Interesting graphs and charts department

[Clodfobble]

Gives you a greater appreciation for how effective it is for birds to migrate south for the winter. I mean it's instinctive, do they even really know what winter is? They've never experienced it.

[BigV]

Maybe to a bird "winter" is "the best food is over there", or "the best mating opportunities are over tgere" . Like many of us, driven by our hunger for food and sex. But without the whole need for permanent shelter thing.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Lots of time for sightseeing.

[glatt]

Sure. As long as there are sights to see from that particular road. No detours allowed.

[Happy Monkey]

How annoying would it be to plan and travel that route, only to encounter unseasonably warm or cold temperatures?

I mean, if you stay in one place, they are par for the course, but if you're setting aside a year of travel just for 70 degree weather, every deviation would be highlighted.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yes, it's a trip which can only be planned in retrospect.

A Smithsonian article, The Great New England Vampire Panic, about people in rural New England blaming Vampires for deaths from "consumption", actually caused by savage tuberculosis outbreaks.

While New England’s farmers may have been guided by something like reason, the spiritual climate of the day was also hospitable to vampire rumors. Contrary to their Puritanical reputation, rural New Englanders in the 1800s were a fairly heathen lot. Only about 10 percent belonged to a church. Rhode Island, originally founded as a haven for religious dissenters, was particularly lax: Christian missionaries were at various points dispatched there from more godly communities. “The missionaries come back and lament that there’s no Bible in the home, no church-going whatsoever,” says Linford Fisher, a Brown University colonial historian. “You have people out there essentially in cultural isolation.”

[Griff]

Things are not so different today, they just worship Tom Brady now.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'll bet they do it just to annoy us.

[xoxoxoBruce]

This ranking, and re-ranking, of history's biggest killing sprees, adjusting the ranking by the number killed as a percentage of the worlds population at the time.
The Asians sure were good at it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Told ya so...

[Lamplighter]

I don't know if the stats are correct, but it fits all my preconceived ideas !

[xoxoxoBruce]

The chart itself does not prove causation, even though I know damn well it's a major factor. It's labeled as share going to the unions, and with union membership in decline that's to be expected. What it doesn't show is all the non-union workers who benefited from the unions keeping wages following productivity and inflation, by being carried along.

The modern robber barons knew this, they'd watched it happen for 80 or so years. Then when the workers got fat and complacent, they jumped at the chance to beat the unions down, telling workers they were going to move production down south, or overseas. Telling them there was no reason to pay dues when they were going to do just as well without it.

It wasn't only the workers who got fat and complacent, so did the union big shots. All union officials from the local shop steward to the president of the UAW, IBEW, el al, are elected. That makes them politicians, and we know what how that works. The ones at the top are making big money, living high on the hog. Some are great, some are not, but Joe-average sees shit going on that irks him, and he may not move to Canada like he threatened when Congress irked him, but he may just quit the union.

[Lamplighter]

1947 was a banner year.

Someone came up with the brilliant idea of a law, and naming it:
"Right to Work"
and many poor slobs... ummmm, workers bought into it.

Truth in advertising would have named it "Right to Work for Less Pay"

.

[xoxoxoBruce]

These might come in handy some time.

[Clodfobble]

Hmm... what they call "TS" and "TRS" are more commonly referred to as "quarter-inch" and "stereo quarter-inch." I work with that particular plug a lot and I've never heard it called by that acronym.