Cool and humid, but nice. It was beautiful yesterday. Didn’t see a thermometer, but it was very pleasant in shirtsleeves even in the late afternoon. Hoping for more of the same today.
Did a couple of pickups. Got an ebay item from storage and mailed that. Guy will pick it up in Georgia, while visiting from Germany. Crazy world.
I’ve got a couple of pickups today. I have the 7cuft freezer I bought to flip to my neighbors at the lake, and a knaak box I’ll use as a secure storage for tools up there. Knaak box was only $40 which was stealing it. I was planning to get the auction stuff and head out of town, but my wife and kids want to stay home this weekend, and I’ve got a guy coming to my secondary to look at a big item I’ve been trying to sell. I really need it gone, and I could use the money back in my pocket too. He’s available on Saturday. I hope to sell it. I’ll head up to the BOL on Sunday or possibly Saturday later. I may win some stuff to pick up on the way, which will mean heading up Sat. Flexibility is key to success, right?
Work on the foundation starts Monday, so I need to be up there and ready to go. I’ll be there most of the coming week, home for the weekend, then back up. “Life of a repo man’s always intense…”
Mine too, at the moment.
Stack something.
nick
Fort Myers has been trashed since Charley.
The Sanibel Causeway was just rebuilt in the last 20 years out of concern that the old design wasn’t high enough to avoid being washed away in a storm. It looks like the new design wasn’t high enough either.
Again, big money on Sanibel/Captiva. In a year it will look totally different.
And, remember, when you see video footage from Fort Myers, WPLG out of Miami is the Geico Gecko’s only remaining TV station owned outright.
The FL insurance carriers are toast, but the Gecko has played the state well.
Insurance only makes money when people don’t use it. The math hasn’t worked in FL or TX coast for a long time. Partly because they aren’t $20k shacks any more.
n
Wow, 56F and 80%RH this morning.
That’s downright chilly.
n
The politicians of both parties have kicked the can down the road in Florida since 2004.
I doubt it will be resolved until an Ian-level storm rips up Tampa Bay and devastates the stucco shacks built in the swamps over the last 40 years.
Honestly, the government shouldn’t be in the insurance business at all. Which would mean that lots of coastal and swamp areas would never have been built up.
The State of Florida’s government-owned insurer of last resort, Citizens, is possibly the only carrier in the state that is technically solvent.
When we left Florida and sold our house 12 years ago, lack of major storms during the first Crist administration, which would have revealed the structural problems in the system, meant that homeowners’ insurance became another “Show Ya” game in the late 00s.
“What are you paying for Citizens, Greg? … Sucker. I’m paying half that for Green Turtle Good Hands Subsidiary … What? Storms? When? … Showed ya.”
Insurance only makes money when people don’t use it. The math hasn’t worked in FL or TX coast for a long time. Partly because they aren’t $20k shacks any more.
The average overhead in a insurance company is 30% to 40%. That means that to make a profit and pay out claims, the rates need to be almost 200% of the claims. That does not work so they fight tooth and nail on paying claims.
Honestly, the government shouldn’t be in the insurance business at all. Which would mean that lots of coastal and swamp areas would never have been built up.
We are having an argument in the USA about what is a 100 year floodplain (floods once in 100 years) and what is a 500 year floodplain (floods once in 500 years). The data is horrible (we barely have 100 years of data, much less 500 years of data) and the best elevation maps are only good to two feet.
I suspect that the 500 year flood plain maps are horribly underestimated. At least several of the Gulf Coast counties do not allow building below the 500 year plain now after Harvey. That includes Harris County, the central county of Houston. None of the flood maps take the two tropical storms in December 1913 into account since we do not know the rainfall amount. The first storm probably dropped 30 inches of rain on west Houston and the second storm a week later probably dropped another 30 inches of rain on west Houston. I have pictures of the old Sugar Mill, the highest spot in Sugar Land, with flood water from the Brazos River on top of the railroad tracks. And the railroad tracks are high in elevation.
Also, many of the water detention ponds that have been built in the last 50 years are drastically undersized. They were built for the old 100 year flood plain and desperately need to be doubled or quadrupled in size. There should be zero water runoff for any neighborhood except for the small controlled flow from the water detention pond at 100 gpm to 1,000 gpm.
Houston barely missed getting totally immersed by Hurricane Harvey. If Harvey had gone north of Houston instead of south of Houston, we would have seen another two to three feet of rain in the Houston watershed. That would have been horribly grim.
“Is ‘Our Democracy’ Failing Our Country?” by Patrick J. Buchanan
https://buchanan.org/blog/is-our-democracy-failing-our-country-159699
“Forced constantly by the establishment to choose between them, patriotic Americans may one day come to choose, as did their fathers, the country they love over the crown that rules them.”
In other words, balkanization may be coming to the USA.
“Oil Prices Are About To Reverse Course”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Oil-Prices-Are-About-To-Reverse-Course.html
“Actually, JP Morgan was one of the bullish forecasters. Last week, the banking major’s analysts wrote in a note that they expected Brent crude to rebound to $101 in the fourth quarter. The analysts cited tighter supply as the reason for their forecast.”
“Goldman Sachs is even more bullish. Three weeks ago, the bank’s analysts said Brent could hit $125 next year despite the oil price cap touted by the G7 as a tool both for keeping the market supplied with Russian oil and for lowering prices. They remain bullish to date.”
The USA SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) has sold off over 1/3rd of its contents to friends of Hunter Biden. Now that oil must be replaced. And every oil field in the world outside of the USA is in decline.
“Never-before-seen malware has infected hundreds of Linux and Windows devices”
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/never-before-seen-malware-has-infected-hundreds-of-linux-and-windows-devices/
“Small office routers? FreeBSD machines? Enterprise servers? Chaos infects them all.”
Great, my dedicated web server is a FreeBSD box.
“Putin vows to use ‘any means’ to defend annexed Ukraine regions in new nuke threat after biggest land grab since WW2”
https://www.the-sun.com/news/6337530/putin-officially-declares-ukrainian-regions-are-russian/
That is almost all of the sea ports of Ukraine.
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
I ordered some stuff from Big River. They really push “get Prime free for a month” don’t they? It was to arrive on Monday. Now, Saturday, tomorrow. We’ll see.
I had weird dreams last night. Mostly the continuation of the weird dream that’s been running for a couple of years. No, it’s not like dreaming a book I’ve read. I wonder what’s going on in my head sometimes. Anyway.
Nice weather today. Sunny and all of 85F. 56F this AM. Dry enough to be almost itchy. A/C? Off. Windows open. Got to keep the kWh usage down…. grin.
I woke up thinking about the new PC, tracking says it’s at the airport in China this morning, and how it has, best I can tell, one sata SSD and if you want more storage you can add a M.2 SSD drive stick.
And I’m like, how do I get my stuff off of the old machine to the new machine if it has only one connection for a hard drive? I can’t pull the drive from the old machine and copy stuff to the new machine? Maybe I can pull the drive from the new machine and stuff it in my current machine. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
My USB ports don’t work for more than charging the phone so forget using the portable drives. And I’m out of ports on the switch/hub so now it’s all complicated with adding a switch to the switch and what the heck… !!!
Oh. Never mind. I have the space to set up the new PC and play with it. It has wi-fi so it will see my Desktop share. I’m not exactly looking forward to messing with Win11 but at the same time I want to see what looks like it’s from WfW3.11.
Duh. Moron. I swear. At myself, too.
Time for the dog’s cookies.
I’m back to being a Prime member, albeit at half price. Students get 50% off a membership for 4 years. I’m willing to pay for Prime at that price.
We had to put our other older lab down on Wednesday. He was a mix that we rescued at barely 8 weeks. I think the first 8 weeks imprinted on him, as he was always a little OCD. But he was very loving and loyal, and was my wife’s shadow. I’m not having as hard a time with him as I did with my son’s dog in January. I think part of it is that he had been in pain for several months now, and it’s finally over. It’s still not fun though. At least he can run with his brother now and bark at all the other dogs forever.
The golden puppy is missing him, but I think she’s doing ok. She is definitely my shadow. We are going to look at another golden tomorrow. There are puppies available (8 weeks) and a couple older puppies (5 months, the same age as ours). Yeah, the odds of one coming home with us are pretty high…
“It’s still not fun though.”
It’s never fun. Every single one is a heartbreak.
“New York begins implementation of 2035 ban on new gas-powered cars and trucks, following California lead”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-2035-ban-new-gas-powered-cars-trucks-ICE-vehicles/633041/
“The transportation sector is responsible for the greatest share of greenhouse gas emissions in New York, as well as nationally, and leaders say the shift to electric vehicles is essential to meeting climate goals.”
Never gonna work.
Put a password on your SSH private key and keep it private.
Plus, F5. They got very lucky. I think that was a Cramer pick back in the day. Cramer endorsements are always a mixed bag.
And use Putty with WinSCP on Windows *downloaded from the authors* if you are not running OpenSSH client tools under Cygwin. Open source crypto.
““Where’s Jackie?” Biden Looks Around for Dead Congresswoman”
https://www.clayandbuck.com/wheres-jackie-biden-looks-around-for-congresswoman/
“Did you see Biden’s latest cringeworthy show of confusion? He was searching for a dead congresswoman, asking where she is and calling out for her at the White House.”
Does Biden see dead people ?
Put a password on your SSH private key and keep it private.
I don’t have my SSH private key. My host has the key and the root password since they manage the box for me. I don’t have the time or the experience to do so.
@ITguy, sorry for losing another, that’s a double whammy and twice the pain.
n
>> We are going to look at another golden tomorrow. There are puppies available (8 weeks) and a couple older puppies (5 months, the same age as ours). Yeah, the odds of one coming home with us are pretty high…
@ITGuy1998, sorry for your loss. And best of luck finding the right pup and giving them their ‘forever home’.
@ITGuy1998
I’m so sorry. It is never easy losing them, each one takes a bit of our heart with them when they go. Good luck with puppy tomorrow. Take a look at Ian Dunbar’s “I’ve Got a Puppy Now What Do I Do” for a quick refresher on all the glory that is puppyness.
Preps – for all of us. Do you have a will? advanced directive? Someone you trust who isn’t going to be emotionally overwhelmed when you kick the bucket or have a major (permanent) medical whatsit? If you have animals, do you have a plan and a backup plan? You can bet my middle sister doesn’t.
My middle sister made it into a good skilled nursing facility. She’s not expected to exit it alive. The unexpectedly dead partner has a sister, who is already taking action on packing everything. I don’t find this unexpected and warned family to anticipate this move, they’re surprised though. I’ve seen this behavior three times in the last two years. Humans can be horrible.
I’ve been tasked by my older (sane) sister with helping a friend of the dead partner to find homes for my middle sister and dead partner’s two dogs. I know nothing about the dogs (one is big and the other one isn’t) and haven’t been able to get ahold of the friend. I texted and left a voicemail. My older sister flew down to take over but heads back Monday. It’s going to be a mess unfortunately and my older sister will drive herself nuts trying to bring order to the chaos that has swirled around my middle sister her whole misbegotten life.
Middle sister is actually really good with animals, so there is a strong possibility that the two dogs abruptly looking for a home are well mannered dogs.
-joking- Cowboy Stu, need a couple dogs in your life?