This is what I was really wondering about. Does anyone know the tricks for finding a “good” Kitchen Aid? Are their model numbers or construction details to look for?

I am of the mindset that we are now and have been a fascist nation for at least the last 40 years. They are just coming out in the open about it now, but what we are seeing is the end stages of fascist creep, not the beginning. Ultimately, over the course of my lifetime, I believe the US will descend into a series of neo-feudal states headed by corporations, who will eventually supplant and dismantle the government entirely.

What other byproducts would you expect to find in the burn plume? Obviously it isn’t an ideal way to incinerate chemicals. They can’t be getting complete combustion.

Everyone keeps getting worked up about how the burn off made hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere; is that really worth worrying about compared to the vinyl chloride itself and whatever other byproducts came off the burn? Like, HCL isn't carcinogenic. I have no chemical training to speak of, but I can buy a gallon of muriatic acid at the hardware store. My gut instinct is that I'd rather stick my hand in a beaker full of HCL than be in the same room with any visible quantity of vinyl chloride.

>Since his name will come up, let's clarify that Elon Musk did not invent the idea of a vactrain.

No, some victorian era crackpot kook invented it. 150 years ago, all of these gadget-bahns were invented by some top-hatted jackass. He took all of his profits, from sending children to die in the mills, and put it all on his vision for the future. Then all of those ideas failed spectacularly and were left in the dustbin to die, until now; when the marvelous Mr. Musk comes along and decides to rebrand them as the future. Novelty is a brain poison.

Holy fuck, why won't this die. It a scam; it is literally the monorail salesman from the Simpsons.

Do you find any relief in confronting death? So many people, your age and younger, look at their situation, and the general direction of the world, only to see a great deal of hardship with little prospects and no mechanism to improve things for themselves. I don’t know what life you live now, or what you will be leaving behind, but it sounds like you have a fixed amount of time. You can reasonably predict every consequence for you actions going forward; to what extent do you feel like you are not responsible for yourself anymore since your future has been decided for you?

Edit: also, do you anticipate and afterlife? What existential philosophy did you hold before your diagnosis? Has it changed in light of everything? Has it served you well?

"Ladies and gentleman, it's your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs."

If someone is smoking on the plane when they are already not allowed to, are they really going to bother using as ash tray?

As a consequence, the merchant marine have the most conceptually disturbing WWII memorials of them all.

Yup, the US strategy was literally to launch ships faster than the Germans could sink them. A disturbing number of the surviving war built liberty ships failed catastrophically right after the war. Merchant Marines were torpedo fodder.

Like...do you thing that Penn Station was built from load bearing masonry? It was a steel building. The stone was a facing material laid over a steel frame. And the train hall was pretty famously made of steel and glass.

Yeah, Trump has no fucking idea what comprises classical architecture. I've seen his buildings.

> Contemporary advancements in manufacturing have easily replaced skilled craftsmen used on historical classical buildings.

No, they haven't at all. Quality and integrity have just been compromised and degenerating for the past century to meet the limited capabilities of consumer driven mass production. There still isn't a machine that can carve those corinthian capitals or hot rivet together the steel and glass vaulting. You'd either have to substitute a shitty imitation of the genuine article, or you would have to develop and automated technology capable of replicating what those skilled craftsman could do; which would take decades to develop. The truth is that it doesn't matter how much money we have; there is no longer a sufficient skilled labor pool. It would take a generation just to apprentice a sufficient number of new craftsman in order to be capable of executing a project of that scale.

eh, I still don't think asbestos is common in traditional plasterwork. It's more likely to show up in mastic flooring, roofing, siding ect., or even is early gypsum drywall systems like Rock Lathe, but with 1940, it could go either way.

OP , do you know exactly when your building was built. Asbestos wasn’t actually that common domestically in the pre war period. If you find fibers, don’t panic, it’s probably horse hair.

Doodle-oodle-duh-duh Henry Hoover

Doodle-oodle-duh-duh Henry Hoover