Hot and humid. Sunny. Brain broiler. Like yesterday. Nothing much more to say. It is better in the shade with a breeze, and it’s ok at night.
Did a bunch of pickups including a couple I was going to put off to today or grab on Monday, but I’ll be heading to the BOL after my meeting, and I won’t be back on Monday.
Drove about 100 miles yesterday. There are lots of parts of town that still have tree branches and other debris in the streets, in the right of ways, and on medians… They are more “urban” parts and tend to have lots of illegal dumping too, and trash. Dunno what comes first, the trashy conditions, or the city’s delays in pickup. I’m betting it’s a feedback loop though. Picked up some good stuff for the BOL and for home and the kids. (Taylor Swift “Red” on vinyl had them fighting for who got it first…)
Today I’ve got my non-prepping hobby in the morning, then I’m swapping trucks and heading to the BOL. I might hit the Lowe’s on my way to grab a few things. I’m sure I have projects to do if I don’t bring up the supplies for the other projects.
I stopped at my secondary location and grabbed a roll around A/C unit and hoses to try in the garage at the BOL. Grabbed a MrHeater propane 30K BTU heater too. I’ve already got at least 2 at the BOL, but I’m a lot more likely to sell a propane heater up there, and the Natgas heaters down here. Heck, the Tractor Supply store carries them, so I know there is a market. Buy heaters in the summer and coolers in winter…
They’ll got on the stacks up there, tentatively earmarked for sale. And if I need them, they will be there.
Stacks. So comforting.
nick
Everyone wants a job where they “work” from home or, if that isn’t possible, work part-time for full-time money and benefits.
The pandemic lockdowns seriously damaged the work ethic. I don’t know if the US can recover absent a mobilization for a war.
Austin/Travis County jury pool.
Don’t move here if you are running something like Infowars.
Texas in general is a risk. The state will turn real fast when it happens.
A glimpse into the freak show world of the Texas Renaissance Festival courtesy of HBO Max.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/ren-faire-review-1235912003/
My argument against drafting women is a cultural one. Healthy societies that aren’t in extremis don’t force their young women to go off to war. I’d argue that just like dying cultures send their women out to be prostitutes, healthy cultures balk at forcing young women into the military. But that boat has already sailed. Healthy societies don’t have a 41 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate. Healthy societies don’t surgically mutilate kids. Healthy societies focus on family formation and they don’t treat random homosexual pairings the same as marriage. We obviously are not a healthy society and this surrender to the false god of sexual equality just lets us know the war to save our culture has been lost.
https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/06/15/draft-registration-for-women-heads-for-a-senate-vote-n2175520
Mike Lee
and Chip Roy
have announced their opposition.
That’s great, guys. Real principled. We haven’t drafted anyone for 51 years.
So why have you had your little pink butts up in the air for five years while men pretending to be women have taken their athletic places away and invaded their locker rooms?
And you think posing as a woman should get a man exempted from the draft? Stand over there with FJB and think about it.
Well, meeting adjourned… and I don’t have any new responsibilities, yea!
Now to load up and head out…
Quiet here today…
———-
WRT to pinky, two things spring to mind… don’t come to their attention, and don’t self incriminate on social media. Fail.
———-
I really don’t understand how NM can proceed against the bad baldwin when they won the case against Pinky, which puts the blame for the accident solely on her shoulders.
———
Oh, I forgot I have an auction pickup today, it’s mostly on the way, sorta… at least it’s in the right direction.
n
– ok, I’m assuming he meant “hews” but who knows. Is this the Ren Faire in Austin area or the one by me?
n
added- nvrmnd, one by me
A healthy society wouldn’t be contemplating a draft to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.
The subject of the documentary, Texas Renaissance Festival, is out near you.
The one closer to Austin is Sherwood Forest Faire.
TRF is much older.
I believe that if we get to the point that we actually NEED to draft people, we’ll need every warm body male or female. I also believe, with Heinlein, that no society that cannot recruit enough soldiers to defend itself WITHOUT conscription deserves to survive in the long run.
More to the immediate point, conscripts make TERRIBLE soldiers for our high-tech military.
So I’m against the draft – but if the draft is needed, we need to draft everyone.
Personally, I dodged the draft – by enlisting in the Navy. I didn’t want to go to college, and in my county, they were drafting everybody. This was two years before the “draft lottery” was established. The Navy worked out well for me, and I did well for myself in the Navy. But several of my high school classmates never came home from Viet Nam.
The “work from home” group are mostly the ones that never learned to work combined with the ones that think they work, but don’t by any objective standard.
There’s a long list of jobs that can’t be done from home. Welding, roadbuilding, residential and commercial construction, electrician, a/c tech, auto repair… Long list. The kind of jobs that the “work from home” crowd can’t conceive of doing and aren’t physically or mentally fit to do, yet believe they are superior to.
Most coding is low and mid-level talent struggling mightily to solve problems that have already been successfully solved in myriad ways, or adding
bells and whistlessand in the gears that no one wants (90+% of Microsoft for more than 20 years) . Get a big enough library and it’s a simple lookup, hence “AI”. 70% of coders will be replaced by the next 10% giving instructions to the code library bot on how to string subroutines together. The top 20% will do the heavy lifting as they’ve always done.Teachers have devolved into credentialed and unionized organized crime, bribing pols to give them ever increasing amounts of tax dollars for ever decreasing performance. They’ve worked for more than two generations to destroy the work ethic and replace it with entitlement based on skin color. More than half their “graduates” are illiterate, innumerate, trained to think they are special and for the most part are social media addicts incapable of dressing and showing up for work on time, have no prospect of making any useful contribution to society and are destined for the dole. The biggest question is how to prevent them from being actively destructive beyond their own social radius and channel most of their welfare money back into the taxed economy–hence one-half the justification for the pseudo-legalization of drugs. (the other half being that it serves the destructive goals of the anarchists and communists). Lying to them and telling them they “work from home” by doing the equivalent of pressing a button to get their monkey chow is just a safe way of keeping them out of the way.
True story: I know a local government unit that has a building receptionist–who works from home.
If they can rewrite the definition of “virus”, “woman”, “machine gun”, “waterway” and have made it down to “receptionist”, what is left to create a common communicable description of reality? What happens when the road you are sharing with thousands of other drivers of two-dimensional semi-guided missiles loses the coherence of shared references like “left”and “right”?
@Greg Norton
“A healthy society wouldn’t be contemplating a draft to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.”
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2024/06/14/biden-skips-peace-summit-to-hurry-home-for-a-celebrity-fundraiser-n3790285
There is no one that FJB or any Democrat gives a rip about that will ever have boots on the ground anywhere that is actively disputed. Their people are the REMF’s that come in later for the photo ops and the mission participation ribbons.
“Democrat Commissioner Nominee Arrested in Texas for Staging Racist Attacks on Himself to Frame Republican Opponent”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/democrat-commissioner-nominee-arrested-texas-staging-racist-attacks/
This scumbag is running to represent my very conservative neighborhood. The county commisioners have been playing games with merging conservative neighborhoods with larger liberal neighborhoods. He just got caught by our conservative commissioner he is running against.
I’ll bet that he still wins the race. Missouri City will vote for any scumbag, the scummier the better.
Subcontinent.
My wife was astonished this week during an orientation session for UT Dallas when several Colonist fathers pushed back on the university policy against using AI to complete class assignments.
“Why should my child get penalized if he knows how to use the technology to get the job done?”
At least he wasn’t trying to run for the Republican nomination with a bunch of Socialist policies buried in his platform hoping the Wine Moms voting in the primaries won’t notice.
I’ve seen that in this part of Texas among several Colonist candidates running for US House seats.
“We are taking the threat of heavy rainfall next week seriously”
https://spacecityweather.com/we-are-taking-the-threat-of-heavy-rainfall-next-week-seriously/
We are going to get zero to 30 inches of rain starting on Monday. Could be even more.
“A few notes on the math behind Trump’s scheme to replace income taxes with tariffs”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3045970/a-few-notes-on-the-math-behind-trumps-scheme-to-replace-income-taxes-with-tariffs/
Why not ?
I sure am tired of filling out tax forms every year for several entities.
Picked up some good stuff for the BOL and for home and the kids. (Taylor Swift “Red” on vinyl had them fighting for who got it first…)
I thought I had “Red” in my truck ripped USB drive with 200 albums the other day and tried to play it. I was wrong, it is my to be ripped stack, waiting for the new to be built pc.
Toyota is really fussy about flash drive format to get the music to play in the right order. I just got around to digitizing about two years’ worth of album purchases, going back to our abbreviated Tennessee road trip.
No one in the US wants to work turning a wrench or running a sewing machine anymore.
Tariffs wouldn’t achieve the desired long term effect of restarting domestic production for a very long time.
It took several generations to lose the domestic manufacturing base, and several more would be required to rebuild the capability.
The end result of steep tariffs would be a lot of misery.
The people do not support these leaders. Great change is coming.
https://x.com/balajis/status/1801285652304285933
Stunning numbers.
No one in the US wants to work turning a wrench or running a sewing machine anymore.
Tariffs wouldn’t achieve the desired long term effect of restarting domestic production for a very long time.
It took several generations to lose the domestic manufacturing base, and several more would be required to rebuild the capability.
The end result of steep tariffs would be a lot of misery.
I think that you might be surprised.
Or not. But, if we dont do it then the common folk will have nothing to do but smoke weed and get drunk at breakfast.
I’ve made a mistake of letting PC pieces sit for too long, and by the time I got around to building the computer, the return period had expired for components which turned out to be defective.
Hard drives have been really bad lately. DOA out of the box.
I just revived my primary desktop with a clean Windows XP install which I can replicate at will, and it took two returns on hard drives to get a unit which worked.
The next step will be installing Visual Studio 6 Pro and service packs, the last real Visual Basic compiler.
Toyota is really fussy about flash drive format to get the music to play in the right order. I just got around to digitizing about two years’ worth of album purchases, going back to our abbreviated Tennessee road trip.
Whose music system is Toyota running ? The system in my wifes 2019 Highlander is nothing fancy and only has a four inch screen. I suspect that system is way obsolete now as it has a real CD player in it that the wife loves.
From the WSJ:
We recently told you that the Environmental Protection Agency handed [Inflation Reduction Act] money to an outfit backing anti-Israel protests. Turns out EPA is also funding groups that oppose immigration enforcement.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/06/domestic-axis-of-evil.php
Put all the leftists in camps and feed them kale.
Toyota had their own system back then which was surprisingly capable, supporting a number of formats including Ogg Vorbis and Apple’s FLAC.
The trick is the FAT32 format storage and getting the track order right.
I wouldn’t know how to do it with Windows. I have to use Linux to manage the flash drive.
Jonathan Turley ably documents the total PLT hypocrisy of the Connecticut Bar:
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/06/15/no-place-in-the-public-discourse-the-connecticut-bar-association-warns-critics-of-trump-prosecutions/
After Trump is elected the GOP majority should pass a bill implementing a flat 2% tax (no income exempt) on people who support the illegal alien invasion. Let them put their money where their mouths are.
Do it as an “opt out” program where people are automatically enrolled unless they opt out, and then publish the names of the people that opt out.
“The Sperminator welcomes 165th child just before Father’s Day — and makes shocking announcement”
https://nypost.com/2024/06/15/us-news/sperminator-ari-nagel-welcomes-165th-child-ahead-of-fathers-day/
I’ve got nothing.
I was looking at my bank account the other day. Someone’s retirement was deposited on at the end of May and it is still there. Maybe they pay a month late and that was the May payment? I need to rummage around and find a phone number.
My 401k is doing whatever. I get mail every month from HEB and from State Street. The bank account says “HEB something something Benefit”. This month? Just “Benefit”. I went the mailbox today and oh, nice, now the payments come through Northern Trust.
So I have to watch for two 1099s at tax time.
Last year his retirement started coming from a different company. The old company? They didn’t send a 1099. The sent them for years and years. I had to call and ask for it. I wonder how many old folks that screwed over via the IRS?
I found one of those bins where you can drop off clothes. That’s how I got rid of Mom’s clothes. I mean, they didn’t fit so why keep them? I have plenty of clothes anyway. This one is for some kind of dog thing in Austin. I’ve see others that are for breast cancer. I don’t know what they do with the clothes but it’s got to be more useful than just tossing the stuff into the trash.
Now I just have to bag stuff up and take it there. No huge rush.
97 F today with a clear sunny sky. Felt hotter, more like 105 F. The van needs a can of freon.
I have no clue what kind of OS my truck’s radio uses. It does XM. Plus AM and FM. And GPS maps. It has a CD player. You can bluetooth your phone to it. It has a USB port… that’s what I use. I have about 5 GB (855 files) on a 32 GB USB stick that is small. It sticks out about half an inch. I just play it on Shuffle. Sounds good.
I have yet to pair my phone to the truck. I don’t use the phone while driving.
I have no clue what kind of OS my truck’s radio uses. It does XM. Plus AM and FM. And GPS maps. It has a CD player. You can bluetooth your phone to it. It has a USB port… that’s what I use. I have about 5 GB (855 files) on a 32 GB USB stick that is small. It sticks out about half an inch. I just play it on Shuffle. Sounds good.
I have yet to pair my phone to the truck. I don’t use the phone while driving.
My wifes 2019 Highlander does not have XM but it does have one USB port. My 2019 F150 has XM (I refuse to pay) and three USB ports.
For both of our vehicles, the salesperson tied our phones to the vehicle.
I don’t use the XM. I don’t know if it still works. Don’t care, actually. I’m not paying for it.
My truck is December 2019 Nissan Frontier. If that matters.
Time for bedtime potty walk.
I was looking at my bank account the other day. Someone’s retirement was deposited on at the end of May and it is still there. Maybe they pay a month late and that was the May payment? I need to rummage around and find a phone number.
Maybe there was a survivor benefit to his pension ?
My pension has a survivor benefit if I precede my wife. Of course, that $289 per month pension that starts next year wont go very far.
Made it to the BOL. Having dinner now.
Got the lawn mowed. Tried a different setup on the mower deck, I think it’s scalping less.
Currently 89F, mostly still, lotsa mosquitos.
n
Wife canceled the XM for her car, and my Ranger. They’ve been sending “sign back up and save” letters, but the deal isn’t that good.
I miss it in the ranger. I HATE commercials. I’ve been listening to the classic rock station and they are running AARP ads, FFS.
Drugs with horrible side effects, ambulance chaser lawyers, and AARP. At least I still have XM in the Expy.
And supposedly I can stream on my phone, which would give me back XM in the ranger, if I wanted to increase my data plan. It should work for W, as she has unlimited data.
Since the Expy XM account was separate from the others, I should be able to set up an online account and set up the streaming. I couldn’t for the old plan as I was caught in some sort of Kafka trap with the log in and account names/passwords/etc because I did it originally a LONG time ago, and they changed the way their online works, which buggered the account somehow. Wasn’t worth fixing at the time.
n
Every so often SiriusXM runs free week promotions, where everything is available whether you subscribe or not.
They just finished one that went through the first week in June.
I subscribe, for my long car trips and so I can stream old time radio classics (like Gunsmoke and Dragnet) while I’m in the gym. I should drop the second car, though. For the last 3 months, we drive it to HEB and back once a week. I plan to give the car to my son but I’m waiting until my girlfriend’s job situation is straightened out. She may need to borrow it as a commuter car for a while, once she’s got something to commute to.
>> Wait, does BOL stand for Bug Out Lake ? If so, I am at my BOO, Bug Out Ocean.
Bug Out Location.
>> I really don’t understand how NM can proceed against the bad baldwin when they won the case against Pinky, which puts the blame for the accident solely on her shoulders.
Because power-hungry, politicized DAs (see Bragg, Alvin). Wouldn’t surprise me to see him primary Hochul in 2026.
AND/OR
Because corrupt, biased judges (see Merchan, Juan).
Bug Out Location.
Cool. Thanks !
Sorry but my acronym table overflowed several years ago. Now I have nulls and discontinuites in it. Entries such as LNG, EIT, DMPEG. BLEVE, PFX, FPSO, etc. I have tried to unload the table, compress it, and reload the table but that quit working a couple of decades ago when I turned 45. I have complained to the designer but he said deal with it. Something about MTBF.
Torque wrench? What’s that??
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-investigates-quality-problem-undelivered-787s-sources-say-2024-06-13/
Greg, would you be very kind and give details, please? I have had no luck getting this to work correctly in our RAV4, so would appreciate a how-to. Linux to prepare the stick is no problem – my machines run Mint.
Thanks!
@greg: @denis:
Put the track number for your desired play order at the start of the filename(s). An alphanumeric sort (probably the default) will then do the trick. If not, fiddle with the first couple of characters until it does. Then do that for all future rips.
I do this.
G.
Toyota’s “infotainment” system ignores the sort order inside the directory and uses the order in which files were written to the FAT32 file system copying the files to the flash to determine which file comes first.
Windows and Mac OS are wild cards with regard to which file gets written first. Linux will write the files in the order in which they were placed into the source directory in the ext4 file system, which offers some degree of control.
Format a flash drive with FAT32 using Gparted or another Linux utility. Do not use exFAT.
If you used Rhythmbox to manage all of your CD rips and maintain the music directory on the Linux machine, just drag and drop all of the folders in the Music directory to the clean flash drive’s top level directory.
If you have problems with album or song order on the flash, the fault isn’t on the flash but with the order in which files got written to the disk on the Linux machine over the years, and you will have to address the problem at the source by rebuilding your Music folder contents with a ‘find’ piped to ‘tar’ and the unarchiving the tar into a new Music folder.
Yeah, I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it works and is something which took a lot of experimentation and time to figure out.
New albums ripped by Rhythmbox and copied to the flash will appear later in the Album list in the car unless you rebuild your Music folder again.
Houston has been technically insolvent for decades, possibly since the other Mayor from the Whitmire family (by marriage to the current Mayor’s brother) signed the first responder contracts with the overly generous retirement packages back in the 80s, kicking the can down the road.
Haircuts are coming for everyone, including all levels of government which cannot print money, but the desire is to delay those haircuts as long as possible. YOLO!
And if you don’t think you are getting a haircut, at a minimum a steep drop in the value of your house, possibly placing you underwater in the mortgage if purchased in the current bubble, you’re living a fantasy.
Thank you very much! That is indeed counterintuitive. Invaluable pointer.
I’ve made a mistake of letting PC pieces sit for too long, and by the time I got around to building the computer, the return period had expired for components which turned out to be defective.
Hard drives have been really bad lately. DOA out of the box.
I just revived my primary desktop with a clean Windows XP install which I can replicate at will, and it took two returns on hard drives to get a unit which worked.
I hope that all of the pieces work. The hard drive is a WD 1 TB M.2 drive that should run forever.
I bought a Windows 11 Pro USB drive from MS the other day for $200 since the old trick of installing Windows 7 and using the free upgrades does not work anymore. Win 11 is very finicky to install but this is a version 9 Intel cpu and MSI motherboard which are suppose to work. We shall see.
It looks like the Sunday June 16 topic did not come up yet. I am away from my PCs so I cannot put it in. Nick ? RickH ?
Church today is going to be interesting. Dad has pulled a muscle in his back so I will be running Mom in her wheelchair up and down the ramp. Plus somebody at church needs to unload her chair from the car.
I think that Mom and Dad are the oldest now at their church, 85 and 82. That is what happens as time goes along. This form of time travel feels inefficient.
AMD and Intel sold their souls to Microsoft, cutting off Windows 7 support on recent generations of hardware. In return, I’ve noticed that installing Windows 10 and 11 are very smooth on new hardware, especially if you have the very latest *.iso installer downloaded from Microsoft and burned to a thumb drive.
I had zero issues moving my primary desktop’s Windows 10 install from a 15 year-old CPU to a current AMD processor and relatively new-ish AM4 chipset last year. I simply input the registration code and everything worked.
I do not attempt booting the Windows 7 partition, however, which is why I still have the old system around in case I need to boot the OS for some reason. A core dump on boot could put the hard drive in a weird state which would prevent me from mounting the NTFS partitions under Linux.
For now, the primary desktop keeps the spinning metal. I’ll move up to a flash drive with a Windows 11 install, but I’m not in a hurry.
85 is oldest? Paul Harvey used to say people from the cold northern states live longer than people from the warm southern states. My aunt from Minnesota made it to 100, and she was not the oldest in her church in southern California. Must be the water!
Haircuts are coming for everyone, including all levels of government which cannot print money, but the desire is to delay those haircuts as long as possible. YOLO!
Houston is a mess. About 8 years ago they gave the cops a raise but did not give the same raise to the firefighters. The firefighters sued and the amount has accumulated to $1.6 billion.
Mayor Whitmire wants to pay but there is no cash. The city controller, the check writer, refuses to pay. Looks like Houston is headed to the ditch.
85 is oldest? Paul Harvey used to say people from the cold northern states live longer than people from the warm southern states. My aunt from Minnesota made it to 100, and she was not the oldest in her church in southern California. Must be the water!
There used to be a 105 year old lady but she passed a couple of years ago. The church only has 75 members so that is a small group to sample.
People do live a long time in the South with air conditioning. If we lose a/c due to the stupid EPA, old people will be dropping like flies.
Half of the houses in town have three or four window units in them, sticking out in all directions. The other half have central a/c units.
Just like many other cities. Maybe we should elect crooks instead of politicians to run our cities. Oh, wait…
The NGOs are getting ready for Trump:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/us/politics/trump-2025-democratic-resistance.html?sgrp=c-cb&unlocked_article_code=1.0E0.-t3y.INdGRNr06wEW
The population would adapt and build houses appropriately again.
When we first moved to Florida, we had an early pre-US Home Arthur Rutenberg house in Clearwater, many of which are still intact with only minimal maintenance. The split floor plan slab-on-grade designs dependent on AC are relatively recent, mostly built in the last 50 years.
Researching for our trip to Taliesin, I watched the Mike Wallace interview with Frank Lloyd Wright on YouTube, which has been parodied multiple times by “The Simpsons”. Looking past the comedy gold mine of the format of the program, Wright said some really profound things including that, given another 15 years of career – this was 1957, not long before Wright died — he could change the way the entire country built houses.
Wallace was incredulous, but I believe Wright was correct, and the future arrived roughly on schedule in The South. However, it was dependent on AC.
Remember that electricity was going to be too cheap to meter with the nuclear power plants. Then everybody got a/c in the 1970s and demand quadupled in Texas alone. Men wearing three piece wool suits in August in Houston.
If Trump is elected and makes it to Inauguration Day, we are getting a rerun of 2017-2021, including the midterm.
The Dem women voters who decide these things and live in the suburbs of DC and the tech hubs are not done working out their mental issues, starting with the Bad Daddy returning to the White House.
I don’t get to this place until after 9am PDT, so asking me to start the current day’s post will take a while.
Just looked, and Nick is currently editing Sunday’s post…so I’ll leave him to it.
Happy Father’s Day to the dads.
I brain-farted the post last night but it’s there now…
Time for coffee.
n