(no subject)
It's lame that deductions apply to company bonuses. Makes them feel like more salary, not a gift you can have fun with. Or 53% of a gift I could have fun with, in my case.
There's a German U-boat sunken off the Norwegian coast full of mercury. So naturally they're trying to find a way to prevent it from getting out of its storage tanks as the sub disintegrates. This I don't understand:
"After spending three years and about $6.5 million researching the problem, the Norwegian Coastal Administration recommended encasing the submarine with sand to prevent the spread of mercury. The method, it said in a report released Tuesday, had worked 30 times worldwide and was said to be less risky than attempting to lift the 2,400-ton sub."
Now that I think about it, that amount of money makes sense given that employees are billed at high rates that salaries are only a small part of, and they probably did a lot of stuff at sea. But all that, to recommend encasing it with sand? I could've come up with that for $20. I'd design a concrete tomb for $3,800.
Cool story though, it being the sub that was carrying technical documents about the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, that Japan wanted to copy. A sister sub made it to Japan and led to a Japanese copy of the Me 163 Komet rocket fighter, albeit too late to see combat. If we hadn't dropped the a-bomb and invaded Japan instead, a lot of interesting weaponry would've been thrown at us and model airplane/tank/ship hobbyists would have more cool designs to play with. And it would've been worse, with all civilians between 15 and 60 apparently complying with the order to prepare bamboo spears to fight the invaders on the beaches. The armed forces had been pretty inactive through '45, saving fuel for that fight - the Japanese army would debut the only modern tank it had developed during the war, the Navy was preparing suicide sea-bottom-walkers to blow up landing ships with bombs stuck at the end of 20' poles, and the kamikaze forces had been reduced to using wooden mini-planes that didn't have landing gear.
Japanese culture hadn't been like that before the 1920s; they fought the Russians at the beginning of the century following all the norms of warfare at the time. All it takes is one regime that isn't good at running things any other way... I'd start getting into parallels but it's getting late and I don't know why I'm writing about this anyway. Good night!
There's a German U-boat sunken off the Norwegian coast full of mercury. So naturally they're trying to find a way to prevent it from getting out of its storage tanks as the sub disintegrates. This I don't understand:
"After spending three years and about $6.5 million researching the problem, the Norwegian Coastal Administration recommended encasing the submarine with sand to prevent the spread of mercury. The method, it said in a report released Tuesday, had worked 30 times worldwide and was said to be less risky than attempting to lift the 2,400-ton sub."
Now that I think about it, that amount of money makes sense given that employees are billed at high rates that salaries are only a small part of, and they probably did a lot of stuff at sea. But all that, to recommend encasing it with sand? I could've come up with that for $20. I'd design a concrete tomb for $3,800.
Cool story though, it being the sub that was carrying technical documents about the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, that Japan wanted to copy. A sister sub made it to Japan and led to a Japanese copy of the Me 163 Komet rocket fighter, albeit too late to see combat. If we hadn't dropped the a-bomb and invaded Japan instead, a lot of interesting weaponry would've been thrown at us and model airplane/tank/ship hobbyists would have more cool designs to play with. And it would've been worse, with all civilians between 15 and 60 apparently complying with the order to prepare bamboo spears to fight the invaders on the beaches. The armed forces had been pretty inactive through '45, saving fuel for that fight - the Japanese army would debut the only modern tank it had developed during the war, the Navy was preparing suicide sea-bottom-walkers to blow up landing ships with bombs stuck at the end of 20' poles, and the kamikaze forces had been reduced to using wooden mini-planes that didn't have landing gear.
Japanese culture hadn't been like that before the 1920s; they fought the Russians at the beginning of the century following all the norms of warfare at the time. All it takes is one regime that isn't good at running things any other way... I'd start getting into parallels but it's getting late and I don't know why I'm writing about this anyway. Good night!