Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Good Morning, Readers

     I'm drawing a blank.  The current Congress is a nearly-endless source of amusement -- but it's as funny as riding in a bus going over a cliff.  You can laugh all the way down, but it's still going to hit.

     On the other hand, how hard is it going to hit, and what is at the bottom?  The Federal government has been shut down* for over three weeks and yet civilization has not fallen.  Who possibly could have predicted it?
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* N.B., a "shut down" fed.gov still seems to be operating at a level that George Washington or Calvin Coolidge might have recognized as a functioning Federal government.  It's not like Congress has gone home and there's a stack of sign-in sheets at the abandoned border crossings.

5 comments:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

By all accounts I’ve seen, 80% of fedgov is funded and up and running normally.

Paul B said...

Yep. and if they are still furloughed at the 30 day mark they can me let go.

They all should be abundantly qualified for food server or other service industry positions.

All hale the decline.

Anonymous said...

An interesting speculation at:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/trumps_shutdown_trap.html#ixzz5cgrz32RQ

Roberta X said...

Anon, that would presuppose that Mr. Trump had some over-arching plan. I have seen no evidence of that sort of thinking in his Administration so far. But it's good that some people can find a reason to be optimistic.

Douglas2/Unknown said...

I wanted to reference a PDF article on power surges that is usually available on the NIST site, and the site was redirected to a shutdown placeholder page -- so I had to past the URL into the Wayback machine, where the PDF page layout is crap but the information is still the same --

I was happy to see that they didn't change the robots.txt file to make the saved version disappear from archive.org, I remember being very suspicious that that had happened during a previous shutdown, where some pages not only disappeared on the federal website but also disappeared from Google and Bing caches and were not on Archive.org. It's possible that they hadn't ever been indexed on archive.org, but I think that unlikely for the stuff I was researching.

Anyway, within a day all of the NIST pages I wanted to reference were working again this time, but with a header at the top that falsely claimed that they were not working. Go figure.

I'd heard that in previous shutdowns, according to one in a position to know, (i,e.: Coyote) word came down from on high to shut things down even if it was more trouble and expense to do so than to make no changes. In this one I half suspect that stuff like the NIST web-library shutdown was malicious compliance with an old protocol by staffers upset with the situation.

https://www.nist.gov/pml/quantum-measurement-division/surge-protection-low-voltage-ac-power-circuits