Met Fall 2021 Banter.

[dryslot]

My .02 cents, We've not seen the worst yet.

[Cyclone-68]

This winter milk disappearing on the store shelves might actually become a thing again 

[Ginx snewx]

13 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

I think it’s one of those things where the system was working at its max, redlining even, but any stoppage and slow down just overwhelms it and it then takes X-time to unf*ck.

I almost think of it like a ski lift and lift line.  Ski lift has an 10-minute stop on a busy holiday to reset an electrical switch.  The line grows massive because 4 bodies aren’t being ferried up every 12 seconds. Even once the lift is running again, you can’t add carriers to the haul rope so it’s a fixed capacity that takes a long time to untangle. The only way to do it is if people go to other lifts for a bit to let it back to equilibrium (like sending cargo to another port)… otherwise the same fixed amount is still trying to go through and you never clear the backlog.

I just think those ports handle so much volume that even a few month slow down can’t be unscrewed because there are only 24 hours in a day and fixed infrastructure. 

Picture your highest volume lift being down all day MLK day with 12 new and full sun. You won't ever catch up that day. Now picture the Christmas holidays and the mad rush to buy goods. That added bulk of skiers just crammed everything back up. We are screwed, no leadership at all either 

[Whineminster]

10 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

I think it’s one of those things where the system was working at its max, redlining even, but any stoppage and slow down just overwhelms it and it then takes X-time to unf*ck.

I almost think of it like a ski lift and lift line.  Ski lift has an 10-minute stop on a busy holiday to reset an electrical switch.  The line grows massive because 4 bodies aren’t being ferried up every 12 seconds. Even once the lift is running again, you can’t add carriers to the haul rope so it’s a fixed capacity that takes a long time to untangle. The only way to do it is if people go to other lifts for a bit to let it back to equilibrium (like sending cargo to another port)… otherwise the same fixed amount is still trying to go through and you never clear the backlog.

I just think those ports handle so much volume that even a few month slow down can’t be unscrewed because there are only 24 hours in a day and fixed infrastructure. 

Yeah the ports aren't going to run at 50% as an SOP.....they want to run as close to full to maximize profit.....so when some ripples came along w/ covid, trying to ramp back up is not easy. 

[Ginx snewx]

1 minute ago, dryslot said:

My .02 cents, We've not seen the worst yet.

Agree and by the end your 2 cents will cost you a dime

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, wxeyeNH said:

Scott,  I get what your saying too.  It's basically a continuum from what the eye sees to total art or fantasy.  If I happen to get a great morning shot on a still lake with mist and a heron flying  flapping his wings and creating ripples on the water that would be a great photograph.  If someone else takes a picture a minute before me and "photoshops" him in, to me it's cheating.  WMUR our NH station posted this picture that someone took at the Balsams.  Obviously no one under any lighting pictures would see that.  To me it is much more art than photography but countless comments said how stunningly beautiful it must have been up there.   We could go round and round but I think we both understand each others point.

Yeah I'm on the same page as long as people know what they are looking at vs. it being a scientific image.  That one above is too blown out for my liking too.

I think there's a difference between dehazing, adding clarity to the horizon and such vs. just taking the saturation slider bar on an iphone and jamming it all the way to the right .

There isn't a single image any of us see in our daily life though in magazines, advertisements, brochures, websites, etc that isn't at least a little touched up.  But photoshop is getting insane at what is possible.  I could add 2,000 feet to Mansfield, flip it over so the northern end looks like its south, add snow to the top and then put a giraffe running down Nosedive so much that it looks dead real.  The algorithms and coding is getting insane the tools you can use.  Can insert rainbows, remove buildings, etc.... heck for Forky I could start dropping red barns into all foliage shots and it would look real because of how good the coding is. 

[Chrisrotary12]

42 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Yes for some people.  I get that. But it has to end, so my question is...what are these people doing now.

I think we should stop focusing on the people. How about companies pay workers a wage that is worth working for? 

[tamarack]

11 hours ago, powderfreak said:

In the photos above, I don't even notice the fall color as much because the foliage isn't that vibrant around the lake in either one.  It's more of a warmth alteration.  To me the top one is well refined and has an awesome wow factor but really...it's just "warmer" (red hued) and one is colder (blue hued) IMO.  The midday light is going to lead to a more blue photo (how the light passes through the atmosphere casting a blue tint, just like late day or early day light is warmer/red.  The crazy difference is in the background... can clearly see the wind farm vs. not even visible in the bottom.  The clarity in the background is nuts.

Good points all (including those which I deleted) but I think the windfarm disappeared because Gene's pic was taken at lower elevation.  Though it's hazy, the mountain behind the windfarm shows up in both pics but less of it in the bottom one. 

[powderfreak]

1 minute ago, Ginx snewx said:

Picture your highest volume lift being down all day MLK day with 12 new and full sun. You won't ever catch up that day. Now Picture the Christmas holidays and the mad rush to buy goods. That added bulk of skiers just crammed everything back up. We are screwed, no leadership at all either 

Yeah that's probably better comparison... you have ports with fixed capacities.  They can't just all the sudden start processing two ships for every one ship.  So once the backup happens, it's nearly impossible to unf*ck it.

I mean the other thing is as Americans we can try to prioritize what we get.  We are a spoiled country used to creature comforts.  Like getting vehicles seems like a higher priority to me than Best Buy getting their containers of 60-inch flat screen TVs.  Same with ski equipment.  There should be a priority lane, ha.

[Ginx snewx]

1 minute ago, Chrisrotary12 said:

I think we should stop focusing on the people. How about companies pay workers a wage that is worth working for? 

Have you looked? Schools are paying janitors 18 to 22 an hour. Huge bonuses for new hires. We aren’t talking mickey ds. It is time to start paying people but you know what. The owners don't absorb those costs you and I do.

[WinterWolf]

6 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Have you looked? Schools are paying janitors 18 to 22 an hour. Huge bonuses for new hires. We aren’t talking mickey ds. It is time to start paying people but you know what. The owners don't absorb those costs you and I do.

Exactly!   In our town school bus drivers get a $7000 signing bonus to start.  Never heard of that ever before. 

[J.Spin]

10 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Gene I get what you are saying, but photography is also an art and can be abstract.  I guess it depends on how someone describes their photo?  Like a photographer who's prints someone is likely to want to print and put on their wall or view for fun might be different than someone taking photos to document an event for a newspaper or something.  Lets be honest, every single photo you've ever seen in National Geographic, in a scenic calendar you have hanging in your kitchen, postcards, magazines, posters, etc all were post processed.  Are National Geographic cover photographers lying to you?  Maybe a bit but they are sick photos.  Same with someone taking photos under the sea of fish life in that Nat Geo mag... it's probably a lot more murky, dark, and boring than the photos look in the article on fish.

In the photos above, I don't even notice the fall color as much because the foliage isn't that vibrant around the lake in either one.  It's more of a warmth alteration.  To me the top one is well refined and has an awesome wow factor but really...it's just "warmer" (red hued) and one is colder (blue hued) IMO.  The midday light is going to lead to a more blue photo (how the light passes through the atmosphere casting a blue tint, just like late day or early day light is warmer/red.  The crazy difference is in the background... can clearly see the wind farm vs. not even visible in the bottom.  The clarity in the background is nuts.

I think if someone was trying to take photos for a scientific experiment/comparison purpose, obviously post-processing would skew it.  But if you are a big fan of Newfound Lake and want to print a cool shot for your house to remind you of a beautiful place, which one of the two would you put on your wall?  Would you care or think about it any further if it's sitting on your living room wall?  Someone buys that beautiful sunset photo over the ocean for their beach house... the photo was played around with or tweaked but it's still beautiful to look at.

To me it's about what the photographer is claiming the photo is.  If they are going for an artistic piece, or a scientific observation would matter.

Great comments PF.  We had this conversation several years back as well, perhaps in the NNE thread.  I assume it’s from a period where color film predominated that the concept of a “native” or “unadjusted” photo being some sort of best representation of “reality” came into existence.  Did people do this back in the days of black and white film?  I have a hard time imagining the conversations of people going back and forth, with the black and film photographer insisting that his/her images were more realistic vs. the person who was attempting some sort of colorization.  Really?  Your eyes don’t see in color?  Weird.  It’s the same thing with color film.  That someone is going to believe that an arbitrary synthetic film made by one company is any better of an “unaltered” representation of reality than someone else’s film just doesn’t make much sense.  It’s all artificial.

If you’re not post-processing your images, you’re just insisting on being stuck with whatever settings the film producer or camera maker decided to be their default settings, and they can make that whatever they want.  One is not necessarily any more real than the next (i.e. you don’t know, objectively, what the world looks like through the eyes of other humans in terms of colors, saturation, dynamic range, etc.).  Insisting on not post-processing just means you’re stuck with whatever drab, or oversaturated, or improperly color balanced, or over-sharpened, or blurry, or grainy, or whatever, settings that camera maker or film maker decided they wanted to be that default.

There’s no way to have an unprocessed image – the image doesn’t exist before it’s processed.  Even if you shoot digital in RAW, you still have to process it to an image format to make the viewable image.  If you’re taking jpeg images out of your camera, they’re already processed with whatever defaults the camera has for processing, so you can’t avoid it.  All one has to do is set the in-camera processing to make pictures as over-sharpened, over-brightened, and radioactively color saturated as they want, then post them or print them and tout how they came right out of the camera with no “post-processing”.  Every scene is different with respect to lighting, coloring, dynamic range, etc., so limiting oneself to not post-processing is, ironically, the best way to ensure that you’ll almost never get images that are close to some sort of “reality”.

In the end though… it’s a photograph.  It’s not reality.  It’s a representation of a scene.  It’s art.  It’s subjective.  There are no actual standards.

[forkyfork]

please let this be the beginning of the collapse of global capitalism

[DavisStraight]

10 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Have you looked? Schools are paying janitors 18 to 22 an hour. Huge bonuses for new hires. We aren’t talking mickey ds. It is time to start paying people but you know what. The owners don't absorb those costs you and I do.

Restaurants are paying more too, they had to to get the worker back. When I was in Maine last month our waitress at one of the places were had dinner said she quit her corporate job because she makes $500 a night waitressing. She makes more money and works less hours.

[powderfreak]

23 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Have you looked? Schools are paying janitors 18 to 22 an hour. Huge bonuses for new hires. We aren’t talking mickey ds. It is time to start paying people but you know what. The owners don't absorb those costs you and I do.

This is the largest wage increase in many people's entire lives.  I can't complain, we’ve seen a 13% increase even at a management level to avoid compression and keep separation from lower positions that saw increases of as much as 30%. Thousands and thousands of extra dollars over the course of a year for the same exact job as past years.  My wife is seeing the same thing.  When people start at $30-35K/yr as the most basic entry level, all the sudden $60K a year turns into $70K a year above them.  The labor costs this winter are going to be insane.

None of us will ever see this type of wage adjustment happen in our lives, IMO.  It's been waiting to happen in many industries (stagnant wages) but this labor shortage tipped the scale.

And those costs end up somewhere.

[HoarfrostHubb]

13 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Have you looked? Schools are paying janitors 18 to 22 an hour. Huge bonuses for new hires. We aren’t talking mickey ds. It is time to start paying people but you know what. The owners don't absorb those costs you and I do.

We can't find janitors, my building is short a few.  But the city pays those poor folks a terribly low wage. Not $22 an hour by a long shot.

 

[Ginx snewx]

4 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

please let this be the beginning of the collapse of global capitalism

Lol if you think socialism is the answer. Failed every where. 

[forkyfork]

he says as capitalism fails in front of him

[HoarfrostHubb]

Regarding the truck drivers... the shortage was starting before the pandemic.  I recall reading articles about a looming shortage due to retirements and not being able to replace them, several years ago.  The pandemic sped that up quite a bit.

 

[Ginx snewx]

1 minute ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

We can't find janitors, my building is short a few.  But the city pays those poor folks a terribly low wage. Not $22 an hour by a long shot.

 

My daughter's private school where she is a special ed teacher pays 22 an hour for a custodian. Yea city pays 13 but they will have to come up. I fought long and hard for may janitorial staff to get raises. I only partially succeeded. People just don't respect hard work until they have to do it themselves. I would pay them a lot more. 

[forkyfork]

5 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

Yesterday I was shopping. I was amazed at the prices for even the most banal items but especially at the price of good cuts of meat. Absurd. 

 

Ground beef: +10.6%
Steaks: +22.1%
Bacon: +19.3%
Steak: +19.2%
Chicken: +17.1%
Fish: +10.7%
Eggs: +12.6%
Peanut Butter: +6.2%
Apples: + 7.8%
Ham: +7%
Baby food: +4.4%

some election truther pulled those numbers out of his ass and you ran with it. lol

https://protecttheresults.com/author/browndebbie21

[snowman21]

The U.S. already has socialism. Almost every country on earth does. I guess Americans just don't work as hard as our peers in other first world countries that have a substantially better quality of life. Get back to the fields and mines you lazy Americans ! Time to bring China's 996 work week to America.

[TauntonBlizzard2013]

2 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

Regarding the truck drivers... the shortage was starting before the pandemic.  I recall reading articles about a looming shortage due to retirements and not being able to replace them, several years ago.  The pandemic sped that up quite a bit.

 

It’s also crazy expensive to get a CDL, unless you can pass the test without any training or class time. I looked into a training course last year to get one, and it was like 5-10k for the classes/training/ testing, etc etc. most people don’t have that kind of coin laying around to jump in.

[UnitedWx]

8 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Lol if you think socialism is the answer. Failed every where. 

Always does...but don't let examples across the globe get in the way of the Bernie types... Oh yeah, Lets Go Brandon!

[Ginx snewx]

2 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

he says as capitalism fails in front of him

Capitalism is still king. Politicians and lack of leadership during the pandemic have created a lot of these problems.  Thinking Govt can spend its way out of crisis and all will be OK is crazy.  History will show that political decisions excaberated everything 

[forkyfork]

Just now, UnitedWx said:

Always does...but don't let examples across the globe get in the way of the Bernie types...

bernie's a capitalist 

[TauntonBlizzard2013]

My new gig is 6% raises every July for at least the next 10 years. I’ve personally never seen that type of increase, but I’m happy to get it 

[UnitedWx]

Just now, forkyfork said:

bernie's a capitalist 

He could have fooled me

[forkyfork]

he obv did

[Ginx snewx]

2 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

some election truther pulled those numbers out of his ass and you ran with it. lol

https://protecttheresults.com/author/browndebbie21

Really because if you left your protected lair and actually went out in society you would find those numbers very close to reality.