10:53 – Barbara is out running errands. I’m doing laundry and the other usual Saturday housekeeping tasks. We’ll do kit stuff this afternoon and tomorrow.
Once we get moved, I’m going to talk to Barbara about converting some of our paper assets into hard assets. Most couples have only their home, vehicles, and personal possessions as hard assets. We go a bit further than that, with significant funds devoted to long-term food storage and other prepping supplies, as well as considerable inventory for science kits. All of those are a hedge against inflation, but I’d like to go further. The balances in our bank accounts are worth less and less every day, and I’d like to convert some of those funds to stuff that appreciates rather than depreciating.
For example, last autumn I bought 5.56mm ammunition in bulk for $0.37 per round. The same round now costs $0.47, an increase of 27% in just seven months. I still remember years ago when Walmart had a sale on Russian-made SKS carbines for $30 each and 1,000 rounds of Russian-made 7.62×39 in ammo cans for another $30, or $.03/round. That was probably not too long after the fall of the Soviet Union. What I really, really wanted to do was buy 100 SKSs and 100,000 rounds of ammo. That would have set us back $6,000. Nowadays, I see Russian-made SKSs selling for $400 and Russian-made ammo going for $0.50/round. Those 100 SKSs and 100,000 round of ammo would cost me about $90,000 today, maybe $80,000 if I really shopped around or was willing to settle for inferior SKSs made elsewhere.
Not that I’d go out and buy 100 SKSs today. Even if Barbara agreed, they’re simply too high-profile. But I might pick up a half a dozen or a dozen more civilian-type rifles and shotguns. Things like the Maverick 88 or Remington 870 in 12- and 20-gauge, the Marlin Model 60 in .22LR, and so on. Lever-action rifles aren’t the bargain they once were, but I wouldn’t mind having some in .38/.357 and .44Mag/Spec. They’re easily speed-loaded, use common ammunition, and are actually pretty competent defensive rifles. And they’re only going to gain value.
Is it true that 12 guage is a man’s shotgun and 20 guage is a woman’s? Or is that an oversimplification?
Assuming you’re talking about heavy buckshot/slug loads, it’s pretty much true. Many women use 12-gauges for light loads as in skeet/trap/clays, but defensive loads are too much for probably 99% of women. I’d go even further. For sustained shooting, a 12-gauge is probably too much gun for anyone other than large, strong, young men.
Put it this way. The free recoil of a typical .308 rifle with a typical load is around 15 fpf. Most people, including most men, find that level of recoil uncomfortable for any kind of sustained shooting. The free recoil of a 12-gauge shotgun with heavy buck/slug loads is typically 30+ fpf. and can approach 60 fpf. with a very light shotgun. That is literally well into elephant-gun territory, and indeed more than a few elephants have been taken with 12-gauge slugs.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. Would you say that old codgers like us should eschew 12 gauge loads alltogether? I think you said a while back that 20 gauge loads might not have enough stopping power for defensive uses.
Seems like a lose-lose situation.
I have 12-gauge shotguns for myself and also for Barbara, although I thought seriously about 20-gauge for her. I’m a big guy and she’s also a big, strong woman. But I’d have her using the 12-gauge only for backup anyway. Her primary will be 5.56, which has pretty light recoil. I seriously thought about .308/7.62 as my primary, but decided the 5.56 was a better choice for me as well. Also, don’t underestimate the value of ammunition commonality between/among your weapons. I’d hate to run out of 12-gauge and still have plenty of 20-gauge left, or vice versa. So we’re pretty well standardized on 5.56, 12-gauge, .22LR, .357, and .45ACP, with mostly just a box or a few boxes of the oddball stuff like .44 SPL. I do have a fair amount of .308, but that’s for my
sniperhunting rifle.A heavy 20-gauge load is nothing to sneeze at, either in terms of effectiveness or recoil. You’re putting out roughly two-thirds the mass of lead at slightly lower velocity
“So we’re pretty well standardized on 5.56, 12-gauge, .22LR, .357, and .45ACP, with mostly just a box or a few boxes of the oddball stuff like .44 SPL. I do have a fair amount of .308, but that’s for my قناص hunting rifle.”
Likewise here, except instead of the .45ACP it’s 9mm. I also like .22 WMR in both semi-auto rifle and SA revolver, and I have a soft spot in my haht for .41 Magnum in SA revolver. I’m roughly RBT’s size and can handle the Remington 870 12-gauge for a few rounds but as he says, it gets to be a PITA with sustained fire after a while. So the handy-dandy shotgun is a Mossberg 20-gauge with a pistol grip, classified by the ATF, allegedly, as a pistol, haha. This is nice for both of us, easily hefted and maneuverable on stairs and around corners, and can be secured/hidden easily, also.
.308 and 6.5 Grendel will be in the works later for built-from-scratch.
Yo, spiffy new retirement plan!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr5YYHTGlWw
I gotta agree with the conversion of cash into assets, but it’s always the question of exactly what assets. Things like ammo – obviously essential in the worst case; in less-than-worst-case, say a non-violent economic collapse, can you actually re-sell that if you need to? I’m not objecting to the choice, because I don’t know, just asking the question.
Even just a hedge against inflation can be important. We officially have 0% inflation here, but I just bought a load of construction material that was offered 2 years ago. Price increase 30%. If that’s the way things are looking, buying material you are going to need anyway makes a lot of sense, if you have spare cash around.
I suppose it all depends on how dystopian things get. I’m not planning for worst case, but I do fully expect the worldwide economy to have…problems…over the next 20-30 years. Where I live, I’m not seeing a need for ammo stockpiles, but I’m very glad to have some fully-paid property to live on. It’s situational – Lynn near Houston will have different needs from Miles in Australia, who has different needs from me in Switzerland.
“”that’s for my قناص hunting rifle.””
What’s a قناص hunting rifle?
@Brad
Yes, everyone’s needs, situation, and personal circumstances differ. No one-size-fits-all.
I too am expecting dystopia rather than a sudden collapse, although I do think it’s going to continue getting worse and worse in cities. As to what assets to convert to, that’s the $64 question. Obviously, owning your home/property free and clear (other than paying rent to the government) is a very high priority. I’m not planning to go big into guns and ammo mainly because they’re too high-profile. But I do have some other thoughts outside food and other prepping requisites.
Hey, RBT, I’m just trying to get with the program and learn me some Arabic. Sharia is on the way, doncha know. You crossed out yer English word and I swapped it for an Arabic one.
Mr. brad makes a very good point; his situation is way different from Mr. Lynn’s in Sugarland or mine up here in Retroville.
But I also agree with turning our nearly worthless fiat currency that we have on hand regularly into hard assets. If and when I can bring my former or better level of income in here we’ll be paying off taxes and the mortgage as fast as we can, while also piling up hard goods for house and grounds. And probably starting to move similar hard goods to the place in northern Noveau Brunswick, just in case.
I bet lots of us wish we’d piled up .22LR over the past several years, for example, and more recently, chickens and eggs. It gets tiresome always being on the scene at the barn after the damn hosses have left.
I have seen several 16ga semiautos for sale cheap. The ammo is really only widely available in TX during the bird season, but that isn’t too much a problem. Yes there is some added complexity mechanically, but it’s easier to shoot too.
If you are buying multiples there are special reporting requirements, and it will likely trigger a closer look.
If you want to stockpile g u n s you better buy in private sales.
Do I regret not buying the pallet of russian 7.62 back in ’88? Oh yes, I do. But I really didn’t have the money (minimum wage was $3.20) or the storage space.
My vote is for rental property (generates an income), gold (stores value), food (you need to eat anyway), guns and ammo (as long as you buy at good prices and not during a panic.)
nick
Yep, it gets old. I’m working on getting Barbara’s attitude adjusted. Geez, I remember standing there at the Walmart gun counter one day when they had 525-round boxes of .22LR on sale for less than $0.02/round. They had a mountain of the things. I wanted to buy 20 boxes, if not 100, but Barbara gave me the long-suffering wife look, so I passed it up at 2 cents/round. It’s five times that now, if you’re lucky.
To answer Brad’s earlier question, yes I could easily sell as much .22LR as I wanted for 5 or 6 cents a round. “as much” as in millions to tens or even hundreds of millions of rounds. I’m betting there are several readers here who’d be happy to take 100,000 rounds or more off my hands at $0.05/round.
Gold and silver will increase over the long term, but the fluctuations over the short- to medium-term put me off. Yes, I know that it’s not just commodities demand changes and political/economic issues that fluctuate, but the real value of the dollar, but I’d still prefer something a bit more stable.
I suspect I’ll end up plowing more money into our business, particularly inventory of items that don’t age. But before I tie up tens of thousands or more in science kit inventory, I want to make sure that Barbara can handle the business without me if I get run over by a beer truck.
I bet lots of us wish we’d piled up .22LR over the past several years
You didn’t? I’ve got a couple of bricks that I bought at Kmart back in the early 1980s for $5 each. Of course, I now wish that I had bought several dozen of those. I remember looking at the big pile of them.
Some of us define “pile” differently. I think of a couple bricks as “really, really short on .22LR”.
My vote is for rental property (generates an income), gold (stores value), food (you need to eat anyway), guns and ammo (as long as you buy at good prices and not during a panic.)
My experience with rental property is very, very good over the long term. Short term, you need to be able to withstand zero tenants for a year or more. And local rental property is much better. When we moved back to Sugar Land in 1990, I could not sell our home in Carrollton so I rented it out. For the next ten years I had to effectively drive up to Carrollton each month (300 miles each way) to collect the rent and fix the minor crap that always seems to fail. Luckily I could stay with my in-laws so there was no housing expense. I ended up selling that home in 2000 and made a $20K profit.
I have a large commercial property (9 acres) now that I rent to three tenants and am contemplating building more office warehouses on. I also own a five acre unimproved property that I am holding onto for appreciation.
Gold is cool until some guy with a gun takes it away from you. Silver is more of the same. BTW, the government will seize the gold some day in the next ten years and gold hoarders will be disparaged by the media, (Bracken).
Food is good. Water is good. But you will be called a hoarder some day.
Guns and ammo. Good and good. My worry is some day that somebody will park an APC at the end of my street and demand that all guns and ammo be brought out. Again, Bracken.
Some of us define “pile” differently. I think of a couple bricks as “really, really short on .22LR”.
That is the bottom of the pile. My point was that I have been stockpiling XXXXXXXX accumulating ammo that long.
Boiled right down to its essence, for prepping in our location, for us, it means having enough of life’s necessities on hand for a long, hard cold winter like we just had two of, with the power out completely, and the means to protect those necessities from local goblins and any who manage to make it this far from the big cities if stuff blows up and/or falls apart.
Right now, given what we have on hand today, we could do one lousy month. We need to get that up to six months, at a minimum. And that’s just us, not feeding half the neighbors and/or standing off repeated attacks from both organized and unorganized gremlins and slugs. Realistically, given our current tax and income situation, I hope to get us up to two or three months capability by September. And at that point we’re gonna have to kick in hard to prep for another winter anyway. This time we may try to do a week or two without using the Grid at all, just to get an idea of what else we gotta do. In January or February, like our grandparents and great-grandparents in New England had to do.
Likewise by then I plan to have the attic workshop up and running, and the rest of our windows, shutters, storm doors, electric and plumbing work done.
Perimeter and garden fencing is underway even as we “speak,” and this next week I’ll be hooking up motion-detector floods and at least one webcam. Also researching the best door, lock and door-frame configurations.
I think it’s time for an update…
Back on Thursday Lynn posted …
28 May 2015 at 12:38
“America has already taken in one-fourth of Mexico’s entire population.”
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2015-05-27.html
I am not sure where we are going with this but I suspect the problems will multiply.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I was immediately suspicious of that figure, seemed kind of high to me – especially with Ann Coulter’s history.
So I decided to do a Google-search using the quoted text and her name.
I found two interesting links to pursue, here’s the first one …
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/05/28/ann-coulter-falsely-asserts-one-quarter-of-mexi/203804
Ann Coulter Falsely Asserts One Quarter Of Mexico’s Population Has Been “Taken In” By U.S.
65 Percent Of People Identifying As “Mexican-Origin Hispanics” Were Born In America
May 28, 2015 7:53 PM EDT ››› LIS POWER
Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter grossly misrepresented Pew data, falsely suggesting that 25 percent of Mexico’s population has been “taken in” by the United States, creating a false narrative that is spreading through right-wing media.
During a May 26 interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, Coulter alleged that the United States has “taken in one quarter of the entire Mexican population.”
Coulter doubled-down on her claim while appearing on the May 28 edition of The Sean Hannity Show, citing the Pew Research Center to assert “yeah we already have a quarter, a quarter of the entire Mexican population.”
Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh parroted Coulter’s assertion the same day, claiming “25 percent of the total population of Mexico has already immigrated, not all legal obviously, to the United States.” Rush went on to say “you can trace the demise of California to this.”
The Pew data Coulter referenced actually includes both “native born” and “foreign born” Hispanics of Mexican origin. Pew’s summary of the data explained that “this estimate includes 11.4 million immigrants born in Mexico and 22.3 million born in the U.S. who self-identified as Hispanics of Mexican origin.”
That means 65 percent of the people Coulter claimed that the United States has “taken in,” were born in this country.
Using Coulter’s flawed logic, if we were to analyze the number of people of Irish descent in the United States, the country has taken in 737 percent of the population of Ireland.
Here’s the second link …
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27870/has-the-us-already-taken-in-25-of-mexicos-population-as-immigrants
Skeptics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for scientific skepticism.
Has the US already taken in 25% of Mexicos population as immigrants?
In a recent interview Ann Coulter claimed:
America has already taken in one-fourth of Mexico’s entire population.
Is this true?
In 2013, data suggests that the Mexican population is estimated at 122.3 million mexicans.
Number source: World Bank
25% of 122.3 million = 30,575,000 million immigrants.
So, the claim is that there are 30m mexican immigrants in the States. Is it true?
A record 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican origin resided in the United States in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Pew Research Center. This estimate includes 11.4 million immigrants born in Mexico and 22.3 million born in the U.S. who self-identified as Hispanics of Mexican origin.
Retrieved from pewhispanic.org
You should note here based on the definition of immigrants; 22.3 million people who are born in the U.S. from a Mexican origin are not immigrants.
The would mean there 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican origin in the US but only 11.4 million are considered immigrants (born in Mexico).
So there you have it. Did she lie ?? What do you think. Was there intent to deceive ??
I’ll be hooking up motion-detector floods
Get LED flood lights. Use a lot less electricity than hot wire. CFL sucks as the warm up time is much too long in the winter. I have converted most of my lights to LED. All the exterior flood lights (13 of them) are LED, interior lights are LED. Shop lights in the mower shed and garage are still fluorescent and will be until the fixtures get below $20.
“Get LED flood lights.”
They are enroute.
According to the Pew data, then, 33.7 million (“officially”) were either born in Mexico or ID as Hispanic of Mexican origin. Seeing as how the current pop of Mexico is 122 million (again “officially”), then yeah, roughly a quarter of the pop. Maybe that’s how they’re pushing the figure. And again, that’s not counting the millions of illegal immigrants who’ve come up, including the many more STILL coming hourly.
So they come here “out of love” according to the Jebster, or they come up to “do the jobs that Murkans simply won’t do” and those who can afford to pay them hire them on as servants, maids, gardeners, drivers, security, etc., etc. We have it on some authority that many appear to be hard-working solid people, etc., etc. We also have a bunch of cases involving theft, rape, assault, murder, narcotics, etc., etc. And who knows how many hadji sleeper cells have crossed that joke of a border over the years.
Check out the Gavin McInnes piece again:
“Actually, I had some time to kill so I figured I should double check if Ann is as batshit crazy as we all think.”
“The real wake-up call in the book are the crime statistics. “You will spend more time trying to obtain basic crime stats about immigrants in America than trying to sign up for Obamacare” she writes. In the “Immigrants and Crime” chapter we learn the government has extensive data on the exact count of Samoans without battery-powered radios (2,651 in 2010) but very little on immigrants and crime. The data that is there gets skewed by conflating Hispanic with white and excluding cases such as children born to illegals and immigration detainees.”
Here’s the second link …
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27870/has-the-us-already-taken-in-25-of-mexicos-population-as-immigrants
Skeptics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for scientific skepticism.
Has the US already taken in 25% of Mexicos population as immigrants?
In a recent interview Ann Coulter claimed:
America has already taken in one-fourth of Mexico’s entire population.
Is this true?
In 2013, data suggests that the Mexican population is estimated at 122.3 million mexicans.
Number source: World Bank
25% of 122.3 million = 30,575,000 million immigrants.
So, the claim is that there are 30m mexican immigrants in the States. Is it true?
A record 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican origin resided in the United States in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Pew Research Center. This estimate includes 11.4 million immigrants born in Mexico and 22.3 million born in the U.S. who self-identified as Hispanics of Mexican origin.
Retrieved from pewhispanic.org
You should note here ***based on the definition of immigrants; 22.3 million people who are born in the U.S. from a Mexican origin are not immigrants.***
The would mean there 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican origin in the US but ***only 11.4 million are considered immigrants (born in Mexico).***
So there you have it. Did she lie ?? What do you think. Was there intent to deceive ??
A couple of months ago I replaced all of our lights with LEDs, Costco had a real good “utility sponsored” deal that made the bulbs cheaper than CFLs (per equal lumen bulb, not lifetime where LEDs blow CFLs away).
Long story short, there has been a noticeable decrease in our electrical usage. Our Public Utility District provides the past 13 months usage and includes degree days, I have 35 years of records. Anyway, this past March and April were the lowest usages by at least 7% in the past 35 years, and that includes before kids. About half of the LEDs are in enclosed fixtures that you used to not be able to touch with the CFLS, now you can. The dining room light used to put noticeable heat on my bald head, now no more. I am an LED convert.
For “hard assets” get creative with false backs in your closets, etc. Our area is dry, so I have created “hidden” storage pits in our crawl space.
Lotsa room for getting creative here in this nearly 200-year-old house. Good idea.
Forget about renting if you plan for a dystopian future, the very first thing a government do is a freeze on rentals and a freeze on (damn, I dont remember the word) getting out the people of the property, and, for commercial properties, dystopia is equal to low activity and mostly local.
Land maybe for agricultural things or cows, if you could enforce the property of the later
I live in a country which had from 1943 to 1992 a freeze on rents, so, forget, you could not enforce, and, right now, to take agin the property you need a trial, 2 years
PS the only rent is vacation rent, the people doesnt live at seaside, so, sooner or later they are gone
PS2 I have a friend in Michigan, I said to him time ago, is a good business, planning to invert on this, he said, if you are not on the next house, forget
I am an LED convert.
Unfortunately I was not able to get in any deals. I did buy some Costco lights. They sucked. Had to return two lights (three in a package) because the lights did not work reliably. You had to wiggle them in the fixture. Next package had another light fail. To return to Costco you needed the packaging with all three bulbs. I would have needed to buy another package as I no longer had the original package. It was not worth the hassle.
What I have now is the CREE bulbs. You can get 40W, 60W, 100W or 36,60,100W (equivalents of course) from Home Depot. Still more costly than I want. But the CFL’s that were supposed to last years, don’t. Thus the cost over time for CFL is sometimes more than LED. I figure in about 5 years I will recoup most of my cost. By reduced power to generate the light and the A/C needed to remove heat generated by the hotwire bulbs. CFL’s also tend to generate more heat than I light, energy that is not being used to generate lights.
The CREE bulbs look like regular bulbs, the light generated is like regular bulbs, highly recommended. Especially if you find them on sale.
The outdoor floods are more costly unfortunately. Converted the kid’s house to LED when we replaced all the outlets and switches. (Backstab crap that I really don’t like.)
I had already replaced most of my incandescent bulbs with CFLs. So last year I replaced most of those with LED lighting. A 60-watt bulb was about $10 but supposed to last a long time, and used much less energy – so I figure they will pay for themselves over time. Agreed, the CFLs don’t last nearly as long as they claim. We’ll see about the LED ones. The really nice thing about the LEDs, they turn on instantly !! Whereas the CFLs can take minutes to warm up and reach full illumination if the temp is cold. But yeah, the higher wattage ones are still priced too high. Hopefully they’ll come down to a more reasonable price. Then I’ll upgrade those too.
the higher wattage ones are still priced too high
A lot of that price is due to the requirement to get rid of heat from the LED die. Removing that heat is not a trivial task. With hotwire bulbs most of the heat (and energy) is radiated out. With LED the heat is contained within the LED. That heat needs to be removed otherwise the LED will self destruct or have the life significantly shortened. (I could talk about high end flashlights here but I won’t for OFD’s sake).
With the higher equivalent wattage bulbs you have multiple LED’s that have to be heat sinked. Usually requiring a somewhat sophisticated heat removal system so that all the LEDs remain at the same heat level. Notice on the lights there are lots of fins and heat dissipation surfaces. Lot of machining and that contributes to the cost. I also suspect there are heat regulating (controlling the current draw) on the bulbs and that adds to the overall cost.
As time goes on, technology improves, manufacturing improves and volume increases the price will drop. I expect within 10 years you have no need to buy hotwire or CFL bulbs as the price difference will be trivial and any price difference returned in less than two years. The next target for LED will be fluorescent tubes and the subsequent price drop. Hotwire and CFL are doomed.
“(I could talk about high end flashlights here but I won’t for OFD’s sake).”
Hey, don’t mind me! Y’all go right on ahead.
Later I’ll throw in some nice literary stuff; y’all dig some medieval epic poetry? Norse sagas? Some Anglo-Saxon lines from “The Seafarer”? How about Marie de France or La Chanson de Roland?
“Later I’ll throw in some nice literary stuff; y’all dig some medieval epic poetry? Norse sagas? Some Anglo-Saxon lines from “The Seafarer”? How about Marie de France or La Chanson de Roland?”
Oooh!
Of course the other good reason to get rid of the CFLs if possible is the obligatory mercury content, which is toxic if they break open. And maybe even if they don’t break open, but leak slowly over time.
“Önundur hét maður. Hann var Ófeigsson burlufóts Ívarssonar beytils. Önundur var bróðir Guðbjargar, móður Guðbrands kúlu, föður Ástu, móður Ólafs konungs hins helga. Önundur var upplenskur að móðurætt en föðurkyn hans var mest um Rogaland og Hörðaland.”
Wot’s this, then, eh? Not about light bulbs, I reckon. Or flashlights.
Another bloody genealogy…
“”Aunund man named. He was Ófeigsson burlufótar Ivarsson tilt. Aunund brother Guðbjörg mother Guðbrands sphere, father Asta, mother of St. Olaf. Aunund was dissolved English to his mother’s side but föðurkyn his most Rogaland and Hordaland.”
Hell, I’ll try to find some real medieval poetry…
RBT wrote:
“What’s a قناص hunting rifle?”
Sniper rifle. (from Google Translate.)
How many cubic feet of storage space are the serious preppers here setting aside? I have a double garage and a 200 m2 house. I have enough diet soft drink, iced tea and fruit juice to last for quite a while, and enough cans of thick soup, etc to last for a couple of weeks.
OFD, I could read your 21:36 snippet well enough and recognize the language. What language was the 21:39 snippet? It looks like it’s something partially translated into modern English.
… Oh. Never mind. I experimented with putting the first (Icelandic) snippet into google translate and got something partially translated into modern English.
re LEDs, I got some when I found a sale and had a few bucks. One went into my 7-y-o’s desk light. She’s very happy with it – she can touch the lit bulb and not burn her fingers. Even the CFL it replaced was so “hot” she was worried about getting too near it while drawing or doing homework. What is it with little girls? They’re so … wimpy. They freak out when they realize they just picked up a dead mouse, don’t want to learn kung fu and worry about second degree burns on their fingertips.
“What is it with little girls?”
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and all things nice,
That’s what little girls are made of
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
And the War on Boyz continues…
So are CD / DVD drives passe now in PCs? We built our latest server PC without a CD drive, just used a USB CD external drive to boot Windows 7 x64 on it and load the Gigabyte motherboard drivers.
I am wondering because we hand out CDroms in our brochure at the trade shows. Is it time to move on to USB logo keys?
http://www.discountmugs.com/product/usb0741gb-1gb-key-shape-logo-usb-flash-drives/
Found my outside oven, fits on a Coleman stove:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Coleman-Portable-Camp-Oven/895626
Man, Walmart has good prices on their website.
“So are CD / DVD drives passe now in PCs?”
Not in my experience with PCs, per se, but in laptops, netbooks, and servers, yeah. At my last real job we had to use external CD drives to load firmware onto racks of RHEL servers sometimes. Which was a royal and time-consuming PITA.
“Man, Walmart has good prices on their website.”
I like this Wall-Mutt bundle:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Coleman-Sunrise-Value-Bundle-3-burner-camp-stove-with-BONUS-Camp-Oven-and-Coffemaker/41736734
Bring both CDs and USB widgets to a show and see which are more desired. I’m guessing that a few hundred dollars for a batch of logo key devices isn’t much, against the time and cost of a vendor booth and actually getting to the show.
Technically, I’m suspicious of USB devices that I receive because of the security threat — it’s possible to hide malware on any USB device which is detectable only with specialized equipment. However, technically, you’re right that CD/DVD drives are more and more considered optional in new machines.
The Brazos River keeps on getting higher and higher. I drove down to Thompson this afternoon where the river is about a foot lower than FM 2759. Was a little unnerving going down the road with the flooded ditch on one side and the flooded fields on the other side. Looks like we just have 7 or 8 more inches of rise to go before the crest:
http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2
My office property is high and dry along with my house. I stopped last night and talked with a guy who watching the ditch come up slowly next to his house. He was living there in the last flood in 1994. He told me that there is a dyke out by the river that slows the river flooding down significantly. He said that over time, the flood will come.
One of my employees lives in an RV park down the way in the flood plane of the river. I have been trying to get him to move his RV and truck to the office but he is sure that it is not going to flood. I am fairly surprised that they are high and dry also as the park is only 70 ft above sea level. The river is currently 76.3 ft above sea level (but at the gauge five miles upstream).
We only had two measly t-storms here today, with high wind gusts and monsoon downpours again. It was VERY windy all day, but with temps in the high 70s. Everything is soaked and it is muggy and buggy.
In other nooz it looks like OFD will be traveling with the missus in late July for a week in Bucks County, PA; I intend to exhaustively visit the Brandywine and Valley Forge battlefields accordingly. My first trip in a commercial airliner since 1994, supposedly gonna be a turboprop with good legroom. We shall see, only an hour flight down to Newark anyway and then we’ll drive across middle NJ, with which I am very familiar, having served a three-and-a-half-year sentence there with the first wife, to Doylestown, the county seat of gummint.
We got 4.16″ of rain today, mostly in 1″ /hour deluge. Poured down. At one point, from a sunny sky.
WRT 1/4 Mexico’s population, if she meant we’ve taken in “a number equivalent to…” I’m fine with that. If she meant “gave them homes and jobs and a place for their kids” for “taken in” again, I’m fine. To slice every hair so thin, and parse every word spoken is a fools game. If it was a policy paper, where every word is reviewed, chosen, and vetted, you could slice it that thin. Spoken? No. Even N. Armstrong got his ONE spoken line wrong as he stepped down…..
I have no trouble believing that we’ve taken in FAR MORE than one quarter of Mexico’s population in HISPANICS/latinos/chicanos/whatever. To limit it to Mexicans is another artificially thinly sliced hair. Most people outside the border states call EVERY brown immigrant a “mexican” since they’ve come thru mexico and are brown, and speak spanish, even though they are really salvadoran, guatemalan, dominican, ecuadoran, etc.
Sam, I encourage you to visit California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, or any state adjoining them and make your own unofficial census. Just stand on a corner and count. Do that honestly for a few days and you won’t be trying to score political points over how many of them there are. There are a shit-ton. And they are pushing MY kids out of MY public schools, that I pay for. The same schools my parents paid for for decades. They are destroying the medical system that I’VE been paying for these last 3 decades. They bring exotic diseases, and reintroduce ones that were under control here in the first world. They commit sex crimes against children far out of proportion to their numbers and CREATE a child sex slavery trade wherever they go. Google some of those key words and Houston for some truly horrifying articles.
They have gutted the skilled trades, further eroding the middle class of LEGAL CITIZENS. By working here and sending money back home, they prop up their home countries’ economies and allow the continued existence of the corrupt ruling classes there. They are NOT assimilating. They are not becoming “Americans” in fact, in outlook, or in beliefs.
Whether the number is 20M, 24M, or 34M, doesn’t really matter. Whatever the actual number is, it is TOO FUCKING MUCH.
This is too important an issue to sidetrack over minutia. It is changing the nature of our country, and it is ILLEGAL. And it continues. They are still coming across the border in record numbers. They are still feeding their kids into the pipeline that ends with them crossing into TX and CA. 6 out of 7 kindergarten classes at my local elementary school are taught in full or in part in Spanish. Every school in our district has similar demographics. 6 out of 7!
It’s not racism or xenophobia on my part to be upset by this. Individually, there are certainly hard workers, and decent people. As a group, by the very nature of how they entered they start out as CRIMINALS. I could use language, education, socioeconomic status, or any number of other things, appearance is just the easiest to see. It is an economic and cultural disaster to allow this sort of mass migration of people who are not motivated by love of America, or the ideals of America.
I could go on but it’s already way past bed time. We’re not gonna get flooded out tonight, so I need some sleep.
nick
Ann Coulter is walking flamebait. She deliberately makes her points in the most offensive, exaggerated way possible. Maybe that’s good marketing for her personally, but it’s irritating. Frankly, I think she actually does more harm than good to the causes she espouses.
“Using Coulter’s flawed logic, if we were to analyze the number of people of Irish descent in the United States, the country has taken in 737 percent of the population of Ireland.”
Exactly. By choosing such exaggerated figures, she makes it easy to discredit the point she is trying to make. Isn’t the real figure high enough for her? Or is she deliberately sabotaging her own argument? I stopped reading her stuff years ago, because it’s just too irritating…
I grew up in New Mexico, and sure, the state is about half hispanic. I didn’t have a problem with that, and don’t, as long as the people are citizens or legal immigrants. I think it’s a mistake to allow or encourage an anti-Mexican attitude – the problem is illegal immigration, wherever the people are from. As Nick points out, plenty are not from Mexico at all, but from other countries farther south.
Where I’ll disagree with Nick is that hispanics – even the illegal immigrants – are responsible for any of the problems that he lists.
If I a piece of bacon lying on the coffee table overnight, I really shouldn’t be surprised the next morning to find cat footprints on the table, and no more bacon. It’s not my cat’s fault, either, and there’s no point in getting mad at her. The fault lies entirely with me: if I didn’t want my cat to eat the bacon, I really shouldn’t have left it lying there.
The immigrants are coming from some really awful places and situations. They see a chance for a better life, the door is open, of course they walk through the open door. If there is any blame to be placed, it is with whoever left the door open. There’s nothing to be gained by being angry at the illegals. That anger would be a lot more productive directed at politicians.
Look at Australia: They had a similar problem with illegal immigration from Asia. They have closed the door, the problem is pretty much gone. People now know that they can’t walk into Australia, and even if they do somehow manage it, they will promptly be deported. So they’ve pretty much quit trying.
The government has closed the door, and the Labor Party has been dragged kicking and screaming to much the same position. Troble is there are plenty of bleeding hearts who want to let any and everybody in, at taxpayer’s expense of course.
So are CD / DVD drives passe now in PCs
For the most part. Thumb drives are the way to go now. I have all my software ISO stored on a hard drive. If I need to install the software I just expand the file with 7-Zip and install from the hard drive. In the case of Windows I have the contents of the disk on a thumb drive and install from the thumb drive. Much faster than using a DVD drive.
I archive wedding pictures on on DVD’s and also an external hard disk. That is about all I use a DVD drive for anymore.
I’m curious why it’s taking so long for blu-ray drives to become more common – in laptop computers, and also external drives. They should make excellent archival devices for larger files like videos and music. Anyone here using blu-ray for backups ?
I mostly use DVD+Rs and SD Memory Cards for my backups.
Also external hard-drives of course. CD-Rs rarely. USB Flash Drives occasionally.
The government has closed the door, and the Labor Party has been dragged kicking and screaming to much the same position. Trouble is there are plenty of bleeding hearts who want to let any and everybody in, at taxpayer’s expense of course.
I hear you. We have exactly that problem in Europe. Every week, many thousands of African refugees are fished out of the Mediterranean and put into refugee centers. As long as Europe keeps rescuing them, instead of towing the ships back to Africa, they will keep coming. Even my wife, who is a lot more liberal than I am, sees the wisdom in the Australian solution.
Mind, there’s nothing wrong with accepting immigrants. However, they should apply at the embassies, and be approved or denied while still in their home countries. Arriving unannounced should be grounds for immediate deportation, as well as permanent loss of any later chance at immigrant status.
I have no problem with open borders and free immigration, AS LONG AS there are no public programs available. It should be sink or swim, literally. Those boats that are fishing refugees out of the water at public expense and delivering them to refugee centers that are also run at public expense are a taxpayer subsidy. Any immigrants that are accepted by a host country should have to provide, at their own expense, evidence that they are medically fit and carry no infections.
I do have some sympathy for the idea that under our current system we could accept unlimited numbers of smart Mexicans who speak English, and do a one for one trade, exporting our underclass and other losers to Mexico. Imagine how much better things would be here if we just sent 30 million of our worst and useless people to Mexico.
Amen Brad.
I have no in-principle objection to accepting immigrants/refugees. But I want them to apply in their home country or transit countries, not here.
All our recommendations and ideas for fixing this are now moot anyway; what’s done is done, and continuing, whether we like it or not. I feel it’s mainly a result of malice aforethought and deliberate, but there is plenty of stupidity and incompetence to go around. Coulter was rattling off hot button points for the tee-vee, which as Mr. nick points out, is different than a carefully prepared political speech or a book. Nevertheless, she is basically correct; we’ve allowed many tens of millions of Hispanics from south of the Rio Grande to come up into our country and it has not all been love and rainbows and unicorns, again, as Mr. nick illustrated.
Our rulers allowed this to happen without our input, naturally, but we bear the brunt of the decision, just as commoner Euro mundanes must deal with their ongoing horror (“Camp of the Saints”).
In the near future, i.e., our lifetimes, we will see that our Murkan Southwest has become de facto Nuevo Aztlan as will also be true for large sections of our major cities. We’ll end up with either a nasty Balkanized North Murka or some version, at best, of the Nine Nations of North America. That will take a bit longer, but will come about of sheer necessity as the Empire implodes and crumbles.
@Brad,
you say “Where I’ll disagree with Nick is that hispanics – even the illegal immigrants – are responsible for any of the problems that he lists” but you only justify their COMING here “They see a chance for a better life, the door is open, of course they walk through the open door.”
I agree that they are coming from shitholes, it’s kind of axiomatic because very few happy well established people immigrate. I can’t fault them for wanting a better life, and acting on that desire. I can fault them for doing it ILLEGALLY.
I can’t even fault them individually for the societal impacts they have as a group, both here and in their home countries, but the group is made up of individuals. You don’t stop a group, you stop individuals. Yes there is blame to be had by OUR elected leaders, and I do blame them. But that doesn’t absolve the individuals that broke the law to come here. It is no different than the thief who steals your car. It’s trivially easy to do, yet it is still a crime. The shiny new car is an attraction, but it’s still a crime. And most people don’t blame the manufactures, or the owner, or the local government for not making it harder, they blame the car thief.
I can absolutely fault them for the volitional acts they commit AFTER coming here. They want to drive drunk in Ixtapa with no license and insurance, fine with me, that’s Ixtapa’s problem. When they do it here, with impunity, I have problems with it. Want to have sex with children in Ixtapa? Again, Ixtapa’s problem to solve. But when they are running a brothel full of children who are victims of sex trafficking and slavery IN MY FUCKING NEIGHBORHOOD, patronized almost exclusively by hispanic males, you BET I have a problem with it. That one was straight from my city councilwoman’s mouth to my ear, less that 1 mile from the horror.
BTW, comparing humans with free will, intelligence, morals, and volition to a cat who is a bundle of instinct and cunning is really pretty messed up. You are saying they can’t help themselves, are slaves to their instincts and desires, and those are pretty much the same racist arguments made historically about blacks in the US. The fact is, no matter how shitty their circumstances, or how desirable living here is, they CAN make the same choice that millions of others make daily–not to break the law and enter the US illegally.
Yes, I am emotionally invested in this issue. No, there aren’t easy answers for the ones who are already here. But like deficit spending, the first thing you should do is STOP doing it.
nick
Well, just remember that passports are a very recent invention. For most of human history, you were where you were and if you wanted to be somewhere else you simply went there. Of course, back then you were free to starve because there weren’t any government plans to help you.
The idea that one is breaking a law by moving from Place A to Place B is simply bizarre. When my grandmother was a young woman, around 1900, if she’d wanted to visit (or live in) England, Argentina, China, Egypt, or wherever, she could simply have gotten on a boat and gone there. No passport, no visa, no nothing. I think that’s how it should still be. Anything less is a violation of individuals’ rights.
One difference was the population was significantly lower.
Another was that travel was dangerous and arduous and for the extremely poor, or the wealthy. Either way, it was a significant undertaking.
Now we have gypsy gangs of pickpockets basically commuting daily by air from one EU country to another. Easy travel and open borders has a set of unwanted effects when combined.
If we are to have governments, then they must be able to control an area, and that means borders and movement control. Otherwise you have the equivalent of locust swarms. Neal Stephenson explores part of this as background in Diamond Age. It’s a theme he returns to across his novels. One of my favorite passages is from his second, Snow Crash in the opening vignette “The Deliverator” :
I don’t want to live like a prosperous Pakistani bricklayer. I want to live like an upper middle class American of the 20th Century.
That means controlling immigration. We no longer need masses of unskilled labor to feed the factories. Outsourcing the work to factories in 3rd world shitholes didn’t work, so now we’re importing the 3rd worlders to do the work here. But in the mean time we’ve lost the factories. So we have masses of young men standing around in our parks and on streetcorners fighting over what manual labor is left and can’t currently be outsouced (primarily the building trades).
Their kids are over filling our schools, and our ER’s. They get free healthcare from the ERs, free education from the schools, free meals for their kids, free or discounted housing (if families) from the Feds, free legal help from the churches. They don’t get sent to jail when they commit crimes, they get turned over to Homeland, who then lets them go.
And I’m paying for it all. In money and lost opportunity. And I’m tired of it.
nick
“Anything less is a violation of individuals’ rights.”
Not really sure about this, but that is a much bigger discussion. In any case it was understood that along with those rights came RESPONSIBILITIES.
You were responsible for feeding yourself and your dependents.
You were responsible for providing your own security or hiring others to do so.
You were responsible for the consequences of your actions, most especially your FAILURE to provide for yourself.
Everyone today is claiming “rights” but no one is accepting the responsibilities.
nick
“If we are to have governments”
One of the many reasons that I’m an anarchist (AKA free marketer). Government does nothing except screw things up.
I tend to fall heavily in Mr. nick’s view of things here, with this latest salvo of posts; we’re unfortunately stuck with gummint, the less, the better, of course, but we’re stuck with it in one form or another. I favor local town-meeting-style and that could even work in politically divided city ‘hoods but as we all know, humans are fallible, error-prone, selfish and sometimes evil, so with or without gummint, we’re always gonna have those factors to consider, too.
If we try to say “America for Americans” again now we’re called nativists, xenophobes and racists, but when “America” still meant the country we all love/d, I think it was the right way to look at it. And people with contributions to make here and who were willing to assimilate were welcome, mostly of European background. Now we’re trying to fit Somalis and Bosnians into the local Vermont culture and Zulus into the Carolinas, while the western states are inundated by wave after wave of very different Hispanic subgroups. We wonder why this tends to only exacerbate tensions, which we already have beaucoups of with the Afrikan-Murkans and the aforementioned Hispanics and us Cock-a-Soids.
“And I’m paying for it all. In money and lost opportunity. And I’m tired of it.”
Ditto. And I don’t see the libertarian or anarchist philosophies helping us much here. If we intend to keep some sort of national political entity, then we simply have to control our borders. Our leaders have failed to do that, and have also failed to defend us adequately, and in my view have thus voluntarily abdicated their right to rule over us; they violated our social contract, in other words, and should be replaced forthwith. But they will not go quietly.
I’m curious why it’s taking so long for blu-ray drives to become more common
The cost of the blank media. I have a Blu-Ray disc drive and rarely burn Blu-Ray discs. It is easier, faster and cheaper to just back up to a couple of 128 gig thumb drives that can be reused.
@nick, @Brad, @OFD, @RBT
I very much appreciate what nick had to say in his comments, but I tend to agree more with Brad’s views. However I have a strong feeling that both of these views are mostly dealing with symptoms of deeper underlying problems. And until we figure out ways to deal with these deeper underlying causes we aren’t going to have much hope of alleviating the symptoms. I hope that most of you will take the time to watch some of the videos I recommended in my previous posts. I think they explain some of the problems, and also have some solutions to those problems. Anyone here ever read Daniel Quinn’s book “Ishmael” ?? I think he explains a lot of it. We need to totally rethink some of our basic concepts of “civilization”, “society”, “culture”, “agriculture”, etc., etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Quinn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29
Robert Pirsig deals with most of the same concepts in his books: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” and “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila:_An_Inquiry_into_Morals
These are some of the best authors and books that I’ve ever read in my life.
Highly recommended.
@Ray Thompson
Thanks for the reply. I’m curious what brand of blu-ray burner you are using. Also what software you think works best for backups on optical media. I’ve enjoyed your posts, even the LED flashlight ones. I tend to buy the cheapie Walmart Ray-O-Vac ones for everyday use, but I also have a few of the more expensive ones too. I give away the cheapie ones to friends sometimes. Even though they only cost about $3, they work fabulously well – only needing a single AAA battery that lasts for weeks or months.
Immigration is a mess, no doubt about it. I don’t really disagree with anything that Nick says, except I think he overestimates the understanding of the people he wants to restrain themselves. They simply do not understand anything about Western society.
I remember a television interview with an African woman. In Africa, wherever she was, money was a pretty scarce thing. She desperately wanted to come to Europe, because she had been told: In Europe there are machines in the walls that give you money!
Just for clarity, we’re talking about ATMs. But she had literally zero understanding of what an ATM is, what a bank account it, or anything. She just knew that she was dirt poor, that she needed more money, and that in Europe, money comes out of machines in the walls. Really, I cannot blame her, as a person, for trying to come here.
I don’t think that’s racist, by the way. It’s just a fact that her society, upbringing and education are utterly foreign to what exists here.
I can blame the politicians that fail to turn around the ships of illegal immigrants. They do – or should – understand that this woman will be utterly lost here, that she will never be able to lead a productive life in Europe, that she is in fact better off as a human being, being poor in a society she understands. They do – or should – understand that turning that boat of around is the only way to discourage the next ten boats from launching.
I’m curious what brand of blu-ray burner you are using.
I am using a LG burner, SATA. Seems to work OK.
Also what software you think works best for backups on optical media.
I use NERO to burn files to the DVD’s. For some items, such as a wedding slideshow (the primary use of Blu-Ray), I use the software that creates the slideshow.
Windows 7 and up will burn to a DVD by simply copying the files to the DVD drive, the selecting burn from the toolbar. I have never created a Blu-Ray disc using that method so don’t know if it works.
only needing a single AAA battery that lasts for weeks or months
If the battery does not leak. I have had a few flashlights, and other items, trashed by leaking cells. Duracell no longer has a warranty against leaking, Everyready does.
Skip the Alkaline batteries and go with Lithium. Longer shelf life and not as prone to leaking. When you need a flashlight and discover it does not work because a battery decided to swell and leak, rendering the flashlight permanently useless, then you have a problem. The CR-123 cells have a very long, stable shelf life. Something I would want in an emergency light. Keep the AA and AAA lights around but also keep a really reliable light.