Tues. Aug. 30, 2022 – ‘tell me somethin’ good….’

Very damp and a bit cooler today.   Rained like crazy yesterday, depending on where you were, and when you were there.  Similar forecast for today.

Did 4 pickups, making a big loop.  Not many items at each place, so not super efficient, but even with gas and tolls it still nets out to a savings over retail, and these were mostly for the BOL.

I’ve got a couple of pickups today, maybe an auction drop off if I can get my stuff together, and getting ready to head up to the house Wednesday night.   Electricians are still supposed to be working Thursday and Friday, and then we’ll be spending the weekend up there. Well, fingers crossed anyway.

Out in the wider world, gas prices continue to slowly come down.   We dodged a bullet with diesel prices as they follow gas down.   One of the guys I chatted with at my show told me that Texas cattle auctions were running round the clock to sell off herds.   They don’t have the water to keep them.  He sold his just before the drought got going.  The current glut is driving beef prices down.   That won’t last.   Fill the freezer is my advice.   I’m doing it myself.  Of course you might look at the situation and make other choices.   Take  that look though, decide, and ACT.

Stack it up.

nick

69 Comments and discussion on "Tues. Aug. 30, 2022 – ‘tell me somethin’ good….’"

  1. Greg Norton says:

    BTW, Bozo was here in Rosenberg, TX a week ago.   Only 50 people showed up to see him.

    Turnout in Austin is higher at his events, at least that’s the way it looks on local Faux News coverage, but Robert Francis’ only hope at this point is a few days of rolling blackouts.

    The major Robert Francis theme of recent weeks is abortion. Yeah, the Republicans in this state have an obsession with chasing Ann Richards’ ghost, but he’s not going to get any traction in this cycle with the issue.

  2. Greg Norton says:

    The problem in Austin in a nutshell. Watch the video.

    https://www.fox7austin.com/news/lakeway-missing-mini-labradoodle-dog-texas

  3. Ray Thompson says:

    Subbing today, first event of the year. Wife already has one under her belt. Teachers have their preferences for subs.

    No freshmen for this teacher. This year the freshmen are a significant bunch of monsters. One can tell there is little discipline at home. The boys are the biggest issue, many see no use in school beyond sixth grade. The girls are obsessed with cell phones, talking and texting. I don’t deal with the crap, neither does the wife. We just send the little cretins to the office.

    The school is being replaced. Construction is delayed. Supposed to be in the new facility the start of this school year. Then it was Christmas. Now it is the start of the next school year. Want to take bets that gets slipped?

    In the meantime the school district has completely ignored maintenance. Except for safety issues most problems are being ignored. A/C is not getting fixed. Only one of the three boys bathrooms is working and even then not at full capacity. A couple of classrooms are unusable due to roof leaks over the summer that destroyed the rooms. Floors have not been stripped and waxed over the summer. Trash collection is marginal at best. Bell system does not work. Intercom does not work so radios are used instead. Fire alarm is working because it is required by the fire marshal and is a real safety issue.

    The class I am subbing I moved to the library because the A/C in the classroom is broken with no plans to fix the unit.

  4. Nick Flandrey says:

    @ray, yikes.    FWIW, they might not be ABLE to fix anything due to lack of parts and labor, and the delays in new construction are everywhere.

    My wife has projects slipping left and right.   They have run out of alternatives to substitute for spec’d equipment, and are at the mercy of a totally F’d up supply chain.   Her biggest manufacturer in terms of percentage of what she sells is now quoting 24 month lead times on gear.

    My client has gear that isn’t working, but I can’t replace it because none is available.

    “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

    Welcome to 2022, the beginning of the new world…

  5. Nick Flandrey says:

    76F when I got up but now 80F with light intermittent drizzle/mist.  Muggy as heII.

    Bus was trying a new route today and was over 30 minutes late.   Kids will be late to school.  She was 20 minutes late even by her new/revised pickup time.   I know routing is a difficult problem, but jeez.  

    n

  6. Greg Norton says:

    In the meantime the school district has completely ignored maintenance. Except for safety issues most problems are being ignored. A/C is not getting fixed.

    The A/C system at our local elementary school received a long overdue upgrade this summer which was delayed during Covid as the district spent a metric sh*t ton of money installing and then scrapping plexiglass dividers in all of the classrooms at the schools instead of serious maintenance issues.

    Go back and watch the video I linked earlier showing the problem in Austin in a nutshell. That’s “mom” in a lot of households around here. And not just “dog mom”.

    The AC was iffy when we moved here. I can’t imagine what it was like at the end of last school year.

    Gotta wonder who got the plexiglass contract.

  7. Nick Flandrey says:

    Missed the fire last week.   I grew up near Whiting, and you could smell the refinery when the wind blew in the wrong direction.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/emergency-declared-four-states-oil-refinery-fire-indiana-feared-disrupt-supply-gasoline-diesel-jet-fuel/ 

    note that the huge mish mash of rules adds to cost, decreases flexibility, and increases fragility, and they can waive them when they want to.

    n

  8. EdH says:

    Oh boy, getting ugly here in the California High Desert.  Prediction is temps over 105F for the next 10 days, many in the 110s.  

    Well, it is September, we start cooling down in October.

    Good time to be elsewhere though.

  9. Nick Flandrey says:

    Oleksiy Kovalyov, 33, (pictured) a senior official in charge of agriculture in the Moscow-appointed military-civil administration in Kherson, was killed with a pump action shotgun at his home in the city of Hola Prystan. His wife, 38, was also stabbed and her throat slit in the attack before she died in hospital. Russian officials said they would probe the attack, the latest in a series of apparent assassinations of Moscow-backed officials in occupied areas. The couple are believed to have been assassinated by a hit squad, local media reports.
     

    –yup more assassinations…    rise in extra-judicial state killing  is not a good sign.

    n

  10. CowboyStu says:

    Oh boy, getting ugly here in the California High Desert.  Prediction is temps over 105F for the next 10 days, many in the 110s.  

    I’ll skip Buck Owens Crystal Palace this weekend.

  11. Nick Flandrey says:

    Culture wars getting hotter…

    Battlefield brunch! Rifle-wielding Antifa thugs face off with Proud Boys and demonstrators outside children’s drag event in Texas – where at least 20 kids saw performers in skimpy outfits serenade them, dance and tell jokes

    AWESOMELY BAD reporting in this article…

    “the distillery’s owner attempted to play down the sagacious nature of the event,”  – pretty sure the author meant salacious

    and instead of his heroes “brazenly” I think he probably meant “bravely”…

    When anti-fa fascists show up armed it’s to [probably “bravely” – because ‘brazenly’ doesn’t make sense in context]   defend, while when the right shows up armed it’s due to “Texas’s lax gun laws.”

    Wonder when the war will go hot for real?

    n

  12. drwilliams says:

    If you can’t take care of anarchists in Texas we are all doomed. 

  13. drwilliams says:

    Gibsons Bakery collects judgement againt Oberlin College:

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/gibsons-bakery-wins-ohio-supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-oberlin-college-appeal/

    Before this happened the Gibson family was going to invest in the community by building student apartments. If I were them I’d change the plan a bit—buy up the low-scale stuff and renovate it, making the rents more expensive.

  14. Ed says:

    https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-demands-he-be-declared-2020-election-winner-or-hold-a-new-election-immediately/
     

    It’s somewhat stunning that, years on, the guy just doesn’t understand that’s not how any of this works. Only somewhat, though, because American civics has not been a strong suit. 

    1
    2
  15. Greg Norton says:

    “the distillery’s owner attempted to play down the sagacious nature of the event,”  – pretty sure the author meant salacious

    Why is an event for children being held at a distillery?

    I saw way too many kids running around Memphis and Nashville wearing t-shirts advertising moonshine distilleries in the mountain tourist trap towns.

  16. nick flandrey says:

    Some other good questions-

    how did the children become aware of the show?

    were the self declared teachers the CHILDREN’S teachers?

    was this a sanctioned or supported school activity?

    where were the children’s PARENTS?  No interview with a parent in the article.

    how old are these children?

    n

  17. lynn says:

    The school is being replaced. Construction is delayed. Supposed to be in the new facility the start of this school year. Then it was Christmas. Now it is the start of the next school year. Want to take bets that gets slipped?

    In the meantime the school district has completely ignored maintenance. Except for safety issues most problems are being ignored. A/C is not getting fixed. Only one of the three boys bathrooms is working and even then not at full capacity. A couple of classrooms are unusable due to roof leaks over the summer that destroyed the rooms. Floors have not been stripped and waxed over the summer. Trash collection is marginal at best. Bell system does not work. Intercom does not work so radios are used instead. Fire alarm is working because it is required by the fire marshal and is a real safety issue.

    The class I am subbing I moved to the library because the A/C in the classroom is broken with no plans to fix the unit.

    Who knew that Heinlein’s crazy years were going to be so crazy ?

    The major problem that I am seeing with the supply chain is that so many little companies went bankrupt during the Koof.  Big companies repackage a lot of stuff from little companies and ship the entire mess to their customers who think that dealing with the big company is “safe”.  

  18. lynn says:

    Oh boy, getting ugly here in the California High Desert.  Prediction is temps over 105F for the next 10 days, many in the 110s.  

    Well, it is September, we start cooling down in October.

    Good time to be elsewhere though.

    At least it is a DRY HEAT.  “snicker”

  19. lynn says:

    If you can’t take care of anarchists in Texas we are all doomed. 

    You would be surprised how many there.  Or maybe not.  Almost as many as California.

  20. Lynn says:

    “Washington Post: The USA Should Pay for Pakistan’s Climate Floods”

        https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/29/washington-post-the-usa-should-pay-for-pakistans-climate-floods/

    “According to Wikipedia, since 1952 Pakistan has received 22 IMF bailouts, substantially funded by the USA. But apparently the USA is still liable for climate reparations.”

    “One of the main reasons Pakistan is so bankrupt, aside from their eyewatering corruption, is they spend crazy amounts of money funding a large military and a nuclear weapons programme.”

    No. We, the USA, should not pay for anyone’s climate problems. All of the climate models are fake.

  21. Greg Norton says:

    If you can’t take care of anarchists in Texas we are all doomed. 

    You would be surprised how many there.  Or maybe not.  Almost as many as California.

    The I35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio is very left anymore. Combine that with the parts of Dallas that look like they were lifted right out of Southern California, and the trends are not promising in Texas.

  22. EdH says:

    At least it is a DRY HEAT.  “snicker”

    So they are predicting. Fingers crossed.

  23. Lynn says:

    Tues. Aug. 30, 2022 – ‘tell me somethin’ good….’

    Great song !  Written by Stevie Wonder, I did not know that.  But the best version is by Chaka Khan and Rufus.

         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm_cFzVAoo8

  24. Lynn says:

    Ok, I have now got to get serious about a 64 bit version of my calculation engine.   I cannot get Visual Studio 2019 to automatically build my 5,000 F77 subroutines and 200+ C++ methods for me so I am going to built a manual forced script to do the build.  Four Win32 EXEs and three Win32 DLLs to start for the 32 bit version to verify the compiler port.   I am still trying to use the Intel Fortran compiler even though I have had major showstopper problems with it in the past. And they are incredibly slow for patches, years to fix.

    Then I will modify the F77 code to use all 64 bit integers and logicals as I stash C pointers in the F77 integers and I cannot lose the addresses.  Then I will add the four Win64 EXEs and three Win64 DLLs to the build and see what blows up.  Hopefully I will be done by Christmas.  Christmas 2022 that is.  Hopefully not Christmas 2023.  I’ve got five users wanting to run the 64 bit version of Excel now.

    I will end up shipping both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of my calculation engine in my software distribution for years. That should be interesting and just one more thing for my users to get messed up.

  25. Lynn says:

    Wow, my WD Black 1 TB NVME drive is incredibly fast !  I just copied my 22 GB sandbox to a backup directory for creating version 16 patches.  Took about 10 seconds.  My main sandbox is now version 17.00.

       https://www.amazon.com/WD_BLACK-SN770-Internal-Gaming-Solid/dp/B09QV692XY?tag=ttgnet-20/

    Highly recommended.

    I’ve still got lots of room to go crazy here.  I now have version 14, 15, 16, and 17 development sandboxes on my main office pc drive.

    C:\dii>df
    Drive C: 635454894080 bytes free, 999549886464 bytes total, 36% full.

  26. Lynn says:

    Speaking of version 16.15, our release went without a hitch so far.  I got two users, one user and one prospect, asking about the release which I forwarded to my customer support dude.  The prospect wants to know when we are going to support modeling ammonium nitrate and a couple of other molecules.  Probably not this decade but who knows.  Ammonium nitrate would require a specific equation of state since it is like sulfuric acid, wants to violently exothermically bond with anything and everything.

    We are working on a new electrolytic equation of state to handle just about any polar molecule but, we are having trouble getting base data, just like any other day ending with a y. People who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting their own base data guard it jealously.

    And now I just put this website on the NSA watch list.

  27. Lynn says:

    Peanuts: Sally’s Summer

        https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/2022/08/30

    Hey, we did the same thing this summer, watched tv.  I did not even get my new home pc built yet even though I bought the parts a year ago.

  28. paul says:

    And now I just put this website on the NSA watch list.

    On the plus side, the under bridge dwellers are also on the list.

  29. Lynn says:

    “Jeff Bezos’ Bet On Housing Slide — His Single-Family Rental Play Appears Well-Timed”

         https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-bet-housing-slide-134130180.html

    All of these billionaires are buying hard assets with their cash.  I wonder what they are saying ?

  30. Lynn says:

    I’ve still got lots of room to go crazy here.  I now have version 14, 15, 16, and 17 development sandboxes on my main office pc drive.

    C:\dii>df
    Drive C: 635454894080 bytes free, 999549886464 bytes total, 36% full.

    BTW, I use the old Thompson Toolkit on Windows which is starting to show it age unfortunately.   He released a 32 bit (Win32) version before he retired but he did not change the sizing functions like df to 64 bit integers.  So at disk drives over 4 GB, the unsigned integers start to roll over and you get some weird looking numbers.

        http://www.tasoft.com/toolkit.html

    I asked him to open source his toolkit but nothing to date.  Bummer.  His version of the standard Unix utilities runs so much faster than cygwin since he wrote a lot of it in assembly language for the speed.

  31. Lynn says:

    “Who Owns More Land: Bill Gates, McDonald’s or The Catholic Church?”

        https://finance.yahoo.com/news/owns-more-land-bill-gates-132113385.html

    The Case for Bill Gates: Microsoft Corp co-founder is largely considered the biggest private owner of farmland in the U.S. with nearly 270,000 acres. This number stems from last year’s edition of The Land Report. It’s reasonable to assume that the purchases haven’t slowed down.”

    The Case For McDonald’s: The McDonald’s brand is massive and has been around since 1955. Over nearly 70 years, McDonald’s currently sits at just over 39,000 locations as of January 2022. Those locations each come with approximately 1.2 acres. The research suggests that McDonald’s owns about 70% of the buildings and 45% of the land at its locations worldwide. Once all the math is done, calculations show that McDonald’s owns around 47,037 acres of land.”

    The case for the Catholic Church: The Catholic Church owns 177 million acres of land across the globe for its churches and schools as well as owning farmland and forest land.”

    Wow.

  32. nick flandrey says:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-bet-housing-slide-134130180.html

    All of these billionaires are buying hard assets with their cash.  I wonder what they are saying ?

    same thing I’ve been saying, economic collapse, triggered by monetary collapse (ie hyper inflation).

    Use your inflated dollars to buy hard assets, then make money from the assets, either thru rent or by producing (ie growing) something with them.

    I think they want to be El Senor of the Hacienda with serfs to work the land, nothing mechanized.  An idyll if you are at the top of the pyramid.

    n

    All the riding school and becoming part of the “horsey set” easily ties into that.
    n

  33. nick flandrey says:

    Ted Turner owned a lot of farmland too.

    n

  34. nick flandrey says:

    Did a double pickup.   Rain and thunder continues.   dropped from 82F to 77F in the last half hour.

    Going thru some thrift finds.    Bunch of early 90s baseball cards, mostly $1 each,   ditto for mid 2010s Pokemon.   Got a bunch of football that I will just let the auctioneer look thru.

    n

  35. nick flandrey says:

    And suddenly it’s POURING down.

    n

  36. Greg Norton says:

    I think they want to be El Senor of the Hacienda with serfs to work the land, nothing mechanized.  An idyll if you are at the top of the pyramid.

    Bezos may aspire to be El Senor, but Gates wants to be Leonardo. Or Einstein. Or Feynman.

    He’s running out of time to just be Bob Metcalfe or John McCarthy, with his name at the top of one of the seminal papers in Computer Science.

  37. EdH says:

    Gah.  Started the Xcode update from the App Store yesterday…24 hours later it is still running.

    DSL? Apple’s servers? Who knows.

    Naturally the “mouseover Launchpad icon” trick only says “installing”, no message on status or % done.

    update: 30 seconds after I wrote the above it finished.

  38. EdH says:

    I am still trying to use the Intel Fortran compiler even though I have had major showstopper problems with it in the past. And they are incredibly slow for patches, years to fix.

    Tut, tut, Lynn.  

    Intel has only so many resources to go around.  There are hard choices to make, like:

    Supporting customers and existing programs,

     or 

    Spending hundreds of millions, per year, on “diversity” efforts.

  39. Lynn says:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-bet-housing-slide-134130180.html

    All of these billionaires are buying hard assets with their cash.  I wonder what they are saying ?

    – same thing I’ve been saying, economic collapse, triggered by monetary collapse (ie hyper inflation).

    Use your inflated dollars to buy hard assets, then make money from the assets, either thru rent or by producing (ie growing) something with them.

    I think they want to be El Senor of the Hacienda with serfs to work the land, nothing mechanized.  An idyll if you are at the top of the pyramid.

    A friend of mine, a real estate agent, was buying houses in a Hispanic neighborhood in Houston back in the 1990s and 2000s.  When 2008 happened, 3/4s of his tenants went back to Mexico when they lost their jobs in Houston as the illegals get laid off first. He had every single one of his rent houses, all 32 of them, mortgaged on the same commercial loan. After six months, he could not make the payments and his bank foreclosed on all 32 of his rent houses.  A year before that, he was flying high and made $600,000 net profit in 2007.  

    Moral of the story, don’t buy hard assets with lots of borrowed money.  I had no idea he was going down in 2008 but he did manage to stay out of bankruptcy.  His last big deal was he figured out how I could buy the million dollar commercial office property that I have my business in now.  He passed away three weeks after we closed the deal in 2011.  He and I were doing high fives in the title insurance office when all the paperwork was signed and my bank funded the commercial mortgage for 50% of the property.  He was the most honest real estate agent that I have ever known but he always pushed the envelope hard.

  40. nick flandrey says:

    Temp down to 74F and my gauge says 1.46″ .    It is slowing down a bit.

    I’m going thru boxes of stuff.   For some reason my goodwill had a bunch of evouluent vertical mice, including lefty versions.

    The soft coating got sticky, but it wipes off with alcohol.  Otherwise, seems to work correctly.

    n

  41. Lynn says:

    “Aluminum-Sulfur Battery Promises Low Cost Energy Storage”

        https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/26/aluminum-sulfur-battery-promises-low-cost-energy-storage/

    “Researchers at MIT and other universities have created an aluminum-sulfur battery that is cheaper and more effective than lithium-ion.”

    Must be heavy if it is not good for cars.

  42. Lynn says:

    “SpaceX’s Starlink Suffers Global Outage”

        https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-suffers-global-outage

    “The outage seems to have lasted for 3+ hours before service came back online Tuesday morning.”

    And this is why you have backup internet suppliers.

    “SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has also warned that the Russian government has been trying to jam and hack Starlink, which has been supplying high-speed broadband to wartorn areas of Ukraine. Globally, Starlink has around 500,000 subscribers.”

    Ok, that is so not good.

  43. Lynn says:

    Temp down to 74F and my gauge says 1.46″ .    It is slowing down a bit.

    I am beginning to think that we got three inches of rain yesterday here in the southwest side of Fort Bend County.  My ditch in the front of my house had a foot of water in it when I got home.  I have not had standing water in that ditch since last April or May.

    We are 76 F right now with a very small rainfall today, just drops of water.

  44. Greg Norton says:

    “Researchers at MIT and other universities have created an aluminum-sulfur battery that is cheaper and more effective than lithium-ion.”

    Must be heavy if it is not good for cars.

    I’ve seen lots of “battery breakthrough” stories as of late. They seem intended to counter stories like this which are increasingly common in various outlets.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevy-volt-battery-invoice/

    Again, Florida. Cape Coral. Gulf environment like Tampa but freezing weather is more rare.

    I believe that is significant.

    There is not going to be a magic battery tech which will prevent a ruinous battery replacement bill for any EV being purchased now. A true breakthrough tomorrow wouldn’t appear in new vehicles for 5-7 years, and EVs are not sold in sufficient numbers to interest a third party in making new batteries for old Tonymobiles at a scale which would make the price affordable.

    EVs are toys like a Porsche. If you want a toy, buy one, but realize it will be a money pit if kept long term … just like a Porsche.

  45. Lynn says:

    “Aluminum-Sulfur Battery Promises Low Cost Energy Storage”

        https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/26/aluminum-sulfur-battery-promises-low-cost-energy-storage/

    “Researchers at MIT and other universities have created an aluminum-sulfur battery that is cheaper and more effective than lithium-ion.”

    Must be heavy if it is not good for cars.

    Got too many things going today, did not finish my thoughts.  

    If this battery truly works, this is a good thing for the USA.  We have so much sulfur in the USA and Canada that we landfill thousands of tons of the stuff each day.  Elemental sulfur is a byproduct of the natural gas cleanup process and crude oil cleanup process.  And the Canadian tar sand plants produce 2,000 tons of sulfur a day by themselves.

    We do not have bauxite (aluminum ore) in the USA.  But we used to get three freighters a week of bauxite here in Texas at the Point Comfort port from South America where Alcoa had an alumina plant dating back to WWII.  We stopped about five years ago when China flooded the aluminum market with cheap aluminum.  Alcoa made 300,000 tons IIRC of aluminum per year in Rockdale, TX with four coal units supplying the power for the electrodes.  I worked there for three months back in the 1980s.  The aluminum side was amazing.

    So we have the materials or we can readily get them here in the USA to build these batteries.  And the materials are recyclable as opposed to the lithium-ion batteries which are not recyclable.  The only down side is that when you get sulfur to 240 F (116 C) at atmospheric pressure, it turns into a liquid.  Then at 320 F (160 C), sulfur becomes a gas.  Then it wants to combust with atmospheric oxygen to form SO2 at 2,800 F in stochiometric conditions.  It burns hot, real hot.

  46. Greg Norton says:

    I asked him to open source his toolkit but nothing to date.  Bummer.  His version of the standard Unix utilities runs so much faster than cygwin since he wrote a lot of it in assembly language for the speed.

    Once Red Hat bought Cygnus Solutions and made the Cygwin license free as in beer for commercial purposes, any competing commercial product was done.

    The 64 bit Cygwin was a mess a few years ago, but it is now at a point where IBM/Red Hat feels comfortable ending the 32 bit Cygwin.

    Hand coded 32 bit x86 assembly code is not going to run as fast as GCC output targeting x86-64, but Cygwin will still have the disadvantage of needing to hit the Posix emulation DLLs to do anything.

    Not having the 32 bit Cygwin will require me to change my workflow since I usually install both 32 and 64 bit versions, with a limited set of packages (vim, make, git, enscript) installed in the 32 bit environment and the bin directory available in my Windows PATH. The 64 bit environment gets a more complete set of packages including GCC and X.

  47. Lynn says:

    Once Red Hat bought Cygnus Solutions and made the Cygwin license free as in beer for commercial purposes, any competing commercial product was done.

    The 64 bit Cygwin was a mess a few years ago, but it is now at a point where IBM/Red Hat feels comfortable ending the 32 bit Cygwin.

    Hand coded 32 bit x86 assembly code is not going to run as fast as GCC output targeting x86-64, but Cygwin will still have the disadvantage of needing to hit the Posix emulation DLLs to do anything.

    I can grep my entire source code, 1.3 million lines of F77 and C++, in about ten seconds with his grep.   Fast, very fast.

  48. Rick H says:

    Speaking of EV batteries, and their long (compared to ICE) recharging times, saw this today:

    Thanks in part to a machine learning program analyzing vast amounts of lithium-ion battery data, scientists have reportedly found a means to safely and reliably recharge EVs’ power supplies up to 90 percent within just 10 minutes.

    See link here in Popular Science. 

  49. Ray Thompson says:

    means to safely and reliably recharge EVs’ power supplies up to 90 percent within just 10 minutes

    That will obviously apply to commercial chargers only. That is a lot of power to dump in 10 minutes. I doubt many homes would have a 1.21 gigawatt Mr. Fusion available.

    I also wonder what types of cables would be required. Higher voltage, smaller cables due to lower current. I don’t know that I would want a 4KV socket to be held in my hand. One flaw in the cable, say someone sticking a sewing needle in the cable, and that pile of carbon used to be the driver. Nor would I like a 4K ampere cable to wrestle which would be about as big as my arm.

    It is certain that the need for electric vehicles will drive technology into some interesting areas. Battery technology will certainly improve. Charging infrastructure will have to get better.

    Regardless of the improvements I really don’t see the demise of ICE vehicles. Some tasks such as towing require a lot of power. With the current technology I could not get to Crossville, TN from my house due to altitude increase. That takes a lot of energy towing a trailer.

  50. Greg Norton says:

    I can grep my entire source code, 1.3 million lines of F77 and C++, in about ten seconds with his grep.   Fast, very fast.

    On my work machine, Cygwin 64 bit frequently has long startup delays while the security software investigates all of the DLLs and the EXE. This despite the fact that I can’t run the upgrade process on the environment without Admin access, which, in theory, requires Director level approval.

    I had approval for 24 hours of Admin access the other day to install some bloated VMware remote desktop package, and I took advantage of the opportunity to upgrade Cygwin for the first time in six months.

    One upside of the last job was a $6000 Intel MacBook Pro i9 with 64 GB RAM and the max storage available as my work machine. Of course that isn’t an option at the current gig.

  51. nick flandrey says:

    Who knew that “hook up” culture wouldn’t benefit women?

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11162235/Tinder-toxic-young-women-swipe-right-apps-promise-sexual-liberation-working-men.html 

    a culture of casual sex is a disaster for women — not only because it leaves them feeling disrespected and used, but also because it can lead to dangerous situations.

    The truth is that men and women are not the same. Not only are men much more likely to be interested in one-night stands, women are also at a physical disadvantage whenever they go home with a man they’ve just met.

    using Tinder feels very similar to using a shopping app. You can swipe through a seemingly endless line-up of ‘products’ until you find a perfect match — or several.

    – I’ve been saying for a while now that the sexual revolution and the culture that grew up with it seems to be perfectly suited to men (and lesbians).   Men couldn’t ask for anything more than a shopping app offering thousands of potential sex partners without money or commitment changing hands.

    I think the ladies have been sold a bill of goods.

    n

  52. drwilliams says:

    “Thanks in part to a machine learning program analyzing vast amounts of lithium-ion battery data, scientists have reportedly found a means to safely and reliably recharge EVs’ power supplies up to 90 percent within just 10 minutes.”

    Ray pretty much covered it. I was thinking solid silver conductors in 6” diameter. No need for fancy plots to bring down the grid. Just a good clock and a spreadsheet to calculate when to plug in a hundred EV’s to coordinate the load spike.

  53. Alan says:

    >> At least it is a DRY HEAT.  “snicker”

    102 F and 18 % RH here in early evening in the low desert.

  54. Alan says:

    >> Going thru some thrift finds.    Bunch of early 90s baseball cards, mostly $1 each,   ditto for mid 2010s Pokemon.   Got a bunch of football that I will just let the auctioneer look thru.

    Didn’t happen to come across another one of these cards?

  55. nick flandrey says:

    Nope only ordinary cards. 

    n

    added- more’s the pity. You always hope….

  56. drwilliams says:

    latest CDC guidance on monkeypox:

    Wear a Mask in the Bathhouse and Don’t Pick Up the Soap

  57. lpdbw says:

    Sigh.

    Delurking again, because I need expertise.

    I have need for a portable USB drive 1TB or greater to hold video.  Due to the class I’m taking, I need it to be readable in Apple world, which is entirely alien to me.  My first couple days using it I’d describe it as just like a computer, only upside down and backwards and the mouse is stupid.  Oh, and it’s slow as molasses, too.

    But I also want to use the drive in the world of real computers.  

    So the questions are:  What brands (and don’t mention Seagate; I was a victim of the first gen Barracudas) and what models can mount seamlessly in that awful Mac world but also in PC land?

    Someone just a bit upstream recommended a WD drive, which is the way I was leaning anyway.  Educate me on the differences between WD drives, and whether buying refurb is folly (I’m guessing yes).

    I appreciate your experience and willingness to help.  Some of you, anyway.

  58. Nick Flandrey says:

    My mac experience is way out of date but laCie was always good.

    n

    (off to bed)

  59. drwilliams says:

    @lpdbw

    Got nothin’ for ya.

    But if I was going to mention Seagate, it would be Seagate LaCie d2 Pro.

  60. Lynn says:

    I have need for a portable USB drive 1TB or greater to hold video.  Due to the class I’m taking, I need it to be readable in Apple world, which is entirely alien to me.  My first couple days using it I’d describe it as just like a computer, only upside down and backwards and the mouse is stupid.  Oh, and it’s slow as molasses, too.

    I don’t know a single thing about Macs.  But, if I were to purchase a portable hard drive of 1 TB size, I would get a SSD drive.  WD of course.  $130 for 1 TB, it claims PC and Mac compatibility.

         https://www.amazon.com/Passport-External-Portable-Drive-WDBAGF0010BRD-WESN/dp/B08F27J5SQ?tag=ttgnet-20/

  61. Greg Norton says:

    I have need for a portable USB drive 1TB or greater to hold video.  Due to the class I’m taking, I need it to be readable in Apple world, which is entirely alien to me.  My first couple days using it I’d describe it as just like a computer, only upside down and backwards and the mouse is stupid.  Oh, and it’s slow as molasses, too.

    Any portable USB drive will work on Mac, but you may need a USB-C to USB-3.0 adapter dongle.

    Use the Disk Utility to format exFAT if you need to use the drive on both Windows and Mac.

    If you are just using the drive with Mac, format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.

    Apple’s latest disk format is APFS, but I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable using that on an external drive.

    I buy portable drives at Sam’s. Whatever is on the shelf, Seagate or WD. I haven’t had one go bad yet, and one of my backup drives has been around more than a decade.

    I actually have more problems with backup drives and Windows 7 than I’ve ever had plugging one into a Mac.

    Apple really has USB-C nailed. My M1 Mac Book Pro with the Plugable dock connected to a larger keyboard/mouse/monitor is magic.

  62. EdH says:

    As Greg says.

    FWIW my last gen intel based Mac Mini is quite snappy (SSD and home upgraded to 32GB ram). And I use a windows style mouse, but the scrolling direction is what it is.

    I took a graphics class at the local JC a couple years back and their Macs were agonizingly slow.  I talked to a tech and he said their anti-virus and anti-malware stuff was the culprit.

    In addition, as a public facing machine and one that people regularly plugged their own media into, they wiped everything down to bare metal and re-installed from a server image regularly…daily or weekly, I can’t remember.

  63. Alan says:

    >> All of these billionaires are buying hard assets with their cash.  I wonder what they are saying ?

    Umm, “we’re smarter than you.” 

  64. Lynn says:

    >> All of these billionaires are buying hard assets with their cash.  I wonder what they are saying ?

    Umm, “we’re smarter than you.” 

    Yup.  I was not smart enough to go to work for Microsoft in 1988 when they offered me a job.  I figure that I would have a boatload of stock and be retired now had I done so.

  65. Ray Thompson says:

    scrolling direction is what it is.

    Scrolling direction can be changed in settings. Costco has a 1TB SSD on sale for $99.00.

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