PhilSalkie

Industrial Automation Specialist. Big awesome poly family. Lots of cats. USA and UK citizen. Amateur radio AB3MS.
#nobridge

My Empty Website: https://salk.ie

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Last Notes

2026-07-17 15:10:01 UTC

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A long time ago, some MBAs decided that humans were basically interchangeable, and the problem was that companies just weren't documenting their internal business processes well. Once those processes were documented, then cheap labor could replace expensive experienced employees.
Note that this idea came from a bunch of people who contribute nothing to society and have zero inherent talent at anything.
So, companies bought into this and started documenting random things and firing all their best paid workers. That was uniformly a disaster, but the zombie concepts live on just like trickle-down economics.
The institutional knowledge that leaves when a trained, productive employee departs is the destruction of a valuable asset (sometimes the transfer of that asset to a competitor) - may as well just light money on fire.

2026-06-13 10:35:34 UTC

What a shocker - US groups that are pushing propaganda against offshore wind energy development are funded by Big Oil.
https://electrek.co/2025/08/25/scientist-exposes-anti-wind-groups-as-oil-funded-now-they-want-to-silence-him/
#Renewables #ClimateChange

2026-05-10 11:57:33 UTC

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References? I will vouch that that is a Very Good Dog who deserves a treat.

2026-04-09 11:41:34 UTC

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My half-brothers would never eat tapioca pudding.
That's because our father, at that point in time a single dad, bought a box of tapioca pudding mix. The recipe on the box said "scald 2 cups of milk" - he knew that scald was another word for "burn", so he cooked the milk until it was black, and proceeded with the rest of the recipe (although he did have to add some water to get everything to dissolve.)
Life-long memories of horrid, black pudding...

2026-03-26 12:52:11 UTC

An anti-ICE app that installs from a web page and can't be removed from any app store because it's not on an app store.
Now with EFF legal support, a warrant canary, a backup domain in Iceland, and more!
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/3/26/2374832/-Update-ICE-Tracking-App-AntiFreeze-Is-Becoming-Harder-to-Censor-Here-s-How?utm_campaign=trending
https://antifreeze.app
https://antifreeze.is
#NoIce #NoKings #ProtectOurCommunities #ProtectImmigrants

2026-02-21 13:24:50 UTC

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Well, we're also the ones who spent several years busting hump to fix all the software we could think of that didn't understand that the year after 1999 was 2000, not 1900 or 19100. We had vendors sending us new releases in July 1999 that were still not compliant, we worked like mad dogs in the background to make sure everybody's milk got bottled and their checks got printed, then heard the world say "Oh, what a joke that Y2K thing was, all that fear and nothing bad happened! What a waste of time and money!"
So I'll say, on behalf of said academics, "Nah, we already knew they're all drooling lackwits, at this point it's become sick entertainment watching it all unfold."

2026-02-15 13:56:16 UTC

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Oh, you mean these things? (See alt-text)
https://a.mindlycdn.com/media_attachments/files/116/074/980/199/359/709/original/1cac9fc170b7b173.jpg

2026-01-30 01:12:36 UTC

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About 40 years back, I designed and programmed the control system for possibly the first commercial pre-packaged sanitary production liquid chromatography system.
This was at the very start of using transgenic yeasts to make human protein drugs, and the point of this device was that the lab folks could figure out at desktop size how to take the noxious yeast brew and separate out just the important bit, then take that process and punch it into our system, and it would do that on a hundred-litre batch.
I was there at the first run of a phase 3 trial batch, a new way to produce a drug that was very expensive and much in demand. The way this system was set up, it took 100 litres of beer-like goop, pumped it slowly through the system, and the output liquid went to waste - save for one second, where a valve switched, and a few mililitres went into a vial. That held a half-million dollars worth of 99.99% pure product (probably 10-mil in today dollars) which would be thousands of doses of the drug.
The techs then took this vial and put it into a lyophilizer to remove the water and produce crystals of the protein for storage and processing.
After quite some time, the vacuum drying process finished, they opened the dryer, and found an empty vial. Something had gone wrong, and 3 months of bioreactor time worth half a mil had been blown out the roof vent stack.
I would not have wanted to be the poor S.O.B. who had to tell their boss how the day had gone.

2026-01-28 04:46:59 UTC

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Another good one was in NJ on 287 - someone had a Ryder rental box truck that they had absolutely filled with boxes of machine screw washers. A single washer weighs like a penny. A box of washers is 50 pounds. A truck full of washers is way, way, way overloaded. Like neutron star overloaded.
These gooby snooberts were driving down 287 at 55 or 60, then went to take the decreasing radius curve exit. I suspect they _tried_ to slow down - but those rental trucks aren't made of brakes, and that bad boy was _Heavy Heavy Heavy_.
So, predictably, the truck went over, and the entire load ejected through the roof of the box truck, bursting out of the cardboard boxes on the way. Fortunately, most of the load wound up off the roadway. Unfortunately, there was only one road crew guy with one shovel to clean up the 30% that was on the travel lane. Him didn't look happy.

2026-01-28 04:36:54 UTC

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Driving north on I-79 in WV a few decades back, noticed no southbound traffic at all. Then saw why - a _big_ ol' coal truck had swerved too fast, flopped on its side, and spilled _all the coal_ all over _all the highway_. Nobody was able to get past.
And there was the highway department crew, Clem and Bob, each with a little shovel, scooping a pound of coal, walking it to the shoulder, and throwing it in the ditch. My quick estimate for clearing the road at that rate of progress was 6 to 9 months.
There was a minimum of 20 miles of stopped traffic as I continued north. The best, best part was a pickup truck that had tried to turn around and head north. Trouble was, the ditch between the South and North lanes was maybe 10 feet deep and six feet wide. "No prob!" thought Rosco, in his 4WD Toyota. "I've saw Dukes of Hazzard!"
He gunned it and made the leap.
As I drove north, I saw his Toy Truck suspended over the ditch by the front and rear bumper, all four wheels danging in space. A tow truck had arrived (heading North) and the tow driver was standing there, holding the winch cable and hook in his hand, trying to figure out what to hook into, and how he could possibly extract the Toy without dragging his own truck into the ditch.
I continued on my way to the airport. When I came back three months later the road was clear, so I guess the road crew must have called for backup.

2025-10-20 21:12:46 UTC

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Many years ago, the MBA was created.
A central tenet of this coveted degree was that workers were interchangeable - this gave rise to absurd thoughts like that by writing down business processes and getting an ISO9001 certificate, you could now ditch all the highest paid workers and replace them with new hires just out of school.
For four decades I have watched hundreds of critical personnel get laid off in industry after industry - sometimes it results in a product that can no longer be manufactured, often it means that someone comes back as an expensive consultant. Sometimes it crashes the company completely.
It is costly and time consuming to train an employee. If that employee leaves, you have not just burned that investment, you may have given it to a competitor.
People are not interchangeable (except MBAs - they're all the same.)

2025-10-20 03:24:46 UTC

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We'll make the Tylenol font smaller and squeeze in the Love!

2025-09-10 16:43:48 UTC

Dreaming of being a stripey tiger.
#WhiskersWednesday #CatsOfMastodon
https://a.mindlycdn.com/media_attachments/files/115/180/996/265/836/847/original/c5ae6221c12e55a4.jpeg

2025-08-23 13:33:19 UTC

Turns out the USA already mines all the critical minerals it needs (like cobalt, lithium, rare earths) - we just throw them out instead of using them.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/23/0120237/us-is-throwing-away-the-critical-minerals-it-needs-analysis-shows
Not surprised. I worked with an industrial chemist who was an efficiency expert - he was convinced that the USA's infrastructure was built on the principle of "Energy is free, resources are free, just make stuff whatever way is easiest." He saw so many processes which used NatGas to heat a vat, then cooled the contents using chillers, then NatGas again to heat, etc. He cut the cost of production significantly by transferring heat between vats using heat exchangers, increased cooling efficiency through piping changes - well known methods that the original designers just couldn't be bothered to do, because energy is free, right?
I also knew a pharmaceutical VP who told of getting a request for a particular chemical used in manufacturing. He contacted headquarters in Switzerland, they got back with a good price, he made the sale. When he next visited the main office, they showed him the "production" facility - the chemical was a byproduct of a process they were already doing, and rather than throw it out, they'd been packing it away in vacuum sealed boxes in unused rooms of the building for decades because it would be wasteful to throw it away. As it happened, that "waste product" became a sizeable revenue stream for the company - any US firm would have just trashed it.
#sustainability #recycling

2025-08-16 15:20:51 UTC

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I see this in Industrial Automation over and over - I call it "Cargo Cult Syndrome".
1) Company buys complex automated machine, vendor comes in, trains some employees to operate and maintain it. Manuals are delivered & shelved somewhere.
2) Time passes. Trained employees train new employees, trained employees move on. New employees train other employees, etc. Manuals are forgotten. Each generation of training has more original knowledge getting lost, and more invented ritual added in - like "Hold reset five seconds, then turn this switch off and back on."
3) More time passes. Settable items on screens are no longer changed by the operators, they don't know about the settings - they just adjust things mechanically because they understand how to do that.
Past behaviors of the machine are invented: "It used to do X, but that broke a few years ago." In reality, X was an option that was never installed, it was never even wired for X, but it's so obvious that it _should_ do X that it becomes something that was there and is no longer working.
4) Something serious needs maintenance, I come in, find the manuals, read a bit, and see what the 20 year game of telephone has created. It's often tough to break the entrenched behaviors - "Press this, turn that, go over there, press that, turn the other, come back, press this to reset" is actually "step off the sensor mat to tell the machine you're fixing the problem, then come back and press Reset."

2025-08-03 23:05:14 UTC

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Maybe some $35 7"Android tablets? Turn them into digital picture frames if you like, or just leave them powered on, plugged into a charger, Bluetooth enabled and connected to WiFi, sitting somewhere inconspicuous like behind books on a shelf.

2024-10-22 18:04:36 UTC

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Because of course they did

2024-10-19 16:12:22 UTC

(I'm hoping that if I look plaintive and hungry, they'll bring me some licky-tube treats...)
#caturday #CatsOfMastodon
https://a.mindlycdn.com/media_attachments/files/113/334/949/109/734/249/original/3f3d7bcc081bdd52.jpg

2024-09-21 16:07:32 UTC

Bartram Von Snarleton, known as the Red Baron, flies his Fokker Triplane while keeping a sharp eye out for that pesky Beagle in the Sopwith Camel.
#caturday #CatsOfMastodon
https://a.mindlycdn.com/media_attachments/files/113/176/362/618/873/642/original/c3d7d058dcdeea1b.jpg

2024-08-02 01:39:07 UTC

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Took about 3 months.
At this point, on Linux machines my hands auto-Dvorak. On customer windows machines, they switch to qwerty. When I TeamViewer from a Linux machine to a Windows box, they're Dvorak.
Put a qwerty keyboard on a Linux box and my hands just freeze up - it's comical. The worst is a DOSBox or VirtualBox instance with qwerty running on my Dvorak Linux box - that's like some kind of typing aphasia from having to switch layout window-to-window.