10:00 – When I got up this morning it was 68F (20C) in the house, so I fired up the natural gas logs in the den for the first time this season. When she got up, Barbara turned on the heat, also for the first time this season. Our overnight low was 40F (4C), and I could see my breath while I was walking Colin this morning.
I ended up ordering that air rifle yesterday, along with a thousand pellets to get started with. It was on sale for $100, which was a good deal. It’s a break-action spring-piston model, which means we can expect to fire 100 to 500 shots to break it in. Until then, it’s likely to be quite rough and exhibit mediocre accuracy.
The last time I handled a Gamo air rifle was in 1979. It also cost about $100, but in 1979 dollars. At the time, it was called El Gamo rather than just Gamo, and it was made in Spain. I suspect the current model is made in China, which accounts for unchanged price. In 1979, I also had the chance to handle several top quality air rifles, made in Europe by companies like Feinwerkbau, Anschutz, and Walther. At the time, those sold for $200 or so up to more than $1,500. Those companies still make similar models in Germany and Switzerland and, as you might expect, they now sell for three to five times their 1979 prices.
“When I got up this morning it was 68F (20C) in the house…”
OMG!!!
Is everyone alright there???
Yikes!
That is bitter, bitter cold!
You could see your breath in the air???
OMG!!
68!???
And 40 overnight??!!
OMG!
My A/C is running right now. Gonna be in the 90’s today. Good thing I got my Soul Vaccination last night.
Thanks, OFD. I was trying to think of an amusing way to express my lack of sympathy for RBT’s plight and your comment was better than what I had in mind. The only thing you missed was asking if the emergency room was able to save their fingers and toes from frostbite and gangrene.
I have no idea what the overnight temperatures were here, but I went outside shortly after dawn wearing season-appropriate clothing: shorts, t-shirt, and light flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to my elbows. Work gloves because I was hauling stuff from the cellar to the garage and vice versa. Nothing on my feet because, c’mon, it’s way above freezing.
We set the thermostat here to 65F during the day in winter, 60 at night. A couple years ago when everyone was in the PRC for a month and I was alone in the house, I kept it at 55. That was a bit chilly in the evening while I was writing before bed, but it wasn’t worth warming the house up to 60 for the two or three hours between getting home from my day contract and going to bed.
Oh that’s right, you’re also down in the tropics, the infamous Capital District of the Vampire State; the Banana Belt.
I’ll be out later stacking firewood, nice day for it; breezy, sunny, blue skies. Nice after yesterday’s rain, wind and fog.
We have a contest here to see who weakens and turns the heat on first every year. Normally it’s 60 during the day inside and allowed to turn off at night, esp. if there’s been a fire in the woodstove anyway. Yeah, sometimes we see our breath coming down the stairs but hey, it wakes ya right up and you’re full o’ piss an’ vinegah the rest of the day. And we’re slackers and sissies compared to the buggers over in Alberta and the NWT.
Where’s dat global warmin’ we been hearin’ about for twenty years?
I’ve been keeping Anthropogenic Global Warming in a pit in my cellar for the past 17 years. It puts the lotion on its skin…
I like how the scare-mongering changes over the years. The latest “call to action before it’s too late” is to shriek that CO2 emissions are higher than ever. What’s missing from the shrieks is the associated claim that temperatures are higher than ever before because of the CO2 emissions. One can only deduce that the public is educated enough now that the alarmists can’t get away with their former claims. Strange, though, that the general thrust of the solution for global-we’re-not-sure-what’s-going-on is the same as the solution for global warming, and the same as for global cooling a couple decades ago: only control by an international organization over the world’s economy will save us. It almost makes one think that notional climate changes are just the stalking horse for what the shriekers really want.
“It almost makes one think that notional climate changes are just the stalking horse for what the shriekers really want.”
Imagine I’ve put a diagonal line through the world “almost,” (dunno how to do it and too lazy to find out).
Just as “affirmative action,” “civil unions,” the “feminist movement,” and various other projects, innovations and schemes concocted to allegedly address and solve gigantic problems and crises over the decades. It always somehow ends up that some State or other quasi-official body sucks up revenue and then exerts iron control over those segments of the population deemed ‘behind the times’ and ‘ignorant.’
Aren’t things so much better now in our wunnerful country?
You guys might not realize it, but people who live in cold climates develop the biological equivalent of antifreeze in their systems. I was born and raised in NW Pennsylvania, and until I moved to Winston-Salem I was relatively immune to cold. I remember back in the 70’s on one occasion being outdoors for half an hour wearing only a regular jeans, tennis shoes, and a short-sleeve t-shirt when the temperature was -23F (actual temperature, not counting windchill). I finally came indoors when I started to feel chilled.
It took a few years, but that immunity disappeared once I moved south. Also, I’m now 61, and the older one gets the more one feels the cold. Nowadays, wearing short sleeves I’m chilly if the temperature gets below 72F, and I actually start to shiver if it’s below 70F.
I’ve noticed that immunity building as we spend more time outdoors during the colder weather, so that by December and January and so on, we are pretty used to it. It takes really wicked bitter cold for anyone around here to even remark on it, like windchill factors of 40 below or sumthin. Standard-issue zero and single digits with lotsa snow is nommul. I remember one year a while back when the July 4th weekend was kinda chilly in the evenings and we started a fire in the fireplace because we had company from the tropics who were asking us how we can live like this.
Of course when I was 18 and introduced to the wunnerful tropical paradise of southeast Asia, I eventually got used to 115-F in the shade and 100% humidity. Lost fifty pounds the first coupla months, too. After my second tour and coming back in April to MA, it was still snowing and I froze my ass off.
Now I have a full stock of internal antifreeze every year and yes, I’ve also noticed that age causes me to feel the cold more and I take measures to avoid feeling it more. I’m even considering getting one of them heated towel racks so we have nice warm towels in the mornings; now that’s sick.
Oh, I already knew that, RBT, but I’m not going to let a little thing like facts get in the way of my lack of sympathy. I have a reputation to uphold, you know.
I’m just at the point where I’m occasionally running the house air conditioner. I run the car air conditioner most days when I’m out now. Still freezing to death at night so I have to sleep with the electric blanket on and under a doona.
I used to have Canberra antifreeze in my blood, but the effect is wearing off. Winter nights are often -8C there, but it rarely gets below zero here.
Not looking forward to the summer electricity bills.
In the dead of winter in Berlin, most residents throw open the windows for about 20 minutes to air out the house, regardless of the temp outside. Unless it was below 0 C the heat in most houses shuts down completely from 23:30 to 05:30. I cannot deal with that here. My body is about the same as RBT’s: anything below 70 F and I need long sleeves. And I just cannot take it below 64 F no matter what. I think I could do better if I had heat in the floors. We had that in our last place in Boston, and I could take it a lot colder, because the heat was rising from the floor through the body. Same with the old-style train cars on the European transit. The ones with heaters under the seats, got you instantly and thoroughly warm in a minute. Unfortunately, they do not build them like that anymore.
This is interesting. A letter from Sean Connery to Steve Jobs, telling him in no uncertain terms to stop contacting him about adverts for Apple.
http://wallblog.co.uk/files/2011/06/sean-connery-steve-jobs-apple-letter.jpg
You will have to zoom in to read it. In Firefox, that is Ctrl-+.
That was pretty funny; I can almost hear him saying that in his Scottish burr.
Best-Ever Buddy Movie: “The Man Who Would Be King.”
Bar none.
I watch it every year.
Bring out the language lawyers, XKCD has made a rule change for English concerning STNG:
http://xkcd.com/1429/
I believe that it is English rule #5638. I may have missed one or two though.
Not President Obummer, it is President Obola:
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/obola/
Yeah, but watch President Obola get a third term anyway.
Most of the country won’t bother to vote anymore, and the Obola-Heads have the majority of the ones who do. He’s also looking at a possible coup if he keeps going the way he has been. I’ve seen some interesting information that indicates a mighty struggle is going on within the ruling factions. This next year should be extremely interesting.
Yeah, but watch President Obola get a third term anyway.
Nah, Hilary headed off the Mooch at Money Pass. The Dumocrats are running an old grandma in 2016.
Lady MacBeth of Little Rock has way too much baggage, old and more recent. But it’s all just a big joke anyway. I’m in it for the boffo laffs.
My son with the economics degree and his econ buddies say Bloomberg is now the best source for accurate business news, despite Bloomberg’s own personal political torments.
In November 2010, 23 economists signed a letter to Ben Bernancke demanding that the Fed stop quantitative easing, warning of inflation and other dire consequences if he did not. Ignoring them, Bernancke actually increased the intensity of QE and 4 years later, inflation is still below the Fed’s 2% target.
So, Bloomberg went to all 23 of those economists and asked whether they had been mistaken in their predictions. Thirteen refused to answer; the 10 who did, all insisted they had been right.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-02/fed-critics-say-10-letter-warning-inflation-still-right.html
Very few economists today are worth a damn. The only one I ever kept up with, who could actually predict the future accurately (and did so all the years I followed him) was the late Jude Wanniski, who I first became aware of through a post here. Wanniski died suddenly in 2004, before the Great Recession. (I should note that in 2004, he had not predicted a coming collapse, but it did not happen until 3 years after his death.)
There is just now, growing agreement that the economy is probably recovered and where it should be, given current factors (not where it left off when the housing and financial credit bubbles had caused distortions that led to collapse). This examination of the labor situation is typical (not from Bloomberg, however).
http://soberlook.com/2014/10/how-close-is-us-labor-market-to.html
Exactly like the folks predicting we will soon die from global warming, you just cannot trust most economists. Definitely not those 23.
OK, we have a contestant for best source of biz nooz; any others?
I’m interested; haven’t usually followed it much other than for the occasional WSJ squirts on my iPhone, but it would be nice if somebody was out there we could sorta trust to give us the straight bumf.
While I’m on the nooz subject; what about reliable science nooz?? Any suggestions?
I’ve of course long since given up on literary matters in regard to nooz; they’re all reliably hardcore lefty and have been for decades.
BBC has 2 good science podcasts: Discovery and Science in Action. I download both every week, but I am way behind listening.
NPR, PRI, and BBC have quite a few podcasts and web pages covering science and tech news. When they hit any of their reliably worthless hobby-horses (
global warmingclimate change is reeeeaaalll!; all cute critters are infinitely important and all human concerns must take a back seat to cute critter concerns!; a few others) I skip ahead a few minutes or even just skip the rest of the podcast, but otherwise they’re pretty good. See the big list o’ links I put up a couple weeks ago for a bunch of good BBC feeds. For NPR feeds, browse through http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php . There are several other sources of science feeds but they tend to be less newsy and more topical. http://legacy.mos.org/events_activities/podcasts is often more newsy, but the usual presenters annoy me for no especially good reason.Ah, my source for media news in Chicago goes behind a paywall starting Tuesday. Thank the Chicago Tribune.
http://www.robertfeder.com/2014/10/01/a-personal-note-about-my-blog/
Oh, well. It is most definitely not worth $99/yr to get his columns. I do not even live in Chicago anymore. We only took the Sunday Trib when living there, but I got all the daily papers at work. We had at least a half-dozen subscriptions to everything in our department.
BTW, was listening to Sean Hannity’s radio show for fifteen minutes last Friday. He had an ER trauma doc on for a while who gave the following recommendations:
1. get your flu shot now
2. if you get the flu, do not go to the hospital
3. the hospitals are going into lockdown mode and anyone who shows up with a fever will go into the isolation ward for 21 days
4. the chances are that you will not have Ebola but someone in isolation will have it
5. then you will get Ebola in the hospital isolation ward
The ER doc thinks that Ebola will spread like wildfire through the USA now. He really hoped that he was wrong and that there will be no problems whatsoever.
That’s the thing about isolation wards: beyond a very few cases, they don’t have the resources to make it individual isolation…
BTW, Chuck writes that inflation in the US has remained under 2%. I’m not there, but from what I’ve read and heard (and also what shadow-stats has to say), this is only true of the government-approved numbers that exclude lots of things. Do y’all have the feeling inflation is really that low?
Official US inflation numbers don’t include energy, food, or taxes.
In other words, they’re a flat lie.
But it gets worse: Allegedly the agency which makes the numbers has been fudging the inputs to that already-flawed equation. Flat lie squared.
(Sorry, no links. Need to get out the door.)
My personal experience is mainly with groceries not counted by the government, so give me a second here to do some calculations…
scribble, scribble…add…carry 9000….scribble
Yeah, Brad, an inflation rate of 2% per day compounded hourly sounds about right…
I keep close track of the prices of items that I buy for our science kits and food and other items we buy from Costco. For the last three years, the average increase in prices we’ve seen is about 8% to 10% per year, but there’s a lot of variation. Some of the kit items, for example, remain the same or even decrease, while some increase by more than 10%, sometimes much more. The same is true to a lesser extent for food, but on average I’d say food is maybe 10% per year.
Food prices are stable if not falling in the UK – the invasion of the Germans (Lidl, Aldi) coupled with the continuing war between our three big chains Sainsburys, Tesco and Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) have ensured that the staples, at least, don’t change much.
Of course the knock-on effect from that is that our famers are being paid less for a pint of milk than it actually costs to produce but hell, that what EU subsidies are for, right? I’ll gloss over the fact that we only get chump change back compared with what we put in on the grounds that I’m presently in quite a good mood 😉
Of course, we monetarists (TM) believe that inflation is the increase in the “money” supply. Price increases are an effect of that. I do get tired of hearing prices equated with inflation.
Our inflation is probably more than 20% per year. What a great time to be in debt! Just be sure your income is keeping pace. Ah, there’s the rub.
I pay $2 for a two litre container of milk at the supermarket, but you can pay much more if you want. Dairy farmers here claim that the big supermarkets are working them over, making them accept less than the production cost. I think that’s probably true, but the solution is to sell out… or seek better markets. Some of our farmers and processors have found markets in Asia that will pay (at the retail level) around $9 per litre for quality milk. I hope we can tap into more markets like that.
I consider myself Austrian School, but of course inflation is an increase in the money supply. But, through no small effort on the part of the federal government, the public has come to equate “inflation” with what is actually price inflation, which of course is the result rather than the cause. That makes the government happy, because people don’t blame them for increasing prices when of course they are responsible for inflating the currency and causing those increased prices. Not least important to them is that as the money creator they get first benefit from making, as Dire Straits said, Money for Nothing. And I suspect their chicks are free, too.
I do not track expenses as closely as I once did, but since I have returned, I would be pretty close in saying that the price of retail goods and gasoline that I buy regularly, has increased about 10% — not more — in 5 years. That is 2% a year on average. Food has undergone the biggest increase — both grocery and restaurant. Other items have gone up marginally, but my food costs have definitely risen above 10% during the last 5 years, pulling the average up.
Price of gold is still falling, although very erratically, which means the value of our currency is increasing. That will drive Yellen crazy, but it seems kind of like a checkmate to me, as the alternatives for correction that most of today’s economists accept, are believed to cause rampant inflation.
Best source I have found, if you track gold, is:
http://www.lbma.org.uk/pricing-and-statistics#tabs-2
They post immediately after the fixing.
I gave up on the semantics of inflation. Prior to 1971, the word “inflation” was known only to economists, and all dictionaries defined it solely as increasing the money supply above that necessary to represent the goods and services available in an economy. Increasing prices were an effect of inflation, and “price inflation” would have been a misnomer.
One investment newsletter that my dad subscribed to, began referring to the classic definition of “inflation” as “inflating” the economy and the resultant price increases as “inflation”. I have followed their lead on that.
Very few economists today are worth a damn.
It’s been said: “If you took all the economists in the world and lay them end-to-end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.”
Not mention the old description of it as the “dismal science.” When it’s not even a science.
I’d probably tend to going along with the Austrian School but man, I just can’t take the endless discussions and arguments over pseudo-libertarian arcana and the most excruciatingly detailed concepts and theories that is prevalent on the net. And they don’t wanna play with ya if haven’t memorized the complete works of von Mises and gotten yourself that PhD at their institute.
You are right: it cannot be a science, because its foundation is human interaction, and that is as variable and unpredictable as whether it will rain 15 days from now. Yet that is what economists of today and schools teaching it try to do: reduce the whole thing to mathematics and formulas.
As the late Jude Wanniski maintained, if you see somebody trying to reduce commerce and finance to formulas, you know that person is not an economist.
There it is.
That guy checked out too early.