srf0638
26d ago
Carving some spoons and maybe a ladle from manzanita. Would go a lot faster if I could rough out the blanks with a power tool but I'm not sure what would work, a reciprocating saw surely won't, for the ripping cuts. Maybe a little top handle chainsaw, at least for the ladle.
Also learning to climb trees this week, hell yeah.
srf0638
1mo ago
from hitting new personal bests, to just trying to slow the inevitable decline and doing it because you have to.
Simple, constantly contest new events, inventing them yourself if necessary!
srf0638
1mo ago
would progress psychologically by doing 2 x 7.5 minutes instead, as the longer intervals are harder mentally.
Physiologically as well, surely! Pretty common approach with cycling sweet spot intervals, as you doubtless know.
People tell themselves whatever they have to on order to get through the work, but I tend to think that most "mental toughness" is 1) a reasonable degree of general preparation for the event and 2) being honest with yourself and choosing to do something that you actually want to do in the first place.
srf0638
1mo ago
If your definition of "real value" implies a market outcome, sure, that follows. I still think this is separate from the question of whether Federal employment is a good deal for the employee, but at this point I'm content to let anyone still reading make up their own mind on a) the object-level goodness of the deal and b) whether these are, in fact, separate questions.
srf0638
1mo ago
these agencies generally serve as landing spots for people who have washed out or are tired of actually working.
And yet they're competitive for the top 5% compensation packages for their educational background? My guess is that it's probably a smaller paycheck but with shorter hours and better job stability, which isn't necessarily off the market average seller's indifference curve. In the other direction, it's worth noting that sometime in the last decade OPM spun up special non-GS pay scales for doctors and IT guys because even with benefits and job stability the GS compensation packages weren't attracting enough new hires.
And even your hypothetical doesn't seem like a bad deal for this person.
That's market heterogeneity for you. Grinding billable hours at biglaw isn't a bad deal for the right kind of person, spending a month at a time at sea in the Alaskan fishing fleet isn't a bad deal for the right kind of person, cutting firewood for cash sale when you feel like it and living cheap isn't etc. But none of it, in expectation, is a free lunch. You could argue, of course, that the government shouldn't be in the pipevine swallowtail business at all, but that seems to me like an entirely separate matter.
srf0638
1mo ago
Approximately 100% of the Cubans in the surrounding three counties, so one guy. And he wasn't from there, he came there for the job.
I believe your observations, but I also believe my observations: it's been fairly easy for me to get land management jobs without any special status, I've worked with a bunch of guys who had the same experience, and minorities aren't overrepresented relative to their presence in the recruiting pool (local high school and junior college sports, general private sector blue-collar labor.). Were you working for a land management agency? Entry-level fire, at least, has been mostly direct hiring authority since 2020 or so, with no obvious change in the composition or quality of new hires, so I don't think the points system is even applicable--the postings would specifically say no vet pref. Before that, they asked for racial self-ID on USAJobs but not in the agency questionnaire where they ask about vet status, displaced Fed status, and how much of an expert you are with a shovel--which is not to say they weren't using the race data, but it does seem like further evidence against it.
Do you have a specific example in mind? Within land management, it's been my experience that if you know how to jump through the hoops on USAJobs (which takes a little Googling but is hardly a special qualification) and are willing to apply to multiple remote duty locations, entry-level jobs are pretty much there for the taking. There are some competitive positions (climbing rangers in Denali NP, hazard tree removal in Yosemite, smokejumpers and most hotshot crews) but they're competitive for a reason and nobody starts out there. There are a lot of remote duty locations that would like to hire more people than the number of minimally-qualified applicants they receive.
I'll also note that if there is, say, a GS-5/6/7 ladder biology tech position in a hypothetical DOI pipevine swallowtail conservation program for which a Ph.D. on the pipevine swallowtail is a de facto requirement (and I emphasize I don't know of such a thing), 1) that seems like a fairly reasonable meritoratic outcome and 2) it's not actually all that great of a deal, is it now.
srf0638
1mo ago
Law enforcement officer, not low Earth orbit. (Yet.).
I suppose "officer" is redundant, I've generally heard them referred to as LEOs and I think the USAJobs postings usually say "ranger (law enforcement)".
srf0638
1mo ago
Somebody forgot to tell me or damn near everyone I work with, I guess. (Quite a few Mexicans, but there are a lot of Mexicans living around here in general and working outside around here specifically.).
I won't say affirmative action in government land management hiring has never happened, but it's massively overblown in online discussions by people who think it's called the National Forest Service, don't know the difference between district rangers, LEO rangers, interp rangers, and backcountry rangers, have never submitted an application or visited a potential duty station or Googled "how to write a resume for USAjobs", etc. etc.
srf0638
1mo ago
absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.
You're welcome to apply if it's such a good deal. Well, you aren't, because land management is in a hiring freeze, but you would have been before Jan 20.
srf0638
2mo ago
Where I will be doing 41, 4000m peaks through hard routes.
Sounds rad, looking forward to summit reports.
srf0638
2mo ago
I'm trying to track down a brief study or case report that I first saw in an SSC links post or maybe screenshotted on ratblr. tl;dr mega autist is given heroic dose of LSD in the 1960s, is completely unaffected except maybe feeling a little tired, experimenters shrug and let him go home. Is this ringing any bells for anyone?
srf0638
2mo ago
Strongfirst is a goon show but Prevost is the real deal. It sure doesn't sound like your boy needs surgery.
srf0638
2mo ago
In a heavily hispanic state like California, I'm surprised they're not
They are. (They're also generally less susceptible to poison oak.). They're certainly not underrepresented, and extra certainly not in Socal.
srf0638
2mo ago
the most effective air assets
I dunno tbh. I guess if you're paying war-surplus prices everything is more cost-effective, and scooper types probably are the best of a bad lot if you have a suitable body of water around. But neither aerial water or retardant works all that well for the money in heavy fuels or high winds.
srf0638
2mo ago
The 10am policy wasn't late 20th century, particularly environmentalist-aligned (the Forest Service has historically been a timber agency), or unique to California (see e.g. pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.gov/fire_policy/docs/chp1.pdf).
I'm not going to say that it's impossible to carry out RX in steep chaparral surrounded by structures, but it's a lot more technically challenging than cleaning up long-needle litter or dead grass.
srf0638
2mo ago
Flat, road access (and roads to use as containment features), water supply/draft sites, and to an extent fuel type. And Socal chaparral isn't really adapted to low-intensity burns the way some coniferous forests and grasslands are--if it burns, it's gonna be at a high intensity and challenging to control.
srf0638
2mo ago
Pine Barrens have some potential, maybe: https://archive.is/ZdeSh
srf0638
2mo ago
It's happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991
People like living around trees.
srf0638
3mo ago
See, this is fairly compelling! Thanks.
most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town
Many of whom were at least locally distinguished in folk sports (e.g. wrestling), it seems to me, but this is of course quite different than modern spectator sport culture.
srf0638
3mo ago
Nothing I've said is a knock-down argument against your historical claim, but you're scarcely providing any argument for it either, just a lot of pointing and spluttering about "kids today" and bald assertions that it couldn't possibly have been so in days gone by (coupled with trivialities about modern mass media and so on). As a side note, projecting the modern concept of childhood back to a time when midshipmen were routinely commissioned at 13 is a chancy business.
some man developed a reputation for being good
At least in boxing, it was a good deal more than that. Champions dined with royals, drew aristocratic sinecures, and seem to have been household names (to the extent that any names were household names in a pre-mass-media era). John Gully, for one, became an MP. I recall references to news of prizefights and cricket matches being avidly sought after by East India Company men. All very recognizable.
invest significant childhood time on competitive sports
"Significant" and "competitive" are rather weaselly words, but the aristocratic boarding schools certainly expected participation in their house games (Rugby football was officially codified in the 1830s and played for generations before that) and it doesn't seem to have been uncommon for aristocratic scions to play nationally competitive amateur cricket by at least the 1830s. Have you read Tom Brown's Schooldays? Well worth it for its own sake, and may shed some light on early 19th century British sporting culture. Hell, I'd recommend Boxiana as well, albeit perhaps as toilet reading due to its episodic nature.
maybe pugilism was prosocial
I make no claims whatsoever about pro- or anti-sociality, to be clear.
srf0638
3mo ago
If you were a child in the 1800s you would look up to an historical hero, a national hero, or possibly some business titan
I dunno. Britain had a recognizable celebrity culture around boxing (see e.g. Pierce Egan's Boxiana) and cricket (Aubrey-Maturin, Flashman--by convention the only legitimately citable fiction) by 1805 or so. My initial reaction was to wonder whether the same thing was in the water supply in America, or whether instead this was an under-discussed difference between the two. Thinking about it some more, though, I reckon that this stuff is properly considered as adjacent to animal sports (a famous early boxer was even nicknamed the Game Chicken), which were surely popular in the colonies--Andrew Jackson bred racehorses and so forth. Which doesn't necessarily contradict your point.
srf0638
3mo ago
The nice thing about lifting is that it's almost always possible to do something productive that doesn't piss off the injury. (In an endurance context, similarly, a well-known triathlon coach says "as a multisport athlete, you usually have at least one that's going well."). ROM, tempo, exercise selection, upper body pump on the machines, whatever. John Sarno's concrete advice and explanations are probably wrong but he's probably mostly right in spirit. The Painscience.com guy is also pretty good. While I can't endorse Starting Strength as an organization, I appreciate having been exposed to Rip's attitude about injury (it happens, it heals, there's usually something you can do to keep moving) early in my personal physical culture history. My training injuries don't generally hurt that much, the distress comes from not knowing when or if I'll be able to get back to what I was doing, so knowing that I can still do something alleviates my distress considerably.
I agree with @gog about physical therapy, with one sorta-caveat--a good physical therapist can help calm you down if you're spun up and suggest exercise modalities that don't piss off the injury. The downside is that you generally don't know who's going to do this and who's going to give you a stream of soothing babble and, like, Graston therapy and icing until you've shopped around a bit.
I dunno about all that tbh. Structure departments in wealthy US cities/counties seem to take pretty good care of their people and most of the work is, like, lift assists on medicals. Retirement eligibility is usually quite a bit before age 65. These jobs do tend to be a bit of a tournament to get in at first, though.
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