08:03 – I need to build more chemistry kits today. We have five in stock, but four orders for them that came in yesterday and overnight, including one that’s going to France. I have enough subassemblies in stock to make up another dozen or 15, so it’s just a matter of boxing them up. But we do need to get more subassemblies built.
13:11 – One thing about half-hour (actually 20- or 21-minute nowadays) TV series is that you can binge-watch an entire season pretty quickly. Over the weekend, Barbara and I made it through the 24 episodes of series 5 of Modern Family–about 8 hours worth–and nine of the 26 total episodes of Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23. DTtBiA23 was a mid-season replacement that followed Modern Family. Apartment 23 was mishandled by ABC, which ran episodes not just out of order but pretty much at random. No surprise that they ended up making only 26 episodes of it. The irony is that DTtBiA23 is a much better series than Modern Family. ABC should have seen that and nurtured it. Instead they treated it like Firefly.
Modern Family has an excellent cast and top-notch writing, but DTtBiA23 is better in both respects. Krysten Ritter is superb in the role of a slutty party girl who’s a borderline psychopath. Dreama Walker is also excellent as the nice girl from Indiana who finds herself in NYC with a great job and apartment all set up, which promptly falls through. James Van Der Beek, who played Dawson on Dawson’s Creek, plays himself as a fictional James Van Der Beek, with frequent allusions to Dawson’s Creek. This series is good enough that it could have run for many years if ABC hadn’t botched it.
RJ’s 2015 Resolution Absolution:
http://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2014/12/29
BTW, gave one of my brothers a couple of prepping books for Christmas. My SIL said, “oh no, you are not one of those people now, are you?”. I just smiled.
We have gotten 5 or 6 inches of rain here in the Land of Sugar in the last couple of days. The swimming pool is getting ready to overflow if we get another inch.
Just made the dump run at the Northwest Recycling Center in beeyooteeful Georgia, VT, about ten miles down the road and chatted, per usual, with my guy who works part-time there and his full-time gig is as a gunsmith (previously worked at Century Arms in the same town) and he builds one custom AR per month to pay his mortgage.
Wife got him 5k rounds of .22LR for Xmas; he says she probably got it from one of the big online catalogs but he’ll know when the credit card bill arrives. He also got into a hassle at the local Wall-Mutt Superstore firearms department over whether he and his wife could each buy the limited three boxes of whatever ammo, as posted on their site, “per customer.” Had an argument with the sales clerk who said the new policy was “per group.” So my guy called for the manager and said he’d stand there and scream until he got what he wanted and was too old to be embarrassed anymore. They sold them the ammo.
I do not understand Wal*Marts policy on ammo right now. They are selling it at the below market price according to the Wal*Mart ammo guy. He has a couple of guys show up each Tuesday morning when the truck arrives and he gets the new ammo out. He says that they then rush over to the local gun dealers and resell it to them. Why would Wal*Mart not sell at the market price or close to it?
Which ones?
I’m waiting for Bob’s book. I am confident that it will be well researched and mostly right.
Rick in Portland
“…and mostly right.”
You just blew your Dr. Bob Discount.
No, that’s actually a compliment. I have yet to write a book without making some mistakes. No author I know has ever written a book without at least some mistakes. It’s not the stuff one doesn’t know that causes the problem; it’s the stuff one thinks one knows.
What bothers me about all of the prepping books and web sites that I’ve seen is that their authors all seem blissfully unaware of how much they don’t know that they don’t know. I find myself wondering if they have verified things they state as facts or are just repeating what someone said. Not that it’s practical to verify everything. I could, for example, verify the temperature/time actually needed for, say, a log5 reduction in C. botulinum spores, but if I verified all of the items like this I’d have no time to do anything else. So if the NIH, CDC, and a bunch of university papers agree on values, I’ll take them at their word.
The other thing that makes me uncomfortable is the degree of commercialization. I don’t really mind when someone links to a product on Amazon with an affiliate link, but people who are recommending stuff on their sites and selling the products themselves make me very uncomfortable, as do people who recommend products without a specific disclosure. Do they have an financial interest in the companies and/or products? Did Berkey send them a free Big Berkey water filter in exchange for them recommending it? And so on.
That’s why I don’t use an affiliate link when I link to something on Amazon. Just amazon.com with the product number. I’ve already gotten emails from companies offering me free “eval” samples of stuff, none of which I’ve accepted. Everything I’m getting for the book I’ve paid for myself.
BTW, gave one of my brothers a couple of prepping books for Christmas.
Which ones?
“The TEOTWAWKI Tuxedo: Formal Survival Attire” by Joe Nobody:
http://www.amazon.com/TEOTWAWKI-Tuxedo-Formal-Survival-Attire/dp/0615524192/
“The Disaster Preparedness Handbook: A Guide For Families”
http://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Preparedness-Handbook-Guide-Families/dp/0785830243/
Gave my son who lives inside Houston this book:
“Dirt-Cheap Survival Retreat: One Man’s Solution”
http://www.amazon.com/Dirt-Cheap-Survival-Retreat-Mans-Solution/dp/1581607474/
I’m waiting for Bob’s book. I am confident that it will be well researched and mostly right.
Christmas 2015 is right around the corner!
Books are just like software, a bug here and a bug there. Or is it that software is just like books? The only real difference is that the software crashes and burns with some bugs and books don’t.
“… and books don’t.”
Except in 1930s German and “Farenheit 451.”
More gun nooz from Oz, you know, the anti-gun paradise, like Merry Old England?
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/12/robert-farago/sydney-rifle-blast-impossible/#more-344442
Everything I’m getting for the book I’ve paid for myself.
This is why I have confidence in Bob’s book. I’d buy it even without a discount, although I won’t turn a discount down. As my brother said recently “You are such a JEW!”
Rick in Portland
I plan on buying Dr. Bob’s book in quantity (not huge quantity but still…) and distributing to family, friends and neighbors, sight unseen. (I have seen his previous books and that suffices.)
We gots another two cords of firewood arriving tomorrow AM, just in time, haha. And more racks for me to build. We’ll be ordering four cords in the spring this time.
The new windows have made a tremendous difference in our heating situation here; oil usage is now what it should be, as a backup source, and taking much longer to empty the tank. No more wind rattling the windows right outta the frames. Once we get the rest done, we’ll be as snug as bugs in rugs. Next up: the living room ceiling, with insulation. Then at some point I plan to install vents in one wall of the attic so we have circulation up there, and put insulation in the flooring. That is gonna be OFD’s little workshop area and radio shack.
We also gotta upgrade the electrical and fix a coupla pesky plumbing issues.
And insulate and install better windows on the back porch.
Plus organize food+ storage areas in the cellar and attic.
Projects galore! More toolz to buy!
I am getting so much more mail at the door these days, I kinda wonder what is happening. I changed the Part D insurance of my Medicare just before the deadline to a deal offered by Humana in Louisville that apparently is only available in Indiana and Kentucky. I pay $15/mo and all ‘tier 1’ drugs are completely covered. I am told that each of my 3 tier 1 drugs wholesale for about $3/30 days, so Humana should be making a cool $6/mo off me. Their competitor, First Health out of Lexington, KY, has been making about $32/mo off me for the last year, then Walmart charged me $27/mo more. Of course, they both made the changes on 1 Jan of this year with no advance notice to let me opt over to another plan before last year’s enrollment change deadline.
Anyway, in with all the other 6 to 10 pieces of daily mail, Humana sent a 560 page booklet about my new plan. How many people are going to read 560 two-sided 8.5×11 pages bound together about how — for me — the 3 pills a day that I take are going to get paid for?
Sun still down over the horizon here by 16:00. If we did not do the switch to DST and were on CST year-round, which we should be, that sundown would be at 17:00 in the dead of December. Oh, well, what I have now beats the pitch-dark at 15:30 of my years in Berlin.
Arctic chill for the next few days, but strong sun, which Berlin never gets in winter.
Ah. I’d been meaning to ask.
And the phrasings which mean a segment can plausibly be taken to mean something other than what you meant. Short simple sentences are the best way around this, but a lot of the nonfiction I write does not lend itself to short, simple, declarative sentences.
Just catching up on some earlier days of posts that go back to the beginning of the month. Brad commented on the satellite delay causing pauses in Swiss TV satellite-delivered interviews. Those are about a 2 second delay for each hop, and sometimes there is more than one hop.
We at PBS, long ago figured out how to eliminate those pauses, and the technique was used most widely on the old McNeil-Lehrer Newshour. As most here know, I do not even own a TV these days, so I have no idea whether they still use the same solution. In the days of landline phones, the cross-country delay was practically negligible. So the originating station (WETA, ostensibly in DC, but actually in Arlington, VA), sent a ‘backfeed’ of their live audio on the phone lines, and that was fed to the ears of the person being interviewed. Thus, the interviewed person heard audio in essentially real-time and responded instantly, without the hop delay.
The US networks copied that technique for their more important programs like the old Ted Koppel Nightline program, but the cable news stations never adopted that method of correcting for the satellite delay. Not sure why, but even the networks no longer bother to correct that delay in programs I have recently seen, like the Today show.
Even though you can ping a site halfway around the world with minimal delay, latency in video and audio codecs sending packets via the Internets is a real problem. Moreover, for live TV/radio, unbroken delivery is very difficult. The Internets was never designed for continuous uninterrupted packet delivery; actually, it was designed for the exact opposite — stop and go traffic. Plus, error correction sent back by the receiving box to the sender, in order to recover lost packets by resending them, adds even more delay. Typical latency from our studio to the transmitter is about 3 to 4 seconds — almost double the satellite hop delay, and even though we can ping the transmitter with as little as 15 and 20 ms latency. Unless you are running on your own gigabyte LAN or WAN, it is pretty much impossible to eliminate significant delay.
There really is no incentive in the US to solve that problem, so I do not expect the solution to come from us. The Internets backbone in the US is way overloaded, and the solution our monopolistic private enterprise uses to solve that problem is to implement throttling. One of my high school buddies works in Hollywood, and they have need to send audio from San Fran to San Diego via Internet, and junction points between the two places especially at San Jose and outside of San Diego are always so overloaded that they have had to implement their own VPN’s to circumvent the trouble spots. It is not the latency that is a problem to them, it is the complete drop of connection that was their difficulty.
We really are in a time when American business does NOTHING if it does not increase the money in their pockets. What incentive did phone companies have to improve the quality of their service up to, say, the 1980’s? Improving it would not increase their revenue. But they did it anyway. Different attitude in management, I guess.
The US dragged its feet terribly on digital TV, and the whole rest of the civilized world had it before we did. In the US, nobody would make more money by implementing digital TV, so why convert? We had it in Berlin in 2002. When did the US implement it? 2010 before the conversion was completely finished. And were it not for the FCC mandate that required analog broadcasts to cease, we would likely still not have DTV.
Same is happening in Europe now with digital radio broadcasts. Countries across Europe are converting to DAB systems, requiring people to buy new radios. All that is going on here is the industry kibitzing about how Europe is once again going to force American broadcasters to do something they really do not want to do. Talk about a political and economic system that insures laziness and lack of improvements in quality. We gots it in spades.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, I’ve just come across a perfect example of regulatory capture. The last time we were in the US, we brought home two 1000 tablet bottles of ibuprofen. My wife has frequent headaches, these get used for sports injuries, etc.. Anyhow, they’ve run out, so I was looking around locally for replacements.
In the US, the cheapest Amazon price is something around 1.5 cents per 200mg tablet, in a 1000-tablet bottle. Here, you can’t get a package with more than 20 tablets (presumably by regulation), and the price is around 50cents/tablet. Since the US price tells us the manufacturing costs, the rest is entirely due to regulation.
I have an account with a forwarding service in the US. They’re a bit expensive, but this is exactly the kind of thing it’s for. The only risk is that Swiss customs notices what’s in the package and impounds it, but they’ve not bothered any earlier shipments of mine, where I also had “forbidden” products that you can get in the US. So I’ll probably be putting together an order in the next couple of days…
It’s not what we don’t know that hurts us,
it’s what we know for certain that just ain’t so.
~ Mark Twain ~
I think it’s more accurate thus:
It’s not always what we don’t know that hurts us,
but just as likely what we know for certain that just ain’t so.
And then there’s …
I know you believe you understand what you think I said,
but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.
~ Robert McCloskey ~
The earliest known print attribution is to Robert McCloskey, U.S. State Department spokesman, by Marvin Kalb, CBS reporter, in TV Guide, 31 March 1984, citing an unspecified press briefing during the Vietnam war.
Then there is:
“I mean what I meant.”
— Eugene Ormandy
and my favorite:
“You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”
— William Blake
and two unattributed:
“I’m willing to sacrifice anything for this cause, even other people’s
lives.”
“If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad,
he should see how bad it is with representation.”
Define “representation.”
“Concrete thinking is the representation of a possible action, and formal thinking is the representation of a representation of possible action.
— Jean Piaget
You might think that is the wrong sense of representation. I don’t.
To me political representation is when a legally elected person to government does what his or her constituents tell him or her to do, within Constitutional limits. They don’t go swanning off to Mordor or Montpecular and then have fun at my expense and ignore what I tell them.
“What you inferred is not what I implied.”
— me, though I’m sure others have said about the same thing
OFD, your notion of representation might work if each representative didn’t have half a million nominal constituents and if he wasn’t in practice beholden to an unknown number of unnamed donors, who are his actual constituents.
Duly noted, filed and we here concur most heartily, Mr. SteveF. I was momentarily plunged back into a dream world of how things might have been Once Upon a Time. (It’s a routine hazard of many of us far advanced into our dotage and decrepitude. We’ve been informed that our time hath ended and good riddance, etc., etc. in so many words.)
I’m not quite ready to check out just yet, though, and hope to see my guillotines and tumbrels in full swing before I go.
As for the number of constituents per representative, there’s Plan A, which is to greatly increase the number of representatives so that each has a few tens of thousands of constituents, and there’s the added benefit that there will be so many legislators that it’s too expensive to bribe a working majority. There’s Plan B, which is to greatly reduce the legislature’s (every legislature’s) power, so there’s no point in bribing them because you won’t get anything out of it, and there’s no worry about them representing half a million constituents because they can’t do anything anyway.
And there’s my preferred approach, Plan C: greatly reducing the population so that we can keep the same size Congress and statehouses, but get back down to where it’s actually possible for every representative to meet all of his constituents. I’d say that a 95% reduction in US population is a good starting point. We’ll kill off the stupidest first. That’ll get most of the current politicians, which is a nice added benefit.
I reckon we’ll eventually end up with a version of Plan C. Probably about 75-80% of the pop, most of it concentrated in the coastal and central metropoles. Extrapolate from this to the rest of the world and we’re looking at a reduction down to about 1.5 billion, total.
Most of us on this board will be long gone by then, though. Hasta la vista, amigos!
That is a lot of guillotines.
I rather suspect that the population will increase due to unrestrained immigration into the USA. The population just hit 320 million, I expect 500 million by 2050. And potentially a non-English speaking majority.
No guillotines needed, just a lethal disease engineered to attack the “stupid” gene. I’m in favor of 24-Hour Whooping Ebolapox, but of course the first step is to find the “stupid” gene. C’mon, genome decoders, stop messing around!