Cold and clear, or maybe cold and overcast, but probably cold. Yesterday started cold, warmed significantly, and was very comfortable with the windows down driving in the late afternoon. It will be nice if today is the same.
I spent a lot of time yesterday doing chauffeur stuff and driving. Took back the broken solar panel. Took the kid where she needed to go. Went to the chiropractor. In total, spent almost 2 1/2 hours sitting in the truck waiting for kids or other people. Good thing I have kindle on the phone.
Today I’ll do some auction stuff in the morning, then maybe grocery shopping. Our eating habits have changed as the kids have grown so I’ve had to adjust what I buy and stack. MUCH less bread. No peanut butter. A lot more snacks and stuff for school. I don’t mind the ‘hangover’ with having more peanut butter than we need, it’s a great prepper food that keeps well. Push comes to shove, we can eat it again. We are eating a lot more meat, just because the kids eat more. I’ve been packing it in single meal quantities and now those older packages are a bit too small. Probably should have seen that one coming, but didn’t. Monitor and re-evaluate…
But certainly keep stacking.
nick
Would these be missiles with fuel in the fuel tanks, or water?
@lynn, @stevef:
GPS can have up to 32 active satellites, by design, and requires 24 for full coverage, plus an unknown number of on-orbit spares, probably 1 for each of the 6 orbit planes.
G.
There was recently a university study to see if Starkink could be used, as is, for GPS. The answer turned out to be YES, then suddenly the study lost support. Which, given the number of mainland Chinese grad students, makes sense.
Taking out 32 satellites is doable, taking out 12,000 is another thing. It would require massive nuclear detonations in orbit. Or a tremendous number of ground based lasers.
RLTS addresses this in an interview, where he makes it a joke after the Ruskies took out a sat in orbit. It’s also mentioned in the RFPs and trade magazine articles I referred to earlier.
Yup, lot harder to kill thousands than a few.
Extrapolating from what I see in the trade magazines, DoD expects to have to operate without GPS, and soon.
n
Don’t know if I posted this, or if someone else did, but this is the face of modern asymmetrical warfare…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYnEOlCPRyo
\n
If they were to pull the trigger on that, then I would imagine that the sudden creation of that much space debris would shred many of their orbiting satellites as much as it would everyone else’s.
Let’s make space unusable!
If you don’t use space all that much, it doesn’t matter if it’s made unusable…
n
Does anyone else find business reviews increasingly useless? I’m not talking product reviews like on Amazon (though, those are also mostly useless). I’m talking about Yelp and Google reviews of restaurants, bars, retail shops, etc.. Google reviews have been mostly useless for quite some time. It seems most businesses on Google have 4+ stars. So, if it’s a dumpy McDonald’s with consistently bad service and you look it up on Google it will say it’s 4.2 stars. If it’s the hot new trendy restaurant that everyone seems to love and is doing everything right, then Google will say it’s 4.8 stars. So, no matter how good or bad the place it seems Google reviews frequently average > 4.0 stars. That’s why I used to prefer Yelp (at least for restaurant reviews). However, even Yelp lately is skewing heavy toward every review being a 4 or 5 star review. If you pay close attention you’ll even notice that the default display order for Yelp reviews on business listing is their proprietary “Yelp Sort” which weights positive reviews closer to the top. Back in 2020/2021 during the pandemic if you wrote a Yelp review that was only 1, 2, or 3 stars you would actually get a pop-up message from Yelp telling you times are tough for businesses and are you sure you want to leave a poor review. The new philosophy on business reviews seems to be that if you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all. So, even if you have an objectively horrible experience at a business you had better keep that sh_t to yourself. A business is either 4 stars, 5 stars, or STFU. It’s slowly being reflected in business owner reactions to their reviews as well as they will frequently lose their sh_t anytime they get a negative review whereas it used to be the occasional bad review was just part of being in business. So, there’s no way to separate the bad businesses from the good businesses because no matter what they’re all 4 or 5 star businesses. Thus making review services like Yelp and Google mostly useless.
Does anyone else find giant paragraphs hard to read?
When I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, in software services, we had a customer satisfaction survey we gave to our customers. Any rating less than 5 out of 5 stars impacted our bonus.
We had to prompt our customers about that, or otherwise they might have been honest.
Not to say we didn’t deliver excellent service, but there’s always room for improvement, and for a lot of that time we had 20 people working for 1 customer. A single 3 or 4 star review could affect all of us negatively.
They make Adderall for that. 🙂
I’d break it up a little, but my 5 minute edit timer has elapsed.
It could also be affected by default font size and font face, so you may want to talk to our web guy, Rick, about it. lol 😛
I tend to write short paragraphs on my phone.
If I use my computer, I compose in Word because I like my settings and autocorrects.
If I use the site’s editor on my computer, I tend to overlook mistakes.
Most people nowadays don’t know how to write a paragraph with a topic sentence.
Hell, most people nowadays can’t even write a complete sentence.
Reminds. Our local daily newspaper used to often limit a paragraph to one sentence. It was very noticeable in a narrow column.
I also remind myself that this site is informal. RBT would occasionally remind us that he didn’t correct typos unless the meaning required it. He must have been a very good composer.
I used to write a lot of stuff on the job, and most of it had to be nearly perfect for legal reasons. Glad that is over.
I enjoy this site more than any other… warts and all. Thanks to all for making it so enjoyable and informative.
No.
On reviews, I too am frustrated with their quality, lack of usefulness, and inaccuracies. I might like a personal AI filter that I could dump a big glob of reviews into and maybe get a summary. That’s what I seem to do more and more lately. Takes a lot of time, and I don’t have much of that.
My best boss and I did some strategic planning together. We were expanding into new lines of business. I admired his ability to zero in on a finished plan without having to go through the intermediate steps I needed. When I asked how he learned to do that, he simply said “Experience.” I know it is more than that, because I eventually had perhaps more experience than he had had, and I still had challenges. Some got it, some don’t.
All online reviews are massively inflated. Add to that the fake reviews, and, well…
Sometimes you find a review that is thoughtful and detailed, and is therefore probably genuine. Otherwise, I look for negative reviews. Sometimes they discuss actual features, and you can gain useful info.
When I worked at a GM dealer, oh, a few decades ago, GM rated customer service by mail-out surveys to new vehicle buyers. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but unsatisfied customers reported about 10 % of the time, satisfied customers about 1 % of the time, and very satisfied about 5 % of the time. But unsatisfied customers would tell other people about their experience 90 % of the time, satisfied customers about 10 % of the time and very satisfied customers about 50 % of the time, so for every survey returned, there was a magnified effect in your market area that you never heard about directly.
Everybody wants a dramatic story to tell, and bad experiences are more dramatic than when things went OK, so I get why there tend to be more bad reviews. To offset that, GM’s questionnaires were rewritten to bias the response numbers to reflect the proportions so they could make more accurate assessments of the dealer service level.
I seldom read reviews for entertainment and rarely for products I buy online, and I don’t do the “rate every transaction” that’s encouraged online. Too much like work.
Yesterday Nick mentioned reading as something they could not take away
https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/01/31/will-work-for-books-or-brother-can-you-spare-some-dostoevsky-n4926013
(yeah a long paragraph but it wasn’t my own)
I like shopping the thrifts and estate sales. The “shelf of books” and “classics collections” are a great way to ramp up see also “harvard classics”.
google put most of them online and downloadable. I’ve read several classics from there.
I may be nuts, but I’ve got a really extensive reference library now.
n
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=harvard+classics+5+foot+shelf+of+books&_sacat=0
n
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/143617.The_Post_Apocalyptic_Rebuilder_s_Library
https://makezine.com/article/workshop/woodworking/how-to-rebuild-society-with-the-survivor-library/
n
WRT reviews, I get hounded by google to review stupid stuff, like Whataburger stores. I will review actual stores and places if I’ve had any meaningful interaction with them.
My reviews tend to emphasize one thing, or they are pretty general, depending on the kind of place. I rarely review a meal or something that is very variable.
I get a report every month, and people are looking at them and rating them, so someone finds them useful.
n
(I also participate in googles “local guides” program so I might see more of that kind of thing than most would.)
When I used to write a technical column about Burroughs (Unisys) computers my writing was not great. It was a monthly publication on newsprint paper mailed to customers. There were many mistakes in grammar and punctuation, with a few spelling mistakes. I asked my editor why she did not correct my grammar. She said I write like I talk and that it is easier for people to understand. In a technical publication it was more important to get the information across than be grammatically correct. She said this publication was not a formal trade journal where people were writing for publication, peer review, and getting a college degree. She said the writing must fit the intended audience and my writing was just fine for the audience.
I wrote 23 articles for that journal. I wrote three articles for ColdFusion Developer’s Journal. I wrote two articles for The Bent, the magazine of the Tau Beta Pi honor society. One article was when I was working for a contractor for the organization, the other article was while I was an employee of the organization. Some of the articles in the magazine are quite “heady” and well beyond my comprehension. So, it felt good to write a couple of articles for that magazine.
Over The Hedge: Tammy’s Mom
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2024/02/01
Tammy’s Mom has a grudge.
As long as we are discussing writing – I’ve done quite a bit over my decades.
Started with some books for “Que Publishing”. A book on “SuperCalc 5” (a rewrite for the new version). Then some parts of a couple of “WordPerfect” books, also with Que. (You might be able to find those on Amazon.)
The, because I thought I could write fiction – the first book was “Digital Choke” back in 2001. It was an on-line book on the digitalchoke.com website. It’s still there as an online book, although also published on Amazon later. Older technothriller type story – has some quaint old terms like ‘dial-up modem’, etc. Some bits of prepping in there, along with an Internet Apocalypse.
Continuing the ‘urban fantasy’ theme, the next were my “Light Blink” books. Followed by my first Classic Western – “The Forgotten Winchester” (a favorite of mine), then another Classic Western “Rocky’s Treasure”.
I then decided to go Vigilante Thriller – the “Reacher” series and then John D Brown’s “Frank Penny” series were inspirational. So came up with the “RV Vigilante” series – three books (working on the fourth). That series was released last October, and has actually sold almost three digits of copies (ebook/KENP reads mostly, some paperbacks). I’ve earned mid-three figures on that series.
Along the way, I came out with the “Compendium of Physics Jokes” (which is a steady seller – in low quantities). Followed that with the “Compendium of Valentine’s Day Jokes”, and two volumes of Dad Jokes – “A Compendium of Dad Jokes” and “Another Compendium of Dad Jokes”. Not many sales of those joke books, but they amused me.
Working on book four of the “RV Vigilante” series. And have started on another Classic Western and a Science Fiction story.
Along with making and maintaining web sites, and my spambot-blocking contact form software (FormSpammerTrap – since 2011, just getting ready for version 16 release), and general procrastination of all projects, I am keeping busy.
Enjoy the writing – mostly – especially when I am not stuck on the next part of the story. Or stuck on procrastinating.
Enjoy the writing – mostly – especially when I am not stuck on the next part of the story. Or stuck on procrastinating.
James Patterson says in his autobiography that he works on up to 30 books at any given moment. When he gets stuck, he just moves on to the next book. He writes all of his books in longhand in a notebook for each, with rewrites of up to six times. Highly recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/James-Patterson-Stories-My-Life/dp/0316397539?tag=ttgnet-20/
Would these be missiles with fuel in the fuel tanks, or water?
Aren’t most countries using solid fuel missiles now ? You don’t have spend six hours loading the liquid fuel or unloading the liquid fuel.
One of my nephews got laid off this week from his pizza delivery /making job. People have really cut back on their pizza ordering. Bidenflation.
All online reviews are massively inflated. Add to that the fake reviews, and, well…
Sometimes you find a review that is thoughtful and detailed, and is therefore probably genuine. Otherwise, I look for negative reviews. Sometimes they discuss actual features, and you can gain useful info.
I don’t rate below four stars anymore unless I really hate the product.
https://xkcd.com/1098/
In Houston? The apocalypse is nigh!
My son worked at Chipotle near the house for a while last year, but their staffing has been cut way back since he left. I don’t know if it is due to lack of demand or that particular store leaving a lot to be desired in terms of customer service.
My son washed the dishes in back. Someone has to do that the entire time the Chipotle is open.
A few weeks ago it was reported that some number of the Chinese missiles’ fuel tanks were filled with water because the troops had stolen the fuel for cooking and heating.
This story has a few holes in it, as the rockets are not normally kept fueled and there’s some question about whether the fuel would be suitable for cooking or for heating a building where people were staying. However, it appears that a number of officers in the missile command were sacked, so either there was really a problem or this was an excuse for a purge.
From Lynn:
What a coincidence, I just finished a James Patterson book, just 5 minutes ago: “Circle Of Death”.
I’m happy. One of my auctioneers sold me a Renogy 200w panel for $100 while I was picking up my lots. I won one too, so today I added 400w to my solar potential.
n
Other than writing here, and in other comments sections, my writing has been almost entirely reports for work. I did contribute to an underground newsletter we produced in high school, but that doesn’t count for much. I used to edit one of my friends who is now a multi-award winning horror writer…
And I produced a ton of adult training materials- er – training materials for adults…
n
Added- I should be well over 2M words on line.
n
>>Went to the chiropractor. In total, spent almost 2 1/2 hours sitting in the truck waiting for kids or other people.
Hmm, maybe some connection there?
Btw, @nick, what’s a timeshare chiropractor? (From yesterday’s post.)
I had a busboy job at I-Hop. It didn’t pay a lot but it was enough to make rent and utilities on my one bedroom and just me apartment. Not enough to buy a car but enough to stick $20 into savings every two weeks.
I liked the job. Ok, I didn’t like the hours, 11pm to 7am. But you got fed. Might as well eat it, it’s coming out of your check anyway. And if you were not an ass to the cooks you’d get extra in your ham and cheese omelette. Not even sucking up…. just wandering by and hey, get the guy cooking a refill on his iced tea or coke.
Washing dishes is ok. I washed dishes in Jr. High so I could get lunch for free. I refuse to this day to eat anything “blueberry”.
Bussing tables, meh, bitchy waitresses accusing (not me) of tips being stolen, made it suck. Then they would bitch that their tables were not cleared…. hey girl, I’m not touching a table with money laying there. One called the Boss on me trying to make a stink, Boss agreed with me.
Anyway. The Boss was Fran. It was a new or almost new I-Hop at Ohlen and Research in Austin. She wasn’t going to hire me because I was “over qualified because I had almost three years of college”. I told her so what? I need a job to make rent, give me a chance please. So…. out of a group of six busboys all hired at the same time, maybe two months later I was the only one left.
Showing up for work matters.
I did that job for about nine months. Found something that paid 75¢ more an hour and the shift was 4 to Midnight. I did thank Fran for giving me a job when I gave notice. She acted like that was very cool.
After what I wrote earlier, I took my truck to get serviced today. The service writer handed me my key when it was done, and asked me a favor. I need to rate him a “5” on the survey. Anything less will hurt his bonus. He said “4” is the same as a zero.
I told him that I don’t generally do surveys, but I promised if I did, it would be a “5”.
In Houston? The apocalypse is nigh!
The Colony, Texas. North of Dallas.
BTW, I noted here recently that I am a new big fan of the Halving Algorithm. Well, Senior Engineer reports that the algorithm is actually called the “Bisection Method”. I am very pleased with the algorithm since it handles non-linear calculations quite rigorously and speedily. In fact, I have yet to see it fail when the underlying calculation does not have any major discontinuities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method
“Demoralized Police Are Tired of Being “One Bullet Away From Death and One Mistake Away From Indictment””
https://thelibertydaily.com/demoralized-police-are-tired-being-one-bullet-away/
“We have all seen rogue, unqualified prosecutors winning local elections based upon promises not to get tough on criminals, but to more aggressively prosecute police officers.”
I don’t know where the good spot is but we are way past it right now. Rouge prosecutors are prosecuting good people, starting with Trump and all the way down to the meter maids. This situation cannot last.
Yup, the Four Horsemen are saddling up.
I waited an hour for a friggin’ hot dog in The Colony last June.
I was going to point out the typo, but then realized that it wasn’t a typo. Rouge means red and red means communist scum, and that’s a perfect description of these rogue prosecutors. (And judges, legislators, and police leadership.)
Boost has an implementation in bisect.
Performance must be decent. High Frequency Trading developers are big into Boost.
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/master/libs/math/doc/html/math_toolkit/roots_noderiv/bisect.html
The tolling company used that library a lot, especially the time functions. The declarations can be brutal to get right, but when they work, its magic.
My favorite Boost toy is MultiIndex. I’ve done some crazy cool things with that, but setting one up is painful.
If you’ve never explored the MIT Press “Algorithms” book, that is worth the time. You’ll see me refer to it here as “CLRS”.
I took three classes based on that book over two grad programs. I passed on the deep dive class in the Northwest where the professor taught the book’s chapter on multiplying high order polynomials using FFT among other techniques.
Yeah, cool, but I didn’t want to be the only person in the class paying real cash for tuition after I lost my waiver when I dropped out of the TA program.
Most of the examples in CLRS are in pseudocode which translates almost directly into Python.
Most of the Soros supported prosecutors have personal issues which eventually come to light, especially in the age of The Googles and The Duck.
I could have predicted Atlanta.
Not that it matters.
Yeah, graft. Trump tho.
“Remember when we used to live in a First World Country? I liked that. That was nice.”
(borrowed from Ace)
[I’m better at attribution than most of the Harvard STEM-nots.]
@nick, what’s a timeshare chiropractor?
–we’ve got this thing called The Joint (chiropractic). You pay a monthly fee and can visit any of their storefronts in your area (and maybe nationally, but I’d guess not). you walk in, they put you on a table. There is an ever rotating group of young doctors, so you never know who you are going to get, and rarely get the same one twice. My plan is for 4 adjustments per month, cash for any additional visits.
There are some restrictions. You have to have had chiropractic care before, and had the xray to see if you have the neck issue that gets people in trouble. Unlike most chiropractors, they aren’t ambulance chasers, IDK if they even take insurance plans, they aren’t billing for xrays or waiting for a settlement…
I call it a timeshare because I get care I’m paying for, but don’t really know how or where or by who it will be delivered.
On the other hand, it’s cheaper than paying a traditional practice, more flexible, and the service and treatment have been uniformly good. There was one guy who was a little more aggressive than I really liked, but the result was good. Some have been really good.
I’ll go months without using it, mainly out of busyness and laziness but when I need it, I really need it.
n
Huh, won another 300w of solar panel.
I really need to move the project forward now.
n
Solar panels are fine. You can send generated power back to the grid. And maybe get a reduction of your power bill.
But if the grid fails, not many systems are set up to use that solar power for your own house. Not without the extra expense of inverters (to convert the solar DC power to AC power), batteries to store the DC power (and you still need the inverters). Plus the bypass switch so your converted solar power doesn’t feed back into the grid during an outage. That’s an extra configuration (and equipment) that most people with solar panels on your roof don’t have.
At least, that’s how I understand it. And I may be wrong. (I’ve been known to be wrong sometimes.)
My daughters house (in suburb of Sacramento CA) has solar panels on the roof of their house. But they still have no power during any power outage from the local utility. Even during the day, the power from their panels doesn’t feed into the house. Not without spending another $10-15K or more.
If the intent is to use solar to power your house during grid failures, that’s more complex (more equipment, more install costs, more $$$$) than just having the panels that people have on their roof.
Yep, I’ve got inverters, and charge controllers, and batteries. Not enough of them, but I should be able to set up one system to run freezers, and another to run a window air conditioner, or the septic pump. Maybe one to run a pump to get lake water up to the garden, one to run cams and recorder…
It’s going to be a learning process, and made more difficult by my insistence on doing it cheaply, and “one piece at a time”…
FWIW, a LOT of people don’t understand that with a grid tied system and no batteries, they won’t have power during an outage. On e of those systems is not for me.
n
My daughters house (in suburb of Sacramento CA) has solar panels on the roof of their house. But they still have no power during any power outage from the local utility. Even during the day, the power from their panels doesn’t feed into the house. Not without spending another $10-15K or more.
If the intent is to use solar to power your house during grid failures, that’s more complex (more equipment, more install costs, more $$$$) than just having the panels that people have on their roof.
The quote that I got for 30 kw ??? of panels and five ??? Tesla Powerwalls installed was $65K back in 2020. I doubt that cost has gone down. That system would let me run the house on batteries alone for a couple of days depending on the time of year (7 tons of A/C will really kill a battery or five). I got the 38 kW natural gas generator installed for $25K instead.
My EE buddy in Alabama has 19 kw of solar panels in his field next to his house with a battery / inverter system that he built himself. He runs off the batteries 24/7/365 and sends extra to the grid or gets some from the grid if needful. He is usually sending power to the grid during the day if the panels are not iced over or if it is real cloudy.
@JimB Re some sort of ‘AI’ to analyse reviews, I’ve been using Fakespot ( https://www.fakespot.com/ ) for a while now on Amazon and Ebay, it does a pretty good job of analysing review, spotting fake ones and giving you a better idea of people’s true views on items.