oitixion

The Royal Navy has a long history of building Floating Dry Docks to maintain the Fleet around the world. In the 1869, the world’s largest floating Dry Dock was towed across the Atlantic to Bermuda to support the Ironclads which at the time was the largest ever built. 🧵1/3

The blast bent those steel beams on the tower inwards:

When I was a "depressed" teen who flunked out of the honors program at his university bc he spent days at a Barnes and Noble reading books on Buddhism and Emile Coue's autosuggestion, I called my dad and he told me "you depressed, go chop wood." But you can't chop palm trees.

Mind you:

Designed, built, and launched in under a year – our dual-use Marauder MUSV is officially entering on-water trials and validating a new model for modern shipbuilding. 1/3

Imagine how many more people could live in NYC if we turned Central Park into a suburb (the answer is 80 more people)

I’m so mad. I was grabbing some ingredients at the grocery store—for esquites, if you were curious—and the self-checkout lady started counting my items. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen,” she counted. “Soooo sorry, but self-checkout is for ten items or less (sic).” She pointed to the other checkouts, the ones with massive lines behind them. “You’ll have to check out over there,” she said oh-so-helpfully. I’d been shopping there for years and this was the first time anyone had the gall to count my items. All the other self-checkout lanes were empty (save one with a homeless guy slumped over it, doing his best to keep Austin weird), and there was no line behind me. I was also fast; I wouldn’t be holding anyone up. And wasn’t “not holding anyone up” really the point of that little rule? I thought about relaying these excellent points to her, but a quick physiognomy check told me they would fall on deaf ears. Instead I gave in to my wrath: I said “fuck this,” dropped my basket, and told her to have fun putting my items back. In hindsight, this was stupid and childish. She would probably just make it someone else’s problem. Oh well. Felt good, at least. It reminded me of an essay I wanted to write. It was going to be called “The Sucker Effect,” even though I was sure someone else (maybe Heather Mac Donald?) had already written something by that title. The canonical example was to be speeding. If you obey the speed limit, you feel like a sucker. Everyone will blast past you, and you just know none of them are going to face any consequences for it. And if you adopt their strategy, going a few over the limit, you’re gambling. It’ll work 99% of the time, but eventually some dickhead cop will pull you over because he was pissed his bitch wife got the wrong orange juice. (And when this happens, some glib motherfucker will say, “Well, you WERE speeding.…”) If the speed limit were always enforced, no one would speed. But because it's only occasionally enforced, every drive leaves you feeling like either a sucker or a gambler! It sucks! And it's the same with self-checkout. It's only because the rule was so rarely enforced that I ended up in that situation. Seems like this sort of thing happens a lot. PPP fraud, HOV lanes, fare evasion, some kind of Somali babysitting grift... they all seem to advantage people who don't care about consequences and disadvantage people who do. I never ended up writing that essay. Probably for the best; nobody would have read it. Anyway, I got the ingredients at another store.