Hot and humid as summer continues here in the South. Likely to keep being hot and humid until it’s not… That will happen fairly suddenly, but not really soon.
We are counting down the days to the start of the new school year. It’s funny how at different times in your life there are different rhythms and different ways to organize your time. With our kids, it’s now “school” but even that changes as they get older. I’m sure the pace and timing of D1’s life, and subsequently ours, will change again now that she’s entering High School.
I spent yesterday driving around doing pickups. Had a chat with one auctioneer about the economy. I noticed this week that prices in the auctions for estate sale type stuff seemed really low. She agreed and thought it was because people are running out of money to spend. The amazon and store returns auctions seem to be holding higher prices for the moment as more people discover them and shop for everyday items. I bought bars of soap and pens at one auction this week. Missed out on dozens of other things because my bid was a bit low. Is it worth it to buy something cheap and simple like that? If I can combine trips with several auctions, yes. If I had to make a special trip? No. The extra time and mileage offsets any savings. I try to bid on and buy enough things that the savings more than pay for the gas and trouble. Other people seem to be discovering the same thing. Of course the best thing is to save a whole lot of money, then it isn’t even close.
Today I’ll do another pickup, go by the rent house* and do a bit of staging for the photographer. They won’t open blinds or shut cabinet doors, so someone has to be there if you don’t want bad photos. Today that will be me. Then I’ll try to do a drop off at my other auctioneer. Some of the stuff I dropped off last week already has good bids, so I’m happy. I would like to get a whole lot more listed too.
I’ll try to make my Costco run today too. I don’t want to put it off. Seems like suddenly time is flying by. The pause was brief.
Back to stacking, scrambling, and a full schedule.
Get your prep on!
nick
*meant to do this on the last post. I have no idea why a rental house is called a “rent house” here in Houston, and throughout the South, but it is. It’s very consistent and people looked at me funny until I adopted the usage. Grey man and all that… even though it sounds bad to my ear.
I forgot they also prefer big because they often build homes with multiple master suites.
The agent name/pic in the listing is a clue.
Around here, the last neighborhood close to HPE and Dell with vacant lots like that is the development with a built in airstrip, the idea being that buyers intend to build a hangar behind a large house for their plane(s).
The Muslim Indian families usually take a look but quickly realize that – gasp – there are actually small airplanes coming and going all the time.
Still, they look because they can build a large house and the mosque is nearby.
The living room and dining room combination in my house could easily be converted to another ground floor master suite, complete with bathroom, but the house is 28 years old now and unappealing to the demographic because it is “old”. Beyond the status aspect, like a lot of wealthy immigrants from Asia, Indians also are loathe to pay Americans for services like painting or other maintenance, and they certainly aren’t going to do the work themselves.
And General Francisco Franco is still dead.
We don’t need a Franco. We need a Pinochet. We have an awful lot of awful people who need half of a helicopter ride.
Robbie Robertson, 80, RIP.
My wife and had a conversation a while ago, which began with something along the lines of “what did we do before our son was born”?
I’ve also noted how nice it is to not be a slave to the public school calendar anymore. Yes, we have the college calendar, but that is completely different. Oh, and sports/activities. Cub Scouts and baseball/soccer took up lots of time. With one child it was manageable, and honestly, it wasn’t a burden. I enjoyed it all.
Our son is essentially an occasional visitor to our house now. Wow, even after doing that for a year now, it seems weird to type it out. Exceptions are summer and likely co-op time. Possibly after graduation as well. If he keeps his current path, he should have a job waiting when he graduates. I won’t rule out letting him live at home with a job for a while so he can save up money. I’ll cross that bridge when the time comes in a few years.
Robbie Robertson.
“Careful where you step, watch what you eat, sleep with a light and you’ve got it beat”.
Well, 80 isn’t bad.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/how-wework-nears-failure-after-valuation-47-billion-2019
No surprise here.
Listened to “Music for the Native Americans” last night with an adult beverage in hand.
“It is a good day to die.”
92F and sunny. Missed any “lawn mowing” window there might have been.
Bacon and coffee make the world a better place, especially for anyone I have to interact with 😉
n
Lahaina has burned to the ground
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/after_devastating_fires_in_maui_lefties_jump_in_with_climate_change_canards.html
Climate change my arse. Decades of lefty nose pickers neglecting the environment. No consideration of wildfires, no consideration of trimming flammable brush that might improve fire prevention—can’t be seeing the neighbors house, yanno.
Wework is yet another tech business that really isn’t tech at all. It’s just a glorified real estate company, and never was worth its stupidly high valuation.
Egomaniacs in Silicon Valley. The surprising thing is that the VCs fund all these ideas. Guess they figure they can sell out to the next sucker, or do an IPO, before the idea collapses.
We caught the Cirque show at their theater at Vidanta here. Amazing.
Back to SA and reality tomorrow.
Similar to what happened out here on a smaller scale.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-06-14/what-happened-bitwise-industries-fresno-business-failure
too good to be true? Exactly.
We were there 2 weeks ago. Crazy.
My wife and I had a conversation with a worker in one of the art galleries there. She said they have had to evac the expensive stuff before. I wonder if they were able to this time? Doubtful.
I also remarked to my wife as we were walking Front Street that if one store caught fire, the entire street would go. Not something I enjoy being right about. Tragic.
Rick Beato did a tribute video to Robbie Robertson as well as others who have recently died. He’s always interesting for his insights, and he’s done a bunch of interviews…
n
A lot of companies have a presence in Austin through WeWork space. I always use it as a sign that a potential employer isn’t serious.
The tolling company used temp space through Regus for a while, but that left a lot to be desired.
There’s an old Soviet joke: “History is rewriten so quickly that we don’t know what will happen yesterday,”
Apparently, it appears to apply to our country now.
In case anyone asks, I am not suicidal.
The tide is going out and we are seeing who is swimming naked. Gonna be a lot more companies get exposed.
And then there is the federal government, the biggest swimmer of them all. The day that we see it swimming naked is going to be a bad day, a very bad day. The number of people swimming naked with the feddies is simply amazing.
BTW, the crazy thing is that Biden is trying to spend the limited capital of the USA on these stupid renewables. The solar is great during the middle of the day but shuts down right when people are getting home and turning on their a/c and cooking dinner. So all of the peakers have to start up to run for just 2 to 4 hours.
Each start on a peaker is debilitating, very maintenance intensive. A complete maintenance is required every 400 to 1,000 starts with a factory engineer standing there with a very big calculator and time clock.
Please list your locations for the past several weeks. Provide evidence to back up your claims.
You would be advised to retain counsel.
Ew. Nude beaches were fine, thirty-five years ago. With the supersizing of Americans, I think that’s nothing I want to see.
You think it’s crazy because you’re evaluating by the wrong metric. Does the push for renewables distort the market and provide niches where the connected can steer incentives and tax credits and carbon credits their way? And does this put 10% in the Big Guy’s pocket? Not crazy at all. Other pejoratives apply but not that one.
Their goals are not your goals.
n
And “Follow the money” along with “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
n
The Federal Reserve can print money and buy the unsold Treasuries. Government at that level will never be caught swimming naked unless Congress grows a spine about the debt limit. Even then the theory about $1 Trillion coins will be explored before the spending simply stops.
Too many soup bowls are tied to government spending at all levels.
>> The solar is great during the middle of the day but shuts down right when people are getting home and turning on their a/c and cooking dinner.
So what if we change all the electric ranges, ovens and cooktops to ones using natural ga … never mind.
The real natural gas or the stuff from the ground?
Too many soup bowls are tied to government spending at all levels.
Yup, you got my point. It was all going great until we hit the wall at 120 mph.
For more information, read the documentary about the Mandibles Family 2029 – 2047.
https://www.amazon.com/Mandibles-Family-2029-2047-Lionel-Shriver/dp/006232828X?tag=azlinkplugin-20/
I am seriously hoping that half of the financial disaster that Lionel Shriver came up with does not happen. Whoa, I am still the number one review.
>> The solar is great during the middle of the day but shuts down right when people are getting home and turning on their a/c and cooking dinner.
So what if we change all the electric ranges, ovens and cooktops to ones using natural ga … never mind.
Ah, you see the problem. When I was a young man, we even had air conditioners powered by natural gas here in Texas.
Ew. Nude beaches were fine, thirty-five years ago. With the supersizing of Americans, I think that’s nothing I want to see.
How about the supersizing of Uncle Santa ? He has got to be 900 lbs by now.
AKA ammonia cycle like RV refrigerators. I reckon.
The Federal Reserve can print money and buy the unsold Treasuries. Government at that level will never be caught swimming naked unless Congress grows a spine about the debt limit. Even then the theory about $1 Trillion coins will be explored before the spending simply stops.
Ol’ Hunter would go wild with one of those coins. Be tough to make change for it though. Just imagine the look that the order taker at Chick-fil-A would give you upon the presentation of that coin.
“EPA’s New Climate Rule Would Cause Rolling Blackouts In Huge Swath Of America, Analysis Finds”
https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/10/environmental-protection-agency-rule-climate-power-plants-blackouts/
“Proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules regulating carbon dioxide emissions for power plants would lead to blackouts in a large slice of the Midwest and impose costs of nearly $250 billion, according to new analysis by the Center of the American Experiment (CAE).”
If you think that the electric rates are high now, just wait. Retiring all coal and natural gas power plants by 2032 and replacing them with wind turbines and solar farms with batteries is gonna be expensive.
Why don’t any of the power plants tell the EPA to F off?
The EPA is going to do what? Send in the local cop SWAT team? The Army to shut down a so-called polluting power plant?
Levy fines? How do they collect the fines? Sic the IRS on the power plants? That’s not going to work… corporation blah blah blah keeps anyone from going to jail. Push that and the plants are simply shut down.
Now. I admit to being an idiot about a lot of stuff. I’m cool with that but I can learn. When the FDIC pulls this shirt(-r) on a bank, the FDIC has the leverage of “do this or your deposits are not insured” which tends to cause a run.
What leverage does the EPA have?
Oh. I saw a thing a day or two ago that China has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement that OMB was raked over the coals for pulling the US out of. Pretty much crickets….
I want to add that all of the pollution stuff is not bad. Getting the lead out of gas was a good thing. Catalytic convertors are a PITA mostly because you need an engine computer…… Hello 1981 Imperial and the Hydraulic Support Plate replacing a carburetor.
Dang, that girl was finicky. Mostly connectors.
Anyway. Once upon a time, while doing plugs and points and all the rest, you could sniff the tail pipe and tell if you got everything right. Maybe get a little buzz, too. Now? I can start the 2004 Ford or the 2019 Frontier and all I smell is hot wet air with never a puff of soot.
I say the same thing when I start my wife.
Screwing with the power plants will do nothing for CO2.
Close the U.S. borders and send the alien invaders home. The difference between their carbon footprint in the U.S. and their carbon footprint in their native country is larger than any new EPA BidenStasi rules.
Take the cost to the economy of the new rules–and make no mistake,rolling blackouts will provably kill more people than the imaginary second-hand smoke deaths–and using it to reduce imports from Communist China will lower their GDP which will lower their energy usage and lower the emissions from the dirty coal plants which are minimally 60% higher than our natural gas plants.
Build a new prison in North Dakota for the Biden crime family and the rest of the Democrat criminals and implement a permanent non-rolling blackout.
“I say the same thing when I start my wife.”
That would be a crank start?
More like a push start.
And I will let myself out.
5th Circuit Ruling on Federal Gun Statute Could Potentially Help Hunter Biden
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans found the 1968 law barring illegal drug users from having firearms unconstitutional.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/08/5th-circuit-ruling-on-federal-gun-statute-could-potentially-help-hunter-biden/
This is the most half-ashed legal analysis I’ve ever seen from LI.
First, I don’t recall that the DOJ routinely starts making charging decisions based on what happens in one circuit.
Second,
is as bad an analogy I’ve seen since … (no, never mind. I read the unrelated story about Trump being a flight risk)
Let’s just say it stinks like week-old fish.
Alcohol was legal in 1787, and overconsumption was not a felony. Use and possession of marijuana and cocaine–which Hunter has admitted to–are federal felonies. Just because Hunter’s Hair-Sniffing bribe-taking daddy is sheriff and he won’t get charged doesn’t change the facts, which include the fact that Hunter lied on his federal application, which is a crime in and of itself.
The coin would be the McGuffin in the “Die Hard” reboot.
Tesla’s solar shingle price is thru the roof, sales are not
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/08/10/teslas-solar-shingle-price-is-thru-the-roof-sales-are-not-n570382
Solar panel efficiency declines as temperature increase.
It is difficult to conceive of a solar shingle design that does not run hotter than a conventional solar panel that has a gap between the panel and the roof.
The conclusion is that solar shingles will have lower efficiency than solar panels when the temperature of the installation is over 80F or so. Which is pretty much all of the sunbelt states for every minute the sun is out for the part of the year with 90% of the solar potential.
Nature, she be cru-el.
“Ol’ Hunter would go wild with one of those coins. Be tough to make change for it though. Just imagine the look that the order taker at Chick-fil-A would give you upon the presentation of that coin.”
https://www.booksatwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Twain-Million-Pound-Note.pdf
Nah, dude, you need to think outside the box. What you want to do is keep the attic very cold, to cool the solar panels from below. The energy to run the air conditioner can come from the increased efficiency of the panels.
Some pix of the destruction on Maui : https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2023/08/10/1193177212/photos-hawaii-lt-gov-whole-town-went-and-dissolved-into-ashes
Not much left….
Wow, that is a fire-nado…
Unfortunately Hawaii has been giving their disaster preparedness short shrift for years. IDK if there was anything to be done in the face of a wildfire moving at hurricane speeds, but if there was, HI’s emgmt probably couldn’t do much.
n
MIchael Eades’ weekly newsletter, The Arrow, is out, and there’s a bunch of food for thought there.
Specifically, regarding the question of whether vaccines, alll vaccines, are really the saviors we’ve been told they are. There are some damning charts, which demonstrate that improvements in sanitation and wealth (and short skirts!) and the natural attenuation of viruses and bacteria caused a decline in the danger of all these maladies before vaccines for each were developed, and in fact the vaccines barely affected the downward trajectory.
That includes killers like measles, polio, and smallpox, and the same downward trajectory is seen for TB and Scarlet Fever. Even if there is not yet a vaccine for those.
I may buy the book he mentions, “Disolving Illusions”. He’s careful about following up on cites.
This is interesting. It’s a PAPR forced air respirator, built under the wuflu EULA by FORD, now surplussed.
https://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/all,tx/auction/view?auc=3289881
Uses dewalt 20v batteries.
N
“ChatGPT answers more than half of software engineering questions incorrectly”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-answers-more-than-half-of-software-engineering-questions-incorrectly/
“You may want to stick to Stack Overflow for your software engineering assistance.”
Wow. I have been suspecting that ChatGPT is just a big ladder logic machine.
@SteveF
“Nah, dude, you need to think outside the box. What you want to do is keep the attic very cold, to cool the solar panels from below. The energy to run the air conditioner can come from the increased efficiency of the panels.”
Your intuitive grasp of thermo is outside the box.
I’ll just pump water up above the water wheel, and then the water falling on the wheel will turn the pump…
n
I mentioned a few days ago that I was using ChatGPT 3.5 as a learning tool, specifically for Kotlin and Android development. It provides better answers, explanations and examples than I can find in any single source on the web. StackOverflow, in particular, is nearly useless: the answers are outdated, incorrect, or way too advanced for someone just learning the ropes.
However, ChatGPT is not perfect. As soon as the questions become more complex, its answers are sometimes incomplete. I haven’t yet seen an incorrect answer, unless missing code counts as incorrect. As a competent software type, I can see when something is missing. Tell it about the problem, and it provides a corrected response. Yesterday I ran into a situation where its example code would not work. Turns out that was because of a beginner’s misunderstanding on my part, and it took a lot of digging through search results to finally find someone, somewhere who explained what my misunderstanding was. Would have been nice if that info were in the ChapGPT explanation? Sure, but it turns out I was working on a corner case without realizing it, and most people will never hit this issue.
For completeness: Making Android apps multilingual is trivial. However, they then use the language that the phone is set to. Making an app that can change its language independently of the system (as is normal for PC applications) is not normal and surprisingly difficult. An experience Android developer would probably not have tried this – I only did, because I’m coming from the world of PC apps.
I haven’t tried using ChatGPT for more advanced things. I wouldn’t expect it to work nearly as well, because doing something advanced almost certainly means that you’re doing something that isn’t in a gazillion examples on the web. So you’re going to wind up with output derived from just a few places, which – likely as not – are people showing code that doesn’t work and asking for help. Poor programmers trying to get ChatGPT to do their jobs for them? Well, likely the results won’t be worse that what they would have produced anyway…
>> “Nah, dude, you need to think outside the box. What you want to do is keep the attic very cold, to cool the solar panels from below. The energy to run the air conditioner can come from the increased efficiency of the panels.”
Your intuitive grasp of thermo is outside the box.
@lynn’s not too busy, let’s see if he can model this in his software…