tnts4me

Think this is how they are gonna pay to fix the roads, probably not. Regular back up to $3.69 Nessel Files for Emergency Shutdown of Enbridge’s Line 5 Pipeline Site Staff 05/17/2023 4:20 PM EDT Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Wednesday asked a Wisconsin federal court to take emergency action to protect Lake Superior from what she called an imminent threat posed by Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline. Nessel filed an amicus brief in support of an emergency motion filed last week by the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians of the Bad River Reservation. The rising waters of the Bad River near Superior, Wisconsin, have caused extreme erosion along the banks of the river and dramatically increased the likelihood that the Line 5 pipeline will rupture, Nessel said. In 2022, the court concluded that the presence of Line 5 on the Bad River Reservation constitutes a trespass, but the court did not order an immediate shutdown or rerouting of the pipeline. At that time, more than 30 feet of riverbank separated the pipeline from the water’s edge. If the pipeline ruptures, it will release oil and natural gas liquids into the Bad River, which flows directly into Lake Superior 16 miles downstream, Nessel said. The Bad River Band has asked the court to order an emergency shutdown of the pipeline, and Nessel’s brief today supports that request. “Lake Superior is a priceless natural and cultural resource and, like all the Great Lakes, it is vital to our way of life in Michigan,” Nessel said. “As attorney general, I owe a duty to the people of Michigan to protect all of Michigan’s waters, not only for us today, but also for future generations. I will always do everything in my power to protect the Great Lakes from the threat posed by those who care more about their bottom line than about Michigan’s residents and natural resources.”

Very sad indeed. It seems as if they were doing everything right, moving over for oncoming sleds. Condolences to the family

Back in the 70's, a friend and myself went to FL to visit some friends that we use to work with. We went to rent a vehicle for the week, guess what? They required a cc for deposit on the rental. I had enough money with me I probably could of bought the rental. My friend happened to have one and we used it. I made sure that once we got back I got one. Not saying you need to use it but sometimes you just need one.

I have no problem with early voting and absentee ballots. I do have a problem with who gets them. The sending out of applications for absentee ballots needs to be better controlled.

Your right absentee ballots have been available forever, BUT they need to have better control on who gets them. Not saying either D or R, it more of the lobbyist, but the same thing happened during mid terms as 2020. I personally seen applications for absentee ballots being sent to dead people, people who haven't lived at that residence for years, people who have never lived there and etc. You would think that those sending these out would have a better list of who and where to sent these applications to, but than again they don't care. Who's to say some one might just take these and request a ballot. I went and voted personally Tuesday and I live an a very small village (about 800). I had to present my ID twice while voting, once when I first walked in and another at the next station. Both of these individuals are retired school teachers (husband and wife) that taught all my kids, oh and did I mention they live 4 doors down from us. Before you had to have a reason to get a ballot, now they just hand them out like candy.

Thanks will have to check them out. I've always been a live type person. When listening to songs on the stereo or what ever method used, I'll pick a live version over a studio version every time, a lot of times I can just picture being at the venue.

When a song by Zac Brown comes on I either turn the station or turn the radio off. Does that count?

To be honest, I've seen all the bands I really wanted to see. My dad use to work part time at the IMA auditorium in Flint, MI during the late 60's and 70's. I use to go to every rock concert that they had there, then throw in Sherwood Forest out in Davision, Pine Knob and the Detroit area. There was always a concert somewhere to go. When I go to concerts now it's with my kids and we're seeing bands like The Lacs, Colt Ford, Demun Jones, Moonshine Bandits and etc. If I was to want to seen a band from the pass it would have to be Zep just because I'd want my kids to seen them. I've seen them twice, 73 at Cobo in Detroit and 77 at the Pontiac Silverdome. Another band would be Skynyrd for the same reason as above.

^^^^^ Use this on our sleds, Sparks, and pretty much anything

I've been to a lot and I mean a lot of concerts over the years, seen them all except the Beatles and Hendrix. Your right about the ticket prices mostly brought on by a shortage of tickets. Pick any venue and then subtract tickets for promo's (radio, etc), season ticket holders, fan club, the band and set up members and the list goes on, it doesn't leave a lot of tickets left for the public. My nephew usually had season tickets for Pine Knob (not now) but we went to see Kid Rock played there for 4 days, we went to each show. Getting back to Ac/Dc, I remember seeing them I think in 77 (not sure), but it was at the Capital Theater in Flint, MI. My dad use to work at the IMA Auditorium in Flint. I use go to all the events (concerts, car show, circus and etc) for free except any pay per view (fights) or banquets. I still go with my son and daughter to see concerts (The Lacs, Colt Ford, Upchurch, Demun Jones, etc) one in a while when they are in the area. I've always been a live music type of person, I'd really listen to a live version of a song then a studio if at all possible.

Thanks, that be the one

Ahh, The Tubes. Seen them a few times, once at the IMA Auditorium and another at Pine Knob. I had their 1st album (Self titled) at one time. Stupid me lent it out along with some others and never got them back. White Punks on Dope, Mondo Bondage Side tracking here, Back in the mid 70's, I use to go to Chicago every so often. There was a band from the area called the Detectives that I really liked. I bought their 1st album (also self titled) that disappeared with The Tubes. Recently I've been trying to find something about them with no luck. I was just wondering if anyone might of heard of them and have the album I'm talking about.

Right along with you on seen him, I'm 67 and still go to his shows.

Look at all the fraud in unemployment claims last year and you will have your answer on how he could of got his money.

We didn't have this problem until men started getting pregnant. lol

IMO, they are very political (lack of a better word), ok they suck. There are a lot of great artist/bands that have yet made it into the R&RHoF, then there are some that suck ass that have made it.

^^^^^ To be honest, IMO, it's a love/hate type thing. I have a 16 1200 with the ITC throttle and love it, BUT i'm also use to it. I do think the sports mode is a bit twitchy in the tight trails and usual run in the normal mode, but for not so tight or long runs it's in sports mode. My son has a 2S and can tell the difference but it use to the throttle.

^^^^ Exactly along with a bigger price tag.

I was given my first car if you could call it that. My mom's car was hit in the front from another vehicle while she was stopped. My dad bought her a new car. I got the damaged one, a 65 Dodge Coronet 4 door. We replaced the fender and the rest of the damage stuff stayed just like it was. Well some of you might remember back then when LEOs set up vehicle inspections along roadways, as luck would have it one day, I got waved into one. They did the checklist on my car and I had 11 things wrong with it, from no horn, blinkers not working, bald tires, wipers squirters not working, bumper not bolted properly and etc. I got a 10 days fix it or ticket. We decided to get another vehicle instead of trying to fix it. I ended up with a 71 Demon 340 that I put the down payment on and made the monthly payments as I was working at a restaurant. My parents paid my insurance on it. Then I foolishly traded in it on a 75 Dodge Tradesman van. Still kicking myself for getting rid of that car

The third doses increases immunity, so after the fourth dose you are protected. Once 80% of the population has received the fifth dose, the restrictions can be relaxed as the sixth dose stops the virus from spreading. I am calm and believe the seventh dose will solve our problems and we should have no reason to fear the eighth dose. The clinical phase of the ninth dose confirms that the antibodies remain stable after the tenth dose. The eleventh dose guarantees that no new mutations will develop, so there is no longer any reason to criticize the idea of a twelfth dose.

Yep Ariens or grab a shovel.

That's simple When did Biden become a politician?

I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End Ryan JOHNSON Oct 27·10 min read I have a simple question for every ‘expert’ who thinks they understand the root causes of the shipping crisis: Why is there only one crane for every 50–100 trucks at every port in America? No ‘expert’ will answer this question. I’m a Class A truck driver with experience in nearly every aspect of freight. My experience in the trucking industry of 20 years tells me that nothing is going to change in the shipping industry. Let’s start with understanding some things about ports. Outside of dedicated port trucking companies, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers. There is a reason for that. Think of going to the port as going to WalMart on Black Friday, but imagine only ONE cashier for thousands of customers. Think about the lines. Except at a port, there are at least THREE lines to get a container in or out. The first line is the ‘in’ gate, where hundreds of trucks daily have to pass through 5–10 available gates. The second line is waiting to pick up your container. The third line is for waiting to get out. For each of these lines the wait time is a minimum of an hour, and I’ve waited up to 8 hours in the first line just to get into the port. Some ports are worse than others, but excessive wait times are not uncommon. It’s a rare day when a driver gets in and out in under two hours. By ‘rare day’, I mean maybe a handful of times a year. Ports don’t even begin to have enough workers to keep the ports fluid, and it doesn’t matter where you are, coastal or inland port, union or non-union port, it’s the same everywhere. Furthermore, I’m fortunate enough to be a Teamster — a union driver — an employee paid by the hour. Most port drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same, and they have to pay 90% of their truck operating expenses (the carrier might pay the other 10%, but usually less.) The rates paid to non-union drivers for shipping container transport are usually extremely low. In a majority of cases, these drivers don’t come close to my union wages. They pay for all their own repairs and fuel, and all truck related expenses. I honestly don’t understand how many of them can even afford to show up for work. There’s no guarantee of ANY wage (not even minimum wage), and in many cases, these drivers make far below minimum wage. In some cases they work 70 hour weeks and still end up owing money to their carrier. So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one. They took a 2/3 pay cut and most of these drivers were working 12 hours a day or more. While carriers were charging increased pandemic shipping rates, none of those rate increases went to the driver wages. Many drivers simply quit. However, while the pickup rate for containers severely decreased, they were still being offloaded from the boats. And it’s only gotten worse. Earlier this summer, both BNSF and Union Pacific Railways shut down their container yards in the Chicago area for a week for inbound containers. These are some of the busiest ports in the country. They had miles upon miles of stack (container) trains waiting to get in to be unloaded. According to BNSF, containers were sitting in the port 1/3 longer than usual, and they simply ran out of space to put them until some of the ones already on the ground had been picked up. Though they did reopen the area ports, they are still over capacity. Stack trains are still sitting loaded, all over the country, waiting to get into a port to unload. And they have to be unloaded, there is a finite number of railcars. Equipment shortages are a large part of this problem. One of these critical shortages is the container chassis. A container chassis is the trailer the container sits on. Cranes will load these in port. Chassis are typically container company provided, as trucking companies generally don’t have their own chassis units. They are essential for container trucking. While there are some privately owned chassis, there aren’t enough of those to begin to address the backlog of containers today, and now drivers are sitting around for hours, sometimes days, waiting for chassis. The impact of the container crisis now hitting residencies in proximity to trucking companies. Containers are being pulled out of the port and dropped anywhere the drivers can find because the trucking company lots are full. Ports are desperate to get containers out so they can unload the new containers coming in by boat. When this happens there is no plan to deliver this freight yet, they are literally just making room for the next ship at the port. This won’t last long, as this just compounds the shortage of chassis. Ports will eventually find themselves unable to move containers out of the port until sitting containers are delivered, emptied, returned, or taken to a storage lot (either loaded or empty) and taken off the chassis there so the chassis can be put back into use. The priority is not delivery, the priority is just to clear the port enough to unload the next boat. What happens when a container does get to a warehouse? A large portion of international containers must be hand unloaded because the products are not on pallets. It takes a working crew a considerable amount of time to do this, and warehouse work is usually low wage. A lot of it is actually only temp staffed. Many full time warehouse workers got laid off when the pandemic started, and didn’t come back. So warehouses, like everybody else, are chronically short staffed. When the port trucker gets to the warehouse, they have to wait for a door (you’ve probably seen warehouse buildings with a bank of roll-up doors for trucks on one side of the building.) The warehouses are behind schedule, sometimes by weeks. After maybe a 2 hour wait, the driver gets a door and drops the container — but now often has to pick up an empty, and goes back to the port to wait in line all over again to drop off the empty. At the warehouse, the delivered freight is unloaded, and it is usually separated and bound to pallets, then shipped out in much smaller quantities to final destination. A container that had a couple dozen pallets of goods on it will go out on multiple trailers to multiple different destinations a few pallets at a time. From personal experience, what used to take me 20–30 minutes to pick up at a warehouse can now take three to four hours. This slowdown is warehouse management related: very few warehouses are open 24 hours, and even if they are, many are so short staffed it doesn’t make much difference, they are so far behind schedule. It means that as a freight driver, I cannot pick up as much freight in a day as I used to, and since I can’t get as much freight on my truck, the whole supply chain is backed up. Freight simply isn’t moving. It’s important to understand what the cost implications are for consumers with this lack of supply in the supply chain. It’s pure supply and demand economics. Consider volume shipping customers who primarily use ‘general freight’, which is the lowest cost shipping and typically travels in a ‘space available’ fashion. They have usually been able to get their freight moved from origination to delivery within two weeks. Think about how you get your packages from Amazon. Even without paying for Prime, you usually get your stuff in a week. The majority of freight travels at this low cost, ‘no guarantee of delivery date’ way, and for the most part it’s been fine for both shippers and consumers. Those days are coming to an end. People who want their deliveries in a reasonable time are going to have to start paying premium rates. There will be levels of priority, and each increase in rate premium essentially jumps that freight ahead of all the freight with lower or no premium rates. Unless the lack of shipping infrastructure is resolved, things will back up in a cascading effect to the point where if your products are going general freight, you might wait a month or two for delivery. It’s already starting. If you use truck shipping in any way, you’ve no doubt started to see the delays. Think about what’s going to happen to holiday season shipping. What is going to compel the shippers and carriers to invest in the needed infrastructure? The owners of these companies can theoretically not change anything and their business will still be at full capacity because of the backlog of containers. The backlog of containers doesn’t hurt them. It hurts anyone paying shipping costs — that is, manufacturers selling products and consumers buying products. But it doesn’t hurt the owners of the transportation business — in fact the laws of supply and demand mean that they are actually going to make more money through higher rates, without changing a thing. They don’t have to improve or add infrastructure (because it’s costly), and they don’t have to pay their workers more (warehouse workers, crane operators, truckers). The ‘experts’ want to say we can do things like open the ports 24/7, and this problem will be over in a couple weeks. They are blowing smoke, and they know it. Getting a container out of the port, as slow and aggravating as it is, is really the easy part, if you can find a truck and chassis to haul it. But every truck driver in America can’t operate 24/7, even if the government suspends Hours Of Service Regulations (federal regulations determining how many hours a week we can work/drive), we still need to sleep sometime. There are also restrictions on which trucks can go into a port. They have to be approved, have RFID tags, port registered, and the drivers have to have at least a TWIC card (Transportation Worker Identification Credential from the federal Transportation Security Administration). Some ports have additional requirements. As I have already said, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers with a 100 foot pole. What we have is a system with a limited amount of trucks and qualified drivers, many of whom are already working 14 hours a day (legally, the maximum they can), and now the supposed fix is to have them work 24 hours a day, every day, and not stop until the backlog is cleared. It’s not going to happen. It is not physically possible. There is no “cavalry” coming. No trucking companies are going to pay to register their trucks to haul containers for something that is supposedly so “short term,” because these same companies can get higher rate loads outside the ports. There is no extra capacity to be had, and it makes NO difference anyway, because If you can’t get a container unloaded at a warehouse, having drivers work 24/7/365 solves nothing. What it will truly take to fix this problem is to run EVERYTHING 24/7: ports (both coastal and domestic),trucks, and warehouses. We need tens of thousands more chassis, and a much greater capacity in trucking. Before the pandemic, through the pandemic, and really for the whole history of the freight industry at all levels, owners make their money by having low labor costs — that is, low wages and bare minimum staffing. Many supply chain workers are paid minimum wages, no benefits, and there’s a high rate of turnover because the physical conditions can be brutal (there aren’t even bathrooms for truckers waiting hours at ports because the port owners won’t pay for them. The truckers aren’t port employees and port owners are only legally required to pay for bathroom facilities for their employees. This is a nationwide problem). For the whole supply chain to function efficiently every point has to be working at an equal capacity. Any point that fails bottlenecks the whole system. Right now, it’s ALL failing spectacularly TOGETHER, but fixing one piece won’t do anything. It ALL needs to be fixed, and at the same time. How do you convince truckers to work when their pay isn’t guaranteed, even to the point where they lose money? Nobody is compelling the transportation industries to make the needed changes to their infrastructure. There are no laws compelling them to hire the needed workers, or pay them a living wage, or improve working conditions. And nobody is compelling them to buy more container chassis units, more cranes, or more storage space. This is for an industry that literally every business in the world is reliant on in some way or another. My prediction is that nothing is going to change and the shipping crisis is only going to get worse. Nobody in the supply chain wants to pay to solve the problem. They literally just won’t pay to solve the problem. At the point we are at now, things are so backed up that the backups THEMSELVES are causing container companies, ports, warehouses, and trucking companies to charge massive rate increases for doing literally NOTHING. Container companies have already decreased the maximum allowable times before containers have to be back to the port, and if the congestion is so bad that you can’t get the container back into the port when it is due, the container company can charge massive late fees. The ports themselves will start charging massive storage fees for not getting containers out on time — storage charges alone can run into thousands of dollars a day. Warehouses can charge massive premiums for their services, and so can trucking companies. Chronic understaffing has led to this problem, but it is allowing these same companies to charge ten times more for regular services. Since they’re not paying the workers any more than they did last year or five years ago, the whole industry sits back and cashes in on the mess it created. In fact, the more things are backed up, the more every point of the supply chain cashes in. There is literally NO incentive to change, even if it means consumers have to do holiday shopping in July and pay triple for shipping. This is the new normal. All brought to you by the ‘experts’ running our supply chains. https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-i-will-tell-you-why-america-s-shipping-crisis-will-not-end-bbe0ebac6a91

America will not make it to 30 years let alone 3 with the current administration. Here's another perfect example of where we're headed https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-in-talks-to-pay-hundreds-of-millions-to-immigrant-families-separated-at-border-11635447591

Snow city seems to be cheaper until you throw in the sales tax if you live in MI.