Block This

[yogi]

I am about as paranoid as anyone else when it comes to those Internet corporate giants tracking my every step on the Internet (and off the Internet too). Some browsers I use default to using an ad blocker and others keep tracking cookies at bay. But the browser itself is seldom thought of as one of the Big Brothers that is following you. Nearly all of them do, but Google Chrome is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to harvesting personal information. The gods of the Internet only know what the hell they do with it. Since I know Chrome is one of your favorite browsers, I thought you might be interested in this article about putting Google data collection in its place. If nothing else, the links therein will show you what Google is collecting. They also suggest how to limit or stop the collection. Interesting stuff.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-tracks-you-privacy/

[Kellemora]

Hmm, all I get is a blank white page when I follow that link.

FWIW: I have ALL COOKIES turned OFF, and use two different ad blocking programs.
Then I allow only those cookies that are absolutely necessary for a couple of the things I do, but none of them are Tracking Cookies.
Naturally you must allow some 1st Party Cookies, and you can make some cookies Session Cookies that delete when you leave a website. Some cookies are beneficial if you visit certain websites a lot, but only if they are truly necessary.

Here's a little website I use every once in awhile to check on a website before I go visit the website.

https://www.cookie-checker.com/

I checked the Publishers Clearing House website, and they stick over 88 cookies on your computer, unless you have them blocked, and about 75 of those are tracking cookies for third party vendors.

If you run a cookie blocker, you can often see what the cookie is for and how it is used, and does it collect other data.
In some cases, you may want to allow a certain cookie, but none of the rest. That's where the cookie blocker programs come in handy.

Google has a cookie that reads your History File, if you don't have it blocked.
Even so, they can still see what website you go to after you leave their website, but only one as far as I understand.
So, as a safety precaution, I always go to Google Search before moving to the next website.

It's been a couple of years ago, before I got the Silver Yogi, but I used to use a little Linux program that logged my on-line activity, what was downloaded and uploaded from the Internet. It got boring to read, even though it didn't show LAN calls, it did show my clock, weather and temperature program checking every 5 minutes.
When you are on a busy website like Farcebook, it fills up log pages really fast on the main screen.
But not so much on other screens because I use a blocking program to block all the garbage they would flash on my screen. It does show a Call to Send data, Receipt Blocked, right on the log page.
When using Farcebook, I learned what cookies I MUST HAVE, it was only three cookies, and none of them were tracking cookies.
So, whenever I load up a new computer, I block everything, then go back in and allow those three cookies for Farcebook.
Then later I may allow a Session Cookie for something I want to do that requires a beneficial cookie.

I set all this up so I never have to look at the setting, unless I get an upgrade from the cookie blocking program, and want to make sure they didn't change some of my settings in the process of performing an upgrade.

[yogi]

The website is on Wired magazine and pointing to an article making suggestions on how to contain what Google collects about you. You can get there manually, of course, by:
clicking on your Google Account Icon (your picture?) >>> Data and Personalization >>> Activity Controls >>> Manage your activity controls

This will let you see some of the information Google has about you in their storage. There are several activities and you can download a copy of what they got on you (scroll down for the link). You might be amazed.

Cookies are a necessary evil in some situations. Most of them can be banned without any noticeable effect on your browser viewing. A lot of browsers can be set to erase all cookies, history, and cache upon closing the browser. Cookie managers may not be necessary in that case. But, managing cookies, as you can see by looking at your Google data, is only one way data about you is collected. There are server side scripts that record how you got to a given page and to where you go after you leave that page. This is put in the ship's log and normally used for site activity analysis (page view count, e.g.). Google is going a step or two beyond that by using your referral links for its own purposes. One question I've not seen answered or addressed has to do with those ads you are blocking. The content is coming from an ad server. Those ad servers have exactly the same scripts to record who visits, from whence they came, and to where they went after the visit. Is that information blocked (I doubt it) or are you simply prevented from viewing the content? I'm very skeptical of ad blockers.

I guess the EU has been a little more aggressive about privacy than we have been in this country. That seems to be the purpose of that link you posted; a check on compliance. And, as far as I'm concerned, anybody who goes to the Publishers Clearing House website deserves to eat all the cookies they are being served.

[Kellemora]

I think the Ad Blockers only prevent it from appearing on your screen, they still download I'm sure, else we would see an increase in speed.

I have taken a look at what Google collects from us a couple of times. Never saw anything to worry about though.
Then too, I never put personal stuff on-line either. I don't normally post to Farcebook, but may share a post, and hit the Like button on other posts. But that's about it.

My late sister Linda won 5k playing PCH scratch-offs. She had to send them a W9 before they would pay her, and then they sent only 3900 having withheld the rest for taxes. Come tax time she got most of it back in her refund. So she figures she ended up with around 4250. She had a cookie blocker set to block everything, so did not play the games which added tracking cookies.
She got to playing after one of her friends had won only 250 bucks, and they sent her friend a check for the full 250.

I never played at all until about two months ago when I entered by mail from one of their mailings.
I got a second mailing saying my entry was incomplete, which was just another sales gimmick.
So I went to their blog to just read what others were saying. Mainly I was curious if the so-called winners were really winners or if they were just bot posts to the blog.
Happened to see a blog post with an unusual name I recognized so sent them a PM.
They got back to me the next day saying yes they are the person I thought they were.
We started talking back and forth a few times via PM messages, then we met in person up at our local Kroger store.
Had a good talk with him too. I told me what games not to waste time playing, because with billions of entries, and no payouts until late in 2020 the odds of winning are zilch.
But he told me about the small games with daily winners, and a monthly larger prize.
He knew I might not believe him, so he brought me printed out screen shots to see, and a printed list of his winning over the past year. It wasn't much, but he had at least fifteen 5 dollar winners, eight 10 dollar winners, four 25 dollar winners, and three 250 dollar winners, since February 2018.
His wife never won a 5 or 10 dollar prize but has hit seven 50 dollar prizes, and one 1,000 dollar prize.
Besides the daily scratch-offs you can get to easily, there are several other instant win to get to without playing the series they are in. He showed me how to do this also.
Although I have not won any cash yet, playing only about two weeks so far, I've already amassed ten million tokens, which can be turned in to buy more tickets in the sweepstakes. He told me to just save them until near the end of the next sweepstakes then spend them all to buy entries, but don't expect to win, hi hi.
One last thing, because of the advertisements between each game, I open about 6 games before I start playing and as soon as I play a game, I move to the next tab to play the next, and by the time I get through all 6, the ad on the first tab is done. Doing it this way only takes about 15 minutes to get through all the instant win and monthly drawing games. I don't play any of the rest, because they are time consuming, and the odds of winning are less than 1 in 6 million, hi hi.

Then the other day I got another mailing saying Final Step Required, Notice of Mandatory Compliance for Imminent Winner Selection. It too was just another gimmick to sell crap. Already fed it to the paper shredder, hi hi.

[yogi]

I once knew a lady, who oddly enough lived in Knoxville, that won $10,000 the very first time she played one of those online games. I don't know if it was PCH or something else, but that win started her on a mission. At the time I lost track of her she was playing around 100 different games, and like your friend was collecting small wins regularly. She could not live off her winnings; they simply were not enough. But it boiled down to free money. Well, free if you don't mind putting the time into the activity.

When I came down here to Missouri, I had only one experience with lottery wins. It was a lotto held in Germany and cost several hundred dollars per ticket. I won the price of my ticked back and never played again. LOL However, about every 3rd or 4th trip to the grocery store I buy a Missouri lottery ticket or three - I give them $6 each time I play. The payout has to be at least 200 mil before I bother with it, and I did win big once. I won $50 which I was able to claim at the store. Last week I won again: $4 this time. I used that and a couple more to buy three more tickets. Tonight will tell if am going to be a multi-millionaire or not. I consider it all a contribution to the state and expect nothing in return. The only reason I keep it up is that I have this fantasy of owning a Bentley some day. The one I have in mind starts around $400k.

[Kellemora]

Back in the day of Snail Mail contests, where sent in a 3x5 postcard with a word on it, in an envelope, I won two major prizes, and upright freezer, a nice one too. And a white elephant called a Ford Mustang, which was a financial disaster to win. It was NOT a cash or car, if you won the car, you got the car, period.
But then comes the IRS, and you had to pay a winnings tax of around 26 to 45% of the value of the car, I don't remember which. I didn't have that kind of money, so a dealer said he would buy the car from me. He gave me a fair price for it so no complaints about that part of the deal.
However, here comes the IRS again. Even though I paid them the winnings tax on the car with the proceeds from the car dealer, they were not done with me yet.
I sold the car for X number of dollars, and they call that INCOME, and they taxed that INCOME at more than my normal tax bracket because it pushed me up a level, perhaps two levels, I don't remember anymore either.
Then the State taxed the INCOME also.
By the time all was said and done, and all the taxes paid, I ended up with only 600 bucks after winning a car. The government got all the rest.
Ever since then, I only enter contests that pay cash or if it is an item, they pay the winnings tax if applicable.
Turn out, most things valued at under 600 dollars do not have a winnings tax applied to them.
BUT, if you sell the item, then the profits from the sale is INCOME. Since the item had no deductible cost, the entire sale price is taxed as INCOME.

I never buy lottery tickets. The odds are just to great against winning.
They should have never started mega-lotteries, there should have been a cap of like a million or perhaps five million dollars. It would benefit a whole lot more people, than one person winning a hundred million or more.

Back before the legality rules got to darn sticky, we used to have a door prize every week at our greenhouses.
When grandpa first started it, there was a stub on every sales receipt that matched the number of the receipt, and these he would put into a box for the drawing.
When they came out with the new law about No Purchase Required To Win, he was still in the clear because it was a door prize not a sweepstakes. But then the law changed again so it applied to nearly everything he could call it.
The company that made the sales receipts supplied him with a roll of stubs the same size and shape as the tear-offs on the bottom of the receipts, with a place on the back for the entrant to place a phone number.
This way, the stubs were exactly the same in the drawing box, so you couldn't feel around before drawing.
After he passed away, we stopped the drawings for several years.
Then CJ started up with something where you dropped a business card in a box. He also supplied blank cards for folks to fill out. He never had any problems doing it that way, and continued up until the day we closed up shop forever.

My dad on the other hand, once a year would hold a raffle. The winner got a vase of a dozen roses sent within our delivery area once a month for an entire year, and the cash from the raffle went to his church as a donation.
He only did this up until around 1975 or so.

[yogi]

The chances of wining the Missouri state lottery, Mega or Power, are 250,000:1. My chances of winning are 0:0 if I don't buy a ticket. As I say, I consider it a donation to the operation of the state when I buy a ticket. I don't care what they do with the money as long as I know they are obligated to play me any winnings I might be so fortunate to qualify for.

The lottery is about as bogus as con schemes ever get. I don't recall the exact number but the adverts say the top payout would be $444 million this week. Well, that's based on a 30 year annuity that would be purchased with the actual amount you could win, which would be $266 million lump sum. Taxes would be applied to that smaller amount and I'd be lucky to receive a check for $133 million in real money. That's not small change, but it's not the advertised payout either.

Lotteries have become so successful that there are several different kinds. Some max out in the hundreds of millions, but most of the tickets sold max out at a few thousand dollars. Plus, those small change tickets are scratch offs and you know what your luck is instantly. It's on one of those small tickets that I won the $50.

I reported that $50 as income on last year's taxes because, well, it was income. Same would be true if I won a white elephant. You can write off the cost of the tickets, by the way, but only up to the point where you zero out your winnings. Losses from lotteries/gambling cannot be carried forward or applied as tax credits. That's another reason those Mega Millions are not as attractive as they are advertised to be.

The theory behind my gaming the state is to ultimately be able to buy a Bentley. I'm paying roughly 10% personal property tax every year to the sate of Missouri because they want that much for the luxury of me owning an automobile or two. 10% of that $400 Bentley would be $40,000 a year personal property tax. That's about the price of a new Mustang.

Maybe I'll get a Lambo instead.

[Kellemora]

My daughter worked behind the service counter at a grocery store where they sold lottery tickets.
They know exactly how many tickets have winners, or I should say, the total amount they have to pay out from each roll of tickets, and the price they pay for the roll is reduced by the amount of payouts they must make from each roll.
In the early years of the lottery, store owners paid for the roll of tickets after the fact, other than the payouts.
They may still do this, I don't know if they reverted back to this or not, after what happened when they went to pay for the rolls in advance.
On the pay in advance rolls, most of the winning tickets were near the end of each roll. So employees would keep track of the number of payouts, and the amounts. If a roll was nearing the end, and they knew they still had a couple of hundred dollars in payouts still on the roll, the employee would buy the rest of the roll themselves. They didn't always come out ahead because a larger payout may have occurred on another shift and not written down in their cheat books, hi hi.
No one ever knew if a roll had a big payout or not, the ones you have to send in to get the money.
But the store she worked at sold so many tickets each day, they often had someone win a large amount, and when that happens the store gets a small kickback from the gaming commission.

Although they are illegal now, back when I was younger, we had these punch blocks you pocked a hole out with a metal pin that came with the block. Many of the punch holes only had sayings in them, like a Chinese Cookie, but each block had at least 20 to 50 bucks in payouts. The only folks making money on these were those who were selling the punch blocks, hi hi.

When I was a young tyke, a couple of the taverns in town had these big prize wheels you could spin. They also had gambling type pinballs too, which were also illegal. The bar owners claim they don't pay out money, and the big prize wheel is just for a chance to win a free drink, ha ha. But when the only people in the bar were those known by the owner, things were a little different. You could give him a dollar, or five or ten to spin the big prize wheel, but it couldn't be obvious. He would jot down on his pad your bet and the number you chose. Then the next time you came in the door, just like everyone else, you would spin the big prize wheel and hoped it landed on Free Drink. Although if you had a secret bet going, you hoped it would land on your number, hi hi.

I don't know if it is still against the law, but you could not bring a deck of playing cards, or a pair of dice into an establishment that served liquor. But it was OK to play Darts or Dominoes, or shoot pool if they had a pool table.
I remember a table of women playing Yahtzee and the cops coming in and telling them they cannot have dice in the tavern. But these are not gambling dice they retorted. The cop said put them away or visit a cell. They put the game away.

[yogi]

Up in the Chicago suburbs where I lived a few of the convenience stores had those rolls of lottery tickets. My godmother would buy them every week and send me a few on my birthday. I never had a winner from her pickings. Down here in Missouri I don't see anybody with rolls of tickets. It's all vending machines or printed out by computer.

The break point on payouts is indeed $600. The store has to pay that or less for any winning in that category. $601 and up in winnings must be collected from the official lottery people. It must all be computerized these days so that the stores merely send the state the proceeds from the ticket sales minus any payouts. Humans don't handle those scratch type tickets at all, or at least not in those stores where I shop.

I well remember those punch blocks. Let's just say my dad's side of the family frequented a lot of bars in their days, and I believe that's where I saw those blocks. My earliest memory of being in a bar has to do with nickelodeons. I distinctly recall putting nickles into a slot on the bar and then watching a cartoon or something on a screen over the pinball machine. This happened at one tavern out in the country. None of the city bars had such a thing.

[Kellemora]

Almost every place down here still has scratch-offs, except instead of being on a roll, they are fan-folded and piled up in stacks of which game they are inside Lucite dispenser boxes the seller can access from his side of the counter.
They have $1, $2, $5, and $10 scratch-offs at most places, a few places may have the $20 and $50 scratch-offs.
But yes they all have the printout machines for the daily, weekly, and monthly drawings, plus the national drawings.
A few of them also work from your cell phone, which sends the data to the machine and it prints out your selection, after paying of course, hi hi.

One of the restaurants we used to eat at had scratch-offs for sale up until they got robbed one night.
They had banners in the store showing folks had won, $5k and $10k winning tickets from there store.
I don't think they had the Lottery machines though, just the scratch-offs.

My brother used to enter some big Lottery in another country. Probably spent well over a grand buying tickets over the years, until he finally won a small winnings of 500 bucks I think. The hassle he had to go through to get it, and then pay to have the money converted to US Dollars, he only ended up with about 400 of the 500 he won. He never played that game again, but still bought the US Lottery Tickets, and also sent some out in birthday cards.
One cousin he sent those tickets to, won 3 dollars, hi hi. I don't know of any others.

Speaking of winning. I won $5 on a PCH game, but because I had cookies blocked, all I got was a blank screen.
I backed out of it, turned on my cookies, then went back forward again, and I lucked out, was able to get to the Claim Screen. Twice I got an error message, but I was persistent. I had them send it to my PayPal account, since doing it that way didn't cost anything, or cause a delay.
Then I turned off the cookies and cleaned out every cookie on my computer, about 80 of them from PCH alone, just in that short time I had it turned on. Sheee.
I'm only playing the Instant Win games, and not messing with the Sweepstakes or Entry Games for later drawings, or guessing a right number. That being said, most of the Instant Win games do enter a number in a drawing for you.

It would be nice if I did win 25k or over, I could sure use the money, hi hi.

[yogi]

I have to laugh, particularly at myself, when I think about winning the lottery. It seems that everyone who buys those tickets knows they are not going to win the big jackpot. 1 person for every 250,000,000 tickets sold will win according to the odds table. That's kind of remarkable considering how many winners there are. Even if it's only once a month a winner is drawn, that's a billion tickets a year being sold. Of course if the lottery is truly random the winners could bunch up and then be spread out over a longer term. The odds are actually averages. Anyway, I know all this. You know it too. So does everybody who buys a ticket. But each and every one of us has this thought in the back of their mind that they will win ... eventually.

This morning I was over at Schnooks and eyeballed the lottery ticket vending machine. Every kind of ticket allowed in the state of Missouri was in there. I'll say that it appears Dierberg's machines seem to have more scratch-off selections than Schnooks, but each store has them all. My wife likes the vending machines, but when I buy I go to the service counter for Power or Mega tickets. I fill in the cards with numbers I select instead of having the machine pick numbers for me. I recall reading somewhere that the winners are more often hand picked numbers than machine generated.

The current Lotto App on my clever phone does a little more than just show the winners. I can't buy tickets with it but it does show a history of past draws. It categorizes hot numbers, cold numbers, and numbers overdue to be drawn. You would think that would be valuable information, and it is to a degree. Unfortunately, they only keep track of the last thirty draws. That's a good sampling but it's not statistically significant. If I find an app that would do the same analysis from day one of the lottery I would even consider paying for THAT one.

[Kellemora]

Back in the days of 3x5 cards with a word written on them and mailed in via snail mail.
I subscribed to a magazine that showed the number of entries each contest usually got.

What killed me is the number of entries received for like a stuffed small animal sometimes were in the hundreds of thousand.
While the Upright Freezer I won, the expected number of entries was only like 10 to 20 thousand.
I entered 100 times which dropped my odds down to about a 1 in 200 chance of winning.
Cost about 15 bucks in stamps.

I would scan the little monthly newsletter for contests with something I really wanted, then check to see what the average number of entries the host usually got. I didn't mess with any that were usually over 100,000 entries.

Back in the 1970's almost every grocery store had a cardboard box on a card table with little slips you put your name and phone number on, to place an entry in the box. You had to read the rules carefully, because some said the entry must be hand written on the form provided, so you couldn't use a rubber stamp, hi hi.
Some entries required their name, or a word, in 1 inch block letters on one side of a 3x5 card and printed, but you could put your name, address and phone number on the back with a rubber stamp or use a return address sticker.
I used to bring home about 3 or 4 of their entry form pads of paper strips and fill them all out, fold each one in half, and put them in the box the next time I was at the store.
Often, boxes were collected from several stores and dumped into this huge drum for the drawing.

On large national contests, all the entries were left in the mail sacks, and each sack was numbered.
Then they would pull a number from a box and that is the sack the winner would be selected from.
And as always, a member from the gaming commission was there to supervise the major national drawings.

[yogi]

I do recall those 3x5 card contests. And I do recall reading how important it is to follow the rules exactly. I know I entered a few of those contests but can't recall ever winning anything. I wasn't picky about what I went after either. I was just as likely to go for a year's worth of Maybelline mascara as I was to try for a power saw. LOL The thrill was going to be the win, not the prize.

One time at least a dozen years ago, probably more, I visited the local McDonald's for a hamburger. Actually, I'd buy two or three and pile the innards up between one bun. That, and their breakfast McMuffin were the only things I ever bought there. While standing in line on this particular occasion I noted a pile of tickets on the counter which only needed a phone number in order to enter the drawing for a bicycle. I had to think hard about it because I knew they were just milking the customers for phone numbers they can sell to a spam warehouse. Against all instincts, I filled out the ticket and went home to enjoy my burger. About 6 PM that same day I got a call from the store manager. I won the bike. Come and get it. To say I was shocked is an understatement. I rode the bike two or three times but it sat for a couple years in my garage collecting dust. We had a garage sale one autumn day and the bike was snatched up by a neighbor who worked for a competing bike company. He said the bike I had was far superior to any his company made.

[Kellemora]

Son of a gun, guess what.
When the new McDonald's opened up across from our flower shop, I did the same thing, put my phone number on a slip of paper in their box. I won a lifetime supply of Crest toothpaste!
How they paid it off was by sending something like 3,000 store coupons that never expired.
Naturally I gave away more than half of them.
After a number of years, when coupons had to have a bar code on them, I sent a snail mail letter to Crest telling them about the contest I won, and that stores would no longer accept the gazillion coupons I still had left.
They asked me to mail them only five of my existing coupons for verification purposes, and they would send me a new set of coupons. Sure enough, about three weeks later a small box arrived filled with over 2,000 coupons.
Again I gave most of those away too. I still had about 75 coupons left when I moved south, and gave those away to the frau's relatives, they were all still good after all that time.
I had dentures so no longer used toothpaste.

[yogi]

I stopped brushing my teeth altogether twenty, maybe thirty, years ago. I do use toothpicks however. About a year after I stopped brushing, the dental assistant who was cleaning my teeth made a remark about how my gums are not bleeding. Not even a tiny bit. The only thing I can think of is that my use of toothpicks hardened off the gums, not to mention cleaning out the gunk between my teeth. I have had a cavity or two after I stopped brushing, but nearly every tooth in my mouth has fillings from the days I used toothpaste and a brush. I also found that rinsing my mouth with coffee after meals does a terrific job of loosening the leftovers hidden in the cracks between my molars.

It's a crazy story, I know, but it's right in there with the craziness of not using an antivirus checker program on my Windows computers. LOL

[Kellemora]

I got hit with 30,000 volts AC back in 1975. It should have killed me, but I lucked out, sorta.
I was holding a screwdriver but was backing away from the panel box when the arc jumped to the screwdriver.
Slightly burned my right hand, and burnt the bottom of my right foot, and welded my teeth together.
I woke up in the hospital, only to learn they would have to remove several of my teeth, because they were damaged when they pried my mouth open. Filling had bonded themselves together between upper and lower teeth.
A dentist ground them out and refilled them all, but it was useless as the nerves or something was damaged and within the year I lost all of my teeth.

My frau still has all of her teeth, as did her mom and dad.
My side of the family, not so much, almost all of them had false teeth.

[yogi]

That is the scariest story I ever read from you. I never heard of teeth welding together, but I guess it's possible in theory. Why you are still alive has something to do with the devil not wanting you at that time, I'm sure.

I consider myself to be fortunate regarding my teeth. I am missing two molars since the days of my being a teenager. The dentist back then didn't use Novocain and I'm pretty sure the drill was activated by a foot peddle, something like a sewing machine. He was an old guy and did not accept appointments, which means you often sat for two hours in his waiting room to see him. But, he was dirt cheap. His son decided to go to dental school and take over half the office from his dad. Sonny boy, of course, had all the high tech tools of the day and a receptionist to schedule patients. Well, dad retired soon after that and took my two teeth with him. A few of the molars in my mouth have root canal work done; dead nerves in other words. But, everything in there is original equipment that has been slightly modified. Mom and dad were like you. They didn't have any of their own teeth. Back in their days they didn't fill cavities, I guess. They just yanked out the tooth to solve the problem.

[Kellemora]

It was the silver amalgam fillings in my teeth that melted and/or welded themselves together.
Since the shock did get into my mouth, they worried I may have also suffered brain damage.
But I was so far gone who could tell, hi hi.
It took over six months for the sole of my right foot to heal completely, and even then it had little sensitivity for about five more years. Now it is like normal again. My right hand only had a minor burn, enough to take the skin off, but not so much that it didn't grow back right away, and only a narrow streak across my palm, where the handle of a screwdriver would land on your palm.

Here's what happened. I was connecting the wires in a new panel box to the circuit breakers. Already had the mains connected and the utility company turned the power was on. I had just made the last connection, and finished tightening the lug and started to back away from the box. My arm holding the screwdriver was still outstretched, as I was in the process of pulling back from the box.
The utility companies bucket truck's bucket somehow snagged a wire to the other house on that transformer, it snapped and wrapped around the connection terminal on the transformer to the house I was working on, as it also flew up around one of the high tension wires. I did not see this, since I got zapped and was out cold, but was told what happened later, after I finally woke up in the hospital.
The last thing I did remember seeing was the arc jump from the electric box to the tip of the screwdriver, and even then only for a split second and I was knocked out. I only felt a little buzz go up my arm, but when I woke up in the hospital, I was in great pain, it felt like my entire body was on fire, and that was after they doped me up and got my mouth open too.

My dad used to laugh at me for adding a car tire tread over the soles on my boots to make them last longer. He wasn't laughing after the doc told him I was lucky to have so much insulation between me and the ground I was standing on.

[yogi]

That was a pretty freaky accident which could only happen with exquisite timing. It also sounds like a lawyer's dream come true. You don't seem to be the suing type, but I don't think there would be any problems getting compensation for the negligence shown by the power company.

Every so often I read or hear about people surviving being struck by lightning. That's considerably more than 30Kv, but it's not AC and relatively low current. One of the more amazing stories in this regard involves people who are struck when there are no visible clouds or storms in the vicinity. I suppose it's the moving air masses that create the static charge, but it's hard to imagine what is holding all that charge in the absence of clouds.

That old dentist I was talking about did whatever was acceptable practice in his day, but the next dentist I had after him ended up taking out a few mercury fillings and replacing them with something less toxic. I also recall the plumbing in the house I grew up in. The water pipes were all made of lead. It wasn't until I entered school that this toxic plumbing was discovered. I won't even go into the asbestos floor tiles in that house. So, according to all theory about such things, I should be dead or imbecilic. Possibly both.

[Kellemora]

All I know for sure is I never got a bill from the hospital. I do know my insurance covered some of it, and also my later alveoectamy work and first set of new teeth. I can only assume Union Electric's insurance picked up the rest.
The event was classified as a subsequent event as the result of a previous accident, which the way I understand it basically let UE off the hook for a major lawsuit. I also did not lose any salary while I was in the hospital or recuperating, but that was a policy of the company I worked for. If injured on the job, and only laid up temporarily, you still get paid. Not worded that way of course, but that's what it means. I would have had to be out for a full three months not to have got paid after three months.

Most of downtown St. Louis used Lead water pipes. However, due to the hard water, they were all coated with calcium inside. That being said, anytime I did work on a house, we had to replace any lead we touched with copper tube. Normally, the lead water mains and laterals changed to steel where they entered the house for the supply. We could still leave the Lead intact on 3 inch to 6 inch waste lines, but not if we were changing smaller diameter lead waste lines.

Heck, I should be dead too. Many houses had asbestos shingle siding, which we drilled to install wood, tin, or vinyl siding over. I also worked at a brake shop blowing out brake drums filled with asbestos from the brake shoes.
Every steam pipe in our greenhouses was covered with insulation and then wrapped with an asbestos cover.
And nearly every school I attended had asbestos in the ceilings.
Plus I used to play with Mercury doing all kinds of things as a kid, plus carried over some of the things I learned when I worked for a short time as a magician.
Of all the things they now claim are deadly to be around, I'm surprised the majority of us who lived through their usage are still alive, some well into their hundreds, hi hi.