I don’t think we’ll get a white New Year, but it feels cold enough… at night anyway. We’ll see how warm it gets in the daytime and sunlight, but it was 37F when I went to bed. It’s supposed to be clear and cool.
Got my errands done, truck loaded, and made the trip to the BOL yesterday. Nikki Heat audio book kept me awake and alert. Freaking moon was HUGE and yellow orange, and just above the horizon for most of my drive. VERY dramatic. Unfortunately it was cloudy when I got here.
I drove up to the house and half my Christmas decor was dark. Dang fire ants love them some electrons… They’d built a mound over the outdoor timer/photosensor and invaded it enough that it wasn’t turning on. I banged most of the debris out, and got it working again. Wife and kids got the full experience when they drove up later.
There was some extreme weather up here this last week. The wheelbarrow was full of water, and there was plenty of evidence of high wind and severe gusts. Lake is still not at normal levels though. I think I better get some rainwater capture set up because long term, anything could happen with the lake. Sabotage could drain it, it could get contaminated, or it could just be very low in a drought. ‘Course in a drought, there won’t be much rain either. Still, I’ll feel better if I have a few hundred gallons of my own sitting here.
Wish I could store a few buckets full of electrons as easily.
And why the h-e-double-el is kerosene $15 per gallon? Gas is $2.50, and even the pre-mixed gas-oil for small engines is only $9/ gallon… it pains me but I picked some up anyway. It’s an expensive choice for heat at the moment. I pay $12 for a bbq bottle of propane,and even less in the bulk bottle for the house. I will look at firing up my Mr Buddy to warm up the garage rather than the kero heater.
Maybe I’ll install one of the wood stoves in the garage (now that we’re using it as another room)… Plenty of wood around here… and it’s not dependent on infrastructure I don’t control. Of course, that’s why I’ve been holding on to the stoves, for the house and my eventual workshop. Insulating the garage is on the list, and will happen. I skipped the step at the house in Houston when I had the chance and have regretted it ever since. Funnily enough, there have been several stoves come through the auctions with shipping damage (like mine) and despite sometimes severe damage, they STILL sold for more than I was willing to pay. Some other folks are getting ready too.
Think about infrastructure and what you can live with and can’t live without. Make some choices, and start some stacks.
nick
Sony and Universal take better care of Marvel’s brand than Marvel does right now.
Plus, Sony is not a subsidiary of Vanguard/State Street/Blackrock. The management will do what makes them money.
Check the county building code where you live. Wood stoves and fireplaces now violate code in many surprising places.
Right before we left Vantucky – Clark County, WA – the county passed a rule banning new wood stove/fireplace installations, joining many other jurisdictions in WA State.
Think about it. The bureaucrats don’t like gas furnaces because the energy source is not easily controlled remotely by computer. Do you think they are going to let wood stoves/fireplaces slide?
Dave Chappelle performed at the opening of Joe Rogan’s comedy club in Austin last year. The rule for opening night was that all cell phones had to be off and placed in locked RF-blocking bags, effectively Faraday cages. No one present in the room talks about the set publicly, and any leaks have not gone viral.
Welcome to the future of comedy. The Club I-Don’t-Get-It demographic, always a problem for comics throughout time, have taken over.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/dave-chappelle-cancel-culture-netflix-the-dreamer-cfb8b23c
Yeah, Austin, but on my last trip to Killeen recently, I noted In-n-Out even had a new location there – always a sure sign of infestation from California.
Texas is not a Republican state anymore.
The fake Atari 2600 Lego console went back to the store in favor of one of these, which should arrive next week.
https://atari.com/products/atari-2600-plus
It actually … get this … plays the games. Imagine.
An SOC with an HDMI port in a plastic Lego module would have been $10. Maybe.
Lego deserves their fate if they’re circling the drain due to the sucking vortex that is Disney “Star Wars”.
Lego is a prime example of a company that could have stayed small, and made good money basically forever. Greedy management, greedy stockholders → stupid result.
Odd indeed. I paid $9.80/gal in California two weeks ago, via Walmart, although generally it is north of your $15 at smaller markets and hardware stores.
I don’t think anyone believed that Disney would damage the Lucasfilm IP as badly as they have. Lego rode that wave for a long time.
Lego is also yet another business where the decision makers never “got” nerd culture but still manage to profit despite sometimes releasing cynical or half baked products.
The biggest problem with cons as of late are civilians looking for a financial score overwhelming the show floors, trying to cash in on nostalgia as X-ers are in peak financial earning years.
A whining screed on 2024:
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-dare-even-look-forecast-2024/
The sad, sad truth is that he isn’t wrong.
46F and sunny this fine day. Some gently breeze too.
Had a nice lie in, now to get to work.
Hah, who am I kidding, I’ve still got coffee in the cup.
n
“Lego is a prime example of a company that could have stayed small, and made good money basically forever. Greedy management, greedy stockholders → stupid result.”
Failed green weinism in the form of soy plastic didn’t help. $400 million?
@Nick
That’s not a lie in, it’s total surrender of the day.
I thought that the soy plastic experiment was more limited.
Most of the Lego sold in the US is Hecho en Mexico so the nasty petroleum based manufacturing processes … and the skilled jobs involved … cough … stay south of the border.
At least Lego is still a quality product even if they are strip mining nostalgia.
I never did understand why Lego wanted to move away from normal plastic. Legos live basically forever – they aren’t trash, instead getting handed down over and over. In that sense, they are already “green”.
Lego is privately held, but the owners of their big IP licenses (Disney, Comcast, and, to a lesser extent WarnerDiscovery) and the major US retailers are all beholden to Vanguard/Blackrock/State Street and those institutions’ ESG agenda which has trashed American business over the last 10 years.
On a related note today, we were in Walmart going after contact lens supplies which HEB no longer stocks, and I noticed that “The Dukes of Hazzard” was back on the shelf in the video section.
WarnerDiscovery must be closer to bankruptcy than many imagine if they put “them Duke boys” back on the shelf, especially in light of John Schneider’s comments about executing Corn Pop last week.
Go back 10 years, pre-Charlottesville, and that show was right on the verge of being a huge cultural phenomenon again thanks to reruns being the single most popular program ever on CMT.
If you want to see what the ESG agenda does to the toy licensee if both the IP holder and manufacturer are public US companies and held mostly by institutions, keep an eye on Hasbro as it heads to Bankruptcy right behind Warner and Disney.
“Mysterious US Military Spaceplane Launches With Ability To Travel Farther Out Than Ever Before”
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2023/12/29/mysterious-us-military-spaceplane-launches-with-ability-to-travel-farther-out-than-ever-before/
“The U.S. military launched a secretive space plane Thursday night using heavier boosters that could potentially send it into an orbit farther from the earth than ever before, CNN reported.”
“Thursday’s launch is the seventh trip into space for the military’s X-37B multi-use, autonomous space plane, which resembles a small space shuttle, laden with classified experiments as the Pentagon keeps the purpose of each mission under a tight lid, according to CNN. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy booster that propelled the object into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is one of the most powerful rockets in the world and could place the X-37B in an orbit far distant from those achieved in previous missions.”
Huh.
And why the h-e-double-el is kerosene $15 per gallon? Gas is $2.50, and even the pre-mixed gas-oil for small engines is only $9/ gallon… it pains me but I picked some up anyway. It’s an expensive choice for heat at the moment. I pay $12 for a bbq bottle of propane,and even less in the bulk bottle for the house. I will look at firing up my Mr Buddy to warm up the garage rather than the kero heater.
The refineries make diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel out of the same cut of crude oil. Diesel is the premium fuel and most marketable fuel in the world. We ship almost a hundred million gallons of diesel to other countries every DAY from the USA for CASH. So that makes kerosene very expensive as a fuel. Almost double the cost of gasoline.
Then there is the one gallon metal can that kerosene comes in. Metal is expensive right now and rapidly rising in cost.
And then there is shipping of incendiary liquids. The railroads are charging extra for any volatile fluid due to recent blowups and the insurance companies, there are two: Re and Lloyds, are charging extra for the same. I am hearing that the insurance costs are up 3X from 2019.
I would move your heater to propane and get a 250 gallon propane tank. Plus you can run most generators on propane for three days to a week before they run out.
Or, get a wood pellet heater like Paul’s and Jim’s. Be sure to vent that bad boy outside.
Living is jumping in cost rapidly.
If you want to see what the ESG agenda does to the toy licensee if both the IP holder and manufacturer are public US companies and held mostly by institutions, keep an eye on Hasbro as it heads to Bankruptcy right behind Warner and Disney.
I read somewhere that Disney has laid off an guesstimated 60,000 employees in 2023. I doubt that Disney is going to end up in bankruptcy. All of the cushy jobs for the executives with awesome benefits would go away.
Most of the Lego sold in the US is Hecho en Mexico so the nasty petroleum based manufacturing processes … and the skilled jobs involved … cough … stay south of the border.
At least Lego is still a quality product even if they are strip mining nostalgia.
All of the plastic is made in Texas. 60% ??? of the world’s plastic is made at the Formosa Plastic Plant in Point Comfort, Texas. Something like four million tons of plastic pellets per year in a $30+ billion plant.
SpaceX had a successful launch for the airforce. Thatshould be 99 or 100 for the year. Absolutely mind boggling pace.
N
Try another store.
For example, HEB has a canned made in Mexico salsa. Hill Country Fare. Really good stuff. Comes in a little can, like the little cans of veggies. Not full of sugar like a jar of Pace. You can buy it at the Burnet store. Not at Marble Falls. Certainly not at the Plus store in Leander.
Oh, and chips for the salsa? They have sea salt tortilla chips in the Deli area. Good chips. You can buy in Burnet or buy the same in Marble Falls for 40¢ more a bag.
HEB is rather, uh, “tuned to the market at each store”. Shirt(-r) why else have scanners and virtually on-line tracking of product movement?
Different size stores do have space constraints. You can’t stuff the Plus store into the Marble Falls or much less the Burnet stores but…… maybe a bit? Two rows of whatever instead of 16 rows?
Oh. Last time I went to the store at Rundberg and Lamar? Burnet is better, heck Lampasas is a little store and it’s better.
The Gecko owns General Re, BNSF, and 80% of the tanker car manufacturing capacity in North America through Marmon/UTLX.
UTLX also leases many of the tanker cars they manufacture to other railroads if the cars are not purchased outright.
The next time you see a freight train, look for the UTLX on the tanker cars.
Another factor in the cost of kerosene in 1 gal. cans is the lack of people interested in working in the distribution and retail levels to load/unload and shelve the product as entry level employees.
We were not in our usual Walmart inside the Austin city limits today so the store was clean and well stocked.
The colonist developments have been spreading up Ronald Reagan Blvd. into West Georgetown and Leander in the last few years. It is the only route left for builders to meet their demands for new and big houses.
The stores would be smart to cater to that demographic.
Every time we head up Reagan to 29 heading to Marble Falls, I swear there is a new HEB. We make the drive once a year at Christmas unless I get a Father’s Day trip to the Bluebonnet Cafe.
Our local HEB is a remodeled legacy Albertsons and dominated by Curbside. The pharmacy section which usually has the contact lens supplies has been shrinking steadily since the pandemic.
Disney as currently constructed will not survive.
Spammers are sometimes amusing. And sometimes not very patient.
Just got this one about my “McAfee AV” subscription (which I don’t have) in my gmail spam folder:
Rick,
My deepest condolences!
A whining screed on 2024:
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-dare-even-look-forecast-2024/
The sad, sad truth is that he isn’t wrong.
I wonder if this is true: “Mr. Putin enjoys something like an 80-percent favorability rating in Russian polls. He has managed his country through a crisis ably. He is certainly more esteemed as a national leader globally than any other figure, at least on a par with Modi in India and Viktor Orban.”
I have no doubt that Putin’s poll numbers reflect 80% favorability.
I have no doubt that the next election will show similar numbers.
I have a teensy bit of doubt whether 80% of the population in Russia view him favorably.
We were not in our usual Walmart inside the Austin city limits today so the store was clean and well stocked.
If you are price sensitive (who isn’t ?), if you cannot make it to a Walmart then you will be upset at the prices of today.
“Why the New York Times is unlikely to win its AI lawsuit against Microsoft”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/why-the-new-york-times-is-unlikely-to-win-its-ai-lawsuit-against-microsoft
“This matters in relation to this particular case because copyright law aims to further the pursuit of knowledge, not to stop it dead through demands for unreasonable compensation. Under United States law, there is no copyright violation for ” fair use ” of the material at issue. The fair use doctrine promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works. Under the doctrine, teaching, scholarship, and research are highlighted as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use.”
Yup. Fair Use has long been a established usage of copyrights. Otherwise, one would have to go negotiate a license to use any printed material. And all of my 1,000+ reference books would be worthless. I have an 800+ page 8.5 inch by 11 inch reference book open on my desk right now that I am copying data out of.
So, the number of illegal aliens will probably hit 15% of the USA population at the end of 2024. Roughly 45 million or so illegal aliens. And 80% of them are men from ages 18 to 40 ? What could go wrong with that ?
Biden is proposing putting them in the Army. Just what the Army needs, a bunch of men who do not speak English, have very little education, do not read or write English (do they read or write at all ?), and no loyalty to the USA population. Sounds perfect for going house to house seizing guns and gold.
Well, the 80% that were asked under threat of relocation to Sibera were certainly favorable.
House to house searches will be city cops contracted for the jobs outside their jurisdiction, preferably from a completely different part of the country.
Out at dinner in Fredericksburg tonight, I noticed someone was running “Don’t Trust Trikky Nikki” ads on the local ESPN cable feed during the Liberty Bowl.
I couldn’t hear the audio, but it looked like a PAC ad buy and not a particular candidate’s.
Linux ate the lunch of all of the other non-BSD Unix flavors thirty years ago because Linus was free to implement the C API right out of the POSIX manual, without having to support legacy quirks in some system calls the other vendors would have to maintain until the end of time.
Examples out of the “Stevens” books, the Bibles for POSIX development in the 90s, just worked in Linux, and, because C API compatibility is sacred going back to Kernel 1.0, most still work.
Unlike Target stores I’ve been in recently, management at WalMart generally try to keep their locations looking decent as much as staffing allows.
And Bentonville is brutal on suppliers to keep costs down.
WalMart is also only 30% owned by institutions, with the big 3 maintaining only 10% total ownership of the stock. Peak WalMart was ~ 20 years ago.
Patrick Lee wrote a science fiction trilogy (The Breach, Ghost Country, Deep Sky) that had some interesting concepts. Well worth reading, so skip the next if you have any intention of doing so.
Spoiler Alert: Stop here if you haven’t read the books and intend to.
The McGuffin is revealed at the end. The reader has known for some time that messages and strange objects are coming back from a few years in the future. In that future humanity has determined that they would be better off without a relative handful (20 million) of troublemakers, so they identify the members of the group and get rid of them. Things are much better, and they’ve already committed to doing it again when a similar group comes of age.
I thought at the time that his estimate was low–if you don’t get rid of the rabble they will find some other p.o.s. to lead them.
The excess males in the alien invader army are 60% of 45 million = 27 million.
The answer that Nikki Haley missed:
“In 1861 the evil Democrat slaveholders in the South would not give up their slaves and were determined to murder their fellow countrymen to get their way,
The heroic Republicans of the North, led by Abraham Lincoln, were determined to end slavery in the United States, and the Civil War was the result.”
Buuttt everyone knows the Republicans are evil…
n
Too cold for a fire tonight, I’m going to have a hot shower and (for me) a somewhat early night.
Currently 33F at the back of the house. Probably 32 or lower down by the water.
Brrr.
n
drwilliams, is that a complete trilogy or is it an open-ended series which currently has three books? (You may have answered that in the rest of your comment, above, but I avoided seeing spoilers.) I get really tired of stories that never end, they just fade away as sales dwindle and the author stops publishing.
39F up here, at 0300.
There should be a term for national weather patterns where you’re colder than us. I’d call it the Hahaha Inversion Effect, but I’m not that mean – I realize that you down there really aren’t able to handle the cold more than briefly, between lack of snowplows, shallow pipes, building codes, and so on. And, lately, the push for “renewable” electricity sources, which, very inconveniently, become less reliable just when they’re most needed.