If I don’t or can’t edit this Thursday night, here’s an open thread to start the day. It probably means I’m still at the BOL waiting to meet with the slab guy. Or it could be the mice who built this universe are re-running the last batch of test assumptions.
n
Greetings from my BOL. Lots to do today. Hang a house number to replace the old, faded one. Repair a wall that someone clipped with a truck.. hang lights, mirrors, install a new satellite dish LNB, assemble furniture… Will see how far I get over the weekend. Some social engagements too- local hunters' pre-season meet-up, lies and and drinks on Saturday and a birthday party on Sunday. Meatspace!
Say what?
The house we used to live in was around 5000 ft2, plus basement. Once we closed the business, as a family of four we left 1/3 to 1/2 of the house unused. The house my wife and I just built is about 1500 ft2, plus garage. That’s plenty big for two people plus occasional visitors.
When we visited my cousin in Texas, they had a huge house. Probably 4000 ft2. Our tour of the house included a room that…oops, the dog’s been pooping there, and they never noticed. They had a passel of kids, too, and still there were rooms that they never set foot in.
Why do people want these McMansions that are so big they can never sensibly use all the space? I seriously don’t get it.
Are your decimal places off? We have 1G/1G fiber to the home, at a rate of around $60/month. Ok, we didn’t have to install the fiber – it was already here. But $1200/month seems insane.
Because they can. And Texas sold its regulatory soul to get AT&T to run fiber in the legacy Southwest Bell service areas.
Legacy GTE service areas in the North Dallas suburbs, where the AT&T and Verizon execs live, have fiber from when Verizon ran FiOS to wealthy areas there in the 90s and early 00s.
Pricing like that is what fuels the “Pizza Box” dream in the US, where the customers buy wireless equipment about the size/shape of a takeout pizza box, hang the box on the side of the house with requisite antennas, pay $50-100/month, and tell the incumbent phone/cable companies to get bent.
Starlink is just the latest in a series of companies exploiting the dream. They may well be the last, one way or another.
After Bishop Mittens votes *for* our new “biologist” on SCOTUS, the Redumblicans should sanction him as much as possible. Let the dirt digging begin.
The Elders will let him have this one. In theory, the New Mexico Dem Senator has "recovered" sufficiently from his stroke to vote in favor, and Mittens vote really doesn't matter with Kamala as the tie breaker.
plugs is squawking about how we will *RESPOND* if Putin uses dirty weapons. He will get us in a shooting war. Where is NATO? Bueller? Putin has probably already done the dirty.
Still at the BOL. Thought I had prepped a real post for today, but must not have. Brain like a cabbage some days.
Note from yesterday,. I got a scanner set up with local freqs and had it on thru the day. Fire rescue got a dispatch about a possible single vehicle wreck, called on by onstar. Based on the sketchy location info provided, they could not find a wreck.
Might be there wasn't one. Might be it's far enough off the road they didn't see it.
Mortal of the story, your tech might not save you just a few miles outside of town.
Sweet, foundation guy calls and is on his way.
N
Another problem is that older Onstar systems are 3G or older IIRC. T-Mobile will shut down the legacy Sprint 3G, with the backwards compatibility, at the end of this month in order to repurpose the bandwidth. AT&T shut down their network last year.
Streaming Baby Yoda on the go comes first.
So, with the MSM headlines stating that Biden warned of food shortages can we expect a run on staples at the grocery store this weekend as concerned people buy 12 loaves of bread?
On the plus side, 2022 is looking to be a very good year if you’re a wheat farmer.
This weekend? Around here, the stay-at-home mommies see something like Biden's warning on the 9 PM Faux News, and they start working the HEB Curbside website to pick up the next morning.
Asian households will send Instacart to HMart, but HMart closes at … 10 PM IIRC. HMart will be busy the following day, filled with Amish women shopping from lists scrolling on their phones, the Instacart gig paying for the nails … and the phone.
It was a really dumb thing for the cabal to feed Biden to say because the losses in the midterms will be in direct proportion to how p*ssed off the general population feels in November.
Well, had a good walk thru with the foundation guys. It's not gonna be cheap. I know that at least. And it's going to be extensive.
Wrt bidn flapping his gums, shouldn't affect anyone here, right? Because you've all been paying attention all this time and getting ready…
I'm still adding to the stacks so there is some additional cost, true. But basics should be covered by now.
And if not, I'm genuinely interested in why.
N
HMG has just sent me a letter detailing my increase in State Pension for the next year, starting on 22nd April. It's 3.6%, near as makes no difference, compared to last month's annualised inflation of 6.2%. I'm lucky that my State Pension is more than the minimum, and I have occupational pensions, as well, to the extent that my income now, in retirement, is not much less than my base salary, before overtime, before I retired. And that's 6 years ago, come the end of this month.
G.
Just got back from my Costco run. Normal crowd levels and no shortages I could see. I did pick up a couple extra packs of canned chicken.
From SRW at the Fort Bend Journal:
"Overheard at the Houston Stock Show: "Gas prices are so high my mailman is working from home. He called me today and read me my bills.""
Are your decimal places off? We have 1G/1G fiber to the home, at a rate of around $60/month. Ok, we didn’t have to install the fiber – it was already here. But $1200/month seems insane.
That $1,200/month is the commercial (business) price. $60/month is the residential price.
It used to be that commercial used way more internet. But now that everyone is streaming Baby Yoda, residential is used way more. We have been hitting 1 TB every month at the house lately.
Say what?
The house we used to live in was around 5000 ft2, plus basement. Once we closed the business, as a family of four we left 1/3 to 1/2 of the house unused. The house my wife and I just built is about 1500 ft2, plus garage. That’s plenty big for two people plus occasional visitors.
There are very few basements down here in the swamp.
And, if you got it, flaunt it.
The problem with that feature is if the gate is there to keep critters in?
Rolling codes? No, just some dip switches.
We have the same code as one of the neighbors. Makes it easy to visit. We are far enough we don't open each other's gate. But maybe it happened and they opened our gate? It shouldn't matter, the timer is set to close after 45 seconds.
I'm sticking with the opener having a brain fart. Fingers crossed.
A camera would be fun but there's no wi-fi that far from the house.
Residential has very little guarantee about service level if any. The part of AT&T provisioning fiber is separate from the old school phone company in terms of regulation.
Sam's run today in North Austin. The store was busier than normal, but the carts didn't look like panic buying. Signs back up in the meat department for “Limit 2”, and chicken was fairly depleted. Spaghetti Os still unobtainium, and I saw a white woman loading up a 50 lb sack of rice — very unusual for that store.
I will see Costco at some point this weekend because my cash back certificate arrived for Costco Visa. I always get the cash.
Don't worry about the AC cost this year. The utility companies will get a bailout after Abbott is reelected.
@Lynn – My print copy of The Simple Homespun Wisdom of Warren Buffett, Formerly Ghostwritten by Carol Loomis of Fortune (TM) showed up today along with "Woodstock for Capitalists" meeting information — live this year! — and a sale flyer for shareholder pricing at Nebraska Furniture Mart stores during the meeting weekend in May.
That's why the company contacted you this week. Buffett likes to boast about the HQ staff handling all of the meeting credential requests in a few weeks.
I've requested credentials as late as a week out and received them in time.
No, I've never gone, but it is on my list. The credentials were to shut the yap of one of the Chinese relations who liked to spew Buffett quotes but didn’t actually hold any BRK, even -B. Once I offered him my meeting tickets, he stopped quoting The Gecko, at least in front of me.
I meant to stop for the Billionare's Blue Plate Special — T-bone, hash browns, and Coke — at Gorat's on my second drive West in Fall 2010, but I got lost in Missouri and had to make up the time by bypassing Omaha.
"Where did Americans move in 2021? This population map will show you"
https://www.fastcompany.com/90735184/where-did-americans-move-in-2021-this-population-map-will-show-you
"Los Angeles County was the biggest loser, while five counties in Texas were among the biggest gainers."
"The biggest loser due to these trends was Los Angeles County, California, which saw a decrease of 159,621 residents in 2021. Texas, on the other hand, had a banner year: Half of the top 10 U.S. counties that saw the largest net population gains in 2021 were located in the Lone Star State. Together Collin, Fort Bend, Williamson, Denton, and Montgomery counties saw a population increase totaling 145,663."
Yup, a bunch of libs are moving here.
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
"Risky people to have around in a crisis"
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/03/risky-people-to-have-around-in-crisis.html
"I wouldn’t embed this video except that I have actually talked to people like this. Yes, to someone who told me he was arming himself (and even minimizing ammunition purchases) but planned to take what ammunition he had and steal ammo and food from other people."
"Bear in mind, too, that this is a very likely official response in an emergency. I've seen it time and time again in real life in the Third World, and there's plenty of history of it in the First World too. In a crisis, the authorities mostly won't have reserve supplies to feed people, but they'll be under pressure by a huge number of folks demanding that they "do something!" There's not much they can do, except take whatever supplies they can find from those who have them, under cover of a proclamation of a state of emergency. If you check your state's and town's laws and statutes, you'll almost certainly find legal authorization for such proclamations, including the right for the authorities to take whatever they need from anywhere or anyone to deal with the emergency. It's standard legal boilerplate, and it's ubiquitous. (Look at the official seizure of firearms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and how the authorities confiscated whatever they needed from those who had it – including cops looting stores right alongside "regular" looters. Learn from that example. If it happened there, it can happen where you are, too.)"
This happened in Harris County (Houston) as attested to by Nick during the s0-called pandemic. The more liberal the area, the more the officials are willing to steal from the rest of us.
There is now an option for electronic deposit. That is what I did with my rebate.
Well, had a good walk thru with the foundation guys. It's not gonna be cheap. I know that at least. And it's going to be extensive.
Did he tell you how much dust the jackhammer inside the house will put in every nook and cranny of your house ? My wife's uncle had 7 ? 8 ? 10 ? piers put inside his house in Abilene back in the 1990s. I went by and took a look, there was concrete dust everywhere in their 3/2/2 house. But, the foundation got fixed. Afterwards they sold the house and moved south of Abilene on a very nice four acres.
Don't worry about the AC cost this year. The utility companies will get a bailout after Abbott is reelected.
I am confused. Why do they need a bailout ? Are you talking about the natural gas companies, the electrical distribution companies, or the electrical generation companies ?
We always stop for the hot dog and drink special afterwards, but this year, heck, I'll spring for pizza. Maybe ice cream too.
"Ford Confirms F-150 Lightning Range; WATCH: Extreme Cold Weather Testing"
https://www.carprousa.com/blog/2022-ford-f-150-lightning-electric-pickup-official-battery-range-extreme-cold-testing
"Ford confirms that F-150 Lightning XLT and Lariat trims equipped with the extended range battery will deliver an EPA-estimated range of 320 miles, up from 300. The Platinum will deliver an EPA-estimated range of 300 miles up from 280. Ford says fleet customers have the option to purchase the extended range battery on Lightning Pro which will deliver an EPA-estimated range of 320 miles."
Where is the 600 mile battery ? Where is the add on generator with the eight gallon gasoline tank ?
Meh.
“Ford attributes the Lightning’s stability and confidence in slippery conditions to its all-electric powertrain, and Built Ford Tough functionality:
Standard dual motors front and rear
Standard always-on 4×4
Quick torque delivery
Standard electronic-locking rear differential
Selectable drive modes
Low center of gravity for even more confident handling”
Ok, the standard dual motors and standard rear locking differential are cool.
And all F-150 Lightnings are 4×4. Cool !
IMHO, CarPro isn't trustworthy when it comes to being straight about Ford as of late.
Notice that the coverage of the range numbers are carefully separated from the portion of the text covering the cold weather testing, but the headline implies that the range numbers come from the cold environment.
I dislike plugsy McSpongeBrain very much. He is a bi-polar mean old man. I bet he throws massive tantrums in the White House. Plus, every time he opens his mouth, he can't even get a complete sentence out without changing thoughts.
plugs: "When you soldiers get to Ukraine…"
pSaki spin: "He didn't mean that…"
He can't say anything right.
It could happen.
Neighbor’s unit is a vintage 1990-ish “DoorKing” chain drive unit. At first it was once in a while, then monthly, then weekly, then daily, then stopped closing (staying closed) altogether.
Most likely it’s a bad capacitor on a board.
IMHO, CarPro isn't trustworthy when it comes to being straight about Ford as of late.
Notice that the coverage of the range numbers are carefully separated from the portion of the text covering the cold weather testing, but the headline implies that the range numbers come from the cold environment.
Nobody is being truthful about the effects of cold weather on any batteries. The EPA, the manufacturers, nobody ! That is why I want the onboard generator with the eight gallon gasoline tank.
"What Is a Woman? Question Stumps Brightest Democrat Mind"
https://www.clayandbuck.com/what-is-a-woman-question-stumps-democrat-judge/
"CLAY: We begin with the Party of Science running into a bit of a brick wall, Buck Sexton. The Party of Science that has been arguing for two years now, basically, “You have to wear a mask. You have to socially distance. Your kids can’t be in school — or they can be in school, but they have to have masks on,” all these different moving parts which are unsupported by science at all."
"I feel like they came to a head in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing late last night, when Sen. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee — who, by the way, is scheduled to join us tomorrow on the program — asked what would be a fairly simple question considering we have one of the great, esteemed legal minds of our generation (according to Democrats) poised to join the Supreme Court. Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson a simple question."
"She said, “What is a woman?”"
Wow.
And I am in moderation again. Obviously I cannot count above three.
That would be the problem. Released.
dust the jackhammer inside the house
— this company uses a version of 'mud jacking' with foam. Small holes in slab, inject foam. +- 1/2 finished height according to their website. although we are remodelling anyway, so if they need to install piers, it won't be messier than anything else.
— from above, decimal place is in correct position. Cable company and ATT both gouge business customers. They do allow some servers whereas the residential plans don't, so you could run mail or videoconferencing I guess. They have had to stop blocking http and port 80 since so many things in the IoT space use built in web servers as their control interface, I don't know if you could run apache or another web server at home without issues.
Made it home, but only got one pickup done. Tomorrow will be a busy day.
n
@nick – maybe I only know west coast buiding (in CA, it's common to build directly on a slab, no basement, no piers). But confused at the combination of 'mud-jacking the slab' and 'need to install piers'.
I know about 'mud-jacking' (you see commercials for it on late night TV around here, where they drill through a portion of the slab then pump in some material to force the slab up). But I see 'piers' as supports into the ground (maybe on a concrete post) that support the wood floor. Why would there be piers on a slab foundation?
Even mud-jacking would cause me some concern – not the need of it, bu the 'aftermath'. Is the process going to cause cracking of plaster/windows/doors out of alignment because of any severity of the slab not being level? Would be something to consider.
But, maybe I'm just channeling my 'inner Bob Villa'. … from a distance, not seeing the actual issue.
Port forward from the router to 80 and 443 on the web server machine inside the firewall should be safe enough. I never had any problems with Fedora or CentOS default installs running Apache on the campus network at the university, but that's still not the open Internet.
@nick – maybe I only know west coast buiding (in CA, it's common to build directly on a slab, no basement, no piers). But confused at the combination of 'mud-jacking the slab' and 'need to install piers'.
I know about 'mud-jacking' (you see commercials for it on late night TV around here, where they drill through a portion of the slab then pump in some material to force the slab up). But I see 'piers' as supports into the ground (maybe on a concrete post) that support the wood floor. Why would there be piers on a slab foundation?
Even mud-jacking would cause me some concern – not the need of it, bu the 'aftermath'. Is the process going to cause cracking of plaster/windows/doors out of alignment because of any severity of the slab not being level? Would be something to consider.
But, maybe I'm just channeling my 'inner Bob Villa'. … from a distance, not seeing the actual issue.
Most of Texas is a swamp until you get above 700 to 800 feet in elevation. Or a former swamp. My grandfathers farm outside Sherman, TX was at 700+ feet in elevation and we could find sharks teeth in the rows every time he plowed the land. The land is mostly a black gumbo soup. It may look solid but it is not solid. It moves all the time with the rain and the droughts.
So if you put a concrete slab on the ground, you get uneven support from the black gumbo soil moving about. If you build an expensive house, the first thing you do is put piers in the ground 10 or 12 foot deep. Then you pour the foundation on those piers. Very little movement of the slab since the piers support the slab, not the land.
If you build an inexpensive house, you clear the dirt off and pour the slab on the resulting flat space. In the last 30 years, we throw down a foot or two of sand to even the slab support up. Sand is much better than the black gumbo. Plus we put 3/4 inch cable in the slab and tighten those after the slab is poured. That is a post-tension foundation.
When the foundation heaves and breaks because it is poured straight on the black gumbo with no sand and no post tension cables, we dig four foot deep holes around the edges of the foundation and add piers under the slab. We use automobile jacks and concrete blocks to even the foundation up. If the slab is real bad then we jackhammer holes in the middle of the slab and put concrete blocks under the slab to make the slab flat after we jack it up.
At least that is what we used to do. This new thing of drilling a one inch hole in the concrete and injecting concrete foam under the slab is new. I had my driveway done three years ago with this. My one inch cracks in my driveway are now four inch cracks, some days I feel like engaging four wheel drive to go down my driveway. I do not have anything holding my 10 foot by 12 foot concrete slabs together (no rebar) so my driveway just got wider when it spread out some more. But it was only a $1,200 fix for my 125 foot driveway. The next fix is around $8,000 where we replace several of those 10 foot by 12 foot slabs in my driveway. But my driveway will be out of service for a month so I have yet to do it.
@Nick, I hope your experience is better than mine. Of course, you probably have rebar in your BOL house slab whereas there is zero rebar in my driveway slabs.
When I bought my new used house three years ago, I had a fellow measure the slab to see how much it had moved. It was +- a half inch (a full inch) so I figured that was pretty good for a 1998 house of 3,301 ft2 size. I need to get him back out as I think my kitchen is moving. I just removed a kumquat tree outside the kitchen, it had three one inch roots going under the slab that we pulled out as much as we could.
@rick, this link explains the pier and jacking in detail but doesn’t show it…
https://www.easttexasslabmasters.com/foundation-repair-methods/pier-pilings/
you are basically putting a new piling under the slab, by inserting a 12″ concrete cylinder and pushing down on it. When it moves 12″ you reset the jack, put another cylinder in place and push down on it (by jacking against the slab.) when you’ve done that enough, the cylinders eventually stop moving with the weight of the slab, then you finish with shims or cement. Repeat 40 times, every six feet around the perimeter of the slab, and in the interior of the slab if needed (by cutting holes in the slab, digging down, and doing the whole “drive a cylinder into the ground until it supports a given weight” thing.
Piers and jacking are a very common repair in the SE Texas land. We were pioneers of slab on grade residential construction back in the day, and have learned a LOT since then.
The confusion comes when we talk about “pier and beam” construction. You can think of that as like a mobile home up on blocks. Very easy to re-level when needed. That is the old way, btw. The new way is as Lynn describes, drive a bunch of piles to make a support for the concrete mat, then build on top of that.
There are variations. You can combine pier and beam with a below grade foundation called a ‘grade beam’ which is poured on top of pilings, for what looks like a traditional pier and beam style home, but one that is much less likely to move around.
Clay soil swells when wet and shrinks when dry. There are people here with ‘foundation watering systems’ to keep the soil at a particular moisture level, so it doesn’t change and move the house.
The now 60 yo house I live in is slab on grade, clay soil. It never moved in 50 years but then we had the two year drought, and the back half of the house settled at least an inch. I’m hoping the soil swells and corrects the issue rather than paying to fix it. The effect inside the house is minimal.
One of my ham lunch buddies has 6 or 8 inches of settlement from one end of his house to the other. THAT he’s fixing.
n
Should have added that big buildings install 'de-watering systems' to pull water out of the soil before construction. I believe many or most then leave the systems in place and running for the life of the building.
There was a "how it's made" about the Patronas Towers that showed a massive piling and mat system constructed under the towers to provide support in Singapore's swampy soil.
n
>> Why do people want these McMansions that are so big they can never sensibly use all the space? I seriously don’t get it.
It's keeping up with the Joneses.
One day the kids come running into the house yelling "Dad, Dad, Frankie and Johnny's dad from down the block just put in an in-ground pool. Can we get one too? Huh? Huh?? With a slide too, cause Frankie's pool don't have one."
And so it goes from the pool to the pool and slide and then to the pool, slide and spa and on and on.
Meh, I think it's more about having the space. Americans spend more time in their homes than most cultures, mainly because there is space! And that is self-reinforcing. I'd love a game room/ home theatre, a hobby/sewing/makerspace room, or one extra bedroom suite we could leave set up for guests. Or all of the above. The short lived consideration of a second floor remodel and addition to this house would have given us most of that.
n
>> There's not much they can do, except take whatever supplies they can find from those who have them, under cover of a proclamation of a state of emergency.
Thought about this the other day. What do we do? Build false walls, hidden rooms, stuff cans under the floorboards? Those with a BOL i a secluded area may have an advantage
If a sizeable group of the "authorities" comes to 'inspect' your premises, do you try to defend your castle (which the growing mob takes as a sign that you have things to hide)?
It would be hard, I think, to join forces with some neighbors absent an underground tunnel to consolidate goods into a more defensible location.
Don't yet have any good answers…what do others think?
@alan, I think a good hedge would be an offsite storage rental unit. Or a commercial space that wouldn't be associated with you prepping (your business office, janitorial closet.)
In the books it's always a hidden cache on property, but I'd expect that like burglars they would become adept at finding that stuff.
You could build off that, and provide a 'give up' cache, the way I keep some cash in a clip in my pocket to 'give up' if I'm robbed. Or the cash envelope in my desk drawer, that I hope satisfies a searcher before they get to the really good stuff.
I don't have a good answer. It's probably a combination of techniques. And shooting the bastards in the face right in the beginning might not be persuasive, but shooting them in the face every time should eventually be effective. The problem with that is "ok, you first".
n