katherinemichel.github.io
The greatest tour I ever had was at the Smokejumper base in remote WA. At any time when they're open, you're allowed to drop in for a tour and whoever is there that day is obliged to give you one. Even in the height of fire season.
We got to see them pack parachutes, repair gear, coordinate parcel drops - everything. Our guide was a 3 year jumper veteran on summer break from his masters degree in linguistics. It was incredible.
Any org that's proud of what they do should aspire to have public tours.
https://turismoitaipu.com.br/en/
Get the "special tour" which takes you inside the dam. An absolutely incredible spot and incredible achievement. They will take you into a room with a turbine shaft that's mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power.
Expect potential weirdness though. My wife was wearing a (not particularly short) skirt, and the lady at the office selling tour tickets made her step back and spin around, then said she couldn't go in like that. There is a gift shop that sells dam branded pants, so she bought a pair and we were cleared to go in. After all that, one dude in the control room was watching soft-core porn on one of the control room computers.
The turbine shaft room is especially crazy, since they let you (at least back then) walk right up to a few inches away from the shaft mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power! You could reach out and touch it, but we didn't and I wouldn't recommend it.
You're also invited, but not required, to look over the edge of the dam from the top, which is also very far down.
Source: My father was a 35 year veteran of the fire department in a large city.
I've noodled with the idea of starting a "fieldtrips for grownups" group but I feel like a wastewater treatment plant is more likely to open their doors for a group of third graders than a group of thirty somethings.
Probably true. Usually. Just keep your eyes on local news, and wait 'till the Sewer Dept. is facing budget cuts, or needs a rate increase to pay for long-delayed repairs, or is trying to get a millage passed.
Wouldn't be surprised if others do as well, or would be willing to if you asked the right person nicely.
It answered a lot of the "what can Brown do for you" question in a way that no commercial could ever do. Their drop shipping and picking/packing facilities are impressive too including their cold storage areas that are massive warehouse sized freezers.
Also learned that the Louisville airport is listed as an international airport solely because of UPS.
It's crazy how even something which feels mediocre so much of the time - fast-food coffee, a budget airline - requires an enormous amount of human effort to pull off reliably.
(And yes, you can dislike Southwest as a corporation and still think things like flight attendant training and plane simulators are cool. Come on folks.)
I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.
Quoting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.
I’m picturing a room of tasters going “bitter, acrid, off-putting… approved”
If you have this kind of scale, you can do crazy things. You have enough data to AB test every single decision, not necessarily even via customer surveillance, you can just have half of the restaurants do A and the other half do B for a month, and then compare results. You can optimize the hell out of everything. You can do focus group testing to discover what customers really want. You can hire the world's foremost expert in chair design to design chairs which fulfill your business goals.
If you're a mom-and-pop, you go off on vibes and on "Karen Smith posted an angry review on Google Maps and she mentioned that the coffee tasted bad, so let's change the coffee."
Apps like Uber Eats change this dynamic a bit, as they can use the power of 0-marginal-cost software to write some of these optimizations once, and then deliver them to all their customers, no matter how small, sometimes without those customers' explicit knowledge.
Customers in store A might have wildly different preferences to customers in store B. Starbucks can't account for that - small stores can.
Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.
The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.
They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.
My guess is all airline NOCs operate 24/7 as flights happen around the clock. Also planes typically don't have much downtime as that loses money so everything has to be a continuous operation.
Cool looking at the pictures of the dashboards. It's nutty to think how much has to be tracked when doing airplane maintenance.
Anyone know what that is?
Perhaps an escape rope for the pilots?
EDIT: Yup, here it is in action: https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/7389569
https://www.aviation-gadgets.com/photo/virgin-australia-boei...
Highly recommend reading Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger for a little more background on SWA rough and tumble startup story with Herb K.
Maybe you should tell me about the chickens, since I am unlikely to ever get to ask anyone at Southwest HQ.
We software people are spoiled with our keyboards and Red Bull :p
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_%28American_TV_series%...
Britain has plenty of these; there was one about Virgin, there's one about Scotland's national airline (on iPlayer, $4/mo Windscribe subscription required if you live outside the UK), "Heathrow, Britain's Busiest Airport" is another longstanding one about Heathrow.
A Youtube channel called Our Stories is a good place to find such content.
I'm envious of your full tour. You got a chance of a lifetime to see everything up close where most of us just get a glimpse if we are lucky.
I am not sure that's a "sadly". I used to fly a lot and talk to flight crews. Aviation is a ton of crazy schedules and nights away from home (I assume this is well known)
From a family perspective it's bad enough if dads missing from the house for days at a time, much more catastrophic if mom's not around like that.
(A child's relationship with mom vs. dad is very different. Kids need their mom in a very different way that we can't just paper over)
> Are we happy there aren't more women pilots?
I'm sorry, what? Who's we? You and... ?
> That would be your POV
If you want to know my POV all you have to do is ask.
Why do you believe they have the same schedules? There's no rule that says when a pilot follows one flight with another flight, all the flight attendants have to join him.
I don't think there's all that much inherent value in having several flights flown by the same pilot -- if anything, it's the reverse -- so I'd tend to suspect that the rarity of female pilots owes more to the fact that pilots come from the Air Force.
I suspect this institutional flexibility is actually a natural consequence of the gendered nature of the role.
Ah, what is so special that women bring that men can't? Neither women or men are fundamental to raising a child, parents are. Gay couples raise healthy, well-adjusted children all the time without one or the other gender as a parent.
Positioning a family as having women-at-home as a requirement just sounds like old-school misogyny to me. (And also de-valuing the capability of men.) Men are perfectly capable of filling this domestic role as well.
In first grade, we took a field trip to Chet's factory. It was so interesting to see how they made tamales in quantity–and they sent us each home with a free tamale.
Another Oregon treat is Tillamook cheese. My family went on one of their tours. They still offer tours today, but you are in a glassed-in area on the second floor overlooking the line. Back then, we got to walk right up to the vats of cheese curd. They trusted us (and instructed us!) to not poke our fingers in.
Much more recently, a friend who works at La Terra Fina in Union City, California took me on a private tour of their manufacturing plant. You may have seen LTF's quiches and dips at stores like Safeway and Costco, and private label versions at other stores.
I think they were making the Artichoke-Jalapeño dip that day. What struck me was the contrast between the first part of the production line and the rest. They start with huge blocks of cream cheese, industrial size cans of artichokes and jalapeños, and dump them into a giant mixer by hand.
Once a batch is mixed and gets a taste test, the rest of the line is high speed and highly automated. Plastic tubs come through and get the dip squirted into them, the plastic seal and top goes on, and then a labeling machine attaches each label.
Pro tip: If you like their dips, try them warm. My friend had not actually done this, so I asked Claude for a recipe:
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One time a friend served some La Terra Fina dip warm at a party. I'd only had it cold before, and it was a revelation. I forgot to ask for his recipe, but I believe he warmed it in the oven for a while and then under the broiler for a bit to lightly brown the top. What would be a good temperature and time for the first step, assuming a typical shallow casserole pan?
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La Terra Fina dips warm up beautifully — the cream cheese base gets silky and the flavors meld in a way cold just can't match.
For a shallow casserole dish, I'd suggest:
Oven step: 325°F for about 20–25 minutes. Low and slow is the move here — you want it heated through without the dairy breaking or getting grainy. A shallow dish speeds things up compared to a deep one, so check at 20 minutes. You're looking for it to be bubbling gently around the edges.
Broiler step: 2–4 minutes on high, watching closely. The top should get lightly golden with a few darker spots — that slight caramelization on the cheese and any onion bits is where the magic happens. Don't walk away during this part.
A few notes:
• Pull it from the fridge 15–20 minutes before baking if you can, so it's not stone cold going in
• The spinach artichoke and artichoke jalapeño varieties both do particularly well warm
• Serving with something sturdy (crostini, pita chips, thick tortilla chips) beats thin crackers when it's hot and scoopable
The broiler browning is really what elevates it — that textural contrast between the creamy interior and the slightly crispy top is what probably made it feel like a revelation.
But the Tillamook cheese and ice cream factory is going strong, and one Google review says it's a great experience.
It would be fun to compile a list of places like this that offer tours to the public!