11:20 – Several people have suggested renting/leasing the Winston house rather than selling it. I’d actually considered doing that, on the idea that I’d rather have an income-producing asset than the equivalent cash in the bank, which produces essentially no return. But I’m also fully aware of the downsides to renting: landlord hassles, damage to the property, dead-beat tenants that are essentially impossible to evict, and so on. I brought up the idea with Barbara this morning. She is not just opposed to renting/leasing, but adamantly opposed. As in “ABSOLUTELY NOT.” So we’ll sell it.
I just ordered a two-pack of those Costco LED shop lights and a pair of Adidas running shoes. The 4-foot shop lights are rated at 3700 lumens, which is about the equivalent of 2.3 100W incandescents. There are four 100W bulbs in the basement lab area right now, so two shop lights should provide a bit more light than those four incandescents. If I’m happy with the shop lights, we’ll get rid of the incandescents and install two more shop lights. That’d give us the light output of about nine 100W incandescents, but with only about 150W of power draw. Or I may just install three of the shop lights in the lab area and use the fourth one to supplement the fluorescent fixture in the garage.
Among the easter eggs I found on our last trip down to the Winston house was two bricks of .22LR ammo. It probably dates from 1978 or 1979, and at the time I probably paid $6 or $7 per brick. Call it maybe $0.014 per round. Nowadays, if you can find it in stock, it’d be $0.07 or $0.08 per round, five times what I paid. In today’s dollars that’s roughly the same amount, or perhaps even a bit more. There aren’t a lot of things that hold their value that well.
Here are a couple of tidbits that should send shivers up your spine.
From an industry trade mag:
“4K video cameras are already making significant improvements in security. With high resolution, these cameras can be placed at considerable distances from the area they monitor and still allow digital zoom to pick up small objects. In one instance, a camera located two miles from a city center can be digitally zoomed to pick up license plate numbers.”
“In addition, sites are enhancing security by using low-cost facial recognition servers to process the video feed. One customer recently cited to us that for as little as $6,000, users can deploy a facial recognition server and integrate this into the video camera control system (network video recorder) to provide quick identification of suspicious people.”
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/print/volume-24/issue-2/features/security/powered-fiber-cable-drives-video-security.html
Of course to be useful, there must be a database of faces. Anyone doubt that there are companies building those databases out of publicly available images, say from FaceBk, photobuckte, piccaasssa, etc?? Google has been using piccassa to improve their facial recognition [*citation needed] just like they used free 411 lookup to improve their voice recognition [*citation needed].
nick
[* not really, you can take my word for it that the links are out there]
Wow! Two miles? Amazing. Yes, companies like Google (CIA, NSA anyone?) will collect and store faces. Doesn’t that new NSA facility have enough storage for every face on the planet?
Important news today:
Glenn Beck has gone completely crazy.
Cait says it’s golf game is better with “tits”.
I’m not making this up.
“Of course to be useful, there must be a database of faces.
In WA State, a couple of years ago they started collecting facial recognition data when they take your DL or ID picture, plus they collect the same data for all mug shots. So by this time if you are not in the WA State Facial Recognition Database you are living in the shadows.
Of course, I am sure, that illegals get a waiver (i.e., their data gets “lost”).
Two miles? Well not in Los Angeles. (or Bakersfield)
The last time I hadda get my motor vehicle operator’s license renewed up here, they made me take my specs off for the new pic, due to new facial recog sw the DMV had just implemented. I also have a chip on my license that functions as ID and as a quickie passport going in and outta O Kanada, The Failed State to our South, and the Pacific Trust Territories. Yes, I am New Man of the New World Order and soon Elder Glenn Beck will be reporting on my new forehead “666” tattoo, the Mark of the Beast. He and the newly risen Priesthood will cast me into the Lake of Fire.
“Of course, I am sure, that illegals get a waiver (i.e., their data gets “lost”).”
Hater.
Bright sunny day with blue skies; 28 right now and 22 tonight with snow, rain and sleet enroute for later in the week, i.e., when wife and MIL are due back on flights from Kalifornia and Floriduh, respectively. Happy Spring!
”
Two miles? Well not in Los Angeles. (or Bakersfield)
”
Smog as a defensive measure???
n
WRT Glenn Beck and Ted Cruz: What more proof do you need that Beck’s brain is fried and Cruz is the devil incarnate. As I have said before, Cruz and his ilk are as bad, if not worse, than the mooslems.
@OFD, how am I doing on my hater points today? I am being rather restrained.
“Cait says it’s golf game is better with “tits”.”
We’re living in a matrix run by the editors of The Onion. You can’t parody real life anymore. There should be an “absurdity index.” We’ve got indexes for everything else.
When Amy Shumer is heralded as a great beauty, Jenner is held up as a hero and a woman, and the kard-ass-ians as the model family, we are surely not in Kansas anymore.
nick
“OFD, how am I doing on my hater points today? I am being rather restrained.”
Why hold back? It’s Palm Sunday and the first day of Spring! Laissez les bon temps rouler, mes amis! Mr. nick is ahead of you now on the Hater Points Scale. I get more hateful as the day turns into late night, so hold onto yer hats! Must be from all those years of working shitty night shifts and having my whole biological clock thing scrambled no matter how hard I tried to reverse the schedule. ZERO cooperation from family, friends and the daylight world.
“When Amy Shumer is heralded as a great beauty, Jenner is held up as a hero and a woman, and the kard-ass-ians as the model family, we are surely not in Kansas anymore.”
As I have said many times before, no doubt ad tedium, ad nauseum, we live in Mirror World now, or Bizarro World, where everything is topsy-turvy, the contemporary version of Alice going down the hole into Wonderland, only this ain’t Wonderland. Not only is Schumer a great beauty, but she is also a great wit and media intellectual and just the greatest comic to come along since…Lily Tomlin?? Jenner is a Hero for the Ages, but like most heroes, he has feet of clay, according to his fellow trannies and homosexual pals; he’s a Fox Nooz “conservative,” of the George H.W. Bush variety (senior Bush is a drug smuggler and dealer, sexual deviate, money launderer and murderer, as are at least two of his sons). So Jenner is pissing off his Star Wars bar scene of friends.
The less said about the big-ass Cardassians (weren’t they a Star Trek ethnic group?) the better.
Mirror World. Where the current and at least three other recent Presidents smoked pot and hoovered up coke while also smuggling and dealing it, and we still imprison kids caught with a pound of grass for forty years if they don’t dime out someone else. Where a former SecState can mix her government top-secret email and private money-laundering and pan-handling email from foreign powers on her home machine but if OFD or DadCooks did it, we’d have long since been picking up trash by the roadsides in fluorescent orange jumpsuits, at BEST. And where all the achievements of Western Christian civilization are trashed and denigrated while death, slavery, mass consumption of junk and sexual perversions are exalted and worshiped.
It’s Palm Sunday and the first day of Spring!
Hater! It’s Persian New Year. Show some respect.
Yeessss, turns out that was the reason for my late night noise complaint of a few nights ago. “It’s just a fun family event, why are you all hating on it?” (FB post in the neighborhood group) WELLLLLL< maybe it was the loud music an hour after the noise curfew, loud enough to be heard more than 10 blocks away. That means it was either damagingly loud onsite, or the speakers were positioned incorrectly (on purpose or not.)
Gotta be tolerant though.
nick
“It’s Persian New Year. Show some respect.”
“Gotta be tolerant though.”
You bet. We’ll dig up Alexander the Great and send him over to finish the damn job. Wussy slacker caught a cold or sumthin’ and checked out before it was finished. While we’re at it, we’ll scoop out Henry V and have him finish his gig in France, another slacker.
If I had that going on in this ‘hood, I’d be cranking up the pipes and drums of the Black Watch full blast and ask them why they be hatin’ on us northwestern Euro Murkans. And I’d do it at the ass-crack of dawn.
(naturally the local constabulary huckleberries would make a beeline for OFD’s crib and do the full SWAT thing); OFD would be looking at multiple charges and a probable beat-down. I’d ask the officers why they be hatin’ on us north—oops, there I go again.
More hate and rayciss stuff:
http://takimag.com/article/the_week_that_perished_takimag_march_20_2016/print#axzz43I65riW2
In re one of the tidbits today on there; Slovaks and South Asians took my job at IBM, though I still wonder to this day how it is they manage when 80% of it was with hardware inside the security-clearance-classified data centers. But I do not hate Slovaks or South Asians; I hate the cocksuckers in IBM management and their gummint enablers who made that transfer possible, and put me and hundreds of other Vermonters outta work three years ago. Two of my colleagues also had to train their replacements; I was dumped immediately with one other guy and then our boss likewise a couple of weeks later. Boss man tried reading law here for a while but I see he’s now hooked up as some kinda IT “architect” with the state; his wife has worked for the state for decades.
Just applied for yet another IT drone job, they seem to be popping up more often lately around this AO; this one would be with a young almost-startup-level operation down in Essex; we’ll see if I get a call. Meanwhile the five-page To-Do List stuff continues here.
@OFD
“… he’s a Fox Nooz “conservative,” of the George H.W. Bush variety (senior Bush is a drug smuggler and dealer, sexual deviate, money launderer and murderer, as are at least two of his sons). So Jenner is pissing off his Star Wars bar scene of friends. …”
You out-did yourself today !! Hope that you’ve also been busy working on your literary best-seller. 🙂
You out-did yourself today !!
Nah, OFD’s got a macro attached to a function key that programmatically generates his rants for him! 🙂
Hmm, a couple of decades ago I was exposed to a manual, paper based algorithm for writing .gov documents.
It went something like:
Start with a simple declarative sentence.
–John killed the mouse.
Switch to passive voice.
–The mouse was killed by John.
Substitute descriptive phrases.
–The small furry rodent was killed by the senior engineer.
Substitute euphemisms.
–The small furry rodent met his maker at the hands of the senior engineer.
Insert editorial comment.
–The helpless and unsuspecting furry mammal went to his reward at the hands of the uncaring priviledged senior man in charge of making life and death decisions.
Continue expanding with prepositional phrases, etc
It went on in that vein for quite some time. I wonder if anyone here has a link or remembers something similar?
nick
PS it was intended tongue in cheek, but perfectly described the process…..
“You out-did yourself today !! Hope that you’ve also been busy working on your literary best-seller.”
We’ll see how much of a best-seller it is when readers are getting upset by my programmatically generated rants. It’s pretty cool, though, this software…
“…intended tongue in cheek, but perfectly described the process…..”
Mrs. OFD and I both worked in state gummint up here and that is how it was done; much, much worse on the Fed level. They must get paid by the word. For even more fun check out college and university humanities and social “science” papers written by faculty and grad students. It will blow your mind. Even you coders will be stunned.
Big excitement down in the Commonwealth, haha, another cop getting hung out to dry for posting hateful rayciss chit on social media:
http://freedomoutpost.com/massachusetts-terror-linked-muslim-group-wants-a-medford-police-officer-fired-for-his-facebook-post-about-peace-with-islam/
And Medford is the home of Tufts University, and, ironically, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. I say “ironically” because the connection here is the image that cop posted on FaceCrack and the fact that the USGOV rebuffed several attempts of the Japanese to negotiate/surrender and couldn’t wait to drop the big ones. On mostly civilians, but I’m not Monday-morning-QB’ing my forebears for that; it was a long and nasty war and bad chit went down on all sides.
Speaking of automatically generating text, try this site: http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/ .
After reading the intro, hit the button at the top of the page to get your own new-age bull-(*$$ .
Sorta related to the Bullshit Bingo game popular in corporate and gummint prolecube farms. I should gin one up for the college humanities dolts but I bet someone already has done it somewhere.
I wrote a program to generate Buzzword Bingo sheets (select 24 from a list of about 50), then handed them out as people entered a big all-developers-and-many-others meeting of the company. As it happens, I was the first to call Bingo!*, and as it happens, it was the manager of the branch office where I worked who provided the last couple buzzwords in a rambling and pointless oration. She stopped talking in surprise when I called out Bingo, everyone else was silent for a moment, then several dozen of the couple hundred people there started laughing. Possibly related, I was fired not long after.**
* I strongly suspect someone else would have won but didn’t have the guts to speak up.
** Most of the company’s developers were fired as part of restructuring from a software company to a solutions company. Considering that the “solution” was software-centered, you might suspect that this was a short-sighted plan. And you’d be right!
“Possibly related, I was fired not long after.”
Most of them types of drones don’t have much of a sense of humor; possibly related, Satan cannot abide laughter or mockery, either.
“…you might suspect that this was a short-sighted plan. And you’d be right!”
Sure, if one was a cynical bastard with scads of first-hand experience in the corporate IT sector…
Uh-oh, my haht bleeds for all these other starving, poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free….up in O Kanada!
https://www.lewrockwell.com/political-theatre/trump-causing-flood-illegals/
I just ordered a two-pack of those Costco LED shop lights and a pair of Adidas running shoes. The 4-foot shop lights are rated at 3700 lumens, which is about the equivalent of 2.3 100W incandescents. There are four 100W bulbs in the basement lab area right now, so two shop lights should provide a bit more light than those four incandescents.
I bought a pair of four foot LED shop lights from Sam’s Club the other day. I’ll bet that they are the same light. They are bright as all get out and provide a lot of light. Recommended. I think that I paid $40 total for two lights.
http://www.samsclub.com/sams/4ft-led-shoplight-shoplight-led/prod16460030.ip
Oh joy, Switzerland has two of the top four most expensive cities. In definitely related news, the Swiss National Bank just dropped interest rates again, now down to -1%, in an attempt to weaken the currency. Too many people from Europe and the Middle East are trying to get away from the Euro and the dollar – and willing to pay for the privilege.
The units at Costco are 3,700 lumens rather than 4,500, are made by Feit Electric, and cost $60 a pair, but otherwise they appear similar.
WRT LED lights: maybe some of you have noticed, but LEDs do not decrease in brightness as they age like fluorescent lamps do. This was very evident the other day when I replaced one of the two recessed lights in my kitchen. I replace a 100 watt equivalent fluorescent with a 60 watt equivalent LED. It was substantially brighter than the old 100 watt equivalent fluorescent still in place. Just for grins I used a lightmeter app on my smartphone and the 60 watt equivalent LED was producing 2-times the lumens of the other old 100 watt equivalent fluorescent.
Some time ago I replaced the fluorescent tubes in the main kitchen fixture with direct replacement LED tubes that Costco had. I did not do a before and after with the lightmeter on those, but my wife’s first remark was “I’m going to need sunglasses in here”.
Do be vigilant, though, when buying the LED replacement tubes. Some require you to remove the ballast and change clips, not recommended for the electricity challenged. So far Costco has only been selling the direct replacement tubes, but do stay vigilant as the Costco Buyers are not always the brightest bulbs in the bunch 😉
Oh the pain this morning, apparently Fox News has started giving Cankles equal time, they have been playing a campaign speech wall to wall. Even with the sound off my ears are hurting. Can’t take it any more, turned it off.
OFD wrote
“…the USGOV rebuffed several attempts of the Japanese to negotiate/surrender and couldn’t wait to drop the big ones. On mostly civilians…”
News to me. The Japs wanted to surrender on *their* terms, which was a long way from those a defeated nation could expect.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate targets. Given what the Japanese were doing to Europeans and Asians in their sphere of influence I find it hard to be sympathetic.
DadCooks, does your phone’s lightmeter measure everything or only human-visible spectrum?
Miles_Teg, make note of this date. Unusually, I find myself in agreement with you rather than with OFD. IIRC, the Japanese offered not so much a surrender as a cease fire. Furthermore, practically every Japanese city was a valid military target because the economy had been turned almost entirely to military production. And, as Miles_Teg said, my sympathy for Japanese civilians is negligible because of their brainwashing as well as the mistreatment of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Dutch, British, Australian, and American civilians, noncombatants, and prisoners of war. (That’s not an inclusive list, by the way, simply off the top of my head.)
The Japs wanted to
Japs? Rayciss hater. Next it will be the Krauts! Calling Mr. Chuck!
I’m a Kraut myself, so I can use the term. Just like ni**… not going there.
@SteveF: “DadCooks, does your phone’s lightmeter measure everything or only human-visible spectrum?”
Only human visible spectrum, I’ll guess, since the App does not specify. And I doubt that it is calibrated. I only use it as a relative reference. If I was to be needing for photo work I’d look for a better App, probably have to get a paid one.
That is the reason I didn’t list numbers, however, IIRC the new LED “bulbs” registered about 1700 lumens (more than specified on the package) and the fluorescent I removed about 900 lumens. Both bulbs had the same color temperature rating, which I see could relate to your “human-visible spectrum” question.
I’m not too happy with much of the LED lighting switch over. Of course I’m cheap and like to save money, however I don’t like light that is too blue. Took me more than one try to get led bulbs for the low voltage outdoor lights that looked right. Fortunately they are low cost.
House bulbs have varied as well. Just going by what the manufacturer puts on the box can be touch and go. So far I’ve only replaced about 10 bulbs, mostly in fixtures with long run times.
The replacement of street lighting is starting to show in many areas. In particular in residential neighborhoods the LED light is harsh and ugly compared to the amber like glow of HPS lights. Far be it from me to side with the eco-freaks but some are questioning if white to blue light disrupts the day-night cycles of many animals (including people).
The leds are blue because of the way most “white light” leds are made. They start with UV, and make a phosphor glow “white”.
I haven’t looked at the new undercabinet tape lights I put in for my wife with a spectrometer, but I specifically bought the yellow light option. My guess is the spectrum is spikey as hell. They are certainly VERY strong RF emitters, which blows out my short wave and high frequency listening. I’ve confirmed it’s not the power supplies but the tape itself. Which sucks as I can’t think of a good way to deal with it, other than turning them off when I want to play radio….
I did a direct replacement for the 4 ft tubes in my rental house kitchen light. The light looks good. Cutting out the ballasts, and wire nutting the driver in was straightforward, and well within the ability of anyone who has wired a plug on a cord, or replaced a lamp socket. A 2 strip kit replaced 4 tubes. No more buzz, or slow startup, or acting funny in the cold…
BTW, I don’t expect to get anywhere near the rated life from the LEDs, just as I don’t get the rated life from the CFs. The LED might last, but the driver or connectors or some other component will go.
I mentioned putting in LED landscape lights out front. My only complaint is they are too white. I’m gonna put a little bit of colored film on them and see if I like it better. As an old theatre guy, putting colored gel in front of lights is pretty old hat.
in other news, grabagun.com has S&W M+P AR15s for $600, and savage Mark II FV-SR rifles in 22LR for $210 after rebate. The Savage has a threaded barrel. They’ve got magpul AR mags for $11. You may find them cheaper elsewhere, but that’s pretty cheap!
nick
On the end of the Good War with Japan:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/08/john-v-denson/the-hiroshima-myth/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/04/bionic-mosquito/roosevelt-demands-unconditionalsurrender/
Dave, ya gotta stop getting your “factoids” from these nutcase sites.
Try reading Richard B. Frank Downfall. He makes a really good case for the atomic bombings and bombing of Tokyo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo as being justified.
The question the bleeding hearts have to answer is this: what would you have done?
The Japanese military in East, SE and South Asia were killing and otherwise mistreating Asian civilians at a fearsome rate, by “negotiating” with the Japanese government for a few more months hundreds of thousands more non-Japanese Asian civilans would have been killed. A naval blockade of the Japanese home islands would have killed, probably, millions of Japanese. An invasion would have killed millions of Japanese and hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers. Would you have liked to have delivered the telegrams to their families?
Even the Japanese “peace” faction insisted on the emperor keeping his position as part of any surrender. The warhawks wanted much much more, including no Allied occupation of the Japanese home islands, the right to try their own war criminals (yeah, right) and, IIRC, the right to keep large amounts of the territory they had occupied.
Want some boffo laffs? Read this, the emperor’s own words:
“… it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_Voice_Broadcast
The entry into the Pacific War by the Soviets was an important factor, but the emperor specifically mentions the atomic bomb:
“Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation…”
OK, riddle me this: what if we hadn’t had the Soviets doing most of the work in the European theater and suffering by orders of magnitude, more casualties and destruction of their country? Would it have then been desirable to drop the big one on Berlin and Munich?
“…these nutcase sites.”
lewrockwell.com is hardly a “nutcase site” and has been around a long time now. Many of its authors have had bestselling books and/or were very well-known and credible sources.
“The question the bleeding hearts have to answer is this: what would you have done?”
And the question the bloodthirsty war hawks have to answer is: why not is what’s good for the goose good for the gander? Why not nuke Germany? Or the Soviet Union? When both regimes were not only murdering millions of people in other countries but also in their own. Why not nuke Beijing while Mao was beating all of the above hands-down in wholesale slaughter of his own people? Couldn’t we have nuked Phomh Penh to stop Pol Pot?
And as for delivering telegrams to grieving families I note that not many chickenhawks can be bothered to perform that duty.
Sure, it would have been fine to nuke Munich or Berlin if Germany hadn’t been out of the war by then. The Germans tollerated Hitler, therefore they had to bear the consequences. I’m sure that you’re aware that the initial impetus for developing the atomic bomb was to use against Germany, not Japan.
Not in favour of nuking Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot. We weren’t at war with them.
Nuking Berlin or Munich? Really, no different from the firebombing of Dresden, just with fewer airplanes.
I think it comes down to a philosophical point: what is war? We try to put all sorts of rules on war, with things like the Geneva Conventions. However, as soon as someone finds that playing by the rules is making the price too high, the rules go out the window.
Indiscriminate bombing, including nuclear bombs, is pretty clearly making war on civilians. Someone who is of the school that says “war is total” will say that destroying civilian infrastructure and morale makes absolute sense. Of course, that same person should* logically accept that the enemy can do the same thing, i.e., blow up his civilians.
If, on the other hand, one thinks that war should abide by certain rules, then those rules apply to both sides. One should* not object to the enemy blowing up civilians, while nuking the enemy’s cities.
*Of course, in reality, the enemy is evil and we are good. Whatever the enemy does is wrong, anything we might do is right, proper, and simple necessity. That’s reality, on both sides of the battle lines, in any war ever fought. And the winners write the history books.
War sucks. Anyone that thinks violence never solves anything has never been a soldier, sailor, airman or marine. Still sucks.
As it happens, my Grandfather was on a boat to China to get in on the ground campaign when Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened. Had he landed, my mother would have grown up without a father. I’m _glad_ it was ended before Grampa got involved.
The difference in WWII (In My Opinion) is that Japan attacked us. Regardless of what provocations or conditions pertained, they attacked us. There was no surrender in that nation – they would fight until they had no choice but to surrender. We did then what we don’t have the heart to do know – War to the knife.
I see few reasons to get involved in foreign adventures. But if we do, we should win. Convincingly. Then be merciful in the ensuing peace.