KingGimpicus

Former federal employee and member of AFGE here.

My experience with AFGE is that they are maliciously incompetent at their jobs. I worked for 6 months and never heard from the union ONCE, despite reaching out multiple times. Turns out, everyone from the local (1533) had left the union around 2 years before I'd started. The national office just ignored the problem, and purposefully left everyone covered by that local completely unrepresented.

After 6 months of gaslighting, contract violations, and hazing, I'd had enough, and started standing up for myself. I started invoking my Weingarten rights. I started quoting specific sections of the contract. I kept sending emails to the national office for my union.

I was fired less than a week later for "rocking the boat" and making a complaint outside my chain of command. I was a civilian, and I did not have a "chain of command".

About a week after I'd been terminated, the national office FINALLY assigned a union rep to my local. What did the rep finally tell me? While I was correct that I was entitled to union rights as a probationary employee (it was specified in the contract), the union didn't have the funds available to fight for me, so they wouldn't. The most they would do is help me draft complaints about my treatment, which would at best result in a "posting" for the base i worked at. A "posting" is a letter they have to hang on the wall saying what they did and how they'll try their very best not to do it again.

No compensation. No justice. No accountability.

Fuck AFGE sideways for taking my dues and refusing to fight for me. I hope every last one of you gets terminal stage five asshole cancer.

The majority of these people should be in retirement homes. Bad ones.

Red Eaglefeather. Obvs

Welders and machinist are retiring in droves and very few young people are coming in to replace them. Worse, the skills they're showing up with aren't applicable to the reality of the job. I've seen a LOT of CNC guys twist up their whole scrotum when asked to manually set up a lathe or mill. Programming or whatever is nifty but it won't help you actually make a fucking part. I can't tell you how many apprentices have given me a blank look when I ask them to read a mechanical micrometer instead of a digital. Or worse, VERNIER. It's pathetic. And that's just machine work. Welding is worse. The smoke and sparks are "scary", but they'll try to turn up the acetylene past 15 psi like they're not about to blow up half a block. Surprise, they don't know how to run a torch either.

I got laid off Monday, and Thursday I'm doing paperwork to get paid at a new job next monday. Skilled trades feels good.

Im a welder and machinist, and I'd be pretty bummed to see 60k/year. No way an engineer should be looking at that.

I think bonzi trees are enslaved. Like, they're purposefully mutilated and stunted in their growth for the tastes of beings vastly beyond their comprehension.

By that same vein, I think most commercial trees are probably enslaved too. Do you know what they do to walnut trees in the central valley of California? They cut old trees down to the stumps, then Frankenstein little sallplings onto those stumps like gluing the top half of a toddler onto world class powerlifter legs. It's honestly kinda fucked up even if they didn't feel anything, and studies have repeatedly shown that plants can probably feel something analogous to pain.

Oooo we doing preppers again?

Second

Well it doesn't matter to me because I just got hired at a new shop and start Monday. Union machinist position this time . I think 4 days for a raise and better benefits is my record lmao I'll have to send those assholes a thank you note

I was laid off Monday, but all the paperwork says is "reduction in workforce". Id always thought that was just business speak for layoff but maybe they're using it as a technicality.

I mean, banded iron? The process for depositing the minerals that compose banded iron (which is still hotly debated) no longer exists.

The most widely recognized theory is that the oceans had way more iron dissolved in them early in the history of earth, and the single celled organisms that called those waters home liked it that way. Then, all those little organisms started farting oxygen EVERYWHERE. Oxygen cooled the planet, thus cooling the oceans, and was also toxic to most of the single celled organisms, so they all died when planetary levels of iron started percipitating out of the oceans. Repeat this over a billion years or so and eventually the high concentrations of co2 eating iron loving organisms all died out and we eventually wound up with the ocean and atmospheric chemistry we have today.

Obviously I'm leaving out a ton of other very important interactions along the way, but the gist of it is that this planetary phenomenon simply doesn't have the mechanisms in place today for more banded iron formations to be made today.

I think this is also true of petroleum deposits because of how fungus figured out how to break down wood fibers.

Basically for the first 100 million years of plants existing on dry land, cellulose plant fibers did not decay. There were no fungus or microbes around that had figured out how to deal with the relatively "new" (in geologic time) invention of cellulose plant fibers, and so those plant fibers built up. Over tens of millions of years, with some of those deposits of plant fibers MILES thick getting covered up, fungus eventually figured out how to digest cellulose. Since then, plant detritus decays and decomposed into dirt.

What that means is that oil deposits were formed SO long ago that they were older to the dinosaurs that eventually came along than those same dinosaurs are to humans now. The process by which oil deposits are formed was over before the first ancestor to mammals decided to try out breathing air.

I always thought it was because they tried for an "anatomical" perspective and it never worked. Like I think the goal was supposed to be you could look down at your own character model but it was never really inplimented, leaving a janky forward and back motion to the vertical tilt. It's just enough to make some people a little motion sick.