65F and wet. Of course. Because NOAA said it would be dry, and because yesterday was beautiful.
All the narratives are coming apart.
Russian collusion.
Robust economy.
Diversity is our strength.
War is peace.
American supremacy.
3rd rate actor gets pummeled.
Democrats are the party of the working man.
MSM informing the world/press as watchdog.
Violent crime is falling.
Drugs are good.
on and on
The US is about to sneeze, and the world is going to catch a cold.
n
People are seeing signs of deflation.
Note that Costco spiral slice ham is 1.89 USD per pound. It’s been YEARS since it was that low. Might be because of reduced Chinese demand, but what are the chinese eating instead? Dog?
Gas here is $1.89 at the grocery store, less at discounters and Costco.
Home prices in our neighborhood are down somewhat yoy, and certainly are not increasing.
I talked to another reseller at the estate sale yesterday- he’s not selling anything either. And hasn’t for a while. ALL the resellers I talk to are having similar experiences.
At the estate sale, prices were very fair.. High end speakers, big boy toys, were priced half of ebay on the first day and didn’t sell. Granted that it’s harder to sell big speakers and heavy amps, even when they are good brands, but half ebay should entice resellers. (they’re not Mcintosh, but high end)
I stopped by the ‘toy’ store on my way home and they had a steady stream of customers until closing time. Prices are up for ‘toys’, and people are buying. Not necessarily a good sign for the republic.
n
Note that Costco spiral slice ham is 1.89 USD per pound. It’s been YEARS since it was that low. Might be because of reduced Chinese demand, but what are the chinese eating instead? Dog?
Costco is wholesale price plus 3% (?). Robert knew those numbers better than I did.
You’re not going into Costco to just buy a ham. They data mine the cr*p out of every customer visit. My guess is that they spotted a correlation in Issaquah and put the hams in a more prominent location to take advantage of whatever the reports showed.
Plus, this is the time of year when the “helper” at the register is typically an older woman with a sales spiel for Executive membership. The last few years, my response has been to open with “You must be an exec. District manager? Why don’t we talk about how my wife got hosed in the auto buying program …”, and the sales shark swims away.
I don’t think so wrt ham.. . It’s always in the same place, and the price is pretty steady. During the great pig dieoff, prices went as high as $2.40/pound for spiral slice. I haven’t seen it under $1.99 in literal years. Add in inflation and it shouldn’t be steady or lower.
Why wouldn’t you get the Executive membership? The additional cost is covered by the rebate, unless you don’t use it, and the rest of the rebate is gravy. If you get a rebate on your payment card, you are double dipping too.
n
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6711491/California-town-trials-universal-income-handful-residents-500-year.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6711013/Payless-ShoeSource-shutter-remaining-US-stores.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6711907/Scientist-71-invented-nerve-agent-Novichok-says-campaign-calling-paedophile-smear.html — ok, we are pretty sure it’s pedos all the way down, but this is the deep state’s favorite attack on people…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6710097/Uber-posts-50-bln-annual-bookings-profit-remains-elusive-ahead-IPO.html — but it has a stock valuation bigger than GM, iirc….
n
This deserves its own comment–
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6710563/Chief-Officer-lied-affidavit-deadly-Houston-raid.html
HE LIED ON THE SEARCH WARRANT
Then they killed the dog and the two people in the house. THEY CLAIM they announced themselves. But then they claimed that drugs were purchased there too.
n
BTW, it looks like the interwebs were right about this, as there were immediate questioning articles published with a different story than the initial, official one.
Why wouldn’t you get the Executive membership? The additional cost is covered by the rebate, unless you don’t use it, and the rest of the rebate is gravy. If you get a rebate on your payment card, you are double dipping too.
I have the Costco Visa for the current job’s travel expenses. Sam’s Master Card offers a similar deal, but Google and Master Card have a creepy deal for info sharing.
Executive Membership is an important part of the Costco cash flow equation, and, like I tell the sales shark every time, we got hosed on my wife’s Exploder purchasing through the auto buying program so I’m denying them the known cash flow.
(I’ve shared that experience here before. I’ll spare you the flogging of the expired equine.)
We aren’t in Costco that much anymore beyond buying certain things we can’t get at the Sam’s five minutes from the house.
I got a better price on my Camry going through the dealer’s Internet people than the quote I got from Costco to sanity check my deal. Shop around, especially if you are in the market for a car and not a crossover or truck.
ok, we are pretty sure it’s pedos all the way down, but this is the deep state’s favorite attack on people…
The attack is effective because a disturbingly large percentage of the population *are* pedophiles. As I’ve written before I think it is a fine line between that and the Asian fetish.
Working in tech, I just assume all of my co-workers have some kind of kink which probably doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but they wouldn’t want generally known.
One of our guys went out on disability for personal reasons, and the lead didn’t blink when I asked, “Sex change in Thailand?”
The response was ‘no’ … this time. That’s always an HR circus at any mid to large-sized company, and we currently do not have the time to p*ss away on the inevitable meetings. One upside of my current group is that we are all adults — even the Millennial other Junior Programmer is tattoo free … well, visible, anyway.
WRT to the retail apocalypse, is it a sign of a coming recession, or something else? I hope that it’s just the retail market trying to right-size itself. I look around and wonder how so many businesses stay open. The answer is that they should never have opened to begin with. Do we really need 5 Dick’s sporting goods stores within 30 minutes of each other? Don’t even get me started on mattress stores, of which there are 3 within rock throwing distance of each other in our bedroom community. Oh, and nail salons…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6710097/Uber-posts-50-bln-annual-bookings-profit-remains-elusive-ahead-IPO.html — but it has a stock valuation bigger than GM, iirc….
GM is going down for the count. I doubt that GM is going to survive as it has the biggest UAW problem of the three. Unless, they break the UAW which, is certainly doable.
A friend of mine has a 2017 Chevy pickup that he bought after Harvey when his old truck got three feet of water in it. He managed to nail a deer three months ago at 75 mph. The deer went through the front end of his truck and popped out and through the windshield. The battery grounded and caught the vehicle on fire. He got out after cutting his seatbelt OFF (the crash locks were engaged). The damage to the truck is only $19,000 and the total amount is $24,000. The truck has been sitting in the repair shop since then, 90 days !, waiting for a air conditioning condenser ! GM stopped making the air conditioning condenser for a 2017 Chevy pickup and has zero in stock. My friend’s rental was paid for only 30 days so he is on the hook for 60 days so far.
So, if GM cannot get parts for a 2017 Chevy pickup, they are dead.
My wife’s 2015 Crosstour has been making a rattling noise on cold startup. It turns out it is a defective VTC actuator. There is a service bulliten out for it, but not a recall. I’ve been trying to record the sound but of course it won’t do it for me. On a whim, I stopped by the local HONDA dealer service department and chatted with a service advisor. I explained the issue, and he was not only knowledgeable, but was extremely helpful. He said he would do the repair, and put on the order that they heard the noise. It’s under warranty, so that helps, but still nice of him to be helpful. Going to bring it in Monday to have the work done. It’s supposed to be cold that morning, so I’m still hoping to get a recording of the noise anyways.
The tsb is 09-010 if anyone is curious. I could do the work, but it’s under powertrain warranty. Plus, I’ve generally resolved I’m not going to do any more major work on my daily drivers. There are other things I want to do.
Do we really need 5 Dick’s sporting goods stores within 30 minutes of each other? Don’t even get me started on mattress stores, of which there are 3 within rock throwing distance of each other in our bedroom community. Oh, and nail salons…
Yeah, Dick’s expanded way too fast. They will be done when the yoga pants fad goes away. The mall developers using the chain as anchor stores are kidding themselves.
I remember Cramer cheerleading the stock one night about 10 years ago when the expansion started rolling out, supplanting Sports Authority stores. That guy should have been fitted for an orange jumpsuit 20 years ago.
(In my own defense — I must have been someplace where I had no control of channel. Airport? Restaurant? I think Cramer’s an a**hat.)
So, if GM cannot get parts for a 2017 Chevy pickup, they are dead.
GM has been dead since the bailout. Anything made since then was in the design pipeline when Obama fired the previous management and Bob Lutz retired.
I do love my ATS, but seriously GM…rear end seals leaking? How have they not perfected this yet? I expect to have weird problems with cars. But the same basic things that keep failing year after year?
Back from foraging… got the two best pieces out of the estate sale. Lots of resale upside. Didn’t get some of the stuff I might have wanted. I offered on 4 VR headsets, including 2 occulus models, and a bunch of the marker lights. She didn’t take the offer, so Eh. I don’t really have any time to go haring off after VR but it’s something I’d like to try if it was cheap. My offer was cheap.
Kind of a warm dreary day so far.
Currently cooking ribs for our association BBQ cookoff. I didn’t place in the chili cookoff, so I’m just hoping to hurt the judges with the super hot sirracha based BBQ. Or, maybe they’ll like it. They seem to be biased toward hot. Trying the InstaPot on half the ribs, half in the oven. May not have time for the oven, since I was screwing around with estate sales so I thought I’d better get at least SOME cooked…
n
Apparently not. I had a 1989 Astro van. The seals began leaking at 24,000 miles. Damaged the brake shoes in the process. Also had the speed sensor fail at 15,000 miles which made the odometer non-functional, overdrive wouldn’t work and naturally cruise control. I was on the way back from Texas with another 500 miles to drive. Not happy at all. Last GM product I will buy.
My best friend had a Cadillac that developed an electrical problem and would not start. Computer was sensing a fault and refused to allow ignition. Dealer worked for two months and could not find the problem even with factory help. Swapped the computer twice. Not enough test points available. The dealer eventually gave up and told my friend he owed them $3K for diagnostics. He paid, I would have told the dealer keep the car and get the money from GM.
Our SRX had a weird electrical issue where every once in a while the radio and all the lights on the dash would blink. Just the backlights, not the indicator lights.
It was a dealer service to change the front turn signal bulbs as there was no way to access them without engine compartment disassembly. I saw a lot of Caddy SRXs with burned out right front turn signals.
We loved the ride and design though.
Wife loves her honda Odyssey van. Pretty lux, even one step down from “rape my wallet” trim level…
n
“GM has been dead since [before] the bailout.” – FIFY. If it weren’t for .gov and .mil buying GM for fleet, GM would BE gone. It should have undergone bankruptcy not bailout. Breaking up behemoths that are too ossified and filled with cruft to survive is the only good reason for bankruptcy to even exist.
n
I don’t “get” the pedo thing. One must be very insecure of rejection to want sex with a pre-teen.
And the risk of being caught? If anyone had done such to any of the kids I’ve helped raise I’d be writing this from death row. Yeah, me, the guy that feels bad for shooting raccoons for trying to get into my chicken coop or shooting chicken snakes in the nest box.
A twenty year old woman marrying a fifty year old man, she’s old enough to know better, but he’s got money and she’s hot looking (and fertile).
GM stopped making the air conditioning condenser for a 2017 Chevy pickup and has zero in stock.
That’s some stunning stupid happening there. A 2016 or 2018 condenser doesn’t fit? I thought there was a law saying they had to have spare parts for 10 years.
The condenser is the A/C system radiator, right? The hose fittings are pretty standard and someone can’t cobble up a mounting bracket?
As for cars here, the Barr’s Stop Leak seems to have worked. $6 for a bottle o’ stuff and 15 minutes of piddling versus $450 or so for a new radiator and hoses, etc.
Our SRX had a weird electrical issue where every once in a while the radio and all the lights on the dash would blink. Just the backlights, not the indicator lights.
Bad ground. Finding the bad ground will make you crazy.
_The Y Factor (Cresperian)_ by Darrell Bain and Stephanie Osborn
https://www.amazon.com/Y-Factor-Cresperian-Darrell-Bain/dp/160619089X/?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number two of a three book space opera series. I read the well formatted and bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback. I am going to purchase the third book in the series and read it also.
The series started with an alien starliner FTL drive exploding in the Solar System around 2030. A couple hundred of the aliens survived in individual lifeboats, some of which crashed on the planet Earth. The first book covered several of the survivors across the planet and their conversion to human forms through innate abilities.
In the second book, several of the nations build small starships and head out looking for the aliens home world. This is their story.
Like I said for the first book, wow, this is pulp science fiction at its best ! I loved it ! I gave the first book 5 stars.
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (I could be talked into 5 stars)
Amazon rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (9 reviews)
It was a dealer service to change the front turn signal bulbs as there was no way to access them without engine compartment disassembly.
The neighbor had a VW new Beetle. To replace a turn signal light was, from the story I was told, involved jacking the car, taking the tire off and removing the wheel well liner.
My wISP seems to be blowing smoke up my ass. My guess, at the moment, is that local guys are being lazy.
Well, yeah. A 40 foot or so push up mast isn’t a lot of fun.
So… someone on the far end of me decided there is something wrong here. Yes, the radio at the top of the pole is failing. So, someone sent an e-mail at 10:30 PM saying “our network teams have investigated your situation we now believe we are going to need to schedule a technician to come out to finish repairing your issue.” I waited a few days…. crickets. I called and well, another week before the guys showed up.
Said guys say my connection is just fine. Said guys also know I just received an ISP provided router. But they don’t want to mess with installing it…. because the whole authentication process is a pain in the ass. And then I got a spiel of how the former manager of this area “over sold” capacity on this tower which also feeds to folks out by the lake but that’s supposed to be fixed in a couple of weeks. Yeah, folks “out by the lake” can get 15mb service. I can get 5mb service. Sure, like the tower by DPS was supposed to be upgraded by October 2018 but that hasn’t happened.
Monday is going to be a PITA.
I still say a lot of the bulb replacement stories involve somebody not realizing that the trick is just to remove the entire lamp assembly to allow access to the bulb socket on the back side.
I do suspect that there are exceptions to this, but I have seen a lot of major disassembly messes performed by “techs” who ignored the obvious screws (or even wingnuts) that held the lamp unit in.
Anyway. My 5mb connection has at most made it to 3mb that drops to .09mb.
It’s like a FLASHLIGHT with bad batteries.
“Overselling” my ass.
I just found a video showing Beetle parking light replacement by loosening part of the fender liner, but no jacking or wheel removal was needed.
A local cable tech pointed out that a cable box on pole has a dozen connections on a box designed for only eight. Clearly “overselling” with no radio-related magic required.
He told me to just wait for fiber… years ago. Still waiting.
@ Paul:
I’m not trying to be argumentative. Just agreeing that lots of technicians are full of it.
I just found a video showing Beetle parking light replacement by loosening part of the fender liner, but no jacking or wheel removal was needed.
Yeah, Jim does tend to get carried away with details. Shrug. 🙂
Argue away.
In this context, I also had a _good_ tech find squirrel damage near the top of the pole that explained the water running out of the cable at the house end.
” Argue away. ”
That’s what friends are for!
Having been involved in a LOT of field service on very complex systems, I can say that there is a HUGE range of ability across techs, and some of the ones with the best skills have the worst attitudes. Most will poke at it until they can justify calling it fixed, and rarely will get to the root cause.
I have an issue at one customer’s house that we have been fighting for over 4 years. We have changed every piece of gear in the chain, even though they all tested ok. The problem still happens. EVERY piece of gear, yet we still get a loss of signal in one room. It’s not possible for the original problem to persist across all the gear changes. EVERY PIECE. And yet, the problem looks exactly the same.
Also, same customer, I have been getting the problem ticket- outdoor tvs won’t turn on from the control system. After a couple of visits, I figure out that if I manually turn them on, then use the system to turn them off, they work normally. Further, I find that the issue is usually reported after a power failure. So viola, cause, fix, done. Nope. I fix the issue and the customer says it’s still there. I SHOW his wife it’s fixed. Nope, still there. This last visit, I get it all working, verify several times, he comes home, picks up the control ……….. and the tvs won’t start. I WILL figure out why he’s the only one who has the issue. (I reset them again, and this time it worked fine for him. NO IDEA what is really the issue. He’s doing something with the controls that I don’t do, but I couldn’t see what.) This has been an intermittent issue for a couple of years. Thought it was fixed. Thought I had a cause. NOPE. But now I know better where to look.
n
Haha! I won the BBQ judges choice, 1st place, and the peoples’ choice (although I suspect a bit of ballot stuffing on the part of my 7yo…)
The ribs ended up tender and juicy, with a hint of hotness. I used a sirracha bbq sauce. I did half in the oven, and half in the InstaPot, and finished on the grill. The time ended up about the same. I’m starting to see that as a trend. The time under pressure may be shorter with the ipot, but overall time is about the same as traditional methods.
The ipot ribs were more tender, but needed sauce mopping and charring on the grill because they looked terrible. I prefer the slightly firmer oven ribs for texture. Both tasted great.
I did a mango/pineapple chutney as a side and a peach/mango cobbler as dessert. All yummy, and pretty straightforward. All but the ribs and onion came out of storage, and the mint and lime came from the garden.
All the other competitors (all 4) provided delicious barbecued meat too. A nice meal was had by all (about 20 adults and a passel o kids.)
nice to put a bit of ‘social’ into our social club
n
Intermittents… baaad thoughts!!!
Don’t even want to think about them.
I’m really happy when things work right. Some actually do. Happy thoughts are good just before sleeping.
“no way to access them without engine compartment disassembly”
There’s more and more of this kind of crap. In our RAV4, for example, swapping out the battery involved dismounting various plastic engine cover pieces, just so you can get at one particular screw. It wouldn’t have been hard to design things differently, but either no one could be bothered, or no one thought about little things like servicability. Don’t get me started on headlights – I have to let the garage handle that. It’s seriously nuts.
“I don’t “get” the pedo thing. One must be very insecure of rejection to want sex with a pre-teen.”
I expect it’s much more instinctual than that. Something, somewhere went wrong in their mental wiring. Assuming you are a normal, heterosexual guy: Why are you aroused by women? Could you decide to be aroused by men instead? Probably not – you are wired a particular way.
That said, pedos know that what they find arousing is not only illegal, but damaging to the kids if acted on. So they have a choice not to act on it, and likely most make that choice. Which is why I don’t have a problem with pedo stories, and young-looking porn actresses, and such. Give them a legal out, as long as they leave real kids alone.
@Nick: On the problem with loss of signal in one particular room, you’ve surely thought of this, but: what’s in the walls? Or even the paint? I’ve heard of situations where a wall had plaster secured with chicken wire, and other cases where someone claiming a WLAN allergy had used metal-containing paint to block the signal. Or maybe even just a wall with a lot of water pipes and other stuff.
RE: GM. When it fails (remember Too Big To Fail?), it should be sold off in bankruptcy. Just so long as Ford and Toyota don’t get it. They’re big enough to compete as it is. The retirees will take a bath – the bath they should have gotten a decade ago.
It can survive in pieces as a second manufacturer (behind Ford). Maybe third as well. I can see Chevrolet (trucks & Corvette) and Cadillac (luxury) coming out the other end.
” figure out why he’s the only one who has the issue. ”
Shoes (or wool underwear?!) generating static?
Like the water in my cable, above, intermittent is horror.
Yep. We had dual internet connections for years, because the one we wanted to use had some unfindable problem, mostly in summer. The best theory was that – because we are at the end of the cable – perhaps the ground was getting warm enough, to increase resistance in the cable just enough, to…
Some inspired tech visited us once. By happenstance, he had his meter connected just as he touched a connector, and he saw the meter twitch. Instead of just brushing it off, he dug deeper. Turned out there was a broken wire in the cable just behind the connector, which mostly was connected by pressure, except when it wasn’t. He cut off a bit of cable, remounted, the connector, and years of trouble vanished.
We had a person in our church that could never get the TV in their room to power up. I had been there several times and had no issue getting the TV to power up, consistently, every single time. Then I watched her use the remote and the exact buttons she was pressing. She was pressing the TV button on the remote rather than the power button. Somewhere the TV setting on the remote had been changed to a different brand and never restored and was doing something, don’t know what. I instructed her to always use the power button and I reset the remote back to the correct TV model.
What is intuitive to us propeller heads is not to the technically challenged.
One of JP’s first steps in problem solving. Check the cables.
RE: GM. When it fails (remember Too Big To Fail?), it should be sold off in bankruptcy. Just so long as Ford and Toyota don’t get it. They’re big enough to compete as it is. The retirees will take a bath – the bath they should have gotten a decade ago.
What piece of GM would Ford or Toyota want?
Cadillac is once again on the decline, and the Corvette plant *might* be attractive to private equity fanboys.
Toyota would have taken Fremont, but now they’ll have to wait for Tesla to enter bankruptcy.
The time to break up GM was 10 years ago when Bob Lutz was still rockin’ and rollin’. and various bits were worth something.
My ATS has the battery in the trunk. Nicely tucked away with just the terminals accessible. Replacing it involves removing the entire left side trunk interior pieces. Not looking forward to that task…
No car issues here. Everything’s just peachy!
“@Nick: On the problem with loss of signal in one particular room, you’ve surely thought of this, but: what’s in the walls? Or even the paint?”
There is a hard wired link about 75 ft long between the equipment closet and the bedroom. Each end has an appropriate send and receive unit for video. We’ve changed the TX and RX boxes (many time w/ different manufacturers, different cost and quality, different physical formats, etc), changed the cables feeding both ends, tried cat and coax, changed the tv, changed the switcher that routes video to it, tested and verified the cable lengths and quality were within spec for the extender boxes, basically everything. It works about 90% of the time, and 100% while I’m there troubleshooting. I arrive and it has failed, but I can’t MAKE it fail.
We’ve even tried chinese anti-copy protection boxes to change the parameters of the actual video signal. Nothing has solved the issue.
n