Several people have been commenting that they are experiencing a site slowdown effecting commenting, loading, and/or reloading the site starting around midnight EST. I emailed Alain to see if he knew what was going on. He replied:
“I suspect it’s web hosting-related, like backups being run. I’ll try to take a look and postpone to 3 am so it’s midnight for west coasters. ”
So he’s on it. I asked him to keep us apprised of what he finds.
Treat this as a very late night or early morning open thread and feel free to run amok in the comments. I’m turning in, but you all have fun.
Amir Khalid
Run amok in the comments? Wait, I got to sharpen my parang first. And practice my silat moves.
mclaren
To get to the second, third, etc. pages you enter after the balloon juice website url: /2016/01/page/2 or /2016/01/page/3 and so forth and reload the webpage.
It stands to reason that a professional web designer could not figure out how to do this with a button at the bottom of the page, since appending the string “/2016/01/page/2” to the site URL using Javascript lies far beyond the competence of even the most masterful web programmer.
Proof once again that programmers are people who don’t actually know anything and can’t actually do anything, but strut and brag and get very highly paid in the process. Much like CEOs or lawyers.
TheMightyTrowel
Tomorrow I’m driving 15 students to Tasmania – 12 hours in the car plus an overnight ferry. JOY. Wish me luck.
Another Holocene Human
Random rant: a very sensationalistic article recently did the rounds about food parasite diseases in the Roman world. It exaggerated the science and was more speculation than fact. Now the clickbait farms are running “Roman toilets were no good for health”. Fuck no, clickbait hell, Roman toilets prevented cholera. Just as ours do. Still a scourge of urban life all over the world. (The original article did assert* that rather than treat the sewage the Romans exploited it as fertilizer which would have made them vulnerable to human-borne pathogens just as we are vulnerable to cattle-borne pathogens due to sloppy farming practices today.)
*-I don’t know based on what because it’s not a typical farming practice to just dump untreated shit in a field and the use of manure must go back to the Neolithic. But, you know, the claim is out there.
David *Rafael* Koch
Drudge – Who Won the Debate
TRUMP……………..56.17%
CRUZ……………….30.1%
RUBIO……………….7.12%
CHRISTIE………….1.93%
KASICH…………….1.66%
CARSON……………1.52%
¿JEB ?……………….1.5% ◄
Total Votes: 219,861
BillinGlendaleCA
@TheMightyTrowel: Good luck.
BillinGlendaleCA
@David *Rafael* Koch: Actually I though the Joisey Whale did better than Failgunner Ted. Then again, I’m not a Republican.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Holocene Human: In human history, composting is a relatively recent invention and one that takes time to do properly. Humans are not as a rule very patient. Also, I’m quite sure the Romans aren’t the only society that used human fecal matter for fertilizer. I read somewhere that it was a common practice for the Japanese at one point in time. As to the point of the Romans spreading pathogens, that is a story as old as man. The Romans were better by far on a number of things, but they had there own issues too because of societal norms and taboos. Any time an isolated people gets exposed to new pathogens by a conquering army, violence does not kill near the number as disease does.
Native American populations were decimated by Old World pathogens and in the Civil war far far more Union and Confederate farm boys were killed by diseases they had never come in contact with before than ever died in battle.
NotMax
On the plus side –
“Largely” eliminate? Come on, Reuters, that’s a weaselly hedge. Without a core, it’s an ex-reactor.
On the minus side –
amk
@David *Rafael* Koch: guess rafael needs more poll freepers. and drudge is still alive?
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: In Korea the rice paddies were fertilized with “honey buckets”. As the paddies came right up to the wire of our little “compound” it was really nice about August!
raven
We were more sophisticated in Vietnam.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Night soil goes back a pretty long way.
@Another Holocene Human
The Roman public toilets were constantly flushed by a trough of running water beneath. Doesn’t mean they were necessarily what we would recognize as sanitary, but certainly more so than cesspits, open sewers or thunder mugs.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Fragrant!
raven
We have compost available at the dump that is made from sewage sludge and wood chips. They put the material under big plastic tarps and cook it. I guess it’s illegal in California and lots of our friends are freake out by it but we use it on the flower beds.
raven
BASIC COMMERCIAL COMPOSTING INFORMATION
Commercial or industrial composting is large-scale composting which is designed to handle a very high volume of organic material, as opposed to backyard composting, which handles organic material from only one household. The compost (finished product) produced by a commercial composting facility can be sold to farms and nurseries, applied to municipal landscaping, or sold to individuals. With a growing interest in composting, recycling, and reducing the environmental impact of doing business, commercial composting operations have expanded in Georgia and around the country.
amk
from
amk
to
alain, the site fixer
how about incorporating toc’s even betterer balloon juice script to bring back the effing back button?
okthxbi
your eternal bj whiner,
amk
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
A look at some of the history of the privy, including mention of Cloacina, the Roman goddess of sewers and drains.
amk
Maybe the most striking finding in this NBC/WSJ poll is the growing GOP acceptance of Trump. Back in March, only 23 percent of Republican primary voters said they could see themselves supporting the real-estate mogul. Now that number stands at 65 percent.
The Republican candidates with the highest percentages on this question are Cruz (at 71 percent, up from 40 percent in March) and Rubio (at 67 percent, up from 56 percent 10 months ago).
By contrast, only 42 percent of Republicans say that they can see themselves supporting Jeb Bush, which is down from 75 percent in June.
///
more brink$ please.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: I compost all our kitchen waste and chicken manure but that is just because I have to do something with that stuff and it’s easier than having it hauled away. All my garden compost comes from STL Composting in Vally Park and it is one hell of an operation they got going there. And the compost is beautiful.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: The wife says that makes the best vegetables, when the kid heard about that, eh, form of fertilizer she was grossed out. The wife was a city girl(Seoul) but they did go out to the country on occasion.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yea, I have no idea what it is like now, this was a loooong time ago.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: I have helped build a # of outhouses over the years including the “Crystal Crapper” which was made almost entirely of old windows. The last 2 were both “Skycrappers”, 1 1/2 story composting outhouses. The 2nd one turned into a work of art as some folks engaged in a wood carving competition and others put up a covered walkway and planted flowering vines along it.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: We do the kitchen stuff in a couple of big bins next to the gardens.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Sweet!
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: After all this “addition” agony the bride decided the front hall needed painting so the house is in fucking turmoil again! Rolling scaffold, ladders and the whole shoooting match! I did some work on the beadboard ceiling but, besides that, it’s her project.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Madame’s been here for over 30 years.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yes, and that’s about 17 years fewer than my visit.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Yeah, it was a lot of fun although all I did was the carpentry and drink beer. I like the Crystal Crapper the best, as one sits and takes care of business, all about you the world is going about it’s business.
@raven: I always have between 3 and 6 different projects going at any one time. It’s my strategy to stay married. If my wife divorced me she’d have to hire someone to do all this work and she’s just too cheap for that.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: :)
Steeplejack
Can we get a general site-update update from Alain (or someone?) He has been absent on the threads since the holidays, and the site-update posts under “About Balloon Juice” are all old and closed for comments.
WaterGirl
For me, the site slowdown has been happening on and off for days. I don’t think it’s just backups in the nighttime.
Manyakitty
@srv: You too? I can’t see any posts before page one. This happens on my home PC running Firefox on Windows 7, my work PC running Firefox on Windows 10, or my android phone.
EJ
@Manyakitty: Same thing happens for me with chrome on Windows 7.
EJ
@mclaren: You clearly aren’t and have never worked with a professional web designer. If you had, you would know that there are ways of reporting bugs that don’t make you look like a gigantic asshole.
a different chris
Why, in the name of all that is holy, is there stuff on the front page that makes 50+ connection attempts to something or other at twitter.com (or so says the Disconnect extension)? And it’s not consistent – on one page load it’ll try 91 calls, reload and it’s 37, reload again and it’s 58. Even though none of the content has changed.
EJ
@a different chris: The fact that it’s a different number every time should be a good clue. Sorta like how ad-blocker and the like will tell you they blocked 95 ads while you watched one youtube video. They do block connection attempts, but there’s no incentive on their part not to overstate how many connection attempts they blocked.
Also, for operational efficiency, things like the twitter feed widget typically don’t simply make a request and wait for whatever comes back – if an inital ping has a slow response time, they’ll usually abandon it and try again a short time later. In addition, Disconnect itself might fool the widget into thinking it’s not gotten a response, forcing a retry.
a different chris
Go to the front page, right-click->view source. Ctrl+F for ‘twitter’. When I do that, it says ‘More than 100 matches’. I realize most are probably URLs, though since I don’t see any of the twitter-related stuff, not even the embeds, I don’t know. I hate all that fancy-for-fancy’s-sake interactive live feed bullshit anyway.
Ruckus
A new issue that I’ve noticed of only a few days.
If I open a post and scroll down, just reading the comments when I press the back arrow I now have 10-20 pages to back track through before hitting the page I was actually on last. Most of the time nothing else loads, I just have to backtrack all those pages. I’ve taken to just closing the tab and reopening/loading BJ to avoid the issue. But why all of a sudden?
2015 iMac, osx 10.11.2, FF 43.0.4 It hasn’t been doing this on this configuration up until a week or two ago.
Alain the site fixer
@Ruckus: Investigating.
Alain the site fixer
@a different chris: I’ll see what’s going on but I suspect it’s the Twitter feed and that be the nature of the beast.