Sat. Oct. 16, 2021 – trying to sleep late…

By on October 16th, 2021 in culture, decline and fall, ebay, WuFlu

Cooler and windy. Should blow any rain and overcast right the heck out of here, but – say it with me – we’ll see. Yesterday we got some rain at the house, but it was after I’d left on my errands. I went north, and missed the rain entirely. It was almost dry by the time I got back here. Had to ask the family if they got wet.

Houston micro-climates. Someone is getting rain when there is rain in the forecast. It just probably won’t be everybody.

Wind picked up around 8pm and has been blowing stuff around since.

After I did my auction pickup, some storage cases for ‘tools’, I hit a thrift I don’t usually have a chance to shop. It’s run by the LDS church, called “Deseret Industries”, and it’s really nice. They have a ton of staff, nice stuff, and it’s well organized. I hit their ‘outdoor section’ and scored. Camping stuff, hooray. Thermarest pad, two old school open frame back packs, coleman lantern for a buck, inflatable kayak and paddle for $10, some other small camping stuff, real RollerBlade knee, elbow, and wrist protectors for a couple of bucks each, times two…crazy good prices on the stuff. Indoors, the prices were fair to a bit high for most things, but still a third below ebay. They just take most of the margin out for resellers. Stuff was subsequently piled high on the shelves.

The thrift stores rely on Americans having more than they need, and being too lazy or busy to get rid of it on their own, or to recover any value from it. That isn’t the reality in most countries in the world, and it won’t be true forever here either.

We’re in a window for a lot of things, and that window may be closing. Don’t be left outside with your face pressed against the glass.

Stack it up.

nick

69 Comments and discussion on "Sat. Oct. 16, 2021 – trying to sleep late…"

  1. Ray Thompson says:

    Today is assembly day for the new computer. Will be a fast system. Probably my last system.

    One of my hearing aids is failing, again. Third time. Rather than replace parts the VA needs to replace the entire unit. Off to the audiology clinic next week.

  2. Pecancorner says:

    It gets better.  The five admins were outside the main data center that the data center rat was in.  The rat could not let them in manually since their key cards failed.  They could see the rat through the glass (window ? door ?) but could not get it ! ! ! ! !  I would have found a fire axe and broke in. Or driven a vehicle through the side of the building.

    Did none of them know where the Fire Exits were?  Those MUST be manual.

  3. Greg Norton says:

    Another Samba mystery solved.

    The printer services of my home server have been unusable for the better part of a year. I could configure the printer and run test pages from the server, but anything sent via Samba (Windows print clients) seemed to disappear.

    It turns out that Fedora deprecated the /var/spool/samba directory at some point, with the example Samba file now referencing /var/tmp instead. Once I edited my smb.conf to match the example, print services worked again.

    Gotta go through the example from Fedora the next time I have a problem.

  4. MrAtoz says:

    The Navy announced it will discharge all sailors who refuse the the clot shot. I hope all the services follow suit. A good chance for tRump to come in and "build back better".

    3
    1
  5. Greg Norton says:

    Today is assembly day for the new computer. Will be a fast system. Probably my last system.

    Please. Microsoft's bloat keeps pace with Moore's law. Even Linux is quickly becoming unusable in less than 8 GB.

    Also, graphics cards that sell for $300-400 would have been $50 discount bin items by now if it weren't for resellers serving the pinheads trying to hop on the Bitcoin bandwagon.

  6. Greg Norton says:

    The Navy announced it will discharge all sailors who refuse the the clot shot. I hope all the services follow suit. A good chance for tRump to come in and "build back better".

    *Honarable* discharge too, which surprised my wife.

    As of this morning, the total active duty Navy Covid death count stands at 14. Active cases are 800 and hospitalizations are at 11. A sailor taking the vaccine has a higher chance of death or incapacitation from the shot than the virus.

    Given the carefully controlled diet and physical condition standards, the active duty armed forces personnel would be a statistically significant control group useful for studying the long-term effects of the vaccines, good and bad. Of course, the agenda can’t have that.

  7. ech says:

    My son said he heard through the grapevine that five Facebook admins were locked out of the building.  They managed to get a data center rat on the cellphone and were teaching him how to edit the border gateway router over the phone with much screaming and yelling.

    Informed sources have said that they had to physically break into some of the server rooms with metal cutters.

     

  8. Nick Flandrey says:

    Sunny day, but continued gusty winds.   72F  and only 40%RH…  If it were colder, it would be 'blustery'.

    Today's post was brief because I fell asleep at my desk.  Woke at 3:45, finished the post, and moved to bed.

    I ate some candy* while we were watching the Muppet Haunted Mansion… it was exactly what I expected.  Typical muppet jokes, LOTS of great homage to the Mansion to the point of silliness.   Muppet character I never saw before, Pepe' the King Prawn, was the main char. side kick and comic relief.  Lot of gratuitous POC females inserted.  A very hardcore 'crossing of the streams'. 

    added- I enjoyed it. If you like muppet humor, you’ll like it.

    If they re-dress HM in the park it should be fun.  It kinda dilutes the brand, but it also extends it into Muppet world which is much bigger.

    *sugar and carbs put me to sleep.  One cup of M&M peanuts was like a sledgehammer to the forehead.  Even felt hung over.

    n

  9. ech says:

    The fact that the list does not mention Perry Rhodan, David Weber, or John Ringo makes the list very suspect in my mind.

    Eh. All are popular (Rhodan mainly in Germany), but none are particularly influential in shaping SF. We'll see in a few tens of years on Ringo and Weber.

    The omission of Doc Smith's Skylark series and the Lensman series is unforgiveable. Skylark was the first SF story to go outside the solar system and meet aliens. Lensman made Star Wars possible and had a lot of other effects in SF and popular culture.

    Also, Heinlein deserved two more entries – one for Stranger in a Strange Land and one for the "juvenile" series. Both had huge effects on sf and beyond.

    There's also a bunch of obscure stuff on that list that nobody ever read, so how can it be influential? 

  10. Nick Flandrey says:

    Informed sources have said that they had to physically break into some of the server rooms with metal cutters.

    –I'm a bit surprised they could.  I've been in some that had more in common with vaults than office space.  If no one was already inside to open a door, you have to defeat some serious physical security.  Man traps.  Iris readers.  Concrete walls, fire doors, mag locks, etc.

    n

  11. ech says:

    Long COVID not as prevalent as thought. A major paper on that had a methodolgy error that has been corrected. Looks like the incidence is on the order of 3% after 12 weeks.
     

    https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/10/14/covid-10-14-less-long-cvoid/

  12. Nick Flandrey says:

    There's also a bunch of obscure stuff on that list that nobody ever read, so how can it be influential? 

    –like the Japanese stuff.  I'm guessing he considers anime to be part of SF, and possibly that early stuff influenced SF in general, but I think most readers outside of Japan wouldn't have noticed.    Ghost in the Shell was widely popular, but I don't know how much INFLUENCE it had on further work.

    n

  13. Greg Norton says:

    If they re-dress HM in the park it should be fun.  It kinda dilutes the brand, but it also extends it into Muppet world which is much bigger.

    The Muppets have been tied in with Liberty Square for about a decade.

    I've noticed that The Mouse is very careful with additions to the Magic Kingdom, maintaining the core Disney IP or, as in the case of the Muppets, IP that the company wouldn't part with outside of Bankruptcy Court.

  14. Greg Norton says:

    –like the Japanese stuff.  I'm guessing he considers anime to be part of SF, and possibly that early stuff influenced SF in general, but I think most readers outside of Japan wouldn't have noticed. 

    "Battlestar Galactica" 'borrowed' heavily from "Space Battleship Yamato" aka "Star Blazers" in the US, which started a influence cycle between "Galactica" and "Yamato" which was really obvious in the live action movie of the Japanese series, made about 10 years ago.

    "Star Blazers" saw heavy play in syndication in the US as one of the first anime series imported and dubbed, but the original shows are horribly non-PC, to the point that even distribution in Japan is limited following the release of the reboot movies, "Yamato 2199" and "Yamato 2202".

    Arguably, across the various animated versions and the live action movie, the emergence of the Yamato from the rubble and first firing of the Wave Motion gun is one of the iconic scenes in sci-fi. Across all versions, the gun has never been test fired prior to that moment, and none of the crew know what will happen.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4phT2Vukvn0

  15. Greg Norton says:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4phT2Vukvn0

    And, yes, it is the Yamato sunk by the Americans during WWII, the wreckage used as a cover for Earth to construct the spacship without the enemy aliens noticing. Part of the political incorrectness of the 1974 series is a flashback to the sinking with patriotic Japanese music playing in the background, depicting the event as a great tragedy.

  16. Pecancorner says:

    None of their gimmicks that they try to call "property tax relief" are any good.  However, since they already have this money back from the Feds, I won't object to giving it directly back to us homeowners, since it was our money in the first place.

    The version of SB 1 passed by the House would use $3 billion of American Rescue Plan Act funds to send one-time checks to Texas homeowners who receive a residence homestead exemption on their property tax bill. The money would be evenly divided among all eligible homeowners, not based on the amount of taxes paid.

    Lawmakers estimate 5.7 million Texas homeowners would each receive about $525.

    https://texasscorecard.com/state/texas-house-passes-one-time-property-tax-rebate/

  17. EdH says:

    Interesting article over at gCaptain on the shipping crisis.  

    https://gcaptain.com/biden-maritime-marad-admiral-phillips/

    I will mention that the site editors generally have a leftwards bias, believing in global warming, green energy alternatives, off-shore wind farms and the like…but at what they personally know about they are quite conservative.

    The takeaway quote might be:

     To the untrained eye the 139 ships waiting to leave Los Angeles may look like a port crisis that can be solved by a US Port Envoy, it is not. It is a SHIPPING crisis. Numerous ports around the United States including Oakland and San Diego, have extra capacity, what we don’t have is anyone with recent SHIPPING experience at MARAD directing the SHIPS to empty ports. This week Biden addressed the nation with a plan to prevent containergeddon from ruining Christmas but experts say his plan is doomed to fail because, again, not a single ship captain was called to give advice on how to fix this SHIPPING crisis.

  18. Ray Thompson says:

    Well, shirt(-r). Assembly was a bust.

    To install 2 DVD writers I need a two fan water cooler, not three. I could work around that issue with three fans as one DVD writer is doable. Just takes longer to produce photo disc for students of the sports activities. DVD burner has to be in the lower slot, not the top.

    Next power supply cables are too short. Power supply was for a small case. Who knew they scrimped on cable length? Could source another power supply locally so we continue.

    So we move to motherboard install. We open the motherboard box. CPU socket cover is not over the socket. That needs careful examination. Uh-oh, a few socket pins are bent. Useless motherboard. Apparently the cover coming loose in shipment banged some pins.

    Thus the power supply, water cooler, and motherboard are going back to Amazon. Replacements will be ordered. Will try again in three weeks.

    3
    1
  19. Nick Flandrey says:

    Yikes Ray, that sucks.    They do make extension cables for the PSU, might be cheaper than a different PSU.

    Can you offload the burning to another machine, like your old one?

    I've got a CD burner that was purpose built to do the job, it does 4 at a time.  Might be something on ebay cheaper than using a high end pc… since no one is using discs anymore.

    n

  20. ech says:

    Numerous ports around the United States including Oakland and San Diego, have extra capacity, what we don’t have is anyone with recent SHIPPING experience at MARAD directing the SHIPS to empty ports.

    It's not just a port problem. There is a shortage of truck drivers, exacerbated by the CA law on freelancers. There is a shortage of warehouse space in CA to put goods (partly due to the trucker shortage). Space in some ports is getting tight because of a pile up of empty containers, and a pile up of undelivered containers full of stuff (it can be cheaper to pay port fees than warehouse fees). There is a shortage of the trailers used to carry containers to end users, as it used to take 24-48 hours for a container to get offloaded, but due to lack of space it takes 4-5 days (or more) now. Rail systems are running at capacity to deliver containers. There is a general shortage of containers, as production of them stopped during the pandemic. There is a shortage of ships also.

    So, there is no quick solution. 

    As an aside, the Sikh community has turned to long haul trucking for employment, to the point that some of the truck stop chains have added Indian food and snacks to their offerings.

     

  21. Ray Thompson says:

    They do make extension cables for the PSU, might be cheaper than a different PSU.
     

    That was a first thought. The PS in question was small, for a small case. A full size PS is on order that should have longer cables. Full size PS is slightly cheaper. Not an an issue waiting for a new PS as we have to wait for a replacement MB.

    Will try again in three weeks.

  22. Alan says:

    @Ray, ouch, been there recently upgrading my new PC.

    Anyway, have you decided on W10 vs. W11?

  23. Alan says:

    >> Numerous ports around the United States including Oakland and San Diego, have extra capacity, what we don’t have is anyone with recent SHIPPING experience at MARAD directing the SHIPS to empty ports.

    I did find out that the container ships being leased by the likes of Home Depot and Wal-Mart are much smaller (1000 to 3000 containers vs 20,000 containers) and as such are getting them docked and unloaded faster by bypassing the larger ports which is where the congestion is.

    HD is also air-freighting its most popular tools to the US to keep the stores supplied.

    But not to worry, our SecTrans is on top of this cris…oh, never mind…

  24. Nick Flandrey says:

    the Sikh community has turned to long haul trucking for employment 

    –interesting.    Taxi driver was a staple, and in Canadia, airport worker too.  I guess both those saw significant decreases in capacity to earn…

    –wrt the port situation, embrace the power of 'and'.    there are a couple of relevant comments over at aesop's.   https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=714028479313834812&postID=7144405671530642456

    Notably

    Winston Smith said…

    I work for the large railroad that services these intermodal yards at the ports and I can say with the utmost confidence that y'all better buckle up and stock up on essentials (should have done so months ago) because the jab mandate the railroad just implemented will see at least thirty percent of transportation (train crews) and track maintenance personnel forced off the property for non compliance. We'll have to see if Leviathan blinks after that poke. 🙂

    October 15, 2021 at 8:39 AM

    and

    Noveske's Rock said…

    I’ve coordinated air and ocean freight for 40 years. By necessity that means adjunct warehouses and trucking too. Logistics chains have multiple shifting choke points. If you tweak the system the pacing item changes but there is always some pacing item.

    Re the Port of Los Angeles issue my opinion is that it is currently the pick time by the longshoreman. Normally it takes 90 seconds to identify the next container to move, pick it with the crane then move it to the chassis or rail car. For efficiency they then ideally pick an outbound container and place it on the designated spot on the ship for transit. 3 minutes per cycle per crane to offload/on load 1 TEU. The Port has 82 cranes. That suggests max capacity is shifting 1,640 units on/off per hour or or 39,360 per day running 24/7.

    They aren’t running 24/7, equipment isn’t always spotted on time, sometimes containers are buried beneath through cargo, there are labor shortages and some crane operators aren’t as skilled as others. Plus allow for maintenance down time. In 2020 the Port moved 9.2 million TEUs or 25,205 per day.

    Secondary pacing items are chassis shortages for truck drayage and rail car availability for loading. This is due to extended dwell times for loaded containers to be unloaded (due to warehouses being blown out due to labor shortages) and for empty / reloaded containers to be returned to the Port for outbound shipping. On dock dwell time for containers moving by rail is currently almost 12 days per cargo link.com

    On 9/28 CBS reported that the current number of containers on ships offshore waiting to be offloaded was over 500,000. If the Port shifted 25,000 cans per day it’d take 20 days to eliminate the backlog – but there would be another 25 days of ships arriving in the interim and this is peak shipping season.

    Many other factors throw sand in the gears to reduce efficiency – lack of truck drivers, union work to rule issues, shifting government regulations, weather, COVID restrictions and finding warehouse staff that can pass a drug test. Short version – eliminating the backlog won’t happen easily or swiftly.

     

    October 16, 2021 at 4:32 AM

    –and not just anyone can do 2 containers every 3 minutes for a shift.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0ejYk1s4k

    n

  25. Nick Flandrey says:

    I'm sure I'm not the first to consider it, but I'd run the port  2 shifts for current volume, the additional shift for backlog reduction.

    Of course,because these are real things in the real world, it doesn't actually work that way, because the ships are still in the dock at the end of shift two, so there isn't any way to switch to pure backlog reduction.   All you can to is hope to get that additional third of potential capacity during the third shift.

    Running three shifts is HARD on gear and people.  A lot of maintenance will have to be delayed.  Things will break badly and then be unavailable.  People will get broken.  Drop a container on a truck cab and you shut down operations at that crane for the length of the investigation, and you lose a driver and crane op.  How many people do you kill to keep Christmas shopping on track?  Because that's how the union will spin it.

    n

    3
    1
  26. Paul+Hampson says:

    "Probably my last system."  That's what I thought two systems ago, but I'm still here after all.  A lot of us will not make it to one hundred, but none of us can any longer count on not getting there.

  27. Nick Flandrey says:

    Jail for thought crimes. 

    Prosecutors pressed US District Judge Tanya Chutkan to lock up Indiana native Dona Sue Bissey because she is 'avid consumer of conspiracy theories 

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10098739/Hairdresser-called-Jan-6-best-f-ing-day-breaching-Capitol-gets-14-days-jail.html

    3
    1
  28. Greg Norton says:

    How many people do you kill to keep Christmas shopping on track?  Because that's how the union will spin it.

    It doesn't really matter if port productivity increases. Biden wants to pin the impending dismal Christmas on the unvaccinated being selfish.

    The tactic could work in a knee-jerk way among moderates similar to "That Blasey-Ford woman could be my (grand)daughter!"

    God help us all if the Dems lose Virginia. Recalls are a judge-ordered thing, and Perkins Coie will get busy.

    2
    1
  29. Greg Norton says:

    45%? 60% in Dade County?

    I thought only the selfish unvaccinated people were taking up all the capacity at the antibody treatment centers in Florida and Texas.

    https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2021/10/16/floridians-embrace-covid-19-antibody-treatment/

    1
    1
  30. lynn says:

    "The Secret of the Time Vault (Perry Rhodan #6)" by Clark Darlton, translated by Wendayne Ackerman
       https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Time-Vault-Perry-Rhodan/dp/4416459750/br?tag=ttgnet-20 />

    Book number six of a series of one hundred and twenty-six space opera books in English. The original German books, actually pamphlets, number in the thousands. The English books started with two translated German stories per book and transitioned to one story per book with this book. The German books were written from 1961 to present time, having sold two billion copies and even recently been rebooted. I read the well printed and well bound book published by Ace in 1971 that I had to be very careful with due to age. I bought an almost complete box of Perry Rhodans a decade or two ago on ebay that I am finally getting to since I lost my original Perry Rhodans in The Great Flood of 1989.
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan

    In this alternate universe, USSF Major Perry Rhodan and his three fellow astronauts blasted off in a three stage rocket to the Moon in 1971. The first stage of the rocket was chemical, the second and third stages were nuclear. After crashing on the Moon due to a strange radio interference, they discover a massive crashed alien spaceship with an aged male scientist (Khrest), a female commander (Thora), and a crew of 500.

    Perry Rhodan and his crew have captured the Arkonide 2,400 meter (yard) spheroid battleship from the Topider lizard people. They return to Earth to pick up several hundred more crew members to staff the battleship. Upon returning to Vega, they force the remaining 100+ Topider space ships to relocate further out in the Vega star system.

    One has to remember that this book was written in German in 1961 and translated to English in 1970. Many items that came about in the 1970s and beyond such as cell phones are not reflected in the book. However, commercial aircraft commonly traveling at Mach 3 are not available to the public as talked about in the book. Niels Bohr's saying "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future" comes to mind.

    My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (6 reviews)

  31. Nick Flandrey says:

    She was given jail time while Morgan-Lloyd avoided serving time behind bars after prosecutors requested that the court take Bissey's damning social media posts under consideration in regards to sentencing, while noting her belief in far-right wing conspiracy theories.

    If the headline wasn't clear enough, they flat out state it here.   This is jailing people  for beliefs. Her actions would have gotten her the same treatment as the friend.  The thought crime got her jail time. 

    If you STILL can't get your head around the fact that we're in a banana republic, and that traditional ROL is dead after reading something like this, you aren't living in reality.  Harsh,but there it is.

    You will not get a fair trial.  You can't afford to come to their attention.  STOP POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

    n

    yeah, this is a blog so I get the irony and I'm probably F'd if they come knocking.

    5
    1
  32. lynn says:

    The thrift stores rely on Americans having more than they need, and being too lazy or busy to get rid of it on their own, or to recover any value from it. That isn’t the reality in most countries in the world, and it won’t be true forever here either.

    Are you including the Dollar stores in that group ?  Consumer Reports has a big article on the Dollar stores this month and really hits on them for finishing off the mom and pop stores that Walmart missed.  "The Truth About Those Dollar Stores – Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and others offer low prices but also raise concern in communities that feel choked by them"
    https://www.consumerreports.org/dollar-stores/the-truth-about-those-dollar-stores/

    I think that competition is good even if a lot of the goods the Dollar stores sell were bought as castoffs from the supplier.

    I was really surprised to see that 9 out 10 Americans have shopped at a Dollar store in the last year. That is serious market penetration.

  33. lynn says:

    Sunny day, but continued gusty winds.   72F  and only 40%RH…  If it were colder, it would be 'blustery'.

    One of my favorite books as a very young child was "Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day". 

       https://www.amazon.com/Winnie-Pooh-blustery-Day-Milne/dp/B0018C5TS2//p?tag=ttgnet-20

  34. lynn says:

    My son said he heard through the grapevine that five Facebook admins were locked out of the building.  They managed to get a data center rat on the cellphone and were teaching him how to edit the border gateway router over the phone with much screaming and yelling.

    Informed sources have said that they had to physically break into some of the server rooms with metal cutters.

    My former USMC son came back from his first trip to Iraq with a triple action set of bolt cutters.  He refuses to tell what they used those for.  He claims that if those don't work then a quarter pound of C4 will do the job.  He lost count at 60 or so buildings (homes, etc) that they broke into to check them out at 1 am in the morning.

       https://www.amazon.com/RIDGID-14223-Cutter-Heavy-Duty-Cutters/dp/B00140X8W2//p?tag=ttgnet-20

  35. lynn says:

    The fact that the list does not mention Perry Rhodan, David Weber, or John Ringo makes the list very suspect in my mind.

    Eh. All are popular (Rhodan mainly in Germany), but none are particularly influential in shaping SF. We'll see in a few tens of years on Ringo and Weber.

    The omission of Doc Smith's Skylark series and the Lensman series is unforgiveable. Skylark was the first SF story to go outside the solar system and meet aliens. Lensman made Star Wars possible and had a lot of other effects in SF and popular culture.

    Also, Heinlein deserved two more entries – one for Stranger in a Strange Land and one for the "juvenile" series. Both had huge effects on sf and beyond.

    There's also a bunch of obscure stuff on that list that nobody ever read, so how can it be influential? 

    George Lucas has said that he used the Perry Rhodan spherical space ships for the Empire Deathstar base design. Of course, that has been carefully expunged from the intertubes by Disney.

  36. lynn says:

    It gets better.  The five admins were outside the main data center that the data center rat was in.  The rat could not let them in manually since their key cards failed.  They could see the rat through the glass (window ? door ?) but could not get it ! ! ! ! !  I would have found a fire axe and broke in. Or driven a vehicle through the side of the building.

    Did none of them know where the Fire Exits were?  Those MUST be manual.

    Most large data centers use an airlock design for their fire escapes.  The fire doors are 10 to 20 feet apart so two people have to hold two doors open to let people in from the outside.

    All of the data centers that I visited in the 1970s and 1980s did not even have dedicated fire exits.  The biggest one was the size of a football field with 300 IBM mainframe disk drives, each the size of a short refrigerator, and two IBM 3090s.  That one did have the airlock exit design with stairs to go up inside since the data center was in the basement of the building.

  37. Greg Norton says:

    I think that competition is good even if a lot of the goods the Dollar stores sell were bought as castoffs from the supplier.

    I was really surprised to see that 9 out 10 Americans have shopped at a Dollar store in the last year. That is serious market penetration.

    Dollar General had locations in the Texas beach areas we visited this Summer. Decent real estate too, not side streets or out of the way locations. The stores were busy.

    Ironically, the locations were probably subsidized with sales tax concessions if Dollar General stuck to their usual business MO.

    Dollar General is not castoffs, but it isn't pure free enterprise either.

    Of course, neither is Bucee's — the "Pensacola" location is in Alabama because the Florida Legislature didn't come up with enough concessions fast enough to satisfy The Beaver.

  38. lynn says:

    I tell you what, Fubo TV streaming service is pretty good.  Especially for sports.  Except, they do not have preview turned on for their fast forward until the feature being recorded is over with.  So, if you catch your baseball game an hour after it starts, you are fast forwarding in the dark between innings.  Sucks.  But at $70/month instead of $150/month for DirecTV with a DVR, much cheaper.

    I just watched my Aggies beat up on Missouri on Fubo and am jumping to the Astros Boston playoff game now.

  39. Greg Norton says:

    I just watched my Aggies beat up on Missouri on Fubo and am jumping to the Astros Boston playoff game now.

    Looking at the crowds (or lack thereof) for the Boston-Tampa Bay playoff games broadcast from the Toxie Dome in St. Petersburg, it is obvious baseball is over in Tampa for now.

     

  40. Pecancorner says:

    Consumer Reports has a big article on the Dollar stores this month and really hits on them for finishing off the mom and pop stores that Walmart missed. 

    The biggest thing killing off mom and pop local stores is rendition taxes. And no media ever talks about it. Forcing people to pay tax on merchandise every year just because they have it drives out the best thing about those long-time local stores: slow moving stock that once could be kept forever without costing anything, and thus we all knew where we could get it, decade in and decade out.  Now that stock has been taxed out of existence "locally".

  41. paul says:

    When I moved to this tiny town there was a very small HEB that sucked with the usual HEB BS of having almost no registers open, a Super S, a Perry's 5&10, DQ, Sonic, Storm's, and a few great food but dumpy looking restaurants but get here before 7pm because they closed at 8pm. 

    For any actual shopping you went to Austin.  Not Leander or Cedar Park.  They were just wide spots in the road back then.  All the way to Austin and Northcross Mall and Highland Mall.  Burnet Road at 183 was just newly expanded to two lanes each way with traffic lights.

    HEB built the current store.  Super S went away.  Darn it.  Same for Perry's. Somewhen a Dollar store appeared on the edge of town.  Just a total dump…. piles of crap all over the aisles.  If my CircleK looked like that my zone manager would have blown gaskets.  Fire hazard if nothing else.

    They built a new Dollar General (the yellow sign) to replace the old.  It was nice for about a year and it's back to piles of stuff to walk around in the aisles.  They need to hire more help.  You can't have one person at the register and expect the shelves to be stocked.  Anyway, they have a nice assortment of cheap stuff like Wal-Mart had 30 years ago if that's what you need.

    Folks talk about buying groceries there.  I don't know why.  Buying their mystery brand of canned corn for a buck versus 79¢ or less for DelMonte or Libby's at the HEB /right across the street/ and even less for HEB brands makes no sense.

    I can see the utility of the dollar store if your income is very tight.  A little box of Tide for $4 that is enough for two months (and a lot cheaper than buying the tiny boxes at the laundromat) versus $8 at HEB for the big box that will last six months.  Look at the price per ounce and the dollar store is pretty expensive.

    But that's me counting my pennies.

    In my paid for house in the middle of 25 acres.  🙂

     

  42. Nick Flandrey says:

    The biggest thing killing off mom and pop local stores is rendition taxes. And no media ever talks about it. Forcing people to pay tax on merchandise every year just because they have it drives out the best thing about those long-time local stores: slow moving stock that once could be kept forever without costing anything, and thus we all knew where we could get it, decade in and decade out.  Now that stock has been taxed out of existence "locally".

    Absolutely.   And paying tax on something that decreases in value every year is even more egregious.    And so is paying tax on stuff you paid tax on when you bought it, like computers, desks, carpet!, tools, and fixtures.    Business personal property tax is an extra special kind of evil.

    n

  43. Nick Flandrey says:

    I've never shopped one of the big chain dollar stores, but the local King Dollar (everything is $1.59 now except the name) has some good deals and some bad deals.

    Assuming everything in there is a good deal would be very short-sighted, they have to make money to stay in business.

    Cans of spray paint, craft supplies and party decor, formulations of products you can't get from the name brands anymore, and a few other things are good deals.  Most of it is very flimsy crap like I saw in china for the chinese market.  Looks ok, but isn't.  

    somewhere on here I did a review/aar on my last visit….

    n

  44. Nick Flandrey says:

    I'm bidding in my big twice a month new product auction.   I'm buying a lot of masks very cheaply.   People must think this is over, but I'm pessimistically certain that if covid-19 doesn't get the result whoever built it to get, there will be an equivalent covid-21 or ebola-22.  

    I waited a long time to use my ebola-14 masks  but I was glad to have them, and I bought them super cheap because no one wanted them.

    n

  45. Nick Flandrey says:

    wRT inflation,   the King Dollar store was $1.25 in Nov 2017. 

    n

  46. drwilliams says:

    @Lynn

    Eh. All are popular (Rhodan mainly in Germany), but none are particularly influential in shaping SF. We'll see in a few tens of years on Ringo and Weber.

    @ech

    The omission of Doc Smith's Skylark series and the Lensman series is unforgiveable. Skylark was the first SF story to go outside the solar system and meet aliens. Lensman made Star Wars possible and had a lot of other effects in SF and popular culture.

    Also, Heinlein deserved two more entries – one for Stranger in a Strange Land and one for the "juvenile" series. Both had huge effects on sf and beyond.

    There's also a bunch of obscure stuff on that list that nobody ever read, so how can it be influential? 

    Spot on, but re Heinlein add one more: His short stories. Science fiction was largely short stories 1930-1960, and from Lifeline (1939) on, Heinlein was a huge influence.

    Weber's influence is already established. Honor Harrington. He was at the forefront of the new era of collaborative science fiction, first with John Ringo, but most notably the Honorverse.

    The influence of the Japanese was mostly on movies through their animation. I'd remove them from the list for that reason, and substitute the group of American author/editors that had tremendous influence: John Campbell, Fred Pohl, Donald Wolheim, and Eric Flint. Hugo Gernsback could be added just as the namesake of the Hugo Award. If authorship is not required, add Tom Doherty and Jim Baen.

    Toss Walter Miller, despite the Hugo. Post-apocalyptic sf is more societal and less science. On the Beach, Star Man's Son, and Alas, Babylon were all earlier and more influential.

    I'd drop Butler and Delaney, and all the entries post-2000. Actually, toss all the entries post-1970, and add back Hitchhiker, Snow Crash, and A Civil Campaign.

    Puzzling omissions: Andre Norton, Larry Niven, JEP, David Drake.

  47. ~jim says:

    A superhero comedy, from Luxembourg? There goes my evening, he said heroically. 

    "De Superjhemp Retörns"

    https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9185526/

    https://www.amazon.com/Superchamp-Returns-André-Jung/dp/B09F735Z9P//p?tag=ttgnet-20

    I watch these movies so you don't have to. 

     

  48. lynn says:

    https://bookriot.com/the-most-influential-sci-fi-books-of-all-time/

    Puzzling omissions: Andre Norton, Larry Niven, JEP, David Drake.

    It is almost as if the author of the list exempted any male who sold more than a million books. And not everyone knows that Andre Norton was a woman.

  49. MrAtoz says:

    plugs is the worst:

    There are two versions of the ‘angry Biden’ video to choose from — The real one, or the apparently doctored even angrier version

    Old man yells at a cloud, news at 5.

    Tell me you don't miss tRump, warts and all.

  50. drwilliams says:

    Upon reflection, I'd have to include Keith Laumer. Everett published his "many worlds" theory in his 1957 thesis. Laumer published Worlds of the Imperium in 1962, and followed it with several sequels as well as another major series and many other short stories. I don't recall any earlier sf, but the list of subsequent tales by other authors is long.

  51. lynn says:

    "Guardian Climate Apocalypse: The End of the World is Now"

         https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/10/16/guardian-climate-apocalypse-the-end-of-the-world-is-now/

    "According to the Guardian, the “surprisingly small” temperature increases we have experienced to date is causing “unprecedented pain and turmoil”.

    The climate disaster is here

    Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this disaster from getting worse?"

    Unreal.  This is propaganda, not news.  These people have an agenda and want the rest of the first world to follow it, no matter what the cost is.

    BTW, the cost will be in lives, not just dollars. We cannot support the current population using the so-called renewables. We must have hydropcarbon and nuclear generation for electricity. And we must have hydrocarbon for transportation.

  52. Greg Norton says:

    I'm bidding in my big twice a month new product auction.   I'm buying a lot of masks very cheaply.   People must think this is over, but I'm pessimistically certain that if covid-19 doesn't get the result whoever built it to get, there will be an equivalent covid-21 or ebola-22.  

    They got the result they wanted. Trump is gone.

    All that is left is eliminating the control group of unvaccinated so no one can study the long term health effects resulting from the shots and draw any meaningful conclusions.

    Deploying mRNA and adenovirus tech on an emergency basis cut years of development time off things like an AIDS vaccine or human rabies immunizations.

  53. Ray Thompson says:

    Anyway, have you decided on W10 vs. W11?
     

    Will go with W11. No reason to not do so. Son's system he built 5 years ago will not run W11. His CPU is one version too early.

    Replacement parts will be in Monday. I may go Wednesday or Thursday to son's place and finish the build.

  54. Greg Norton says:

    Will go with W11. No reason to not do so. Son's system he built 5 years ago will not run W11. His CPU is one version too early.

    Windows 11 is clearly the path forward.

    I wouldn't be surprised if HBO Max and Disney+ drop support for streaming to Windows 10 and earlier within a year.

  55. Nick Flandrey says:

    Ugg.   After doing the Avatar attraction at WDW we decided to watch it.  

    I've avoided it so far just because of the ridiculous premise, that a starfaring society that can grow hybrid creatures from DNA, and is so wealthy they have interstellar exploitation, can't fix the guy's paralysis with an outpatient procedure that costs a nickel.  

    So far it's all evil corporations, tired tropes about stupid jarheads and Sigourny smoking cigarrettes, because she's a ball buster….

    Gah.

    \

    n

  56. Alan says:

    >>  https://www.amazon.com/RIDGID-14223-Cutter-Heavy-Duty-Cutters/dp/B00140X8W2//p?tag=ttgnet-20

    or one of these:

    <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Milwaukee-MLW252220-FUEL-Compact-Tool/dp/B07H7SH6HC/https://www.amazon.com/Milwaukee-MLW252220-FUEL-Compact-Tool/dp/B07H7SH6HC//a/p?tag=ttgnet-20

    Believe it or not, used by bike thieves in NYFC in broad daylight to cut through the heavy-duty locks. On a busy enough street no one notices.

  57. Alan says:

    >> Assuming everything in there is a good deal would be very short-sighted, they have to make money to stay in business.

    You're obviously not considering the demographic that typically shops at dollar stores.

    Besides, you know the old saying, they lose money on every sale but they make it up in volume.

  58. lynn says:

    Weber's influence is already established. Honor Harrington. He was at the forefront of the new era of collaborative science fiction, first with John Ringo, but most notably the Honorverse.

    Actually, Niven and Pournelle collaborated on "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Footfall" in the 1970s, over a decade before David Weber and Steve White's 1992 Starfire collaborations.

  59. lynn says:

    Ugg.   After doing the Avatar attraction at WDW we decided to watch it.  

    I've avoided it so far just because of the ridiculous premise, that a starfaring society that can grow hybrid creatures from DNA, and is so wealthy they have interstellar exploitation, can't fix the guy's paralysis with an outpatient procedure that costs a nickel.  

    So far it's all evil corporations, tired tropes about stupid jarheads and Sigourny smoking cigarrettes, because she's a ball buster….

    Gah.

    \

    n

    I could never decide if Avatar is American Indian or Asian Indian mysticism.  But the movie is mostly cool.

  60. Nick Flandrey says:

    Yeah, cool to look at, marvelous tech, but tired, oh so tired and predictable.

    All that art in service to such a pile of suck.

    n

  61. lynn says:

    >> Assuming everything in there is a good deal would be very short-sighted, they have to make money to stay in business.

    You're obviously not considering the demographic that typically shops at dollar stores.

    Besides, you know the old saying, they lose money on every sale but they make it up in volume.

    I have a Dollar General about four blocks away from my house in Crabb, Texas.  I think that it is the only general store in Crabb which is about a square mile at most.  So it is nice for the locals to be able to walk to as most of them are quite poor.  However, I doubt that very much in the store is priced at a dollar.  Much of the merchandise is at least 2 or 3 dollars.  And of course, there is a smoke shop next to the Dollar General.

  62. ~jim says:

    I could never decide if Avatar is American Indian or Asian Indian mysticism.

    Definitely AmerInd. Not that I'm any expert but I've studied the mythology and folklore of both.

  63. lynn says:

    Perry Rhodan and his crew have captured the Arkonide 2,400 meter (yard) spheroid battleship from the Topider lizard people. They return to Earth to pick up several hundred more crew members to staff the battleship. Upon returning to Vega, they force the remaining 100+ Topider space ships to relocate further out in the Vega star system.

    As pointed out to me on another forum, the battleship spheroid is 800 meters, not 2,400 meters. I got my yards and feet confused.

  64. Nick Flandrey says:

    My wife said it was an allegory of what the Amerinds should have done when the white men arrived.

    Little one was very p!ssed that the tree was destroyed and that we destroy trees in the real world.

    n

    –added- and somehow I doubt that the next mining team to go to Pandora will come so lightly armed.

  65. Greg Norton says:

    Ugg.   After doing the Avatar attraction at WDW we decided to watch it.  

    I've avoided it so far just because of the ridiculous premise, that a starfaring society that can grow hybrid creatures from DNA, and is so wealthy they have interstellar exploitation, can't fix the guy's paralysis with an outpatient procedure that costs a nickel.  

    So far it's all evil corporations, tired tropes about stupid jarheads and Sigourny smoking cigarrettes, because she's a ball buster….

    Ironically, the spoof "Galaxy Quest" was the last decent sci-fi Sigourney Weaver made. Some people like "Paul", but that flick really depends on you being a Simon Pegg/Nick Frost fan willing to overlook that Edgar Wright wasn't available to make a real "Cornetto" flick.

    "Avatar" was Disney's consolation prize for losing out on Harry Potter. Joe Rhode made it work.

    Disney is going to regret parting ways with Rhode. Universal has a new park going up, and one of the themed areas is Universal Monsters — a sure fire Rhode masterpiece if he wants it.

  66. Greg Norton says:

    Some people like "Paul", but that flick really depends on you being a Simon Pegg/Nick Frost fan willing to overlook that Edgar Wright wasn't available to make a real "Cornetto" flick.

    Which reminds me — it isn't for the kiddies, but Pegg/Wright/Frost eventually made a very good "Cornetto" sci-fi themed flick with "The World's End". Sadly, it is the end of the series.

Comments are closed.