Cold. Damp. [47F and 99%RH, possibly]
I did get some stuff done yesterday. Beautiful weather for outdoor work. Bright overcast, shirt sleeves temps, not dripping wet.
I cut the grass and leaves, blew the debris, cleaned up some corners of the yard. I refilled the fish pond. Then I washed my Expedition. That took a few hours. I ended up scraping every inch with a credit card to get the pine sap and road tar off. I started out to just get the sap off the roof before I install my rack, since it will eat the paint, and I won’t be able to easily get to it after the rack goes on.
Well…. that took a bit, and I ended up doing the same treatment to the whole vehicle when I saw how damaged the paint on the roof was getting. I only wash the vehicles a few times a year so I was due. Perfect light and temps to wash a vehicle, but DANG that thing is big.
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Apparently some celebrities were in town at our local mega-church. I was listening to the scanner when the event ended. Nothing much to hear, but our Special Response Group was out there working, and LOTS of other cops too. Wonder who paid for all that?
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In other news, the Secret Service Threat Assessment Center released a report about “Targeted School Violence” that is worth a read if the subject interests you, or you end up debating gun control would-be tyrants. https://www.secretservice.gov/data/protection/ntac/usss-analysis-of-targeted-school-violence.pdf At least read the Executive Summary. They admit that outside law enforcement really can’t respond and that it has to be addressed before it starts. Their recommendation is essentially closely evaluating kids and deciding if there are causes for concern, and then DOING SOMETHING to help the kid. That sounds awesome, except for all the surveillance, investigation, data gathering, and dossiers.
And then, you actually have to do something, and it has to be effective…
“Four attackers in this study (11%) were referred to their school’s threat assessment team prior to their attack. In each of these four cases, a student or teacher at the school reported to someone in a position of authority that the attacker had made a direct threat toward classmates or school staff”
In the first 4 cases, the teams either didn’t think the threat merited investigation, or thought the threat minimal. For the kid who was referred a second time, they took it seriously enough to expel him for 3 weeks, but let him BACK IN for the next semester. All 4 kids went on to attack their school within a year or two.
Bullying or being bullied is another indicator/precursor the just doesn’t get addressed….
“WHO KNEW ABOUT THE BULLYING: From case-to-case, there were differences among who was aware of the bullying
experienced by the attacker. In almost half of the cases (n = 16, 46%), at least one of the attacker’s parents was
aware that their child experienced bullying. In 16 cases (46%) a classmate was aware, and in 12 cases (34%) a school
official was aware. In five cases (14%), there was evidence that all three groups knew that bullying was taking place”
Go and read the whole thing if you’re interested. It’s a big bucket of fail.
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With that cheery thought, I’m getting ready to send my kids out the door and start my day.
n
You should be using clay to do that process to avoid damaging the paint. The detailing clay works wonders to get sap and other stuff off a vehicle finish. Probably easier than using a credit card.
I’ve got a clay bar somewhere, but I wasn’t impressed last time I used it. Really it’s just sandpaper in an easy to hold form. The card only catches on stuff that sticks up. The pine sap is like hardened gorilla glue, kind of yellow and brittle. I did pretreat with Maguire’s soap and tar/bug remover. You can see discoloration in the paint where drips sat for a while.
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“All the victims were “Asian males” between 25 and 35 years old”
Hmmm, someone shot up a party in Cali, the gun free paradise. 10 shot, 4 dead. No one knows why, or what the attacker(s) looked like. CNN coverage is bizarre. Weird music, golden voiced interviews, and heavy emphasis on the “family” gathering. Gotta get local coverage to know that they were ‘asian’ and that there was another shooting at a home in the same area too. Hmm.
added- of course going outside the US media gets you more informative coverage, with the Daily Mail headline “Four Asian men are killed and six others are injured after gunman sneaks into a family’s backyard and opens fire ‘in targeted shooting’ as dozens watched a football game” giving more information than the whole CNN package. And add in this- “Motive for the killing is unclear but police said ‘somebody picked that house'” and a picture starts to develop.
Look at the Fresno crime map, and it shows a bunch of weapons violations and assaults in the surrounding area too.
n
added–of course “Reid said it was unclear how many perpetrators had been involved in the shooting and said there was no initial indication that the incident was gang-related.
. . .
‘We are praying for peace and calmas we continue to investigate. My thoughts are with the victims and their families,’ he said. ”
–why the prayers for peace and calm if there is no gang involvement?
n
Our car gets washed once per year, whether it needs it or not 🙂 The garage does that, when the car goes in for the annual service.
– – –
School shootings, and “doing something”. That involves collecting a lot of data on essentially everyone, and magically picking out the true fruitcakes. We all know how much dumb stuff teenagers say. The chances of finding the one who actually means it? Nonexistent. Trying to do it, you’re going to mess up the lives of a lot of innocents along the way.
If there is a solution to violence, it is to fix the underlying societal issues. That takes generations, of course, and people want “quick fixes”.
1. Cut back on prescription of SSRIs and speed to teens, especially boys.
– If you look into it, you’ll see that the vast majority of white teens who shot up schools were on prescribed drugs.
2. Following divorce or parental separation, give custody of boys to the father unless there is a compelling reason not to.
– If you look into it, you’ll find that the vast majority of school shooters were raised by single mothers.
– There’s good evidence that daughters do better when raised by their fathers than by their mothers, but that’s not relevant to ending school shootings.
3. Do something about blacks and hispanics in the US, mainly the boys and men under age 35.
– A significant fraction of “school shootings” are more accurately characterized gang violence taking place near a school.
– As has often been said, the US doesn’t have a gun violence problem, it has a black violence problem. Ditto for hispanics; their gun violence, violence in general, and crime in general rates have been climing in recent years until they’re around the same as those for blacks.
– I don’t have a concrete suggestion for this problem, as suggested by the “do something”. Deportation, mutilation, enslavement, or death would solve the specific problem of out-of-control gangs of lifetime violent criminals but would cause social problems which might be worse than the problem they solve.
Drudge has the shooting on the left side in little, non-red print. Top of the page is, of course, TTTTTRRRRRUUUUMMMMPPPPP! Get him! Who cares if a bunch of Asians were killed. If a WHITEY! shooter comes out, then top of the page.
Geez the MSM sucks.
tRrump makes an unannounced stop at Walter Reed = tRUMPS GONNA RESIGN AND USE HEALTH AS AN EXCUSE TO AVOID IMPEACHMENT!
Hummmm, just realized I can’t move comments from post to post anymore…..
I put some links in comments on yesterday’s post.
n
tRrump makes an unannounced stop at Walter Reed = tRUMPS GONNA RESIGN AND USE HEALTH AS AN EXCUSE TO AVOID IMPEACHMENT!
Didn’t he give a soldier an award while at Walter Reed this weekend?
With DC traffic, who wants to make two trips?
On the final run up to our retirement move. Most of the house is packed up and in the garage waiting for me to bring over a big uhaul truck Saturday. I have engaged help from church members to load it up. Still have 2 small rooms to pack.
Wife is in surgery right now having a fistula put in her leg. He veins are too small for the normal arm location as we discovered this summer. I will finish packing while she recuperates. Thanksgiving week is the big move. Fingers crossed Murphy doesn’t show up.
My question for them, “Has the donald EVER walked away from a fight?” cuz I can’t recall when he might have.
Yeah, he’s just tired of being the most important man in the whole world. Can’t wait to have all the burdens without any of the perks….
n
“Trump will resign to avoid impeachment” is surrounded by the same marijuana smoke as “Trump is going to drop out of the race any day now. He doesn’t want to be President, he’s just running to gratify his ego. Any day now…”
“The Supreme Court will hear Google and Oracle’s nearly decade-long copyright fight”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20946398/oracle-google-java-copyright-lawsuit-trial-supreme-court-request
“Oracle has claimed for years that Google’s Android operating system is built on stolen code from the Java software platform. Google argues that it fairly developed its own alternative to Java code. Lower courts have sided with Google, but the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned their decisions multiple times. It’s concluded that companies can copyright application programming interface (API) packages, which are vital to making different software programs work together, and prevent other companies from using them commercially without a license.”
This is important for the future of software development. If SCOTUS agrees with the Federal Appeals Court on copyright then software developers will have to get permission and pay for every software product built on something else.
My question for them, “Has the donald EVER walked away from a fight?” cuz I can’t recall when he might have.
Yes. His casino(s) in Atlantic City.
Didn’t he take the money and run? ie. some bankruptcy, some sold to the next sucker?
n
Getting out of the Atlantic City casino business looks pretty good now….
n
This is important for the future of software development. If SCOTUS agrees with the Federal Appeals Court on copyright then software developers will have to get permission and pay for every software product built on something else.
My personal theory about the case is that if SCOTUS agrees with the appeals court on Java then IBM suddenly becomes the most valuable company on the planet as it could then arguably move to collect royalties on every IBM PC clone ever made from the mid-80s to now.
I’ve discussed the theory with a couple of patent lawyers over the last decade, and the discussions always turned serious as the lawyers realized the implications of an Oracle victory and what that would mean for IBM and the BIOS API. Neither lawyer dismissed my idea outright.
“Thousands of Disney+ accounts already hacked: What to do” By Paul Wagenseil
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/thousands-of-disney-accounts-already-hacked-what-to-do
“Brisk trade in stolen accounts online”
Well, that was predictable.
This is important for the future of software development. If SCOTUS agrees with the Federal Appeals Court on copyright then software developers will have to get permission and pay for every software product built on something else.
My personal theory about the case is that if SCOTUS agrees with the appeals court on Java then IBM suddenly becomes the most valuable company on the planet as it could then arguably move to collect royalties on every IBM PC clone ever made from the mid-80s to now.
I’ve discussed the theory with a couple of patent lawyers over the last decade, and the discussions always turned serious as the lawyers realized the implications of an Oracle victory and what that would mean for IBM and the BIOS API. Neither lawyer dismissed my idea outright.
Yup, my worries exactly.
BTW, SCOTUS has ruled on this already. Hopefully they will not reverse their ruling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int%27l,_Inc.
BTW, SCOTUS has ruled on this already. Hopefully they will not reverse their ruling.
Quattro had a much more efficient calculation engine than Lotus, even more so than Excel, and the spreadsheet, unlike Borland’s word processor, Sprint, had started to get traction in the US marketplace because it was mucher cheaper than the competition, not copy protected, and … emulated the Lotus keystroke commands!
(People forget that every Lotus 123 diskette was copy protected with a laser process which burned a magnetic dead spot at strategic locations on the media, forcing every user to have a copy of the physical disk. More so than anything Microsoft did, this was probably what ultimately did in the company IMHO. Excel sucked well into the Windows 3.1 era.)
Sadly, the Supreme Court decision did not arrive in time to save Phillipe Khan’s job, but he went on to invent the camera phone. Maybe you’ve heard of it. 🙂
From @Brad yesterday:
Medicaid-for-all? Thankfully I was out of the US before Obamacare hit, but from what I hear from y’all, Medicaid-for-all would be better than what you have now. Obamacare seems to be the worst of both worlds: All the bureaucracy and scamming inherent in insurance companies that have turned into parasites. Plus paying for the care of all the people who cannot afford to pay themselves.
Unpopular opinion: Since there seems to be zero chance of going back to a free market system, maybe free government health care is the best you can do. Certainly better than what you have now. It at least gets rid of the crazy insurance bureaucracy.
In the UK, precisely because everyone is covered by the NHS, the government is pretty hands-off with private insurance. There’s a pretty healthy, competitive private marketplace at work. Which means, in a sense, the best of both worlds. You can pay your taxes and take your chances – mostly long waiting times. Or you can pay for better service, through private insurance and private clinics. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it’s not a bad compromise.
You know, I would like to think that a Single Payer system (Medicare For All ™) which rapidly becomes a Single Provider would be the fix for our nasty situation here. But, the devil is in the details and we know what JEP thought about bureaucracies. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, any one ?
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Lee Iacocca is spinning in his grave.
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2019/11/17/20967565/ford-mustang-mach-e-electric-suv-specs-price-la-auto-show-2019
Getting out of the Atlantic City casino business looks pretty good now….
Yes, it turned out to be a good decision on Trump’s part. I gather that he wrote off his entire value of the investment for him and his partners at the present value of the investment. That is stretching USA tax law but, he has very good tax lawyers. I would have written off the investment for the actual cash that I had invested in the project. I suspect that his present value was 10X that of the actual cash investment.
The man makes good decisions most of the time. We could do worse as a nation. For instance, President AOC will not make good decisions. Nor President Bernie or President Warren.
Lee Iacocca is spinning in his grave.
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2019/11/17/20967565/ford-mustang-mach-e-electric-suv-specs-price-la-auto-show-2019
Why ? You have been able to buy a four door mustang in down under (Australia) for over 20 years. Who cares what the means of moving down the road are ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Falcon_(Australia)
From @Geoff yesterday:
The chemo ran £500 or so ($650, approx.) from research I’ve done. How much the surgery and subsequent hospital stay came to, I have no idea. I suspect that, in America, I’d be on the hook for $50,000, at least, and/or $500 a month insurance premiums.
Just as an example.
Try $500,000 for a years worth of cancer surgery and chemo treatments. And $750/month for health insurance with a $5,000 deductible/year plus another $5,000/year copays.
“First victim from Fresno shooting is identified as popular Hmong singer as police say there has been an increase of gang violence among the local southeast Asian community
Xy Lee was among four men killed at the home in Fresno, California, on Sunday
He was a popular Hmong singer with a large following on YouTube
He and 15 other men were in the backyard when two shooters appeared
Four people were killed and six were injured; the gunmen escaped on foot
Police say there has been an ‘uptick’ of gang violence in the community
They do not yet know if it is the cause of Sunday’s shooting but a task force designated to tackling gang violence in the area is being set up ”
–anyone surprised if this turns out to be the case?
Oh, once again, I encourage anyone who would avoid trouble to stay away from walmart. It’s not safe in their parking lot, or their stores.
n
You know, I would like to think that a Single Payer system (Medicare For All ™) which rapidly becomes a Single Provider would be the fix for our nasty situation here. But, the devil is in the details and we know what JEP thought about bureaucracies. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, any one ?
JEP was also a fan of Kaiser, something which worked fine for him, but an organization I watched kill one friend and nearly kill another back in Vantucky.
HillaryCare and whatever replaces Obamacare will not make what Progs consider to be the fatal “mistake” of the UK system — allowing for alternatives. Well, except for Congresscritters.
Several companies pulled that little stunt. No diskette, software no run. Annoying as everything. The arrival of the luggable computer heralded the demise of that scheme. People would travel and forget their diskette and could not use the software away from the office. There were supposedly some ways around using software that faked a disk drive but never tried any.
I remember WordPerfect well. Used it a lot. No copy protection. Call in for support and were never asked for verification of ownership. Did not seem to help as it died on the vine.
Back then none of MS’s software was copy protected. It did not seem to hurt their sales. Companies wanted to stay legal because not doing so would result in big problems. Home use by people that took the Word, Excel and other home did not seem to hurt MS. Lot of companies with big licenses also have the option to let people take copies home for home use. Get people hooked and used to the software.
We lived in the UK 1995 to 2001 and had terrible experience with the NHS whose incompetence I blame for my wife’s advanced diabetes. Our assigned physician couldn’t speak English and we could only see him when a translator was available which wasn’t often. I was never told of any insurance options and was getting about 90k (sterling) per anum. Most physicians I saw advised me to go back to the US for decent treatments. Leaving the UK for hong Kong was a breath of fresh air. Doctors who spoke english, called and emailed you to see how things were going, and the latest high tech equipment. The hospitals were better than anything in the UK or even the USA and the private insurance was very affordable.
On the final run up to our retirement move. Most of the house is packed up and in the garage waiting for me to bring over a big uhaul truck Saturday. I have engaged help from church members to load it up. Still have 2 small rooms to pack.
Wife is in surgery right now having a fistula put in her leg. He veins are too small for the normal arm location as we discovered this summer. I will finish packing while she recuperates. Thanksgiving week is the big move. Fingers crossed Murphy doesn’t show up.
Good luck on your move and prayers for your wife. Sounds like she is really having a tough year.
I am having a total blast rebuilding our new used house. NOT ! The shower that we are rebuilding into an ADA shower for the daughter just had my wife call the dudes back to put the wall tile 8 ft up instead of the 7 ft up they did. We agreed to 8 ft, not 7 ft. And the tile guys left tile chunks all over the front yard.
And the water main pipe to the new used house broke Saturday. My plumber just fixed it. The home owners warranty did not cover the broken pipe since it was not in the foundation or a wall.
And the interior painting is going splendidly now that the wife and I agree on the wood trim and kitchen cabinet color. The painters are repainting all of the wood again with EXTRA WHITE. They used a paint before that dried to an off-white yellow after two days. I expect an argument when I get their bill. I will pay a certain amount extra but not much.
ADD: I am hoping for our move to the new used house around Dec 10. We would then have the old house recarpeted and painted, maybe listed on Jan 2, 2020.
HK hospitals are (or were) not required to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, IIRC. I haven’t read about health insurance laws in HK, but knowing what I do about British administration there, I’ll bet it bore no semblance to the “health insurance” mess in the US.
Why ? You have been able to buy a four door mustang in down under (Australia) for over 20 years. Who cares what the means of moving down the road are ?
A Mustang is a coupe, has rear wheel drive IC engine drivetrain, and is a mass market car in base models. Anything else isn’t a Mustang, especially not an EV.
Ford gave serious thought to a four door Mustang in the US 20 years ago, but wiser heads prevailed and that vehicle became the Lincoln LS semi-disaster.
The current D2C Mustang is the only vehicle Ford builds on the platform. The non-stop rumor on the Ford grapevine is that the new Crown Vic will go on that drivetrain, but nothing else is actually in production right now.
I think the Crown Vic is what I saw shrouded and rolling around in Chicago in March.
Going to call a lawyer to file a civil suit just as soon as I finish this post.
My son was calling a medical/health insurance company to get some information and he was asked what his gender was. Why does that matter, male, female, transing from m to f, or transing from f to m? What about his privacy and his constitutional right to non-speech?
Someplace or other had a report recently about problems starting in Britain because apparently patients are registered as male or female, whichever they prefer. So biological (ie, real) women are not scheduled for breast or cervical exams and are scheduled for prostate exams. Vice versa for biological (ie, real) men.
My son was calling a medical/health insurance company to get some information and he was asked what his gender was.
If you are young female then they charge more because, babies.
If you are a older male then they charge more because, guys have heart issues in their 50s.
Medicare has it’s own crazy bureaucracy – it is a form of insurance.
” it is a form of insurance”
–not if they can’t charge differing rates based on differing risk.
–not if they can’t decline to cover a person.
It is a prepaid discount plan at best.
n
I lived in CA the first 60 years of my life (mostly), and had Kaiser as the medial plan while working for a local government agency. Had no problems with the care and coverage there.
I liked their advice book, which told you what to do for any type of ailment. And they had ‘advice nurses’ that you could call with concerns that would determine the need for a visit and make the appointments. They would often just ease your mind; your issue didn’t always require a visit/appointment.
So my experience with Kaiser in CA was just fine. I had no major medical issues, except when I started having atrial fibrillation problems (probably brought on by undiagnosed sleep apnea prior to that). Lots of visits to the ER during an afib episode; good care there. Eventually got that under control with various drugs over the year. And a CPAP (since the 1990’s) ever since.
So, no complaints with Kaiser. Currently in WA, and coverage is through Humana + Medicare. No complaints here, either. YMMV.
Back then none of MS’s software was copy protected. It did not seem to hurt their sales. Companies wanted to stay legal because not doing so would result in big problems. Home use by people that took the Word, Excel and other home did not seem to hurt MS. Lot of companies with big licenses also have the option to let people take copies home for home use. Get people hooked and used to the software.
Once clones rolled in, copy protection involving a PC diskette mechanism not blessed by IBM made the loading process unreliable.
Microsoft ate huge losses from Office for years until it finally gained critical mass in the early 90s. Finally, the key to their dominance was Word *.doc file compatibility, especially Word 6.0. I doubt even Microsoft could reverse engineer the spaghetti C code that reads those files to write a coherent spec at this point.
So, no complaints with Kaiser. Currently in WA, and coverage is through Humana + Medicare. No complaints here, either. YMMV.
Yup. YMMV.
The irony of our friends’ experience in Vantucky is that’s where Kaiser Health got its start.
Takes a while to get started but has some interesting thoughts that put concepts to things you might have already noticed.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-social-economics-of-wokeness.html
Even I’m not cynical enough to have fully articulated this.
n
I doubt even Microsoft could reverse engineer the spaghetti C code that reads those files to write a coherent spec at this point.
But by golly, that code is FAST.
And all production code by version 3 of a successful software program is spaghetti code.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
Speaking of “wokeness”:
Creepy New Sprite Commercial Sells Transgenderism and Breast Binding, Not Soda
That basically describes most C (or C++) programs after six months have passed. Those languages are what I tend to call “Write Once Languages”.
But the crown is taken by Assembly code most of which is “Tried to Write Once Code”:-)
“Tried to Write Once Code”:-)
—Winner!
n
I am guessing you never had to write in machine code, enter into memory using set switches, examine the memory twice, then lose power and have to start over. Assembly was a minor miracle as was punch tape. But I date myself.
Ray, I am a tad younger.
Started with a COBOL course (B500) just before finishing High School and that determined I went for “Systems Analysis” at Uni instead of going for Engineering.
Played around with Assembly on a Timex Sinclair (Z80).
Started working with COBOL on first year of Uni and by third year I got a decent job and started with Assembly on an IBM 360. Big joint. Had access to IBM internals information. I did a system that read from floppies and sent jobs to Job Entry Subsystem(JES). That was a million times more cost effective than starting Jobs using punched cards.
And Just to mark the end of my Assembly interactions, that was on Intel ‘286s and ‘386’s.
IBMs 360 architecture was waaaay better than the “newer” Intel and all it’s cumbersome limitations (For a start: You can only use this particular register this particular way and only using this particular instruction – and how few of those…). Never got to x64. By then the Visual thingies were miles ahead of trying to get Windows programs running in Windows 3.0.
Nowadays? Visual Basic and not for paid work. (Almost) All the power and flexibility of C# but with mostly readable code.
I am guessing you never had to write in machine code, enter into memory using set switches, examine the memory twice, then lose power and have to start over. Assembly was a minor miracle as was punch tape. But I date myself.
I used to have to take some of our Fortran code, compile it to assembly language, fix the bad jump instructions, and then compile to machine language. I took those four ??? subroutines out of our general build and always built them by hand only when I had to. That was the first 80386 compiler for the PC from NDP. And yes, we required the 80387 chip.
On good coding practise… I worked on an IBM cheque image processing system, which, for performance had a lot of IBM Assembly code. The system in operation was having performance issues, and I was asked to comment on why. I suspected a user exit routine, so asked the technical support group to print out the user exit for me to look at (written in Assembly). I had NO experience with Assembly, but the user exit was beautifully commented, which enabled me to understand the logic and confirm this was the cause of the problem and to recommend changes to facilitate the necessary performance improvements. I had the highest respect for those developers.
My belief in well documented code was sustained by that experience.
Paul
But by golly, that code is FAST.
And all production code by version 3 of a successful software program is spaghetti code.
From what I understand from people in the club with key access to Microsoft’s source code, the Word *.doc processing code is *serious* spaghetti, involving gotos and global variables. It could be much faster on modern CPUs, but the regression testing would be someone’s career. Office is already career suicide at Microsoft, and testing is the over-40 ghetto in Seattle tech companies which few people ever escape.
(I walked out of my only job in four years in WA when it turned out I was tricked into a testing role. Some things are worse than unemployment.)
As I’ve written before, I think languages have reached an evolutionary dead end in terms of performance. Facebook probably has the right idea optimizing at runtime.
The epitome of “write once” languages is APL. No contest.
Code can be easier to read and understand if you enforce strict standards on commenting. We did this at one of my jobs and I could generally figure out someone else’s code in a reasonable time. All bug fixes were documented with a pointer to the bug report. Even assembler was done this way so you could figure out what was done.