Cooler, wet.
Yesterday was cool and wet, with spotty rain throughout the day. I mostly stayed indoors.
Did a little bit of work on my client’s issues, mostly ordering replacement stuff and working with the controls programmer to troubleshoot issues that looked like failing hardware. It turned out to most likely be a software issue. The touchscreens had a little widget to get the local temp and weather conditions from the internet, but someone somewhere changed something, and the widget broke. It didn’t fail gracefully and kept causing buffer overflows with error messages or error states (I’m not clear, and not being a programmer, only care a little.) He eliminated the widget and the error logs stopped filling up. Hopefully problem solved, but only time will tell. Word to the wise, external links will break, and that may cause issues that look completely unrelated.
My new hard drive came so I’ll probably put that in today if the weather remains wet. Hard to believe that 8TB of name brand and extra sturdy HD is only $220. The new NVR software records everything in .mkv format, which leads to some huge files. I might have to actually read the users guide to figure out how to get some smaller files, without losing too much quality. The old software had months of recorded imagery, where the new only has days. Of course the old would often miss recording very short duration events, like someone walking past the camera. And I’ve added two 8mpx cams to the streams. Still, I should be able to get a lot more on the drive than I am. Doubling capacity to 8 days isn’t really enough.
WRT wuflu, secondary and tertiary effects are starting to manifest. Low oil prices due to low demand. Food shortages due to plant closings because of high infection rates in staff. Crime increases due to prisoners being released, and decreased policing. History says, it will get worse before it gets better. Prepare yourself.
Stay in and stay safe.
n
The new NVR software records everything in .mkv format, which leads to some huge files. I might have to actually read the users guide to figure out how to get some smaller files, without losing too much quality.
If the software doesn’t allow for a change in quality, Handbrake will crunch the MKV files using convenient presets after the recording finishes. Just run a cron job or, if you’re storing on the same machine as the DVR, the Windows equivalent schtasks.
FFmpeg would do the same thing, but lacks convenient presets. Plus, the Handbrake people provide an official Windows command line build.
I have zero experience with schtasks beyond looking at the options. And Windows means nothing convenient is available out-of-the-box in terms of scripting languages beyond what Microsoft provides, with which I have less experience.
It’s sometimes too efficient. We’re looking into local gravel pits, because we’re going to need a lot of gravel for some garden projects. It’s apparently cheaper to bring in gravel from Austria. Talk about low value per unit volume – I really don’t see how that can possibly make any sense. Just out of principle, we’ll buy local.
Within Europe, it is quite common to ship cattle from country X to country Y for slaughter, then on to country Z for processing and packaging, then back to country X, where they sell it to you as “local” meat.
Long-distance transport like that has always seemed to me to be wasteful. Pick your reason: bad for the environment, burning oil that would be better used as a feedstock, or just because over-concentration of industry is not always a good thing.
Here’s another example, from Google maps. Scroll out and watch that white spot on the satellite picture – it’s absolutely huge. An absolutely massive concentration of greenhouses, specifically, the source of winter fruits and vegetables for a huge part of Europe. There are various problems with this:
– An entire region of Spain depends on this economically, meaning that the local government turns a blind eye to all sorts of abuses. Lots of the labor is provided by illegal immigrants, the working conditions are horrible, the workers regularly get cheated on their pay, etc, etc.
– Because of the abusive practices, the companies have stupidly low prices. Fresh strawberries in January, a buck per pound. Right now it’s blueberries. Crazily cheap, on the back of the above-mentioned abuses. Which means that producers elsewhere cannot possibly compete, since their governments don’t look the other way.
Which brings us full circle: this only works because of the cheap transport. It should not be possible to truck a strawberry across all of Europe without impacting the price. Transport is too efficient.
– – – – –
We move for the first time in 20 years, and – bam – pandemic. We’re not happy about it, but sh!t happens.
Speaking of which, I’ve got to collar the electrician today. I think he’s too busy to read his email – anyway, I’ve had no reply to my question about the new remote-control system I found. I definitely want it, if he can make it work, but it will change the installation plans. Better now than later…
– – – – –
One of my sons loves them too. To me, it’s nothing special. When I was a kid, chickens came with a package of “giblets” inside: a rather random collection of hearts, and gizzards livers. Some of those chickens were anatomically challeged. My grandmother made incredible fried chicken, and the giblets would be served up to us grandkids first, to keep us quiet while waiting.
Dunno when the chickens lost their giblets, but they did. So people are no longer used to eating those inner organs.
– An entire region of Spain depends on this economically, meaning that the local government turns a blind eye to all sorts of abuses. Lots of the labor is provided by illegal immigrants, the working conditions are horrible, the workers regularly get cheated on their pay, etc, etc.
You just described a lot of basic food processing in the US going back at least 30 years. Just enough plants are unionized to allow political games with the food supply as we’re currently seeing, but everyone looks the other way at the amount of illegal labor required to run the country’s delivery infrastrcture.
And there are other problems beyond fragility. Outside Tampa, the upside of Amazon moving to Ruskin and plowing what were some of the most productive tomato fields in the world is that the productivity came with scary antibiotic resistance stats for the area thanks to the underground pharmacias dispensing the drugs without supervision to the migrant workers.
Storm and rain got here some time last night. Wife said it got dramatic out, but I slept through it. Currently a steady rain, 64F and very wet.
Chicken producers discovered there was a market for entrails, separate from the whole chicken market, and viola! Packaged giblets. I sometimes get a package with a whole chicken, but then I have to save them in the freezer until we make soup or something that uses them. And if people don’t remove the bag, bad things can happen. So it’s probably better to separate them.
Last time I checked you could get a sea container, full, from china to the US for $300 and I’m sure it’s cheaper now. (‘wholesale’ price) We import cast iron manhole covers from indian foundries. Cheaper to send a container of pig iron across the world than make it here- and some NIMBY about the foundry I’m sure.
When John Michael Greer was still writing his “Green Wizardry” blog the cheapness of global transportation was one of his common themes, and especially how its LACK would contribute to the (ongoing) collapse of the Western world.
n
Last time I checked you could get a sea container, full, from china to the US for $300 and I’m sure it’s cheaper now. (‘wholesale’ price) We import cast iron manhole covers from indian foundries. Cheaper to send a container of pig iron across the world than make it here- and some NIMBY about the foundry I’m sure.
The NIMBY chickens are coming home to roost instead of heading to the grocery store.
The last time I stopped in Tennessee to visit Lodge, you could smell the tension in the air over their foundry. You can forget about directions in town so make sure you turn on Google maps to find the store if you go. Considering the location and the geography, I’m sure that a lot of real estate interests have speculated about the possibility of yuppie vacation home developments up on the hills, overlooking the river … if someone would just give up the silly idea of making pots and pans from — ick! — cast iron.
OMG. Cast iron hanging from the rack of pots over the breakfast bar. Can you imagine?
Jokes aside, I believe Buc-ee’s is eying that stretch of 24 as one of their next store locations outside Texas.
“you could get a sea container, full, from china to the US for $300”
Yeah, that’s just insanely cheap. But there are a lot of bizarre things in the world of transport. We only ever had a brief look into it, with our whisky business, but a couple of things that come immediately to mind:
– Long-distance transport is generally cheaper than short-distance. In our case, it cost less to get a palette from Scotland to Switzerland than it did to get it the last few miles to us.
– You can get utterly different prices for the same service, depending on how you book. For us: booking the same shipment through a Scottish freight handler was massively cheaper than booking exactly the same service through a Swiss handler.
That last is true all over the place. Price an international round-trip flight ticket from X to Y. Now price the same trip, but from Y to X. The prices are different, even though the service is essentially identical. I knew someone who regularly flew between two cities for work. To take advantage of the price difference, they once booked a one-way flight, and ever afterwards booked round trips the wrong way around.
Just the latest version of house flipping, overleveraged suburbanites getting smacked down HARD….
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/holy-god-were-about-lose-everything-pandemic-crushes-overleveraged-airbnb
–question for the curious, how is an AirBNB “superhost” different from any other hospitality property owner, other than lack of regulation? –they’re not. just like Lyft and Uber, they found a way temporarily around the heavy regulatory structure of an established economic market. Note the issue of ‘scale’… and the difference between doing something “occasionally” vs. doing it as a business.
Leverage gets you eventually.
n
FEMA update–
@Ray Thompson: Fired teacher accuses Catholic school, Scranton Diocese of race-based discrimination
Excerpt:
The tail wags the dog.
The other thing we can’t buy any more, at least I never see them, is a cut up whole chicken. It’s either whole, or packaged pieces-parts. I’ve never seen chicken hearts offered like liver or gizzards. I will ask about them – the skewer sounds like fun. Our kids were always adventurous eaters, and so their children are as well. We love chicken livers. Talk about a cost-effective meal! A pound of them was still 85 cents last time I bought them in February. I have a beef heart in the freezer and am waiting for the right time to try cooking it… Paul found a recipe for making tacos al carbon with marinated heart that we may try.
I got more of my garden planted yesterday: melons, winter squash, some summer squash that I don’t have much hope for. Squash bugs are bad, but we have squash vine borers here, so this year I searched high and low for varieties of C. moschata, which are supposed to be resistant. We’ll see. The summer squash are targets, but I hope to get a few squash before the borers get to them. I want to try to pickle some baby patty-pans.
Cultivated and pulled a lot of grass and weeds. Put more bean seeds in place of the ones that didn’t come up , and more cucumber seeds in place of the little seedlings that have disappeared since I planted them on Monday. A couple of tomato plants have been killed, and the collards’ and tomatillos’ leaves are badly chewed. We had such a mild winter that the bugs are out in force this year. I usually don’t do much spraying in the garden, but this year, organic ain’t gonna cut it. I bought a variety of insecticides in early March when it first looked like something was going on with the virus, along with diatomaceous earth, so I need to go read the labels and figure out which one(s) I need now to protect the seedlings.
Considering I first put seeds out first week of March and of that which grew, even the lettuce is only at a “baby” size, it is a sobering lesson in the lead time needed to grow one’s own food.
My eggplant seeds – newly bought in March – have not germinated so I am going to have to buy plants. I am going to see if I can find seed from a different source too. Eggplants are a good low-carb food I can dehydrate and we like them cooked several different ways.
Buc-ee’s has purchased some land of I-40 in Crossville, TN. About 48.3 miles from where I live. When, or if, they are going to build is still up in the air.
Yes, I have been threatened by students saying their dad was going to come to my house to talk to me because I removed the student’s phone. I promptly told school administrators who informed the school resource officer who is a county deputy. The SRO stated they would handle the issue. I suspect a phone call was made as nothing every became of the issue.
I took one girl’s phone during class. She waited until the class was empty at the end of class and came up to me and stated “I will do anything you ask if you will give me my phone back”. I was holding the door open and promptly told her to leave the room, immediately. I also reported her comment to the school principal and what I had done. I don’t think anything became of that.
The strangest was when I was subbing for PE. A girl stated “I would rather be in MEC”, which is alternative school for kids with issues. I said, “No, you don’t want to go there”. She then said “What if I hit you? Will that get me in MEC?”. I told her no, that will get you put in jail and a lawsuit filed. She walked away. I told the school administrators what she had said.
The next day I am subbing again and I get called into the office. In the office are two people from the county office. They said they wanted to speak to me. I thought I was going to get reamed. They then asked exactly what the girl said and what I said. I told them. They said the issue was not me, but the girl and I had done exactly what should have been done. Two hours later the girl was removed from school and never returned. Simply asking the question “What if I hit you” was considered a threat against a teacher with bodily harm. Zero tolerance and the student was tossed.
The school system I work for really supports their teachers and especially the subs. The subs don’t have the benefit of being full time employees and are not protected by unions and other teacher groups. The school also needs subs, badly. The school also knows that the subs are for the most part retired and really don’t need the job and can (and will) quit if the school does not support the subs.
I’ve had success growing the Japanese eggplant from store bought plants. Grew and produced without any effort. But we don’t LIKE them, and I didn’t plant them a second year. Plus, actual cooking of the eggplant was a complicated and drawn out procedure. (compared to most fresh veg).
Last year I planted cukes and zukes in the same plot and I guess you shouldn’t do that, because I got mutant giant things that grew up into my citrus tree and were not tasty. Or maybe that was just me, but simpler to put them in different areas…
Gardening in most places has a learning curve. I see preppers all the time just buy seeds and think they were covered. The same thing happens with Baofeng ham radios, medical supplies, and sometimes even firearms, buy it, store it, and you’re covered. You’ll figure it out if you have to. Except that unless you intend to just eat your seeds, there is a lot of learning and time involved prior to getting anything useful.
Everyone should get started with at least a couple of plants in containers, if for no other benefit than to get used to watering, monitoring for growth and pests, and because fresh herbs or some peppers or tomatoes are yummy.
n
@Ray: Still worrisome. Would it be sensible for the school to have cameras in the classrooms?
That sort of “he says, she says” situation is unnerving. We have a lot fewer progs here, and even so, I try to never be alone in a room with a female student. I am generally happy to offer individual help after the lectures, but if it’s a woman, I try to make sure there are other students around. It’s a stupid situation. I’ve never had problems, but it only takes once…
This might turn into something worrying….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8267721/Three-children-U-S-develop-rare-inflammatory-syndrome-linked-coronavirus.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/uk-warns-doctors-about-mysterious-new-respiratory-syndrome-appearing-children
n
My brother-in-law got nailed by the system when he was a teacher. He was teaching a technology class, helping a female, in a full classroom. He put his hand on her hand while she was using the mouse so he could show her where, and how, to move the mouse. Her parents filed a complaint and initiated a lawsuit against my BIL and the school system for sexual harassment. The people filing the suit were low-lifes, on welfare, looking to game the system. The school forced my BIL to retire early with full benefits, the school system paid the parents a few thousand to make it go away. BIL is now unable to get a job in any school system and the scum bag parents got enough money for cigarettes for a year. What a system. Settlement was cheaper than litigation.
–question for the curious, how is an AirBNB “superhost” different from any other hospitality property owner, other than lack of regulation? –they’re not. just like Lyft and Uber, they found a way temporarily around the heavy regulatory structure of an established economic market. Note the issue of ‘scale’… and the difference between doing something “occasionally” vs. doing it as a business.
The banks lend the money. The Fed buys the paper. The superhost assumes all the risk.
The schools we deal with in Kalifornia now require a $1,000,000 sexual molestation clause on our liability insurance. It is so expensive our policy with The Hartford won’t do it. We have to get a separate company to insure us. $1,000’s a year just for Kali, since many other States aren’t as ridiculous.
“I believe Buc-ee’s is eying that stretch of 24 as one of their next store locations outside Texas”
Buc-ee’s has purchased some land of I-40 in Crossville, TN. About 48.3 miles from where I live. When, or if, they are going to build is still up in the air.
It is always about tax breaks with Buc-ee’s when they build the mega stores away from their core market of Houston.
The chain made a big deal about buying land in Florida a few years ago near the intersection of I-4 and I-95 in Daytona Beach, just north of the racetrack, but I don’t believe construction has even started.
The new Pensacola Buc-ee’s is technically located in Alabama, just across the border. My guess is that FL isn’t giving them something they want in terms of sales tax concessions.
Woodpile report is worth a read thru, nothing new to readers here but it’s all in one place.
http://www.woodpilereport.com/html/index-625.htm
n
@brad, there are legal reasons that there can’t be cameras in the classroom related to student privacy in the US. Teachers are also very anti-camera, as they don’t like being supervised or second guessed.
n
Saw in a news article that they have discovered airborne Covid 19 in Wuhan. Oh,boy
Child Inflammatory Syndrome… I wonder if there are multiple viruses circulating? There were results a couple of weeks ago that showed only 20% of those who thought they had covid, actually had covid.
There are multiple strains circulating, which is typical of an outbreak. The child infection could be riding along, or could be just another manifestation of the same virus.
What is currently worrying me, is the almost total lack of visibility into areas like Africa, india, and the other third world hellholes wrt spread of wuflu. Video and anecdotal evidence is that it is ramping up dramatically, but no one is counting…
n
I guess it doesn’t support the narrative: America Bad! Everybody Else Good!
They can test for COVID floating in the air, but we can’t get a swab test. Is Gates in charge of this or what?
@Pecancorner
The other thing we can’t buy any more, at least I never see them, is a cut up whole chicken.
Dismembering a whole chicken is a cinch, just takes a bit of practice and as Nick will agree, get a BUTCHER’S KNIFE.
(And a cleaver to split the breast)
I learned from a YouTube video with Jacques Pepin demonstrating the technique. I’m sure there are others.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xfDsNRXPKE8
Cinch=5 minutes or less.
In limited areas of the hospital, mainly toilet stalls with little air circulation. Not known if they found whole viruses or fragments.
The current tests are swab tests. A saliva test is in development.
My new hard drive came so I’ll probably put that in today if the weather remains wet. Hard to believe that 8TB of name brand and extra sturdy HD is only $220.
8 TB is yesterday’s yesterday’s technology. When I buy a new external backup drive for the office LAN backup fleet in June, I am going to buy a WD 12 TB external USB for $215. BTW, I would have sworn the other day that drive was $199.
https://www.amazon.com/12TB-Elements-Desktop-Drive-WDBWLG0120HBK-NESN/dp/B07X4V2M3B/?tag=ttgnet-20
I used to have a full height 20 MEGAbyte RLL drive. That thing sounded like a jet engine starting.
I picked it up for free 20 years ago and never used it for anything serious, I just liked the sound.
Freefall: space pirate equations
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3500/fc03428.htm
Being a space pirate requires detailed planning. And lots of fuel.
I used to have a full height 20 MEGAbyte RLL drive. That thing sounded like a jet engine starting.
I picked it up for free 20 years ago and never used it for anything serious, I just liked the sound.
I used to have a house refrigerator sized DEC Vax mini. It had a two speed 100 or 200 MB 8 ? 10 ? inch hard drive (cannot remember). You would flick the power switch and it would start going up in speed, get to 2,000 ??? rpm after 10 seconds or so. Then KA-CHUNK, shift to second gear, and start accelerating again. It would hit 3,600 ??? rpm after another 10 or 14 seconds. At first it was cool, then it was a pain.
I had to go to the Post Office today to make another attempt at shipping the defective calculator back to Switzerland, trying to be a decent human being. Last time. If it comes back to me, it will need a good home if anyone is interested in an HP16C clone and is up for trying to fix it. Paypal decided the dispute in my favor with shipping.
On the upside of the situation, I took the time to learn how to use my HP Prime well enough to nearly duplicate all of the functionality of the 16. The Prime was a birthday gift six months ago which I had planned to work on learning during downtime in New Orleans.
On my way back home, I stopped at HMart to get another 25 lbs of rice to top off our big storage bin. The parking lot was fairly deserted so I figured it was safe. Inside was a ghost town. OTOH, the Home Depot across the parking lot looked like Christmas at a 90s mall again. On a weekday. WTF?
Getting people back to work won’t be a matter of finding them jobs. The problem will be giving them the incentive.
I used to have a house refrigerator sized DEC Vax mini. It had a two speed 100 or 200 MB 8 ? 10 ? inch hard drive (cannot remember). You would flick the power switch and it would start going up in speed, get to 2,000 ??? rpm after 10 seconds or so. Then KA-CHUNK, shift to second gear, and start accelerating again. It would hit 3,600 ??? rpm after another 10 or 14 seconds. At first it was cool, then it was a pain.
We had those minis built into the GenRad in-circuit test equipment when I worked the assembly line at Jabil after college.
Old DEC and HP guys on the West Coast collect and restore that stuff if you still have it somewhere. Things left in a garage in Oregon or Washington don’t deteriorate significantly as long as the items can tolerate cold. Retro computing gear and pinball machines are not uncommon things to find in a garage/barn, especially around Portland where pinball was banned until … the 70s IIRC (?).
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/consolidated-meat-industry-was-no-match-pandemic-brazil-stands-ready-help
has a revealing map.
n
Now now, ech, you’re not feeding the hysteria. Please correct your thinking.
@lynn, I thought you learned a bad lesson gutting the drives from those cheap external drives. Can’t remember but you had a bunch of issues didn’t you?
I paid more for the surveillance version of the drive because it’s designed for 24/7 use, not 8/5 like a desktop drive, and is optimized for reading and writing video streams, with double the number of rated cycles.
Sun came out and (hopefully) dried up all the rain, so my not so itsy bitsy @ss is headed outside…
n
added- I’d bet that any drive in an external enclosure is rated for even fewer ops and less runtime, as typical usage would be intermittent backup…
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/consolidated-meat-industry-was-no-match-pandemic-brazil-stands-ready-help
has a revealing map.
McDonalds has been sourcing from Brazil for a long time. Australia too, a connection that Johnny Carson beat mercilessly for a few months near the end of his run when it slipped that a couple of dozen pounds of kangaroo meat slipped in with the beef.
“I walked over to McDonalds across the street from the studio before the show today, grabbed a Big Mac, ate it quickly, and hopped right back.”
My wife said that a lot of bacon was moving at Sam’s on Sunday when the media push for the shortage story began with the ad from Tyson in the New York Times. I guess the masses can microwave that stuff and not kill anyone.
I saw a funny meme about how a whole ready-to-eat rotisserie chicken is cheaper than a whole frozen uncooked chicken and that should scare the hell out of everyone. 🙂
That is the case with the Costco prepared chicken vs HEB whole fryers…
n
Just the latest version of house flipping, overleveraged suburbanites getting smacked down HARD….
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/holy-god-were-about-lose-everything-pandemic-crushes-overleveraged-airbnb
–question for the curious, how is an AirBNB “superhost” different from any other hospitality property owner, other than lack of regulation? –they’re not. just like Lyft and Uber, they found a way temporarily around the heavy regulatory structure of an established economic market. Note the issue of ‘scale’… and the difference between doing something “occasionally” vs. doing it as a business.
Leverage gets you eventually.
I hope not. My leverage was about 35% before this nightmare started. We own four properties at the moment, only one of them is income producing, the commercial property. We also own a piece of cleared land in my IRA, and two houses. But we made 40% profit on the commercial property last year and so far this year. We also have three more residential properties that the wife is managing for her father that are a pain in the butt even with the realtors doing the direct managing.
If we cannot sell the old house for a decent amount then I will rent it out. But yearly rentals, none of this AirBNB stuff, that is crazy hard to manage. I have been thinking about converting the five acre property into an open ustoreit but not until I retire in five to ten years.
I saw a funny meme about how a whole ready-to-eat rotisserie chicken is cheaper than a whole frozen uncooked chicken and that should scare the hell out of everyone.
It is deliberate. You have to walk all the way to the back of the store to get those most of the time unless the Costco is very old.
I don’t remember the chickens being too far back in the flagship store in Issaquah, behind their HQ. The snack bar was outside!
@lynn, I thought you learned a bad lesson gutting the drives from those cheap external drives. Can’t remember but you had a bunch of issues didn’t you?
Nah, I have shucked several of the external drives for internal backup drives. The biggest problem with external drives is that they use passive air cooling and get hot over long term. I would never use one for more than a day or so without converting it to an internal drive.
The problem is that my office computer is limited to 4 TB hard drives in its motherboard hardware. If I get a half day, I am going to build me a new pc from parts I have here so that I can put in a bigger backup drive. I keep on having to delete files off the internal 4 TB backup drive so that I have space for more files. I am a hamster on a wheel …
USAA said “One result of the COVID-19 pandemic is fewer drivers on the road and fewer accident claims, so we’re returning a portion of your premium to you. You will receive an auto policyholder dividend equal to 20% of two months of auto insurance premiums. There is no need to call or take any action. To keep it simple, the following amount will be credited to your next bill: $35.62”.
That’s nice. They didn’t have to do it. I think I’ll buy a brisket with my “refund”.
Mom’s account gained $1200 this morning. Nice. The nursing home called a few minutes ago to let me know she has a year to spend it. Huh? Is this money special and not part of the $2000 max in her account at the end of the month? No clue and I’m not going to worry.
I can offer a reason. The rotisserie chickens are “ready for the spit” other than washing and packed many in a plastic bag in a box. Maybe 24 birds.
Also, think loss leader…. buy a chicken and a bag of pre-made salad fixings, some pre-made potato salad from the Deli, sodas, beer…
The individual chickens have giblets and are individually wrapped in their somewhat vacuumed sealed bags.
I don’t buy rotisserie chickens because (a) I’ve yet to find one seasoned the way I want and (b) I do not like pink to red poultry.
Paul and I love Jacques Pepin. We have a couple of his cookbooks. My grandfather taught me how to cut up a chicken, and yep a cleaver is handy. Mostly it is just separating the joints. We cut them up a little different than the grocery stores did: separating the wish bone, so that the breast makes 3 or 4 pieces.
Isn’t that odd? I think the difference in weight has a lot to do with it, but those rotisserie chickens must be a huge draw to get people into the store! Plus they smell so good, right there at checkout in a lot of stores, they are probably a big impulse buy.
Yes it does. I’ve been gardening here off and on for several years but I still consider myself a newbie, and every year has some new surprise: success in some things, failure in others that previously did well.
Here’s a video from twitter, via Twitchy, of two Wisconsin cops haranguing a Mom for letting her kids play at another house. “but muh stay at home order” But is it law? LOLing at the female cop at the end when the mom refuses to give her last name “I’m marking you down as uncooperative.”
‘Totalitarian garbage’: Video shows officers giving Wisconsin mom a warning for allowing daughter to play at neighbor’s house during ‘stay at home’ order
Some years ago (on Daily Pundit) a chef mentioned he’d seen a Japanese chef bone a chicken ridiculously fast, under a minute or under two minutes or something, but the guy had to be drunk to do it. My comment that I’d have to be really really drunk to bone a chicken at any speed led eventually to the conclusion that the prefix “de-” was very important.
Lordy. Stretch puts Maxine Waters on Coronavirus review board. Is there anyone dumber than Waters in Congress?
Oh God, SteveF.
Kamala Harris?
Also, think loss leader…. buy a chicken and a bag of pre-made salad fixings, some pre-made potato salad from the Deli, sodas, beer…
Its definitely a loss leader at Costco. Above all else, Costco prizes cash flow, and the chickens are at the back of the store, usually forcing you to do a complete circuit in then out. Even if you don’t buy anything else, you still gave them $5 cash money and 15 minutes of your time.
A plain reading of “no law … abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble”, under the interpretation that the bill of rights also applies to the states, suggests that banning peaceable gatherings is prima facie illegal.
Of course, you can’t get through law school and certainly not onto a court bench without having plain readings and common sense beaten out of you.
Old DEC and HP guys on the West Coast collect and restore that stuff if you still have it somewhere.
It is long gone. I had one of the stripper guys come by and get it back in 1998 or so. I’ll bet it had a pound or two of gold in the connectors. The entire monster weighed 400 or 500 lbs. If it had fallen on anyone then it would have killed them.
I am trying to release version 16.04 of our software today. Maybe before the clock strikes midnight. I have gotten buy-in from the staff, “meh”, “whatever”, “no comment”.
A plain reading of “no law … abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble”, under the interpretation that the bill of rights also applies to the states, suggests that banning peaceable gatherings is prima facie illegal.
Of course, you can’t get through law school and certainly not onto a court bench without having plain readings and common sense beaten out of you.
As old Billy said, “Let’s kill all the lawyers”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers
This new legal concept has come into play that Constitutional rights may be “regulated”. Apparently we need more “regulations”.
We have had our rights curtailed before due to pandemic, “California lessons from the 1918 pandemic: San Francisco dithered; Los Angeles acted and saved lives”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-19/coronavirus-lessons-from-great-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic
Lordy. Stretch puts Maxine Waters on Coronavirus review board. Is there anyone dumber than Waters in Congress?
Can I nominate that piece of trash also from California, Adam Schiff ? You may know him by Trump’s favorite nickname for him, pencil neck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Schiff
ADD:
https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-cabin-fever/
Lordy. Stretch puts Maxine Waters on Coronavirus review board. Is there anyone dumber than Waters in Congress?
Impeachment 2.0 is coming. Maybe an October Surprise?
Of course, if the shortages continue while Congress plays that game, it could backfire on Stretch, with that video of her SubZero full of ice cream getting regular play in the districts of vulnerable members.
Impeachment 2.0 is coming. Maybe an October Surprise?
I rather doubt that the Senate will play the game again.
I wouldn’t be so sure. If it’s another impeachment, election fraud so blatant it’ll kick off a civil war, or Trump winning reelection, a couple more RINOs might play along. At it doesn’t matter if the Senate goes along with it. The impeachment is all that matters, and that’s up to the House.
The real question is how many Dem representatives will refuse to play along with the witch’s attempted coup. A bunch of them are in seats which aren’t quite so safe-looking as they were the last time they ran. And there’s a non-trivial chance that the witch won’t be speaker next year.
Possibly Shiela Jackson Lee from Houston.
In technical news, time for another Fedora upgrade since 30 will go end of life shortly.
I’ve been pretty happy with 31, but the 32 beta left a lot to be desired. Hopefully, the final release fixes the problems.
GCC 10. Already?
https://betanews.com/2020/04/28/fedora-32-linux/
Our website server was upgraded to version 12.1 of FreeBSD a couple of weeks ago. Seems to have a small load issue since then, I never see the load below 20% anymore.
We are contemplating trying to port our calculation engine to GFortran / GCC 9.3 in a couple of weeks. I have tried Intel Visual Fortran twice and run into critical bugs in it both times. We will use the version in Simply Fortran since it comes with a symbolic debugger. We are around 750,000 lines of F77 code with 10,000 lines of C and C++ code.
http://simplyfortran.com/
Is there anyone dumber than Waters in Congress?
Possibly Shiela Jackson Lee from Houston.
I second your nomination.
“Is there anyone dumber than Waters in Congress? ”
–Sheila Jackson Lee, hands down.
And who was the guy who thought Guam would turn over?
n
We are contemplating trying to port our calculation engine to GFortran / GCC 9.3 in a couple of weeks. I have tried Intel Visual Fortran twice and run into critical bugs in it both times. We will use the version in Simply Fortran since it comes with a symbolic debugger. We are around 750,000 lines of F77 code with 10,000 lines of C and C++ code.
I haven’t touched Fortran since my undergrad days.
Hopefully Simply Fortran wraps Mingw and that will leave you with a portable set of build files, making the intern’s job of the Linux port simpler.
And who was the guy who thought Guam would turn over?
That estimable gentleman would be Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA)
(If you’re in a hurry, FF to ~1:10 to hear him finally ask his question.)
One hopes he was joking; one fears he was not.
Our website server was upgraded to version 12.1 of FreeBSD a couple of weeks ago. Seems to have a small load issue since then, I never see the load below 20% anymore.
Isn’t your website a self-contained C++ program?
I’ve never done dev work on FreeBSD. If you can compile the server program on Linux, you could try dynamic analysis using Valgrind/Cachegrind. FreeBSD may have similar tools.
Just a wild a** guess, but select() works slightly differently on Windows vs. Unix flavors specifically with regard to the value left in the tm struct.
Our website server was upgraded to version 12.1 of FreeBSD a couple of weeks ago. Seems to have a small load issue since then, I never see the load below 20% anymore.
Isn’t your website a self-contained C++ program?
I’ve never done dev work on FreeBSD. If you can compile the server program on Linux, you could try dynamic analysis using Valgrind/Cachegrind. FreeBSD may have similar tools.
Just a wild a** guess, but select() works slightly differently on Windows vs. Unix flavors specifically with regard to the value left in the tm struct.
My website is a combination of static html and several C++ programs using flatfile databases. One of my databases is up to 300 MB, I really need to split it apart.
I don’t use select ();.
I haven’t touched Fortran since my undergrad days.
Hopefully Simply Fortran wraps Mingw and that will leave you with a portable set of build files, making the intern’s job of the Linux port simpler.
The calculation engine was ported to several Unix boxes (Sun, HP, Apollo, RS/6000) back in the 1980s and 1990s. It works just fine there.
The problem is our user interface. It was started in Windows 1.0 and has been ported upwards over the years. It is 100% C++ and extremely tied to Win32 (the Win16 to Win32 port was not that bad). Around 3,000 calls and callbacks to the Win32 API. I used Anders Hejlsberg’s Delphi library and ported it to C++ to write our custom Dialog class. Works well. Much better than the MFC CDialog class of which I used for our six modeless dialogs. Yup, I multiple inheritanced our Dialog class and CDialog together. It was fun, especially my custom event handler trying to figure out which dialog to send an event to. It never gets confused even if there are 5 or 6 dialogs up simultaneously.
Porting our user interface to anywhere but Windows will be a lot of work. I told my partners five programmers working five years each.
My website is a combination of static html and several C++ programs using flatfile databases. One of my databases is up to 300 MB, I really need to split it apart.
Berkeley DB?
I used Anders Hejlsberg’s Delphi library and ported it to C++ to write our custom Dialog class.
Geesh, its been almost 25 years since that limo pulled into the Borland parking lot.
“Mr. Hejlsberg? Bill Gates would like to buy you lunch. Your team can join us, of course.”
My kind of man!
Not sure what problems you’ve had, but if I can help, let me know…
The press is just ridiculous. Here, they’ve been complaining for weeks that the shutdown went to far. So now the government is relaxing a lot of the measures, allowing most businesses to re-open, etc.. So what does the press do? Accuse the government of being too lax, and not taking things seriously enough.
They’re going to get their clickbait headlines, no matter what.
Well, there is a lot of good competition, but…probably not. As far as I can tell from the times I’ve heard her speak, she’s a pretty extreme example of the left-hand side of the bell curve.
It’s not her fault, of course. There are dumb people and smart people, and she can’t help who she is. What one doesn’t understand is why people keep voting her into office.
“another attempt at shipping the defective calculator back to Switzerland”
Not sure what problems you’ve had, but if I can help, let me know…
I have the hang of the shipping now. I received a refund from PayPal. At this point, I’m trying hard to get the merchandise back to the vendor.
I remember talking with a friend 1 week ago, he sells erps and pos, made in delphi, and he is planning to move, I asked him why? because we have it since 2000 and bla, I said, who pays? silence, so, if it isnt broke, dont fix it, if the governement subsidizes you to upgrade, fine, if a customer wants something updated, fine, choose the Gates way, blame the hardware.
I know 32 vs 64 bits, memory usage, speed, blah, nicer interfaces, blah, more graphics, blah, less errors to debug in an local IRS change of rules, ok, but, who pays?, is there a business case?
My 2 cents (yes, I know, PHB at his best )