08:46 – One of the most annoying things about Netflix streaming is that they drop titles with only a week’s notice. One series we’ve had in our queue for probably a year has been gradually bubbling toward the top. Last night, I brought our queue up in my browser, intending to move it to the top so that we could conveniently sample it on our Roku. Unfortunately, availability of that series is now listed as “until 3/25”. There are 50+ 45-minute episodes, so there’s no point to starting it now. Netflix must know how long they’ve licensed each movie or series for, so what’s the point of waiting until a week before their license expires to let viewers know how much longer it’ll be available? They should list the expiration date as soon as they add a title to their catalog.
I see that Cyprus has become The Mouse that Roared. Cypriot legislators rejected the Troika’s (read, Germany’s) bailout terms without a single vote in favor, even though those terms had been modified to protect depositors with balances of €20,000 or less. Merkel must be spitting nails. Germany now has the choice of backing down, which it can’t do, or watching Cyprus crash out of the euro. That’s assuming that Cyprus doesn’t come to some agreement with Russia, which Merkel has explicitly forbidden. No matter what happens, things look ominous for the EU, the euro, and Merkel’s reelection chances this autumn. It will be ironic if tiny Cyprus, which accounts for something like 1/500th of EU GDP, is the straw that breaks the euro’s back.
12:20 – I’m building kits today. We’re getting low stock on the CK01A chemistry kits, with less than a dozen in finished goods inventory, but the real problem is the BK01 biology kits. I shipped one this morning, which takes our remaining stock down to one. I just finished putting together another 30 of the biology kit small parts bags, which was the last thing I needed for another batch of 30 biology kits.
The real problem is that the biology kits include a 12-pack of deep cavity slides. These aren’t the common well slides. They’re three times the thickness of a standard microscope slide–about 3.2mm versus 1 mm–and have a deep cylindrical cavity through most of their thickness. Only one of our vendors carries them, and they’re backordered through 15 May. After I build these 30 biology kits, I’ll be down to only eight packs of the thick cavity slides in stock. That means we’ll have only 38 biology kits available to carry us from now until mid-May. I don’t think that’ll be enough.
We’ve already decided to delay introducing our new LK01 Life Science Kit from 31 March until about 1 June, because it also includes thick cavity slides. I guess we’ll just continue to build stock of the biology kits without the thick cavity slides. If we get more than 38 orders for biology kits between now and mid-May, we’ll just ship what we have and back-order the rest of the orders.
Surely Merkel has a conscience buried somewhere. Is re-election worth that much to her?
Apparently not and apparently so.
What are you basing that on? The only thing I can think of is, it’s the end of the workday for you and you’re relaxing with a couple or six brews and you’re letting some unrealistic view of the innate goodness of Man be applied to a politician.
Cynics may not get much enjoyment out of life, but they’re right more than they’re wrong. In fact, that’s one of my Observations: The problem with the world is how it so often makes cheap cynicism the most appropriate perspective on the world.
Think about 99 years ago, when another useless shithole in a forgotten corner of Europe pulled on the entanglements and brought nations crashing down.
We still haven’t started using the Roku I bought awhile back. I’d be very interested to know what – if any – response you get from Acorn.
Somebody could put some leading Cypriot politician in a carriage or car and turn them into a cul-de-sac, having notified whichever violent faction in advance, of course.
The Russians have TONS of their dough in Cypriot financial institutions…this could be very interesting indeed.
Paging OFD: You’ve been booting about the meme that there are a half billion to a billion firearms in the US. Do you have a source for that? Even 500M is waaaaay higher than the FBI’s official number and also much higher than other estimates I was able to dig up.
I am here and at your beck-and-call, sir, like I have been for others here at work on the Plantation today, first day of spring with steady snow for the past thirty-six hours…
Let me boot that meme again, and call on our host for his support thereby: there are Feebie figures and other gummint stats; those don’t mean diddly. A whole shit-load of firearms purchases and other types of acquisitions never get reported or documented in this country, and I can back that up through personal experience many, many times over several decades. And here in New England, of all places!
The State’s interest would be in playing down those numbers, thereby hoping to support the proposition that the numbers can somehow be controlled and that a genuine effort to round them all up could possibly be possible. They can forget that nonsense. I’ve known guys who buy truckloads of stuff, and I mean all kinds of stuff, and it goes who knows where. That won’t show up in the Feebies’ databases or at the gun store cash registers linked to the net.
Bob said a while back, IIRC, that he thought there might be close to a billion and back then I thought that was high by a factor of two. I no longer think so and have come around to his estimate accordingly.
The State’s figures on numbers of firearms are like unto their figures on the economy, the job market and the nuclear weapons threat from Iran.
I don’t particularly doubt that there are a billion firearms in the US. The issue is justifying it to a skeptical audience. (Not a hostile audience, just a skeptical one.)
FBI and similar numbers are, of course, bogus; as noted, that’s just an instance of government numbers being bogus. However, the higher number seems to be pulled from the aether.
You have to love this one. Libturds Maximus! My Dad gave me a 410 for my 10th birthday. I’m glad there was no Facebook or the whole family would be in jail. We kept all of our guns in/on a homemade gun rack in my bedroom.
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2013/03/20/family-says-new-jersey-overreacted-to-boys-gun-photo-on-facebook/
As I’ve said, my guess is about a billion. That may be high, but I’d be surprised if it were high by much. I tried to make an unbiased guess, taking into account that many of my friends and acquaintances over the years are likely to own many more guns than average, that I’ve spent most of life in areas that are gun-friendly, and so on. A billion guns is only about three for every person in this country. And I know many, many people who couldn’t even guess how many they own. (I was in that category until recently when all of my guns were lost.) I’m just thinking back to people I’ve shot with over the years and how many guns they had. One, a doctor, owned at least 100. Another, a nurse, maybe 35 or 40. Another, an engineer, something north of 200. Another, an elementary school teacher, at least a dozen that I saw, most of which I shot with her. And it goes on and on. For example, one young couple of our acquaintance both voted for Obama, but they own maybe half a dozen guns between them. Even assuming that blue-state liberals own zero guns, which I think is a very bad assumption, there are probably more than enough multi-gun households to make up for that.
Your dad must’ve had a cruel sense of humor. I have enough trouble hitting stuff with a 12-gauge, let alone a .410. I’ve known guys who shot skeet and trap with a .410 simply because they didn’t consider 12/16/20 to be challenging enough.
[snip] Surely Merkel has a conscience buried somewhere. [snip]
A German with a conscience? I assume that’s purely theoretical, like Hugh Hefner with a brunette!
I’m sure Hugh has “been with” plenty of brunettes.
In theory I prefer redheads, then blondes, then brunettes, but hair colour doesn’t matter that much to me. And as the saying goes: Gentlemen prefer blondes but gentlemen marry brunettes.
Mrs. OFD is a redhead. So is Mr. OFD. And two of Mr. OFD’s brothers, his paternal grandfather and maternal grandma. Also two nieces and his granddaughter.
Redheads rule! All others drool!
How about Princess? 🙂
Princess has light brown hair down to her waist with blonde streaks, and gorgeous blue eyes; she’s six feet now and around 200 pounds but it ain’t fat, not by a long shot. Also 44DD. Probably TMI for this group of lecherous old goats but there it is; if you get fresh with her she’ll knock you through a brick wall. Then there’s her wacky ex-drunk ‘Nam vet stepdad, with neurons and synapses all messed up and armed to the teeth.
Hey! I thought you were giving her a one way ticket to the antipodes…
She sounds just my type, although she’s perhaps a bit short and flat chested for my liking 🙂
“We’ve already decided to delay introducing our new LK01 Life Science Kit from 31 March until about 1 June…”
I haven’t noticed mention of a new book lately. Is one in the works or on the drawing board?
Speaking of red hair, here’s me in about 1985 with Ethel, our former guard-snake.
http://www.ttgnet.com/images/rbt-snake-small.jpg
but hair colour doesn’t matter that much to me
As long as the collars and cuffs match.
“As long as the collars and cuffs match.”
James Bond, 007, Diamonds Are Forever
“Speaking of red hair, here’s me in about 1985 with Ethel, our former guard-snake.
http://www.ttgnet.com/images/rbt-snake-small.jpg”
I’m sure I’ve seen a picture of you with a much larger snake, cradling it like an infant. Same location.
Gee whiz, Bob, you was a real carrot-top, eh? All gone now, sadly. Mine is dark auburn, copper-colored, and not a gray hair yet, except the facial hair.
But you won’t catch me picking up any snakes anytime soon; nossir, saw as many as I ever care to see, between Texas, Kalifornia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Malaysia. Once accidentally walked into a room at the dispensary/hospital in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, and the shelves from floor to ceiling were filled with jars of various sizes holding all their indigenous snakes in whatever solution. The stuff of nightmares.
No. O’Reilly would like us to do a new book, but I simply don’t have time. The LK01 kit will be just a standalone kit, with no associated book.
It always seems strange to me to come across a chemist who doesn’t have all the energy he needs, IYKWIM. Actually, ISTR RBT mentioning downing an awful lot of Coke or Pepsi, almost certainly consuming more caffeine daily than I do, and I don’t even bother lying about my addiction anymore.
He also has a Border Collie. Border Collies eat Time. Bob also has to keep his intake of caffeine steady for the energy to deal with a BC.
As to number of firearms in the USA, I find rough order-of-magnitude calculations to always be of value.
The current US population is approx. 315 million, which is very close to one third of the stunted little inadequate number which the USA considers to be a billion (whereas a true billion (bi=2) is actually a million (m=mono) to the power of two). Anyway, a serious US shooter will have a minimum of four firearms (.22 rifle, shotgun, handgun, centrefire of deer-killing and man-killing capability). They may also have a varmint calibre like the AR-15 or mini-14 as well. So, allowing sloppy phrasing, that would come close to two billion firearms if everyone was a shooter. Actually, I’ve heard with no evidence at all that there are about 100,000,000 shooters in the USA, which still runs to a minimum of close to half a billion firearms.
Allow shooters a BUG (back-up gun (handgun)), a 30-30 lever-gun and a long-distance bolt-action gun, maybe a mid-calibre .243 as well as their .223 and .308, an air-rifle for cheap no-travel practice, maybe an air-pistol for the same reason, a home-defence shotgun as well as a long-barrelled hunting shotgun … Well, around a billion firearms as a close order of magnitude seems very reasonable.
I guess that I am not a serious shooter. I have three handguns, a colt black powder revolver that I have never fired, a Dan Wesson .357 revolver and a Springfield XDM .40 semi. I have two rifles, a Ruger 10-22 and a Ruger Mini 14 in .223. No shotguns. No backup guns but am looking for a S&W bodyguard .38+P. Should have bought one last Christmas but was buying a new home and being careful.
Of course, all of these guns are lying at the bottom of the Brazos river. Since the water is only a foot deep, they may be grabbed by anyone.
Was in Wal*Mart last night. Totally cleaned out of ammo except .243 rifle and above and shotgun shells. Five boxes of .22 shorts and a guy was buying three of them. Two other guys plus me standing around looking into the double glass case with all the labels and zero inventory. It is crazy out there.
“Allow shooters…”
Now see, right there we have a problem, Houston: “allow” is not a word we firearms owners wanna hear. We buy and own what we want, period. If I want one-hundred Rock River Arms Delta carbines with 30-round mags, then I get them and keep them, no questions asked by pesky buttinksy types and nosey parkers. They can sod the fuck off.
And some of my compadres out here buy and hold numbers just like that or even more. Ammo right now is being gobbled up by the boxcar loads, wherever it can be found. Gun stores can’t keep their inventory up to snuff and the firearms manufacturers are running three shifts with mandatory overtime. All thanks to Barry Soetero and lovely Dianne.
I am good right now with what I have but am saving toward not just the Rock River Arms Delta carbine but also the Colt hybrid, just in case one or the other falls into the Lake like all my other firearms and gets gobbled up by Champ, our Lake Monster. He likes to eat all kinds of stuff, apparently.
The hysteria will pass this year sometime and prices will return to more or less normal and that will be the time to stock up again. Right now is a good time to have oddball firearms and ammo, but soon it will be more provident to store the really common stuff again.