csteubs

VMI has a number of cannonballs embedded in the turrets on the backside of Old Barracks as well. They're more placeholders now than anything, but were left in situ after General Hunter shelled and burned the then-arsenal during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. One of my favorite points of intrigue as a cadet tour guide long ago.

Not OP, but I use solar and H8-size AGM batteries as primary with a backup diesel generator that I've converted to run on wood gas (and occasionally coal gas). Added a triple stage water filter to the gasifier last year to keep the tar and creosote down. The generator is an old clunker but it's easy to disassemble, which made it an ideal candidate for tinkering and the eventual retrofit.

Completely rational. It makes sense that an area with a highest concentration of defense/government contractors would see a ton of ads geared towards the procurement folks. I grew up in the beltway and interned with some bigger defense contractors in college, just pointing out that it's a phenomenon unique to the DMV area (with some more memorable examples).

Extremely accurate. L3Harris pumped so much ad money into the walkways at Dulles I'm surprised they don't have naming rights to a terminal. There was a time not too long ago where you couldn't listen to WTOP without hearing Mitre and ManTech ads with the term "Digital Twin".

I grew up in northern Virginia and very fondly remember going to Dulles with my dad as a kid to watch the Concorde take off for the last time. That this is the engine off the same plane I saw 20 years ago is really cool. Our old house was directly under the approach path; the windows would shake at 2:30PM almost every day.

I install replacements for friends and their referrals who've had them stolen; it's a serious and unfortunately common problem in LA. Roughly 80% are off of Priuses (Prii?) and most local Toyota dealerships are backordered for months. The OEM replacement part itself is one of the most expensive at around $2300 due to the higher level of precious metals in the catalyst matrix. The replacements I install aren't CARB compliant (which is why they're $125 or so on eBay), but it resolves the exhaust leak/fuel smell and noise at the expense of passing emissions.

I'm not sure what aspect of this conversation is "low intelligence", but automotive technician salary data doesn't often match reality where techs can (and often do) make close to double their "official" salary in side jobs. I'm a full-time engineering manager at a startup in LA, and I do repair gigs in my garage during the evenings and on weekends--all word-of-mouth referrals from former and returning customers. I've made a shade over $30k after expenses this year doing 2-3 jobs a week. Most are catalytic converter replacements that I charge a flat $500 for on $145 in parts; takes me an hour per. I've done everything from rear main seals to fuel pump replacements to in-and-out oil/filter changes.

What your comment and sentiment misses, I think, is that a significant percentage of mechanics do shade-tree jobs that won't ever be accounted for in official reports. Dealers and shops have become extremely hit-and-miss, part quality fell dramatically during the pandemic (ask me how I know), and thrifty consumers are more inclined to spend money on independent mechanics that work out of a small shop; there's a ton of money not being accounted for in the process. Maybe not "cool" or "attractive" to you, but I'd love to never have to touch a keyboard again and spend my time working on cars, boats, and fabrication.

I hope their Trust & Security team has a roadmap that prioritizes topic and thread-jacking. The advent of GPT and their recent changes to creator compensation has created a massive drive for engagement by any means; the results are fairly predictable. Clicking on any trending topic usually surfaces completely unrelated videos with that topic's hashtags (and all of the other trending topic hashtags) appended to the tweet.

Then you have the "content creators" who use GPT to summarize or add details to a post from a larger content aggregator in hopes of bandwagoning engagement. I see a lot of this type of behavior from popular History-focused accounts and the mega-accounts that post engagement bait content (think canned, "desert island"-type questions and polls). It's less malicious but certainly reinforces cynicism towards the state of Twitter/X and the broader social web.

This guy was undoubtedly the kid who reminded the teacher to assign homework.

New cylinders can get a little pricey but used bottles can be found dime-a-dozen on Craigslist/FB Marketplace/etc. Just need to know how to properly inspect a tank. Gas supply stores can get really particular about BYOBottle because of the safety/liability component, but they'll typically treat a no-fill tank as the deposit for a new tank in much the same way consumer propane tank exchange works.

Boost is likely the way to go for OP. I first saw them in Walmart in 2012 as a freshman at a military college. They made the surprise cadre workouts and X mile rucks suck so much less that I'd buy them all up when we were on liberty to sell out of my supply box. Really clever bit of kit, and the mint scent was a nice touch.

Having to handle lead for a practically unretrievable amount of gold would (I hope) be enough of a deterrent for the vast majority of "citizen scrappers". Worst case, I think a Pb/Au scrap grey-market would look something like the current catalytic converter market, where raw materials are purchased at set rate by an intermediary and then sold for further processing. Most people know there's gold in their computer parts, but still opt for the recycling bin/ziploc bag in a junk drawer.

I used Grav for my CS capstone back in 2016. One of the requirements was to create and host a web page with project details, abstract, etc. I completely forgot about that portion until 2 days before the deadline, and I stumbled on Grav while looking for templates. I had the cleanest, most modern looking site of all our groups up in about 5 hours of tinkering and adjusting and turned what would have been a C into a B+.

Haven't used it since, but I'm glad it still exists.