Fri. May 22, 2020 – yet another week gone with little to show for it

By on May 22nd, 2020 in decline and fall, ebola, personal, WuFlu

Hot, humid, maybe rainy.

No rain yesterday, but the air was damp enough for a sponge bath… and hot. 100F in the shade hot. Enough wind that I thought the storm would blow in for sure. Thank gnu for a bit of overcast.

I really didn’t get much done except birthday stuff for daughter 1. She had a good day. And that’s not a bad day for me.

I did the tiniest bit of garden weeding, and moving my protective screens around. Did I mention it was hot?

Yeah, it was ‘hide in the house’ hot.

I did get up before the alarm, with a little help from an excited 11yo. That makes three days in a row. Leaving aside my lack of work yesterday, I’m hopeful that my productivity will increase.

If it doesn’t rain, I’ll get the archery set up for daughter 1. I’m curious to see if I can hit anything!

Dinner was lamb rib chops (2019, from the freezer), and brusselsprouts saute’d with onion, bacon, and truffle oil. Dessert was birthday cake (2019,box from storage) with homemade butter cream frosting. The lamb chops are my “Heinlein” dinner. Wasn’t it him who said every man should have one really good meal they could make for company? The marinade and grilling are mine. I can do it for family, or dress it up and plate it restaurant style…

The world is definitely changing. Geopolitical shifts are happening. At home we’re in the middle (or more likely the beginning) of a major disruption. The rest of the world is too. Lots of places won’t have the money to feed themselves, let alone meddle in other countries affairs. That might include the US, by the way. I expect that we’ll be a long time getting back to “normal”, and really probably never will. We never got back to 1932 normal, did we? It’s been my contention for some time that we were headed into one of those periods where everything changes. Like pre-WWI and post-WWII. Like post-USSR vs the Cold War. Think about that and see if you agree, and if you do, how do you position yourself and your family to get through, and get set up for success? Or is it enough to survive?

I want to thrive.

nick

43 Comments and discussion on "Fri. May 22, 2020 – yet another week gone with little to show for it"

  1. Clayton W. says:

    I believe it was Heinlein. I’ve always thought of it as your ‘Date’ meal. Everyone should have at least one. And be able to cook well enough to feed yourself.

    And change a tire, jump-start a car, replace a light fixture, well, it goes on and on. Specialization is for insects!

  2. Harold Combs says:

    Woke to thunder shaking the house. Heavy rain moving off to the east pretty fast.
    Dinner last night was stir fry with Pillsbury French bread. Pretty good.
    This afternoon I am off to Memphis to pickup great granddaughter for her summer custody with us. 7 hr drive there, catch some rest at a holiday inn, then back home first thing Saturday morning.
    I managed to find one hole in the Coleman inflatable spa, patched it with ShoeGoo. The spa still deflated but much more slowly. I either botched the patch or there are other holes. I am betting on multiple leaks. More fun.

  3. Chad says:

    Wasn’t it him who said every man should have one really good meal they could make for company?

    Cooking for others intimidates the hell out of me. Cooking for my family in our home is no big deal, but cooking for company (even visiting relatives) is just a whole lot of anxiety for me. I have no idea why. I enjoy cooking immensely. When we have company in town and we start discussing dinner plans my wife will occasionally slip and suggest “we can do steaks on the grill” or something similar and I’ll shoot her a freaked-out look and she quickly changes it to “there’s this great local restaurant you guys HAVE to try.” 🙂

  4. Pecancorner says:

    Heinlein was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. That quote about Specialization used to hang above my desk when I worked at a desk. Now is on my own blog’s sidebar to be sure I see it regularly.

    Aldi’s has 5lb chubs of ground beef for $1.99 lb (or maybe $1.49 lb I’ve slept since then). I bought 2 packs, and cooked some of it that night. It is very good – very fresh, not a trace of gristle or bone in the batch we had. We have plenty of meat – I had to take pecans out of the freezer to make room – but ground beef is Paul’s favorite so I took advantage of the price.

    And in United it looks like the toilet paper shortage is over, and prices looked normal to me: Scott 1000 Sheets pack of 4 for $4.19 or so. We haven’t needed to buy any paper goods so I just looked out of curiosity.

  5. Nick Flandrey says:

    On the video call with the grandparents last night the subject of TP came up somehow… Oh, that it was worth a bunch of money/valuable these days… daughter volunteered that we use a lot and have a lot. Whelp, how much is a lot? A roll a day. Nervousness on the part of the other daughter and comments from the gparents… so I shut down everyone with the statement that we hadn’t bought TP since January, or possibly December, and were not going to need to buy any soon. We hadn’t even started on the backup supply. We have a backup? Of course—

    I like to eat, and I like Charmin.

    n

    (there was also some mention of bidets and alternative means… wife mentioned her FB group. Several of the ladies bought bidet toilet seats at the beginning of the isolation. Pretty forward thinking actually. I told her we had a garden sprayer if it came to that.)

  6. brad says:

    Despite not being the social types, we are getting well-integrated here. Finished working on a neighbor’s railings, with another neighbor whose normal job is in the construction industry. I was a decent side-kick, and learned a good bit from working with him. Meanwhile, another neighbor wedged the side of her car against a post in a parking garage, so we drove over and pulled her car sideways away from the post. It’s a very eclectic group of people in this village, which is just fine, because we’re certainly weird in our own way 🙂

  7. CowboySlim says:

    WRT programming, my last projects, about 20 years ago, involved analytical number -crunching with MS Exel, Access, and Word using MS VBA. The outputs were used for rocket launches, pre-flight activities. Guess I made no mistakes, the GPS receivers in your SUVs work OK, don’t they?

  8. Greg Norton says:

    On the video call with the grandparents last night the subject of TP came up somehow… Oh, that it was worth a bunch of money/valuable these days… daughter volunteered that we use a lot and have a lot.

    People are still weird about TP. It seems like any time we stop at Sam’s every cart going out the door has a bulk pack of Members Mark or something better if available.

    I thought I saw that WalMart had a blowout quarter. Cash flow is king for the warehouse clubs.

    Finally got a haircut yesterday. It was going on 10 weeks.

    Today’s outing is the Post Office to mail an EBay dispute return. Prepaid — I always offer to eat the cost of the return shipping outside of the arbitration process — but the box is kinda big so I don’t want to take the risk that the package drop is jammed. Someone needed $50 more than I did to the point that they went to the mat with the disagreement, and I’ve seen that with increasing frequency even pre-virus. Return addresses in Google Maps Street View never fail to speak volumes.

    As I noted last week, the EBay customer service pendulum has swung back in favor of sellers. I’ve been warned that I’m in jeopardy of having my account temporarily deactivated as an “abusive” buyer. It wouldn’t be a huge loss, but I gotta wonder about EBay’s longevity at this point if they’re protecting the junk sellers. I’ve only lost one dispute over the last five years, and PayPal provided the refund.

  9. Nick Flandrey says:

    I enjoy cooking for the family and guests. I actually have several things I’m pretty confident serving to guests, but the lamb chops dress up to “date night restaurant” pretty easily and they’re not something most people would eat every day.

    I’d like to try more new recipes, especially to use things in new ways, but the kids aren’t adventurous eaters, and I usually just fall back on the tried and true. And simple. I’ve gotten rid of cookbooks that were too fussy- anything by Williams Sonoma for example.

    Despite the collection of cookbooks, I’ll often hit allrecipes.com for something quick. The recipes there are usually simple, direct, and easy to succeed with. If it works especially well, the printed recipe goes in the family recipe folder for later. Nothing goes in that folder without being tried, annotated, and approved. My MIL is one who cuts recipes from magazines because they “look tasty”. She probably has flip top crates full of clippings, but almost never cooks anything.

    I will say that I can read thru a recipe and if I’m familiar with the ingredients, I can have a fair idea of how it should taste. That comes from tasting lots of food, and knowing the stuff that goes into it. (which is a lot of fun in and of itself)

    n

  10. Harold Combs says:

    People are still weird about TP.

    I recently emptied one 24 pack of TP to replenish the 3 bathrooms. The Wife and I don’t use all that much. I immediately thought about running to Walmart to refill the empty space, then I looked around and realized we easily have 6 months supply left and the urge left me.

  11. Greg Norton says:

    I guess this clears things up about the attitude of the local law enforcement towards anyone showing up to watch next week’s launch from the causeways around the Kennedy Space Center. Two words: outdoor event.

    https://www.space.com/spacex-demo2-launch-attendance-coronavirus-impacts.html

  12. Pecancorner says:

    I immediately thought about running to Walmart to refill the empty space, then I looked around and realized we easily have 6 months supply left and the urge left me.

    HaHa! That’s us. I’ll wait for another 20% off coupon from Big Lots, and replenish then!

  13. dkreck says:

    Walmart NM trip at 7am. Almost no one there yet. Short on TP, PT and beef but some of all three if not much to choose from. Did get one 6 mega-roll of Cottonelle Ultra. I find most major brands including Great Value, good enough as long as you get the premium one. Six pack of paper towels too, normal size, I don’t like the really oversized as they are often too big for some holders. One ab liquid soap but got a large Palmolive AB dish soap to give daughter as she washes the bottles for the new grandson. No beef other than hamburger.
    Everything else except no Bisquick brand but just bought store brand. Lots of strawberries so shortcake coming up. Also lots of apricots from tree at mom’s house so a cobbler tonight. Many here don’t eat it so the few of us that do will have the treat. Mom’s gone and I will probablyget around to selling her house soon so that will be the last of that unless I get them from someone. Commercial ones usually have no flavor.
    Lastly remeber what Monday is and what it means.

  14. lynn says:

    Lynn: What I don’t understand (but I haven’t programmed Fortran 77 since – geez – since the early 1980s): why do you want zero as the result of a division by zero? That is a manifestly wrong result, and I assume that you have to catch it somewhere else (if result is zero, then…). Floating point math on the processor supports the result “infinity”, which is the normal result of a floating point division by zero. Does Fortran 77 not support this?

    Anyhow, converting a huge program to a new language, or even to a newer edition of the existing language: Horror. Been there, done that, but it really is horrible. And the automatic conversion tools never do more than the obvious 90%, leaving you with the worst 10% to handle manually. It’s frankly almost easier to rewrite from scratch, using the old program as a specification and basis for testing. Of course, I’m sure you have the time and resources to write a new million-line program…

    In my experience, zeros dont propagate but infs do. Our software is trained XXXXXX written to treat a zero as a initial value and try to make it better down the way. There are special steps to put in a better value than a zero and move forward. On the contrary, once a variable has been assigned an inf, it is dadgum hard to get that inf out of there.

    Oh yes, converting from one software language to another is hard. Dadgum hard. Will probably never happen for us just due to the bugs. I am going to try another Fortran / C / C++ compiler though. Simply Fortran incorporates the GCC and GPP compilers along with the GFortran compiler which is a total rewrite from scratch starting about ten years . They have a world class debugger that they kinda borrowed from the Open Watcom project. BTW, I know two of the Gfortran developers and correspond with them occasionally.
    http://simplyfortran.com/

    BTW, my experience on the software language conversion tools is 80% conversion rate at best. Including the tool that I wrote from Smalltalk to C++. There is an exception to that rule and it is the old Unix F77 compiler which converted F77 code to C code and then compiled it. I never saw the F77 tool fail, never. We used it on several Unix boxes and always got a good build from it with 100% conversion. But the produced C code is total crap for readability with pointers all over the place, etc, etc, etc.

  15. lynn says:

    @Greg, Tesla may be moving to Oklahoma, “Report: Texas-size rivalry for Tesla’s Cybertruck factory heats up”

    Didn’t the Perot family build a bunch of infrastructure up there somewhere to take advantage of the Trans Texas Corridor? Rail would be critical to getting a factory up and running quickly, doing final assembly at first, and I remember the proposed TTC scheme 20 years ago was to haul import containers from Mexican seaports into Oklahoma and do customs clearing there before the goods spread out across the country on trucks and other train routes.

    Austin has a lot of geographical limitations, but Tulsa lacks the bacchanalia. 6th Street reopens this weekend. I wonder if the drunk tank -er- sobering center will have social distancing on the cots.

    Didn’t the first transcontinental railroad run through Tulsa or the Chisolm trail run through Tulsa to the railroad ? One of my great-great grandfathers ran cattle up the Chisolm trail from south Texas to the railroad after the Civil War to 1900. He made a boatload of money being the trailboss and ended up buying an 8,000 acre ranch 30 miles southwest of where I am now sitting.

    Anyway, plenty of transport for Tesla in Tulsa. And lots of skilled workers in the oilfields up there. And if Tesla relocates to Austin, they still cannot directly sell cars in Texas. But if they relocate to Tulsa, they sure can sell cars from Tulsa to Texas.

  16. lynn says:

    Over The Hedge: George is mowing again
    https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2020/05/22

    Yup, humans can’t handle the truth.

    I wonder what he does with the money ?

  17. lynn says:

    Swan Eaters: Helping the Nazis
    https://www.gocomics.com/swan-eaters/2020/05/22

    Ok, this is going in a different direction than I thought.

  18. lynn says:

    A Girl and Her Fed: The Presidential Negotiating Room of 2030
    https://www.agirlandherfed.com/1.1765.html

    Heh.

  19. lynn says:

    From BH in the Fort Bend Journal:

    “We would like to take a moment of silence for all the bartenders who are going back to work and will have to hear “I’ll take a Corona please, hold the virus.” joke repeated over and over and over and over …”

  20. MrAtoz says:

    I guess this clears things up about the attitude of the local law enforcement towards anyone showing up to watch next week’s launch from the causeways around the Kennedy Space Center. Two words: outdoor event.

    Perhaps NASA wants to cut down on all the cameras that record a potential fcuk up of a launch. You know that’s why half the people show up at launches.

  21. lynn says:

    As I noted last week, the EBay customer service pendulum has swung back in favor of sellers. I’ve been warned that I’m in jeopardy of having my account temporarily deactivated as an “abusive” buyer. It wouldn’t be a huge loss, but I gotta wonder about EBay’s longevity at this point if they’re protecting the junk sellers. I’ve only lost one dispute over the last five years, and PayPal provided the refund.

    My dad bought my daughter a Playstation 4 for her birthday from a New York outfit. The P4 was shipped from Hong Kong which was the first sign. The P4 that we got was for Hong Kong, the Asia region version. Wrong electric cord, wrong BIOS, etc, etc, etc. I am wondering if my dad can get his money back because it supposedly will not be upgradable or usable to play with others across the net outside the Asia region.
    https://www.quora.com/Is-PlayStation-4-region-free

  22. Greg Norton says:

    Anyway, plenty of transport for Tesla in Tulsa. And lots of skilled workers in the oilfields up there. And if Tesla relocates to Austin, they still cannot directly sell cars in Texas. But if they relocate to Tulsa, they sure can sell cars from Tulsa to Texas.

    Isn’t Tulsa closer to Dallas time-wise than Austin? In terms of distance, it might be farther, but driving from Austin to Dallas means dealing with Temple and Waco traffic.

    The other contender for Tesla’s plant I’ve seen stories about lately is Nashville.

    I see both the pros and cons of the auto dealer requirement. I don’t expect the situation in Texas to change anytime soon.

    Tesla could always run a high-end rental at Austin-Bergstrom airport if they put a plant here. There is definitely a market between tech business travel and the semi-annual events where Austin pretends to have real culture beyond getting a drink on. Some high end car rental service already provide Teslas, and Audi owns the Silvercar service outright, providing their own vehicles.

    The EV snobs definitely like to virtue signal even when on the road. I know car carrier services shuttle the cars out from the Valley in two days for really well-off business travelers flying into Austin.

  23. lynn says:

    “In contentious interview, Biden says black voters considering Trump over him “ain’t black””
    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-black-voters-considering-trump/

    Wow, just when I thought Uncle Joe could not get any creepier, he crosses that line and then some.

    Hat tip to:
    http://drudgereport.com/

  24. lynn says:

    “I’m Not Paying Any Attention to Any Polls” by Rush Limbaugh
    https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/05/21/im-not-paying-any-attention-to-any-polls/

    “If the news is negative about Republicans losing the Senate, I immediately ignore it and go (raspberry) ’cause it ain’t happening. If there’s a story about Biden beating Trump by 11, I go (raspberry) ’cause it’s BS; it isn’t happening. Trump is not losing the election, and we’re not losing the Senate, and we may win the House.”

    “All of this in the Drive-By Media is BS! Whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are threatening or promising is BS. There’s not a shred of truth in the Drive-By Media. There’s not a shred of truth in all these polls. The polls can’t possibly be accurate. Ignore them! The things that are gonna the outcome of the election in November haven’t even happened yet.”

    There is only one poll that matters and it will be on the first Tuesday in November.

    Speaking of voter fraud, a dumbocrat admitted to ballot box stuffing in Philly yesterday. For $5,000, he would guarantee you win his precinct. “South Philly judge of elections admits he took bribes to stuff the ballot box for Democratic candidates”
    https://www.inquirer.com/news/voter-fraud-philadelphia-ward-leader-judge-of-elections-domenick-demuro-guilty-plea-20200521.html

  25. MrAtoz says:

    Wow, just when I thought Uncle Joe could not get any creepier, he crosses that line and then some.

    lol. Biden gets the “Dancing Pallbearer” Meme.

  26. Greg Norton says:

    My dad bought my daughter a Playstation 4 for her birthday from a New York outfit. The P4 was shipped from Hong Kong which was the first sign. The P4 that we got was for Hong Kong, the Asia region version. Wrong electric cord, wrong BIOS, etc, etc, etc. I am wondering if my dad can get his money back because it supposedly will not be upgradable or usable to play with others across the net outside the Asia region.

    If it was purchased through EBay and/or PayPal, there are dispute processes.

    Are PS4 units in short supply at Best Buy or Tar-jay? I know Nintendo Switch is unobtainium right now unless you want the low end unit, but 1 TB PS4 consoles should be readily available.

    If all else fails, hardcore gamers into Asian titles might be willing to buy the console. Or individuals into BluRay tentacle pr0n.

  27. lynn says:

    “One good thing: Americans got to test drive socialism”
    https://freepressers.com/articles/1-good-thing-americans-got-to-sample-socialism-up-close-and-personal

    “In September of 2019, President Donald Trump went before the UN General Assembly and told representatives of member states that socialism is “a destroyer of societies” and is “one of the most serious challenges the world faces”. Since most of the UN member states are led by tin-horn dictators, communists and strong arm regimes, it had to be unsettling and unnerving for them.

    “”America will never be a socialist country,” said Trump who added “socialism is just power for the ruling class” and reminded those totalitarians that it was “socialism and communism” that was responsible for over 100-million deaths due to executions, starvation and poverty. Another swig of Pepto-Bismol.”

    “Trump may well be the first president to make socialism a campaign issue. He vowed several times during his campaign rallies that America will never be a socialist country under his watch.”

    “That brings us to the “silver lining” as we suffer through this coronavirus pandemic. The lockdowns, panic-buying, empty store shelves, travel restrictions, factory closures, bankruptcies, suspension of medical procedures, threatened arrests and fines for disobeying dubious executive orders by politicians have given us a taste of socialism we could have never predicted here in America.”

  28. Greg Norton says:

    There is only one poll that matters and it will be on the first Tuesday in November.

    Early voting and “no excuse absentee” mail in ballots in TX will turn the election into a month-long event.

  29. lynn says:

    If it was purchased through EBay and/or PayPal, there are dispute processes.

    Are PS4 units in short supply at Best Buy or Tar-jay? I know Nintendo Switch is unobtainium right now unless you want the low end unit, but 1 TB PS4 consoles should be readily available.

    All I know is that he bought the PS4 from some outfit in NYC.

    I know that the PS5 is coming out soon so the PS4 is in short supply at some places.

  30. paul says:

    Once upon a time Firefox had the option to disable web sites from re-sizing the window. So I did. It broke a couple of bookmarklets. I can’t find that setting and I want to change it.

    Because my on-board video card is a PITA. If I have windows open, even minimized, if the PC goes to sleep when I wake it, all windows are cascaded at what looks like 800×600 from the upper left corner.

    I like the taskbar at the top of the screen. Where it belongs. At least the windows are bumped below that.

    Resizing everything is a bother. I have a javascript bookmark that once worked. ( javascript:void(top.resizeTo(806,726)); ) for window size and another for align to nearest side
    ( javascript:Ve8rC=screen.availHeight-screenY;H9mP3=screen.availWidth-screenX;if(Math.abs(t47b=(screenX+outerWidth>H9mP3)?H9mP3-outerWidth:-screenX)Ve8rC)?Ve8rC-outerHeight:-screenY)){moveBy(t47b,0)}else{moveBy(0,tAq6N)} )

    ( and ) added.

    Neither work. And have not for a few years.

    Google may be helping but articles about Firefox 23 or so are about 7 years out of date.

    I just want a little bookmark I can put on the toolbar to resize and move the browser window where I want. Just a “click and done” thing.

    I could stuff in an add-on video card but the onboard Intel stuff works pretty good.

  31. paul says:

    Went to Dairy Queen today. They installed a couple of TVs several months ago. Today they were turned on. Some silly show that makes Judge Judy look real. Oh, Hisense TVs and my phone does infra red. Clicky click and I turned the loudest TV off. Grin. I love my phone.

    We were the only folks in the joint. Seems odd to that they ask “for here or to go” and it comes in a to-go bag. Oh, hey, can we have some ketchup? Sheesh, everything on a tray extended at arm’s length.

    Then to HEB. Masks “advised”. Six feet spacing. Whatever. Folks are fondling the merchandise anyway. Soups were thin, everything else looked almost normal. Lots and lots of stuff is missing. Almond nut spread is not normally 16 jars wide on the shelf.
    Check out is a cluster and not fun as how I hear orgies are.

    Then to Wal-Mart. Can’t take a cart that was just shoved in from the sunny parking lot, have to use one she just sprayed and swabbed the handle of. With what? Something slimy and gooey. So I pulled the cart. Arrows all over. Most folks are ignoring the arrows. My flavor of beer is out. My flavor of toothpaste was in stock for a change. Bought coffee and looked at the batteries.

    Oh. I tried to get a spare key made for the stupid van. Nope. It’s some kind of liability thing if they make a chipless key for a car that uses a chipped key. What? I just want a key to unlock the door for the eventual moron moment when I lock the keys in the car. Just a key, to open the door, scrape off the plastic and mount behind a license plate screw.

    Am I getting crabby or are folks turning into feeble minded wimps?

  32. lynn says:

    Then to HEB. Masks “advised”. Six feet spacing. Whatever. Folks are fondling the merchandise anyway. Soups were thin, everything else looked almost normal. Lots and lots of stuff is missing. Almond nut spread is not normally 16 jars wide on the shelf.

    Yup, lots of weird stuff missing that was there a month ago when HEB restocked. I could not find my daughters EZ Mac single serving there Wednesday.

    Yeek ! I am allergic to almonds, you can have ALL of that almond stuff.

    I have told the wife if she wants anything to buy five of it because people are still stocking up.

  33. Nick Flandrey says:

    I went out today to do two auction pickups. I won a Thermidor cooktop. Needs a little elbow grease to look purdy, but I’ll do that… ~$150 for a cooktop that originally cost over 4k? I want a gas cooker and now I’ve got one. I’ll just add it to the list of projects.

    The other sale was for my non-prepping hobby. Something I’ve wanted for a long time. I’ll have to sell something similar to pay for it, probably.

    The went to my secondary location and did some cleaning and organizing. Brought some stuff home for the garage re-organization project.

    Traffic was light. Very light for a Friday afternoon. There were two major crashes though. One on 610 and another on I 10. That made the driving a lot more of a pain. Lots of detouring through the ghetto south of the Astrodome. Lots of people just ‘hanging around’ in those neighborhoods.

    I saw plenty of people with no masks or gloves but they were outnumbered by people wearing one or both. Costco isn’t disinfecting gas pump handles or keypads between customers any more. There were people in line to get into Best Buy, standing 6 ft apart in 100F heat. I can’t think what I’d want from Best Buy that would make me wait in line.

    n

  34. lynn says:

    If you’ve just used your last ICBM, you have bigger worries than a divide-by-zero.

    If you have used any ICBMs, you have bigger worries than a divide-by-zero.

    Fixed that for ya.

  35. Greg Noton says:

    “Then to HEB. Masks “advised”. Six feet spacing. Whatever. Folks are fondling the merchandise anyway. Soups were thin, everything else looked almost normal. Lots and lots of stuff is missing. Almond nut spread is not normally 16 jars wide on the shelf.”

    Yup, lots of weird stuff missing that was there a month ago when HEB restocked. I could not find my daughters EZ Mac single serving there Wednesday.

    Certain categories of canned goods are unobtainium around here, especially smaller quantities of vegetables and quick serve foods … well, except Wolf Brand Chili or, strangely, SpaghettiOs.

    Who knows what’s going on. Costco has plenty of Spam, and that was nonexistent just a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if people are stocking up or someone is plotting arbitrage.

  36. lynn says:

    Who knows what’s going on. Costco has plenty of Spam, and that was nonexistent just a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if people are stocking up or someone is plotting arbitrage.

    People are listening to @Nick and stacking food and water high.

    The MSM is talking about a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th waves going through the next two years. People don’t know who to trust so they are spending their disposable income and stacking it high.

    If you think Walmart and Big River (Amazon) had awesome first quarters, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The amount of canned food moving through my HEB is simply amazing. I suspect that it is 2X that in the average 2019 period.

    What happens when the warehouses run out of long term food ?

  37. Robert V Sprowl says:

    If you have used any ICBMs, you have bigger worries than a divide-by-zero.

    We were mostly calculating unit readiness rates. A plane or missile would be unavailable to due to routine preventive maintenance. For the missiles it often was the silo (supporting infrastructure) or high winds which in the first few seconds of launch could push some missiles sideways.

  38. lynn says:

    I am bingeing the third season of “The Expanse” on Amazon Prime. It is awesome as were the first two seasons.
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/

  39. Harold Combs says:

    Stopped by CVS to get some eyewash for the wife. In the discount bin by the register they had LOTS of surgical style masks marked 50% off and literal cases of hand sanitizer at $0.75 each. My liberal friends in California are still telling me that they can’t get either of these items because the president, Orange Man Bad. I snapped a photo to post and advised them to run by CVS when their governor let’s the free.

  40. Nick Flandrey says:

    I think not being able to get stuff when they wanted it, after being able to order just about anything at any time, shocked some people. The change is going to stick with them for a while.

    There are a lot of stay at home moms in our area who had very high achiever jobs before taking the mommy track. They are looking around and applying their quite formidable intellects and DRIVE to supporting their families thru this. I know there is a lot of scorn for the grasshoppers, but just like a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, a prepper might be someone who got caught short and didn’t like the feeling…

    I’d be willing to bet that this is at least part of it.

    n

  41. lynn says:

    I think not being able to get stuff when they wanted it, after being able to order just about anything at any time, shocked some people. The change is going to stick with them for a while.

    The USA is very wealthy nation where the average person has disposable income. I agree, I think the average person is making sure that they have stuff for the immediate future.

    I am wondering how much of the latest long term food, mostly canned food, came out of warehouses and how much was made from agricultural stocks. I’ll bet that most of the long term food is coming out of the warehouses.

  42. Nick Flandrey says:

    You’re worried about drawing down existing stocks and not being able to replenish them. There are lots of reasons why too.

    -last summer’s flooding
    -heavier than average hurricane season
    -fewer illegals to pick the crop
    -record low sunspot activity and global cooling
    -reduced staff at processors
    -price deflation
    -disruption to global supply chains
    -disruptions to exporting countries
    -massive collapse in shipping capacity

    Pick your justification scenario, and then pick up a few extra cases…

    n

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