- Terry Pratchett, The Truth
Today I was doing a bit of googling to check my facts for a message I was writing on Moisin-Nagant rifles. I usually depend on my memory instead of web searching, since searching always leads off to informative but time-wasting side journeys. Today I wound up at the Alaska Purchase, and the squirrels, who are always going on in some indeterminate number of background processes, coughed up a nearly-complete alternate timeline.
In this one, the initial deviation would have been very small. Congress approves the Alaska Purchase, but fails to ratify funding. (in reality, the approval was 37-2, but the battle for funding was a near thing) After extensive delays Alexander II's representatives went back home, and nothing much happened. Alaska stays part of the Russian Empire.
With the Russians still in control of Russian America, there would probably have been no American explorers mapping the area and finding gold, so there would have been no Yukon Gold Rush.
Things then happen pretty much as before - Nicholas II assumes the throne, WWI happens, the Kerensky government overthrows the monarchy and in turn is overthrown by Lenin's Bolsheviks, the Influenza Plague hits, the Depression, the Second World War, all more or less the same.
We'll assume that even though the Soviets had a foothold in North America, they still preferred to send agents and agitators into the USA and Canada through New York and Montreal, closer to the scenes of power, and closer to Europe, where most of their agents were staged. With Novy Archangelsk being half a world away from Moscow and so little development in the eastern USSR, the territory was mostly ignored.
We get our first notable differences in 1943. US Lend-Lease materials are shipped to Novy Archangelsk, where major docks and warehouse facilities are built to handle the traffic. The trading village becomes Americanized as plumbing and electric generators are installed. The ratio of NKVD agents and Party observers to Soviet workers is very high to counter possible political subversion.
WWII ends more or less as before, the Americans pull out, and the muddy town of Novy Archangelsk sits mostly dark and empty until June of 1949, when a Soviet survey team finds gold. When the size of the deposits is estimated, Stalin sends in a major development force and a division of the Red Army to patrol the Canadian border. Novy Archengelsk becomes an important Soviet city, railways are built, and some industrialization begins.
Senator Joseph McCarthy's rabid "Red Scare" accusations, red lists, and scaremongering were taken much more seriously than in our timeline, and the evolution of the Cold War began to diverge widely as the Soviets based several Red Army divisions in Alaska and began building bomber bases.
The main difference here is that we would have been under the Soviet thumb. Though we could have bombed the Soviet installations in Alaska, it would have done nothing to their infrastructure back home, while ours could have been attacked with ease.
Since the Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949, same as here, this would have been a serious threat.
With the Soviets so close and McCarthy taken seriously, American society in general would have been considerably different, as would the Cold War.
There are lots of ways it could go from there; from less-favorable progress of the Cold War to nuclear war fought mostly on US soil.
In our timeline, Truman's "USA as the world's policeman" policy dominated the 1950s and 1960s. We opposed the Soviet-backed revolutions in Korea and Vietnam, as well as a number of Soviet coups in Africa that few Americans remember any more. We butted heads with the Soviet occupation forces in Berlin and they built their wall across the country; we opposed the Communist takeovers of Greece, Italy, and France. With Soviet nuclear weapons sitting on our doorstep already, American installations in Germany could have been successfully opposed. A majority of nations in the UN would have become de facto Soviet satellites, toeing the Soviet line.
NATO would probably still have been formed in April 1949. In our timeline France dropped out of NATO in 1966, in the failed Alaska Purchase timeline, NATO might have been completely ineffective. Canada, sharing a common border with the USSR, might well have become part of the Soviet bloc. The various Communist revolutions in South and Central America would likely have been unopposed by the USA, leaving the USA, Australia, Britain, and parts of Europe alone against the Soviets.
As usual you can only go so far before the proliferation of "what ifs" becomes too much to handle, but it's fun to play with alternate histories.
> > Do not rouse the Leviathan, because he might just tear your ass up."Do not call up what you cannot put down."
- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward"
The average American don't know enough about the federal reserve and our monetary policy to know that they should be pissed.Donald P. Regan was Secretary of the Teasury under Reagan. I read his autobiography. Judging from that, the Fed doesn't know much about the Federal Reserve or monetary policy either... according to Regan, there was no formal policy to start with, so they just made it up as they went along.
Reading books by ex-politicos can be scary.
> > Vologograd (Stalingrad),I've always been saddened at how they changed Stalingrad's name back to Volgograd. Cities change names over time, true, and Stalin was out of favor even before the end of the USSR, but the name "Stalingrad" means something special. A handful of conscripts and armed citizens stood off the might of the Third Reich for *years*.
If you look into military history, you'll find that beseiged cities almost always fall. The defenders are stuck with what they started with, while the attackers can forage; it's almost always a logistical problem. At Stalingrad, the Red Army was able to get occasional supplies to the city, while the Germans had basically outrun their supply chain, which brought them to more equal footing... and both sides were operating under a "no retreat policy." And when the Red Army finally came to the rescue, the Germans simply surrendered; the people of Stalingrad had fought them to the point of collapse.
It may have been an evil Soviet name, but Stalingrad *earned* that name with the blood of the thousands who died there.
It's like the wave of political correctness that swept the South a few years ago, when some states changed their flags because psycho groups claimed they were too similar to the "Confederate" flag. There were many "Confederate" flags, despite Hollywood. And people died for those, too.
A strong young man at a construction site was bragging that he could out-do anyone in a feat of strength. He made a special case of making fun of one of the older workmen.
After several minutes, the older worker had enough.
"Why don't you put your money where your mouth is," he said. "I'll bet a week's wages that I can haul something in a wheelbarrow over to that building that you won't be able to wheel back."
You're on, old man," the braggart replied. "Let's see you do it."
The old man reached out and grabbed the wheelbarrow by the handles. Then, nodding to the young man, he said, "All right, stupid, get in."
The team web site is at http://www.charityrallies.org/en/50north for those of you who want to follow along.
Yes, I know some people don't like salt, or their doctors tell them not to eat salt, but the War Against Salt is reaching absurd proportions. I'm going to be pissed if I have to start carrying my own salt shaker around.
- Dave "Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, how was the drive?" Williams
Khruschev wasn't a particularly literate or cultured man even by Soviet standards, so a lot of his stories were "Yuri and Georgi and Lavrenti and I think it was Alexi, we were all at Stalin's at one of his interminable dinners. Stalin was pissed at Georgi and kept making him drink vodka until he passed out at the table, but we are all shitfaced drunk anyway, as usual..."
There are little reference numbers by the names, and down at the bottom of the page are the proofreader's notes, "Yuri, executed as enemy of the State, 1938, Georgi, executed as enemy of the State, 1937, Alexi, executed as enemy of the State, 1938..." After a while it's almost funny, every time Khruschev went to the movies, or made a speech, or attended some function, or went boozing, and he mentions a name, 90% of the time the footnote reads, "executed..." or "disappeared..." or something similar.
Hm. The Terror wasn't a joke, but the whole story of mismanagement and oppression is so depressing your sense of humor gets twisted if you read about it long enough...
-> ideas. Sounds like a ridiculous idea until you see a Hummer -> taking up three parking spaces at the mall. - Sandra SwansonHell, any real full-size car or pickup truck can do that with the cheesy little parking places at some malls.
I used to be able to occupy *six* parking slots at the local K-Mart. It has tiny little places marked at a 45 degree angle, which means they're all about six feet shorter than they look. My '60 Chevy was already wider than the slot to begin with; if I pulled in all the way so the tailfins weren't hanging out in the aisle, it spilled over to the two side places, a couple of feet into the one in front, and hung the corners of the front bumper well into the forward adjacent slots.
- Dave "mmm, big" Williams
Lone Star restaurants used to serve buckets of boiled, salted peanuts as appetizers. You shucked the peanuts out of the hulls and threw the hulls on the floor, which got swept two or three times a day. I thought it was rather amusing myself, but the Japanese were shucking handfuls of goobers, throwing the hulls on the floor, and roaring with laughter. The waitress brought them another half-gallon bucket of peanuts so they could continue amusing themselves. The American looked rather distressed, for some reason.
- Dave "food fight!" Williams
> > if Ford gets to define what a motor is,The dictionary-freaks insist what Ford makes are "engines." When I looked that up in the dictionary, there was nothing about prime movers there; back in prehistoric dictionary-land, "engines" are "instruments of destruction", specifically seige engines. Not *quite* the same thing.
And furthermore, James Watt called his contraption an "engine" too. So Watt, Otto, Diesel, Clerk, and the others are wrong because some dictionary says so?
Not in DaveWorld...
> > Why were they called "Motor Cars" or simply "Motors" in the > > beginning and even today in some locals? Ford never sold loose motors or > > even engines!Sure they did, at least back to the Model A days, when you could buy an A motor for whatever purpose you wanted. Lots went into irrigation rigs and inboard boats, as did most of the V8s. Ford will also sell you an industrial 5.4 Mod motor with a computer and wiring harness right now, not to mention the marine engines and "crate motors" for the hot rod/street rod market.
-> I don't know about everyone else but I'm growing very weary of this -> bitching about PDFs in particular and every advancement since CP/M in -> general. Yes, I wish things were different but they're not soRun with those lemmings! Run! Run run run!
- Dave "this too shall pass" Williams
-> I still don't get it. Some people's thought patterns just -> don't parse in my head. After all, I wouldn't dream of blaming the -> circuit and calling an electrician if the lights go off -> after I pressed a button.That's because you're off on the end of the social sigma curve, out where people stand on street corners talking to large rabbits who aren't there, and people wearing aluminum foil helmets to keep the CIA mind control beams out.
To the average American, whatever goes on is *always* someone else's fault. You spilled hot coffee in your lap? "They" should have put a warning on the cup. You left the kid in the running car and he put it in Drive and ran over his sister? The car manufacturer didn't provide proper shift interlocks. You shot yourself in the foot with your new .357? It should have had safety instructions stamped into the barrel.
They teach them this crap in *school*, Ron. Someone *else* always has to pay. And now the first couple of generations of them have grown up with these ideas and taken their place in society.
20-30 years from now, we're going to have a "Generation Gap" like nobody ever imagined...
-> "We used to think that the average American car buyer was -> just...dumb. We were wrong! We're now thinking that the average -> American car buyer is a total idiot."That makes me think of the station wagon purchase in "National Lampoon's Family Vacation." You can tell a movie is funny when your grandfather turns purple and goes into that funky breathing pattern people get when they're starting to have a heart attack. We had to stop the tape and find his pills before he kicked off right there on the couch... We had to reassure him about ten times that the movie would resume right where it left off, he wasn't missing anything. That was back when VCRs weren't very common, and he'd never watched a movie on tape before.
- Dave "well, how much y'got?" Williams
While I was reading it, I kept thinking, "this reads like a female wrote it". Nothing happened to advance the plot; the author just kept creating tedious "relationships." So today I googled "Charles Ingrid", and lo and behold, Charlie is a girl. "Rhondi A. Vilott Salsitz", according to Wikipedia.
I've encountered enough of this crap that I'm able to spot it fairly often. Apparently, this is the kind of thing the female species likes to read. Or perhaps more precisely, what the people who publish books think they might want to read. And they print a lot of it. And it infects otherwise-good fiction.
Case in point: Laurell K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter" novels. Anita Blake was Conan the Barbarian with guns. Her character was closely patterned after Robert Parker's "Spenser"; Hamilton even uses an occasional Spenser line. A few of those, and then it all turned into increasingly-complex tangles of "relationships", usually taking 100 or more pages before anything resembling a plot developed. AB still reads them, but I've given up. Hamilton's sales are still high, so I guess *someone* likes that crap.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some of the best SF I've ever read was Eluki bes Shahar's "Hellflower" trilogy. And that's the only SF she ever wrote - she primarily writes Regency romances under the name of "Rosemary Edghill." Any of her fans who tracked down her SF stories were probably very confused.
I said that seemed reasonable, since S10s with that pattern often used Isuzu transmissions. I acquired two when I was putting the Chevy 2.5 in the B2000.
Kenney said, yes, there was that, but that Isuzu engine came out of a Honda minivan.
Hmmm...
> > What is even more RARELY mentioned is that twice as many Polish > > Catholics, various Baltic people, and Gypsies as Hebrews were murdered > > in that affair. 6 megajews, PLUS more like 12 megaothers !!A couple million ordinary Germans, Dutch, French, etc. were killed for revenge, political deviationism, or simply because they had property Himmler or Goebbels wanted. Besides the Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill or physically defective, and "Slavs" were targeted for extermination.
Even the Soviet Union isn't sure how many people Stalin had killed, but the going figure (including the Terror) is 20 million.
The Japanese probably killed that many in Manchuria. Not even figuring Korea.
All of those groups just whimpered and pretended it never happened... except the Jews, who banded together with "Never Again!" They not only didn't "get over it", they actively work to prevent a recurrence. It also provides a social core for their society; nothing like a good persecution to pull people together.
In Europe and America, Jews are seen as quiet, inoffensive people. For the last 1800 years or so that's been true, but they gave the Pharaohs, Greeks, and Romans hell. Jews were intensely tribal, aggressive, and migratory - for 1500 years or so, they were like giant packs of Hell's Angels roaming the Middle East and North Africa. Even when they were technically subjugated by the Egyptians and Romans they were more trouble than they were worth. Tacitus gave several pages to "the Jewish problem" in his Annals; when I read that, it looked a whole lot like Mein Kampf.
You've probably read about the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII, and the Nazi atrocities there. You can find film clips of the Jews just standing there and watching the SS shoot people down in the street without doing a thing about it. True, but not the whole story... all those pictures are of children, women, the very old, and the crippled. All the able-bodied men were dead. They died charging armed SS with sticks, bricks, and their bare hands; a few captured German weapons and fought until they ran out of ammunition. Then they were shot down. You seldom hear about how the Jews actually fought back.
The Nazis had blockaded the Jewish Quarter and were waiting for them to starve. Though you hear about Zyklon B and firing squads at the camps, starvation was their favorite method of disposing of undesirables. They got to enjoy the process for days or weeks. Besides, bullets and gas cost money, and the entertainment value was less.
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero)
> > A little rummaging confirms that 1/4"-20 is indeed a match for 1/4" > > Whitworth, though I think the US and Whitworth thread angles are different > > (55 and 60?).They're not "US" threads unless they're pre-WWII.
American and British threads used mostly the same pitches, but the thread shapes and vee angles were slightly different. American threads were cheaper to make, British ones were stronger. Both had been designed by production engineers, balancing cost of manufacture of the tooling, tool wear, strength of the threads in average materials, etc. Both groups of engineers came near-as-dammit to the same thread systems.
Nobody much cared until Lend-Lease, when vast quantities of American and British made stuff was supposed to be bolted together, and that required lubricant, a large wrench, and cursing.
Very early in the war, one of the production committees basically averaged the American and British systems together and came up with the "Unified National Coarse" and "Unified National Fine." "National" meant *both* nations. Vast quantities of production thus ensued, and the inch-based Allies proceeded to kick metric butt.
Now, remember inch-based threads were designed by production engineers. On the metric side, thread pitches were selected by, as far as I can tell, whatever even increments of millimeters looked good to whoever was making the thread. As long as it's dimensioned in metric, it's a "metric" thread. Which is why 1/2-13 Rover head bolts are 11.2xsome bastard millimeter pitch in my Australian BL service manual. And why I have boxes of *five* different pitches of 6mm bolts, plus a sixth box of "who the heck knows." And a whole box of 6.35mm bolts, which I got from *somewhere*, but don't seem to fit anything in particular. They're 1/4 inch diameter, but metric thread pitch, best as I can tell.
> > As someone who grew up with a whole mix of inch thread systems and later > > used metric, I have to say that the metric thread systems are much easier to > > deal with. The screw thread strength is generally not the limiting factor in > > choosing a screw size anyway (though many machine designers get it wrong), > > so the metric system as a whole wins overall in convenience and overall > > efficiency.Heck, I *started* metric; I had to pick inches up much later. They only taught metric in the People's Republic of California in the 1960s; when we moved to Arkansas in 1969, I ran into teachers who insisted I was "belligerent" (their universal term for anything they didn't like) because I couldn't tell them how many pecks to the furlong, or whatever. I know cgs/mks metric backwards and forwards...
I dunno... I find it "easier" to have 99.5% of 1/4" bolts to be 1/4-20 and .5% 1/4-28, and clearly distinguishable by eye. Why do I have to deal with six different 6mm thread pitches? Well, because engineers or manufacturers just make up metric thread pitches as they go along.
>>> >>>ANSI or ISO metric? >> >> "Standards are wonderful, there are so many to choose from." > > This seems to be an American phenomenon. I rarely see non-ISO metric > > fastener threads, except where there is a specific functional requirement to > > be non standard.There's French metric, Japanese metric, German metric, "ISO" metric, and American metric, more or less. At least in thread pitches. My collection of metric fasteners mostly came from the compulsive disassembly of any car, motorcycle, or appliance before disposal. Which is where I got that insane assortment of "metric" fasteners.
BMW-guy chose the same gas stop we did, and I told him I thought he'd done a fine job, for a BMW driver. I think he'd heard that one before... anyway, he told us about another road, Highway 341, that wasn't too far away. Kevin dug out the map and it didn't look like much, but we decided to try it out.
Much of that area is national park; 341 goes mostly through the park, and apparently doesn't *go* anywhere, since it is so old the blacktop is almost white, but it is a pristine motoring surface.
Oh, my. I have a CD full of video clips of the Nurburgring. The 'ring is narrow, bumpy, and flat compared to 341. Short, too. There's a limit to how hard you can ride on the first time you're on a new road, and about a third of the corners were blind, but I had the Bandit wound up to 9000 RPM and more a lot of the time; it likes to corner under power, and I used all it had. There were parts of it I was moving over 100mph, but a couple of times I'd glance down and there I was, 10,000 RPM showing on the tach, toes up on the pegs (I ground almost through one shoe...) butt hanging off the side... and the speedo is saying 50mph.
About this time, we passed a sign that said "CROOKED AND STEEP NEXT 2.8 MILES." That was good for a Galactic Overlord guffaw... when we finally got out of the mountainous area we turned around and went back the other way, then parked at 14 for a rest and chat. Lots of freshly buffed rubber off the sides of the tires, oh yes. And on the Bandit's rear, the tread blocks were visibly deformed from acceleration. I probably put the equivalent of several thousand miles of wear in that run, and you could see the effects on the front, too. The VFR's tires looked identical, except for the acceleration wear.
I'd worked the Bandit for all I was worth, and I was just barely keeping up with Kevin. Kevin said he hadn't been pushing *that* hard. I thought he was pulling my leg until we swapped bikes later down on 14. The VFR is a cornering *fool*. In that curiously-detached Honda way, it's almost like a videogame; just lean it down until something drags, or you roll out of tire, lean it the other way, no muss, no fuss. The Bandit is like an excited puppy; it responds instantly to any input, intentional or not. Any change in throttle setting affects the steering. And what I didn't realize, until after riding the VFR, is the Bandit has almost no self-alignment when moving. It's not nervous, exactly, but it responds instantly to any input. I don't know how much different it is from a stock Bandit, but Kevin spent a lot of time optimizing the suspension for drag racing.
I found I can cut a corner or two all the way down to the edges of the tires just like always, and I can still push a bike very hard in the mountains, but I'm still rusty. And I'm beginning to think I never really had the knack of stringing a bunch of fast corners together, at least not more than a handful at a time. Despite the differences between the machines, Kevin was flat out-riding me most of the time.
The Bandit's fat torque curve has also reinforced a bad habit I picked up on the Turbo - "sit back and let the torque do the work." This works well enough in many situations, but on something like the Highway 341 ride yesterday, eventually even the Bandit runs out of power, and it's time for the rider to quit sitting there with a big torque smirk and figure out how to herd this thing properly... this will be a learning experience I'm looking forward to.
- G'Kar, Babylon 5, "Survivors"
-> I am not slagging off my old man, its just to illustrate that a fair -> %age of people who are locial and intelligent, loose all rationality -> when confronted with a system that they cannot understand....and don't *want* to understand. Like me trying to drive an Olds Alero the other day. First, I couldn't find the switch to turn the instrument panel lights on. GM apparently no longer uses English, so all the randomly-spaced controls were marked in Egyptian heiroglyphics. Tommy finally came over and turned the lights on for me.
The dome light wouldn't turn off when I got out of the car. Okay, I knew about that. But I'm trying to lock the goddamned doors. There is a group of four buttons on the door; I guess these operate the windows. So I wiggle the odd rocker switch and slam the door. Open the door. Wiggle it the other way. Slam the door. Open the door. Finally I try the key, and the doors lock. Later, as I'm bitching about it, Tommy tells me the switch just notifies the computer you would please like to have the doors locked; it then locks them when it's damned good and ready. Five minutes after you've been carjacked...
Every one of these new GMs is carefully engineered to make me want to climb up on the roof, beat my chest, and emit screams of frustrated rage in the direction of Detroit. They can try to pass the buck to me, but it's stupid designs that are the problem, not stupid users.
>> >> [Now I'm confused; if fossil fuels are created from decaying plant >> >> growth, h > > 'cuz is ain't an' it didn't...Coal is black, composed of hydrocarbons, and often contains fossils, showing that it is made of decayed plant matter.
Oil is black, composed of hydrocarbons... so it must be made of decayed plant matter too!
Obviously, oil is a later form of coal. At least that's what the schoolbooks said.
Oddly, nobody has ever discovered any intermediate forms that oily coal or coaly oil. You get one or the other. The closest you get is shale oil, which is a sedimentary rock impregnated with oil. But shale isn't a hydrocarbon, it's just porous rock and doesn't burn.
Now both go red with indignation while denying everything.
What I learned from this is, when your friends do something really stupid, you should take pictures...
-- (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
> Extra points when they request additional napkins.I *always* request additional napkins...
I was leaving one of the local Chinese places the other day, and a waitress pointed out that I had something on my shirt. I told her I was making a fashion statement. I could see her running it back into Chinese and chewing on it for a second before she got it...
The new Chinese restaurant is heavily staffed with ethnic Chinese, mostly teens to mid 20s, who are still coming to grips with the English language. Some day I'll corner one and ask where they're from.
The food is somewhat below average, tending toward underspiced and overcooked. The place is *jammed* at lunch and evenings, and I'm pretty sure I know why. It's brightly lit, there are no radios or TVs, and the tables are spaced far enough apart you don't feel like you're wedged in a can of Vienna sausage. I go there sometimes on my once-a-week non-TV-dinner lunch, because it's quiet, bright enough to read comfortably, and I don't have people spilling onion soup down my neck as they try to wedge between tables. Pretty radical stuff, for a local restaurant.
> > I saw on TV the other day that they are going to make cellular phones that you > > can use to pay for merchandise at the store. Just swipe it through a the > > register and it takes it out of your account. A built in ATM card basically.Mack Reynolds, 1963. Add the GPS transponder and Big Brother can track your location as well as your transactions. Then someone would get the bright idea of using it as your employee ID, driver's license, and to chat with the alarm at your house...
> > Great...now when I loose my cellphone, not only do I loose the phone, all the > > data in it and my high score on Snake...now people can go and buy stuff with my > > money out of my account.If I loose my phone, it simply falls to the floor.