Cool and damp, but probably no precip. Lovely day yesterday at the BOL. Sun came out and dried up all the rain, and the itsy bit-sy ……….
Anyway, enough of the silliness. No one called me on my “insert clever remark” joke? I’ll take it as you guys hoping to spare my feelings for a dumb mistake, and not a failed joke. (I don’t actually have a template for posts, despite the familiar (some might say ‘well worn’) shape.)*
There, you see? It was a kindness, not a bad joke. The power of an author knows no bounds.
Anyway, enough of this silliness. I did get stuff done to advance the ‘livability’ of the BOL. Still plenty to do, but the master bath has made progress, and the master bedroom. Having a Christmas tree up makes it more homey than you’d think.
Now to really get to stacking up there. I’ve got piles (stacks!) of stuff to take up. The difficulty will be in deciding where the balance should be between the amount of stuff here and the amount of stuff there. That will be a temporary issue if everything holds together long enough for me to get to parity….
So stack some stuff at your place. Then stack some more at wherever you’ll end up if things go sideways. You won’t regret it.
nick
*and here I would have dropped the close parenthesis and made a ‘failed to compile’ joke for the programmers in the audience.
Woman found 51-years after being kidnapped
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/woman-kidnapped-as-child-found-51-years-later-still-in-fort-worth-reunited-with-family/ar-AA14CGtU
Incredible
Amateurs. Austin had three outages in the last few years, one spanning a month in 2018 during which the inept Mayor was reelected by a wide margin.
Of course, the Tribune is not going to mention the Austin situation with another Mayoral runoff election pending and one of the Dem City Councilmen ultimately responsible about to take office as a Congressman, hoping to challenge Rafael Edward for Senate in two years.
57F and 90%RH this morning but nice sun and blue sky.
Kids are asleep. Wife is at work. Bacon in the pan, and the coffee robot is brewing…
Time to start the day.
n
The end is nigh-er!
n
Someone here must have mentioned SkyGlass before as an interface to flight data, because I’ve been to the website before, but I haven’t downloaded it.
This guy has the developer on to explain the UI and how to use it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfX1lUK3-Xw
The difference between using SkyGlass and one of the other tools, is that SkyGlass is crowd sourced and they do not scrub the data to hide flights. REALLY cool.
n
Kids are asleep. Wife is at work. Bacon in the pan, and the coffee robot is brewing…
I miss my grandfather’s old percolator coffee pot. It was neat to hear from where I was sleeping on the couch. I would wake up to the percolator going pop, pop, pop and my grandfather sitting in his chair watching the sun come up. Of course, I could barely see him due to all the blue smoke in the air, he would usually be halfway through a pack of Camels by then.
“Crypto firm BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/28/blockfi-files-for-bankruptcy-as-ftx-fallout-spreads.html
Oops. I am sure that Sam did not mean for that to happen.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
“”Collapse” in home prices is coming, experts say”
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/28/home-prices-real-estate-housing
“The residential real estate market has screeched to a halt, and some economists believe home prices are about to drop significantly.”
If all your savings is in your house and you need to sell, your life might suck. At least according to the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy. I have his book, I am going to read it some day.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/i-believe-the-economy-is-the-biggest-bubble-in-world-history-says-rich-dad-poor-dads-robert-kiyosaki-god-have-mercy-on-us-all-11669410423
But then again, we all gotta live somewhere. And I prefer a house over a tent.
Crypto has always been not much more than a shared hallucination as far as I could tell. Like people trading currency for bits as NFTs, most of crypto looked like FOMO mania.
When times get tough, you want stuff you can hold in your hand, bury in the backyard, or use to sneak across a border.
Peoples’ belief in crypto collapsing is another sign that sh!t is about to hit the fan globally and historically in my book.
n
Time to start the day.
I started my day off with Grape Nuts and soymilk (yes, your life kinds sucks when you are allergic to milk). Then I popped the top on the septic tank, cleaned out the chlorine tank from tablet residue, and added four more chlorine tablets. Every freaking month.
When times get tough, you want stuff you can hold in your hand, bury in the backyard, or use to sneak across a border.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy says buy a lot of silver.
https://twitter.com/theRealKiyosaki/status/1596229493244317697
And I prefer a house over a tent.
– or a van down by the river. Or a box under an overpass.
When I left my stable job in Hollywood and moved south, I very carefully considered buying something like a Vanagon as a fallback. There was no such thing as a ‘van life’ movement back then. Fortunately I found my footing before too long and didn’t need to live in my car.
If 40% of small businesses can’t pay their rent, house values are dropping and people will walk away from mortgages that are upside down, and rental unit prices are going up (to the point that some in Florida are trying for rent controls), there is a world of hurt coming for people. Ordinary people are going to be falling down the ladder to homelessness.
Look for a rapid increase in car living, increase in squatting with old campers (vis Cali), increase in multigenerational households, increase in multiple households under one roof, increase in shanty towns….
Look for more beggars, more “impromptu” markets, street vendors, hustlers, and person to person crime.
And look for people from a culture like that, and familiar with how to survive in same, to dominate that culture here, specifically gangs from south of the border.
n
cleaned out the chlorine tank from tablet residue
–after hearing about your experiences, not having a clorinator was one of the major factors in choosing the buried drip lines for my septic at the BOL.
n
cleaned out the chlorine tank from tablet residue
–after hearing about your experiences, not having a clorinator was one of the major factors in choosing the buried drip lines for my septic at the BOL.
n
I am still amazed that they let you build a system without a chlorinator in these enlightened times.
I am still amazed that they let you build a system without a chlorinator in these enlightened times.
– buried lines, no one should ever come in contact with the water.
n
Well, that sucks. I got fully outed on Usenet this weekend. A guy followed my gmail address and outed my full name and employment. I have been talking about my experiences on comp.lang.fortran on converting to C++ using F2C and a fortran fan boi decided that he had to blast my name and employment all over the place.
And, of course his opinion on anyone moving from Fortran to C++ with a full diatribe on my lack of intelligence. Of course, he made my point that Fortran is moving from a serious development computer language to a hobbyist language but he is so full of himself that he fails to see that.
out him back.
n
Lynn, IIRC your business has a lawyer on call or on retainer. Send him the relevant usenet posts and ask there’s anything to be done. Your brief description made it sound defamatory to you and therefore to your business, but I don’t have all of the details and I’m not a lawyer blah blah.
Why do people find pleasure in doing such things? Is their life so miserable that is all they have left for some morbid pleasure?
And in other news. My right hearing aid is failing, again. I have had nothing but problems. Last time it was sent to the manufacturer to have it replaced. I don’t think the manufacturer did anything but sprinkle fairy dust on the innards or maybe some incantations expressed by a man in a robe.
Now the right hearing aid is being sent off again. It will take 3 to 4 weeks. What do really deaf people do in this situation? I asked to see an audiologist to just get new hearing aids. The earliest appointment is in the middle of February. Even if the audiologist approves new hearing aids it takes three months to get the devices and get them programmed so I can pick them up at the VA. That makes it a six-month process.
I think next time I have problems I will just lose the hearing aids and get replacements from the VA. Probably a quicker process.
The fiat monetary system is a house of cards, as recognized since its’ inception in 1971. But all the world’s monetary systems are fiat, therefore it is in no one’s interest to speak of the Emperor’s clotheslessness. It is a con game that everyone is in on and dependent upon.
Smoldering fires like FTX, Credit Suisse, Deutche Bank, the Chinese housing bubble or something as yet unseen threaten to torch the whole shebang, ala 2008.
The backstop for the whole game is the Saudi oil fields and the policy of pricing their oil in dollars only. The oil is consumed as fast as it is extracted. Should the policy change, or the regime change, or the reserves be downrated… We are not their biggest customer anymore.
I’ve seen it reported many times that a quite nice apartment in 1923 Berlin could be had for $100US, equivalent then as 5 oz. of Gold. Mortgages should become easier to pay off if inflation really gets going. Provided personal cash flow stays abreast.
… increase in shanty towns….
Let me be the first to say it: BIDENVILLES!
Pearls Before Swine: Helping Elon
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2022/11/28
Oh Pig !
Every now and then some nation, nation-like group, or other group says they will start using a currency backed by gold or other tangible asset. The most recent was the Islamic State, and look at what happened to them. Before that, Libya under Kaddhafi was one of the leaders in forming an Africa-wide gold-backed money, and look at the American response to Libya when they’d actually backed off on support for terrorists. Domestically, every now and then some group takes steps to set up a private currency redeemable for gold. SFAIK, 100% of them were raided or came under bureaucratic attack.
Makes ya wonder…
“Apple Has Threatened to Pull Twitter From App Store, Musk Claims”
https://finance.yahoo.com/entertainment/apple-threatened-pull-twitter-app-190207124.html
““Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” tweeted Musk, who has assumed the role of CEO of Twitter since closing the $44 billion deal for the company on Oct. 27.”
“Musk on Monday also claimed that “Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” He tweeted at Apple CEO Tim Cook, “What’s going on here @tim_cook?””
Yup, Apple is a monopolist.
“My bedside table”
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597165510595989504
That handgun looks like it has been detriggered and dehammered.
Lynn, IIRC your business has a lawyer on call or on retainer. Send him the relevant usenet posts and ask there’s anything to be done. Your brief description made it sound defamatory to you and therefore to your business, but I don’t have all of the details and I’m not a lawyer blah blah.
I’m ok. My lawyer requires a $30,000 retainer for such things.
We got lucky with our first house timing. We purchased in late 2001 when prices were low. We sold in 2010 after the bust. We still made good money on our house, and got a great deal on our current house too. Even if housing prices take a dive, I won’t be under water, and I’d make money if I had to sell. Well, I’d come away with dollars. I don’t believe a home is an investment. A bad savings account, yes, and it beats the alternative of throwing away money on rent.
We have no plan on moving in the near term, maybe even into retirement. I will reconsider if the housing market tanks again and I can move into something else for a less-than-insane price. i feel sorry for people who HAD to buy during the past year, not for those who chose to.
“Small modular reactors will not save the day. The US can get to 100% clean power without new nuclear.”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/small-modular-reactor-smr-wind-solar-battery-100-percent-clean-power-electricity/637372/
“We can create a renewable electricity system that is much more resilient to weather extremes and more reliable than what we have today.”
So why does Germany’s renewables not work ? Answer, the energy storage schemes are expensive and do not work either.
“”Atmospheric Chess Pieces Align”: Polar Vortex May Unleash Arctic Blast As Far As Deep South”
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/atmospheric-chess-pieces-align-polar-vortex-may-unleash-arctic-blast-far-deep-south
Well, that is foreboding. Does not look like it will hit Texas though.
BTW, my favorite Charles Schulz 100 year birthday comic was on Big Nate. It covered four days. It was classy without being overbearing and contained three neat puzzles.
https://www.gocomics.com/bignate/2022/11/23
“I am just a little ol’ country boy doing his job.”
“For fifty years, I did the same thing day after day without repeating myself.”
“If I were a better artist, I’d be a painter, and if I were a better writer I’d write books.”
Ever watch Greater Tuna? During the news broadcast, “Nuclear holocaust to affect 17 states. TEXAS not included.” Pretty much sums it up for me when the network news is having a hissy about the weather on the East coast and a hurricane coming ashore rates “It’s gonna rain in Houston”.
All I can do is make sure my faucets are wrapped and the cats haven’t clawed the insulation from the pipes under the house. Trickle the hall bath faucet, too.
Yay and yippy ki aye! (Spell check disagrees with me.)
I replaced the the auger motor on the Trager knock-off grill in September 2020. It’s not very expensive, $20 to $30 bucks. It is a pain in the you know where to replace. It’s more involved than dropping the blower fan for a few drops of oil.
It’s kind of like having to remove skid plates to change the oil in the side-by-side.
I think I’d like to cook a brisket for Christmas / New Years. Cooking in the oven is not the same.
I can hear the motor cycling. The transmission has failed.
The grill sounds a lot like the pellet stove because… surprise, it’s pretty much the same tech.
Maybe I’ll get a good auger motor this time.
Added: “[Easy to Plug on] – Remove the hopper, remove the burned out or neglected motor, and install it as it was.” You bet man. I’m always taking the pellet hopper off of the grill. I’m going to throw a dart, it’s all from China anyway. Let’s go for actual English…
Almost thirty years ago I heard someone pushing for ultra-high-mileage cars. They’d weigh 700 pounds or less and “could be designed” to be just as safe as 4000-pound cars in a collision with larger vehicles. Even back then I could smell the BS.
Ever since I’ve been alert for “we can create”, “engineers can design”, or, best of all, the extra-passive “can be designed”. They almost always mean that someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has dreams rather than plans.
In Layton, UTright now – currently 29F, and snowing heavily. About 2 inches (so far) on the cars in the parking lot, and large flakes coming down heavy.
Travel day is tomorrow. Expect to get a bit of snow on the way home, but the tail end of this storm ought to be passing east of here by then – I’m traveling west.
Another round of low snow forecast for later Wed; hoping to be home by then. Would prefer a two-day drive of 10 hours then 3-4 hours, but will watch the weather and do the whole thing in one day it that means avoiding the snow. The first 10 hours go through some higher elevations, so aiming to get through those before the next storm hits.
The 2019 Highlander AWD will handle it all OK. And I’ve got tire chains, but don’t really want to put them on. The last trip home with snow (half or OR and all of WA going up I-5) had 2-5 inches packed snow on the I-5, and did OK there in ‘snow’ mode and keeping the speeds down.
I am still amazed that they let you build a system without a chlorinator in these enlightened times.
– buried lines, no one should ever come in contact with the water.
n
How deep are the drip lines ?
The backstop for the whole game is the Saudi oil fields and the policy of pricing their oil in dollars only. The oil is consumed as fast as it is extracted. Should the policy change, or the regime change, or the reserves be downrated… We are not their biggest customer anymore.
The Saudis are their own best customer now. Reputedly they are using three million barrels of oil per day that they convert into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel in refineries built for them in the 1980s by Fluor Daniel.
drip lines are 6-8 inches deep.
n
Almost thirty years ago I heard someone pushing for ultra-high-mileage cars. They’d weigh 700 pounds or less and “could be designed” to be just as safe as 4000-pound cars in a collision with larger vehicles. Even back then I could smell the BS.
Ever since I’ve been alert for “we can create”, “engineers can design”, or, best of all, the extra-passive “can be designed”. They almost always mean that someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has dreams rather than plans.
I have found that these people rarely have created anything, if ever. But, they have SIMULATED the scenario in a dedicated software, or heaven forbid, an Excel spreadsheet. They never take any problems into account such as supply chains, new environmental regulations, etc and always have extremely rosy forecasts on materials, manpower, and fuel. You know, like it used to be when we built stuff in the USA from 1900 until 1970 (Clean Air Act of 1967 and Clean Water Act of 1972).
In case you didn’t hear, the new strain of COVID will kill us all. Please get 12 more boosters for the Twelve Days of Christmas.
That is all.
Yep, not doable at a real price point, or maybe at all.
I know someone with a first generation (1976?) Ford Fiesta, which is about 1600#, designed before crumple zones and side impact rules. He gets about 40mpg out of it, and likes to smoke people occasionally at a light. But he’s a car guy and that tiny engine is probably modified.
His wife fondly refers to it as “your casket without handles, yet”.
So Big River has the $25 or more for free shipping. I had the correct size of silicon/felt feet for my dining room chairs in my wish list. Added the auger motor and yeah, no, ain’t coughing up $16 for shipping for day after tomorrow delivery. Like that has ever worked for me. I’m cool with a Dec 5 delivery.
It’s all pretty slick. You go clicky click and pass on joining Prime and then yeah…. Have to edit that shipping for your stuff.
I guess the moral is “don’t drunk shop on Amazon”.
I carry the house on our balance sheet at the sale price from eight years ago, when Texas had more realistic appraisal standards.
Are you sure it wasn’t our troll friends.
While I doubt they have any real expertise on the “traditional” topics of this space that they claim to prefer reading, I don’t doubt they could fake it given enough time.
Most of the tech industry is faking it … like the laid off Twitter employees.
And if that does not work China will create another strain. Sponge Brain and Fauxi are really hoping for a version that only targets republicans.
I have to be very careful even when sober. I did sign up for 30 days of Amazon Prime for free. I then ordered a bunch of stuff over the course of a couple days. Nothing that really hit the $25.00 boundary. Still free shipping with prime. I will cancel the prime membership the day after Christmas.
If you are looking for Xmas gifts for someone (or yourself) the Humble Bundle people are running a game promotion through December 2.
https://www.humblebundle.com/?hmb_source=navbar
They also have their book packs and software packs, as usual.
This is legit, btw, apparently a bit goes to charity so, at a guess, the donating businesses probably get to deduct things at full retail.
Disclosure: I’m not associated with them in any way, except as an occasional customer.
Musk could license the app to other similar messaging platforms for a fee.
For the masses, Twitter has been all about the dopamine hit of the app, particularly on iOS, since they bought out the original developers 14 years ago.
Take away the App Store monopoly on compiled binaries, and you are fulfilling the wildest privacy-invading dreams of Zuckerberg and Google’s founders among many others. Zuckerberg already got caught trying to evade the screening once, which almost cost him his corporate internal app distribution license.
Fauci hit several of the Sunday news shows doing damage control after his deposition last week.
He did his best Reagan/Bill Gates “I don’t recall” impersonation, apparently, even to the point of throwing a hissy fit over an unmasked court reporter’s sneeze due to allergies.
Fauci will skate unless the vaccines are proven to be deadly long term for more than a single digit percentage of the population.
Still a proud member of the control group.
Amazon works for me. I’m not quite in the boonies, but it’s a 30 mile round trip to real shopping, Target and CostCo and Walmart. The mall area is another 10 miles further, which makes that a 50 miles round trip.
Using the IRS mileage allowance as a guide (not over generous), each round trip costs me a minimum of $18.
It doesn’t take too many trips to make Prime worth it.
Back when I was in grad school, I remember reading that the Department of Energy and Nvidia had a crash project running to create a Fortran compiler front end to output LLVM IM since the reliability of the nuclear weapons can only be modeled in simulation running code dating back 40 years or more. Nvidia was probably involved to mix in CUDA magic in the matrix calculations.
Obscure programming languages pop up in the weirdest places. The last job used Forth of all things, and I got the rationale there.
Are you sure it wasn’t our troll friends.
While I doubt they have any real expertise on the “traditional” topics of this space that they claim to prefer reading, I don’t doubt they could fake it given enough time.
Most of the tech industry is faking it … like the laid off Twitter employees.
Yup, he is one of my competitors. I have his name now. Total scumbag in India, just like our troll friends.
Back when I was in grad school, I remember reading that the Department of Energy and Nvidia had a crash project running to create a Fortran compiler front end to output LLVM IM since the reliability of the nuclear weapons can only be modeled in simulation running code dating back 40 years or more. Nvidia was probably involved to mix in CUDA magic in the matrix calculations.
Obscure programming languages pop up in the weirdest places. The last job used Forth of all things, and I got the rationale there.
The big problem with modern Fortran is that most Fortran programs were developed with zero initialization and saving the variables from one subroutine call to the next. Essentially all variables were global. Modern Fortran compilers try to ignore those two features and get into trouble for it. The first time I tried to port to Intel Fortran, my code overran the internal table for zero initialization and crashed the linker. The last time I tried, I only got partial zero initialization and I could not develop a test case without 100% of my code. They asked me to hand over my code and I said no.
The next big problem is that there is not a decent IDE (interactive development environment) for Fortran mixed with C or C++ code. And the Intellisense features do not work with Fortran in Visual Studio, rendering it almost useless. You have to use grep or some other tool like that.
Well, that sucks. I got fully outed on Usenet this weekend. A guy followed my gmail address and outed my full name and employment. I have been talking about my experiences on comp.lang.fortran on converting to C++ using F2C and a fortran fan boi decided that he had to blast my name and employment all over the place.
. . .
Yup, he is one of my competitors. I have his name now. Total scumbag, just like our troll friends.
To paraphrase Firefly’s Mal Reynolds: out him right back! 😀
>> Of course, I could barely see him due to all the blue smoke in the air, he would usually be halfway through a pack of Camels by then.
Preferred usage would be a “caravan” of Camels 😉
>> Look for more beggars, more “impromptu” markets, street vendors, hustlers, and person to person crime.
Found some good prices here today to increase the stacks.
ADDED: I usually try our locally-owned shop but they’ve been low on certain items of late.
>> I’m ok. My lawyer requires a $30,000 retainer for such things.
(505) 503-4455
I believe Code::Blocks supports Fortran, but you are on your own there. Even though it was the officially supported IDE in the department where I completed my Masters, most undergrads got into VS Code pretty quickly despite official support being zero.
I knew enough Code::Blocks to debug the students’ C++ problems in the lab.
I know more about Code::Blocks than VS Code, however.
I hate VS Code. I’ve worked several jobs where getting that running (or not) has been an excuse for people not getting cr*p done.
>> For the masses, Twitter has been all about the dopamine hit of the app, particularly on iOS, since they bought out the original developers 14 years ago.
I think of Twitter as the app for grown-ups whose kids won’t explain TikTok to them 🙂
Garbage disposal replacement inflation.
IIRC, I replaced the disposal ~ three years ago. $99.
Same disposal at Home Depot today except without a plug-in cord option. $139.
The old disposal was jammed solid, and I spent the better part of yesterday morning trying to get it to move without success. The wife clock was ticking today, and I had a vendor conference call which required a trip to campus ahead of time.
Home Depot is across the street from our group’s building.
I can experiment with the old disposal. Maybe I’ll luck out with some more caustic chemicals … or a sledgehammer.
Our ‘boil water’ notice got extended, and the schools will be closed tomorrow too. I guess we’ll be using those hurricane make up days after all.
Did you guys know that ticky tacky allows hard core porn? Given their user base, the chinese are building quite the blackmail database… much of it looks like ads and promotion for the girls’ only fans page, but a fair amount looks like amateur phone sex…
n
Huh, just won another chest freezer.
n
Maybe I’ll luck out with some more caustic chemicals
– just take it to your local metal recycler and get the $5. You will be ahead on time, for sure.
n
Bang Bang.
Which reminds me – the Republicans are finally discussing removing Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee.
So who was trying to work from home in their jammies using TeamViewer from their desktop at the office with an interface on the secure network?
>> I’m ok. My lawyer requires a $30,000 retainer for such things.
(505) 503-4455
Better call Saul. Isn’t he dead ?
Garbage disposal replacement inflation.
IIRC, I replaced the disposal ~ three years ago. $99.
Same disposal at Home Depot today except without a plug-in cord option. $139.
The old disposal was jammed solid, and I spent the better part of yesterday morning trying to get it to move without success. The wife clock was ticking today, and I had a vendor conference call which required a trip to campus ahead of time.
Home Depot is across the street from our group’s building.
I can experiment with the old disposal. Maybe I’ll luck out with some more caustic chemicals … or a sledgehammer.
I take that the broomstick did not work ? If so, that means that one of the grinders is broken off and the broken grinder is under another grinder.
I also have a six foot long cheater bar that I have used with the allen wrench. That guarantees that the disposal is toast when you are finished.
It must be something in the air. Saturday evening as I was going to bed, I noticed the switch to the disposal was on, and it wasn’t running. I was tired so I just flipped the breaker off and went to bed. The next morning I turned on the breaker and hit the reset switch underneath. It worked properly. Whatever happened, it was magic, as the wife says she has no idea.
“Chief Twit Elon Musk says ‘tyranny is all that lies ahead’ if free speech is lost in America as he prepares to release sensitive ‘Twitter Files’ on suppression: ‘This is a battle for the future of civilization’”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11479723/Elon-Musk-prepares-release-sensitive-Twitter-Files-suppression.html
Unreal. And I do not want to see Hunter smoking crack ever again.
So who was trying to work from home in their jammies using TeamViewer from their desktop at the office with an interface on the secure network?
“Houston Blames Water Outage on Failure of Backup Transformer”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/houston-shutters-schools-power-outages-035629586.html
Houston is blaming Centerpoint Energy.
“Life-Insurance Payouts Hit Record $100 Billion in 2021”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-insurance-payouts-hit-record-100-billion-in-2021-11669554670
“Covid-19 deaths likely fueled an increase in death-benefit payments”
Sobering. I still think that the Koof attacked a certain genetic component in people.
>> In case you didn’t hear, the new strain of COVID will kill us all. Please get 12 more boosters for the Twelve Days of Christmas
Wouldn’t it be 78 jabs?
So y’all mentioned bee keeping…
and in this week’s auctions, one beekeeper helmet and face mask, in another a nice hive box.
n
>> BTW, my favorite Charles Schulz 100 year birthday comic was on Big Nate. It covered four days. It was classy without being overbearing and contained three neat puzzles.
So there was nothing from Scott Adams in Dilbert? Or did I miss it?
Re all that programming stuff: don’t forget those of us who developed the hardware that made those characters on 132 column paper come alive. It continues; think an HD display in your pocket connected to servers all over the world, serving everything you never thought possible.
Of course, programmers control whether that is for good or evil. Hardware just carries it.
Prison. For a very long time.
“Gene” was a very good Cinnabon manager right up until the end.
>> BTW, my favorite Charles Schulz 100 year birthday comic was on Big Nate. It covered four days. It was classy without being overbearing and contained three neat puzzles.
So there was nothing from Scott Adams in Dilbert? Or did I miss it?
Nothing in the last week. Unless it was real subtle.
Here is the list of the participants (over 100 ???):
https://schulzmuseum.org/tribute/
Dilbert was in the tribute to Schulz 22 years ago:
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-05-27
Re all that programming stuff: don’t forget those of us who developed the hardware that made those characters on 132 column paper come alive. It continues; think an HD display in your pocket connected to servers all over the world, serving everything you never thought possible.
Of course, programmers control whether that is for good or evil. Hardware just carries it.
I am beginning to think that Unicode is evil. We are having massive problems with it.
Prison. For a very long time.
“Gene” was a very good Cinnabon manager right up until the end.
I have tried to watch Better Call Saul. I have bounced twice now.
I am bingeing Stargate Universe for the third time right now.
Allen wrench. Broomstick. Baking soda/vinegar in large quantities. Allen wrench and mallet after removal this morning.
I’ll let it sit out for a while and try again in a couple of weeks. After that, to the curb on the night before trash day – usually that kind of stuff doesn’t even last until morning.
>> They’d weigh 700 pounds or less and “could be designed” to be just as safe as 4000-pound cars in a collision with larger vehicles.
NHTSA not withstanding, I still cringe when I see someone driving a Smart car, especially on the freeway.
>> They’d weigh 700 pounds or less and “could be designed” to be just as safe as 4000-pound cars in a collision with larger vehicles.
NHTSA not withstanding, I still cringe when I see someone driving a Smart car, especially on the freeway.
The only thing worse is ANY motorcycle. Even my 800 lb Honda Valkyrie.
I saw a Smart car in France back in 2009 that I swear was only two feet off the ground. The windshield was six inches of that two feet. It was a total convertible. Looked like a gocart.
>> I guess the moral is “don’t drunk shop on Amazon”.
Just a reminder that we’re heavy into ‘porch pirate’ season and if you haven’t already tried them, Amazon Lockers are a good way to foil the pirates.
Now there is a “jab” that you can self-administer to the pirate, but should be used very judiciously.
Watch the black and white opening segments of the first episode of seasons 1-5 and then pick up the story of “Gene” in Season 6, Eps. 10 and 13 (the final episode of the series).
“Gene” is really interesting TV. Carol Burnett gives an amazing guest performance in one of the full episodes, and, sadly, the segment opening season five is the last gig of Robert Forrester before he died.
I have now converted 56,596 lines of Fortran code to C++ code. Not all of it compiles cleanly yet though.
At five words per line average, that is 282,980 words. A very nice sized book. Half of a David Weber book.
>> Which reminds me – the Republicans are finally discussing removing Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee.
Which reminds me:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/23/gaetz-no-charges-sex-trafficking/
>> Obscure programming languages pop up in the weirdest places. The last job used Forth of all things, and I got the rationale there.
I learned RPG in high school and did some programming in it for the school principal. It was an experimental HS back in NYFC where you basically picked your own schedule and the school day was from 8AM to 4PM. I jammed as many of the required credits into my freshman and sophomore years and spent a good part of my junior and senior years either in the computer lab or graphic arts shop (printing – letterpress and offset – and drafting).
>> Unreal. And I do not want to see Hunter smoking crack ever again.
Nor do we need to see his (ass) crack.
>> I am beginning to think that Unicode is evil. We are having massive problems with it.
@lynn, do you support any DBCS languages?
Definitely for @lynn…
https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-11-28
D1 started watching “Wednesday” and binged 7 episodes today. I watched about ⅓ of the first one and thought it was pretty good, except what they’ve done to Gomez. THAT’S a crime against anyone who loved the movies.
n
added- and all the canon.
>> I am beginning to think that Unicode is evil. We are having massive problems with it.
@lynn, do you support any DBCS languages?
We kinda support Unicode file names and path names. Kinda. Everything else is 7 bits.
Our user interface dates back to Windows 1.0. One of my guys is trying to convert it to UTF-8 right now.
Our Fortran code is definitely 7 bits only. One of my goals for the Fortran to C++ conversion is to support Unicode file names and file paths for the calculation engine. We fake it right now.
Definitely for @lynn…
https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-11-28
Yup, I have been faking it for 47 years.
Didn’t link this when it was only Gateway Pundit, since their article didn’t have links to primary sources.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bidens-gender-fluid-nuclear-official-charged-felony-theft-after-lying-cops
This is the shaved headed “pup play” red dress wearing ‘expert’ hired by DOE. I guess he’ll have more time for leather and leashes in the future.
n
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-non-binary-nuclear-official-charged-stealing-womans-luggage-airport