Cool and wet again, with more rain on the way. Ground is saturated, and there has been so much development in town replacing grass with concrete, that I’m sure the downstream watersheds are flooding. My house is about 100 yards from the edge of a watershed, so about as high as it gets locally, it all flows downhill from here… I’m not worried about flooding for myself, but there are going to be some people who get wet.
Had kind of a busted day yesterday. Tried to get to the rent house, but the roads were flooded just getting out of my neighborhood. I didn’t really want to head downstream and then try to get back in time to pick up the kid, and my renter hadn’t replied to my messages. So I went and hung out with my gun store buddy. Had a good long chat with him and his wife. Tenant eventually texted that she’d been sick, but later would be ok… so I’m headed over there today.
EVERYONE I talk to has had the crud that’s been going around, either in December, or they’re finally getting it. I remember a December in 2019 that was similar…
I haven’t been able to do any auction drop offs with the rain pouring down. Just getting stuff out of storage, or to the truck, would mean it got wet. I need to get some lots listed on ebay too. I’m only listing high value lots, pipes, and whatever I can get the kid to list, but I need to actually do it. Inertia is a thing. So is being over-committed.
Stopped at the HEB on my way home yesterday. Bought some more pork shoulder, and beef brisket. Still $1/pound and $2.50/pound. That’s cheap protein.
Dinner was supposed to be pork ribs, but they were spoiled. Still had a day to go on the Best By too, so I’ll be trying to get that money back. If the problem was the store, they need to know about it. If no one else complains, then I guess the problem was me, but I don’t know when it happened. Sucks but it was cheap so worst case I’m only out $12.
I expect a certain amount of “breakage” but food from the store should be good.
Meanwhile the world gets crazier every day.
Stack it high and deep people. We’re gonna be on our own, together.
nick
Spoiled ribs: the supermarkets we patronise have “satisfied or your money back” policies. I rarely take advantage thereof, but I have never experienced any difficulty in so doing on the rare occasion I felt they had let us down freshness- or quality-wise.
Belt-and-braces, for Ken, from yesterday…
Denis says:
24 January 2024 at 04:13
Ken, here you go:
https://www.br-klassik.de/
You can stream it by hitting the play button at the bottom of your browser screen. If you have an internet-enabled radio, you’ll find it high in the list of German (Bavarian / Bayern) public radio channels.
Rain.
Nick, time to worry is when you see an old boy leading two of each kind of animal…
Crud: I had it starting at the end of November. It took two courses of cefuroxime and ten days of hit sea air on Tenerife to get my sinuses back to approaching normal. Not nice.
See also the last two governors of NYFS. Andrew “Granny-killing Groper” Cuomo said that if you don’t support the entire libtard agenda, NY has no place for you. Kathy “The Ho” Hochul also wants non-libtards to knuckle under or leave, though I can’t remember what she said well enough to find it.
I’m torn between leaving as soon as the relatives, whom I’m sticking around to help, shuffle off this mortal coil, and working on a way to depopulate NYFC and environs so that they no longer dominate state politics. Let’s see, six or eight million deaths in agony versus my convenience. Well, when you put it like that…
Idiom alert: belt and bracers.
Everyone still acts like Biden will be the nominee after the “first” primary in South Carolina.
Thanks to the writers’ strike, Force Majeure allowed Apple to take another look at the project and pull the plug. Many more will follow. Using Florence Pugh as a lead in anything right now, especially a pricey period drama, is a complicated decision.
Tim Cook, who makes the final decisions at Apple these days, is not straight.
24 hours after I implemented changes to my NAS firewall, and I’ve had no access attempt notices. I hope the scripters will just delete my NAS name from their lists after getting bounced. I could still get Denial of Service attacks (if it was worth it to the hackers).
I still get my regular, daily, notice that the NAS was successfully backed up to Backblaze.
I am becoming more convinced every day that many people really don’t know how to use computers. Windows, MacOS, and especially Linux.
They use the computers to browse the WEB, do email, the occasional spreadsheet or word document and watch a video. Few know how to really use the computer properly. Cutting, copying, pasting activities, some know how to do those. People using word packages generally don’t know how to properly format the document, instead treating the computer as a glorified typewriter. Paragraph styles, spacing, text alignment, using tabs to draw lines, etc. are all foreign concepts. Notepad would serve them well enough. Spreadsheets are limited to simple add or subtract one cell from the next, no real formatting knowledge.
When it comes to file handling is when things really fall apart. They have duplicate files scattered in multiple places on the disc drive. Apple makes this really a problem with the way that files are moved around by copying and pasting. Sometimes the file is moved, sometimes the file is copied, sometimes a duplicate copy of a file is created. My wife has multiple copies of the same file in as many as five different locations. I gave up trying to explain how to really handle files.
None of the people I have helped with computer problems have backups of their files. That is not even a consideration. For a few clients, I have configured backups to an attached thumb drive as that is all they are willing to allow. None of them want to pay for an online storage account. Free options do not work as there are too many files. I don’t do paid online backup either but my critical files are backed up on external devices and in free storage options. All my files are backed up on external media. I am not totally protected if my house were to burn.
I have had three clients who opted to not pay for backup have real issues. I showed them how to back up to an external drive. A few years later the backup is nowhere to be found, or failed and the device never replaced. Two clients had their laptop disc drives fail completely, The drives would no longer spin up. I got them a new computer, installed Windows and the software but could not restore their files. They are shocked that all those pictures of their grandbabies growing up are now gone.
People with cell phones, almost everyone, does not do any backups. They have thousands of pictures on their iPhone. Then their phone breaks and has to be replaced. All of their pictures are lost forever. When they get a new phone, they keep the same mentality and don’t do any backups. Apple has an iCloud plan for $3.00 a month that will store 500 GB of data and can be shared among family members. Fairly cheap backup. Yet few really use the plan. 1 GB is free but the phone user does not set up the backup on the device.
I believe it was a Food Pyramid in Tulsa that got busted 12 or so years ago. Employees admitted to being instructed to use alcohol to wipe off the expiration dates on expired packaged meat and then apply a new date. There were several other violations, but that one always stuck with me. 🤮
There was a period of time where only the hobbyists really knew how to use a PC (early to mid 1980s). Then, starting in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s it was a lot of kids, geeks, and IT professionals that really knew them. By the late 1990s and early 2000s it seemed most of the under-40 crowd was fairly computer and Internet savvy. Then, they got cheaper (especially storage) and easier to use and more pervasive and at some point in the last 10-15 years they became an appliance. Consequently, nobody knows how to use them anymore. Probably for the same reason nobody knows how to fix a microwave and fewer and fewer people change their vehicles oil themselves or do any other kind of maintenance. It’s an appliance. They turn it on and use it. If it doesn’t work right, then they make a warranty claim or buy a new one. Very few people under 30 are digging around .ini/.config files troubleshooting anything. Those days are over.
Pork supply and quality in the US has been weird since the Chinese bought Smithfield and the swine flu problems in China in late 2019 got pushed off the front page and buried by the Covid panic.
Our usual Christmas Eve pork roast in 2019 tasted freezer burned even with as much garlic as my wife uses to get the Puerco Asado right. I can’t remember if the source was HEB or Sam’s, but we didn’t have a problem getting a refund.
Lately, chicken at our local Sam’s looks really iffy.
Denis; Thanks much!
Steve F: Idiom alert: belt and bracers.
Thanks, Steve, but I’ve read enough British fiction to be able to translate “bracers” to “suspenders”. 🙂
Good reminder to add some Loctite to your stacks – Red and Blue.
Yes, they are. What surprises me is the number of people with files on a device and such files have never been backed up. The only location those files exist is on the device itself, desktop, tablet or phone. Most are shocked when the device fails, and they no longer have access to any of those files. The concept of backup, safe storage, are all lost on those users.
Windows has a built-in backup method that works reasonably well. An external device is required. MacOS has Time Machine, which in my opinion is a hulking mess but it does work. An external device is required. iPhones have iCloud that people don’t use. I am guessing Android has something similar.
Most people don’t avail themselves of these services. When the device catastrophically fails the stuff is lost. With Apple if a person has a MAC or iPad, any pictures on the phone are available on the other device which is a plus for Apple, if the person uses the same iCloud account.
I suppose in the long run it does not matter. When I die all the pictures stored on my computer will be lost forever. And no one will care.
Union labor, where performance is limited to the poorest and sloppiest worker on the assembly line. Where exceeding the minimum level results in a union complaint. Where advancement and raises are based not on quality of work, but how long the worker has been working at the lowest level.
In the early 90s, employees at one store in Delhaize’s Food Lion chain got caught on a network undercover camera investigation dipping expired meat in chlorinated water and rewrapping with new expiration dates. Food Lion’s rapid expansion pace came to an abrupt halt, and Delhaize has never recovered in Florida and other parts of the US where they were the new player at the time.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that Food Lion was the last serious threat to Publix in Florida. The same was probably true in Texas with HEB.
Very true. I only have a free icloud plan, but I backup my photos to my network share. I don’t do it religiously, because I have an iphone and an ipad, so three copies of the data. I copy to the network when I get low on free icloud space.
My wife does this too, though most times it takes a little encouragement from me.
My network shares (on a synology device), automatically backup to Backblaze. I also run scripts to backup to to local hard drives in my desktop whenever I add/change something. Every month or so I also run a script to sync to an external encrypted drive that lives on my car. Lastly, I have an external drive at the bank, but it gets updated much less frequently. It is really a last resort device.
On a related note, I’ve though about having some of the really good pictures in our collection printed. Who knows if my son will keep up the data after I’m gone. Ultimately, it’s on him, so I’m not worried about it.
My wife is a big scrapbooker, and she made a book for him as a going away to college gift. It contained all of our favorite pictures, and notes, of the three of us from his birth up to senior year. That has fulfilled the desire to print out pictures, for a while at least.
Boeing will eventually move all of the jetliner production to the South Carolina facility and out of WA State, which is not “right to work”.
The 737Max was a political decision to keep the union happy while management unwinds Renton and, ultimately, the company presence in WA State.
Boeing will eventually move all of the jetliner production to the South Carolina facility and out of WA State, which is not “right to work”.
The 737Max was a compromise with the union to bolt big engines on a 737 instead of developing a single aisle variant of the Dreamliner in a design process similar to the way that the 757 and 767 moved through development and production at the same time.
Boeing needs to keep the union happy until Renton no longer matters, but that will take a generation.
My students are supposed to be semi-technical, but few of them understand files and directories. Is it in the cloud? Locally on the machine? Where on the machine? No clue…
It’s only partly the fault of users, though. The OS hides file extensions, hides the current path, sometimes outright lies about directory names, etc.
I always mention backups to first semester students, but how many have them? Probably very few…
Yes, I laugh out loud whenever someone talks about how computer savvy the current generation is. They USE computers, they don’t understand them. People used typewriters, pencils, clay tablets, but they didn’t make, configure, or troubleshoot them.
Early cars were the same way. You learned all about them, or you had a man who did. You had to know, because no one else did, and automobiles broke all the time.
I told my daughter I wrote a program to brute force one of her math homework questions, and I got a blank stare. She’s had a programming class, but it’s something you do to make dumb games. I’m not sure she recognized that apps are programs, and I’m pretty sure that she conceptualizes apps and programs as things that EXIST not things that are made, and constantly RE-made.
They think “wifi” is the “internet”, not a means of connecting to it, have no idea how it works, or that it’s RADIO. The fact that there are a dozen radios in their phone never crosses their minds, to them radio is music in the car.
Which is how you get people believing the 5G cellular spreads viruses.
n
Cool and dreary, light rain at the moment. Getting ready to head out for the day.
n
Ack. I thought I lost the first Boeing post above and had to switch personal laptops to sign a siding company’s bid.
Gen-A, Gen-Z, and some younger Millennials have no idea how PC technology (to include all of the OS flavors) works. The days of assuming a young person just automatically knows more about computers than older people are over. Actually, the reverse is now true. I think people confuse the younger gens’ savvy with how to use apps as being the same thing as knowing a lot about computers. Just because your grandson or nephew knows how best to tweak your iPhone photos or can amaze you with how fast that tap and swipe their way around SnapChat doesn’t mean they have a clue as to how any of it works under the hood. Sadly, they really don’t care either.
MacOS is exceptionally good at doing that. I am fairly fluent in PCisms but I still have trouble figuring out where, or why, MAC stores files. Add in aliases and the confusion can add another level. Of course the MAC zealots tell me I just don’t understand computers. At least they provide an answer.
As Jerry Pournelle used to say about Mac’s, it is very easy or impossible to figure out.
Their phones and video game systems receive constant updates. Software never seems to ever exit “beta” anymore.
All of Apple’s operating systems are now GUI shells on top of Unix.
Dr. Pournelle called a Unix/Linux “guru full employment act”.
The Korn Shell/Bash environment is very consistent with a distinct philosophy behind the user interface, but the text-only interaction is intimidating for newbies, even users with a lot of technical experience on Windows or Mac.
None of the GUI shells for Unix ever worked well before Apple, and their shells are still a work in progress.
Is that the block coding they teach now? Conceptually, it’s not horrible. The idea is to get them thinking in terms of algorithms and to “program” using conditionals and loops and whatnot. The idea being that once they have that down the rest is just language-specific syntax. This is in contrast to local community colleges that have been churning out programmers that know whichever language-specific syntax they got their cert in, but very little else about software architecture or engineering. (I suppose that’s the difference between a programmer and a software engineer.) Unfortunately, for block coding, most kids just get a very low level intro course where they make a silly game and the education system gets to pat themselves on the back for teaching kids to “code.”
Sadly, a lot of programmer jobs at non-IT companies will go away in the coming decades as business people will just use high-level languages to block code whatever they need (think “Create Your Own Macro Wizard” on steroids) and won’t need coders for any of it.
Part of what led to my firing from the tolling company was my expectation that a Windows developer with 20 years of career experience and hired at a pay grade above mine for his “advanced” C++ knowledge could pick up the Unix shell easily, without a lot of hand holding or whining, and management would have that expectation as well.
Geesh was I wrong on that one.
I’ve made a related joke to *nix guys before:
Them (expecting me to say KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, Fluxbox, etc.): “What Desktop Environment do you prefer?”
Me (with an amused expression): “macOS.”
The desktop environment shouldn’t really matter on Linux, but a whole generation of developers has come up through the education process who are completely dependent on Visual Studio Code to do any development work on the platform and are clueless about the command line.
I spend most of my time in a terminal window running Gnu Screen for the current job since we target an ARM embedded system with Yocto, but the younger folks all run VSC.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/is-russian-president-putin-really-planning-to-take-back-alaska/
OTOH, What if he has to tale Murkowski? And her whole family.
I’ve had a look at VSC and it’s an ok environment. I use Eclipse or – by preference – IntelliJ. An IDE offers a lot of nice functionality.
Depends on what you’re doing, of course.
>> Yes, I laugh out loud whenever someone talks about how computer savvy the current generation is. They USE computers, they don’t understand them.
As long as TicTok and Insta work, they’re happy.
Motif is the future … and always will be.
Fedora/RHEL still support Motif binaries and provide development libraries as well as the resource compiler.
What always limited Motif GUI development was the licensing cost in a commercial use environment
>> https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/is-russian-president-putin-really-planning-to-take-back-alaska/
OTOH, What if he has to tale Murkowski? And her whole family.
What if we throw in all the Palins?
The 737Max was a compromise with the union to bolt big engines on a 737 instead of developing a single aisle variant of the Dreamliner in a design process similar to the way that the 757 and 767 moved through development and production at the same time.
While the 737Max engines are physically big, that is just a 5,000 hp or 8,000 hp gas turbine in there. The old gas turbines were 20,000 hp or more. Those new engines bypass at 6 to 1 up to 11 to 1 and are crazy efficient since they do not run very much of the air through the combustion pots.
Boeing save an incredible amount of time and money going that route. And time was very important to them since the a320 high efficient was already released.
For the long term, Boeing should revive the 757 to replace the 737Maxes. But I doubt that they will do that as there are more than a thousand 737Maxes on order.
So, never the present? 😜
I’ve heard pilots LOVE the 757.
Motif is the future … and always will be.
I remember the first time that I saw Motif in 1990 and thought, wow that is beautiful. And it has never gone anywhere since it is so compute intensive.
I thought that most degree programs were nominally duplicates of other degree programs.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/01/23/hbcu-duplication-legislative-workgroup/?itm_source=parsely-api
The 757 is done. Boeing will have to develop a new single aisle design which won’t start deliveries until the 2030s, and the union would have kittens.
The union understands that Boeing leaving Renton is inevitable, but everyone in leadership wants to be well into their retirement years before it happens.
The other problem was the C based API.
Motif was very heavily used for internal applications at big companies throughout the 90s, particularly if they bought the HP Apollo PA-RISC workstations.
I get an e-mail called Office Watch. I don’t read it very often more than just a glance through. I don’t have Office and haven’t had any of it since I switched from Outlook98 to Thunderbird. How long ago was that? I think I had XP, I’m running Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 for what it’s worth.
https://office-watch.com/2024/wordpad-alternatives/According to the link, WordPad is going away.
I don’t use it much, just when I want different sizes of fonts in a doc. Maybe some different color text, too. I have zero interest is some on-line program or installing something like Open Office.
I copied the contents of the wordpad folder. Maybe it will run after MS “updates” my PC to remove it.
paul, if Wordpad goes away and you still want RTF editing, you’ll need to install something. Well, technically you can create RTF documents manually with a text editor, but I doubt you want to do that. Searching for “RTF editor for Windows” gives a handful of results for free applications.
Just had a thought. If WordPad won’t run after MS removes it from W11, maybe a version of Write will run. Just dig a copy out of a cab file from Win98 or NT5Beta or XP. Maybe from Win7.
I can do different fonts and font sizes and colors in Dreamweaver2. Pretty easy. I can just do it all in notepad, too. It’s called “HTML”. Printing a pretty copy without the browser’s header and footers is a pain but doable. I did it with my resume eons ago.
There’s always a way.
As for Outlook98, I liked it. But I wanted my mail saved in something not .pst that could be read in a text editor and be (fancy words) cross platform.
Have y’all, especially Texans, seen Abbott’s statement today declaring the Biden (mis)administration being in violation of his oath of office, and the compact between the USA and Texas to be broken?
I just watched “Killers of the Flower Moon”, 2.5 hours of boredom. It has been nominated for 10 Oscars. It is based on a true story. The only reason I can think that it got those nominations was to be politically correct. Or the reviewers fell asleep and woke up at the end and faked their enjoyment of the movie. It was incredibly boring, much too long, and a convoluted story line with too many jumps back and forth. Had I spent money at a theatre to watch the movie I would be demanding my money back, at about the 1.5-hour mark.
“Oppenheimer” also got many nominations. I paid for that movie on Apple TV. I paid $20.00 and I think I wasted $18.00. I was not impressed. I watched to the end hoping it would improve, it did not.
If this is the stuff that studios are producing there is a reason they are struggling to make money.
Yup. “Wheels” is on a “roll”. Will plugs launch F-16s on Tejas?
nope, been driving all afternoon. If so, that certainly escalated quickly.
n
If you want to watch something really excrable, try Aquaman 2. Oof, Jason Momoa killed Aquaman with that piece of shite performance.
Nick, didn’t you speculate that we’d be needing Republic of Texas passports eventually? That was ONE (out of many, many) reasons why we sold everything in Cacafornia and moved here 3 years ago. Well, that and the current proposal and eventual certainty of CA having “exit taxes” for people leaving the state.
I got through 20 minutes and instead watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
This is interesting. I don’t think it’s just a crazy drunk posting.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/theres-a-crown-lying-in-the-gutter
“Are you sick and tired of the rain, Houston? We’re almost through after one more stormy night”
https://spacecityweather.com/are-you-sick-and-tired-of-the-rain-houston-were-almost-through-after-one-more-stormy-night/
“Living in Houston is such a weird trip. We’ll go through an event like Hurricane Harvey and never, ever want to see another rain drop again. Then we’ll go through something like last summer, with its heat and drought, and the first decent rain of the fall will feel so damn cathartic. I don’t know about you, but after this week my pendulum has swung back toward not wanting to see it rain for awhile. I could do with some sunshine.”
I am ready for some sunshine. Last night at 3 am, the house was rocking with the wind and rain coming through. I’ve got over a foot of water between us and the east side neighbor. All of the ditches in our neighborhood have become ponds.
Good
fencesmoats make good neighbors.Would that even be enforceable? Would California just enhance the fruit inspection check points such as they have on the Nevada and Arizona border? A border station would need to be added at the Oregon border. Moving vans, UHauls, could be taxed that are headed east or north. Cars loaded with luggage and material could be taxed. Or would California require a “change of address tax” on the final state income tax filing?
My brother and hundreds of others that retired from Caltrans had to get a law firm to sue the state. The plaintiffs were now all living out of state drawing their retirement from Caltrans. California wanted to tax their retirement pay even though they did not live in the state. California’s reasoning was they were getting paid by the state and thus the income was earned in the state. That got shot down fairly quickly.
California is a greedy state. It has to be. So many liberal programs that require funding. The income stream is dwindling as people are leaving the state.
In-and-Out burger is closing one of their Oakland stores because of rampant crime. Multiple other stores have closed in California cities because the crime rate is too high. Theft from the stores and crimes against customers are out of control.
It is no surprise that people are leaving California.
FIFY. You obviously haven’t been keeping up with the narrative.
In-n-Out is closing their ONLY Oakland store. Too much crime in their parking lot, and the nearby gas stations/Stop&Robs are too tempting.
I read somewhere that California requires you file income taxes for two years on your “income” that you win on a game show.
Two years. How’s that work? If I won something, anything, on Wheel of Fortune, I somehow have to file CA income taxes? And I live in Texas? How do they enforce that?
About 2 am something got flooded out enough to climb up inside the wall of the house, by the master bedroom. Lots of scrabbling and thumping.
When the rain stops, I’ll have some patching to do.
n
Nick, didn’t you speculate that we’d be needing Republic of Texas passports eventually?
– yep, I’m on record with the prediction, but I’ve been thinking I might have got the timeline wrong.
n
Is it some kind of ‘sunk cost fallacy’ that keeps us from murdering our offspring? Asking for a friend.
n
n
Your critter issues are interesting. I’d like to look at your house just to see how FUed it is. Like, the bottom of your walls are open or what?
But I’d have to drive to Houston. And someone would have to be here to take care of the critters.
So I’m just going to keep on with trying to figure how the heck the scorpions are getting into my house.
You’d think something like this would be a lead story on local news, but I’m not seeing it.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/governor-abbott-holds-line-invokes-texas-constitutional-authority/
Odd.
n
It is odd. Someone is watching the news. Channel 36 (KXAN) by the sound. And I’m not hearing anything about the border.
@paul, house is slab on grade, partial brick veneer, partial vinyl siding. The siding is a problem as that was installed over wood shake shingles. That bumps it out past the edge of the slab, and the crumbling shakes, covered with ½ ” of foam board, creates a path to tunnel thru…
That’s my working hypothesis anyway. I can’t get my head low enough to see up under the siding, but I’ve found areas where I believe that’s what happened.
The rats die from the poison blocks, but the possums don’t, so I’m thinking possums at the moment.
Also my eves are enclosed with soffit boards, and lower than the top of the side walls, which provides a protected ‘tunnel’ that wraps around my whole house, and connects with the garage attic. They LOVE the soffits.
n
You would have been better off buying a DVD at Best Buy.
“Oppenheimer” is one of the reasons why Florence Pugh presents a problem for Apple headlining a costume drama portraying an unlikable protagonist. They never would have seen that $200 million back.
Try Faux 7 Austin. The antenna should be in the same general direction as 36.
KXAN is Nexstar, and we only watch that trainwreck if we have no other choice for weather before bed on Sunday nights.
The money printing plant in Fort Worth has Republic of Texas currency samples on the wall of the giftshop, behind the register.
I asked the clerk if they were preparing for something, and the response was “No comment”. This was 2016.
Shrub and Daddy were on the bills. I don’t remember denominations. Maybe $20 (Shrub) and $100 (Daddy).
My souvenir was a sample Clinton dollar coin, slightly oversized since it is not yet an official release.
Yes, because you received the income in California. People that win a $50K car are shocked to learn they owe $10K to California and must then pay their home state taxes to register the vehicle. It could be as much as $20K for the vehicle.
Sports players have to pay income taxes in the states in which they play. A Dallas Cowboy player that lives in Texas and plays a game in California must pay income in California. If a team plays 17 games then 1/17 of the player‘s salary is taxed. If the player plays in post season then the appropriate percentage applies. Even some cities tax professional players that play in a city.
With some of the crap won on the shows, I wonder if the winners can refuse the prize.
I have no doubt but that it will be running on the control room displays of our fusion power plants in the future!
Yes, if you keep your money at one of those “too big to fail” banks, enforcement would be easy.
The Supreme Court is supposed to rule on WA State’s capital gains/exit tax this term. California might be getting ready.
Don’t kid yourselves, Texans, thinking that the Legislature is going to ignore a ruling affirming the money grab with WA having a constitutional prohibition on “income tax” similar to the one in Texas.
But does it have alligators?
Developing a Linux GUI is tough if a requirement is a library free of various license restrictions. I think we eventually went with GTK for the Netclient on Linux at the Death Star after IBM was adamant about not touching Java.
Momoa was awsome as Duncan Idaho in “Dune”.
Even Herbert never wrote Duncan’s death scene. The last two filmed attempts at the book didn’t have the right actor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rQrkheSXTo
For those of you familiar with the book wondering about the black woman, that’s Pardot Kynes.
“Put a chick in it and make her gay.”
It would be an interesting study to take the current holdings of one of the big kahuna mutual funds, say Vanguard S&P 500, and tally how much of the shareholders’ money is invested in CA tech companies or REITs.
What? Invest in S&P 500 stocks? That’s so 20th century.
Use a phone camera endoscope attachment. Great for peeking into hidden areas. Like this one, under $30. You probably have one in your stacks somewhere, I’d bet.
Rent-all tool places in Florida had the scopes available for homeowners to use to investigate possible Chinese drywall installations.
Geesh — vinyl on top of rotting cedar shake in Houston heat/humidity. When was the last time you had a pro out to do a termite check?
comment on a news story yesterday:
“her son’s accused murderer, 26-year-old Marcus Anthony Eriz, smiled at her before fatally shooting her preschooler.”
Convict and compost for highest use.
But does it have alligators?
I’ve got two alligators in the front pond at the office, a 36 inch and a 24 inch. They won’t let me pet them.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Crandall v. Nevada, 73 U.S. 35 (1868) declared that freedom of movement is a fundamental right and therefore a state cannot inhibit people from leaving the state by taxing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_United_States_law
Crandall V. Nevada quotes heavilty from McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCulloch_v._Maryland
and includes a famous quotation from Chief Justice Marshall:
It does not require a close reading to conclude that states are unlikely to succeed in imposing an exit tax if jurists retain any respect for the constitution and precedent..
If I were in the process of leaving a state that tried while the question was in doubt, I would convert my wealth to U.S. Bonds and Treasuries to bring the situation in close alignment with Marshall’s analysis.
But a prudent person would GTFO immediately such were proposed.
And yet, today’s jurists generally have very little respect for the Constitution, which was why we GTFO’ed of Cacafornia.
I am sitting in a dead office building, no power for 20+ minutes now. The forlorn cries of the dying UPSes is the only sound I hear. There is only one UPS left. I am wondering when Centerpoint will get the power back on.
According to Centerpoint, there are 492 electric meters out of service. Special.
I can only hope that all those UPS systems were configured to automatically power down their computers.
Wow, I haven’t heard that name since the 80s.
I’m not that naive.
And the power is back on. I just walked around restarting all the PCs.
And no, no graceful shutdowns.
Composting human remains is legal only in WA State.
Not applicable–slime abrogated any claim to humanity.
But it could be formalized as part of the conviction.
>>“Oppenheimer” also got many nominations. I paid for that movie on Apple TV. I paid $20.00 and I think I wasted $18.00. I was not impressed. I watched to the end hoping it would improve, it did not.
Maybe if they had gone with a different ending, Mr Ray-san?
Alabama Set to Try First Ever Execution by Nitrogen Hypoxia on Thursday.
https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/01/24/alabama-set-to-try-first-ever-execution-by-nitrogen-hypoxia-on-thursday-whatever-could-go-wrong-n2169179
I wonder how much they’re paying for execution-grade nitrogen?
Be a shame if they coated the mask seal with fentanyl. Begs the question as to whether the murderer has a right to know how he’s going to be killed.
OTOH, they use the fentanyl, he dies–who has standing to file a lawsuit?
Biden Goes Off Rails With UAW Comments As the Union Reveals Who It Will Endorse for 2024
oh the suspense….
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2024/01/24/president-biden-urged-to-seize-texas-national-guard-joe-manchin-calls-for-national-emergency-n2169174
Out of 100 people that remember “Don’t Mess With Texas”, there is probably 1 or less that remembers that it was part of an anti-littering campaign.
realistic toy file:
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/Roger%20Ball%20-%20Burning%20Tesla.JPG
Yes, Biden should heed the words of the Idiot Castro brother.
Okay they’re both idiots.
BTW, the scions of La Raza no Habla Espanol.
Could be incompetence. Could be more sinister.
n
Dang, thunder and lightning, and the rain started back up.
I’m going to bed.
n
Re wordpad going away, I dropped office a few years back and haven’t used wordpad since (I know it’s separate from office, just bracketed together in my mind). I now use Textmaker and Planmaker from a German company called Softmaker, haven’t yet found office doc it won’t deal with.
As an aside have a look at this interesting take on a text editor/organiser thingy
https://strlen.com/treesheets/
Typical Microsoft: You bought an operating system from them, complete with a set of applications. So they can just delete part of what you bought? That doesn’t seem legal.
Texas and the border: I understand the Supreme Court decision, but it is just based on legalities, not on the actual issue of the border. What is the justification of the administration for preventing border defense? The only thing I have seen is “address urgent humanitarian situations”. Which is exactly wrong: Crossing a border illegally should be dangerous, even life-threatening. If there is no disincentive, there’s no reason not to do it.
Edited to add: The border and shoplifting, both the same. I read about the rampant looting that happens in shops, because the staff is not allowed to intervene. Meanwhile, the police cannot or will not be bothered. Where’s the risk? The disincentive? Same problem, different context.
@Brad
You doesnt bought, you have a license to use…..