Tomorrow, I have the honor of being inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame.
So, I thought I’d take a look back on how I got where I am today.
There are several paths to becoming an astronaut. This was mine. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Q2QweaGHKO
— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) May 5, 2023
Been saving this since Friday, for a little pick-me-up…
At 23, I became a US Naval Aviator. I deployed twice on the USS Midway and flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm.
It was dangerous. I had anti-aircraft artillery shot at me and a missile blow up next to my airplane. But we successfully completed every mission. pic.twitter.com/eZqtBhPNv3
— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) May 5, 2023
Two days later, I took my first step onto @Space_Station.
All in all, I spent more than 50 days in space over the course of four missions. That’s a lot of bad space food and hard work. pic.twitter.com/wR8aeAnCa4
— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) May 5, 2023
What I remember most from those four missions are the teams.
These flights are really hard to do. They’re tiring, full of long days doing technically difficult stuff.
But, I knew I could always rely on them to solve a tough problem and get the job done. pic.twitter.com/0i8djtF8v8
— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) May 5, 2023
My days in the Navy and at @NASA are in the rearview mirror.
But I’m incredibly grateful for my time in our nation’s space program, and I’m honored to join the ranks of some of my heroes (and my brother) in the US Astronaut Hall of Fame.
See you tomorrow, @NASAKennedy. pic.twitter.com/3HJm3ITXGU
— Captain Mark Kelly (@CaptMarkKelly) May 5, 2023
===========
More fun / informative stories for a Sunday morning. Click on the embedded tweet to go to the longer threads:
It’s been three years since the pandemic turned the economy upside down. So why are prices still so high?
To answer that question, there may be no better product than the humble car tire. pic.twitter.com/qevsHflQyV
— Michael Grabell (@MichaelGrabell) May 3, 2023
14/ As one economist said, “They can tell you it’s going to cost whatever it’s going to cost, and as long as it doesn’t sound like it’s made out of gold, you’re going to say, ‘OK.’”
— Michael Grabell (@MichaelGrabell) May 3, 2023
15/ Read the full story here:https://t.co/xEHRnTHhry
— Michael Grabell (@MichaelGrabell) May 3, 2023
And…
Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals classic GLADIATOR was released 23 years ago today. An enormous production full of star names, the making of story is as epic as the film itself.
A THREAD
1/35 pic.twitter.com/5KzLAXsGm9
— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) May 5, 2023
raven
Looks like he flew F/A-18 Hornets.
Chris T.
He (Kelly) could sing:
I study nautical science
I love my classes
Got a crazy teacher who wears dark glasses…
Regulon
@raven: A-6E Intruders, I had to look it up.
Chris T.
Meanwhile, in regard to tires: I had to buy 4 new ones quite recently due to a sidewall puncture. My car uses a weird tire size that most places don’t carry. Fortunately there’s a truck/SUV tire that’s about 5mm larger (wider and taller) that still fits on the rims, and is much more common. So I got some Michelin branded tires at the local Discount Tire, and while they’re not rated quite as highly as the OEM tires, they should actually last a bit longer, and are a bit quieter on the highway. They also cause the speedometer to read true MPH instead of reading 60 when actually going 59 (per phone GPS anyway).
Still, the $1200-ish for four tires and taxes etc (AWD, have to replace them all together) was not pleasant…
OzarkHillbilly
@Chris T.: I’m not looking forward to replacing the tires on my truck.
OzarkHillbilly
If’ns anybody’s interested: Confessions Of An A-6 Intruder Pilot.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Congrats to Mark Kelly. He seems like a solid, nice guy.
Mike in Pasadena
Anne Laurie: thank you for the work you and other front pagers do for all of us lurkers. I really appreciate your tireless work. I’m in Europe right now and use BJ to keep current. Thank you thank you.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Geo Wilcox
@Regulon: Same plane my husband flew in the Marines. A-6 squadron out of El Toro when it was a Marine base.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@rikyrah:
Good morning
Mike in Pasadena
Wash Post reports 9 dead in mass mall shooting in Texass. Farts and players because nothing can be done except more guns!
Matt McIrvin
“So why are prices still so high?” is kind of a worrying question to ask–after a period of inflation, the only thing that brings prices across the whole economy down again is a period of deflation, which you don’t actually want.
But people who remember how much things used to cost will perceive the new status quo as “high inflation” forever, so it’s a political problem.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Mike in Pasadena:
Of course not! Wouldn’t want to criminalize law-abiding citizens, now would we? Only a good guy with a gun can beat a bad guy with a gun! /s
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Matt McIrvin:
Wage growth would eventually alleviate this, no?
lowtechcyclist
What, you passed up on “Pretty Fly for a White Guy”? For shame! ;-)
satby
@Matt McIrvin: When the WSJ does a story on corporate price gouging, you can depend on it not being due to inflation.
(Edit, found it, it would be paywalled anyway).
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): If the high prices are because of supply chain issues, yes.
OzarkHillbilly
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Wage growth??? Shut yo mouth! Corporate governance demands we stop paying more for the same amount of labor!
RevRick
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I do believe we need to stigmatize the gun culture, which is rooted in some sick fears of others combined with warped hero fantasies. Perhaps, we can begin by referring to the things they possess/use as murder machines.
Frankly, I wonder about the darkness that lurks in the souls of those who arm themselves to the teeth.
As for thoughts and prayers, Sen. Raphael Warnock called them an affront to God. (Words to that effect) In fact, in Judaism it is a deep sin to pray for something and then not act.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@RevRick: When Warnock spoke after the Atlanta shooting, his children’s schools were in lockdown.
Matt McIrvin
…I do think AI tech is going to create downward wage pressure in a bunch of seemingly random parts of the economy. Basically what this does is automate a lot of low- to medium-level “creative” jobs that you’d have outsourced to a person: not necessarily well, but well enough for somebody’s purposes if it’s really cheap. And it’s a bullshit firehose in a lot of disruptive ways, but there have been bad actors using boiler rooms full of people to generate this bullshit already–it automates that.
RevRick
A couple of days ago, there was a post touting Collin Allred’s entrance into the Senate race against Ted Cruz.
While I contributed to his first House campaign, I won’t to this effort. And my reasons are simple. The Senate map for Democrats is awful in 2024. We have to defend seats in the red states of Montana (Jon Tester), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), and West Virginia ((Joe Manchin). We also have to defend seats in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And the hard reality nowadays is that the fate of House and Senate candidates is tied up with which Presidential candidate wins the state. Aside from Susan Collins in Maine and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin in an off-year, the winners of the Senate race are those who are of the same party as the winners of the Presidential contest in that state.
So, what are the odds of President Biden winning Texas?
RevRick
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It can’t get any closer to home than that.
randy khan
One little item that underlines the extent to which companies have pricing power.
We tend to think of gas prices as driven by the underlying price of oil, but since Russia invaded Ukraine last March there’s been a big change in how gas is priced that seems to have nothing to do with oil prices, which is that the separation between the prices for regular and plus and plus and premium has changed dramatically (so premium was 20 or 30 cents per gallon more than regular). Before the war, the differences were relatively small, around 10-15 cents as you bumped up from one tier to another. Now the gap between regular and premium is *much* bigger, sometimes more than a dollar a gallon. (The only place this isn’t true around me is at Costco, and even there the gap is about 50 cents, more than twice the typical gap before.) Basically, the oil companies have decided that premium gas needs to be more expensive, even though from what we saw before we know the cost to make it isn’t really that different from the cost for regular.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@RevRick:
What about the 50 state strategy? You have to build the infrastructure for future success
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
And the Old Testament is loaded with passages where the Lord basically says, “stuff your thoughts and prayers (well, ceremonies and sacrifices, but same idea), shaddup and go do what is right.” The first chapter of Isaiah is a good for-instance.
I can see how secular, amoral right-wingers can value the right to own whatever firearms they want above the lives of the people slaughtered by them. But how anyone identifying as Christian can do the same is totally beyond me.
Tell ’em that if they need a machine to show what a man they are, then they can’t be very manly, can they?
Geminid
From Agri-Pulse May 4:
Now age 38, Xochitl Torres-Small was one of the promising young members of the House class of 2018. She lost her reelection in 2020, but last year Democrat Gabe Vasquez won the 2nd CD, which covers much of southern New Mexico.
OzarkHillbilly
According to some “Christians” all that is necessary is to accept Jesus as Christ and screw all his teachings. All their sins will be forgiven.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Yuppers. When saw ‘Fly Guy’ presumed it would be about Pence.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Doug J for the win.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
“Forgiveness ain’t a one way street, buddy.”
– j. Christ
//
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: Modern gun culture feels like one of those motte-and-bailey arguments that have been getting attention lately. There’s an old-fashioned version of it that people retreat to: guns are tools; they can be owned and used responsibly; they’re used in sports and recreations that are relatively wholesome (hunting, target shooting).
And then there’s today’s version which is revolves around paranoid/bloodthirsty fantasies of getting to kill a mob of bad guys, perhaps in an apocalyptic breakdown of society, perhaps just because the lower orders have decided to invade your home and rape and kill your family. But you press people on it and they retreat to the old salt-of-the-earth vision of Grandpa’s varmint rifle, only they insist their cartoonish arsenal makes sense in that context.
I think the idea that guns, particularly handguns and/or semiauto weapons, are sensible means of everyday home or personal defense is really the lie at the core of it. It’s what makes them dangerous. Grandpa’s varmint rifle never really was except in unusual circumstances. But having a pistol at the ready in your home just ups the danger level, and just owning an AR-15 increases it in a different way.
(I also think we shouldn’t get distracted by the “regulate handguns vs. regulate assault rifles” dichotomy. It’s OK to want to do things that prevent theatrical media-splash mass shootings even if they’re not the lion’s share of gun deaths. They’re different facets of the problem and we should attack them both.)
Suzanne
@randy khan: I buy tires at Costco. Honestly, I try to buy everything at Costco. I even bought the car through the Costco auto buying program.
There are many things that suck about car ownership, and the constant and/or exorbitant costs are one of them. SuzMom decided to give up driving when we moved, and she will routinely remark on how much she didn’t even see all the costs clearly (gas, tires, insurance, parking, tags, car washes and details, etc.) because they were so normalized. I drive her around now, and let her pay for gas sometimes, and that has made a big quality of life difference.
NotMax
Repeated for the morning crew. Can’t tell the players without a program.
’24 watch. From Aaron to Zane, and still counting.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Matt McIrvin: Attacking on multiple fronts is a good idea. There is no one weird trick.
Betty
@RevRick: Baby killers works for me.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: One of the things that makes it hard to promote public transit in the US is that, in most places in the United States, the system has to be unrealistically comprehensive before it can actually substitute for car ownership–and if you’re assuming you’ll need to own a car anyway, now you’re discounting all these sunk costs and the argument to use public transit for a particular trip becomes that much harder. (If public transit wins anyway, it’s probably because of the problem of city parking.)
Betty
@RevRick: I think West Virginia is gone so it would help Dems if Allred is a viable candidate against the despicable Ted. Texans may start thinking that Republicans aren’t so good for their health.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Honestly, I worry about Mom sill driving in her mid-90s. Although when riding in the passenger seat when visiting, have no nervousness. The diameter of her circle of assuredness on the road has shrunken, and deem that a Good Thing.
That she can still successfully maneuver into and out of her assigned slot in the parking garage designed by the firm of DeSade & Bathory underneath her building is the ultimate test, IMHO.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Costco FTW!
I also would give up my car if you would drive me everywhere.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I wish I could tattoo this onto every liberal.
narya
Pierce linked to the Kent State University Chorale performing “Ohio”; sharing it here.
NotMax
Rumor is that in light of the Carroll trial the newest item on the Mar-a-lago menu is Choad-in-the-Hole.
//
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
This is not downward wage pressure, but job elimination.
I suppose, though, that those who have lost their jobs may have to accept lower wages in other sectors of the economy in order to survive.
narya
I like the idea of a 50-state strategy, or as close to that as we can get. We can’t simultaneously say, oh, we need to make sure a Dem is running on every ballot . . . and then not support people in the difficult races or the races that some people think is a waste of time/money/effort. There are a LOT of us, and we don’t all have to put our efforts into the same races–the Balloon Juice strategy is a perfect example of finding multiple places to be useful and following the lead of people on the ground.
O. Felix Culpa
Based on the title, I thought the post was going to be about Mike Pence. Mark Kelly is a better choice.
Oops. Should have read the comments. NotMax got there first. Of course. Pfffft. :-)
RevRick
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think those days are gone. Trump has solidified a realignment of American politics. We may win a few surprises here and there, like Mary Petola in Alaska, but Mississippi is a state where the Democrats have a high floor and low ceiling.
If I were to do so, however, I would frame it nationally as the GOP desecrates the graves of the 405,000 who died fighting fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Agreed. Like, in Phoenix, which is super-sprawling and car-based, there really is no way to get around solely on public transit. Everyone I knew who didn’t have a car used public transit sometimes, but also depended heavily on friends and family to provide rides.
Honestly, that’s a gap that Uber/Lyft fill nicely.
Brachiator
@RevRick:
This will require some heavy lifting. Guns are part of the foundation mythology of the United States.
And conservatives have turned a perverse corner. They accept the murder of innocents as acceptable to worship of the Second Amendment.
Suzanne
@NotMax: SuzMom has an interesting issue. She can very easily perform all the mechanics of driving, and do it well and safely. What she cannot do is navigate. She was always bad at it, but she also has some brain damage from encephalitis about 15 years ago, and after that, it became even harder. She has never been someone with much visual/spatial skill, and now it is, like, much worse. It got to the point that there were about ten places in Phoenix that she knew how to get to and then back home (grocery store, Target, Spawns’ schools), and then she needed help to go everywhere else. Any sort of change, like a detour or even weather, will get her confused, and then she will panic, and it was just not worth the anxiety (hers and then subsequently mine). Now she can walk places or I can give her a ride, and it has dialed down the stress level significantly.
Brachiator
On astronauts.
They have always been some of my original heroes. I had bubble gum cards of the original Mercury Seven astronauts.
Respected the achievements of the Soviet cosmonauts also.
I also loved the movies and TV shows that showed space exploration as international, not just the monopoly of any one nation.
Suzanne
@Brachiator: It can be done, I think. Honestly, the evens of the last few weeks have created a kind of “new face” of gun ownership (not actually new, but a kind of “new in the popular imagination” new)….and that is the rageaholic crazy scared old man. Definitely not an aspirational character.
RevRick
@lowtechcyclist: I couldn’t agree more! As I said, murder machine culture is deeply rooted in fear.
My hunch is there’s a great correlation between gun ownership among white men and white Evangelical churches, which have their own sordid history of racial violence.
In the later BCE, Judaism was moving away from the eye for an eye to the assessing of fines as punishment. And certainly, there’s no way to reconcile murder machine culture with Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, where he asserted that even name-calling betrays a murderous intent ( Matthew 5:21-22).
RevRick
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, that’s the ultimate in reducing relationships to a crass transaction. Jesus as the “Get out of jail” card.
Suzanne
Oh, for sure. I’m sure you have heard about Evangelical churches pushing men to have a “warrior” mindset and not to be gentle. Literally, Mr. Rogers is held up as a negative example for Christian men. Read “Jesus and John Wayne”.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Would avail myself more of public transport were the routes not so stupid.
Neighborhood bus stop within walking distance but takes at least an hour and fifteen minutes to arrive in town. Were every other bus on a reverse route would take 15 minutes.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Yes, along with, I suppose, things like Zipcar–Uber/Lyft (or the taxi in general) isn’t an efficient or green mode of transport in itself, but by providing a workable occasional substitute for car ownership in the cases where you absolutely can’t avoid using a car, it potentially opens that door, that you could just give up those huge recurring costs.
O. Felix Culpa
Heather Cox Richardson’s recurring article on gun history in America (she posts a version of it after sundry American massacres) is worth a read. The current fetishization of weapons of mass murder is a relatively modern phenomenon, and deliberately ginned up for financial and political gain, just like the
pro-lifeforced-birth movement was.While the rabid gun people are unlikely to be converted, it seems to me that a counter campaign against these weapons could eventually succeed. A long, hard slog, perhaps, but when was that not the case for meaningful social change?
ETA: The sticking point may be the un-Supreme Court. Not sure how we deal with that in the short term.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: The biggest problem in most US systems is low frequency.
There’s a bus stop in easy walking distance of my home, and buses ARE FREE! The system completely eliminated fare collection! But I don’t use them because it’s one bus an hour, and to get anywhere you need to ride downtown and transfer to another hourly bus. Going anywhere requires a lot of advance planning and will eat up half your day.
Most Americans haven’t even experienced a transit system where you don’t have to plan because there’s a train every 2 minutes and you can just jump on the next one.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Thank you for your extensive, thoughtful response. And I agree 100% about not getting trapped in the assault rifle vs handgun false choice.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Ironic given that Fred Rogers was probably one of the most devoutly Christian major media figures of the past century.
MomSense
@RevRick:
I’d love to tell them they look fucking stupid to their faces but I don’t want to get shot doing it.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: My grandmother was killed by her insistence/need to keep driving into her late 80s. (The other one never learned in the first place, and lived to 96.)
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes, this. It makes the system unusable.
The other big problem is a real or perceived lack of safety. Unwanted sexualized attention, untreated people in the midst of obvious mental health crises, drug use, crime, filth. The Jordan Neely case is heartbreaking, and it is evidence that an entire social system failed before that subway ride.
RevRick
@Betty: Again, I would caution that we have so many seats to defend first that those should be our priority. Texas would soak up too many resources, especially compared to every other state.
O. Felix Culpa
@Matt McIrvin: Mr. Rogers was a saint, in the best and fullest sense of the word.
NotMax
@Suzanne
“Eat me, pilgrim.”
//
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Yeah, and it’s a case where neither the “liberal” nor “conservative” answers seem to be adequate. There needs to be a system that people who are broken and suffering can use, but it also has to be safe.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
This is Hawaii, right? I would think it relatively easy to have good public transportation within a relatively small area than it would be in some mainland metroplexes.
Matt McIrvin
@O. Felix Culpa: Currently drinking coffee from a mug with a picture of him on it. It’s temperature-sensitive so when the coffee level goes down he changes from his jacket to a sweater.
Ocotillo
Ironic, two of landlocked Arizona recent Senators were Navy veterans.
O. Felix Culpa
@MomSense:
We had a workman in the house on Friday who was wearing a black t-shirt that proclaimed “Size Matters” with a series of increasingly large bullets and their caliber size on the front, plus the reversed black-and-grey American flag with some noxious gun slogan on the sleeve. I was appalled and I wasn’t going to get into arguments with him either. I hate the prevalence of toxic male intimidation in our society.
NotMax
@O. Felix Culpa
But- but- Fox labeled Mr. Rogers an “evil, evil man” don’tcha know.
O. Felix Culpa
@Matt McIrvin:
LOL! I have that mug too. It was a gift from one of my sons, both of whom adored Mr. Rogers.
O. Felix Culpa
@NotMax:
Which serves to underscore what a good man he was, methinks. :)
TS
@Matt McIrvin:
For that you need volume commuters/travellers. For our year stay in London there was a bus every 5 minutes outside the apartments – and a 7 minute walk to the tube which was less frequent (every 15 min I think). Problem with the buses was traffic, by midday instead of a bus every 5 minutes there were 5 buses every 30 minutes.
But – it was a system where the only timetable was morning start time/evening finish time, buses went in few different directions & we lived happily without a car. I think this is why the Brits have small refrigerators. You can’t carry too much shopping home on the bus, so shop frequently for smaller amounts of food.
NotMax
@Brachiator
This is neighbor island Hawaii, home to half a loaf implementation.
“Whaddaya carping about? You still get crumbs.”
RevRick
@Suzanne: The whole mythologizing of the West and cowboy culture is built on lies. Most frontier towns had a strict policy that you had to turn your gun into the sheriff’s office or leave it at the door of the saloon when you entered town. As for cowboys, half were black, Mexican or indigenous men, and far from being independent, they were hired by Eastern corporations which owned the cattle.
We seem to have periodic panics about masculinity. There was, for instance, a debate about it during the 1830s/40s with Southern whites insisting upon a martial/honor vision and Northern whites insisting on a self-control/restraint model. And in the late 1800s we have a renewed debate about men gone soft.
Gvg
@Suzanne: Uber/Lyft are private and don’t bet their employees well enough nor do the pay benefits and insure against valid costs. I do not trust them enough to use them. I want public transportation where I can vote out bad management or a company who can be sued if a real employee rapes me. None of this fake contractor stuff. The business model is a bad unsafe one. If taxis wasn’t working, then we need to force them to improve but these libertarian non regulated companies are freeloaders, passing costs on to society to fake being cheap.They don’t solve the problems.
WaterGirl
@Betty: Baby killers sounds too much like the anti-abortion creeps.
NotMax
@Gvg
Freezing the number of taxi medallions in NYC was a major mistake.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: When I was a kid, I rode the bus all the time when I wanted to go downtown Stamford. And I had a choice of three destinations returning that would get me a few blocks from home. And I, too, have a bus stop a block away. But it’s not just convenience; there’s now a class stigmatization associated with riding a bus.
RevRick
@MomSense: understood.
Matt McIrvin
@TS: The supermarket as we know them in the US is definitely a car-culture institution. City people shop differently.
Matt McIrvin
@Gvg: A lot of visitors to cities use Uber to get everywhere because they’re scared of the subway, but to me Uber is scarier–you’re literally getting into some rando’s car. I guess this is more about perception than reality.
NotMax
So, ordered 5 small items from Amazon early in the tail end of April. Of the five two have gone astray. Refunds being processed.
They did confirm one of them was somehow delivered to a recipient in Georgia (say what now?). The other tracked as in Honolulu as of April 28. Since then? Only FSM knows.
Cameron
I haven’t driven a car in over 50 years, so I was pretty uncertain what to expect when I moved to Florida from Center City Philadelphia a while back. I was very pleasantly surprised at what a good transit system Manatee County has. Buses only run once or twice an hour, not past about 8:30 at night, and not at all on Sunday – but that makes sense in a large county with its biggest city only a fraction of the size of Philly. They’re running an experiment for the next year or so with fares of $0; I hope it picks them up the ridership they’d like (I was only paying $.75 old duffer fare anyway). Sometimes it takes a while, but I’ve been able to get everywhere I need to go.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: Always seemed to me that the endpoint of “Stand Your Ground” is the return of the code duello. But at least that had rules.
Another Scott
@RevRick: Things don’t change until they do.
Allred needs enough resources to get his message and voters out, but doesn’t need $1B in TV ads. There’s a balance.
Some expert was arguing a week or so ago that conditions are such for Democrats to do very well in 2024 (Dobbs, low unemployment, guns, crazy GQPers, end of the pandemic, etc.). We need to fight to create the future we want, and not accept the doom and gloom framing from the “red wave” pundits.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Vision of the future.
;)
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: Not too different from Target’s pandemic-era curbside service, which I used on occasion–though I stopped once I felt it was feasible because it seemed like they screwed up orders a lot.
While we were being hardcore about isolation we divided a lot of our shopping between that and Doordash orders from BJ’s, because the actual supermarket delivery service from Peapod was too slammed to use. Covered most things but it was highly imperfect.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
I’ve grown weary of buying from Amazon. There’s lots of fakes on there. It’s why I prefer to buy directly from manufacturer’s websites now. You know you’re going to get the real thing
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Well, two of the three items which did arrive as and when expected were foodstuffs from bona fide sources. With a modicum of forbearance and eyes wide open Amazon provides viable options without spreading credit card info hither and yon for otherwise difficult to find stuff.
And once one reaches a human on the phone their refund protocol, in my experience, is painless.
Another Scott
@NotMax: Amazon has been very good for me for decades, but they messed up a recent order (1 precision tool kit for $20, 1 precision tool kit for $80, they sent me 2 of the $20 ones, grr…). Ok, no big deal, mistakes happen, I’ll do a return.
Go to orders page, start the return process… What’s this? I need to take it to Whole Foods or some preferred shipping place 30 minutes away?? I can’t just print a label and take it to an all-in-one shipping store that is extremely convenient??!! WTF??
Grr…
I’ve still got a few days to figure out what I’m going to do.
Turned me off, it did.
(sigh)
[/first world problems]
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
I live in SoCal, drive a rather nice economy car that has gotten me more than 40mpg and can get around 30mpg around town. And even given that I take the electric train all the way across LA on a semi regular basis. Now I get a discounted ticket because I’m a senior (and no not a HS senior, a senior in life) but even if I didn’t the ride is far cheaper to take the train than pay the $4.50/gal price around here. And given the population here the roads are almost always a lot slower than the train. It’s fun taking the train down the center of the freeway and passing all the cars.
Kay
I think about a really good advertising campaign to make gun culture undesirable. Ads depicting people with guns in the home as bad parents, thoughtless, reckless – bumbling dopes who put other people at risk- AND humorous ads making fun of how silly a lot of it is, the strutting around with giant guns in supermarkets or dressing in camo and pretending to be soldiers.
Gun manufacturers sold this problem. Seems like we could sell something different. You could try it one area like they do when rolling out a product- see if it has an effect. Maybe take a percent of each gun regulation groups budget and instead of putting it towards lobbying put it toward creating and publishing these ads.
MomSense
@narya:
My dad was the CO advisor at Kent State. The campus ministry group he started morphed into the anti war movement there. SDS met in our church basement. Every summer we would go back to Ohio to visit family and always stopped at Kent State. Of course I was little and didn’t understand so I would roll down the hill and play with my sister on the beautiful lawn there.
My mom did her BA and MS at Kent State. She worked for student affairs and knew the students well.
May 4 is a sad day for my parents.
Kay
One could tailor the ads to the area. So ads depicting gun culture as undesirable and uncool in rural areas would be different than ads depicting gun culture in urban areas- it might be particularly effective for younger people coming up – kids are very aware of what is culturally appropriate in their own kid-culture.
I know I beat this drum all the time but there is SO MUCH MONEY in US politics. We’re flush with it. We reguraly raise tens of millions of dollars and donate it to candidates who are never going to win. We could allocate some to different approaches- try some things. Liberals are supposed to be creative. Let’s experiment.
Kay
When my oldest child was little- 5 or so- we invited a friend from school over to play. His mother called me prior to the date and asked me if I had guns in the home. I didn’t and I told her so but I was sort of fascinated by this phone call – I live in a VERY conservative area and this was 25 years ago. I think you could do a lot with that as far as making gun cuture socially unacceptable.
NotMax
@Another Scott
One reason my preference is to deal with them person to person by phone. Customer service reps can offer options the online pages/procedures don’t.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
There were recent news reports that Amazon was changing it’s return policies, but nothing to suggest that they were totally eliminating UPS returns.
RevRick
@Another Scott: Al I can say in response is that Texas is a hugely expensive market for getting the message out, when the dollars it could easily vacuum up would be more profitably be spent supporting the other vulnerable Democrats. My fear is that Democrats will be suckered into this race because they loathe Ted Cruz. I think of the $16 million wasted on Marcus Flowers campaign against MTG, which he lost by 30%, money that might have saved/won several Democratic House seats in close races.
If you’re aiming for Texas, give to the DNC or Biden campaigns, because if Joe loses Texas, Allred won’t win.
R'Chard
The shorter answer to Michael Grabell’s tweetstring is, “Because they can.”
Elizabelle
@Kay: some great ideas about advertising, Kay. I think you should bring this up in the morning thread tomorrow, because I think a lot of people won’t see them here.