Hot and humid at the BOL today, although slightly less than Houston, if I get lucky. It was hot yesterday in Houston, and dripping wet. Just standing around outside had my shirt soaked with sweat. The humidity just makes it miserable. We’ll get more too, before the summer is done.
I spent the day doing pickups, and running errands before heading to the BOL to do some work. I had to hit Lowes for some lumber and plywood, and grabbed some closeout plumbing supplies too. I always check the clearance aisle and yesterday I hit paydirt. They had a bunch of sharkbite fittings marked down to 1/4 or 1/3 of retail. Since I’ll eventually need to finish my master bath remodel, I picked up a bunch of stuff.
Also swung by the chiropractor, and the HEB for some groceries. Nothing really good on sale at the HEB this visit.
I also dropped the dog off at a friend’s house for the week, and loaded up the truck. By the time I got all that done, and did the minimum housecleaning that would keep me alive when my wife gets back, it was after 10pm. Kinda late to be heading up, but I figured at least I’d be here in the morning.
And I’ve got a bunch of work to do. The grass is knee high. It’s gonna be slow going bushwhacking that. Then I’ll start looking at the list, with heavy weight given to tasks in the shade or in the house. I do not want to hurt myself in the heat.
Maybe I’ll find some time to write and AAR for the past two months. I did learn a few things.
Always be learning new things. And stacking the knowledge as well as the stuff.
nick
31 July 2024, the one in which Denis learns that his wife is a polyandrist.
Now off to bring the Mrs’ car to its annual roadworthiness test. Wish us luck…
Double precision involves moving four times the bits around even to do simple addition of two numbers.
In theory, single precision offers at least six digits of decimal precision, but that’s in theory.
Of course Mark Hamil supports the candidate in favor of zero limits on abortion.
Hang out on any of the online forums celebrating the demise of Disney, and Hamil’s name will pop up. The story has been familiar to the “haters” for a very long time.
A bid we put on a house in Vegas was accepted. We are working on closing. Looks like I’ll be a Knee-vadin by the end of the year. Our realtor thinks we can lease our condo for $3K/mo, so we are prepping to do that. D3 is interested in buying our SA house to start a slum-lord empire. She’ll get a steep discount if she goes forward with the purchase. Daddy’s girl.
Hamil does some awesome voice characters. Too bad he turned into a doosh-nozzle.
Bring back the Burroughs Medium Systems. It was easy to multiply two 50-digit numbers and get a 100 digit result accurate to the last digit. It was also possible to divide a 100-digit number by a 50-digit number and get 50 digits result accurate to last digit. Each task could be done in a single instruction. Yeh, internally there was a lot more work but it was invisible to the coder. And those were digits, not bits. That is why banks liked the machines. Calculations for interest were easy, well beyond what IBM offered. Using scaling interest could be calculated to 20 digits or more. Fractional interest and float were big money for a multi-billion-dollar bank.
Which reminds me, the one thing I missed about COBOL was the use of constants. It would have been great to set a constant for a field size and use that in the PIC entries. A change to one constant, recompile, and all the field sizes are resolved. Taking that further allow simple math in the PIC entries that would include the constant. “05 Maximum_Amount PIC (Amount_Size+5)V(Decimal_Places)”, where Maximum_Amount and Decimal_Places were constants. It would have helped a lot in many programs. Changing a field size was fraught with problems finding all the references. These constants should have been in the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION and have a CONSTANTS SECTION.
But no one asked me. For all I know it may in the latest and greatest COBOL compilers, which I have not used since 1998.
That is one reason I liked ALGOL. Constants were allowed and could be used in any size definition.
Most of my programs in ALGOL would have dozens of compile time constants that defined field sizes for string data fields. Some of these constants would also be used to determine whether compile time code was included, or not. I liked my programs easy to maintain. All the constants were at the beginning, group by function with comments at the beginning, and the alphabetized within each section.
The downside was that if a person was buried on page 183 of the program listing and string was defined in a function, it was necessary to reference the constants to find the real size by flipping back some pages. The maintainability far outweighed that little bit of inconvenience.
MSFT is getting smacked this morning after the earnings report as predicted.
The real owners of everything are sending a message to BillG about AI capex.
Surprisingly, my employer is up after the share price dipped within a few percentage points of where the execs’ RSU grant vesting happened this Spring.
Gah. Awake and moving.
It’s gone from 80F to 82F while I was eating my breakfast. Overcast, but bright out. There was lots of wind earlier but it seems to have died down.
Grass looks pretty tall … mower is going to get a workout.
n
BTW, yesterday while at lowes I ran into a contractor buddy (one of the dads from school) and he said that the price quote we got from the trunk slammer to connect the whole house generator was actually pretty good. His guy would be about $1K more, in fact. His guy would be licensed, and probably pull permits though…
I will probably hit him up for his guy to do the plumbing for the gas line, then I can be sure the thing still runs before spending big money.
n
Swamp cooler work, again, my least favorite chore.
Yes, on the roof this fine July morning, replacing the month old blue plastic pads with natural aspen.
The blue pads just weren’t cutting it.
It is supposed to reach 107 again by this weekend and I may not be around to keep an eye on it.
I suppose they can. I’ve downloaded all of the movies. You have the option to stream, also. If the Movies & TV app goes away or is changed, I’m (bad word). But they would (bad word) a lot of folks so I’m not worried.
Wind is still strong and the sun has burned thru the overcast. It’s 88F in the shade and I’m sitting here reading the Innkeeper series, book one… instead of beating myself up with the lawn mower.
I tell myself it’s because my back hurts, and will only be worse if the mower bounces and lurches all over… but really, it’s because I like this new series a lot, so far.
n
“At crucial times in life, J.D. Vance focused on ‘Wisdom from the Book of Mamaw'”
https://www.tmatt.net/columns/2024/7/24/at-crucial-times-in-his-life-jd-vance-focused-on-wisdom-from-the-book-of-mamaw
“The young J.D. Vance was used to the melodramas surrounding his mother Beverly Vance with her addictions to painkillers, heroin and alcohol, as well as the chaos caused by her five failed marriages and countless live-in boyfriends.”
“But his mother was trying to steer a car during one pivotal clash with Bonnie Blanton Vance, the matriarch known to all as “Mamaw.””
“”There was a lot of screaming, some punching and driving, and then a stopped car on the side of the road,” wrote Vance, in his bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” from 2016. “It’s a miracle we didn’t crash and die: Mom driving and slapping the kids in the backseat; Mamaw on the passenger side, slapping and screaming at Mom. … We drove home in silence after Mamaw explained that if Mom lost her temper again, Mamaw would shoot her in the face.””
“Once he was safely home – at his grandmother’s house – Vance approached her on the battered couch where she napped, watched TV and read her Bible. He asked one question: “Mamaw, does God love us?” She hugged him and began weeping.”
Oh my goodness. It is a wonder that JD Vance did not follow his mother into the dark. Kids do not do well in chaos.
The doosh-nozzle antics may be part of playing up to Disney to keep him in “The Mandalorian” movie which will wrap the Baby Yoda story.
Sympathies. I feel your pain. Now go schedule a VD screen to make sure you won’t be feeling any pain that you can avoid.
Add another for me. I’ve written a couple of full-up compilers and translators for grad school classes and a number of interpreters and translators for “little languages” for specific purposes. I also tried real hard to write an object-oriented Forth but it didn’t work. In hindsight, it suffered from trying to implement everything in the first version rather than get one OO feature at a time working.
Double precision involves moving four times the bits around even to do simple addition of two numbers.
In theory, single precision offers at least six digits of decimal precision, but that’s in theory.
All of the Intel cpus since the 80836 have the ability to move the 64 bits of the floating point values around in one instruction so they are not slow. In fact, Intel cpus were designed to be floating point machines when the games started screaming for more and more speed. The 80387 was a masterpiece of floating point and eventually gained the ability to process vectors of floating point all at once.
Double precision is 15.5 significant digits. Single precision is 5.5 significant digits. Single precision really, really, really sucks for most anything.
Coming up on the horizon is quadruple precision. Some of the chemistry software guys are claiming that quadruple precision will solve a lot of problems calculating around the black hole known as the critical point. Me, meh. My software works fine around the critical point and the retrograde region since we have fought those battles in the 1990s and 2000s as pressures went up in the pipelines and process equipment.
The downside was that if a person was buried on page 183 of the program listing and string was defined in a function, it was necessary to reference the constants to find the real size by flipping back some pages. The maintainability far outweighed that little bit of inconvenience.
This is why every programmer should use an IDE (interactive development environment). The initial pain is far outweighed by the ability to look things up easily. When one has 20,000 source code files like I do, finding stuff with grep can make your life a living hell due to the false positives.
That won’t be a problem if you use a naming convention for all identifiers. Globally-unique 32-character-long names made up of only [l1I0O] will ease your search for all uses of a variable or function.
According to the LSM, The Kamel has massive leads over tRump in battleground States. Even Joe Rogan is predicting a Kamel win for POTUS.
I’m not so sure. Polling is usually skewed. I still see little from the RNC on getting tRump elected. That is more of a factor why I can’t give tRump more than a 50/50 chance of winning.
If The Kamel wins, it will only get worse for the FUSA on the commie infiltration of all things American. Come on Independents, vote to stop the commies.
Monday’s Kunstler column indicates that required FEC paperwork has not been filed by either candidate.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/youll-never-work-in-this-town-again/
Bah. Multitasking.
By either candidate, I meant Biden and Harris.
Apparently there was a convention for black journalists. If there would have been a convention for white journalists there would have been a major uproar, protests, sanctions, if any such place would ever hold such a convention.
WRT reporting on “polls” … they have to convince people that there is a chance she’d win, better if people think it’s a shoe in. Otherwise the cheat isn’t believable.
SloJoe with his long history and time as VP had at least a fig leaf of believability. Kamel doesn’t.
———–
still working on the mower. I decided to give leveling the deck one more go, and while I was under there, I decided to take one more look at why the belt seems to be two inches too long.
Got past the level issue by raising it all the way up against the stops. Finally found the root cause for the belt issue. The pulleys I used when I rebuilt the deck have the same outer diameter as the old pulleys. But upon close examination of the old pulleys, I discovered the V groove wasn’t as deep. Wrapping the belt and measuring it, with the belt in place, each pulley uses 1 inch more belt than the pulleys I put on it. So now I need to put the old pulleys on the new spindles. That should take up all my extra slack and let me get back to work, finally…
———-
meanwhile, leftover indian for lunch.
n
“Yes, Kamala Will Grab Your Guns in First 100 Days if She Successful Steals the Election”
https://rumble.com/v5969id-yes-kamala-will-grab-your-guns-in-first-100-days-if-she-successful-steals-t.html
If Congress won’t do it then she will grab guns using Red Flag laws, Executive Order, etc.
Instant Civil War 2.0.
Because Ebonics. Or Jive. Or whatever the current name is. But hey yo! bros! Have your all black journalist convention. Feel free.
Just don’t get your feelings hurt when all the honkys assume you are DEI hires and ignore anything you say.
We cool?
Uh, buying a new belt might be simpler. ?
“WAYNE ROOT: Mr. President, Now Is the Time to Combine “No Tax on Tips” with “No Tax on Social Security for Seniors” for the Greatest One-Two Punch Since Mike Tyson!”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/wayne-root-mr-president-now-is-time-combine/
“I urged President Trump to champion “No Tax on Social Security for Seniors.””
“And I believe it’s about to happen. Because this morning, out of the blue, President Trump posted at TruthSocial the following statement (in all caps!)…”
““SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY.””
Tempting idea.
This should have been from the get-go. Pay taxes on money you already paid taxes on. That sounds crazy. But, that is the
socialistcommie way.Living the life of
RileyNick.Well, the new aspen pads are in the swamp cooler and their sweet scent is filling the house. It seems to be working better but it isn’t even 100F out.
Quality control was virtually nonexistent, with the nominally 32 inch wide pads ranging from 30 inches to 33 inches. I double padded as always, lapped the pads, and used bits of the old pad to fill the gaps.
Then taped the joints of the pad panels to keep warm air from being sucked in, the old Tradewinds fiberglass unit has warped a bit over the years.
It was also a good chance to clean the mud out of the bottom, and oil the bearings as it has gotten a lot of use in July – every single day and sometimes nonstop for 2 to 3 days at a time.
Then I replaced or repaired the rubber drip lines for my remaining shrubs, which are just this week suddenly irresistable to rabbits or squirrels, policed the place for (flamable) tumbleweeds from the bad neighbor upwind, filled the trash can and put it out, swept the patio & measured the tomato enclosure for new anti-critter fabric.
And then I stopped, because I want to be able to move tomorrow.
That won’t be a problem if you use a naming convention for all identifiers. Globally-unique 32-character-long names made up of only [l1I0O] will ease your search for all uses of a variable or function.
Where were you in 1964 when the grad students started writing the software in Fortran II ?
Oh wait, 32 character function and variable names were not a part of Fortran until Fortran 1990. Fortran II (1959) was limited to two characters and Fortran IV (1966) was limited to six characters (hardware limitation on 36 bit computers).
Even worse, none of the programmers declared variables until 2002 when I put my foot down and said no more implicit declarations for variables. Fortran’s default to this day is implicit variable typing of floating point A – H and O – Z, integer I – N. Which floating point you ask ? Why single precision of course.
I hired a temp programmer and he spent two years declaring all 300,000+ variables in our software. He got 99.999% of them correct !
See also: VAT
Earn money. Pay income tax. Use after-tax money to buy a product.
But the product has
sales taxValue Added Tax.But every step of the way, from mining to shaping/forming to assembly to packaging, the product was taxed over and over again. The cost of labor put into the product is also taxed.
If VAT countries are like the U.S., the corporations pay income tax, too. Which is passed right on to the consumers.
Most people vastly underestimate the amount of taxes they pay, because so much of it is hidden or bundled in other costs.
So he missed 3? I hope you docked his pay.
That WAS the idea from the beginning of Social Security. We even know who reversed it; Senator Joseph R. Biden introduced the bill to tax Social Security benefits.
Is there a limit on how much SS you can draw a month? I’ve not heard of one.
There are limits on other income, aka a job, that will reduce your SS payments.
So, maybe, anything over your standard deduction, filing single or married, gets taxed? Never mind the source of the income.
It’s all theft, taxation, that is.
I was in Long Beach working at Douglas Aircraft and doing a little Fortran II work.
A bid we put on a house in Vegas was accepted. We are working on closing. Looks like I’ll be a Knee-vadin by the end of the year. Our realtor thinks we can lease our condo for $3K/mo, so we are prepping to do that. D3 is interested in buying our SA house to start a slum-lord empire. She’ll get a steep discount if she goes forward with the purchase. Daddy’s girl.
Why do I think that all five of your daughters are Daddy’s girls ?
Is there a limit on how much SS you can draw a month? I’ve not heard of one.
There are limits on other income, aka a job, that will reduce your SS payments.
So, maybe, anything over your standard deduction, filing single or married, gets taxed? Never mind the source of the income.
It’s all theft, taxation, that is.
They will reverse your monthly payments if you make more than $17,000 ??? in a year (that number is OLD) before your full social security date. Your full social security date is probably the day that you turned 66 and ten months. I do not know your actual birthday nor do I want to know it but I think that you and my wife are the same age.
31 July 2024, the one in which Denis learns that his wife is a polyandrist.
I had to look that word up. I had no idea what it meant. Uh, that is a serious accusation.
And here in the States we use the word bigamist.
Bring back the Burroughs Medium Systems. It was easy to multiply two 50-digit numbers and get a 100 digit result accurate to the last digit. It was also possible to divide a 100-digit number by a 50-digit number and get 50 digits result accurate to last digit. Each task could be done in a single instruction. Yeh, internally there was a lot more work but it was invisible to the coder. And those were digits, not bits. That is why banks liked the machines. Calculations for interest were easy, well beyond what IBM offered. Using scaling interest could be calculated to 20 digits or more. Fractional interest and float were big money for a multi-billion-dollar bank.
My limits that I have been putting in the software lately are +- 1.0e+-200. So I need over 200 digits for fixed point arithmetic. And yes, we need those limits when we are calculating solid – vapor fugacities.
The Movies from hell? Yeah, my D partition is red in Explorer. 28.9 GB of 325 GB free. So I thought to burn a DVD. Oh, no, not enough space on C with 93 GB free.
Ok. So, I have the various SSDs in cases from the old PCs. Copy over to each and it’s saved. Currently tossing the folder onto Moa. Then I can clean my hard drive.
And yeah, I don’t remember why I kept the original 512 SSD stick in this box but did all the stuff to have the other two machines have a 1TB SSD.
I have an awesome smelling batch of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove. A dipped spoon tastes great. It was a bit salty at first but as the tomatoes cook down, it’s almost perfect now.
I’ll be burping it. I added a tablespoon of dried bell pepper. 🙂 It’s for flavor!
Monday’s Kunstler column indicates that required FEC paperwork has not been filed by either candidate.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/youll-never-work-in-this-town-again/
Uh, I do not want to see the fat transvestite naked please. And you cannot make me.
I think Paul’s mailman is subbing in today here in California.
I was in my office and saw the USPS guy drive up, get out, and drop my package from 2′ up (i could here it through double paned windows) just inside the little pony wall at the street, then drive off.
The wall is just 35′ from the (shaded) porch.
It’s just a cat tree from Amazon today, but yesterday it was a $450 telescope mount head.
Yes, set by the amount of earnings over the years. There is a maximum amount of about $3,800 per month for benefits for 2024.
Until an individual has reached full retirement age there is a limit on taxable income before the benefits are reduced. For 2024 that amount is about $22,000. For every $2.00 over the limit, SS is reduced by $1.00.
Sort of. SS benefits are not taxed until other income exceeds a certain amount. Once that plateau is reached and exceeded some weird complicated formula is used. The calculation takes a full page of paper on the tax forms. I fall into that category because of redemption of 401Ks and interest income.
The taxable portion of SS gets added to a person’s income and that total amount, minus the standard deduction, is the taxable amount on which taxes must be paid.
It is becoming really difficult to itemize anymore. Medical bills and medical premiums, including what is paid from SS benefits, can be deducted. Assisted living and nursing home can be fully deducted. Prescriptions, glasses (contacts) and doctors can all be added to the deductions. Property tax is deductible. I pay my property tax every other year to get the maximum deduction every other year. It used to help, but not anymore.
Mortgage interest can be deducted up to a certain amount. You can also claim state sales tax and state income tax as a deduction. A major purchase, such as a car where tax is required, can be deducted separately from the state tax.
The best way to figure taxes is to get a tax software package if you want to go it alone. They are all fairly good. I have been using TurboTax for 26 years. If you are overly cautious then get a paid professional. I generally think such people are a waste of money unless the tax situation gets complicated. Mine is more than what is considered casual and I get through it OK. I am probably more money and tax literate than many.
Those clowns at Walmart and H&R Block are mostly incompetent and just follow the bouncing ball on their screen. They are hardly tax professionals. I redid one person’s return where that had the people at Walmart do the return. I found several places that reduced the tax of the individual. It may have been the clod at Walmart did not ask the right questions.
BTW, yesterday while at lowes I ran into a contractor buddy (one of the dads from school) and he said that the price quote we got from the trunk slammer to connect the whole house generator was actually pretty good. His guy would be about $1K more, in fact. His guy would be licensed, and probably pull permits though…
I will probably hit him up for his guy to do the plumbing for the gas line, then I can be sure the thing still runs before spending big money.
n
If you have to replace the natural gas meter, Centerpoint would not change mine out until three weeks after the installers had completed the work. Before that, the Generac would start and run for a minute before low gas pressure killed it. There was a significant pressure drop on the 210 foot gas line from the meter that they raised from 0.5 psig to 2.0 psig.
And my $12,000 installation fee included things like a permanent six inch thick concrete pad poured on site, the 210 foot gas line and trench, the 200 amp $2,000 Siemens transfer switch (makes a real cool double clunk noise when isolating the house), rerouting the power lines through the transfer switch, the 30 foot trench and power lines from the generator to the transfer switch, the $450 natural gas meter upgrade, etc, etc, etc. Lots of little things to do.
Plus the Master Electrician who showed me that several of my electric lines at the breaker box had vibrated loose from their breakers over the 22 years since its installation. He was incensed and retightened them all.
Yes, set by the amount of earnings over the years. There is a maximum amount of about $3,800 per month for benefits for 2024.
Huh, SS says that if I wait until I am 70 in 2030, SS will send me $4,100/month. I guess that they are putting estimated inflation colas in that.
Nevertheless, I intend to start taking SS when I turn 67 (my full SS date) in June 2027. If, I am still walking this Earth. I suspect that SS will be means tested in my lifetime so I intend to take SS when I can get it without losing any if I happen to still be employed.
I suppose they can. I’ve downloaded all of the movies. You have the option to stream, also. If the Movies & TV app goes away or is changed, I’m (bad word). But they would (bad word) a lot of folks so I’m not worried.
I suspect that we are all (bad word). They are building FEMA camps as we type.
Add another for me. I’ve written a couple of full-up compilers and translators for grad school classes and a number of interpreters and translators for “little languages” for specific purposes. I also tried real hard to write an object-oriented Forth but it didn’t work. In hindsight, it suffered from trying to implement everything in the first version rather than get one OO feature at a time working.
Ugh, Forth, nasty. I tried to port a Smalltalk compiler and interpreter from Win16 to Win32 back in 2000. The company folded and handed out the source code to a few of us. It was Intel x86 assembly language converted from Forth for hand tuning. Very, very, very bad stuff as the optimized Forth interpreter had a mark and release garbage collector embedded in the inner loop.
I spent a week on it and then said, what am I doing ? I then wrote my Smalltalk to C++ converter in a week which did 80% of the conversion along with a preliminary typing of all variables. Worked like a champ, allowing me and two of my junior programmers to convert 250,000 lines of Smalltalk into 450,000 lines of C++. The only major loss was the heterogeneous collection object which I turned into a C++ homogeneous collection object (std::vector). Man, I love the STL (standard template library) in C++.
There is the rub. There are three schools of thought on taking SS.
Talk with 10 financial advisors and there will be 10 different answers and reasons why to choose one of the three options.
I had planned to work until 70 to get the maximum amount. Until my friend died. He was a few months away from drawing SS at full retirement. He never got to use the money or actually retire. That settled my vacillation between the last two options. I took SS at 66 and will not look back on my decision.
I don’t think people currently on SS will be affected if SS is destroyed. Too many voters that will annihilate any politician who participates in such a scheme. I also think people with five years of their full SS date will be affected. Again for political reasons.
For the others, look out. At the least I think the full retirement age will be moved up at least a couple of years, maybe more. The maximum draw at 70 will be moved to 75 or further. I also think that SS will become means tested. If a person has a lot of money SS will be reduced significantly, for some to $0.00. Why does some greedy old hag like Pelosi need SS?
I had my fangs cleaned. Since I had knee surgery I need to go on heavy antibiotics before the cleaning as the risk of a serious infection is very high. My dentist will not prescribe Amoxicillin for me. I was told there has been a change in protocol.
Amoxicillin is to protect the knee from infection and that is the responsibility of the knee surgeon, not the dentist. The knee surgeon is supposed to prescribe Amoxicillin, not the dentist. I knew the dentist would not prescribe the stuff about three weeks ago so I was able to get the VA to get me the Amoxicillin after much begging.
“Beryl death toll rises to 36 in Houston area, with nine out of Fort Bend County, officials say”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/hurricane-beryl-death-toll-update-houston-19604504.php
“The Hurricane Beryl death toll in the Houston region has increased to 36, including nine from Fort Bend County.”
“Of the nine newly reported deaths in Fort Bend County, overheating played a role in at least four cases, according to the medical examiner.”
“Experts have cautioned for weeks that the number of deaths will continue to rise as they learn more about conditions surrounding the storm. Forensic examiners across the Houston region have determined loss of power and heat played a growing role in the storm’s damage.”
Tell me again that Beryl was a Cat 1 hurricane. I can remember playing outside in the 76 mph wind of a hurricane in Lake Jackson, TX, 10 miles away from the coast, when I was a kid. Spread your arms out and jump up in the air and float down.
Of course, Houston was just over a million people back in 1971.
I started SS almost as soon as I could. Get it while I can. Might not be all that it could be but it’s enough to pay the electric bills and buy groceries.
I’m not a math genius but it looked to me that if I waited until 70 for the full amount, well what if I don’t live to 70? The break even point for me was 80 years old.
I expect to live to 80+. Dad was almost 85, Mom was a month shy of 89. Granmama was almost 96. Aunt Jessie was 91. No one was crippled up and bedridden until just before the end.
Flip a coin. Yes?
@nick – if a permit is pulled to connect the whole-house generator, you may find that you have to bring everything attached to it up to modern code. My house was built in the late 60s, and we had to have a new transformer installed on the pole, new lines from the transformer, a new meter in a new location (all “free” from the power co-op), and then a couple of new breaker boxes, new grounding, and some other things (definitely not free) in order to pass the inspection. The electrician scheduled it all in advance, so it was not a huge hassle. One interesting thing was that the propane company also had to pull a permit, and the electrician was not allowed to touch the gas line. Our inspectors here are pretty reasonable, so it wasn’t too bad. YMMV.
I think it was worth it, as things are definitely safer now, and it is a good feeling when the generator kicks on automatically after about 15 seconds into an outage.
@nick – if a permit is pulled to connect the whole-house generator, you may find that you have to bring everything attached to it up to modern code. My house was built in the late 60s, and we had to have a new transformer installed on the pole, new lines from the transformer, a new meter in a new location (all “free” from the power co-op), and then a couple of new breaker boxes, new grounding, and some other things (definitely not free) in order to pass the inspection. The electrician scheduled it all in advance, so it was not a huge hassle. One interesting thing was that the propane company also had to pull a permit, and the electrician was not allowed to touch the gas line. Our inspectors here are pretty reasonable, so it wasn’t too bad. YMMV.
I think it was worth it, as things are definitely safer now, and it is a good feeling when the generator kicks on automatically after about 15 seconds into an outage.
Not my experience in Fort Bend County, Texas. No permits were pulled as I live in the county outside of four cities in the Houston metropolitan area. But my house was built in 1998, kinda up to code.
And we do love it when that generator kicks on in 8 to 10 seconds.
“Kamala Harris returns to Houston for fundraiser, speech and Sheila Jackson Lee memorial”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kamala-harris-houston-19607882.php
Oh my goodness, I am having a Hillary flashback with the ugly pantsuits.
OFD used to take the hit checking Kunstler twice a week and letting us know if anything good popped up on the site.
I don’t remember where I saw the quote, but the current head of the Social Security Administration is floating the idea of annually taxing unrealized gains in the 401(k) accounts now that the spending has far exceeded what simple theft would gain them just once. $9 trillion give or take?
Take a look at what Boost offers sometime.
Or a vector of shared pointers under C++11.
Closures from C++11 are also fun, especially when parsing XML with libxml.
What good will that do? Gains are taxed when they are pulled from the account. If gains have already been taxed then all that is left is the original untaxed principle investment. That plan is stupid and is just kicking the can down the road. If these people are that fiscally stupid, why are they holding any office beyond chick gender checker?
Unless they are planning to tax the principle when it is withdrawn (untaxed money) and then taxing the realized gains that have already been taxed.
xkcd: Exam Numbers
https://www.xkcd.com/2966/
No !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
I don’t remember where I saw the quote, but the current head of the Social Security Administration is floating the idea of annually taxing unrealized gains in the 401(k) accounts now that the spending has far exceeded what simple theft would gain them just once. $9 trillion give or take?
Bill Clinton tried to create a one time tax of 15% IIRC of all 401K and IRA accounts with an annual tax of 1% after that. Congress did not even discuss it.
There is a reason why we have three parts in the federal government in the USA. To make things as hard as possible.
“The mainstream media propaganda machine is in full swing”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-mainstream-media-propaganda-machine.html
“I’ve said before that the current “powers that be” dare not lose this election, because it would lead to all their earlier shenanigans being uncovered, and much of the damage they have done to this country being put right. They cannot allow that. Therefore, I expect even more cheating and chicanery in November. What’s more, I won’t be surprised if another assassination attempt against President Trump – or perhaps more than one – just “happens” to get through his security detail. Pray God such attempts will be unsuccessful, because if one succeeds, I think we’re facing a very real danger of civil war.”
“I have no idea who will be declared the winner in November’s election – but I think the next hundred days or so (not to mention the aftermath of the election) will be very dangerous for our constitutional republic system of government. The pressures on both sides to overturn the checks and balances in our system, and “go to the mattresses” instead, are going to be enormous.”
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: TINVOWOOT. There Is No Voting Our Way Out Of This. The powers that be are entrenched, and will not give up their position voluntarily no matter what the voters want. I expect to see that play out between now and November. For a start, watch the Democratic Party’s National Convention in August; then see whether the street violence of 2019/2020 comes back afterwards. Frankly, I’m expecting it.”
I wish that he was wrong.
BTW, there is a belief among many conservative Christians in the USA that God is punishing us or is going to punish us for the sin of abortion. For these people, they vote their belief on this singular issue. Trump is anti abortion and Harris is pro abortion up to delivery. For the conservative Christians, the choice is very easy.
Ask the Humper a simple question on abortion. “Would she feel that way if her parents made the same decision?”
Back in May I saw the proverbial “random palette of bricks” someone left in a median of the road near a major intersection in Fort Worth, not far from the UNT Health Sciences campus, just north of the arena and museum complex. Serious high end targets for mayhem.
People with below-average intelligence have trouble understanding hypotheticals.
“2 Male Boxers Previously Barred From Women’s Events Will Fight In Paris Olympics”
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/2-male-boxers-previously-barred-from-womens-events-will-fight-in-paris-olympics/
Really ? Looks like they tricked their way in.
“There is no mystery over who wrote the Blue Screen of Death, despite what some may want you to believe” by Raymond Chen
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240730-00/?p=110062
“Somehow, there is a claim of a 30-year mystery surrounding Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death. The argument goes that there are three conflicting sources of authorship: Steve Ballmer, John Vert, and me.”
Neat ! Yeah, I am a nerd.
Finished my lawn and the park. Still need to edge and trim. I’ll get that tomorrow.
Picked up a cooked chicken on my way out of town, so I had the legs and thighs tonight with tortillas, the breasts will be later.
WRT the pulleys, yeah, a new belt that was thicker would probably do the trick, or a shorter one, but it’s a 2 hour round trip to the store and they might not have anything suitable. I had the pulleys because I don’t throw anything potentially useful away up here. What is stupid is that every one of a dozen pulleys were the same size, bought at different times, for different mower decks. None of them matched the original pulleys, and at least 2 were supposed to as my buddy ordered them for this deck years ago. Cub Cadet chose slightly smaller v grooves but the same outer diameter, making the effective circumference larger as the belt doesn’t sit so far down in the groove. And the difference is essentially invisible. FU cub cadet.
WRT polyandry, I think/hope that there is a joke in there somewhere, that just got mangled in the comment….
It’s down to 85F at the moment, which is nice on the water with a breeze. I hope there is a breeze. And I hope the bad space weather doesn’t kill my shortwave reception, but I expect it will.
n
I expect to live to 80+. Dad was almost 85, Mom was a month shy of 89. Granmama was almost 96. Aunt Jessie was 91. No one was crippled up and bedridden until just before the end.
I am incredibly far past my expected expire date of 18 according to cardiologist #2. He literally told me I was dead man walking when I was 49. And then he told me that he wanted to dissect me to see why I was still alive. Or, be at my autopsy. I told him over your dead body. He laughed.
My dad is 85, his parents both lived to 86. Their parents all lived to mid 80s. His mom’s dad had a bad motorcycle wreck when he was 83 in 1968. Survived it for several months even though he had several broken ribs and refused to go to doctor or hospital, according to Grandma he literally said “people died there”.
Mom is 83, her mother lived to the day before she turned 89, her dad was 63. His dad was 57 (heart). Her other grandparents lived to late 80s. One of her aunts made to 99.
Choosing the right time to start SS is easy.
Simply figure out when you’ll die, and graph out the returns for every starting date from age 62 to 70. Choose the one with the maximum lifetime return.
Oh, and include factors for SS bankruptcy (not gonna happen), SS benefits reduction/freezing (likely), and SS means testing.
Piece of cake.
I just assumed I’d live to 90, and I’d wait until 70 to maximize my checks. Then I got fired at 67 and had to start collecting to make ends meet.
Yes, the “simply figure out when you’ll die” was supposed to be funny. So was the bankruptcy thing; SS was created bankrupt, so it can’t go bankrupt.
Prepper test tonight. Power went out almost 4 hours ago while I was at work. My current power backup is a collection of UPSs for 1) a (single) light, 2) my computer system (now out of power) and 3) my internet connection (which does not power the ISP’s radio, so actually useless). My generators are currently not available, and I’m not sure which ones work (run and/or generate power). But I do have a laptop with a full battery, and a phone with a WiFi hotspot, so I can at least connect and get updates on the outage.
in other news from The Great Wet North, the northern lights are out tonight, and very pretty.
@gavin, there is some space weather affecting mostly the eastern seaboard, iirc from the FEMA daily summary.
Radio tonight was poor. Still heard one commercial station and at least one ham from NZ or Australia. Heard Canadian time stations in three different bands, so some radio was getting out of Canadia… Mostly though there was a lot of noise, and not many DX stations. Did hear one guy calling CQDX from an EA prefix, most likely Spain. Noisy though and didn’t hear anyone reply.
WRMI was coming in strong from Miami, but the DJ was in a weird mood, playing B sides and stuff I’d never heard before.
Temp is down to 80F from 85F a couple of hours ago and there is a breeze to keep the bugs off, but it’s about 90% RH, so really damp.
Think I’m gonna shower and head to bed.
n
My plan wrt SS is take it as soon as I can. The last graph I saw showed break even with waiting for your max monthly payout happening around 80 years of age. If I have a few years after that where I’m not getting as much as I could by waiting, I’m ok with that.