Personally, I’d go with the idea that the Democrats are the ones who fight for brightly-colored warning signs, guardrails, and PPE for the operators of the orphan crushing machine.

Cynical? Maybe, but that phrase is taken directly from Israel.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I believe in due process, so any Republican making a lot of noise about protecting children should in, a just world, at least be probable cause for a search warrant.

It’s the New York Post, though. 100% intentional.

A rainbow appearing in the sky over Dublin on the day that Ireland voted to legalize same-sex marriage? A tornado destroying the house of Rep. Joe Harding, who authored the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida?

I don’t know how much clearer He can get!

ready and willing and even eager to mouth whatever he thinks will please whoever he’s desperate to please at the moment.

How much would you bet that that doesn’t apply to his wife, if you know what I mean?

I see this so much in so many people that I feel like it’s blown up by the strong streak of magical thinking in American society. Like, I have to worry about it, because if I don’t, it’ll happen. It’s only the anxiety per se (not any actual action based on the foresight gained from it) that stops the bad thing from happening.

Brilliant! Just put your pillow in the wash on spin cycle while cooking your risotto to save a lot of effort.

Dammit. At least I was able to maintain the comforting illusion until I got to work.

I’m no expert on whether it’s codified as a work safe practice, nor am I out to convince anybody to get on such a rig. For what it’s worth, I’m just sharing what I’ve learned as a sailor, and what I see here is a lot of folks certain that this is crazy because of their intuition that it’ll tip over easily. With that it of the way…

Based on my intuition, there was simply no way a 747 could even toodle around the tarmac, much less fly, just by blowing some air out the back. Big ones weigh 500 tons! Then, I learned the power of air and lift intimately by putting a specially-shaped piece of Dacron up a metal pole on top of a boat. Experience updated my intuition, and I’m not even slightly nervous about flying anymore.

Similarly, from the other direction, my intuition said that there’s no way a boat could stay upright with parts (mast, cabin, tuna tower, stacks of containers, water park and shopping mall deck, etc.) so high above the waterline, and so little hull beneath it. But I’ve learned intimately the effects of primary stability, and ballast. With my intuition changed, this setup looks fine.

I’ve had the experience, too, of working in a boat yard. At the end of the season, the owner drove the crawler crane onto a barge not much bigger than the one in the image, and we used it to yank boat mooring anchors out of the lake bed. Even a heavy weight on the end of the crane boom barely affected the trim of the barge. I’ve walked on many an EZ Dock section, and experienced that sections like this have immense primary stability, too.

Indeed, by my back of the envelope calculations, that 20’ by 20’ EZ Dock barge would take in the rough range of 75 tons of force to capsize. (Easier to submerge it!) Even with the 32’ lever arm of the scissor lift, that’s still more than 7 tons of lateral force needed to capsize it. I don’t know the numbers on what it takes to capsize the scissor lift itself, but given that I know that the barge is going to stay quite level, and that there’s no lateral force on the scissor lift platform in this scenario, it seems that they’d be fine even without the straps lashing the lift to the barge.

Anyway, I did a reverse image search, and did not find an original source. I have no idea how common this is, but I did find a comment thread from 4 years ago on the red site with comments from a user who said he called a local company that rents out Rotodocks (a very similar product) which claimed that they do it all the time.

Hope that is interesting, and yeah, absolutely, get the numbers from a real engineer before putting yourself in situations like this.

That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That’s just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!

This has got to be rage-bait. Nobody is this fucking dumb, right? Please let me believe it’s rage-bait at least until after breakfast.

EZ Dock is the brand name, and the company even markets its products for use as floating work platforms.

EZ Dock Floating Work Platforms

The manufacturer markets them for carrying equipment.

It may not be the most poetic, but I’m partial to the word holdfast, which is a biological structure that anchors organisms to surfaces. “Hold fast” was an order given to sailors of yore, telling them to grab tightly onto the ship to avoid being washed overboard in storms. The word suggests images of kelp, mussels, or sponges doing the same, determinedly holding fast against the waves, figurative and literal.

The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it’s really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.

It’s disheartening.

Yes, if Americans rise up, I think it’ll look a lot more like The Troubles than the first American Civil War. For one, because there aren’t clear, geographical divisions this time, and indeed, I would guess that guerilla tactics are going to be more effective than guns against a military with overwhelming conventional warfare capabilities.

Is it? That’s exactly the kind of rhetoric used to defend Israel, and bombing schools with kids in them is exactly what they do. American police train with the IDF. That kind of brutality we (ETA: as in “the U.S.” broadly) support abroad comes home eventually.

They’re called “snout houses,” because the garage makes them look like they have a big, ugly pig snout.

Usually, the answer is racism. In the case of HOAs, though, I’m going to guess that it’s probably racism.

ETA: I looked it up on Wikipedia. The answer is: racism.