Cool, overcast, dreary, and a chance of rain. Yesterday was a mixed bag depending mostly on where you were. The morning at home was mostly light drizzle, but in the afternoon northwest of Houston, it stormed. Hail the size of grapes, and pouring rain. It chased me home and then petered out.
I spent the morning doing auction stuff, and the afternoon taking care of my client. That meant buying a replacement TV, and swapping it and another for two bad ones. The TCL 55 inch 4k TVs we decide to take a chance on have not held up well. They develop vertical and horizontal lines in the image and need to be replaced. Takes a couple of years, but all but one have failed, and I’m sure it will fail too. They were exceptionally cheap, and we bought the extended warranty from costco. It used to be provided by SquareTrade, but this newest one is provided by Allstate. The warranty process isn’t odious, and we’ve gotten a Costco gift card for the purchase price on the ones we’ve done so far.
Given that my time costs money, and the customer has to live with a failing TV for some period of time, I ended up buying Sony this time. We’ve shifted from the cheapest TVs to Sony Bravia, at more than double what a Roku or Hisense TV would cost, and about a third more than the Samsung or LG equivalents. The Bravia does have an exceptionally nice picture, and we’re hoping that because it’s not so cheap, it’ll do less spying than the Hisense or Roku TVs. It’s powered by google so still potential to spy. I don’t put them on the network, but someone in the household might at a later date. I also decline about 6 pages of stuff when I set them up. Of course I’m hoping that the Sony name still means something and that they haven’t been built to quite such a ‘value engineered’ standard as the Hisense… it would be nice to get a few more years of life out of them without issues than we’ve gotten from the TCL models.
If you don’t mind paying for the extended warranty, and replacing the TV after a couple of years, or that the TVs want to spy on you to subsidize the cost, there are some great looking TVs at crazy cheap prices. A 55″ Roku 4K TV was $289 at costco, and it wasn’t the cheapest on the shelf. For anything with a good brand name, or newer (bigger) sizes, inflation has been in full effect, with a roughly 30% increase in cost over the last time I priced TVs, which was about a year ago, iirc.
All you need to do is trade away a little piece of your privacy, and you can save some money while self medicating with the boob tube…
Today I’ll be doing some auction pickups, and maybe some other stuff like visiting my buddy at his gub store. We’ll see how the day goes, what the weather ends up being like, and if I hurt or not. This weather makes everything ache.
I’m thinking about heading to the BOL this weekend to do some of the stuff I didn’t do last week, and to weed the garden. We’ve got 18 potato mounds sprouted, the radishes and turnips might be ready to thin, and we’ll have to see how the peas are doing. My buddy says if they don’t start growing better, he’ll replant with a different variety. I could start another couple of rows of radishes, turnips, or beets, as you can keep planting them for a staggered harvest.
The grass probably needs cutting too.
D1 has GS camp, and D2 has a thing with friends, so I think I’d be alone at the BOL. Or I could stay home and work the list here. It’s a big list and needs to be started. Choices. Priorities. Gah.
Easier (but less effective) to just keep stacking. Don’t do what I’ve done, and just stack. Stay on top of the other things too. AND stack.
nick
Good morning. That is all. Just taking advantage of the time zones and Nick’s early posting to wish you all a good day. I am at the BOL, the daffodils are in bloom and the honey-do list is not getting any shorter, so time for up and at it…
From yesterday…
There is also a real Skynet, a Belgian internet service provider. I regularly get messages from Skynet… Perhaps I need to find a foundry and a handy source of liquid helium. Just in case.
Why is there always “one last typo”. I just sent a semi-important email. First, I drafted it, then I asked an AI to correct it, then I corrected the AI version, then I proofread it again. Then I sent it. And immediately noticed an obvious typo. Geez…
Ah, well, no catastrophe. People are used to typos in email. It’s just annoying…
Brad, you have now found the microsecnod, which is the infinitesimally small period of time between hitting the “send” button and noticing a tyop in the important message just sent.
I do something akin to proofreading professionally. If a text absolutely, positively has to be as free of errors as possible, it is essential to print it, then read the printed version backwards, from the end to the beginning, using a steel ruler or other object to blank off everything but the sentence being read back-to-front.
@Denis: For really important things, I definitely do the last proofreading on paper. I don’t know why that makes a difference, but it definitely does. I’ve never gone backwards. I suppose it makes you focus on the individual words?
I won’t ask if you put in “tyop” intentionally…
Hey, I just realized my title lyric is wrong… so I’ll fix it.
Computers don’t “document” anything due to the malleability of the output…
n
Brad (g)roks…
I won’t ask if you put in “tyop” intentionally…
– of course, that’s what makes it funnny…
n
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/elon-musk-asks-right-wing
His core beliefs look ok to me.
n
Musk is as much a ward of the state as any of the DoD contractor cabal.
TSLA continues to slide so the distractions continue as well.
Once the UAW leadership went and analyzed the true context of Trump’s use of the word “bloodbath” in the speech last week about the future of the auto industry, some factoids popped out concerning the two Chinese EV plants under construction for Hecho en Mexico vehicles, and the situation suddenly didn’t sit well.
The targets for the “EV only” agenda have been lowered, and that is going to hit TSLA price full force today. The stock is already down 18 before the market opens.
I carbonated some cold brew coffee this am with my new CO2 tank. It is surprisingly satisfying.
My bad. Pre-market is down about 6. I was probably looking at old data.
My local asian supermarket has several different kinds of canned coffee drink. They look very tasty but I don’t buy them because they are loaded with sugar and will just put me to sleep.
n
@MrAtoZ
“I carbonated some cold brew coffee this am with my new CO2 tank. It is surprisingly satisfying.”
Try nitrogen.
Try nitrous oxide!
Frontier & Verizon are back up this a.m.
Verizon had dropped to one bar, then none, and was in “SOS” mode by 4 hours after the initial Frontier failure. Weird.
It bodes poorly for when “The Big One” hits.
I had that thought, using a 70N/30C brew mix, but I like my water to have a lot of bubbles and crispness. Nitro is smoother and would probably be great in coffee, but I mostly do water (splash in various bitters). Next week, I’m trying to carbonate some saki. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I used to own a YoyoDyne t-shirt.
Our tax dollars at work:
HOW MUCH for a ‘Gay Senior Citizen Home’? Jesse Watters Highlights Insanity in New Spending Bill
Look at the pork listing. We are the FUSA thanks to our own Congress. Soon, we will achieve true 3rd World Shirt-Hole(-r) status.
Dunno how it is there, but here the various networks often share some of the same infrastructure. I’m not sure, but I think we only have two complete, independent sets of cell towers here, even though there are half-a-dozen providers. Hence, an infrastructure problem can take down multiple providers, because some are just renting bandwidth on someone else’s cell towers.
*****SPOILERS*****
D4 and I watched the Roadhouse remake yesterday. It was awful but not a total disaster. Most of the supporting cast were replaced by POCs. Most of the bad guys stayed WHITEY! An Amish female now owns the titular roadhouse. The female doctor is now Hispanizoid. LOL, her character was born and raised in the Keys but has a strong, distinct accent. Same with her sheriff father bad guy.
McGregor just played himself. A roided up doosh. His high squeaky voice grated on me. How much did they pay him? Geeze.
And no boobies, but still rated R for, what, language? McGreor lives after the big fight. Why?
One of the sites I read semi-regularly has regular military updates on the various conflicts around the world. They mostly manage to be neutral and just present the facts (as far as I can tell, anyway). So, their latest Israel update:
So Hamas continues true to form: ammo dumps next to a hospital. Fighters in the hospital, hiding behind civilians. When Israel clears the hospital, all the usual suspects will express their outrage.
Try nitromethane.
That ought to wake you up!
Carbonation seems oddly interesting, maybe because I gave up carbonated sugary drinks decades ago, and don’t miss them. I still have about four malty beers per year at home. Haven’t had a draft beer at a restaurant in probably a couple years.
When I was a kid, there soda fountains. The carbonated water added sparkle to the ice cream.
Anyone remember “2 Cent Plain”?
(I apologize for quoting myself.)
Yes, I was involved in decomissioning a couple of old water tanks a decade or two back, there were cellular antenna’s bolted to the top of both, which makes sense – high elevation, a road for access, and power present. The water district was happy to lease the space. Towers had to be built, antenna’s moved and re-certified by various agencies before tank teardowns.
But it is supposed to be very very hard to have voice over copper fail.
Time for a double feature, Great Escape, Chicken Run…
n
Unnamed in that document, perhaps.
Be interesting to dig deeper. If there isn’t follow-up in the files then that single statement was probably missed when they got scrubbed. In that case I’d be looking for a pair of prisoners that died under mysterious circumstances.
Just freshly installed Windows 10 on an old system for sale. Ran updates and KB5034441 failed to install with a download error. Turns out that the Windows Recovery Environment partition is too small to install the update. The answer is to run DISKPART and modify the partition sizes. Just the task that your 80 year old mother (plus a zillion others) would not know where to start. And people think Linux is ‘hard’.
Shocking for Microsoft to release such a ‘fix’.
Towers get shared here too. Beyond real estate costs, there are terrain issues and, frequently, NIMBY concerns.
The fiber connecting the towers to the switches is usually leased from the ILEC – Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier – the local landline provider, legacy Bell companies, Verizon, Century Link, and Frontier.
Problems in the local providers networks will affect cell service.
Reduced signal strength means a tower (or multiple towers) lost their fiber.
Ping proof of life
Carbonated coffee? That sounds really tasty. I think one of our local breweries is producing something like.
Nick has sprouting potatoes and I’ve got snow so deep the corgis are stepping over the 4’ fence at will. Gotta laugh. We’ve got a run of above freezing days so the end of snow is in sight. young dogs current favorite trick is to go out to do her business, step over the fence and run to the front dog. She’s barking to be let in simultaneous with the older dog barking to tell on her fool escape. It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. I’ve got too much fence line to raise it to 6’, and not enough time to leash and escort every potty effort. Yikes. Not a good situation. I’m not ignoring the problem, but my efforts to resolve with the resources available have been ineffectual.
Subtle influence by reading Nick’s thrifting ventures had me at Goodwill more frequently. Long story short, I bought a bright blue cello shaped object, repaired it with my own two hands, and am teaching myself to play. It was $80 after my coupon and I likely paid too much -grin-
That led me to spending way too much time on the ShopGoodwill auction site. I may or may not have acquired a few more really nice musical instruments for a song.
Dogs are fine, family is fine, rabbits have produced their first dozen kits of the year. The snow load has exhausted my energy this year. Joined the community band, nice folks but not much in common beyond instruments, sadly. Director gets bonus points for being -really- into fruit trees and exceptionally knowledgeable about his passion.
Anchorage is in election season and it’s grim as usual. I lament for the lack of common sense. Parts of Anchorage look like Calcutta. I wish I were exaggerating. I don’t know where we will move but we are continuing to develop our exit strategy. It is, frankly, disheartening.
Playing more music on a daily basis than I have for years.
You don’t have to be good at something to derive pleasure from it, but as a courtesy refrain from inflicting beginner efforts on those you love.
Currently practicing: flute, guitar, mandolin, violin, cello with a smattering of piano and recorder (a quality wood recorder not those nasty plastic descents into h e double toothpicks which are offered the grade school set to ensure they grow up hating music).
Practice does not equate to skill.
Hope folks are weathering our chaotic world best they can.
Generally, because our brains have gotten really good at anticipating what the next word or words should be, and as long as the word looks close, you just glide on over. My first wife proof-read case documents after graduation (4-year English degree, so you get that kind of scut-work at a legal publisher if you are lucky). She said it didn’t matter how many passes were made by different people, you would always find more typos. As is often the case, perfect is the enemy of good enough (thanks to JP for that).
My thanks for the responses to my question about travel to Tennessee. My wife and I are taking all that into consideration as we book. Funny thing: we miscounted days. We have an extra one buried in the travel down to NO, so it is now Nashville AND Memphis, not Nashville or Memphis.
I honestly don’t know what normal people do. I ‘fix’ these things for family & friends, as does my brother, but that can’t be true for the other 300 million+ non-technical people in the USA alone?
I have bought thrift store ‘guitar shaped objects’ from time-to-time over the 50 years, to little avail. Now that arthritis & tendonitis are setting in I have a good excuse to not feel bad about failing that particular skill set.
Nashville and Memphis are fairly close together.
Nashville has more to do, even if you are not into country music.
Memphis has Elvis — Graceland and Sun Records. I wouldnt recommend a trip downtown, but YMMV.
Snippet of Anchorage nuttiness.
On the ballot is $500,000 for TEN public use toilets. Not ten facilities, ten TOILETS. For public use. Which means for our dug addicts and alcoholics and don’t care to pull themselves together.
And nothing budgeted for upkeep, daily maintenance, etc.
Calcutta in terms of poor/crowded or Calcutta in terms of race demographics?
Austin and Houston are rapidly being colonized by wealthy from India. They’ve moved up the ladder to land development and running for Congress.
@EdH
Consider slide guitar style of playing. Or a mountain dulcimer. The tuning of the instrument does most of the work for you and you can produce pleasing if not expert music with crab hands.
Calcutta slums.
There’s an abandoned lot at Tudor and Denali that has dozens of fabric shelters, pallet structures, defunct rvs.
I’ve heard estimates from a couple dozen to a couple hundred residing there.
Driving past couple hundred seems likely.
It’s inhumane, unsanitary, and fully on the shoulders of the Assembly for obstructing, lying, reneging, and generally behaving as wicked individuals to every single proposal our conservative mayor has presented to address that population. And now of course that he’s up for re-election boo hoo it’s all his fault.
@Jenny – “Ghostbusters” this weekend?
If you didn’t use the flick as an excuse to sit in a theater and eat popcorn for a couple of hours last Christmas, find a way to watch “The Iron Claw”.
Regarding typos:
For my fiction books published on Amazon, I do at least three and sometimes five editing passes through the whole book. Looking for typos, holes in the plot, grammar, etc. I also run a couple passes of Grammerly (free version) which finds more issues than the grammar check in Word (2021 standalone). Only after all of that is the book uploaded to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and made ready for sale.
KDP invited me to their beta of audio books. The process takes the ebook version and does a text-to-speech conversion for the audio books. There are 8 different ‘voices’ (4 each mail / female) which sound quite good. The speaking is not monotone; there is varying levels of emotion in the ‘playback’ that is mostly close to what the emotion of the scene would be. Overall, the results are ‘good enough’. Not human voice actor quality, which can be quite expensive to get done (think low-to-mid 4 figures), but the voices are quite normal-sounding.
For the process, I listen to the entire book using their text-to-speech process. You can adjust the pronunciation and pauses as needed, but that wasn’t needed often. (Think of the difference between “lead bullet” and “lead the horse”.) You can highlight a word and enter the phonetic spelling to correct something like the above.
But – and this is the point – hearing the story has resulted in a few instances where I missed a needed correction that I didn’t find with all my editing and grammar checking.
Word has a ‘read aloud’ function that will do text-to-speech for a document. So perhaps, for content that needs to be well-checked, using that feature would be helpful. (It’s on the “Review” menu bar.)
I’ll be finalizing several of my books for audio on KDP this next week. Royalties are at about 40% for the purchase of an audio book and can be an add-on to the purchase of a printed or ebook version. Audio books are also eligible for the KENP ‘read’ royalties from people that have Kindle Unlimited (unlimited free ebooks to read for a monthly cost). I do a lot of reading (I call it ‘procrastireading’ because I should be doing something else) via Kindle Unlimited.
I’ll probably do audio books for all of my released books. Not a hard process, and possibly result in extra royalties. Not that I am getting rich on this – royalty revenues mostly from the latest three-book thriller are in the low 3 figures for the last 5 months. Dropping off a bit this month, but I have also paused the FB ads.
@Denis – He has this exactly right. You can’t anticipate reading each sentence backwards. I have never had to do this, but it must be very effective, but also very boring, and wearing as you will pay attention to every word but not understand (the context, plot, general meaning overall) of what you are reading.
Funny you should mention that. I just fought this battle, and wondered WTF Microsoft was doing. Pretty insane.
How the heck do they survive the Winter?
Towers get shared here too. Beyond real estate costs, there are terrain issues and, frequently, NIMBY concerns.
I negotiated long and hard with Verizon to put a 150+ foot cell tower on my 14 acre property several years ago. I could never get them above $1,200 per month so I ended up blowing it off. They are very hard negotiators and have million page contracts that cover everything. The cell tower was going to cost well over a million dollars and the lease was for 30 years.
They ended up buying space on the Tmobile tower down the road.
Austin and Houston are rapidly being colonized by wealthy from India. They’ve moved up the ladder to land development and running for Congress.
Yup. They have taken over my county. I just voted for Marshall Khan for GOP sheriff because he had more body armor on in his campaign photo.
The two remaining wireless carriers are there for a reason.
Yeah, T Mobile. It is only a matter of time before the Germans leave.
My wife’s uncle took home two mid six figure paydays in acquisition buyouts at wireless carriers before his luck ran out at Verizon and he was canned still 10 years from retirement. He works in IT for an organic food company outside Seattle these days.
Dont feel too bad for Uncle Bob, however. He lives in a big lake house, sent his kids to Lakeshore (where Billg went to school), and, last we heard, had one kid applying to med school.
Think of the wireless survivors as a group who would feel right at home on Ferenginar.
We haven’t talked directly to Uncle Bob in 20 years. Long story.
“TotalEnergies restarts Tyra gas hub”
https://www.ogj.com/drilling-production/production-operations/article/14310656/totalenergies-restarts-tyra-gas-hub
“TotalEnergies restarted production from the Tyra offshore gas installation hub in the Danish North Sea.”
I worked on this platform back in the 1990s, all my work was over the intertubes. This was the biggest simulation model we ever built with 900+ equipments and 1,200+ streams.
They tried to get me to take the daily Chinook out there one day but the wind was blowing 60 mph at the platform and I chickened out. Plus I had an appointment in Copenhagen the next day and I was going to have to take a 30 mile car / truck / train ferry to get there in my 200 ??? mile trip. I had no idea that they actually had 6 or 7 nine hundred foot ferries making the trip 24x7x365 at 30 mph so there was just a little wait. Now there is a huge bridge.
We have more natural gas in this planet than we know what to do with. But most of it is located in remote locations. Or dangerous locations (Qatar/ Iran).
If there are any sources of power nearby (street lights are a fav) they’ve probably already tapped into them for free electric to run hot plates and charge devices.
Netflix has a new tv series of “The Three-Body Problem”. I watched the first twenty minutes last night. The brutality of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was horrendous. I will be watching more then reading the first book in the series that I bought a few months ago.
https://www.netflix.com/title/81024821
and
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032?tag=ttgnet-20/
A short essay (500 words) on a social issue which must be rectified!
https://www.dailypundit.com/dailypundit.wordpress/2024/03/22/spending-gap/
https://coldfury.com/2024/03/22/spending-gap/
Years ago I bought some low voltage lighting. Toro-Luna Light. I think Toro bought Luna Light. It’s all 12 volt A/C stuff like Malibu lights. The transformer is rated for 6×18 watt bulbs.
My power supply freaked one hot summer day and no more dusk to dawn for me. I checked yesterday and it’s still broken.
I have LED bulbs now. 4 watt incandescent equivalent for ½ watt with LED. Times five.
A rough guess, just faking the numbers, 2.5 watts for lights plus the Toro power supply, call it 10 watts of juice.
We once had a few 7 watt incandescent night lights and never thought anything about them being on all of the time. I’ve idly shopped for a new power supply with working dawn to dusk, and you know what? The math doesn’t work. Just leaving the lights on all of the time for 10 years is less money.
For the grins I plan to take a 12 volt power supply from a random dead switch and see if that will run the lights. A little switching transformer…. it looks like 3 watts at 12v is .25 amps. Seems like a .5 amp power supply will work.
Beautiful day today. Nice and sunny. The trees and wildflowers are getting it on with the pollen. The oaks are not quite there but they will be in a couple of weeks. The Bluebonnets smell nice.
It is not possible, in my experience, for the author of a text to proofread (or to copy-edit) it correctly.
On the one hand, the author is personally invested, and will normally, and often completely unconsciously, shy away from making all the necessary changes. On the other, the author “knows” what the text should say, so they tend to see what they expect to see, rather than what is actually there.
On the gripping hand, if you can’t use an external proofreader and must proofread your own text, the read-backwards technique I outlined goes some way towards mitigating the expect-to-see effect.
On the technique, TV said…
It is indeed excessively boring, but requires intense concentration nonetheless.
Not everyone can do it successfully – there seems to be some innate component to it, over and above training and practice.
That is one of the reasons that there are few truly excellent proofreaders, and why their services are not cheap.
It’s also the reason that people not accustomed to working with top-level proofreaders get the impression that it is a black art- you can have a room full of intelligent professionals who have read the same text a dozen times each, yet the proofreader seeing it for the first time immediately picks up multiple errors they had all missed.
Now imagine doing it all multilingually, and you can understand why there are not many people qualified to occupy my particular professional niche.
At present, it is a skill that cannot be automated, but maybe, one day, Greg’s box of tricks will reach a close approximation, at least for very easy texts.
@Brad
Some do not. There are warming centers when it’s below 0° F, which are often unused because you may not obviously use drugs / alcohol while getting warm.
@Chad
Yep. A lot of theft. And the stores won’t intervene. This big encampment is backed up to a couple big box hardware stories. Ironically the store nearest erected a tall concrete block fence prior to the camp formation. As the wall went up, creating a nice windbreak, the encampment formed. We talked to the store manager prior,and told him his fence was going to grow the problem. He said no it’ll reduce theft because they won’t be able to reach us. Made no sense. Because they couldn’t walk an extra 100’ around the end of the fence? Illogical thinking.
They run electric cables to whatever they can. Propane, fires, gas grills. Anything you can think of. Theres a stupendous amount of alcohol consumed. The encampments have set surrounding areas on fire on more than one occasion.
It is truly dreadful at so many levels I cannot even articulate my thoughts on the matter in a comprehensive fashion.
I’ll bet that running a firetruck up to an urban outdoorsmen campsite and spraying 1000 gallons on them would reduce the problem. This should be done around midnight.
I’ll bet that running a couple of jacked-up pickup trucks with oversized tires over the urban outdoorsmen campsite would reduce the problem. For maximum effect, this should be done in the dark, using night vision devices.
I’ll bet that selling varmint hunting licenses would not only reduce the problem but reduce government deficits.
There are plenty of solutions, to those not afraid to grasp them.
We in London have elections for the Mayoralty and the London Assembly on the 2nd May next.
As is now routine for me, I have received my Official Postal Poll Card, which informs me of my eligibility to vote by post, since I requested this during the early stages of the Pandemic. It specifically states that I will not be able to vote at a polling station.
As I previously reported, I will receive my vote papers (and there will be 3 of them, since 3 races are involved – Mayor, Members of the Assembly (probably a party vote) and Assembly Member for my Constituency) on or about April 15th, and they have to be returned by 10 p.m. on Thursday, May 2nd, this implies that votes received ater that time will not be counted. This should avoid the events of many elections in the US, where large wodges of postal votes arrived days after election day.
Counting is manual, but despite that, it is a matter of local pride that votes cast be counted as rapidly as possible, ideally by next day, and the results declared as soon as available – indeed, in General Elections in past years, it was not unheard of for declarations to occur as soon as 3 a.m. – 5 hours after the polls closed.
Note also, I mentioned multiple voting papers. We use one paper per race – there are no omnibus ballots.
I note also that (and this is new, I believe) you can hand deliver your postal vote (and those of up to 5 others) and you are required to complete a form when so doing. Also, anyone voting in person is required to show an accepted form of photo ID. The list of such IDs includes photocard driving licences, Forces ID card, and Freedom Passes for public transport in London. This would not be a problem for me, since I routinely carry 2 such. Despite that, I am opposed to blanket Photo ID cards for everyone, as are most UK citizens. We don’t major in paranoia, but most ID card schemes in UK in recent years would have captured far too much personal information for our taste.
G.
At the city government level, a lot of soup bowls are probably tied to homeless services.
That’s essentially the problem in Austin.
Texas is no longer a Republican state, but the rot started in Travis County a long time ago.
Picked up my newest 100w solar panel, and bid on a big li-ion battery pack. I won it so when I pick it up, I’ll be able to get the details and see if one of my solar charge controllers will work with it. Should know something Mon. orTues.
I’m bidding on an additional 700w of flexible solar panel too.
One auctioneer had a Cub Cadet riding lawn mower, with a 42″ deck that is entirely electric. It’s throwing an unspecified error code and won’t start. I’m thinking about it as something to steal the pack and charger from if he decides to sell it cheap. It’s brand new.
—————
@jenny, glad you checked in, I was getting anxious…
The homeless bums are a problem everywhere. Here someone is supplying them with tents. They set up under the various expressways, where jurisdiction is muddled. Local PD can’t move them because it’s TxDOT or HCTRA (toll rd) property, TxDOT and HCTRA have no interest in moving bums that are UNDER their road. They are dens of prostitution and drug use, and bicycle theft.
—————
n
You are not alone…
n
– I’ve always liked the Princess, and wish her well. The palace and staff did not manage this professionally at all, and someone should be sacked.
n
You’d think that they would.
That was just the first link for Texas. There’ve been quite a number of bridges and overpasses damaged or destroyed by fires set by bums/migrants/urban adventurers/dirtbags across the nation.
I saw that she’d gotten the full set of clot shots, though now the search engines are not giving me any such links. Assuming that is true, cancer can’t come as a surprise.
Other than that aspect, I can’t bring myself to care. I don’t go so far as to say that every royal and aristocrat across the world should be drowned but I won’t argue against those who do hold that position. The exception is for American aristocrats, the generational wealthy and powerful who manipulate the governments and the culture for their own benefit. Them I’d drown with my own hands.
I haven’t really cared much about the British Royal Family since1776. But I will say that it’s a crying shame that the Princess of Wales has cancer.
Of course, cancer or not, any cardiologist can look at King Chuck’s fat sausage fingers and know that his ticker is less than 100%. And given his brain-dead politics on glowbull warmening, his end can’t come soon enough for my tastes.
A lot of the tents used by the homeless people around here have Academy logos.
I see too many for it to be just a coincidence.
I doubt anyone in the Royal Family received real jabs, but if they did, the Oxford AstraZenica shot was the most likely candidate. That is not mRNA technology.
Anyone that hates modern architecture can’t be all bad.
The Urban Outdoormen have quite a complex dug underneath US183 Northbound just before the overpass crossing I-35.
I used to drive that route daily, and, before the new overpass arrangement, switching to I-35 Northbound meant exiting US183 and sitting through a light. One day, while stopped at the light, I look over, and some well dressed yuppie woman was handing out sandwiches near the entrace to the underground camp, even coaxing a couple of the CHUDs out of the darkness with the food.
I wondered if I was going to see a rape or worse, but, fortunately, the light turned green.
The Queen knew and hung on as long as she could hoping Chuckles reign would be brief.
The 100 year plan is still moving forward on schedule.
The 100 year plan is still moving forward on schedule.
Where Harry becomes King of the USA ?
This isn’t a Republican state anymore.
I don’t think a lot of Republicans here would like what would be necessary to truly crush the Dems like DeSantis and the party did in Florida.
Squishing Collin Zachary (Allred) like a bug should be priority #1 for Texas Republicans, but they’ll chicken out like six years ago and that will be the first state-wide office to fall.
Income tax or, at a minimum, some kind of capital gains/exit tax like WA State’s will be on the November 2027 ballot.
As for dealing with the homeless, there is always “Rat Patrol”.
https://www.fakesteve.net/2006/08/larrys-worst-idea-yet.html
I miss Fake Steve Jobs.
TJ Rogers. That’s who led Limbaugh to be pro H1B for a while until El Rushbo realized how many American engineers were in his audience and quickly corrected the error.
One of Harry’s children with Meghan Markle becomes President of the US while George, William and Kate’s firstborn, ascends to the throne.
William will abdicate young-ish, not wanting to end up like Chuckles … or his mother.
Of course, Big Mike may be the last … person … elected President, which will throw a wrench into the works.
Off to Walla Walla tomorrow for the night. Then Richland to pick up the friend. Off to Spokane on Sunday for a night in a hotel for the flight home on Monday. We will arrive in Atlanta about 9:00 PM, which is 6:00 PM my clock time. The decision is to make the drive home and get in about 2:00 AM on Tuesday morning.
This trip served two purposes, visit my brother and help a friend. The rest of the trip has been fairly boring.
We did stop at Costco and found this Costco carries different items than Knoxville. One item is not even available online. Strange.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin declares disclosure of immigration status in courts is necessary
https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/youngkin-disclosure-immigration-status-courts-necessary
Not just “no”…
BlackRock Pushes Back After Texas Withdraws $8.5 Billion Investment
https://hotair.com/headlines/2024/03/22/blackrock-pushes-back-after-texas-withdraws-85-billion-investment-n3785208
Stupid tonedeaf asshat.
BlackRock Pushes Back After Texas Withdraws $8.5 Billion Investment
https://hotair.com/headlines/2024/03/22/blackrock-pushes-back-after-texas-withdraws-85-billion-investment-n3785208
Stupid tonedeaf asshat.
I wonder what Blackrock charges to manage money. I suspect that they are 1.5% per year people but I really have no idea.
three body problem was one of the most tedious things I’ve ever read, and I read “Dalgren”.
It was nominated for a hugo during the sad puppies affair, and I joined and read all the noms so I could vote. They were BAD.
n
Well shoot. The flexible panels got a bit too pricey and I lost them to the other bidder.
There will be more, and I have to at least pretend to stick to my rules and preset prices.
n