Because the ice was thick, salt and other ice melt products didn't work very well. The individual crystals or pieces would melt their way through the ice and then fizzle out, leaving the treated surface still frozen. Unless a lot of salt or calcium chloride was used they had little overall effect. My neighbors and I had to use a lot of sand to make it possible to navigate our driveways.
To give you an idea of just how bad it was, one acquaintance of mine parked his work truck at the top of his driveway, leaving it on the street. A little while later one of his kids told him his truck was in a ditch, it having slid down the street and off to the side. He figured a good gust of wind must have gotten it sliding, allowing gravity and a poor coefficient of friction doing the rest.
******************
The hypocrisy! It burns!!
You know that SJWs are truly hypocritical when some of those of the African American persuasion leave the US for Africa to escape institutional racism and white privilege only to revel in their new privilege and racism against their new neighbors.
Recent American immigrant to Ghana, Muhammida el-Muhajir, says she moved because she was always made to feel like a second-class citizen. Although she provides no examples of this, she says she left the USA to fulfill her potential and avoid being targeted by racial violence.Elsewhere she mentions that she doesn't have to worry about being killed by the local police “the police there won't kill a Black person like the racist police in America.” Too bad she's wrong as the Ghanaian police are known to beat, rape, and torture people while apprehending them or interrogating them. So she doesn't have to worry about racist cops killing her, just local corrupt cops. That's so much better than where she came from.
--snip--
If I'm reading her correctly, Muhammida clearly believes that Blacks are second-class citizens in the United States. Her solution to this problem was to move to Ghana, where the education and wealth provided by her life in the United States mean she is an Upper-Class citizen. What this indicates is that Muhammida's struggle is internal, separate from the societies in which she has lived.
By throwing off your oppression in the United States you can access privilege in Ghana. According to intersectional theory, every privilege is countered by someone else's oppression. In this case, Muhammida taking a place in Ghana's upper echelons is an act of oppression against the Ghanaian people. Ghana should implement some form of affirmative action immediately to correct the balance.
******************
Do you have any idea how a civil war happens? If not, Daniel Greenfield explains how it happens and points out that we may well be on our way to a Second American Civil War.
...it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.Isn't that what we're seeing now? The Democrats didn't like Trump's victory so they tried to cajole electors to ignore the law and vote for Hillary Clinton. They wanted to change the rules of the election after the election was finished because it didn't turn out the way they wanted.
Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.
How do civil wars happen?
Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.
That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
Read the whole thing.
******************
I find it interesting that California has felt the need to consider making it a crime to offer plastic straws to restaurant/bar patrons. The penalty for such a transgression: 6 months in prison and a $1000 fine.
What's truly ironic about this moron move to “save the environment” is that it is based upon a research project conducted by a 9-year old, and his numbers are at best a “guesstimation”.
What's worse is that the media has been buying into this research without bothering to find out where it came from.
It's sad that so many outlets are treating the rigorous survey work of an elementary school student as the statistic about plastic straw use. But it's not very surprising. Attempts to ban plastic straws—or indeed any plastic product—have as much to do with signaling your environmentalist bona fides as they do with actually cleaning up the oceans or saving the planet. So people pushing the claim have little incentive to investigate it. And the media have every incentive to hype the impact of a phenomenon they're covering.Indeed.
Let this serve as a reminder: A statistic's popularity does not prove its accuracy.
******************
As time goes on I find that Churchill's observations about socialism is proven over and over again.
“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”As long as one remembers that socialism does not help raise to downtrodden but pulls down everyone to the level of the downtrodden (with the exception of the ruling elite, of course). Socialism has always brought with it the spread of misery and, dare I say, fear and tyranny. If one of the proletariat sees that a successful neighbor has acquired some good or another that they do not, they don't wonder if they can possible get one too. Instead they conspire to have it taken away from the neighbor, ensuring that no one will ever be able to have whatever “it” is. Socialism does inspire greed and envy. It always has. It also helps to create laziness as it is always “someone else's job” to provide X, Y, or Z or to clean up the mess made by others.
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Socialism is misanthropic. It hates people, particularly individuals. Then again, one of the greatest proponents of socialism, Karl Marx, was a misanthrope. He neither liked or trusted people. That alone should have warned people reading Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto that he hadn't written it to benefit the 'oppressed and downtrodden'.
He wrote them so people would “get the hell off his lawn.”
******************
OK, this is just plain stupid.
Apparently stores protecting their merchandise from shoplifting is now racist. (These days, what isn't?)
A California woman is suing Walmart, claiming that the store’s policy to lock certain products subject to a higher rate of shoplifting inside glass cases is racist.Gee, could it be because those particular items have been seeing a high rate of shoplifting? Why wouldn't Walmart take extra precautions if that was indeed the case? I'm sure that in other parts of the country different items are kept under lock and key for the same reason – high levels of shoplifting. It's called loss prevention and any retail outlet tries to do the same thing.
Essie Grundy is taking a Walmart in Perris, California, to court, saying she felt like a second-class citizen because items popular with black customers were locked behind glass doors, CBS Los Angeles reported.
I know I was amazed when I went to our local BJ's and found out that razor blades are kept under lock and key. When 15 razor blade cartridges cost $40 (this was for the Gillette Fusion cartridges) I can understand why they have those clear plastic lock boxes with the RFID tags surrounding every package of razor blades. Why? Loss prevention.
Is it racist? I suppose I could make the case if I lowered my IQ by half. Is it sexist? Darned tootin'. They don't do that for the women's razor blades that I saw.
So basically this is yet another attempt to paint standard loss prevention by retail stores as something other than trying to keep people from stealing stuff.
******************
And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the local pond hockey tournaments and ice fishing derbies will be taking place, the ice on our driveway has finally melted away, and where we just might dodge the next round of snow.