Unusual fireworks activity

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby Harvey » Tue Jun 23, 2020 6:56 pm

Is there any country anywhere else in the world with the degree of interest in fireworks necessary for this thread to even exist? :fawked:

Edit: genuinely curious.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
User avatar
Harvey
 
Posts: 4165
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 4:49 am
Blog: View Blog (20)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby norton ash » Tue Jun 23, 2020 7:14 pm

Exploding stuff is cool while you're doing it with friends. But that's best done in a gravel pit or sandbank out in the bush.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Jun 23, 2020 8:12 pm

.


There's also the birthplace of fireworks. China.


Image
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Brooklyn

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jun 25, 2020 9:50 am

So I'm lazy and didn't go around on a bike when the nuisance fireworks started the last couple of nights, because I was already in bed. But I still intend to do it, if I actually stay up past my current bedtime. :oops:

As it turns out, the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, has been going around for several nights now in a low-key way, informally meeting many of the people setting off the fireworks and trying to convince them to stop. Though a former cop, he doesn't want anyone calling 911 if there's no direct danger, and hopes to expand his efforts into a community policing approach that foregoes arrests, stops the noise, collects the contraband peacefully. He reported about it at length on the radio yesterday. Very believably, I found.

Jun 24, 2020

Eric Adams, Brooklyn Borough President, talks about his call for handling the spate of fireworks without calling 9-1-1 and his new plan for a recovery plan that fixes some of the City's long-standing inequities.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/seeking-equi ... -fireworks


No transcript but here are the basics: Overwhelmingly they're male (shocker!), teenagers or 18-24. They've had no in-person school (if they were still enrolled), no jobs (no summer jobs this year, obviously, if there ever were enough), no places to hang out, no youth centers of any kind open, nothing to do for the months of the pandemic lockdown. They sleep late and look forward to setting off some boom-boom at night. So, in part, possibly in the main, this is more Corona Lockdown Fallout.

As we've seen on this thread also, the goods are legal, corporate product, sold at high discounts due to the fireworks industry coroneconomic crisis. In our case these are largely coming from directly neighboring counties, since the prohibition on fireworks sales applies only to the NYC five boroughs.

A well-spoken caller made the case for coordinated psyop, asking how can these supposedly impoverished kids afford it? How come it seems to be happening everywhere in the country at once, she asks, and for hours at a time, traumatizing people and simulating war acoustics? Why is it so loud, compared to what we remember from the old days when summer fireworks were a more common feature of NYC life? Isn't this an intentional plan to keep everyone up and call for police action?

Adams responded by talking about how cheap the goods are right now, and reporting he has collected many print ads offering epic sales discounts, including from his interlocutors in Brooklyn. Many of these offers are from companies as far afield as Alabama.

He thus made the point, but I was hoping he'd add that this is happening everywhere in the country at once for the same reason that the price of gasoline, whenever it changes, goes up and down in similar proportions everywhere at once. This is a national market. The industry is currently depressed and has massive excess inventory. The apex fireworks consumers, these kids, currently have little else to do, at least in their minds.

Another point that could be emphasized is that it does not take many people at all. It needs only a tiny proportion of the youth to engage in this activity for everyone to hear it, all night long. Once it became a thing, I think that tended at first to encourage it. By now it may be engendering reluctance and a sense of greater risk. I think I've been hearing a lot less boom-boom the last couple of days due to the attention.

One answer for the noise is they make a greater variety of louder crap nowadays. In the old days, I remember seeing basically the same three or four items in wide circulation for years, with piles and piles of debris from these same items to confirm it on the ground on the morning of July 5.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby dada » Thu Jun 25, 2020 11:35 am

My fireworks sales are down, so I cut prices by 60-75 percent. Now instead of selling one fireflower blossom for a hundred bucks, I'm selling three or four to make the same hundred. Profit is the same, but now I'm losing money on the other end because I have to place orders with the wholesaler more often. Even if the wholesaler drops prices too, the manufacturer has to order more powder, paper, packaging and fuse from the powder, paper, packaging and fuse distributors. More orders, more shipping costs. But profits have not changed. Somewhere, someone has to take the loss. I wonder why that is?
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
User avatar
dada
 
Posts: 2600
Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2007 12:08 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby Grizzly » Thu Jun 25, 2020 11:10 pm

I wonder why that is?


Fnord! ... :jumping:
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby thrulookingglass » Fri Jun 26, 2020 8:26 am

Capitalism is the virus.
User avatar
thrulookingglass
 
Posts: 877
Joined: Thu May 19, 2005 2:46 pm
Location: down the rabbit hole USA
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Jun 27, 2020 11:16 pm

If there is a lot less traffic and most people are at home cos of the virus then everything is generally quieter and fireworks sound louder cos they are relative to how much background noise there is with less traffic and general activity.
Joe Hillshoist
 
Posts: 10594
Joined: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:45 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby Harvey » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:56 am

My neighbours have answered the question for me.

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
User avatar
Harvey
 
Posts: 4165
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 4:49 am
Blog: View Blog (20)

Re: Unusual fireworks activity

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Jul 15, 2020 1:53 pm

bks » Tue Jun 23, 2020 4:12 pm wrote:Every night, for at least a couple of weeks, in Philadelphia.

By my rough calculations, there must be tens of thousands of cancelled events in April and May where large fireworks displays would have been part of the festivities. I'm thinking mostly about minor league baseball games, major league baseball games, other outdoor events that got cancelled, etc. Further, belt-tightening in an economic depression may mean that, say, 25% of municipalities that were planning large July 4 shows no loner are. So there's bound to be a large production excess of high-end fireworks that suppliers need to dump at pennies on the dollar, yes? That would account for the increased frequency.

Mix in nationwide rallies against systemic racism that threaten the hegemony of police, and it's not at all implausible that cops are both less likely to respond to disturbance calls, and happy to have the inoculating effect of people ignoring loud bangs that sound like gunfire (should they need to use that inoculation effect to their advantage sometime in the near future).


Same observations here. In addition, I noticed that the “invisible” deep booms coinciding with the nights following the worst of the pig riots pretty seamlessly transitioned into clearly visible, professional-level fireworks.

Hot take here, though - I was on my roof last July 4th and the neighborhood displays all along the horizon were like nothing I’d ever seen before - just a constant, glowing buzz, especially up in the northeast. July 4th this year was nothing like that, but they were way more sporadic and spread out, divorced from the actual “celebration.”

I’m sure the “ATM bombs” were discussed here. I was fully on board with that explanation of the deeper booms but later learned that there were something like a total of three exploded ATMs in the entire city following the protests, so I don’t know. The National Guard claimed to not have any sonic weapons (one spokesperson claiming to not know what sonic weapons even were), but I saw them myself while out.

The fireworks also curiously came to a near-halt after July 4th. The contrast was odd.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Previous

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 45 guests