1891: If the on-line deal seems too good to be true, what do you do?
Edit: 11:30 AM Monday 11/6/2023 — no change.
I finally gave up and emailed the elections office. Sure, they have my ballot. They’ve had it for more than a week now. And it’s been accepted.
The problem is Fairfax County’s description of the ballot tracking system. They say it tracks your ballot. Right up to the point where they’ve accepted it as valid. Full stop.
They don’t say that it only tracks ballots returned by mail. Which appears to be the case. So the accurate description of absentee voting is that if you do the entire transaction by mail, they’ll let you know when your ballot was received and accepted. But if you drop the ballot in a drop box, you get no further information.
I didn’t expect to that, because you have the right to “perfect” (i.e., correct) your mail-in ballot if you filled it out wrong, e.g., failed to fill in the date. If you mail it back, you get an on-line site where you can find out if your ballot was defective. But if you drop it in a drop box, it’s up to the County to track you down, if they can.
Original post follows:
I like to vote by mail.
Among the things I like about it is that the mail ballot is tracked across four “handoffs”:
Fairfax Country knows who has my ballot, based on those four handoffs.
Except when it doesn’t. As above. Which happens to depict the incorrect-and-getting-incorrecter status of my ballot.
My ballot’s real status is that I had it for a month, I filled it out and dropped it in a drop box over the weekend.
The County, by contrast, thinks the USPS has still has it, and never delivered it to me. (It must not have been scanned as “delivered” by my carrier.)
For the nerds among you, note that the extremely long time apparently held by the USPS set off no red flag with the County? Possibly, once the letter leaves the mail carrier’s hand un-scanned, that error cannot be easily fixed. There’s no longer anything to “scan out” that’s in the possession of the USPS.
I’m sure all will work out in the end, but still … it’s not what I wanted to see.
Source: The New York Times.
In my just-prior post, I asked why the sidewalks reek of marijuana smoke in some parts of York City. Vastly more than, say, the smell of cigarette smoke. This, despite almost never actually seeing anyone smoking dope, when I was in Manhattan last week.
It was a conundrum. How could the sidewalk air be saturated with the odor of marijuana, but actual, observable marijuana smokers were few and far between?
I think the answer to that riddle is simple: Burning marijuana really stinks. That is, the odor of burning marijuana is potent. It takes a large volume of fresh air to dilute it down to the point where you can no longer smell it. Turning that on its head, a lungful of marijuana smoke can stink up a far larger volume of air than the equivalent amount of cigarette smoke.
Based on a single measurement, casually reported in a single article, using “odor units”, the odor of marijuana smoke was maybe 300 times as potent as the odor of cigarette smoke. Continue reading Post #1869: Manhattan marijuana miasma, part 2
