Well, that’s a bit of an assumption. I’m out of the house all day today, and surrounded by kids. I can’t believe how apprehensive that makes me feel.
n
Solve some of the world’s problems while I’m away.
Thur. April 26, 2018 – good morning!
92 Comments and discussion on "Thur. April 26, 2018 – good morning!"
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Bad as things are with the gooberment sticking its nose in everything, we haven’t got a Social Credit Score.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/04/24/china-assigns-every-citizen-a-social-credit-score-to-identify-who-is-and-isnt-trustworthy/
More rain today. Yay.
At work, yet another day of pulling together numbers to request an increase in our budget. Not just to replace aging hardware, but to get on an honest-to-goodness life cycle plan. Pessimistic me already knows the answer from the government. No.
43º and fair today. I didn’t get to run yesterday, and I won’t get to today, so I’ll be dreaming about it. Maybe tonight. Tomorrow for sure.
@ITguy1998 – good luck. Life cycle – it never seems to sink into the bean counters that replacing things before they break in a planned manner is infinitely better than replacing them after they break and fixing things for days afterward.
Bad as things are with the gooberment sticking its nose in everything, we haven’t got a Social Credit Score.
Woof! I guess I know where I would stand being a deplorable.
JimL wrote:
“…it never seems to sink into the bean counters that replacing things before they break in a planned manner is infinitely better than replacing them after they break and fixing things for days afterward.”
Didn’t Operation Eagle Claw fail due to maintenance problems on the choppers?
We’ve done that. But, the WDC swamp dwellers refuse to implement our solutions.
52f and POURING RAIN in Memphis.
Morning commute was a nightmare. I am driving my wife’s tiny Honda Del Sol today. It’s hard enough for truckers to see on a good day but with fogged windscreens and drenching downpour I was near invisible. Almost got run down several times. I should have worked from home today.
Good thing I had my gutters cleaned yesterday. First time a professional cleaning in 10 years. I am hoping it will make a difference in the terrible water management around the front of the house. Recently had a landscaper put in a 6 inch drain and fill & sod the trench years of runoff had eroded in our yard. Fingers crossed it will solve the issue.
I see that Reuters is reporting “The number of Americans filing unemployment benefits dropped to the lowest level in more than 48 years last week and the goods trade deficit tumbled in March on strong export growth.”. On the face of it that looks a good thing, however I have become skeptical of good news these days. Getting grumpy in my dotage.
“it never seems to sink into the bean counters that replacing things before they break in a planned manner is infinitely better than replacing them after they break and fixing things for days afterward.”
I suppose we’ve all seen this. I’ve seen the following scenario twice, at companies I did some unrelated work for: Pay an IT company to set up your infrastructure, but decide that someone internal will handle regular checks and maintenance.. That duty goes lost – person forgets, leaves the company, whatever. For whatever reason, the automatic backups stop working. Some time later, there’s a hard-disk failure on the server or NAS. Hair is torn out, clothes are shredded, fingers are pointed, but the data is still gone…
Unemployment claims dropping? That could be good news, unless it just means that more people are now considered to be out of the workforce. After all, you can only claim unemployment for a limited time. After that, you don’t count towards unemployment statistics any longer. Shadowstats would seem to indicate exactly that.
Underemployment is also rarely considered. If last year you were working full time as a research biologist, were laid off, and this year you’re working part time at Taco Bell then they consider you employed. Even if you’re living out of your car and taking showers at the YMCA.
Another example of false economy is dropping maintenance all together.
My firm saw they could save hundreds of thousands by simply dropping the, admittedly expensive, Oracle maintenance contracts. They reveled in the extra capital available for a couple of years. Then, in another “cost cutting” measure, they decided to outsource IT operations. The outsourcer required that maintenance be up-to-date on all systems and software. The one time hit in getting Oracle maintenance re-instated was several millions, much more than the cost of simply keeping it in force.
Agreed.
I have wondered lately, is the economy really still in bad shape and it’s just number fudging? Is it actually in good shape and I’m just turning into a cranky old bastard before my time? Some combination of the two?
My best estimation is that on the surface everything is good but the underlying fundamentals are crap. I really wish we could see real numbers from the government and not the *ahem* gently massaged numbers we routinely get. I guess that’s been a complaint since there have been governments…
Didn’t Operation Eagle Claw fail due to maintenance problems on the choppers?
That was part of it. The Task Force had enough aircraft to complete the mission but commanders wanted more backups, so, recommended to abort.
The biggest problem was that was one of the first US “Joint Operations” among various US and ally services. There were equipment incompatibilities, frequency problems, and no familiarity with working with other services. Also, JIMMY CARTER!
Operation Eagle Claw, attempting to rescue the hostages in Iran, would have been aborted by the breakdown of the helicopters. They did not function well on extended flights in sand laden dessert air.
The failure would magnified by the “isolated” staging area being next to well traveled road and having several Iranians spot them.
The disaster came when there was a collision, I believe between one of the helicopters and a C130 sitting on the ground.
Too many players from different services that were not used to working together.
Just checking in. OMG screaming 6 year old boys are just as loud as 6 year old girls! And they all want hugs, which is against the rules.
Oh, and they all scream at recess.
Time for second lunch…..
N
Unemployment claims dropping? That could be good news, unless it just means that more people are now considered to be out of the workforce. After all, you can only claim unemployment for a limited time. After that, you don’t count towards unemployment statistics any longer.
When people stop looking for work, they no longer counted as unemployed.
The various levels of government keep more accurate unemployment numbers via the household surveys but don’t publicize them.
When we left SW WA State, the “adult 18-55 workforce non-participation rate” (I think I have that right) stood at 37% in Clark County. Food stamp and Medicaid numbers in the Portland metro were 25%.
Dunno about Austin or Texas in general, but, working downtown, I’ve noticed an recent uptick in the number of people setting up to sleep in their cars ~ 6PM.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Breaking Cat News, “The Roving Teleprompter”
http://www.gocomics.com/breaking-cat-news/2018/04/26
Wow, cat technology is coming up in the world !
BTW, Lupin (white cat) is deaf and reads whiskers. He also reads the teleprompter on the breaking cat news desk.
My dog has been deaf for about a year now. She has no idea what other dogs are saying. Or humans.
Lady, our dog, is doing better today. Her appetite is still off and she is still shaky from the grooming. Wait, her appetite was off and she was shaky before the grooming. The wife made us scrambled eggs with ham and cheese for breakfast today. Lady and I both wolfed ours down quickly. Life is good !
I looked back and Lady had her last grooming last September. In that time period, she grew somewhere around 4 to 5 inches of hair. If we ever get another dog, I want a short hair. They are cheaper as Lady’s grooming cost $104 with $38 of that being sedation. There was also a $11 dematting charge.
“Alvin may have lost its long-held US rainfall record”
https://spacecityweather.com/alvin-may-have-lost-its-long-held-us-rainfall-record/
“The city of Alvin, located south of Houston in Brazoria County, has held the 24-hour rainfall record for the United States since 1979. Tropical Storm Claudette caused significant flooding in July of that year, especially over Alvin, where it dropped a record 42 inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period. However, it appears that recent torrential rainfall that affected the northern half of the Hawaiian island of Kauai was worse. According to preliminary data from a rain gauge near Hanalei, the island received 49.69 inches of rain during a 24-hour period that ended on April 15.”
Wow, over four feet of rain in 24 hours ! I can attest that 36 inches of rain over four days from Harvey was a disaster, I don’t even want to think about 49 inches of rain.
Fortunately, I have a system of checks and double-checks that seems to be working. We identify something that _can_ fail, then we implement scheduled checks. Weekly, monthly, quarterly. A couple of high-dollar failures from early in my tenure led to some saves.
Of course, no failures in years doesn’t get any attention….
Dunno about Austin or Texas in general, but, working downtown, I’ve noticed an recent uptick in the number of people setting up to sleep in their cars ~ 6PM.
Do they pay to park their cars while sleeping in them ?
Do they pay to park their cars while sleeping in them ?
The campers seem to keep close to the churches near the homeless services downtown. My guess is that the parking in that area is free after 6PM.
Kinda surprising. I never thought that anyone over 45 would vote to put Bill Cosby in *prison* without much more credible evidence. I certainly would not.
A lot of people my age had crappy fathers, “I, Tonya”-style mothers, and the parents were often divorced. Sadly, Cosby was the positive adult male role model in the house, every Thursday night at 8PM — even Reagan rescheduled speeches for 8:30.
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2018/04/26/bill-cosby-found-guilty-sex-assault-retrial/
We’ve had Boston Terriers for years with no regrets.
Shampoo and bathe with nail trim every 4 weeks for $40. No grooming.
More on solar energy fraud:
Conventional electricity plant nearby uses CH4 to supply me with power. I have to pay based on consumption, but do not have to make capital investment.
OTOH, why do I have to make capital investment for solar panels on my roof?
@MRAtoz: Does that solar plant off the I15 just across the state line supply power to you? If so, do you have to buy part of the facility?
Kinda surprising. I never thought that anyone over 45 would vote to put Bill Cosby in *prison* without much more credible evidence. I certainly would not.
Sean Hannity just called Cosby evil and manipulative. Hannity said that 52 women are now accusing him of rape. Hannity’s call screener talked about getting rufied by her boyfriend in her twenties.
I had not thought about Cosby’s behavior as a drugger. The problem is that the women were voluntarily in Cosby’s home or motel room. Several had multiple sessions with him, some lasting years. And, I do not like the drugging aspect of this.
I’ll bet the conviction gets overturned. But Cosby and his wife are going to be sued into pauperhood.
So does this mean that having a few drinks with a woman and having sex is now rape ?
And does a man making promises to help a woman and accepting sex in return make that rape ? Because that happens every day.
@MRAtoz: Does that solar plant off the I15 just across the state line supply power to you? If so, do you have to buy part of the facility?
I’m don’t know the answer to that. I do know that it puts out more greenhouse gases than allowed by Kalifornia emissions standards for power generation. It uses smaller natural gas boilers to keep the system going at night and, gee, when it’s cloudy.
Do they pay to park their cars while sleeping in them ?
A lot of the Kalifornia cities we work in have campers, trucks, vans parked along roadsides near downtown. The “migrants” live there since housing is to costly and living way out of town is a tough commute to clean toilets and such. Until the PoPo boot them. They just move to the next street over where people haven’t complained yet.
It uses smaller natural gas boilers to keep the system going at night and, gee, when it’s cloudy.
We call that supplemental firing in the biz. Sometimes, supplemental firing is all you got. And when System Dispatch is calling, crying, begging, pleading for anything you got, you supplemental fire the you know what out of everything.
@MRAtoz: Does that solar plant off the I15 just across the state line supply power to you? If so, do you have to buy part of the facility?
Nope, it is the responsibility of the power generator to purchase their own facility and equipment. BTW, unless you build a nuclear power plant, the big cost of the electricity generation is not the facility and the equipment, it is the fuel. When I worked for TESCO / TU Electric / TXU / Luminant / Vistra Energy, for 1986 to 1989, our income was roughly $4 billion dollars per year. Of that income, we spent roughly $2.2 Billion on fuel (natural gas, lignite, coal, fuel oil #6, diesel #1 and #2). And, we were profitable. Unless you counted that huge hole in the ground where we were spending $9 billion on building Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant.
My good deed for the day was sending a copy of Victor, Victoria to my auntie who is pushing 90. She has 5 sons, 8 or nine grandkids, and one is a lesbian down to the piercings, butch haircut, and attitude. Like some sort of political statement.
Like who gives a fu3k? Drives us both crazy, but what can you do? So, on top of being a really funny musical, there’s a message buried in there and I hope she’ll diplomatically pass it on. I have no such skill, but she does.
Re Solar Panels: of course they’re a scam. So is the Prius (or Priapus, as I like to call it). Has anyone calculated the energy and “environmental cost” which goes into making one vs. that of a refined internal combustion engine? NOOOO…. Not in Gore’s lifetime.
EDIT: DO not EVER, EVER lose your username or password to the USPS,
https://reg.usps.com/entreg/LoginAction_input?
You can’t get it back, OR your address book.
If you become rich, most certainly. If you remain poor you are just a conquest.
Add in the Tesla. No one seems to consider those vehicles are NOT emission free. All they have done is move the emissions to a central location. Add in transmission line loses, voltage conversion loses, the enormous cost of the batteries and the cost to manufacture, if truth be told I suspect these electric vehicles have more an impact on the environment than a gasoline or diesel vehicle.
And speaking of diesel vehicles. I was in the Ford dealership yesterday. They had an F-250 regular bed, 4WD, Platinum edition (top of the line). Cost was almost $85K. Yikes.
And speaking of Ford they are going to stop manufacturing all sedans except for two models. The Mustang and the Focus. Everything else will be SUV’s and Cowboy Cadillacs.
Speaking of sedans the Ford dealership had a new Lincoln on the floor for $99K. For that I would get a Mercedes. The seats were really nice with about 25 adjustment points. Enough so that little old ladies will never figure it out and old men will be trying to change the radio station thinking they are adjusting the seat.
And speaking of old ladies and men Cosby did not have good taste in women. I would think he could have done better.
Cosby will appeal his conviction unto the end of time. And if he dies during the appeal, his conviction is automatically overturned. That is how Ken Lay (Enron CEO) got out of his conviction and his family got to keep some of their money.
EDIT: DO not EVER, EVER lose your username or password to the USPS,
https://reg.usps.com/entreg/LoginAction_input?
You can’t get it back, OR your address book.
Why would I have a username and password for USPS ?
I remember the time period where Congress was thinking about moving ALL email to USPS and giving them a nickle per email. Wow, what a boondoggle that would have become.
Like money, electricity is fungible.
Sheesh, where have you been for the past decade or so? (In the US, anyway; I think that most of the world, with fewer lawyers needing to make an honest living*, is less insane in this respect.)
Several such claims have been made. I’d like to see the numbers, preferably in a spreadsheet where we can examine and play with the assumptions and other numbers and the equations. I’ll bet that no one really knows, because most of the numbers will be guesstimates.
@SteveF said: I’ll bet that no one really knows, because most of the numbers will be guesstimates.
Au contraire, I have it on reliable first hand knowledge that the DOE has the real numbers, no guesstimates, and they are buried deep and will never see the light of day. But you didn’t hear that from me.
No one really wants to know. To do so would make the heads of the greenies explode and no one wants that much toxic residue dumped on society.
The heads or the brains? Their heads are very large, no doubt swollen with self-esteem and pus. Their brains are very small, and the explosions wouldn’t be a major problem. I mean, yah, yuck, but no worse than a popped zit on the bathroom mirror.
I’m off tomorrow with MrsAtoz to Milwaukee. Two days ago n WI then drive to Des Moines. I fly back to Vegas Monday, MrsAtoz stays the week training. Let the socio-emotional learning begin!
It’s possible, I suppose.
I’ve never seen raw US Govt environmental data that I recall, except for historical temperature data, which was cooked, lied about, and hidden for political purposes. I have seen some of the electrical production and usage data which was fed to the government decades ago, but those data were processed and summarized and aggregated and the private industry analysts who were using the numbers for forecasts didn’t really believe them but had nothing else to go by. I have seen some of the data going into US Govt economic numbers, and the input is bullshit and the processing by DOL and others is bullshit and the output is bullshit. Given all that, I don’t and won’t have a whole lot of faith in any “honest injun” numbers going into or out of the the federal government, not unless I see it myself as well as the audit trail leading to the numbers.
[snip] ahem* gently massaged numbers [snip]
I remember when that was called Information Kinesiology …
@SteveF said: It’s possible, I suppose.
As in many gooberment agencies there are two set of “books”. The set will the real facts will never be seen by anyone in the public and only a very few in the Legislative Branch. Even the type of security clearance to see much of this stuff is not to be discussed or even known.
A lot of the Kalifornia cities we work in have campers, trucks, vans parked along roadsides near downtown. The “migrants” live there since housing is to costly and living way out of town is a tough commute to clean toilets and such. Until the PoPo boot them. They just move to the next street over where people haven’t complained yet.
Austin is getting there, but Kalifornia has the added problem of being a kind of mystical promised land for wealthy Mainland Chinese.
Sooner or later, CA will have to adopt mandatory occupancy laws and taxes on foreign buyers similar to Vancouver, BC and Toronto. Density ringing the Bay will also have to go way up.
Sean Hannity just called Cosby evil and manipulative. Hannity said that 52 women are now accusing him of rape. Hannity’s call screener talked about getting rufied by her boyfriend in her twenties.
Hannity is the next Fox host to go. Right now, the Murdochs don’t have anyone on the bench.
Cosby will appeal his conviction unto the end of time. And if he dies during the appeal, his conviction is automatically overturned. That is how Ken Lay (Enron CEO) got out of his conviction and his family got to keep some of their money.
I thought Kenny Boy died in prison.
Cosby will appeal his conviction unto the end of time. And if he dies during the appeal, his conviction is automatically overturned. That is how Ken Lay (Enron CEO) got out of his conviction and his family got to keep some of their money.
I thought Kenny Boy died in prison.
“Lay died on July 5, 2006, while vacationing in Colorado.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Lay
“On October 17, 2006 his conviction was overturned due to abatement ab initio, a legal doctrine which says the death of a defendant during an appeal vacates the conviction.”
-eyes rolling- Yah, I’m familiar with the BS surrounding the names of clearance levels. I had one of those myself, ages agone — nominally (and publicly) Top Secret, colloquially “higher than the President’s”, officially … well, can’t talk about it. Even the abbreviation of the clearance level was classified (Confidential, IIRC), the name was Secret, and the description of what the clearance level entailed was Top Secret. Sort of like turtles all the way down, this secrecy business is bullshit all the way down.
Suffice it to say, I don’t have a clearance now. Even if my wife weren’t one of those heathen Chinese Commie bastards .. er, wait, are the Chinese a threat to national security today, or are they our dear friends and partners? I might have gotten lost a turn or two ago. Anyway, even discounting my possibly Commie Chinese Bastard wife, the evolution of my political philosophy renders me a poor risk for safeguarding the secrets of the government and especially of the government functionaries. I view their activities with distrust, which is the worst possible sin.
“DEMOCRATS CAVE: Mike Pompeo CONFIRMED as Secretary of State”
https://www.hannity.com/media-room/democrats-cave-mike-pompeo-confirmed-as-secretary-of-state/
Sweet ! Now our new Secretary of State can go waterboard the crazies all over the planet starting with that wacko in North Korea.
Love it all above. I feel so much at home here!
Got some ‘ludes and fentanyl and on my way up to Motel 6 in Hollyweird now.
I’m waiting for the Progturdians to screech about the Korean presidents meeting. “OBOLA DID THAT”. President tRump’s legacy is already exceeding Obola’s.
Oh, puh-lease. A good bowel movement exceeds Obowma’s legacy. Hell, a shart exceeds Obowma’s legacy.
Of interest to Nick:
Get rid of those traps and poison, Nick, and get you an owl.
“Lay died on July 5, 2006, while vacationing in Colorado.”
Skate! OTOH, Kenny Boy was amateur hour compared to the Oompa-Loompa who ran Countrywide Mortgage or Bernie Ebbers, the gym coach turned telecom mogul.
I think Netflix has “The Smartest Guys In The Room”.
Get rid of those traps and poison, Nick, and get you an owl.
I KNEW you were a Potter fan!
Heh. I read the first five books to my sons, by which point the kids read well enough to not need me and they were so old and mature that they didn’t want me reading to them at bedtime. The first one was a good children’s story but they declined rapidly until book 5 was crap. Books 6 and 7 were reportedly even worse, though a number of people think that Rowling didn’t write them herself so that could explain it.
I also read a number of Harry Potter fanfictions. About ten years ago I was helping a number of teens from China and Korea with their English, specifically their writing. Every one of them had written a Harry Potter fanfiction and sent it to me for critique. Each story used much the same tropes. Each story was godawful, though when scaled for the authors being around 15, maybe they were merely bad. My remit was to critique their English word usage, colloquialisms, and such, but they also wanted my opinion of their stories as stories. I hadn’t yet figured out how to tell someone “this really really sucks” without crushing their egos or discouraging from ever writing again. (In fact, I’m still struggling with that but now I edit almost only adults’ work so I’m less concerned about it.)
The first one was a good children’s story but they declined rapidly until book 5 was crap. Books 6 and 7 were reportedly even worse, though a number of people think that Rowling didn’t write them herself so that could explain it.
Blasphemer ! I enjoyed all seven ! And the eight movies.
And yes, 5, 6, and 7 were incredibly dark. I would not give them to a pre-teen.
There is a new ‘data privacy’ law, called GDPR, that will apply to everyone on this site. It requires the site to notify you if any potentially personal information (like your name/email in comments, or for analytics) is stored on the site. Compliance is required by 28 May 2018, and has hefty fines that can be levied.
GDPR applies to any site that collects info, even if hosted in non-EU countries. Since this site uses analytics, and collects your name/email if you comment, the site has to comply with the policy.
So, you might see some changes come up as I try various ways to comply with the policy. There may be a ‘ok’ box before you see (any) content, and the comment and contact forms will have an additional checkbox to acknowledge that it is OK to store your personal information.
In addition, there must be a way to allow people to ‘un-allow’ their personal information. Still figuring this out – there’s all sorts of advice on the googles, and some of it is wrong. I think there will be a process to allow you to remove your user profile, and then that will delete your personal information. But you will still need to consent to the use of cookies, since we use those for analytics. And you will have to re-enter user/email on comment forms.
So, changes afoot here. But we have to comply, even though we are not EU-based. We have EU commenters here. And I suspect that there will be “GDPR Trolls’ that will be looking for (and suing) sites that are not compliant.
I’m testing the tools on one of my test sites, but will also be installing it here….and on all the other sites I manage. Enabling all required aspects of GDPR compliance will protect the owners – and admins – of the sites from massive fines and legal issues.
The Great Horned Owls in our extended neighborhood are teaching their babies to fly now. They are incredibly noisy in the middle of the night, you can hear them hooting two blocks away. They move 3 or 4 houses each night when they don’t have babies.
Rick, I don’t suppose GDPR requirements could be satisfied by an invitation for the Brussels Bureaucratic Boneheads to confiscate the site’s entire ad income? Or for them to pucker up and smooch a goat’s back end?
Seriously, what stick do they think they hold to enforce compliance from Barbara or you?
@SteveF . regarding GDPR enforcement….there are some pretty hefty fines that can be levied against a site owner (and probably the admins). Take a look here.
Fines up to 10-20 million Euros can be levied, apparently against the site owner. The ‘site owner’ would be the owner of the domain.
And that doesn’t take into account the legal fees that would be involved. Which is why I expect to be reading about ‘GDPR Trolls’ that will be looking for sites to sue.
Ahh, ‘ludes. Wish they’d come back. Or at least Seconal. I can NEVER sleep. I suppose I could figure out how to make chloral hydrate… Might have to ask RBT via a Ouija board.
RE: Harry Potter, Rowling should have sued the hell out of the American publishers. The Brit and Indian versions are full of really fun words, Latin, and jokes. The first book was _Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone_ which got dumbed down to _Harry Potter and the “Sorcerer’s” Stone_.
Sheesh.
I read them in UK versions, happily ordered from Amazon UK by my siblings. Didn’t notice anything special. The story is olde as tyme, with a couple of neat things added. DEF needed an editor with bells to prune it back as time passed. She did improve as a writer, so I think the later books are probably better written, but still… I resisted them for some time, finally caved, read them, enjoyed them a bit, then never re-read them. Didn’t re-read before the movie releases either. This is very unusual for me and marks a book that didn’t impress me.
On the plus side, I think reading is great and she brought millions back to reading for fun (or introduced millions to the idea.) That’s gotta count for something.
LOTS of stuff to talk about after spending a full day in classrooms. Don’t know how much it will make sense to share. BUSY tomorrow too, and all weekend, but I’ll try to find some time before I forget it all.
Now it’s off to bed. WIPED OUT. And half deafened.
n
John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.
@Rick – I’m kind of curious now. If I don’t permit commenting, and any data collection is done by a 3rd-party contractor (event registration) that is no more than a widget on my site, do I have anything to worry about?
I do have an events calendar that people MAY submit items to, which must be approved before posting. I’d probably have to do something there.
But as @SteveF points out – what can an EU regulation do to a US citizen that invites only local submissions and only approves local submissions?
On second thought, I may simply disallow any submission that comes from outside CONUS.
The USPS has a feature called Informed Delivery Daily Digest. They send you a daily email the contains scans of all the mail scheduled for delivery to your address. I don’t look at it very often, but I can see benefits in the future. Say, your mailman,er mail person, er mail xi, has a history of delivering mail to the wrong house. This could help track down that missing important letter/bill/mattress store flyer.
I discovered this feature by accident. I had a note on my door for attempted delivery of signature required letter. I went to the USPS site to try and request the letter be held so I could go pick it up. I was never able to successfully do that (according to the site), but the letter was waiting for me two days later at the post office with no repeat delivery attempts before that.
As I was posting above, I did a quick search to see if the xi gender I used was real or not. I went here. Oh my goodness. I knew the crazy was out there, especially after seeing it so much. But wow. We *are* doomed.
They also let you buy postage directly and print it at home. You can order any of the free or paid shipping supplies too.
n
“The USPS has a feature called Informed Delivery Daily Digest”
I posted about that here previously. For a LONG time, USPS has been scanning every envelop and recording addresses and returns (what the spy trade called a “cover” iirc). They have just found a way to make their universal surveillance data available to the public in this very limited way.
n
WRT USPS Informed Delivery Daily Digest (IDDD): You can also see which packages are “in the USPS System”, on the way, and schedule for delivery. The USPS is working up to showing scans of the package address labels. It shows everything coming to your mailbox, not just your name.
I get an email every day with my IDDD and I look at it. It has been informative and helpful for “flats” (letters), not so much for packages as the USPS site is only set up so that you can complain about missing letters.
But as @SteveF points out – what can an EU regulation do to a US citizen that invites only local submissions and only approves local submissions?
Well, if Obola was still Prez…Storm Troopers at your front door to collect your Euros.
@SteveF . regarding GDPR enforcement….there are some pretty hefty fines that can be levied against a site owner
John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.
Huh ?
And see what I mean can go wrong when the UN takes over the internet ?
On second thought, I may simply disallow any submission that comes from outside CONUS.
That is a lot easier said than done. I try to keep Cubans, North Koreans, Iranians (the most prevalent), and other baddies off my website. They come in through VPNs which are difficult to trace back. I do have a couple of tricks that I am not willing to divulge at this time.
But as @SteveF points out – what can an EU regulation do to a US citizen that invites only local submissions and only approves local submissions?
Hey, my business was having an active war with California for quite a while, almost a decade. I even had to bodily throw a California auditor out of my office in Sugar Land, TX. My business has customers in California but we do not have a presence. In fact, I even sued a company in California over copyright violations of our software but I had to hire a lawyer in California and file the suit there.
It is very difficult for someone to control someone else outside their controlled space.
In other words – I’m not really going to worry about the EU. No business and no presence there.
@Rick,
Do you have a good source for information about the GDPR?
@Dave, @JimL: there are tons of articles about GDPR, some are not very accurate. I just started looking at this yesterday, so am still figuring things out. The googles have lots of hits about it. You could start here: https://www.eugdpr.org/ .
But, not having ‘a business and presense’ in EU does not (IMHO) eliminate your need to make your site GDPR-compliant. If you collect any information (visitor tracking, hits, etc) on your site, then you need GDPR. If you use Google Analytics, you are gathering visitor information that is being submitted to a third-party (GA); then you need GDPR.
If you require a name and email address on comment or contact forms, then you need GDPR.
Doesn’t matter what kind of web site you have. If it is on the interwebs, then you need to be GDPR-compliant.
I forsee “GDPR Trolls” that will troll the interwebs looking for non-compliant sites, and then start legal proceedings (or just threats) against the site owner.
So, I will be adding GDPR stuff here and on all sites I own, even personal blogs, and sites that I manage (here, Barbara’s, Jerry’s, others). I think that any site owner needs to do the same, no matter what their ‘market’ is. Even if you don’t have EU visitors.
I’m working on a post on one of my personal blogs about this. Not ready yet, will take a couple of days. Will mention it here.
@Rick,
Thanks for the link.
GDPR: Let the over-regulating begin.
Those in control of the intertubes don’t want to be accused of censorship so they will just regulate away what they don’t like. It all sounds so innocent and helpful; protecting peoples privacy, stopping bullying, preventing the spread of lies….. all with ever growing price tags for implementation or non-compliance. Eventually only the big, well financed, and very PC sites will remain.
These are the good old days. We will look back and reminisce about the days when, for few bucks, you could set up a site and say whatever the heck you wanted. As JEP used to say “despair is a sin”.
I don’t collect web stats or track anyone. My host provides stats and I thought that was how the internet works. I suppose they can change what I can see.
The DuckDuckGo Privacy add-on for Firefox says /this/ site has no tracking.
If you can’t require a name and email address on a comment form, how exactly is one to control spammer and troll comment bots? Moderate every post?
On a contact form, without an e-mail address how can one reply to a question?
I’m not going to worry about this.
@JLP’s right. These are the good old days.
I look forward to Rick’s blog post. Better to be informed than not.
+ a lot to JLP.
@paul: the way that I understand GDPR: if you (or even your hosting place) collects any information, then GDPR applies to you. And your site may use cookies that identify the visitor.
So, you may need GDPR, whether you like it or not. Your choice, of course, on whether to implement.
I’ve found a pretty easy way to do it. There will be more details posted about it here.
It’s a historical quote. Look it up.
Gotcha:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
I am reading a book about a woman who walked the Trail of Tears at age 5 in 1831. I did not realize that the trail was 1,000 to 2,000+ miles long. Not a pleasant time in our nation’s history.
Ok Rick. If my site uses cookies, I don’t know how that happens. The whole pile o’ shit other than a few pages is done in notepad. Because Dreamweaver 2 made sloppy code just this side towards compliant from the shit you see from pages made in MS Word.
Sure, DreamHost has stats. I suppose they can block me from seeing where visitors come from. I think it is interesting to see I had 60 visitors from Russia yesterday. Or from Germany, or Poland.
But. No one from Russia, etc has ever used my contact form.
I’m very interested in your details.
I got it.
It’s a historical quote. Look it up.
I got it.
I think that everyone in here but me actually paid attention in their grade school classes. Me, I snuck a SF book in and sat in the back row. I think that I got every fourth word of lecture, if that much. But the SF books were awesome and grade schools had great libraries of SF books. Of course, I went to HISD (Houston Independent School District) for 7th thru 9th grades. All I had to do was make a cursory pass through the textbook for each class and made straight A’s. The parents actually thought I was smart. Then they put me in Northwest Academy (on Ella at 610) for 10th – 11th. There was some serious competition there and I routinely got my clock cleaned.
Jackson’s quote was not covered in my formal schooling, I’m almost positive. The Trail of Tears was mentioned but only briefly — I was in public school long enough ago that constant wailing and rending of garments at the Teh Most Racistest Country Evah was not a major part of the curriculum.
Regarding men in schools, when I was in public school, 1970s and early 80s, there were very few men even then. In grade school (about 60 kids per grade in two classrooms each, except that kindergarten was three or four smaller classes) the principal and one of the 6th grade teachers were men, as were the two custodians/groundskeepers/boiler operators. The other 19 or so adults were women. The numbers weren’t quite so skewed in upper years, but still very far off from providing working male examples. When my daughter was in kindergarten, her only year in public school, SFAIK the elementary school had one male custodian and one (very elderly) male security guard and every adult was a woman.
Re cookies: I found one site that purports to check if a site is using cookies: http://www.cookie-checker.com/ . But it only checks the main domain of the site, not any pages. So this place doesn’t show the use of cookies with that checker.
But, I know that this place does use cookies. You can tell by opening up the Developer Tools in your browser (usually F12). Looking at that, I see that there are 8 cookies set/in use on these pages. Some are local (‘1st party’), and some are ‘third-party’ (like Google Analytics). But they are there.
If you have a site that has no cookies, then perhaps GDPR is not needed. But I think there are few sites that meet that criteria. See the post that will be published soon here about this whole thing.
Finally, a use for the F12 key.
It’s all code to me.
:scratching head: