The problem - and I would genuinely appreciate input on this terribly trivial problem - is that it falls on my 40th birthday.

I am in a mixed marriage. My wife thinks birthdays are a big deal. I do not. I have learned to adjust.

But this is America, goddamit, and you can celebrate or not celebrate a milestone birthday according to the dictates of your own conscience. Whether or not someone is obliged to bake you a cake, that's a different question.

is curbside pickup a depressing sign of dehumanization and a culture that is insatiably hungry to create time and then immediately fill the time saved?

It seemed like it would have been extremely helpful when my dad could move well enough to drive to the store (unless you were worried about him driving into people) but not well enough to shop. However, it turns out that he didn't like having his kids order his groceries, so he just used the little electric cart they provide.

Simple, you let people live in the empty cargo containers while they're travelling away from the US, then you fly them back on the planes that are half empty because foreigners aren't allowed to travel to the US any more. Repeat ad nauseum and you've solved homelessness. Or I guess the Republican plan would be to leave the poors elsewhere because they don't deserve to be Americans if they don't have money.

I am usually pretty middling on birthdays. I like to do something a little special, but I don't care if it falls on my actual birthday. I don't care if I get given a gift, but if I see something I want, I'll buy it for myself.

I'm just not sure if I'll feel differently for it being a particularly big birthday. This birthday does seem meaningful to me - I got pregnant with Hawaii when I was 30, and the last kid got potty trained a few months ago, so my 30s decade was neatly bracketed by all things babies and toddlers, and now we're moving on to a new stage of life, which will hopefully be slightly less physically exhausting.

Also WTF you're younger than me? I guess that makes sense since our kids are a couple years older than your kids, but I just assumed otherwise... um, not saying you look old or anything, just... wise?

4: You should have a plethora of piñatas for that.

5: You thought I seemed like I was 50? (zing!)

I learned today that if you have Spotify you can play different versions of "Who Let The Dogs Out" for at least 7 hours without repeating an identical version once.

And I got called fat yesterday too.

I assume 8 is accomplished Forrest Gump listing-shrimp style, where it's the same song with a different breed of dog subbed in: Who let the Yorkies out? Who let the corgies out? Who let the dachsunds out? with breed-specific yipping.

That wasn't meant as an early derail, just as news you can use.

9: also how old (and fat) are you, anyway?

Let's all list our SAT scores and BMI.

I don't think there are breed-specific versions. I haven't started this project yet.

40 and 220. I used to hang out in the 204-208 range but gained a lot living abroad, combination of less exercise and cheap/good food. Healthiest was 194 in grad school. I was at a skate last night which I didn't play in last year because we were away, and a guy on the bench said he hadn't played in that game in a couple years either, and he said "you've put on a few pounds since the last time we played together." This was after he yelled at me for missing a shot on a pass he made to me and not chasing after the rebound (which I did, I guess my fat ass was just too slow for his liking.) I was tempted to say, "You're still an asshole like you were last time we played together," which is true, he was always known for being a dick.

15 to 13?

So you're merely months older than me, is what you're saying.

16 made me laugh.

You people are all young.

True, although the OP never specified how long until the next conference.

But the point is, would you have gone to a conference on your 40th?

Only if the conference organizers offered to serve me a gay birthday cake.

I know I was the original proponent of the gerrymandering class, so I may be biased. But there's a decent possibility that the conference will be more fun than a medium birthday. All-day wonkiness, pitched to your political side, with other bright people may well be a very good day. It may also be rarer than birthday parties, although not necessarily decade birthdays on a weekend. I'd say to have your cake and eat it too. Go to the conference, then declare Friday and Sunday your birthdays, so they average to Saturday.

A birthday is an excuse to celebrate yourself and do what you want. If you want to have a party but not on the exact day of your birthday because there's something else you want to do, do what makes you happy.

One of AB's best friends views curbside pickup as a godsend, but she's got 2 kids and a husband who works 3 weeks on/off in Chicago

I literally can't imagine using it, but I like food shopping.

I think it's good to make the kids go into the store and push the cart because I enjoy watching old people get hit by grocery carts.

23 & 24 are correct. I had a nice house party for my 40th, but in general I celebrate my bday by making Thanksgiving dinner or prepping for it.

Hey, you are a baby at 40. Recently, the HS my older kiddo attends posted an archived article from their school newspaper, written in the 1990s by a fellow mom of a kid in my kid's 8th grade class (it was about how email was changing their lives). I realized that when she was writing HS newspaper articles, I was just about done with my PhD (and not because I was a child prodigy).

I think the math idea behind the gerrymandering is part marketing (interesting, no, that the PhD in pure math is a marketing gimmick?), but also a little bit about how to draw contiguous boundaries with similar populations in ways that can be deemed completely neutral to other factors (though if you start throwing natural boundaries, of rivers, train tracks, or highways in there, their not neutral anymore, anyway).

It would seem so complicated to specify exactly what items I want.

But I guess it would solve my perennial problem of leaving my list at home when I go to the grocery store.

I think that, as long as you go in with lowered expectations (which it seems you already have, per the OP), the conference is unlikely to feel like a lost day.

Plus, if you tell people it's your 40th, they'll totally dote on you.

The traditional birthday gift for 40 around here is a 40. You may want to specify your preferred malt liquor before hand.

Let's all play Edward Forty-Hands.

I'm trying and failing to remember what I did for my 40th birthday.

28.1: Especially with Kai (now 9), I'm always thrown when his classmates' parents are way, way younger than us. One of his best friends is actually the youngest son of a woman who lived in my dorm when I was a freshman (and she's a couple years older), so it's not at all consistent, but I just vaguely assume they're ll my peers, then they'll have a much-younger birthday party, and it's weird.

Curbside pickup seems like a curious but possibly useful middle ground to me. If I don't have time to go shopping I usually feel like I don't have time to drive to the store, either, and would go full-tilt into grocery delivery. I can imagine "I can arrange to swing by the store, but not arrange to be home at a particular time window", it's just not how my life works (mostly since I don't drive a lot).

29.1: I know, right? Among other things, much of my shopping algorithm is comparison: not just cheapest, but bang for the buck, like the better canned beans are on sale, so get those, but otherwise get the store brand, etc. And doing that online is tedious and fussy. I kind of suspect that curbside pickup targets people who are bad shoppers.

You could bring cupcakes to the conference.

Curbside sound great to me. I suspect the value of not having to spend your time comparing the price of canned beans is greater than the value derived from getting the better deal on canned beans. But I'm kind of a ridiculously impatient person.

I don't think we have curbside delivery yet.

I'm have a decade birthday in 2018 as well. The wife will want to make a deal of it, but I'm sure my strategy of mumbling and hedging until it's too late to do a thing will work out once more. This year we took a little trip up to Banff, which was a pretty good way to do it.

I think 35 has a strong point, but at root curbside pickup (it's always at the edge of the carpark here for some reason, and badged as "click and collect") has the same other drawbacks as grocery delivery, which is that for whole categories of purchases, especially fresh produce, you want to see what you're buying and not have somebody else decide for you which tomatoes you get; and above all you want the option to look at what's there and say, "fuck that, they're scraping the barrel today, we'll get something out of the freezer." Which is why, having been reasonably enthusiastic about on-line grocery shopping when it was first a thing, we haven't used it in over two years.

The problem - and I would genuinely appreciate input on this terribly trivial problem - is that it falls on my 40th birthday. You don't get many decade-birthdays, especially on a Saturday, and maybe I would rather not spend mine there.

I sympathise. I spent my 40th in the desert with the army. The big day I spent under a camouflage net pitched over the back of an armoured vehicle, listening to a radio, eating cold MREs and worrying about scorpions.

I'm sure the scorpions were just fine.

Which is why, having been reasonably enthusiastic about on-line grocery shopping when it was first a thing, we haven't used it in over two years.

At one point we were using delivery and the produce was absolutely amazing. Stupid expensive, though. I imaging if it was to get down to be more price-competitive with going to the store the quality of produce would have to be one of the first things to be cut.

But, maybe get your produce from a CSA and let the delivery be the thing you use to fill the gaps for "whatever goes well with 14 pounds of bok choy."

I'm sure the scorpions were just fine.

But they probably appreciated your concern.

Does curbside pick up necessarily mean that they get the groceries for you? I've seen stuff where you do the shopping and then it gets delivered to your car as you drive by.

I would love to get milk delivered. They have that service here, but in the US, you have to order a fair amount.

Also, if I could order Trader Joe's stuff online, I would love it.

I've made it more than a week in my parents' living room, moving only to the bathroom or to get food, but this morning I tromped upstairs to the empty bed in my brother's room because it felt too much like some psychological horror movie and I'd been losing my mind, plus my ankle is probably stable enough that I will be able get back downstairs again since it's 1 pm and I haven't eaten yet. Anyway, I would probably make good use of curbside delivery but haven't tried it yet.

46: Stay strong, Thorn!

47: and resist curbside pickup? I'm sure I will since it costs 5 bucks, though I've heard the first one's free.

48: Resist madness! Curbside pickup is fine when you're allowed to drive.

Otherwise, rest and elevate.

I think 45.1.last is pretty common and is usually free. Moving the bags isn't the expensive part, it's paying someone to go around and pick the custom set of things you want. If you already did that they'll put the bags on a roller track or whatever to send them out to your car.

43.last. We still have these things called greengrocers within walking distance.

"whatever goes well with 14 pounds of bok choy."

Some pork and a trash bag big enough to hold twelve pounds of bok choy.

I feel like we've glossed over container ships.

53: According to google, a standard 40' shipping container can hold 61,200 pounds of bok choy.

45.1 is what I assumed hg was referencing. We always had that here in the 80s.

Also, 42 is my pick for most archetypal Moby post.

My sister has told me that shipping companies have vast overcapacity. (Like, say, the 45% of ships traveling around empty.) They keep undercutting each other, in an attempt to get some revenue for their empty containers. She was shocked by the story of Hanjin disappearing overnight, because they had a bunch of ships out at sea. Ports weren't letting them in, because there was no parent company to pay their unloading and fueling and docking fees. But it is the natural end point of the race the shipping companies are locked in.

Check with Jammies. Since my wife loves birthdays, we made a big deal out of hers--a progressive party, with friends joining up for BBQ lunch, or laser tag, or miniature golfing, or the cookout at the end of the day--whichever parts interested them. So she got to see a mix of people in different settings and do silly things.

I was on my work away schedule for my 40th, but last year she surprised me with a rented cabin in the woods with a dozen friends, potluck cooking, and piles of games. It was wonderful!

As a weekend birthday, Jammies might plan a cool daylong thing. If you can confirm that he won't, or that he could run it on Sunday, the conference could be fun.

58.2: There's no way my wife and I could eat a whole dozen people.

For my 35th birthday, Cassandane probably got a babysitter for Atossa and took me out to a nice dinner. Same as for the 34th. For the 33rd, Atossa might have been too young for a sitter. I don't remember what I did for the 30th. That happened within two months of us buying the house and becoming engaged, but neither of those actually happened on my birthday. I remember one year where Cassandane took me to a concert for my birthday. Imagine Dragons or Iron and Wine or something like that. I'm vague about it because I'm not much of a music buff. I'll put background music on if I'm not trying to concentrate on something, I like concerts more than I'd like a hypothetical similar event without the music, it's just not a priority. Cassandane is a music buff, though. Occasionally I give her shit for giving me a birthday present that was more for herself.

As for the conference, I guess it depends. Is it a 12-hour long thing you must attend all or none of, or could you pick and choose sessions to attend? Would it take you 10 minutes to get there from home or an hour? I can imagine conferences that wouldn't conflict with celebrating a birthday the same day.

||

Should we have another Franken post? I don't know how much there is to say but his decision to resign seems significant.

|>

I don't does. Does the idea of another Franken post grab anyone?

People say they want to talk about overcapacity in the shipping industry, but they never mean it.

61: Not sure. IIRC what would happen if he resigns was discussed fairly well. The news is that it's no longer hypothetical. The Democratic governor will appoint a Democrat to the office and they'll have to run in a 2018 special election. Franken was first elected in 2008, so his term would have been up in 2020, and I assume the soon-to-be-Senator will have to run then too.

When the first allegations about him came to light, I think the consensus here was that rather than resigning right away, he should announce his intention not to run again and groom a hand-picked successor to run for his office and campaign for him or her (probably her), both for strategic reasons (keeping Democrats in office as long as they aren't too horrible) and as penance. Since then, there have been a lot more allegations.

By now the value of him campaigning for that successor has gone down and grooming them seems like inadequate penance. So... bye bye Al.

shipping container

Why use a chamber pot now that everybody has a toilet!

You'd think they could find something to ship back. The plastic packaging that all the cheap junk came with.

People say they want to talk about overcapacity in the shipping industry, but they never mean it.

If we didn't have an analogy ban would it be fair to describe it as being like climate change in that it is a problem which develops slowly and incrementally until, at some point, the effects are large and obvious enough to be visible to everybody. But, at that point there's no simple solution.

It is nothing like a frog sitting in a pot as the water boils, because frog legs are delicious.

It costs like 7-800 bucks to ship a container from Guangzhou to LA, no what's in it. I'm amazed by this and want to ship things all the time now.

+ matter

Maybe the shipping industry didn't do itself any favors with the Panama canal expansion and giant-ass Post-Panamax ships. And the second canal that the Chinese wanted to plow through Nicaragua is madness.

The giant-ass ships require new cranes, because they don't fit under the old ones. The arms race is ridiculous.

Yeah, and all sorts of harbors have had to be dredged and expanded at massive public expense. Because if your city doesn't do it, the city up the coast that does will steal all your shipping traffic.

I just had a "kids today and their music" moment. Am I supposed to understand something about "Man's not hot"?
Relevant because old.

Sounds like a lot of employment, anyway.

When I took Maritime Law lo those many years ago, the eye-popping stat had to do with how much of the shipping was transporting water. I don't remember what it was, but it was a lot.

Ok, here's the triangular trade solution. Take all the plastic packaging for all the junk goods from Asia, turn it into water bottles. Fill therewith meltwater in Antarctica, thus preventing it from raising sea levels. Deliver to Mongolia.

Maybe I need a pemtagonal trade solution.

Water bottles to Yemen,

73. They're going to dredge deeper channels in Boston Harbor because of the larger ships, and to sink the tea deeper so it doesn't contaminate anything.

Why not do like Venice and just sink the city?

Hey, did you guys hear that President Trump had some sad health news today? He went for a check-up at Walter Reed and they discovered a large tumor. Yeah. It had a decidedly orange hue and an elaborate comb-over.

WAKKA-WAKKA-WAKKA

Go to the conference.

I haven't read the links, but in theory all that surplus shipping will be great news for everyone when the recession ends and everybody bootstraps themselves out of poverty through global trade.

Thanks to a guest lecturer I had yesterday (who was wonderful) I now have anti-apartheid songs stuck in my head in a running loop. Some of them were better than others, but nevertheless I think it's easy to forget how much social activism was actually happening in music during the '80s.

Also, the music video for "Sun City" is really something.

Snow is accumulating!!! We played hard.

You got playable snow before we did?

It's unexpected.

Maybe 2"? It's very, very exciting. Dramatic giant snowflakes. The kids went nuts, then we did the hot chocolate and movie thing.

You better have had marshmallows.

What's creepier/Handmaid-tale-ier than asking your staff if they will have sex with you?

How about we call on someone in the back. Arizona?

That's on topic because surrogate motherhood is the curbside pickup of uteruses.

The framing "45% of cargo ships" is really misleading. It's actually 45% of bulk carriers. Since bulk carriers carry bulk goods from places where there are bulk goods to places where there aren't, some of them inevitably will be empty on their return trips. Bulk goods are basically natural resources, which aren't evenly distributed.

They should be filled with pudding.

And bulk carriers aren't necessarily interchangeable. Maybe the same ship can move coal on one voyage and sugar on the next, but cleaning is time and money.

It's hard to get the pudding out of the corners.

61: We could speculate on who Roger Stone will get Democrats to turn on next?

The OP is interesting and right to point out the non-flatness of the shipping network. Frex I imagine the economics of cleaning holds between cargoes will vary a lot by location.

To the extent there is oversupply I assume it's mostly yet another piece of the great China boom and bust. Which will be fine when growth resumes. Or surplus ships are culled in the next war. Whichever.

And the culling aspect might matter. A big fraction of these ships are built in China. They had to know they were building surplus shipyard capacity. Of course there are internal politics there too, but still.

Virtually all large ships apparently built in Jpn, ROK, ROC, PRC. Striking how that old school Meiji-MITI model plays out.

Railroad freight has long had the large percent ships empty problem.

Although maybe it's not so much an issue now? I know it comes up in discussions of railroad economics in the 19th century.

Bulk carriers back to China to the USA used to carry coal, until (a) California decided to stop shipping coal (b) China decided to wean itself off coal. So the absence if return whatever is net good for the world plus the sane part of the USA abuts the Pacific.

S/bfrom the USA

Speaking of China and excess capacity, "rounded up" bike share bikes in Hangzhou,

On the shipping subthread, I'm not sure it makes sense to think of it as overcapacity or waste.

If you send a ship from Shanghai to Long Beach, you've also committed to bringing her back to Shanghai (not necessarily directly) unless you're going to scrap the ship at the end of the voyage. The costs of the trip out and back are locked in when you commit to the outward voyage.

This is why backloads are so important to the economics of any transport - whatever you charge for the backload will improve the margin so long as you don't actually give it away. I *think* this means shipping will tend to be cheaper, overall, the closer to balanced trade you are. However, moving the deal closer to balance can be worthwhile enough that it's worth giving a big one-sided customer a deal.

Internet peering works quite a lot like this; ideally you want a balanced peering relationship, but the only way for, say, a huge eyeball ISP to get that is to peer with a huge content point source. which makes sense!

Why buy the transport when you can get the backload for free?

Right - the availability of cheap return freight should move it towards balance.

That may have been a poor attempt at a joke.

If you send a ship from Shanghai to Long Beach, you've also committed to bringing her back to Shanghai (not necessarily directly)
I'm confused. Who is "you" in this sentence.

The Flying Dutchman.

Apparently you cannot drown raccoons in this county, which is probably why we're falling behind China in terms of bulk transport.

Maybe you can't.

Sorry. Apparently you should not drown raccoons.

Although maybe it's not so much an issue now? I know it comes up in discussions of railroad economics in the 19th century.

The trains going from DC to the midwest along the Potomac river sure seem pretty empty. Lots of empty... um, car cars. Train cars that should have cars in them. Looks like they're called autoracks. And the coal hoppers come back empty obviously.

Trump should probably tax the solar power industry to pay for shipping Pennsylvania coal to Wyoming.

I'm not the Flying Dutchman and I want an answer.

Because drowning is animal cruelty and raccoons are not, legally, vermin.

I meant the shipping thing. Raccoons can go snorkel for all I care.

I am the Flying Dutchman and I don't want an answer. I'm an enigma dammit.

Everybody here but you runs a major logistics company.

If we switched to a barter economy, we wouldn't have this problem. Capitalism fails again!

OT: Odds of a pee tape are improving.

I want Japan to become a republic so I can call it the ROJ and make tea jokes.

124: You should pitch that as a manga.

I disagree with the link in 122 that says "The golden-showers detail, while unconfirmed, seemed too bizarre to be plausible."

Knowing what we know of Trump, it has always seemed completely plausible. I don't understand why there has been denial about this.

124: You should pitch that as a manga.

That's very much what the link says. It starts by giving an account of the prevailing wisdom before arguing against it.

124/126 to 125

I think you need remedial work on fractions.

61: I would kind of like a Franken post, or at least a revived Franken conversation in some thread or other. I'm finding it to be one of those issues where I agree with whichever side I've heard argued last. I've been feeling not at all good about it but I can't decide if it's just because I liked Franken* and I'm trying to rationalise the regret I feel over losing him, or if a problematic line really has been crossed with his resignation.

It would be good to hear from women of Unfogged on this.

*not so much personally, but as an unapologetic and articulate liberal who seemed to take his job seriously.

I made my self feel a bit better by sending a postcard to Norm Coleman saying "He still beat you."

Also on the getting-shitcanned-for-wandering-hands beat, have the New Yorkers heard any backstory on the Leonard Lopate suspension? (Hockenberry was always a transparent creep).

y favorite example of filling the empty ships is Fiji water at Starbucks. Fiji imports basically everything except fish, and its main export is tourism, which doesn't fit into containers. So fill the empty containers with water!

There was also an incident a few years ago where an 18 wheeler, with the logo of a milk company clearly visible, crashed on the way out from New York City. The container broke and thousands of commuters saw that it was filled to the top with City garbage. The milk company said they always wash the containers, there are lots of legal dumps near the dairy farms, and it's much more ecological to drive a load of garbage than to return empty.

Bankruptcies of capital-intensive infrastructure businesses like ships are great for the economy. The billionaire investors take a bath, the infrastructure gets sold off for pennies on the dollar, and the rest of us have the benefits of low-cost infrastructure. It happened with railroads in the late nineteenth century, with electricity generators in the Depression, and with intercity fiber optic cable in the 1990's.

My dad's favorite Army Story was about the time they realized the engineers were using the same tankers to bring water in and take sewage out.

If shipping companies have so much unused extra capacity, why don't they just use it to haul bitcoins?

Actually it's my favorite story. For him the memory was still a little bit visceral.

He probably won't appreciate the pee tape that much either.

True. I'll lay money he's a big gibbonista.

135 is seriously one slidedeck away from VC millions. Self-contained sever farm in a container, the ship generates power anyway, mobility protects against sabotage, and bandwidth isn't an issue because the ledger takes like a week to verify transactions anyway.

Back in my day, slides came on wheels and there was no star wipe.

I think star wipes are deprecated these days.

I guess they clog sewers.

Fiji imports basically everything except fish, and its main export is tourism, which doesn't fit into containers. So fill the empty containers with water!

Sure! What does a small island developing state need with a decent aquifer anyway?

You can't make a pee tape without water.

139: and you have the ocean as a heat sink.

Power is going to be a problem, though. Bitcoin farms need a huge amount.

Whatever. We'll iterate.

145.last: Buy cheap, polluting coal and burn it for power where there are no pollution regulations.

I think ships do that anyway, with high-sulfur diesel.

Yeah, ships use the cheapest, most horribly polluting fuel they can get a hold of. Its perfect for mining Bitcoin.

135/139: WatrBNB?

Deep Sea Minr.

So we just got our first Blue Apron deliver (there was a coupon). The produce looks good and the proportions are such that there won't be any leftovers. The packaging was a bit excessive, though. I'm not sure if FedExing a block of ice is particularly green.