Cool and humid, but less chance of rain according to the national forecast. Was 64F when I went to bed. Wednesday was mostly overcast, except for a bit in the NW Houston area.
Did some stuff in the morning, sorting ebay, local auction, and stocking stuffers, then headed out. Stopped by my buddy’s store to drop off something he needed. Several people in buying, one actually looking at long gubs on the rack. Then headed out to my client’s house.
Got everything on the network, finally. Found one bad connection and a couple of mis-labeled cat cables. When you’ve got a six foot air gap, it’s safe to say that run isn’t ever going to work…
Partner’s remote access mostly works, but I’ve got to add a couple more ports to the forwarding. That will be later today.
Early today, I’ve got the annual fang polishing. Hopefully no new holes in my head. One tooth is more sensitive than usual, and it’s been an ‘almost an issue’ for a long time. Might be that it’s moved into the ‘has a problem that needs fixing’ category.
Naturally this is the one day in the semester that D1 has to be physically present at school in the morning for a standardized test. (normally mornings at her school are all ‘electives’ and aren’t really classes, so it doesn’t matter if you are absent.) I’ll be shuttling back and forth, but she’ll have to deal with me and my appointments before getting back.
One of my morning stops is my local auctioneer. Time to do some settling up, and talk about the next one. Hope he’s still willing. I don’t think it will be until the new year though. The leftovers and pieces my other auctioneer is running this week are starting to get bids. The vintage lindsey matchbox cars are doing well so far. The pokemon cards (that were never paid for last time) are getting bids too.
It’s mostly smalls, but every bit helps.
So I’m off, gotta see the ‘tooth doctor for kids’* and to make way for stacking all the things.
n
*yes, actual sign on a building by my secondary. How far we’ve fallen, but plenty left to go, after all, we still HAVE pediatric dentists.
He's not sorry he did it that way. He's sorry he got caught.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59573146
70F and saturated this morning. Did not catch up on sleep. Still feel wiped.
No rest for the weary, no peace for the wicked. I'm not getting any either.
n
zoom guy, narcissistic personality disorder coupled with sociopathy. And by "mortgage company" do they mean predatory lender, with boiler rooms full of people cold calling?
Official range numbers from Ford are 230 to 300 miles unloaded, depending on your battery pack, with the usual 45 minute wait for an 80% charge at a supercharger. The general consensus among the car "journalists" puts the battery at 115-155 kWh net.
Of course, as they say, YMMV, and the “range extender” option (cough … engine … cough) certainly does change the numbers.
I will give the auto writers credit for being honest — unlike how they are about Tonymobiles — but the press is still "burying the lede" to fit the agenda and sell magazines.
The estate was not small by my measure. Others may see otherwise as I am not a financially high on the food chain person. The benefit of this estate is that it is all cash, checking, certificates, a couple of IRA's. Nothing complicated such as having real estate. The reporting of taxable amounts to the IRS is the responsibility of the reporting company. When the 1099's roll in that will determine what entity gets taxed.
I did look over the IRS 1041 form. That is mostly to report dividends and adjustments to the income. Not too complicated. When a person is dead, and an estate account is set up, that tends to limit income opportunities, medical deductions, etc. All that is reported under the person's SSN before the person passed.
The only questionable item is the $19 something in RMD that needs to be reported. I am hoping there is a form that will be sent from the investment firm. If not, and I can't figure out where to report it, I will just leave. In a couple of years the IRS will find it, send me a bill for $30.00 with interest and penalties, and I will just pay the amount.
So 2×45 minutes to charge to go 2×240 miles, which is a10 minute fillup for gas.
6 hours at 80mph becomes 65mph net.
The obvious solution is “Drive 95”. I’ll have to file the IP for the bumper sticker.
That may get 120 miles towing a trailer, maybe. A trailer is a big load. Mileage on my F-150 highway mileage drops from 22 mpg to 10 mpg when I tow my trailer. Talking to others that is about what they experience. Lot of weight to get moving, lot of wind drag.
Fuck Joe Biden!
Assuming a supercharger slot is available when you arrive at the station.
The “You can enjoy a coffee” benefit that is always stuck in the auto “journalists” stories about the EV future is lost on me. Maybe in Europe, but that’s not how work gets done in America.
Good article on Fuher FauXi by Ann Coulter today. FauXi has to go.
Better.com is an originator, an easy line of business when the Fed buys all of the paper. The US mortgage market hasn’t lived in reality in about 20 years.
The fire-by-Zoom guy has an interesting history if you dig into it.
Ray, by small I just meant as a justification for CPA fees.
My family never discussed income or worth, and I never want to know that about anyone else. Content of character is much more important than thickness of wallet, to butcher a phrase.
Range and stops. When I was young, I drove on a lot of trips. One frequent route was 540 miles, almost all Interstate. I made one gas stop, which sometimes included a bathroom visit. Ten minutes by my watch. I could routinely average 70 mph in dry weather without going much faster than that. Never had any traffic.
I can't imagine an electric car in that scenario.
Oh, the plethora of obvious responses…
"Obviously you haven't been in the dating market in quite a while."
"Today, the color of your skin is more important than the content of your character."
@stevef:
Indeed. I consider myself lucky that SWMBO has been willing to put up with me for 40 years.
Ghod, is it really that long?
G.
How time slips away when you’re having fun.
My wife used to believe that kind of thing was true of her family untill her father passed and the dirtbag relations sold us out to his girlfriend for ~ $22,000 total.
The really funny part is that we know the number because, through a quirk in the bank's systems, we received the cancelled checks used to buy off all of the relatives!
Hilarity ensued.
Ray, even though the estate might be small, please consider hiring a CPA. In my experience, the good ones don't think like us, and seem to be able to cope with all the complex regulations with ease. It might not seem cost effective, but you could save yourself a lot of grief.
My wife hired a CPA from our church to help her out with her Dad's estate. He is a friend that we go out to Sunday lunch occasionally with since his wife passed away a couple of years ago. The first estate tax filing was not bad (Sep 13 to Dec 31, 2020). This next one will be bad since she has been selling stuff.
"Is It Safe to Eat Raw Cookie Dough?"
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/blog/articles/2021/nov/is-it-safe-to-eat-raw-cookie-dough/
I don't care, if the wife is making her famous Christmas cookies then I will sneak in and grab me a handful of raw cookie dough. If I don't get caught then I will sneak in and do it again.
When the son was in Iraq during 2006 – 2007, the wife made 300 Christmas cookies with icing and put them in ziploc bags, 3 to a bag for easy sharing. She mailed it in early November to his designated mailpost in California which got to his battalion just before Christmas.
We were mailing stuff to him almost every day so he and his platoon eagerly awaited to see if he was getting food, socks, comics books, or a DVD or something else. He told me later that only half of the guys were getting boxes at all so he felt that he had to share the wealth, especially with the guys who did not get anything.
He told us that he opened the box of Christmas cookies and his fellow Marines went nuts when they saw the 300+ Christmas cookies. They mobbed him and got about half of the cookies. He managed to get the rest of the cookies into his lock box. He would then carefully share the cookies around, trying to get them to last for a month. He went into his hootch one day and caught one of his fellow Marines trying to jimmy the lock ! They were eating MREs almost every day and would do anything to vary the taste.
"In need of a baby boom, China clamps down on vasectomies"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-need-of-a-baby-boom-china-clamps-down-on-vasectomies/ar-AARDlgL
Wow, that has really changed in China. I guess that they are now regretting the single child policy.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
Get stuffed.
You know what they don’t seem to be providing? Information on the prevalence of salmonella in raw eggs. They put hundreds of words into scaring you about the diiiiire potential consequences of salmonella poisoning — Stomach cramps! Anything but that! — but nothing on how likely you are to get it.
The numbers are very hard to ferret out, at least for ordinary people using ordinary search engines. What I can tell you is that, 20 years or so ago, the numbers showed that about one out of 20,000 chicken eggs from commercial producers had detectable salmonella. If you eat an egg with “detectable” salmonella, the odds were something like 1:100 that you would suffer any health effects. If you had any health effects, it was something like 1:10 that they’d be worse than gastrointestinal distress for 12 hours. The odds of death were very low. (I remember the 1:20,000 number but the others are only somewhere in the neighborhood of the reported numbers.)
Bottom line, go ahead and eat the cookie dough. The undead nannies at the CDC can get stuffed.
But just keep on trusting Democrats and other Communists when they want to centrally plan the economy. That works every time it's tried, right?
Official range numbers from Ford are 230 to 300 miles unloaded, depending on your battery pack, with the usual 45 minute wait for an 80% charge at a supercharger. The general consensus among the car "journalists" puts the battery at 115-155 kWh net.
Of course, as they say, YMMV, and the “range extender” option (cough … engine … cough) certainly does change the numbers.
I will give the auto writers credit for being honest — unlike how they are about Tonymobiles — but the press is still "burying the lede" to fit the agenda and sell magazines.
Yup, I put the number that I require for an all electric truck at 300 kwh battery (or two 130 kwh batteries) for a very good reason. I do tow stuff occasionally. And I do take 1,000+ trips once or twice a year.
My F-150 4×4 is lifted four inches. That gets me better approach angles on ditches, I even broke off my horn the other day since it was low mounted. But, that takes a brick at 75+ mph and makes it even more of a brick. But I still get 16+ mpg in town and 20 mpg on the road. And my 36 gallon gas tank will take me over 600 miles down the road quite regularly. Any total electric truck will need to meet all of these to meet my needs.
<< I will give the auto writers credit for being honest — unlike how they are about Tonymobiles — but the press is still "burying the lede" to fit the agenda and sell magazines.
Are print magazines still a thing? The only one I recall having in the recent past was Consumer Reports, which I canceled when it was last up for renewal as I felt it had turned into just a print version of their website and an attempt to get you to pay for their paywalled content. I sent my cancelation directly to the editor-in-chief to express my opinion but no one bothered to reply.
Yup, I put the number that I require for an all electric truck at 300 kwh battery (or two 130 kwh batteries) for a very good reason. I do tow stuff occasionally. And I do take 1,000+ trips once or twice a year.
Lets try 1,000+ MILE trips once or twice a year.
And next summer I am thinking about buying a 6,000+ lb camper like Ray’s and towing it to Montana for a month. If I can get Starlink to work as I ramble about and a few other things.
@Ray
RMD: Required Minimum Distribution from IRA annually. The RMD amount is calculated by reading tea leaves and throwing darts at the wall.
(which I’m sure you knew)
IRS, form 5329. 50% penalty for not taking RMD on amount of RMD not taken. May be waived.
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/retirement-plans-faqs-regarding-required-minimum-distributions#8
As a recipient of an IRA use care so you don’t get slammed on your personal taxes. Depending on your age there are few opportunities for using an inherited IRA without being taxed. If you’re 67+ (I think) you can use it for 501c3 donations and not be taxed on the withdrawal. Otherwise an inherited IRA may be used to make a one time / life time contribution to a health savings account tax free. Beyond that, not much.
If the inherited IRA is larger than you want to cash out at once (because it’s going to kill your personal taxes) then the funds in the IRA need to be moved to a carefully structured and carefully named Beneficiary Designated IRA, or BDA IRA.
My moms IRA was largish and split between three of us. While the money is welcome, it’s been a huge hassle to use the money without giving vast chunks of it to the IRS. We use our portion to make donations to 501c3s – we are still taxed but not as hard. The information out there on BDAs is contradictory and misleading.
xkcd: The Last Molecule
https://xkcd.com/2552/
Nope, chemistry is not complete and is not even close to being complete. My business partner estimated that we had 2% of interactions between hydrocarbons mapped out. He had a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Rice University and taught at the University of Oklahoma for over a decade.
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2552:_The_Last_Molecule
When I was overseas my wife made me a couple of fruitcakes and packed them in coffee cans cushioned with multiple napkins. She mailed two identical packages at the same time and they arrived a month apart, one just before Thanksgiving, the other just before Christmas. She had doused the fruitcakes with brandy and we kept the then empty cans with their packing in the radio shack for a couple of months. Every now and then someone would go by and crack the lid and take a big sniff, put a smile on their face.
Last thought on BDA IRA stuff. If you have a largish IRA and your estate is going to multiple individuals after you die, consider the relative tax brackets of the recipients of your estate. If the IRA goes to the recipient in the lowest tax bracket, you’ll minimize how much of the inheritance winds up in the hands of the government. My moms estate was x dollars from house sale, and y dollars from IRA, and z from bank accounts. She structured her estate so we each got (x/3 + y/3 + z/3). Had she structured it so that we each got the value of ([x+y+z]/3) = p but used the full value of y + what ever portion of [x+y] was necessary to equal p, and paid the higher tax bracket inheritors out of [x+z], the higher tax bracket inheritors would have made out better in the final equation.
It’s more complicated, no doubt. In our case it would have made a significant difference because of the tax bracket disparity of the inheritors.
I've been dealing with the thought process for 30+ years. A lot of soft power is applied through the Number One Son concept in Chinese families. If everyone is a Number One Son, chaos follows.
Car magazines are still around thanks to the editors drinking the EV Flavor Aid. Look at the airport bookstores the next time you're flying.
I am well aware of the tax consequences, significant. I will have 20% withheld. The other issue is that the funds will cause most of my SS to become taxable income. I have significant deductions this year as we gave 10% to charitable organizations. But it is still going to hurt.
RMD is 4% of the untaxed funds from all accounts. Calculated on the balance on January 1 of the tax year. I pull enough from one account, pay taxes, that it would satisfy the RMD. RMD does not apply until I reach 72 in 2023. It is the RMD on the MIL's funds that are the issue. A lot is going to depend on to whom the companies report the funds.
I am going to pay now or later. This is the best year to pay the taxes because of the significant deductions that I have been able to gather.
I rely on my financial advisor to get me through the complications. He knows my goal is to minimize taxes, secure the funds, and beat inflation, and provide long term income. So far he has been quite good at achieving those goals.
Everything goes to my wife, legally. Wife's mother made some verbal requests which we have honored. Morally half needs to go the wife's brother, there is only the two of them. His kids already got money as beneficiaries; my son got some as a beneficiary. My wife and I are going to do the right thing and get half of what's left to her brother. We will pay the taxes, withholding 20% before cashing in the IRA will cover the taxes, barely. Close enough.
I filed taxes for my aunt for the last 10 years she was alive. Hers were quite easy as there was nothing left when she died. Well, some, but less than $1K. She did not have to pay, nor did she owe, any taxes.
The EV trucks will not be about long distance. Trades people will use them around town, where it makes sense.
Driving by Costco today, I noticed a Tesla supercharger lot getting installed. Figure about a dozen "pumps". The transformer block involved was massive.
And, yes, you can get that proverbial coffee while you wait, along with Chipotle and In-n-Out within walking distance.
Fuck Joe Biden!
@MrAtoz, thanks, you got in before I had the chance.
Came home between errands to let the dog out. With the cone on, he can't get thru the doggy door. He waited.
Costco was well stocked. Charmin blue was limit 5, and they had pallets. there were half pallets of several choices in the rice, flour, sugar aisles.
I didnt' see any toys left, only gift cards and tech.
They have a few fake trees for big money.
Drove past Lowes. No Christmas corral, but they had some trees in the garden center.
Headed back out.
n
The parents of one of the students injured in the Michigan school shooting is filing a $100 million dollar damage lawsuit.
That is insane.
>> Driving by Costco today, I noticed a Tesla supercharger lot getting installed. Figure about a dozen "pumps". The transformer block involved was massive.
And, yes, you can get that proverbial coffee while you wait, along with Chipotle and In-n-Out within walking distance.
I wonder if Tony uses the FSD cameras to help determine the wait times. If so, I'm sure this use of the cameras was covered in the TOS that no one reads when they click OK for the latest OTA update.
https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-navigation-now-shows-wait-times-when-supercharger-stations-are-full/
At the gate in SA otw to Atlanta. TSA pre was a breeze. Less than 5 minutes with a carryon full of tech.
>> "In need of a baby boom, China clamps down on vasectomies"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-need-of-a-baby-boom-china-clamps-down-on-vasectomies/ar-AARDlgL
There's always this option.
"Dead Roombas, stranded packages and delayed exams: How the AWS outage wreaked havoc across the U.S."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/09/how-the-aws-outage-wreaked-havoc-across-the-us.html
"Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology for businesses large and small, was hit with a historic, hourslong outage on Tuesday. Popular websites and heavily used services were knocked offline, angering users and underscoring the severity of problems that can arise from having so much economic activity reliant on technology from just a few vendors.
AWS controlled 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%. Revenue at AWS jumped 39% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $16.1 billion, outpacing growth of 15% across all of Amazon."
I am amazed at how much stuff is running in the cloud.
What's the point? It's not like there is another one 5 miles down the road you can stop at.
Hot skillz!
DevOps currently has the ear of management, selling the concept that traditional development is dead. The future is stringing together VMs provisioning services built from stringing together poorly debugged libaries from NPM and “pip install” (Python).
Hashicorp went public today. $14 billion valuation can’t be wrong.
Your hot skillz aren't as hot as you think they are, Greg. All the cool kids use "conda install" for Python.
Yeah, that's a new one on me. Why have one Python venv when you can have dozens.
The complexity of all of the layers is unbelievable.
On the previous previous job, we ran into the limitations of using Berkeley sockets for all of the IPC, even on the same machine, sometimes within the same process. Linux reaches a point where things start core dumping.
>> "Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology for businesses large and small, was hit with a historic, hourslong outage on Tuesday. Popular websites and heavily used services were knocked offline, angering users and underscoring the severity of problems that can arise from having so much economic activity reliant on technology from just a few vendors.
Why blame the problem on the market having just a few vendors? If it's a mission-critical system (think link from any mega-bank to the Fed) you should have redundancies that shield you from a single point of failure outage.
>> AWS controlled 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%. Revenue at AWS jumped 39% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $16.1 billion, outpacing growth of 15% across all of Amazon."
With that kind of revenue hopefully Bronco Boy doesn't jack up the Prime membership fee next year.
@greg:
It's still Someone Else's Computer.
G.
My friends who work for a big back office Wall Street operation like the cheap labor who go out, learn, and get AWS certified on their own dime. It is the new Java.
Yep. And that big, centralized Someone Else's Computer sure is a big, tempting target for snoops. Three Letter Acronym-type snoops for sure have gotten in and rummaged around. Presumably scumbags of the private enterprise type have also gotten in but nothing confirming that has caught my attention.
(My bone-deep dislike of the NSA and CIA goes back more than thirty years, when I had to work with them. My dislike of the FBI is more recent but just as deep.)
>> AWS controlled 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%. Revenue at AWS jumped 39% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $16.1 billion, outpacing growth of 15% across all of Amazon."
With that kind of revenue hopefully Bronco Boy doesn't jack up the Prime membership fee next year.
Bronco Boy retired. Somebody else is running Amazon now. Bronco Boy is building spaceships now.
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3139885/richest-retirement-ever-jeff-bezos-stepping-down-amazon
>> Bronco Boy retired. Somebody else is running Amazon now. Bronco Boy is building spaceships now.
Not quite retired, just stepped down as Amazon CEO, replaced by AWS Andy Jassy. Jeff is now Executive Chairman of Amazon's board. While certainly less involved, I'm sure Jassy still runs the important stuff past Jeff.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/26/jeff-bezos-to-formally-step-down-as-amazon-ceo-on-july-5.html
Evergrande Has Finally Defaulted: Here's What Happens Next
by Tyler Durden
Thursday, Dec 09, 2021 – 04:11 PM
This is the way Evergrande ends: not with a bang but a whimper.
Three months after an initial shockwave of fear that China's largest and most indebted property developer was set to default, roiled global markets only to see the company repeatedly kick the can on several occasions even as the final default was always just a matter of when not if (due to billions in interest payments and tens of billions in upcoming debt maturities), overnight ratings agency Fitch (with Moodys and S&P set to follow shortly) officially downgraded insolvent property developers China Evergrande Group and Kaisa Group, saying they had defaulted on offshore bonds.
–could be the trigger for all kinds of bad. Chinese property speculation is crazy out of control and about to come crashing down.
n
Juicy Smu-lay guilty on 5 of 6.
Sentencing not for weeks.
Penalty up to 3 years, expected to get probation.
Bull-puckey.
He embroidered the story not only to be the victim of a hate crime, but to defame supporters of President Trump, whose political enemies jumped in with both feet.
He not only lied repeatedly in making the reports, but lied directly to the jury in making up more outlandish shiite.
Give him probation on the first count, 30 days on the second, six months on the third, a year on the fourth, and 3 years on the fifth. To run consecutively, for a total of 55 months.
Then it would be only fair that the pinhead that tried to inflame his play for sympathy by defaming supporters of the president get sued for defamation.
"Jussie Smollett guilty of staging race-baiting hate attack to boost career"
https://nypost.com/2021/12/09/jussie-smollett-convicted-of-staging-hate-crime/
Here is what happens next. Sentenced to time served ! Bang !
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
https://www.newsweek.com/unvaccinated-illinoisans-pay-covid-hospital-bills-new-proposals-case-spike-jonathan-carroll-1656752
same formula:
'You choose not to
get vaccinateduse birth control, then you're also going to assume the risk that if you docatch COVID, and you get sickget pregnant and have a child, the responsibility is on you,'Just the beginning of the new Personal Responsibility plank in the 2024 Democratic Platform.
"Jill Biden rejects 'ridiculous' concerns on president's mental fitness"
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/585170-jill-biden-rejects-ridiculous-concerns-on-presidents-mental
Glad we can put this one to rest, she is a Doctor after all.
Jill thinks she is a doctor,
Joe thinks he is president.
Nothing to see here–move along.
Don't mess with Texas, fool:
https://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/article/TikTok-goes-viral-Bucees-pronounce-16680122.php
(and yes, for the record, I know the origin of the phrase is littrin)
Stupid, paranoid article. These are the same people who think you ought to cook your meat to the consistency of shoe leather.
There are *lots* of things made with uncooked eggs, from mayonnaise to Italian meringues. Salmonella just isn't that big of a concern.
In cookie dough, bacteria aren't going to breed all that fast anyway, because the moisture content is low and the sugar content is high. Unless you leave it lying around unrefrigerated, there's no problem.
Don't get me started… Automatic deployment is (a) an attempt to save personnel, because your developers are now also your sys-admins, despite those being two different skill sets. And (b) an attempt to rush software into production with inadequate testing and QA. What could go wrong?
But it's all trendy, so…