Contracts on this scale often have an escape clause, where the purchasing party can halt proceedings but must pay a penalty, either a flat fee or some percentage of the remaining contract.
So what percentage did get repo'd? I'd guess it was around half of the private-party purchases. Tho from the list of vehicle makes turned in (which someone posted in a prior discussion), it looked to me like it mostly benefited small business (contractors' trucks and the like).
Is this tower anything that could be rented out to private aerospace companies??
As to bridges to nowhere, there was also the 118 Freeway in Los Angeles County, which I vaguely recall was Jerry Brown's pet project for the benefit of his buddies (I've forgotten the details)... it sat there as a 'freeway to nowhere' for several years. If you remember the TV series CHiPs, most of the highway scenes were filmed on its vacant stretches. The irony is, once it was finally finished and opened, it proved underbuilt for the job, and is now one of the most crammed-solid freeways in SoCal.
It's probably one of those "use it or lose it" budgets, where if they don't manage to spend it all this year, they'll be shorted next year. I've talked to people working for gov't contractors who said sometimes they'd go buy any damn thing related to their field, then immediately dumpster it, because they had to spend the money but couldn't have the asset. Utterly stupid, and they know it, but until budgets become flexible to need rather than this 'use it or lose it' need it or not policy that's so pervasive, we'll have this problem, in one form or another.
Forgot to mention... covert crossbreedings are often how a defect gets INTO a breed that was formerly free of it. Examples that leap to mind:
Cataracts got into one Lab line from a Chesapeake cross in the early 1950s (I've traced it back to a single Chessie and a particular kennel). This particular type of cataract was not previously seen in Labs. (Nuisance, not blinding, but still, it's there.)
Central neuromuscular myopathy in Labs appears to be a 'mutation' if you didn't know the dog who's been pegged as the point source... but back in his day, a lot of us who knew the dog strongly suspected he was a greyhound cross. (At the very least, he was not the dog his pedigree claimed.) Come to find out, CNM also occurs in racing greyhounds. Hmm.
A heart valve defect occasionally found in fieldbred Labs traces back to a dog born in 1946. This dog's sire was (per info of the day and a radical disconnect of type) not the Lab his pedigree claims, but a black Pointer imported from England.
"Silken Windhounds" are most likely (contrary to the original breeder's claims) basically a mix of Sheltie and Whippet. They commonly have the MDR1 gene, which is not found in any other sighthound but is common in Shelties. Hmm.
Breeder and trainer, and I can do any sort of veterinary work that doesn't involve surgery inside the body (mainly because I don't own anaesthesia equipment). My experience across 44 years covers about 3000 dogs. I've had 14 generations of my own line to date.
Sorry, but you are wrong about the genetics. A mutt can only have the genes its ancestors gave it. They are not 'hybrids'. Genes like cataracts, PRA, von Willebrand's disease, MDR1, multiple genes influencing hip dysplasia, and a host of others occur across many breeds. Mix two breeds (however unrelated otherwise) that both have a risk for cataracts, and chances are the mutt offspring can also have cataracts.
The initial test matings for inheritance of PRA was done with crossbreedings of Poodles and Labradors: both have the same type of PRA; breeding a carrier or affected Lab to a carrier or affected Poodle has exactly the same results as you'd get with carrier/affected matings in purebreds. This is a cut-and-dried example, but there are many more that aren't so easily delineated.
Yeah, if you were to do a cross where the two (or several) breeds share NO defective *recessive* genes, none of the defects carried by either parent will show up IN THE FIRST GENERATION. Breed two of those offspring together, tho (which is a very common situation with mutts) and you'll start seeing the recessives expressed.
With dominants, if one parent is affected (mutt OR purebred), 50% of its offspring will also be affected. This is why so many mutts with some herding ancestry have the MDR1 defect. It behaves as an incomplete dominant, so "carriers" still have some problem with ivermectin and related drugs. Since the majority of mutts are not on heartworm prevention, there's no selection against the defect in mutts.
Likewise, any mutt with Doberman ancestry (and a number of other breeds) is at the same risk for von Willebrand's disease as its Dobe ancestor (tho this is usually somewhat self-limiting in the case of injury -- say, if the animal requires surgery -- carriers bleed more and longer, but affecteds will bleed out on the table).
Beyond that, the most typical issue in mutts, outside of orthopedic issues (which are also very common) seems to be skin problems not related to diet. This may itself be a result of crossbreeding -- where due to the chance losses with each generation, you no longer reliably have, say, gene A suppressing gene B (because the mutt is Aa rather than AA). Homozygosity has its value too, ya know.
The real problem with today's purebreds isn't the exaggeration in some show lines, or genetic defects. It's that most show breeders don't let natural selection do its job. Culling has fallen out of favor.
Not necessarily. There are free-whelping, free-breathing bulldogs, and sound hunting-type dachshunds. And rather contrary to popular belief (especially among strictly show breeders!), the people doing the best job of preserving the older, sounder, more correct types, are the *gasp* so-called 'backyard breeders' (who just want a good-natured, healthy, attractive dog, not a big winner) and the commercial breeders (who don't want to be saddled with health or temperament issues, both of which can be expensive to maintain).
An interesting point I learned from a commercial breeder, about French Bulldogs: look to the *sire* for puppies that can be born naturally. (The beef cattle producers are all nodding and saying "I told you so.")
I don't know how TFA got its numbers, but per the big pet industry group the average expenditure is about $300/year. I suspect they have more clues.
However, the money in vet practices now is all in specialties, and pushing stuff that ignorant city folk will buy into, like homeopathy. I've watched it change across over 40 years as a canine professional, and not for the better. In the past 20 years, vet charges have increased at roughly 20x the rate of inflation.
Also (speaking from over 40 years pro experience in dogs) as a general rule you will get more cost-effective and often better advice from that old cow vet, who does things the practical way he's found works, rather than the by-the-book way that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars but doesn't really have better results.
And you are right -- a growing proportion of modern pets' medical and behavioral aliments are directly attributable to the spay/neuter craze. A few references:
No. A very small subset of winning-at-all-costs breeders have bred to extremes, because in the show ring, the more-extreme dog usually beats the correct dog -- and for that you can equally blame judges who are too easily swayed by "if some is good, more is better". This is much more of a problem in Europe than in the U.S. (the really extreme examples in the U.S. are all from Euro bloodlines), but it's been contaging across the ditch along with those top-winning imports.
These bred-to-win show dogs are not the majority by a long stretch, except in very rare breeds, where a few show breeders can control the entire gene pool. The current craze for neutering every 'pet quality' (often meaning non-exaggerated) puppy is not helping matters.
Some venues (UKC shows in particular) still reward dogs of correct (not exaggerated) type, particularly in working breeds. I myself have finished 56 UKC champions, all of 100% working lines and type (including the only 100% fieldbred Lab to get a Best In Show anywhere in the world since 1974).
A lot of the defective genes in dogs occur across multiple breeds. Frex, cataracts occur in almost all breeds (prevalence varies from breed to breed). In any mutt, your risk of such a widespread defect are the same as the average of its ancestors' risks. Mutts don't magically 'lose' the bad genes just because they're mutts.
In fact, they're more likely to have issues, because at least in purebreds, there's been some effort toward reducing their incidence (frex, the incidence of hip dysplasia is about 1/4th of what it was when broad screening started in 1962 -- and the species average for affecteds started at about 45%). No one does genetic screening on randomly-bred mutts.
Mutts are around 1/3 to 1/2 of the canine population, but in my observation, they comprise 90% of the average vet's 'problem dog' clientele. What does that tell you??
[I am a canine professional with over 40 years experience. I pay attention to these things.]
Erm... actually there is no DNA test for hip dysplasia, nor is it a single gene (tho it appears, per pedigree analysis, to be largely the result of one dominant and one recessive). You can xray and evaluate hips that way, but it will not tell you which dogs are 'carriers'.
Nor is it necessarily wise to cull out all the carriers from a given gene pool (ie. breed). Sometimes such culling unwittingly removes necessary genes as well, and leaves you in a worse state than before. This happened in one breed that had assiduously culled inherited blindness...and wound up with a fatal disorder becoming prevalent instead. It's best to breed away from problems as much as you can, but sometimes you can't replace the rest of the dog. This is especially true in rare breeds whose gene pool is already too small (and steadily shrinking thanks to the spay/neuter craze).
Also, individual status is not very informative. A dog with excellent hips but several dysplastic littermates is usually a much worse breeding risk than a dog with marginal hips but no dysplastic siblings. Ditto for not so much parents, but the grandparents.
In short, you have to know your bloodlines, or that OFA certification is just groping in the dark. In one rare breed I was involved with for many years (then rare enough that most fanciers knew every dog of that breed in the U.S.) a particular stud dog who was himself dysplastic proved to be THE best source for normal hips in the breed as it then existed in the U.S. Conversely, the lines founded on a dog that had certified normal proved to have, on average, terrible hips.
[I am a canine professional. I breed working dogs, 14 generations of my own line to date. I founded the OFA and CERF breed club representative programs and was a breed club rep myself for 19 years. I think I might have a few more clues than average.]
Actually, roundworms are not precisely a parasite; they're closer to a symbiote. Recent research found that exposure to roundworms helps kickstart the nursing puppy's immune system. And per DNA studies, it appears that the two species evolved in tandem.
It is possible to raise puppies that are entirely free of roundworms, but I've found it's not such a good idea -- aside from the potential immune setback, they are also very prone to neonatal diarrhea and are more inclined to develop overgrowths of coccidia and giardia (which are also normal inhabitants of the canine gut, can be cultured from almost any dog, and are more of a problem to the puppy when they get out of hand). You're better off to treat parasite-overgrowth symptoms when and IF they occur, rather than rock the boat by unbalancing the normal gut's assorted freeloaders.
Not much different from how using too much antibacterial soap messes up the mix of your skin's micro-inhabitants.
[I am a canine professional with over 40 years experience. I'm not just pulling this out of my ass or from the ravings on some pet forum full of tyros and neos who've had one dog and think they're experts.]
Seems to me that since a maintenance dose is required after desensitization, and since not everyone wants to eat peanuts every day, it could be made available as a tablet.
It wouldn't be the first time. I can rant about thyroid treatment having gone down the same road -- once standardized tests were available, they started treating to get the desired test results and forgot to treat the *patient*.
Seems to me that the more this national security is delegated to secret agencies, the less average citizens know about it, and the *more* vulnerable we become to the very attacks the secret agencies are supposed to prevent.
Folks should also remember, what we lose to space is not replaced. We're not magically making more carbon, or oxygen, or whatever else. Do you really want to accelerate the existing natural loss?
Or put a guy in the back of a dump truck and have him fling gravel with a shovel. That's how it was done before there were special rigs.
I don't blame 'em for not knowing how to cope or not having the 'correct' equipment (it would be silly and wasteful to maintain a stable of winter gear). But ordinary equipment can be repurposed. Frex, some places that routinely get really deep snow use an ordinary road grader to remove it (in fact for big drifts, it works much better than a truck-and-plow). It's not a special-purpose machine; it's the same one used to scrape gravel roads in the summer.
If your problem is underlying glare ice, you're better off to NOT plow it, since the snow on top provides more traction than the ice (which you can't plow off).
I buy WDs exclusively (thanks to more bad experiences with others) and my experience has been that a few die young (first two months), a few more die at around 5.5 years (WD told me the designed lifespan is 5 years), and the rest go on forever. I have some with over 13 years in use 24/7, and my average HD age right now is probably 8 or 9 years.
That's pretty unusual for a Conner. They had a fairly uniform habit of forgetting data if they sat unpowered for 6 months or so, and some would forget the entire partition. I've seen some that didn't, but they're the exception.
As to well-aged stuff, I have a 1991 W.D. that still works fine and tests 100% perfect. (If you have a 386 or older to hook it to!)
Conversely I have a WD 60GB that was a factory refurb, and it ran 24/7 for 13 years, and there's still nothing wrong with it. Only got shut down cuz I moved and it's still in storage.
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Contracts on this scale often have an escape clause, where the purchasing party can halt proceedings but must pay a penalty, either a flat fee or some percentage of the remaining contract.
So what percentage did get repo'd? I'd guess it was around half of the private-party purchases. Tho from the list of vehicle makes turned in (which someone posted in a prior discussion), it looked to me like it mostly benefited small business (contractors' trucks and the like).
Is this tower anything that could be rented out to private aerospace companies??
As to bridges to nowhere, there was also the 118 Freeway in Los Angeles County, which I vaguely recall was Jerry Brown's pet project for the benefit of his buddies (I've forgotten the details)... it sat there as a 'freeway to nowhere' for several years. If you remember the TV series CHiPs, most of the highway scenes were filmed on its vacant stretches. The irony is, once it was finally finished and opened, it proved underbuilt for the job, and is now one of the most crammed-solid freeways in SoCal.
It's probably one of those "use it or lose it" budgets, where if they don't manage to spend it all this year, they'll be shorted next year. I've talked to people working for gov't contractors who said sometimes they'd go buy any damn thing related to their field, then immediately dumpster it, because they had to spend the money but couldn't have the asset. Utterly stupid, and they know it, but until budgets become flexible to need rather than this 'use it or lose it' need it or not policy that's so pervasive, we'll have this problem, in one form or another.
Forgot to mention... covert crossbreedings are often how a defect gets INTO a breed that was formerly free of it. Examples that leap to mind:
Cataracts got into one Lab line from a Chesapeake cross in the early 1950s (I've traced it back to a single Chessie and a particular kennel). This particular type of cataract was not previously seen in Labs. (Nuisance, not blinding, but still, it's there.)
Central neuromuscular myopathy in Labs appears to be a 'mutation' if you didn't know the dog who's been pegged as the point source... but back in his day, a lot of us who knew the dog strongly suspected he was a greyhound cross. (At the very least, he was not the dog his pedigree claimed.) Come to find out, CNM also occurs in racing greyhounds. Hmm.
A heart valve defect occasionally found in fieldbred Labs traces back to a dog born in 1946. This dog's sire was (per info of the day and a radical disconnect of type) not the Lab his pedigree claims, but a black Pointer imported from England.
"Silken Windhounds" are most likely (contrary to the original breeder's claims) basically a mix of Sheltie and Whippet. They commonly have the MDR1 gene, which is not found in any other sighthound but is common in Shelties. Hmm.
Yep, crossbreeding, the panacea.
Breeder and trainer, and I can do any sort of veterinary work that doesn't involve surgery inside the body (mainly because I don't own anaesthesia equipment). My experience across 44 years covers about 3000 dogs. I've had 14 generations of my own line to date.
Sorry, but you are wrong about the genetics. A mutt can only have the genes its ancestors gave it. They are not 'hybrids'. Genes like cataracts, PRA, von Willebrand's disease, MDR1, multiple genes influencing hip dysplasia, and a host of others occur across many breeds. Mix two breeds (however unrelated otherwise) that both have a risk for cataracts, and chances are the mutt offspring can also have cataracts.
The initial test matings for inheritance of PRA was done with crossbreedings of Poodles and Labradors: both have the same type of PRA; breeding a carrier or affected Lab to a carrier or affected Poodle has exactly the same results as you'd get with carrier/affected matings in purebreds. This is a cut-and-dried example, but there are many more that aren't so easily delineated.
Yeah, if you were to do a cross where the two (or several) breeds share NO defective *recessive* genes, none of the defects carried by either parent will show up IN THE FIRST GENERATION. Breed two of those offspring together, tho (which is a very common situation with mutts) and you'll start seeing the recessives expressed.
With dominants, if one parent is affected (mutt OR purebred), 50% of its offspring will also be affected. This is why so many mutts with some herding ancestry have the MDR1 defect. It behaves as an incomplete dominant, so "carriers" still have some problem with ivermectin and related drugs. Since the majority of mutts are not on heartworm prevention, there's no selection against the defect in mutts.
Likewise, any mutt with Doberman ancestry (and a number of other breeds) is at the same risk for von Willebrand's disease as its Dobe ancestor (tho this is usually somewhat self-limiting in the case of injury -- say, if the animal requires surgery -- carriers bleed more and longer, but affecteds will bleed out on the table).
Beyond that, the most typical issue in mutts, outside of orthopedic issues (which are also very common) seems to be skin problems not related to diet. This may itself be a result of crossbreeding -- where due to the chance losses with each generation, you no longer reliably have, say, gene A suppressing gene B (because the mutt is Aa rather than AA). Homozygosity has its value too, ya know.
The real problem with today's purebreds isn't the exaggeration in some show lines, or genetic defects. It's that most show breeders don't let natural selection do its job. Culling has fallen out of favor.
Not necessarily. There are free-whelping, free-breathing bulldogs, and sound hunting-type dachshunds. And rather contrary to popular belief (especially among strictly show breeders!), the people doing the best job of preserving the older, sounder, more correct types, are the *gasp* so-called 'backyard breeders' (who just want a good-natured, healthy, attractive dog, not a big winner) and the commercial breeders (who don't want to be saddled with health or temperament issues, both of which can be expensive to maintain).
An interesting point I learned from a commercial breeder, about French Bulldogs: look to the *sire* for puppies that can be born naturally. (The beef cattle producers are all nodding and saying "I told you so.")
I don't know how TFA got its numbers, but per the big pet industry group the average expenditure is about $300/year. I suspect they have more clues.
However, the money in vet practices now is all in specialties, and pushing stuff that ignorant city folk will buy into, like homeopathy. I've watched it change across over 40 years as a canine professional, and not for the better. In the past 20 years, vet charges have increased at roughly 20x the rate of inflation.
Also (speaking from over 40 years pro experience in dogs) as a general rule you will get more cost-effective and often better advice from that old cow vet, who does things the practical way he's found works, rather than the by-the-book way that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars but doesn't really have better results.
And you are right -- a growing proportion of modern pets' medical and behavioral aliments are directly attributable to the spay/neuter craze. A few references:
http://www.associationofanimal...
http://www.plosone.org/article...
http://saova.org/articles/Earl...
http://www.naiaonline.org/pdfs...
No. A very small subset of winning-at-all-costs breeders have bred to extremes, because in the show ring, the more-extreme dog usually beats the correct dog -- and for that you can equally blame judges who are too easily swayed by "if some is good, more is better". This is much more of a problem in Europe than in the U.S. (the really extreme examples in the U.S. are all from Euro bloodlines), but it's been contaging across the ditch along with those top-winning imports.
These bred-to-win show dogs are not the majority by a long stretch, except in very rare breeds, where a few show breeders can control the entire gene pool. The current craze for neutering every 'pet quality' (often meaning non-exaggerated) puppy is not helping matters.
Some venues (UKC shows in particular) still reward dogs of correct (not exaggerated) type, particularly in working breeds. I myself have finished 56 UKC champions, all of 100% working lines and type (including the only 100% fieldbred Lab to get a Best In Show anywhere in the world since 1974).
A lot of the defective genes in dogs occur across multiple breeds. Frex, cataracts occur in almost all breeds (prevalence varies from breed to breed). In any mutt, your risk of such a widespread defect are the same as the average of its ancestors' risks. Mutts don't magically 'lose' the bad genes just because they're mutts.
In fact, they're more likely to have issues, because at least in purebreds, there's been some effort toward reducing their incidence (frex, the incidence of hip dysplasia is about 1/4th of what it was when broad screening started in 1962 -- and the species average for affecteds started at about 45%). No one does genetic screening on randomly-bred mutts.
Mutts are around 1/3 to 1/2 of the canine population, but in my observation, they comprise 90% of the average vet's 'problem dog' clientele. What does that tell you??
[I am a canine professional with over 40 years experience. I pay attention to these things.]
Erm... actually there is no DNA test for hip dysplasia, nor is it a single gene (tho it appears, per pedigree analysis, to be largely the result of one dominant and one recessive). You can xray and evaluate hips that way, but it will not tell you which dogs are 'carriers'.
Nor is it necessarily wise to cull out all the carriers from a given gene pool (ie. breed). Sometimes such culling unwittingly removes necessary genes as well, and leaves you in a worse state than before. This happened in one breed that had assiduously culled inherited blindness ...and wound up with a fatal disorder becoming prevalent instead. It's best to breed away from problems as much as you can, but sometimes you can't replace the rest of the dog. This is especially true in rare breeds whose gene pool is already too small (and steadily shrinking thanks to the spay/neuter craze).
Also, individual status is not very informative. A dog with excellent hips but several dysplastic littermates is usually a much worse breeding risk than a dog with marginal hips but no dysplastic siblings. Ditto for not so much parents, but the grandparents.
In short, you have to know your bloodlines, or that OFA certification is just groping in the dark. In one rare breed I was involved with for many years (then rare enough that most fanciers knew every dog of that breed in the U.S.) a particular stud dog who was himself dysplastic proved to be THE best source for normal hips in the breed as it then existed in the U.S. Conversely, the lines founded on a dog that had certified normal proved to have, on average, terrible hips.
[I am a canine professional. I breed working dogs, 14 generations of my own line to date. I founded the OFA and CERF breed club representative programs and was a breed club rep myself for 19 years. I think I might have a few more clues than average.]
Actually, roundworms are not precisely a parasite; they're closer to a symbiote. Recent research found that exposure to roundworms helps kickstart the nursing puppy's immune system. And per DNA studies, it appears that the two species evolved in tandem.
It is possible to raise puppies that are entirely free of roundworms, but I've found it's not such a good idea -- aside from the potential immune setback, they are also very prone to neonatal diarrhea and are more inclined to develop overgrowths of coccidia and giardia (which are also normal inhabitants of the canine gut, can be cultured from almost any dog, and are more of a problem to the puppy when they get out of hand). You're better off to treat parasite-overgrowth symptoms when and IF they occur, rather than rock the boat by unbalancing the normal gut's assorted freeloaders.
Not much different from how using too much antibacterial soap messes up the mix of your skin's micro-inhabitants.
[I am a canine professional with over 40 years experience. I'm not just pulling this out of my ass or from the ravings on some pet forum full of tyros and neos who've had one dog and think they're experts.]
In that case, stay away from soy protein entirely. It's a broad spectrum allergen and can cause problems beyond merely being allergic to soy.
Seems to me that since a maintenance dose is required after desensitization, and since not everyone wants to eat peanuts every day, it could be made available as a tablet.
It wouldn't be the first time. I can rant about thyroid treatment having gone down the same road -- once standardized tests were available, they started treating to get the desired test results and forgot to treat the *patient*.
Seems to me that the more this national security is delegated to secret agencies, the less average citizens know about it, and the *more* vulnerable we become to the very attacks the secret agencies are supposed to prevent.
Folks should also remember, what we lose to space is not replaced. We're not magically making more carbon, or oxygen, or whatever else. Do you really want to accelerate the existing natural loss?
I see you beat me to it. Makes a person feel old, don't it?
If you've got one coming up where it's not wanted, could drilling conceivably redirect it?
Like we might end up with a crack in the world?
It's been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or put a guy in the back of a dump truck and have him fling gravel with a shovel. That's how it was done before there were special rigs.
I don't blame 'em for not knowing how to cope or not having the 'correct' equipment (it would be silly and wasteful to maintain a stable of winter gear). But ordinary equipment can be repurposed. Frex, some places that routinely get really deep snow use an ordinary road grader to remove it (in fact for big drifts, it works much better than a truck-and-plow). It's not a special-purpose machine; it's the same one used to scrape gravel roads in the summer.
If your problem is underlying glare ice, you're better off to NOT plow it, since the snow on top provides more traction than the ice (which you can't plow off).
I buy WDs exclusively (thanks to more bad experiences with others) and my experience has been that a few die young (first two months), a few more die at around 5.5 years (WD told me the designed lifespan is 5 years), and the rest go on forever. I have some with over 13 years in use 24/7, and my average HD age right now is probably 8 or 9 years.
That's pretty unusual for a Conner. They had a fairly uniform habit of forgetting data if they sat unpowered for 6 months or so, and some would forget the entire partition. I've seen some that didn't, but they're the exception.
As to well-aged stuff, I have a 1991 W.D. that still works fine and tests 100% perfect. (If you have a 386 or older to hook it to!)
Conversely I have a WD 60GB that was a factory refurb, and it ran 24/7 for 13 years, and there's still nothing wrong with it. Only got shut down cuz I moved and it's still in storage.