09:50 – It was 45F (7C) when I took Colin out this morning, without much wind. Today is devoted to taxes.
I got the Netgear AC1200 R6220 router installed yesterday, which took about 10 minutes start to finish. I left the SSID and password at default. The coverage and speed are at least as good as we had with the D-Link unit. This one adds 5G capability. As it turns out, the only clients in the house that speak 5G are Barbara’s Fire HDX and the Roku. I never was able to get Wi-Fi working with the Roku when we were using the D-Link DIR-615. It just didn’t see it. When I got the R6220 up and running, the Roku immediately offered me the choice of hard-wired and either 2.4G or 5G Wi-Fi. All three options work fine. I wish the Roku would let me choose to use all three simultaneously and pick the best of the three, but it insists I pick one of the three.
We’re currently re-watching One Tree Hill on Netflix streaming, Everwood on DVD, and Endeavor on Amazon Prime streaming. We also added Dr. Quinn, Medicine Girl to our Prime Video queue and watched a couple episodes of it. It’s corny and mediocre, but it has the same small-town, costume-drama feel as Little House on the Prairie, which is incompetently plotted and written, and sugary enough to put a diabetic into sugar shock.
As expected, the progs and neocons (but I repeat myself) are fighting Trump every step of the way. At least he’s getting some of his nominees approved, most recently the head of the EPA. I’m hoping against hope that these new agency heads, particularly Education and EPA to start with, come in and clean house with fire and sword. They could start by firing every employee who’s a GS-10 or higher.
The promise to repeal ObamaCare is now being hedged. In reality, they could fix the problems overnight by letting the free market take care of it. Repeal the individual mandate and employer mandate to start with. Allow health insurance companies to offer whatever policies they wish with whatever exclusions or limitations they wish, and allow them to do so across state lines. Most particularly, again allow insurance companies to exclude pre-existing conditions. The states, if they wish, can create assigned risk pools, just as they do for auto insurance. Repeal EMTALA, and allow emergency rooms to refuse to treat anyone who can’t pay. Repeal Medicaid, and allow states to handle it themselves if they wish. Better yet, allow churches and private charities to establish clinics for the indigent. Station ICE agents in emergency rooms, tasked with gathering up illegals and exporting them back to Mexico or wherever they initially crossed the border illegally. And so on.
* * * * *
the FEMA update on the damn dam:
Note the number of people in shelters. This is beginning to look like that hard core that you can’t get rid of. Again I wonder where the freak the other 150K people went.
An now the other end of Cali is getting smited….
FEMA again:
Anyone else noticing that Cali gets FEMA EOCs and other facilities activated for a rainstorm, but the Carolinas and other parts of the midwest and south have to wait for the fifth or sixth day, with 100’s of thousands affected before they get any .gov love?
Yeah, thought so.
nick
Allow health insurance companies to offer whatever policies they wish with whatever exclusions or limitations they wish, and allow them to do so across state lines. Most particularly, again allow insurance companies to exclude pre-existing conditions.
This is the part that’s hard. Getting rid of the spending associated with PPACA is easy, that can be done with a simple spending bill from the House and using reconciliation to get past a filibuster in the Senate. The legalisms and regulations take a regular bill and that may not get past a filibuster. They can go nuclear, but that’s a two edged sword as the Democrats have learned with the judge and cabinet confirmations.
Laws are legislative branch; regulations are executive branch. Trump can eliminate them with the stroke of his pen.
WRSA has a link up to an organizing document for the Left immigrant worshippers about forming ‘defensive communities.’
While scanning thru it I find this gem “If you have access to
someone who really knows how to use electoral tools, you can even download lists in
neighborhoods of residents who are regular voters, and who always vote democratic.”
Ummmm, how the fuck would they know this?
n
The doc gives advice on how to do opposition research, and has talking points for approaches and policies. It also has some sample letters and scripts which are interesting.
This is what the enemy is up to. They are getting their troops rallied and aligned in message and action. They are repeating lies and misrepresentations. They are using loaded language to persuade and influence. They are lying by omission.
Is there anyone reading this comment that thinks OUR SIDE is doing anything similar?
n
“Is there anyone reading this comment that thinks OUR SIDE is doing anything similar?”
I doubt it. See, we’re all set now; tRump is in the White House. No worries, mate!
No, we don’t have anything like this even planned, let alone set up and working, not at that level. All we’ve got are a few annoying fascist web sites, loaded with Nazis who are just itching to load the immigrants and LGBTXYZ people into boxcars and then the firing squads and ovens.
The point has been made pretty well by other people, several in links I’ve put up here over the past few months; the Left is better organized and active BOOM than we are. They have many tens of thousands of hardcore operators running millions of True Believers who all operate constantly and unconsciously from the same Lefty playbook.
We don’t have anything like that.
And I’m not digging the latest administration adventures, either; fulsomely gushing about our continued support for NATO when we should be bailing out of it entirely, and NATO stepping up naval activity in the Black Sea! WTF??
Berry’s ObuttwadCare is worse than a metastasized cancer. While the “law” is “only” of few thousand pages, the implementing regulations are a thousand times more and spread in every gooberment agency/office imaginable and unimaginable. This was by design as Berry’s ObuttwadCare was designed to destroy the medical care system. Some say it was to bring about single payer, but no, single payer is too good. The object is taking ALL medical decisions away from the doctor, patient, hospital, pharmacy, and medical/drug manufactures. It is “single control” they are going for and you have no say.
You should not doubt that we have a fully functioning Oligarchy, and there is only one way to rid ourselves of it. Too bad those with the stones able to do it are maintaining a low profile.
[snip] Do not open the door. Unless a law enforcement agent has a warrant, they
cannot make you open your door or enter your house. [snip]
This cranky Libertarian wishes *EVERYONE* would learn and heed this advice.
A corporate fascist oligarchy, in fact, no matter which sock puppet is in the White House. For the time being, the Incumbent is being allowed to make a few changes here and there. But just like the Wars of the Roses long ago, there is a seething struggle among the oligarchs for total control and it hasn’t been decided yet. Meanwhile the Leviathan bureaucracy lumbers on, regardless of administrations or SCOTUS or Congress.
Thing is, this can’t go on forever; the financial time bomb alone is gonna be horrific when it finally blows. They’re just kicking various cans down the road and hoping the next administration or the next generation will have to deal with it all. And Mr. and Mrs. Boobus Americanus still drive everywhere, still eat like pigs, and are still mesmerized by various pixels.
Picture a future Yugoslavia here breaking up, only at 15 times the population and larger in area BOOM, and with half a billion firearms and a very ornery populace. The main and most violent struggles, of course, will be in the Clinton Archipelago cities.
Figure five to ten years out; we’re seeing rogue Left elements already hard at work, fomenting increasingly violent activity and deliberately provoking the regime. Textbook.
42 here now and heading to 44, ditto tomorrow. Blue skies and very windy. Back to 30s Monday and Tuesday and then back up into the 40s Wednesday.
Chugging and plugging away on tedious household chores and a couple of quick errands. Exciting!
“Figure five to ten years out; we’re seeing rogue Left elements already hard at work, fomenting increasingly violent activity and deliberately provoking the regime. Textbook.”
Well, we just had one convicted here in Orange County this week. No, it was not one of the Trump “deplorables” as characterized by Cankles. It was either a crimmigrant or a “Dreamer” son of a crimmigrant known as Luis Fernando Alarcon, 20.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/inciting-744405-object-alarcon.html
Yuuup, looks more like Billary supporter.
Regarding the new Netgear router: I assume that you changed the admin user/password for security purposes. Reduces your external attack surface.
I use the old Steve Gibson “ShieldsUp” port checking program to ensure that external ports are protected (here: https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 ). Useful tool.
Not a big fan of leaving the SSID/password default values, though. I also don’t use a SSID that is similar to my name, as many do.
“Yuuup, looks more like Billary supporter.”
So vandalism and incitement to riot only merit an “informal” three years probation? Amazing.
Yeah, what Mr. RickH said about the admin pw and SSID, + 1,000. Maybe not as critical, I gather, at the home site in Sparta, but here I can see everybody else’s wireless throughout the village. IIRC, all but one are locked, though, but most with corny SSID names easily guessed as to location.
Yes, I changed the admin credentials. I used the default SSID and left it public and kept the default password, which is 17 alphameric characters (or is is 18 or 19 or 20?)
I’m not too worried. This router has pretty good WiFi range, but it probably isn’t great enough to reach the boundaries of our property. Except maybe along the back fence line, and I’ve not seen a single one of the cows with a smartphone, tablet, or other WiFi device.
Them cows are tricky, though. Those things on their heads are horn antennas, so they get better range than you’d think. And I haven’t trusted any cows since I found some of them reading The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Sure, those explosives recipes will get you killed, but from where I sit a failure is as bad as a success. I sure down want to have to clean up half a ton of exploded cow.
“Day without immigrants” follow-up
Gotta say, Mr. SteveF is right about them cows. We have a whole bunch of them up this way, and Mr. Jeff Danziger, former Army intelligence officer in ‘Nam used to do cartoons featuring how smart these buggers really are. Now Mr. D. just pens weird-ass anti-Normal and anti-tRump stuff and lives in NYC instead of here, like he used to. Must be something in the wotta down there.
Max Cannon, who does the Red Meat strip, has also broken the veil of secrecy surrounding bovine intelligence.
They put up a pretty good front but behind our backs they talk about us and plan stuff. Don’t be fooled.
“The Anarchist’s Cookbook”
Hee, hee, hee. I used to know Bill Powell (AKA Don Cisco). My favorite was the one about mounting a Molotov cocktail on a length of broomstick, sliding it down a shotgun barrel, lighting the wick, and pulling the trigger. Bill said it would be like a rifled grenade, but I had this image of the grenadier pulling the trigger, being shredded by shrapnel as the shotgun blew up, and then drenched by burning gasoline as the broomstick shattered the bottle.
I wonder if anyone ever tried that; it seems like you could set it up at a safe distance and light it off somehow.
This is what I mean when I talk about how the MSM and progs and SJW types live in another dimension of reality:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157358914491/imaginary-news
Cognitive dissonance.
They really do believe the shit they spout and there is no reasoning with them.
Can’t really call it cognitive dissonance where there’s no clear evidence of cognition.
More on illegals: My daughter saw on my computer the page I linked above, about illegals going on strike to force Americans to acknowledge their economic dominance. As she was asking me for context, my wife — an always-legal immigrant — overheard and started fulminating about illegals. Her brother and sister-in-law had been renting an apartment in California to a family who apparently had all the required ID and paperwork but turned out to be illegals who’d been living on benefits for years. Their status turned up when they sued their landlords for some (allegedly) bogus thing, but it didn’t matter and the insurance company settled. That was late last year, when deranged pieces of shit were occupying not only the California governor’s mansion but the US White House.
What’s that you say? You haven’t heard enough tales of deranged people?
“What’s that you say? You haven’t heard enough tales of deranged people?”
While some other college professor ran off the rails elsewhere declaring that the tRump presidency is an act of terrorism.
The woman professor in the above link is way out there, and her description of the process kinda sounded more like her own sexual rape fantasy than anything else.
The last time I looked, a lecturer was not a professor.
The colleges have long had a bunch of ambiguous and vague job descriptions for various types of faculty; lecturers, readers, assistant professors, adjunct professors, yadayada, partly for status claims and partly for their remuneration and benefit structures. At some colleges the lecturers and visiting adjunct assistant professors seem to have more cachet than the regular tenured people, particularly the instant celebs like this creature.
But that’s the kind of chit they were yakking about and starting to ramp up a quarter-century ago. Just more claptrap about race-gender-power relationships utilizing nearly century-old German and French theories, much of it neo-Marxist.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Desolation_1836.jpg
http://freedomoutpost.com/to-broke-to-fix-11-alarming-facts-about-americas-crumbling-infrastructure/
Well, if a pickup is engulfed in flame, one big fire extinguisher is not enough.
Cab, engine compartment, dash.
Once all the frozen gasoline in that dash gets going, it burns pretty well.
It was weird, I passed a flaming puddle in the left turn lane. Went a half block, flipped a U, made the turn, got one block and found a full size pickup with lawn care trailer, with flames shooting out of the cab. The owners were trying to get the trailer unhooked so all their equipment wouldn’t burn. No fire extinguisher on the trailer.
I grabbed my full size ABC dry chemical and hit the cab and engine compartment, went around and put more in the cab, but the dash was burning at that point, and I was out of juice. I did knock it down briefly. If there was another big extinguisher, it might have been beat-able. But nope, by the time I got back to my truck for the NASA approved spray bottle extinguishers, it was clearly an inferno.
I’d asked if everyone was out when I ran up, so I got back in my truck and we went on our way to the pool as FD rolled up on scene. FD was about 2 blocks away, but the truck was totaled before they got there. Plenty of excitement for me. Gets the old heart pumping.
GET AND CARRY a big extinguisher. It might buy the time you need to get a passenger out.
nick
(like I’ve said before, the universe seems to put these things in my lap. That other car fire was the reason I upped my extinguisher size. Still not enough. That’s two pickups and a car in the last year and a half.)
Man, you have all the fun down there! An accident magnet!
Don’t come to northwestern Vermont, OK, bro?
Good to know; I’ll get a couple of big-ass extinguishers now for the RAV4. Already have a first-aid go-bag hanging off one of the rear seats; other rear seat has a pistol go-bag for whichever one I might be EDC. Sometimes the radio go-bag. And if I go back to work again 30 miles away I’ll have a GHB pack loaded.
I had a car fire myself back around 1980, driving a VM Kharmen-Gia to my training at the MA State Police Academy in Framingham, MA, Troop A. Right at the big cloverleaf of Routes 9 and 495 in Westborough, I saw smoke coming out of the rear engine compartment. I pulled over and got out to check it and flames were already spurting out the back; no fire extinguisher, natch. Grabbed my duffel bag and stood there and watched it become fully engulfed in about a minute. Peeps slowed to ask if I was OK and if everyone was out, and then the FD rolled up. By that time it was just a big ball of fire. They told me I was lucky I’d filled the tank just before that; a nearly empty tank would likely have blown.
@Mr. nick; what size extinguisher were you using?
I’ve never had to deal with fires like that. The closest is when my mother-in-law gets a grease fire going in the kitchen, and that’s usually out within seconds.
(On a totally unrelated note, we seem to have no fire extinguishers in the house. I know there were several, but couldn’t find them and figured they’d been hidden somewhere because my wife and mother-in-law are idiots, so I bought two more for the kitchen. Now they’re missing, too, and no one knows anything about it. To hell with it. If the morons torch the damned house, it’s not my problem.)
I have dealt with several rolled vehicles (not mine) and several collisions and several that splatted into snowbanks and such. In the latter case, the snow shovel in the back of my van is sometimes enough. (For you Texans, a snowbank is where snow is piled up deep after snowplows have pushed it off the road. For you Texans, snowplows are big trucks kitted out to move snow off roads. For you Texans, snow is a kind of frozen water which falls from the sky.) I don’t recall any serious injuries from these accidents, mostly people being shaken up and shocky. In every case the women and children were crying once they were out of the vehicle while the adult men were either quietly in shock or were cursing. But of course mentioning behavior that matches stereotypes is unacceptable, so forget I said it.
Let’s see, what else. Rescued a guy who’d have drowned, and swam one girl out of the ocean where she would have drowned unless a boater happened to notice her. (Tide was going out and I’d just noticed that I was quite a bit farther from shore than intended when I noticed another head near me. Splashed over and asked if she was alright and got a quavering “no” in response. Pulled her into a cross-chest carry and then side-stroked us both home. Which sounds smutty but totally wasn’t, even though we were both naked, as we’d come from a nude beach a ways down the shore. That was probably the heaviest exertion I’ve ever done and I had to drop to hands and knees and gasp for several minutes once I got my feet on land.) Did CPR on one guy who’d been fished out of a river; doing the breathing was much harder work than it was in the classes. And it was worse than wasted, as he was in a coma for at least the next several months, at which point the info source cut out. Did first aid on a bunch of people, almost all of whom were hurt because they were dumbasses. (eg, the guy visiting a martial arts studio who saw a sword on the wall, pulled it down and unsheathed it and started waving it around, and utterly predictably sliced himself up pretty badly. All in the space of probably under 15 seconds.) And rescued people from other people, but I’ve gotten feedback that discussing such things makes people uncomfortable. (On the other hand, people made uncomfortable by such talk are probably delicate little snowflakes who should be roasted on the blowtorch of Seeing the World as It Really Is.) Oh, and fed and entertained a lot of little kids — I always have granola bars, juice boxes, and that sort of thing with me, and will give them to a little kid who’s whining because he’s hungry or thirsty and his mother didn’t have the foresight to consider that a five-year-old would be hungry after an hour-long swimming lesson. I’ll let adults starve if their suffering is their own dumb fault, but it’s basically never a little kid’s fault.
Laws are legislative branch; regulations are executive branch. Trump can eliminate them with the stroke of his pen.
Not really. A large part of the changes in PPACA are law changes – minimum coverage, etc. A big chunk can’t be undone in a spending bill. The regulations can’t all be undone by Trump because they are required by the law. He did swear to faithfully execute the laws of the US, after all.
@Mr. nick; what size extinguisher were you using?
The ~5 pounder from Costco. In the store it’s $35. I bought a couple when they were 2 for 1. I always look at the auctions because they are often surplussed when they expire, but are perfectly good. I don’t get OSHA inspected, so I don’t care. At that point, they are $5 each. As long as the gauge is green, you’re good to go. The limiting factor is when the bottle needs to be re-certified as a pressure vessel. That costs more than a new bottle. They also won’t refill ones that are out of cert.
nick
What I have in the kitchen, garage, and in the other truck are the small aerosol can types. They work great but you need more than one.
OK, thanks, Mr. nick.
“And rescued people from other people, but I’ve gotten feedback that discussing such things makes people uncomfortable. (On the other hand, people made uncomfortable by such talk are probably delicate little snowflakes who should be roasted on the blowtorch of Seeing the World as It Really Is.)”
I’ve also rescued peeps from other peeps but it was mostly on The Job and I didn’t have to murderize anybody to do it, but it coulda happened like that. So far as a civvie I haven’t run into anything like that. I am, however, more or less prepared to do so, more so than probably 99% of the general pop.
Given the same circumstances and the same motivations, I might have done some of the same things at various times, but it’s just never come up.
CDs are susceptible to disc rot. This can make them start having errors in 8 to 10 years. Or less for CDRs.
CDs are susceptible to disc rot. This can make them start having errors in 8 to 10 years. Or less for CDRs.
If it ain’t spinning, it is fake data. Just about any archival medium has a short shelf life. There are supposed gold DVDRs that can last a century but are very expensive. Better to build a disk farm and hold your info online.
https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-UltraLife-Archival-5-Disc-96320/dp/B000WTO352/
Plus who knows how long that one will be able obtain a working CD drive or DVD drive. Easy now, maybe not so easy in 20 years. I use to use a magneto optical drive for ultra critical stuff. I doubt any of my MO drives would work now, especially since they are SCSI interfaces.
Confusingly, if it is spinning, it’s fake news, whether spinning actual events or spinning a story from aether and hate.
I keep my archival backups on chiseled granite tablets.
I go with DVDs. I’ll keep a few here and copies elsewhere in case this house burns. (ref kitchen fires and missing extinguishers) (Though I’ve gotten sloppy and haven’t put any copies off-site in over a year.)
I emphatically do not trust cloud storage. If I don’t have the data in my control, it doesn’t exist. Maybe the service will still be there next year, maybe it won’t, and that defeats the purpose of archival storage. And, while nothing that I back up is super-sensitive, that still doesn’t mean I want the TLAs poking through it, as must be assumed with any cloud storage.
Even though DVD-Rs are in theory subject to bitrot, I haven’t noticed it even on 12-year-old disks — I’ll run checksum/MD5sum if I included one in the burn, or I’ll compare the files from two DVDs. To minimize damage of theoretical bitrot, I write uncompressed, unencrypted files so that most of the data can be recovered even if some bits are trashed.
Hard drives are cheap enough that I could use terabyte drives as my archival backups, but I don’t like that they can be overwritten — ref my tale of wiping and reusing a drive which had pictures and movies of my kids, on account of the “do not wipe” sticker falling off. And anyway, magnetic media are subject to bitrot, too, in addition to mechanical failure from sitting idle for years.
I keep my archival backups on chiseled granite tablets.
I hope that you are a good artist. I am not.
Of course, all of our pictures from the 60s, 70s, and 80s are slowly fading. I guess that I could scan them.
And anyway, magnetic media are subject to bitrot, too, in addition to mechanical failure from sitting idle for years.
Yup. I started using external USB drives for backing up the office LAN about a decade ago. I guess that I could drag one off the shelf in my home closet and see if it still works. I’m guessing that it would make a horrendous racket and never sync.
ref my tale of wiping and reusing a drive which had pictures and movies of my kids, on account of the “do not wipe” sticker falling off.
I tape the yellow sticky archive note to all of my external drives. There is a pile of them in my closet about a foot and a half high. I am getting worried that one might fall off and hit yours truly in the head since they are on the seven foot high shelf. I’ve been waiting for the wife to complain but there is no comment.
I emphatically do not trust cloud storage. If I don’t have the data in my control, it doesn’t exist.
Me too. Plus the bandwidth to upload several terabytes is incredible.
You also have to consider formats and reading hardware. Optical drives of any sort are becoming rarer, and they age even sitting NIB on the shelf. SCSI and FireWire are likely to be extinct before too much longer. USB should still be available as long as any current interface technology. The storage technology least subject to bitrot (other than an array of spinning metal that’s periodically replaced) is flash memory, so I keep the most critical backup data on high-capacity USB flash drives. And SteveF raises a good point; I no longer compress backups.
We’re a little more complicated at my 9-5. Appassure to get (20 minutes or ever hour) for days, days for weeks, weeks for months, and months for up to 2 years. It’s all compressed using a complicated system that “just works”. 4 TBs of data taking up about 9 TB of storage for 2+ years.
On top of that, we extract monthly copies of the data (uncompressed) on USB HDDs. I’m up to 3 years on them, and I’ve been generally pretty lucky. Most everything that was requested has been available. It only fails when a file was first written on the 5th, was deleted on the 20th, and never made it onto a monthly backup. But then, that happens all to often.
Personal / my business backups are simpler. 2 copies of everything important, plus Carbonite. Business data (Quicken for now, but moving to gnucash) gets backed up every week and gets copied offsite and to a jump drive I carry with me. It’s not perfect, but it has worked for me for 10+ years so far, with adjustments as needed.
Multiple drives inside the box, USB drive outside and offsite cloud. Because the first copy is the fastest you get the quickest done first. Once you do your primary to secondary drive you do the others from the copy on the secondary.
I also burn blu-ray disc for archival copies. If you haven’t tried a blu-ray rom or rewriteable you might amazed how fast they are.
Slow write speeds are why I gave up on optical backups 10 years ago.