call them hobbits if you want, but there seems to have been some insular dwarfism going on in the british isles a few thousand years ago...

i keep pointing out that all of the analysis on iran is done in a vacuum, as though they're not surrounded by russia, china and india - the three biggest powers outside of nato - and as though there aren't any mutual interests in terms of defense and trade.

he's getting the right point, i think, but he's avoiding the context. the realization that's being come to is that the harder they push iran, the more they're going to integrate with america's competitors. as a "regional power"? well, let's not sell out the saudis so quickly, now. how many billions was the last arms purchase? that's a big shift in alliance, and there's really no indication it's occurring.

see, the thing is that the sanctions are an act of war to begin with. the united states is already at war with iran. it's just a different type of war, aimed at trying to influence the government. it's not just empty barbarism. i think everybody knows this. but, if those sanctions are having an opposite effect of increased military co-operation with russia, and china and india circumventing the petrodollar to buy oil, it's no longer playing into american interests. the aim is to dominate them; if the effect is they're losing them, then they're not working.

when something's not working, you don't keep doing it - you recognize as much and adjust. the west pretends to be so concerned about iran developing a bomb, but the faster and easier way to get a deterrent is to rely on russian and/or chinese protection. if the americans keep it up, the russians could act out of principle. and the chinese simply need the oil.

but, iran wants sovereignty. it might be an exaggeration to suggest it wants to be one of the four biggest powers outside of nato, but it certainly wants to be in control of it's own interests. so, becoming a fief of russia or china is no answer. that gives the americans a bit of bargaining power.

which means that what is developing is the same situation that exists in north korea, where a crafty state is finding ways to play the powers off against each other.

i had to leave my browser window open last night, and it's generally a bad idea to try and record with it open due to ram issues. it's done now, mostly. i'll have to wait until after 2 am to get back to downloading the rest of the libraries i'm looking into - i'm looking at about a 50 gb download, and...

there was a court ruling last year that put usage based billing in place, meaning the isps can charge you based on your bandwidth. there's a really bad oligopoly in canada with internet, stemming from the way the infrastructure was built. somebody might correct me (i'm not old enough to remember, first hand) but i believe the telephone and cable companies in canada were previously state operated. honestly? that makes far more sense to me, and the reason is that it doesn't make sense to have multiple lines. you want one cable infrastructure and one phone infrastructure - anything else is just wasteful. but, the result of it moving from public to private ownership was that, in any given area, there's a monopoly on the cable and a monopoly on the phone based around who owns the lines. splitting the lines up to different companies in different areas didn't really have the effect of breaking up monopolistic practices, and why would it? if you live here in windsor, cogeco owns all the cable lines (and bell owns all the phone lines) so you're ultimately forced to go through one of them if you want to use the infrastructure.

so, reacting further to the monopoly, the court ruled that the companies that own the lines have to sell service to smaller isps. so, the way it works is that teksavvy buys bandwidth from cogeco, and i buy bandwidth from teksavvy. the capitalist relation should mean that's more expensive, because there's more managers.

but it isn't. it's less than half the price. but what i like about teksavvy is that they offer very basic rates. i'm on youtube all the time, and i download a bit of music, but i don't game or watch netflix or anything like that - and there's only one of me down here, rather than a family of 5 or 6. my average monthly usage is much less than 30 gb - and usually closer to 20. nor can i download faster than the internet will let me download. so, all i need is about a 5 mbps line with a 50 gb limit. what i have is a 6 mbps line with a 75 gb limit (for $25/month) - and 99 months out of 100, i'm not going to get close to it. even if i were to download 50 gb of libraries in peak hours, i'd still only be something like 73 gb for the month.

i don't want to push it, though.

teksavvy didn't like the ruling. so, what they've done is put the download limit down (and, like i say, 75 gb is usually way more than sufficient for me) and allow unlimited downloads over night, from 2-8 am. it's a good solution for gamers, i guess, who are usually up all night, anyways.

for me, waiting until after 2 to suck this down is an isolated thing to make sure i don't hit the limit...

but, i don't need a browser for that, so i should be able to work overnight. i've got a few things to play with, hopefully one of them gives me what i want right away....

i should point out that i have youtube defaulted to the lowest quality level, though. this isn't for bandwidth reasons, it's because my internet tv is a pIII that shipped with windows 98 on it, so i'm trying not to max it out. well, that and i just use it to watch lectures and news shows...

i don't need noam chomsky's wrinkles or paul jay's bald head beaming at me in crystal clear high definition or who-gives-a-fuck p.

yeah. the pressure knocked the valve off. wrench fixed it. for now, anyways. hey, tearing the pipes up is neither trivial nor cheap. but the idea that it was the pressure got through, at least. this is good.

so, things are back to being idyllic in my little basement hideaway, here...

now that i understand the plumbing a bit better, i'll have to be a bit more aggressive. that (and any pipe damage) could have been prevented by unclogging the clog when i first saw it. but i just didn't understand the system. it was just a basic empirical "if rain, then slow drain. should report issue.". which is what i did and should have done. it was really the "rainwater cannot cause slow drains" response that really cost him his pipes, if there's damage....

there may be an upside to it.

the roaches are in the subfloor somewhere. the only one i've seen since may has been out in the laundry area. it's a good guess that their nest was where the flooding was. if i'm lucky, it drowned the bulk of them and washed away a lot of eggs when it flowed through.

it's ok, i'm used to this.

there was a meme in my group of friends when i was in high school. "fuck. shoulda listened to j.".

as applied seriously:

i failed my french assignment because the teacher said i didn't understand the question. it's actually what j said. fuck. shoulda listened to j.

as applied ironically:

it's raining and i forgot my umbrella. fuck. shoulda listened to j.

(in such ironic usage, j would not have offered an opinion on the umbrella, and would probably not even be present.)

there were other usages. but there's a point. shoulda listened to j!

the question that wasn't asked and makes all the difference in the world...

does the white house control the pentagon, or does the pentagon control the white house?

i know there's some rules on some old piece of paper nobody takes seriously, i'm talking about the actual fact of it. because it's easy to see that if the pentagon controls the whitehouse then the elections don't matter in terms of foreign policy direction. the civil service just keeps plugging from one administration to the next.

consider this: when was the last time a president truly altered foreign policy? through the course of my life time, at least, it's been one after the other with an identical set of policies on every important issue that exists.

i think if they took the whole thing, the lions would respond differently.

what this is demonstrating is that lions know how to share. and that's known.

deathtokoalas
yeah, no. the cat's jealous. that's easy to see.

i suppose the eagle must be able to comprehend that eating your cat would piss you off, and it doesn't seem to want to do that. that's not a game i'd play too long.

Stan “Overlord” Unseld
"the cat's jealous. that's easy to see" is that even possible... its a fucking cat. i seen a few of her videos an it seems the cat an bird gets along it is odd to say the least but cool.

deathtokoalas
as moderately advanced mammals, cats have relatively complex brains and a nervous system that makes use of all kinds of hormones. there's absolutely no question that they feel emotions whatsoever.

i think the mental block is probably in not realizing that "jealousy" is a very concrete and well understood chemical reaction, rather than something abstract that exists in some cloud.

Stan “Overlord” Unseld
or they could just enjoy being around each other... lol whatever the case you seem smart as hell... an why death to koalas?

deathtokoalas
the perverse, revolting cuteness of koalas must be obliterated, before it destroys us all.

Stan “Overlord” Unseld
Well in the words of Obama....: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy the koala terrorist group to protect our great nation.

deathtokoalas
again, i feel that you are belittling a concern of prime importance. we must declare a war against koalas before they smother our freedoms away from us.

i take no pleasure in their destruction, but it is a war that must be waged, a task that must be accomplished.

look at them in their eucalyptus trees, lazy and drunk, while the rest of us toil away. is it their fault? did god them make so? satan, perhaps! it is truly despicable. we cannot tolerate this.

they must be annihilated. but, i fear the collective will to destroy them is not present, and this peril that we face has no end point but our own destruction.

...unless we act quickly, decisively and with minimal compassion.

please heed these words without scorn. the future of our galaxy depends upon it.

Stan “Overlord” Unseld
I am in no way belittling your concerns... or should I say OUR concerns. Koalas are extremely cute hell their irresponsibly cute thus I concur we must wage war on them to remove them from OUR planet because they pollute our planet with intolerable cuteness an this my friend must be stopped. I have known many wars an I believed my time of fighting was over but the overwhelming disgusting cuteness of those koalas had forced me to take up my sword an rage once again. I do not know if I will return but that is the life of a soldier...I do this not because it is easy but because it is hard. 

deathtokoalas
FOOL! do you think that koalas may be destroyed with the blow of your sword, or with the shot of a pistol? such a weak creature would not pose us such a threat. you will be devoured by the minions they control, sacrificed, and used as compost for their sacred eucalyptus. do not waste yourself with such follies.

we require a strategic coming together, an industrial project of great magnitude that will produce a great weapon: renewable energy. it is only through a great mastery of physics that they may be truly abolished.

time is running out.

Stan “Overlord” Unseld
I do indeed understand that me an the brave men that follow me are marching to our death...but the koala are moving to fast and if i do not act now they will overrun us before the "great weapon" is complete..but that's not the only reason i go..yes we will die an in our deaths we shall become martyrs..so that many more shall join our great cause...

deathtokoalas
martyrs shall not save us. i'm not getting through....

Cortanasboyfriend
yeah eating her cat would piss her off probably, but I don't think she would dare hurt a bald eagle, hell I don't think anyone would except for those damn poachers.

TheSFCEmpire415
No its just that cat CANT HANDLE OF THAT MURICAN FREEDOM ! USA USA USA !

releasing inri000 in the alter-reality

time is moving forward in the alternate reality...

at midnight, it will be 17 years and 242 days ago that i finished my first demo recordings, in the basement of an upper middle class suburb of ottawa, canada called "sawmill creek".

my dad had built me a recording studio in the basement, and put a drum kit along with a bass and a 4-track recorder in there. i think he had plans to use it himself, and the idea of building it for me was basically a ploy to get it past the wife. that happened more than once before i turned 20...

...but i also think he was hoping i'd stop sitting in my room by myself with my guitar. i'd been playing for around five years at that point, working on a combination of original songwriting, semi-formal blues training and informally teaching myself how to play the alternative rock of the period. people didn't really interest me. it was a bit of a problem, one that's only gotten worse as i've aged. if he could build a studio with some gears, maybe i'd meet some friends and start a band...

the thing is, that isn't how i interpreted it. my favourite artists at the time were billy corgan and trent reznor, so it just sort of struck me as natural to lay the parts down myself. bass is very intuitive for a guitarist, and keyboards are intuitive for everybody, but a big part of this demo is about me teaching myself how to play drums - and at times it's quite obvious, although i should temper that with an explanation that the drum parts are quite purposefully off-kilter in many places.

what can you say about a 17.5 year old demo written by a 15 year-old? there's a few interesting moments on the disc, which i've pulled out as highlights and uploaded to youtube. the bulk of it, however, is exactly what it is - an exceedingly awkward and mildly ostracized teenager working out various day-to-day issues that only a teenager can really understand, while displaying overwhelming influence from overwhelming influences. hey, at least i wasn't writing "mmmmbop". this isn't as polished as frogstomp, but it's arguably more interesting and certainly more original. if i could go back in time, i'd take the influences off my sleeves just a little.

i've come to understand what i was doing as a part of the then contemporary emo-punk movement, albeit on the fringes of it, as it existed in disconnected basements across north america. i had no understanding of that at the time. i'd guess most people a part of it didn't either. it's been defined in a revisionist manner.

i stopped recording for a little while after this. it's partly because i was naive, and was expecting some kind of response, but it's mostly because i was grounded for a substantial period in early 1997. i've cut out a period of 66 days, and will consequently start pushing tracks from the second tape demo (recorded in the same place) on the 29th of october. over this period, i'll be cycling the 11 tracks from the first demo that i have up on youtube in 6 day periods (with boogeyman consisting of three tracks from this demo, and teenage jesus consisting of two), but i will not be posting those updates here.

so, this is the last youtube switch update for a bit over two months. the song i'm working on has been slow, but i'd be lying if i'd say i wasn't expecting that. in two months, though, i should hopefully have plowed through from the summer of 2001 to sometime in 2003.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-1

basement toilet fixed, waiting on upstairs toilet

hi.

i learned a lot about plumbing from this exercise. it's not something i'd looked into before...

the eel fixed the drain. but, for future reference, this is what happened:

- your sump pump is connected to outside
- your floor drain is connected to the sanitary.
- there was a partial blockage deep in the sanitary, meaning the floor drain was emptying the basement water very slowly. this caused the sump pump to be running all the time to compensate.
- so, when it rained the basement got full of water and that water blocked the sanitary completely, causing the slow flush, sink gurgles, etc. given enough of a dry spell, it would have come down on it's own through a combination of slow floor drainage and sump pump action, but it's of course better to clear the plug.

so, the systems are not entirely separate. your pump is pumping excess water to the street, but most of the rain water is in fact flowing through the floor drain and into the sanitary, and if you were to block that off your pump probably wouldn't be able to keep up.

so, in the future, if you see a slow toilet after the rain, it means your basement is slowly flooding due to a blocked sanitary.

j

RAW SEWAGE LEAK FROM UPSTAIRS

the toilet from upstairs is leaking brown water from the ceiling in two places.

it's hard to think this is unrelated to recent concerns.

...and the sump pump is still running from thursday's mild rains...

(pause)

i noticed it stopped...

did you get my email and turn a pipe off? if not, it must be flush related because it's not constant.

fuck. just gotta laugh.

i'm pretty sure the high pressure from the rainwater backup/clog issue burst or dislodged something in the toilet upstairs, leading to a leaky pipe. by the end of it, an upstairs toilet flush was making the dishes in my sink rattle. there was clearly a substantial force of air feeding back...

now, the fact that the snake fixed the problem isn't going to help my case. "i told you there was a clog". and i agreed there was probably a clog, but i pointed out that it wasn't the clog causing the backup, it was the rain. and, i was right. had we not got all that rain, the clog wouldn't have been a problem.....until spring. it's good it was found. but, that doesn't change the fact that i was right about the rain. had he not convinced me that the sump pump is more powerful than it is and that the systems are completely separate, i wouldn't have emailed the fire department in a desperate attempt to figure out where the rain was getting in. it makes absolute sense now, but (dammit jim!) i'm a nerd with a creative streak and an ability to think outside the box (i think i proved my worth on that basis with this), not a plumber. leave it to an artist to come up with the most ridiculous way possible to explain water seepage into the system, right?

that's not going to get through. what's going to get through is "i told you there was a clog".

so, i'm going to be told it's the seal on the toilet and they're going to replace the seal. in the end, replacing the seal might make the connection tight again, and it might fix it. but could it be a coincidence? is the leak unrelated to the backup? i can't prove it one way or the other, but i think it's at least likely that the air pressure broke something and hoping it's just the seal is pretty risky...

"a camouflaged pelican of immense girth must be transporting water from the river to the sewer."

so, the fire chief tells me there's no sump pump in the building.

to begin with, how would the fire chief know if there's a sump pump in the building? is there a master list of sump pumps in city records?

well, maybe there is. who knows. but, there was a tenant in the basement - the lights were often on late into the night - and there's a spout on the side of the building. clearly, there was a sump pump.

it may have been an illegal sump pump. an illegal sump pump? well, maybe there was an illegal unit in the basement. it's not uncommon, actually. but, like i'm supposed to get sad about accidentally reporting it. i need the drain fixed, bob the bourgie across the street that fucked off on his property rights responsibilities can fuck off if he doesn't like it...

i mean, if you're just going to sit there and let the drain back up into the neighbourhood's toilets, you deserve what you get.

so, how do you explain cuteness in animals as a biological reaction, anyways? forget the philosophy, that's oldskool. stop thinking like that. start thinking biologically.

like, let's say you see a squirrel bopping about with a nut. awwww. but, you should probably want to eat the thing, really. or should you? squirrels really aren't the safest thing to eat, in terms of carrying parasites. rodents, in general, carry a lot of diseases....

perhaps it's a type of quality reversal. you're allowed to think psychologically, you just have to recognize it's a result of the biology, rather than vice versa. if you ought to want to eat the thing, but the thing is gross, you really, really ought to NOT want to eat the thing. so, because you would want to eat the thing if it wasn't gross, it's actually rather important that your response to a squirrel bopping about is "i don't want to eat that because it could make me sick".

see, but you might be tempted, anyways. the next step up is "well, i can't eat the thing, look how cute it is.".

perhaps cuteness consequently derives from grossness

i just realized the fire chief (yes, i cced it to the fire chief. i'll call the fucking mayor if i have to.) is going to read this and go "what is she, some kind of anarchist or something?".

ordered solutions are preferable. but if nothing happens, i WILL smash through the windows and fix it myself...

cced to pretty much the entire management of the windsor fire department:

hi.

sorry to be aggressive about this, but i know that the response rate on email communication with public employees can be a little slow due to high volume, so i'm hoping you can advise on what is actually a fairly unfortunate situation.

i'm renting an apartment at marion & cataraqui. about a month ago, there was a fire in a large property across the street (also marion & cataraqui, but technically on cataraqui). since then, the rain has been overwhelming the sanitary on the street (several houses are getting slow toilets and backups) and i'm fairly convinced the cause has to be the rainwater draining through the floor drain. the property is abandoned, and the electricity is off, so the sump pump is not working. additionally, this seems to be causing additional stress on neighbouring sump pumps.

it's unfortunate that there was a fire on the street, but there needs to be a drainage solution developed before the spring. this is a large property and it simply can't be left to drain into the sanitary like this.

i've been informed that the fire department probably turned the power off, and i certainly understand the reasons why. but, there needs to be a pump in the property, or the drain needs to be plugged, or something else - otherwise the toilets on the street are going to back up badly in the spring.

so, i really ultimately need to know who deals with this. the city? the fire department? the property owner? neighbours smashing through the windows and doing it themselves?

j

i'll smash the place up with a baseball bat, and then cram the bat right down the floor drain.

yeah? just watch me...

it'll have to overflow through the windows, out to the storm sewer.

gah...

so, a few weeks ago, a heavy rainstorm came through here and the toilet started flushing slowly. at the time, i had no idea what that meant - i didn't even know if i was on city or a septic (i'm on city). but, some back and forth with the landlord and a lot of googling have led me to believe that something is broken with the piping.

the upside is i've learned a bit about how this works. it's something i've never had to think about before. but the way it's supposed to work is that the rain water goes into the storm drain and down a separate pipe to the river, where it dumps in untreated. the toilet water goes into a separate sanitary line and out to the treatment plant. so, rainfall should never back up the toilet.

and, yet it was clear from the beginning that rainwater is in fact slowing down the toilet's drainage. it's not quite backing up. yet.

but, of course the response i'm getting is "that's impossible, it's not how the system works".

there's since been two rainfalls that have caused the toilet to slow down at levels that are proportional to the amount of rain that fell. small rainfalls mean small issue. big rainfalls mean big issue. so, we've got correlation and proportionality. the scientific method tells me we have a causal relationship, here. but science has been less powerful than faith. my scientific reasoning was met with an offer to use the landlord's plunger.

but, what the causal relationship i developed demonstrates is that there's either a break in the local line (which would be expensive for the property owner to fix) or a break on the city line. so, i asked the guy next door...

yup. he's getting backups from the rain, too.

now, i need to convince them that they need to get the city in here to fix something before the snow melts in the spring. as the relationship is proportional, things could get messy down here if nothing happens before then.

there's some construction on the main street a few blocks away to replace old sewer lines.

i'm *hoping* that what's going on is that they have the rainwater temporarily routed to the sanitary, and it will be corrected within a few weeks. but, i have no evidence of this.

my other suspicion is connected to the house across the street. there was a fire there about a month ago, which is about when things started backing up. the property's been completely shut down. if they shut the sump pump off, the rainwater could be pooling in the basement and heading down the floor drain - which is usually connected to the sanitary. that would explain it. the problem is that it's hard to understand how that could be generating *enough* water to back shit up without there being significant blockage somewhere. but, then you need to ask the question: what else has been flowing through the floor drain since then?

i've done all i can do, though. i've proven to them that something is crossed, and it's probably a city issue. now i just have to hope they do something about it...

i'm honestly expecting a more positive response from the main property owner than the guy upstairs. i THINK i've got enough evidence to convince him. he mentioned calling the city a few emails ago, so i think he'll get it.

but i can't risk this backing up in the spring and am going to have to call the city myself if i don't get a good response.

i mean, it's crystal clear that rainwater is flooding the sanitary somewhere, even if it's not supposed to.

what was weird about the rain today, though, is that the sump pump didn't come on until like an hour after it stopped raining, indicating it's draining from somewhere - like the house across the street, maybe.

i've convinced myself it's the abandoned property next door.

so, i've sent an email off to the windsor engineering department, asking them about the sewer replacement (is the storm going through the sanitary?) and what the procedure is for dealing with an abandoned property that's not draining properly...

slow toilet drains from the rain, questions about an unmaintained property

To: engineeringdept@city.windsor.on.ca

jessica
hi....

i'm hoping this is a good email address, but maybe you could forward this somewhere more appropriate if it isn't?

i'm renting a basement apartment at cataraqui and marion and am getting a few problems and am just trying to determine the cause. my landlord claims there are separate storm and sanitary lines, and i have no reason to doubt him. his logic is that rainfall should not cause the toilet to drain slowly, and he's consequently not taking me seriously. i understand his argument and why it shouldn't happen.

however, i'm a scientifically minded person and i've been able to demonstrate the following:

1) the slow down is correlated with the rain. that is, the toilet drains slowly after a rain and drains normally once the rain has dried up. so, while a block might exist, it's not the primary cause of the slow down.

2) the amount of slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. that is, when it rains a little, it slows down a little. when it rains a lot, it slows down a lot.

despite understanding that these systems ought to be separated, my brief and aborted training as a physicist tells me that when you have things that are correlated in a proportional manner, it is very likely that there is a causal relationship between them. that is, i have a high degree of certainty that the rain is causing the toilet to drain slowly in a manner that is proportional to how much rain is falling.

while it's august right now, the proportionality has me concerned about spring runoff, which is of course substantial in canada. i have every reason to think that that a lot of snow melting could back up the toilet and cause a horrible mess.

now, i've talked to the neighbour next door and he's confirmed that he's actual dealing with back ups through the pipes, which is a worse problem than i have. he's convinced that the problem is related to sewer replacement on wyandotte down the road. this only makes sense to me if they might have put the storm through the sanitary as a temporary measure. is that something the construction team has done in the short run?

i'm leaning towards a different cause. at roughly the same time that the problem started, the house across the street experienced a significant fire. the property has been completely shut down. i suspect the sump pump is not running, the basement is flooding and it's draining into the floor, which is connected to the sanitary and this is causing the backup. the issue i'm running into in having this make sense is related to the volume of water running through the floor drain. it's a pretty big property - it was an apartment before the fire, but it would have been a five or six bedroom house some time in the middle of the last century, and it has a very big backyard. so, there's a potential for a large volume of water to be coming into the floor drain. how likely do you think it is that this could be the root of the problem? how big a problem do you think this is going to cause in the spring, if it's not addressed now? and what is the better solution for this - running a sump pump on an abandoned property, or closing the drains off? how does the city deal with something like this, if it's determined to be the cause?

city of windsor, engineering department
I would like to clear up a few points in your email.

While your landlord may be correct in that the house may be serviced by separate storm and sanitary connections (I can't confirm that), both these connections would outlet to the same combined sewer in the road. There is only one sewer Cataraqui and one on Marion, and they are both combined sewers meaning that they accept both rain water and sewage.

With respect to the Wyandotte project, there is no sewer work being undertaken as part of that project. Windsor Utilities is replacing the watermain and services and the City will reconstruct the pavement following that work. This project would have no impact on the sewers servicing your property.

You are most likely correct in that there is a correlation between rainfall and the slow running plumbing in your house. This is due to the combined nature of the sewer that services your property. During rain events, combined sewers fill with rainwater and therefore have limited capacity to accept flows from buildings.

With respect to the apartment building across the street from you, all rainfall runoff from this property would have entered the sewer system via foundation drains prior to the fire, so the fact that the basement may have flooded and the water is now entering the floor drain would change the drainage pattern very little. In fact, rainwater entering the sewers from this property would be very small in proportion to that coming from the catchbasins draining the roads in the area.

With respect to abandonment of the connections servicing the apartment building, that would be addressed when the building is demolished by the Building Department. If you have concerns regarding the state of
the building, please contact the Building Department via 311.

Hopefully, this answers some of your questions. Please contact me if you want to discuss this matter further.

Sincerely;
----------------, P.Eng.
A/Contracts Co-ordinator

further update...

jessica
we got very little rain today, and the effect was consequently much less, but still noticeable. what that demonstrates is two-fold:

1) that the slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. we now have correlation and proportionality, demonstrating causality.

2) if a very small amount has a noticeable effect, a very large amount would have a very large effect.

i don't think it's likely we're ever going to get enough rain for a big problem, and i can deal with a slow toilet, but i'm worried about run-off in the spring. the proportionality that is now demonstrated indicates that the run-off could be a gigantic problem.

none of this was happening before, so something has changed in the last month, something that needs to be determined is if other people in the neighbourhood are having the same problem or not. a back-up like this should only affect the lowest lying fixtures, so i need to find somebody else with fixtures in the basement to ask. i've identified the basement tenant next door, i'm now waiting for him to come outside for a smoke to ask him. if he's dealing with the same thing, well know it's a city problem. if he's not, i'm not sure what to say other than that something is probably busted...

(pause)

alright...

so, i talked to the tenant next door and he IS getting back-ups from the rain, meaning it's a city thing. he thinks the pipes in the area are bad and it's the construction.

at this point, i've reached what i can do: i've identified there's a problem with the city piping and reported it to the property owner.

it's now in your hands as to what to do...

(pause)

i've thought about this a bit and i think it's worth being careful about. apparently, the neighbour next door is actually getting backups, not just slow drains. i may have a block of some sort, but i'd hazard a guess that most plumbing is at least mildly blocked. what if the reason i'm NOT backing up is because there IS a block?

i think there's enough evidence at this point to conclude that rainwater is somehow getting into the city's sanitary. i think it's better to focus on that.

the landlord
THE City WILL BE HERE MONDAY DURING THE DAY TO RUN THE EEL THROUGH THE LINE:

jessica
ok.

i still don't feel that i'm getting across what the problem is.

the problem is not that the line is blocked all the time. it is not. the problem is that the line is ONLY blocked when it RAINS.

in general, i'm an advocate of ruling out possibilities. the only way to find out is to try. but i've developed what is a pretty strong causal relationship between the drain and the rain. it seems to be that it will continue to drain slowly until the sump pump turns off, then get back to normal. the sump pump continues to run 12 hours after a mild rain storm, and i need to reiterate that this seems unusual. but considering the separation, i think what the connection between your sump pump and the toilet down here is is that the water drainage in the basement across the street is going to level at about the same time the sump pump stops. that is, i think that the reason they seem connected is because the floor drain across the street should stop draining at roughly the same time that the sump pump down here stops.

i'd just request that the three of us spend a few minutes over the weekend brainstorming other ways that the rainwater might be overwhelming the sanitary on the street.

that abandoned house is the only thing i can think of that really makes sense...and it would probably be better if one of you can get a hold of him to turn the pump back on and/or plug the drain somehow, if you know him, because if i do it it's going to be through city bylaw.

this weird fear of swallowing is back.

it has to be psychological as opposed to something like, say, ms, which i've seen various symptoms of come and go since i was a little kid. if i get a jug of juice, it goes right down. if i try and take a swig of coffee, i start blowing into the cup. so, i have to take a small sip, swallow, wait and repeat.

i'm pretty sure i'm afraid of choking myself. it goes away after a while....

update...

jessica
hi again.

the toilet did the same thing after the storm today, so it's really obvious, now.

further, i checked the back room and it seems to be flooding out of the storage area beside the laundry room, which my ears tell me is where the sump pump is.

i noticed when i went out for a smoke that it was dumping water on the front lawn at a startling rate. like, it looks like somebody left a faucet running, sort of thing.

again: i have no idea what this means, only that something is flooding and it seems to be connected to the sump pump.

(pause)

actually, the water in the basement seemed to be coming from a little hole in the foundation. but if i were to guess, i'd think the cause of it seeping through would be the massive amount of water coming out of the sump pump directly above it. i might be concerned that it's producing some water damage, but it's sort of secondary to the plumbing issue itself.

it's hard to believe it 's coming from the rain because the puddles on the rest of the street have already dried up. why is this unit getting a thousand times more water than the one next door? so, it has to be feeding back from somewhere.

i just want to be clear about the flow rate. you know the "outdoor taps" that units used to have? i haven't seen once since i was a kid, but you'd attach a hose or a sprinkler to it out of your backyard. it looks like that faucet is on FULL BLAST. and it's been running like that for an hour. there's absolutely no way it's just the rain, it didn't even rain that much, that water has a different source...

with that much water, i thought maybe it was coming from a pipe that could be turned off, but it was suggested to me that that doesn't make sense. see, maybe it doesn't. but the toilet thing doesn't seem to make sense either.

i don't know what the options on the sanitary line are, or how they could get mixed up with the storm drain, but something seems to be crossed.

so i need to ask: did the furnace guys connect any pipes together? might it have crossed something up, through back pressure?

(pause)

sorry for the long email, but, just to finish the thought, it seems like the water was coming out of the sump pump and back into the basement. so it was recycling itself, creating the impression that it was coming out at a steady flow. he put a device in that acts as an inclined plane, to get the water out from the house and each pump is consequently decreasing in volume. so, it seems like it's not backed up, after all, it's just that the ground is really saturated. it might be a good idea to try and make that permanent to prevent further water damage...

it doesn't explain the toilets, but i do think the logic extrapolates. if the water is too saturated in the front of the house, it stands to reason that the city system is possibly backed up.

i'm still a little skeptical about possible flow issues somewhere, but that's an easy line of thinking to stick with for now.

(or it could have been a coincidence that the pump started slowing when the device was installed)

the landlord
Again the pump, pumps storm water, it does not pump sewage. If the sewer, sewage line is backing up we will call the city and report this. Speak to Paul and explain what you are experiencing so that he can look for himself when it rains again. This will give him first hand knowledge of the problem when he speaks to the City.  I will speak to Paul and have him call this to the Public works. This is not are doing this will be a city correction. If you notice around our building that they have had us divert the water from the eves draughs out of the storm pipes at the side of the building. This is so the storms are not overloading, delaying the run off into the storm sewers from the road surfaces. Paul you are seeing  this e-mail, call me when you get this.

jessica
i guess that explains where the extra water is coming from. ok. i just couldn't understand why there was so much on this property, and so little elsewhere without the water backing up from somewhere. i was thinking that if a stormwater pipe had broken, it could be flooding both the sump pit and the sanitary at the same time. but if you're doing it on purpose, that explains that.

i did a bunch of googling and i'm still working with a weak understanding of toilet plumbing but i think it has to be the case that water is pooling somewhere. it might be a blockage, but if it's a blockage it would have to be somewhere that water can pool where it rains - through a manhole or something. this is then killing the air pressure on the flush. otherwise, it would be slow to drain all the time.

the other thing i was thinking was about the air vent coming up from the toilet. if something had been rerouted with the furnace, could it not possibly have a different reaction to rainwater, and conceivably produce a lack of flush pressure? but, i did an experiment early in the morning and i think i've ruled it out. what i did was let the water in the sink run and then flush. the water was flowing right out through the sink before i flushed, but as it was flushing it started to fill up a little. if i understand correctly, this rules out a vent issue by demonstrating a restriction of the flow rate.

i have to admit that i'm not entirely convinced it isn't construction. if they're temporarily down to one pipe somewhere instead of two, that could be where the water is pooling. i know everybody else in the neighbourhood would have to experience this, but how many have toilets that are low enough for it to be an issue?

i'll bring paul down here next time we get a lot of rain...

(pause)

the only other thing i can think of is that maybe one of the neighbours recently installed a sump pump to the sanitary and it's exaggerating an existing block...you're not supposed to that, but people do that...

whether it's via leak, construction, bad install or whatever else i think the flow restriction happening only when it rains, and stopping when it's dried out, demonstrates that there just has to be rainwater blocking the sanitary at some point, somewhere, somehow - even though that's not supposed to happen.

but, like i say, i'll get paul down here to see it next time it happens.

(pause)

actually, there's one more hypothesis i have. i know this is a little bit of a long shot, but the culmination of what you're telling me and what i'm reading and what i'm seeing indicates that something very strange is happening.

the house across the street had a fire last month. it seems like it's been completely shut down since. if they shut the sump pump off, the basement could be flooding in the rain, and the flooding could be finding it's way into the sanitary, slowing the drain down.

it's just a guess, but something weird like that MUST be happening. i don't known if you know those guys or could call them and ask, but i think the sump pump in that basement ought to be working, regardless, for the benefit of the rest of the neighbourhood....

so, maybe not.

i left my broom to dry in the back room a few weeks ago and forgot about it. i was going to clean today, but not without a broom...

if it doesn't show up by tomorrow, i'll go buy a new broom, i guess. i mean, it's the landlord's broom. but that gives me a few hours to listen to mixes.

i'm really sick of the idea of "education failing our children". it was clever for about two seconds. now it's one of the worst cliches out there.

it's particularly annoying because it masks the root of the problem, which is a culture that places initiative in the wrong places and creates individuals with stupid priorities. the system can break you, but it can't make you. you have to do that shit yourself. every copy of that awful michelle pfeiffer movie should be tracked down and burned. it's not the answer...

it doesn't matter how bad the system is. in the end, if your kids can't count or read then they fail. you can talk about the kids not working hard enough, or not having the aptitude (in rare cases). you can talk about the youth culture downplaying it's importance and producing warped, cynical psychopaths. you can talk about the parents not raising their kids with good mindsets or at all (which is the real root of the problem in almost all circumstances). but you can't reasonably blame it on the education system, which merely presents information to interpret. i can't even get my head around how anybody could even make sense of shifting the responsibility for personal achievement in such a bizarre manner.

so, let's get it right. it's not as touchy feely. it requires a level of responsibility. but, the system doesn't fail your kids. your kids fail the system. and, if that happens, it's *your* fault.

ffs...

i'm basically never going to buy fresh meat ever. i don't want it in the house. and i've been phasing out the bit of salami i temporarily had in my diet, reducing my primary protein source to eggs - which is what it's been for most of the last 15 years.

but, if i were going to buy meat, and you put halal meat beside otherwise unmarked meat at the same price, i'd actually probably get the halal meat. it's not because it underwent some kind of lunar ritual, or because i'm interested in the rules in leviticus (or wherever the rules are). it's because i would understand that this is meat that was butchered with an intent to cause the animal the least amount of pain possible.

when you consider the other option of factory farmed meat, where animals are literally put through meat grinders while they're still breathing, i couldn't imagine any human worthy of the term (i'm allowing some cross-species discussion, here) choosing the factory farm meat. to freak out and go on all kinds of racist tirades about it isn't even really maddening - it's just depressing.

how about we start marketing non-halal and non-kosher meat as MAXIMUM PAIN INFLICTED. fuck it, it would probably develop a market amongst you bloody savages...

relax. everything's going according to plan.

predictable. one wing of the establishment used the protests as a means to seize power from the other. the people that took over never represented anybody on the street. now, they're just as much of an annoyance to the sitting government as they were to the previous one. it's the same pattern you see in essentially all stage-managed seizures of power.

ok, i'm glad to see them doubt the idea that it's just the old and sick lions doing this. that's always been blatant lion apologism. but, i really don't think there's anything new about this, either, or that it has to do with habitat infringement or the weather or some other extraneous factor. that's really just further lion apologism.

i don't know why it's so hard for people to get their head around the idea that lions and tigers are apex predators in their environments and we're not. i think it's ultimately a religious thing. even humans that aren't religious have held on to this idea of humans as being outside of the food chain, but the evidence in front of our faces just simply does not uphold this. i mean, in the video they talk about animals and humans as though they're two entirely different things that don't naturally mix in nature. a moment's reflection should indicate how absurd this really is.

there's actually mounting evidence that humans evolved as prey species, and primarily for lions (or the ancestors of modern lions) in the african savannah. the predator-prey relationship that developed may even be the dominant factor in how we evolved intelligence, both culling the human population of those who were unable to escape and providing a selective factor for those that were able to figure out how to not get eaten, whether we're talking about individual or group behaviour alike.

it follows that what you're seeing here is ancient behaviour that goes back millions of years and defines what we are as a species, not something that's developed recently. there really couldn't be anything more natural than humans being eaten by lions. it just might require adjusting your understanding of humanity's place on our planet to get your head properly around it.

see, the thing is you'd *expect* an irrational creature to build a social system centered around that creature's inherent rationality - as a consequence of that inherent irrationality, which would blind it to it's own nature. if such a creature were to have the capacity to come to terms with it's inherent irrationality, it wouldn't truly be irrational. that is to say, it would be an impossibility, rather than that it would state anything about the creature's nature. a rational creature may understand it's rationality, but an irrational creature could only confuse it's irrationality for rationality. and, i may have just proven what i have suspected all these years - that i am not a member of the species i ought to be a member of.

as i've stated previously, i'm content with sharing a genus with homo sapiens (sapiens) but i need a new species categorization for myself. sorry.

actually, they say that the person that discovers the species gets to name it, so i guess that's my responsibility.

this should surprise nobody that knows me: i am hereby homo j.

i'm half-considering putting the application in to the academy, just to see what happens.

if a god actually did exist, could it even begin to understand our inherent irrationality?

or might we just perplex it to such an extreme point of confusion that it would just give up on us?

i'm kind of leaning towards the latter, really. i couldn't imagine any supremely rational being being able to get it's head around us. it would just be too much for it.

"they're pointing nuclear weapons at...don't they know what...da fuck...?"

then, we wonder why the bastard seems like such a vengeful asshole. well, shit, what other response is there?

you can only frustrate a supremely rational being so long before it gets to a breaking point and is just like "fuck it.".

deathtokoalas
this is not a new (relative to 2005) line of thinking for biafra. he was calling people out on this shit all through the 80s - anarchy for sale is a good example, but it's not the only one. and, it wasn't just jello pointing it out, either. early crass is incredibly critical of the british punk movement. and, try reading the kind of popular historical accounts of punk rock they teach to kids in music history classes nowadays. they're really surreal. it seems like history is going to record punk rock as something that vivienne westwood created to sell bracelets to teenagers.

i can't comment on the case in much depth, but i know that even east bay acknowledged that the royalty thing was an "accounting error". i don't know what "accounting error" actually means. but it seems clear that the crux of the case wasn't about royalties but about control over the discography. honestly? jello may have run the label, but these kinds of decisions should have been democratic - up to veto power by any single member, including whatever drummer was on whatever recording. i'm not sure jello held up to that ideal the way you'd expect him to. that doesn't excuse the decisions that were made by the other band members, but it does present a lesson about the value of democratic decision making, namely that when shit devolves into clashes of egos it rarely works out well for anybody involved.

there's a kind of pseudo-marxist theory driving the idea of youth culture music as propaganda, but i think there's more than enough evidence to draw on since the beatniks to deduce that marx was completely wrong. if you go back a few thousand year to plato (socrates), he said something rather interesting. i'm paraphrasing because i don't want to look it up, but it was roughly this:

when you see musicians begin to gather, you know that some change is occurring.

what i remember about the statement (i don't even remember what text it's in) is it's ambiguity in terms of cause and effect. even back in ancient greece, it was clear that social change and music are correlated together. but, which one is the cause of the other? or are they interrelated?

what i think the empirical evidence since the beatniks demonstrates is that music cannot produce change because it gets co-opted as soon as it tries. it seems like there's a pattern. a message is paired to an art form, and it begins by attracting people that get the message. but, as the message grows, it becomes converted into a product. what that means is that by the time it reaches the status quo it's just a package for sale. the masses consequently interact with it the same way they'd interact with any other product for sale. the next step is that it becomes emulated through the filters of the status quo, and that's when it becomes co-opted. there's not even a place for "selling out" or for corporations to come in and buy everything out. it's the market that co-opts it on it's own. that's the reason music is always so much more powerful at the core of it's development, regardless of whether you're speaking of raw punk power or elaborate progressive rock. blink 182 is to the dead kennedys as journey is to king crimson.

but, i think the market could only be capable of co-option in the first place if the art represents something that the status quo can connect to. that is, the change must have already occurred. i think socrates' observation is consequently better read as that when you see musicians gather, you know they are reacting to a social change that has already happened.

i'd suggest re-evaluating 20th century musical movements in this socratic context, rather than the usual marxist one. could the hippies have been a result of the kind of social change brought out by the beatniks and also by the civil rights movements? and could punk have been more than a reaction to the hippies, but a consequence of the kind of change they brought out? i think we already mostly understand alternative rock as a result of punk rock, and most movements that have existed since then (excluding the reactionary movements) as results of alternative culture and/or punk.

but, taking that perspective changes the rules of the game. it takes the wind out of the sails, but the approach has clearly failed, so we need to try and understand why. all of a sudden, political music becomes about preaching to the choir - which is not something that nobody else has put together, but is maybe something that hasn't been separated out into it's own kind of thought quite yet.

so, what do we do then? well, maybe we stop pretending that music can create social change and start understanding that music reflects social change that has already occurred. that doesn't mean we should abandon music. it has recreational and enjoyment value, of course. but, if we can realize this we can start focusing our political energy in other places...

but, to get back to the point, i imagine that once jello developed into a role of some power over his label he adopted some of the characteristics he spent so much time satirizing. i don't want to psychoanalyze the guy on youtube, but all that shit didn't come from nowhere. alternative tentacles, uber alles, indeed.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
that's very competitive, hierarchical thinking...

Alex Murray
it is true, though. DK without Jello is a joke.

deathtokoalas
i think there are plenty of people that could have filled in for jello, should the band have decided to move on without him. i don't like how things turned out. but it doesn't mean jello has some kind of heightened importance, or was irreplaceable.

yeah. you know, here's the thing: lions eat people, too. quite a few of them. not when their "natural diet" is low; humans are a component of a lion's "natural diet". some theories even suggest it's part of the reason why we humans got so s-m-r-t. they'll come right into the village, grab a human and start munching, alright? estimates are around a thousand human deaths a year due to lion predation. they're above us on the food chain in the regions they inhabit.

now, if you saw a lion munching on a human, would you say "ah, whatever, it's nature. lion's gotta eat."? well, you might if you're some twisted hobbesian psychopath. but, you're probably not. you'll probably react with a healthy amount of empathy and say "noooo! not the human!".

so, why is it different with an elephant?

i'm not denying the premise. it's true: a lion's gotta eat, and it's gonna eat what it can, including you, if you're around. but, there's no rule that says we need to have lions.

now, stop and mentally define the word monster. would you not agree that a lion perfectly fits the definition of a monster? they're horrific creatures, really.

elephants are very smart creatures that demonstrate a range of emotions and cognitive abilities that in some ways exceeds our own. as far as we know, an elephant can't find the root of a polynomial equation (or prove it can't be found using any brilliant methods developed or not developed by french revolutionaries dabbling in group theory), but most humans can't do that, either. we do know that elephants have far superior memory skills to our own. the reality is that the depth of their cognitive abilities is still being studied, and may yield some rather shocking (to some people) surprises.

in short, an elephant deserves your empathy just as much as a human does. at various phases in our existence, we've banded together to chase off predators that pose a threat to us. we've driven some of them to extinction - and that's natural. if it's them or us, and it generally is when we're talking about predators that eat us, i'd rather it be them.

so, i think it's worth asking whether or not it's worthwhile to stand in solidarity with the elephants to drive the lions to extinction. i'm not saying we should, exactly, i'm wondering if we should. do we have a moral case for it, considering elephant intelligence? and do we really need a world with monsters in it?

deathtokoalas
so, the thing is that you're wrong. if you were right, i'd probably uninstall adblock. for the record, what i'm trying to do right now is figure out why youtube is only counting about 30% of my hits (and i suspect it's the reason why). to me, that's a better argument.

the average adblock user simply isn't going to respond to the ads. they're not going to go buy the iggy azalea cd that's advertised on the radiohead video. they're not going to go watch the awful movie that is being mass marketed with no concept of demographics.

what people like this guy (and is that really his bedroom?) need to realize is that advertisers are going to eventually clue into this and abandon the format. making me watch a 30 second spot for something i'm never going to buy isn't going to resolve the underlying problem, which is that the advertising doesn't work.

if we want this internet thing to work outside of a model of corporate dominance, we need to come up with better ideas than advertising because, adblock or not, it's days are numbered.

see, it's actually pretty ironic.

so much of the internet is built on an advertising model - including google. but, google's search function is precisely what has made advertising obsolete. it doesn't really matter what you're advertising for anymore, you're not going to reach anybody under 40. rather, younger people will use google's search engine to actively research anything and everything they're going to buy, from a $5 pack of guitar picks to a $500,000 house. the advertising is just reduced to noise to work through in the research process. it's entirely worthless.

historically, advertising's primary purpose has been to convince us to act irrationally, but all advertising claims are now subject to immediate verification through internet search. it's basis of coercion through emotional manipulation can no longer be effective because it is too easy to rebut.

it might be more than ten years before this becomes understood, but it's happening, so we'd might as well start adjusting for it now, not when it happens.

the way i see it is that advertisers are going to have to shift from actively pursuing customers to being able to provide information. it's going to no longer be about attracting as much attention through volume and whatnot, and going to shift to being about trying to get sites listed at the top of search engines and then creating content on the company's own website that engages possible buyers. this is a really fundamental shift, as it shifts attention away from coercion and towards the actual product.

that reduces traditional advertising to bandying about search terms as buzzwords to try and get the rankings skewed in their favour. and it completely cuts out this clockwork orange style forced viewing that's been pushed so heavily, and is failing so badly.

simply put, the era of the passive consumer that responds to aggressive advertising is coming to a close with the coming irrelevancy of generation x, whom everybody always knew was going to get squeezed between two much larger demographic bulges and have a relatively shorter period of relevancy than the generations that preceded and followed them. what will follow is an era of the active consumer that independently seeks out information and must be advertised to interactively, in a way that responds to their requests for information.

companies that get on top of this will be successful, while companies that cling to obsolete models will fall apart. 

stockingandblossom1
i agree

SuperkenGaming
You clearly have never been to a school if you think advertisement doesn't work lol.

deathtokoalas
yeah. i think it may have worked some time in the early part of the last century, up til a bit past the middle of it. but, we're so saturated with ads now that we mostly ignore them. i think it might have something to do with an extrapolation of the idea of transmarginal inhibition. i think most of us have hit a sort of an ultra-paradoxical phase, where advertising merely produces a negative response.

it's not just youtube. i know where the billboards around my house are, and i walk by them multiple times in a week, but i don't know what they say because i completely block them out as soon as i realize they're ads.

i would consider the literature on it to be very out-of-date, and i'm not aware of anybody that's doing current research on it. that applies both to pro-advertising and anti-advertising literature.

SuperkenGaming
kids buy brand names to fit in... the brand name isnt on the shirt because its a cool name.. its wearable advertisement lol

deathtokoalas
i'm not convinced that's actually true. i never knew anybody growing up that thought like that.

the only brand names i ever had on my shirts were stuff my parents bought me because it was on sale, and i mostly avoided wearing them because i felt awkwardly conformist in them.

there was a phase in high school where i wore a lot of band shirts, but i was trying to advertise myself to people that may have had like interests because i didn't have a lot of friends. it's a bad comparison.

SuperkenGaming
you mustve not known many people :P

look at the iphone.. IOS is clearly the lesser OS, but the iphone is an accessory made popular by public and celebrity advertisement

deathtokoalas
the iphone's market share was the result of it producing the product first. as android/google and others have caught up, it's market share has actually decreased dramatically.

further, macs are still a novelty item and will almost certainly remain that way, no matter how much they spend on advertising.

now that the market has leveled, the primary factor for people buying a new phone actually seems to be price.

stockingandblossom1
i cam watch an old ad from the 90's like the pentium 3 ads over and over and never get tired of it. but i can't stand todays commercials it's too generic.

deathtokoalas
that's probably more your age talking. i'm not saying "you're old", so much as i'm saying "the advertising isn't directed at you anymore".

i think a bigger factor is the saturation. we're just bombarded, and if it doesn't produce that violently negative reaction almost out of reflex (that's what i tend to get) it just gets lost in the low signal to noise ratio.

stockingandblossom1
that could be true, also if i have to watch ads and risk getting a virus i would like to be paid to do it. google should pay both sides of the coin if they want people to disable adblock.

deathtokoalas
i just want to clarify that he probably means companies tracking him, and it's not a trivial concern.

you can see the price determinant everywhere if you drop the idea of brand recognition, which is probably not accidentally pushed through various literature. there's two commodities i consume a large amount of: mayonnaise and soy milk (not blended together).

with the mayonnaise, the brand name is always stacked to it's highest point on the shelf, until they have to put it on sale. then it starts moving. it follows that the brand name mayonnaise is not marketable unless it's price is reduced to that of the no name mayonnaise. and, it often ends up hitting the store doubly, because they have to reduce the brand name to below the no name to get it to move (because consumers just automatically pick the no name, because they know it's cheaper), which causes the no name to back up, and then have to be reduced even further. they only seem to be able to resolve this by reducing orders.

the soy milk is even worse. the grocery store i go to has simply stopped stocking the no name chocolate soy, which is generally about a dollar cheaper than the brand name stuff. i actually went and tracked down the manager of the store, because i didn't want to pay the extra dollar. he explained to me that the brand name has actually put pressure on the chain (food basics) to stop stocking the no name, because the sales for the brand name were so low.

those are just two examples i can see and understand through direct experience. there's no doubt many others.

Eave
I'm not going to argue, you're selfish and inconsiderate. What if you got less money at your job? It would MASSIVELY cause your life to go on the decline. (provided you don't switch jobs in said situation) This would force the fun things which you pay a subscription to to be no longer available. You'd have no internet, TV, and barely any food. Having nothing but the necessities is a terrible life.

stockingandblossom1
i don't see as a job, and don'y try that guilt trip bs because it won't work.

deathtokoalas
that's a market society, buddy. i don't like markets, either, but the solution isn't to sit around and complain that it isn't fair that nobody's propping up a failing business model.

one solution to try and get around the inequalities and anti-art biases that are inherent in market capitalism is to argue for a guaranteed minimum income.

stockingandblossom1
i agree.

jeff darnell
So true, I honestly don't think I have ever bought something I saw advertised on the internet that I already wasn't going to buy. In fact I don't think I have ever bought something advertised on the internet at all. Internet ads make me have ill will towards the company as if they know their product is shitty so let's advertise the shit out of it. Advertising is convincing, a good product shouldn't need convincing.

---

Eyyaz Chishty
Three weeks since i've turned it off and im not even considering to turn it back on (for youtube).  Seriously guys it's only 5-30 seconds of your time, hell you can just go on another tab and read a short news artical whilst it runs.

regret
For some people it's too much time. I don't see how

Darth Grumpy
No, simply because I have been on the internet longer than 99% of you and I know what the internet was like before it go so fucking greedy and commercialized. The internet did JUST FINE WITHOUT ADS FOR YEARS, then all of a sudden it became ad heaven because everyone is greedy. I am fighting back the only way I can and that is blocking the ads. If they get adblock removed, someone will just write another one, and another and another. It's time for the greed to stop. Simple as that. It's called GET A JOB. Sitting on your ass all day making videos doesn't count as work, sorry but it doesn't. Time to wake up and live in the real world, life sucks, deal with it.

Lolatmyaccounts .Lol
Because it benefits me, and that's all that matters. Selfish? Sure, but this guy wants all his viewers to spend small portions of their time just so he can gather more cheeseburger funds.

deathtokoalas
"you should run the ads, and ignore them."

that's likely to keep advertisers keen about paying out, right?

and herein lies the problem. it's the model itself that's obsolete. if half the internet is blocking the ads, and the half that doesn't is mostly older people and/or people that are ignoring the ads to pay the content providers, what it suggests is that this form of advertising is not successful in marketing products and that the model consequently needs to be adjusted.

you're delusional if you think it can carry on like this. it's time to come to terms with the reality that we built this all up on an unsustainable premise, and that it's eventually going to come crashing down. if you adjust to it, you can get out in front of it. if you stick to it, you're going to be washed away along with it.

deathtokoalas
corgan is often attacked for his oversized ego, but he actually strikes me as fairly humble - if startling and slightly painfully pretentious. iha, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be able to get over himself, and that's what strikes me as the root of the problem.

jeb tweebance
again

deathtokoalas
i told you....

but, wait.... ...are you paul mccartney?

Susie G
Billy Corgan can be quite the musical genius but he's also a control freak and I think that eventually drove the band insane. The fact that Corgan has had rocky relationships with MANY people besides James Iha is more a testament to his lack of character than anybody else's. Ive always been fond of James and Darcy and it stopped being the Pumpkins without them.

Gordon Mccracken
drug issues are well known, could see her functioning, touring, recording with any professional band?

deathtokoalas
afaik, her horrible drug problem is that she likes pot and the reason she's not making music is that she's grown out of it and was never really that into it in the first place. heroin is a tour problem. marijuana is not a tour problem.

not to be rude, but the reality is that nobody really cares about d'arcy, anyways. i think iha at the least provided a sort of creative foil. outside of the odd vocal part, i really don't think d'arcy contributed anything.

when i saw 'em in ottawa back in '96, i wasn't even convinced she was playing.

people move on and blah blah blah. it's probably too late now to reconstruct what's been lost. but, i think billy needed james on a certain level. d'arcy? they honestly probably would have been better off with a better bassist....

Gordon Mccracken
I am pretty sure she was arrested for crack possession 

evenflowjimbo
Eh. I can see why he doesn't want to talk to him anymore. Billy is super Republican and just seems like a total asshole.

deathtokoalas
i get more of a libertarian vibe from him, but you have to put it in the context of the american political spectrum. you get the same kind of thing from krist novoselic and a lot of other people that came out of the period. they're out there working with these kind of right-wing groups and stuff, but if you listen to what they have to say they're obviously not really aligned with their politics.

where billy and krist (and jello and chomsky and countless others) are absolutely right is in looking at the democratic party and understanding that it's a hopeless vehicle - there's not a significant difference between it and the republican party. supporting the democrats is worse than a waste of time, it's making things worse. so, when you understand that the united states is a one-party state - and there's a lot of rhetoric, but i mean really come to terms with it and grasp it - then the obvious next step is to look at third parties.

in the united states, there is not a third party on the left. what you have are people like jesse ventura or ron paul that have some good policies and some horrific policies. if you're serious about breaking the two-party system, the reality is that that kind of right-libertarianism is the only option at the moment. you can hope for wealthy artists to support more egalitarian movements, but you can't expect them to go out and build them - that's something that has to be done from the ground up.

i'm about as left-wing as you can get, but if you were to take me back to 2008 and make me vote for obama or paul, i would have picked paul. that would not have been an endorsement of paul's social darwinism, it would have been a rejection of obama's imperialist rhetoric. they're both evil in their own ways, but the libertarian right is considerably less evil than the interventionist left.

i agree that it would often be best if billy just shut up when it comes to certain things, but it's hard to blame him for being realistic about what our options are in terms of actual political shifts.

Gordon Mccracken
I concur, I was raised in a Democratic leaning house hold but have seen the hypocrisy within it and lean Libertarian myself.

metal134
According to Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin, she wasn't playing, some of the time.

Leo B
D'Arcy could definitely play the bass. If you are a seasoned guitar and/or bass player you can clearly see and hear that on the live clips. With the high standards Billy has he would surely have fired her if she couldn't play.

You could say she lacked a bit of energy and inspiration in her playing though, but I think Billy also wanted the bass to be a bit more discrete in their music. It does seem to me however, that D'Arcy didn't share the same passion for music as the other three in the band, she always seemed a bit distant

deathtokoalas
i'm not really arguing that she couldn't play. i'm suggesting that she probably didn't.

there were relationships involved, it must have been messy and confusing...

the argument corgan generally used was "i can do it faster" - and it might have even been true at the time.

but that sounds like an excuse to me. what that really means is "it's my song, and i want the bass to sound the way i want the bass to sound so i'm playing the bass and if you don't like it then go home."

Leo B
oh you meant in the studio. I thought you meant live lol

deathtokoalas
i'd be surprised if she played on anything in the studio at all after gish.

and i did say that it didn't seem like she was playing when i saw them in '96 (with a big budget) on the mellon collie tour.

there were actually a few points (notably the rocket stage show) where i wasn't entirely sure that billy was playing either, while there were points where it was pretty obvious that he was.

it's hard to speculate further.

metal134
I didn't say she couldn't play.  But Billy was quoted as saying (and I wish I could remember the exact quote) that he ended up recording most of James' and D'arcy's parts himself on the albums, which was later corroborated by Butch Vig.

ZeroGravitySubstance
You are correct about Billy recording all the bass and guitar parts on the first two albums but that was not the case on Mellon Collie. James said for all the lead parts it was divided up about fifty/fifty and who knows how the rhythm parts were divided up. And yes, D'arcy is not the greatest bassist haha.

rlos duarte
well said

VTK XTO
Lack of character? Maybe he's got a tough personality, but Corgan can never be accused of lacking character. 

OD138
You know for a fact she's only into pot? I bet you're wrong about that.  

deathtokoalas
i do appear to have been wrong; she has a problem with crack cocaine, as others pointed out.

Mattydigs
Which is fair. A true artist sacrifices everything for the good of the song.

Creat Swartz
Are you serious? Billy humble. That is a good one!

deathtokoalas
in twenty-whatever years, the truth is that i don't think i've ever read or seen him say anything positive about himself. he only deprecates himself.

it's an imaginary media construct.

townies. ugh.

i expected those, though. it's a miracle it took this long, really. best to avoid them....

"you know, you should open up the advertising a little bit so people know the shows are going on."

"but it's a tight knit scene."

"that's why you should open up the advertising, so people outside the scene know what's going on."

"if you want to join the scene, you should come down. it's very tight knit."

"but, that's why you should open it up and make it less exclusive."

"but, it's a very tight-knit scene."

ugh...

fuck tight knit scenes, i want radical inclusion.

somebody shows up and offers suggestions on ways to open it, and all they get is a lot of attitude and an almost violent desire to maintain a small, incestual clique-y group. that's not something i want anything to do with. it's radical inclusion, or fuck off.

i mean, the bottom line is i haven't seen much of anything that's interesting in terms of local music over the year i've been here. it's all very generic and boring takes on different styles of punk, or equally boring folk music. my conclusion is that there's really not very much interesting music happening in the area at all.

but there's a specific bar that doesn't have a show calendar online. now, i really have little reason to think the bar is booking anything that's worth going to. i think the reverse logic is pretty applicable - if anybody worth watching was playing the bar, the bar would be updating it's listings. but, i'm the type of person that wants to know what's going on at all the bars i can get to, anyways, just in case there's that one rare act that seems interesting....

having idiosyncratic tastes requires this kind of meticulousness.

you wouldn't think a suggestion for a bar owner to update a web page would set off such a defensive reaction, but that it did says a lot about the area and the people that inhabit it. it demonstrates a very clique-y mentality that is suspicious of outsiders and wants to "vet" people before they're allowed to integrate.

going to a bar to watch a show doesn't imply a desire to join a club. and i definitely have zero desire to join a club....

this is why i prefer big cities to small towns. when i go out somewhere, i don't want to meet up with a group of people that i know, i want to fade into the crowd. i don't want everybody to know my name; i don't want *anybody* to know my name! i cherish that level of anonymity.

so, detroit's a good fit for me. windsor, less so...

in the end, if the local bands in the area just want to play to the same group of friends every show then that's their choice. i'll go hang out in detroit and watch some more interesting acts in the process...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoCfiZnOplY

naomi klein gave a very important speech at unifor about a year ago, and i was ecstatic when i heard it because she articulated exactly what i've been saying about this for years. it's nice to see that jill realized it's importance, as well. trying to be "bipartisan" about climate change is a waste of time - there is a bipartisan consensus, and it's that dealing with it sounds expensive. if you want to change something, forget about building consensus in washington. that doesn't work. you have to bring in the whole machinery of worker's politics, and you have to be willing to fight those that will reject those politics. what defines our social relations within capitalism is conflict, not consensus. we have to start telling the hippies to fuck off.

the status quo provides us with two ways to change things. first, we can pass regulatory laws. now, we're consistently bombarded with messaging that regulation is tyrannical, but worse is that the regulatory bodies inevitably end up controlled by industry. so, that leads us down the garden path to the elite's preferred method of change: markets. the elite prefers this method because the only change that markets are capable of producing is increased class stratification.

jill is being careful with her language, but what she's calling for is worker ownership of production. and, she's right. naomi was right. i'm right. there is no way the government will ever work against the corporate lobbies to impose substantial sanctions or provide serious incentives. rather, government will continue to work in the interests of capital - and dirty energy - so long as government exists. so, that rules out using both regulation and markets.

this is the option the status quo declines to inform us of, and it's the only way forward. we're not going to elect a saviour that will fix the issue with centralized government policy. we're not going to solve the issue with green toilet paper, or subsidies for clean energy. we have to take over the factories and convert them. we have to take over the oil fields and shut them down.

...and we have to get over our programming that teaches us to work within a system that was constructed to be useless and stop pretending there's another answer.

see, this is rather pointless. yeah, she bashed the thing for a few seconds to get a peanut. but, what did you expect? the moonlight sonata? this is again a circular concern. i'm not aware of a culture that doesn't have music, but, if one did exist, i'm not convinced you'd get a different reaction from a human out of that culture.

and, probably roughly half the adult human population of the united states would react no differently....

"a keyboard. it makes sound. whatever. when do i get paid?"

the implied error is consequently within the universality of music. it seems to be universal across culture. but most humans couldn't care less.

yeah, i've seen enough to realize that the flowers are fake and the gorilla's articulation of sign language isn't. separating between the idea of "falsity" and "representation" may be a little abstract for her (although it might be something that could be taught), but she clearly understood that the picture of a flower was not actually a flower and felt the need to specify it. that is, she wasn't content with saying "that's a flower", she needed to find a way to express "that's a picture of a flower". that might not imply that she meets any technical definitions regarding the use of human language, but it does demonstrate that she understands what she's doing when she flops her fingers around. she is very clearly consciously doing so with the intent of expressing ideas that are her own.

i'm not sure it even makes sense to try and ask questions about grammar as they relate to sign language outside of the context of a spoken and written language, and i think it opens up a lot of questions regarding the circularity of it. i know there's different ideas about it, but i have a hard time separating grammar from written language. it seems to me that it's the writing that enforces the grammar, rather than the other way around. when you look at tribes that don't have written languages, the grammar may exist but is often rather basic - and they have thousands of years of linguistic evolution to get to the point, whereas koko only has her lifetime and a set of limited tools to express herself. i don't really have to hypothesize about taking europeans and putting them on a different planet without writing - you can look at how the language has broken down in areas of australia and north america, where the written component is not great. that is, you take the writing out and the grammar demonstrably starts to fracture. so, i just don't see how this experiment is able to produce any kind of meaningful conclusions on the question. to answer that question, you'd have to carry the experiment out over generations, teach them how to use written language and then construct something that gives the gorilla more ability to use grammar than signing.

but, i'm not falling for this idea that the gorilla is being conditioned. i've seen very little, of course - youtube videos. but the bit i've seen is just overwhelmingly in favour of an independent agent producing independent thought.

if the gorilla can understand over a thousand signs, it could conceivably understand just as many key combinations on a keyboard. that would eliminate a lot of ambiguity. perhaps using chinese style writing (or even something roughly comparable to hieroglyphs) may be a better way to start.

after all, humans didn't start with a complicated alphabet, either. we built it up over time. we started with pictorial representations that expressed ideas.

so, it's not really fair to grab a gorilla and expect it to grasp a modern roman alphabet with the complexity of a modern language right off the bat. i wouldn't even expect that a pre-neolithic member of our own species would be able to do that.

everything we know about plasticity and evolution nowadays suggests that whatever is inherent must have developed over the time we've been using language and grammar. so, if you want to do this and draw any meaningful results, you need to control for that by emulating the same kind of systems that early humans used, not the fully developed ones we use now.

i mean, we have no idea what ancient egyptians sounded like when they talked to each other. we can take some guesses. but there's not really any serious way to really understand how complex their grammar was, at the time.

chinese would be better for that reason, but it might be too complicated.

if tolkien can construct a new language, it can't be that hard to make one for some apes using a simple but "correct" grammar and then transliterate it with pictures constructed with combinations on an oversized keyboard.

and i'm suggesting this because i think the results will be shocking to certain people and put some questions to rest rather permanently.

deathtokoalas
again: when an elephant rubs your nose, it's expecting you to rub back. that's why it's standing there, within a foot of her nose, expecting reciprocation, and eventually walks off, confused and dejected.

why are humans so rude?

(deleted response) 

deathtokoalas
it's not a dog...

basically, she "left the creature hanging". that trunk rub is a high five, or a hug. you gotta reciprocate or it's going to feel rejected...

nuspacestate
I agree, the girl should reciprocate but she is not familiar with elephant behavior.

(deleted response) 

deathtokoalas
the apes that don't wear clothes have no trunks, either. i don't think it would find that confusing.

elephants learn almost everything from their parents and almost nothing from instinct - quite a bit like us. they wouldn't know an ape from a banana if they've never seen one before. that's not how the baby elephant is interpreting the human.

you've seen kids anthropomorphize animals. it's no doubt proboscidomorphizing her.

"humans are elephants, too!"

Ludwig van Beethoven (Truth Lives)
I must have misinterpreted this video incorrectly - but thanks for giving me the heads up on elephant behaviour. What I thought was the Baby Elephant was trying to work out why the woman didn't have a trunk.

paramornal
Where did you learn that "when an elephant rubs your nose, its expecting you to rub back"? I am a veterinarian and my fiance is an animal caregiver and we never learned anything like that.

deathtokoalas
well, it's an extrapolation. for example, you might see people hug their dogs. that's human behaviour, but sometimes we treat other species as though they're a member of ours, for the simple reason that it's how we think. now, humans are unusually smart animals - we can figure out how to communicate with some animals by mimicking their behaviour. elephants are also very smart, but this is a very young one.

when elephants rub their trunks against each other, it's a bonding thing. you'd expect family members or friends to do this. so, you'd expect an elephant to behave that way towards a human it wishes to bond with, because that's what an elephant would do - just as you might hug your dog. certainly, that's what the behaviour she's expressing is - a bonding rub.

it's kind of like when a chimp starts grooming you. that's not random behaviour, it's a bonding thing.\

humans hug, chimps groom, elephants rub - and dogs lick. same idea. the fact that we're different species doesn't change the behaviour.

(deleted response)

deathtokoalas
this isn't new behaviour, and i don't need a lecture. i may have coined the term, but there are many other observed instances of elephants treating humans as elephants. with elephants, especially - due to their extreme intelligence - it takes on a deeper dimension. i'm using examples with dogs and chimps to demonstrate behaviour they share with humans. in more generality, you can't interpret elephant behaviour the way you'd interpret dog behaviour - they're far too intelligent. they're not as smart as we are either, but you need to learn more in the direction of us than in the direction of our pets. with the trunk rubbing, this is a universal in elephant populations. humans may show a lot of variation in customs, but we also have some universals - and touching is one of them.
as another example of elephants treating humans as elephants, elephants have been known to bury sleeping humans under the misunderstanding that they're dead or dying. as astonishing as it sounds - and it is remarkable - elephants actually hold funerals for their dead friends and family members.

in fact, almost any mammal (excluding certain predators that interpret us as a natural prey source, which are mostly cats: lions and tigers) and a lot of more advanced non-mammals (this has been demonstrated in owls) will interpret us through their own filters and allow us to integrate into their social networks when they are existing. even when they're not existing, animals that co-habitate with us will work us into their own social understandings. i grew up with two or three dogs in the house at any given time, and i was entirely aware that i was as much a part of their pack as they were a part of the family - that we lived in a den as much as we lived in a house. the dog that protects their owner is demonstrating pack behaviour with the underlying understanding of the human as their dog kin. and, you've surely been licked by a dog that's trying to show affection and not really aware that we humans think it's a little gross. we do the same thing when we stand up for animals we interact with socially.

we have the ability to separate between species we consider "friends", but a moment's reflection will realize that this is an advanced cognitive ability. that the elephant sees an elephant in the human is not a sign of extreme intelligence, but a demonstration of their lack of full awareness. as great as elephant cognition may be in relative terms, it is a substantial abstraction to understand that different animals have different cultures and adjust behaviour to cater to each one. elephants understand elephant culture; due to our ability to understand that, we have the responsibility to adjust and respond accordingly.

daveyboi28
totally cool thanks for teaching me something new :D

Jessica Cejnar
How should she have responded?

daveyboi28
well all i know is i wouldnt have been ignoring as she did! the cutest thing on this earth happens and she just ignores it? i woulda been stroking his/ her trunk :D