Likely to be hot and humid today with about a 60% chance of rain. It was humid as a sauna yesterday, both in Houston and here at the BOL. My shirt was soaked, and my shorts were wet from the waistband to the hem.
After loading up the truck, I headed to my pickup. Got a very nice grill for $40. Really nice. Basically the same as my grill at home but with a lot less wear, and the upgrade to built in lights. The auctioneer, and judging by his comment while we loaded it, the seller, both seemed to be upset it went so cheap. Wife cooked dinner on it last night and it worked perfectly. Very happy.
I surveyed the downed tree, decided I would get my mower back together and cut the grass first, then tackle the tree since the tree guy is coming (eventually) and he can take care of any parts I don’t do. That worked well.
When I did get to the tree, my chainsaw was cutting like butter. Limbed the whole thing, stacked the small and crooked stuff in the burn pile, and cut what I could for firewood. There is still about 16ft of trunk I’ll leave for the tree guy, and the standing part. I might try to just leave the part that is still standing. The pole saw (mini chainsaw on a stick) attachment for the string trimmer engine worked great too. It make getting the high limbs easy, and made cutting the low ones that were holding the trunk in place a lot safer to cut, being 10ft away in case it rotated.
Even though it fell next to my garden, the potatoes survived. One mound is thriving, the other 3 are surviving. Berry bushes are not. Peach tree still has green fruit growing, so the animals haven’t stripped it yet. I hope we get some fruit from it this year.
Had a nice fire on the dock after playing games with wife and D2. We played the LoTR version of Monopoly, and Rummicub. Then I went down and watched the (not very) distant lightning. Radio was pretty good, New Zealand had a segment produced by the BBC World service about religion and politics in the US that was interesting for the 45 minutes I caught. No Cuban stations, and the ham bands were quiet with just the built in antenna. Just before coming in, I caught about 20 minutes of the Worldwide Country Music show and heard some old school country, and some gospel. Nice change of pace for me.
I’m hoping we don’t get rain today. Don’t have a lot of time today before we need to head home. I can’t stay an extra day as we have a swim meet and I have to get back out to my client’s to re-pull the cable. Even a short time up here, mostly spent doing hard work, was nice.
Don’t forget to stack up some good times. They will be real important if TSHTF.
nick
First post.
Another fine day in South Norway. Clear blue skies, slight breeze. Big breakfast at about 10:30. The father is an excellent cook.
Surprising that I cannot read a couple of the local TV station websites. Get a message the site is not allowed in the country. The TV stations choice, ISP choice, country choice. advertisers choice? I don’t know.
Brain fart on accessing my Ameriprise online account. TFA requires a code be sent to my phone. That will not work overseas. I have a different cell number and my US cell provider will not provide overseas calls or text. Not a technological problem, but a cheap use problem as I did not want to spend the money. So I am locked out of that account until I get back home.
The brats were Opa’s out of Fredericksburg. Probably more. I haven’t seen pre-cooked plain Johnsonville Stadium Brats since in the store since before the pandemic hysteria.
Opa’s are ok but pricey for what they are. Going to their factory/store in Fredericksburg is actually more expensive than HEB.
Our HEB is a huge Curbside outlet with all of the stay at home mommies in the area and big 6000-7000 sq ft homes in the Fancy Lad development behind the store. Some categories are constantly empty unless you time the visit right.
You should have sold that DIS before you left. 🙂
Their day of reckoning is coming this year but not for a while. Anyone who thinks The Mouse has won is kidding themselves.
Big Tech has the AI bubble. I’m living that feeding frenzy.
No, I don’t own stock in my employer and options grants are rare. Even the 401(k) matching is cash.
My only direct participation in the frenzy is INTC, and Sapphire Rapids is just keeping the lights on.
Where is the SIM provider based?
The US is the only country with the 1st Amendment protection, for what it is worth these days.
Even Canada can impose a news blackout on a topic, and God help you when that happens and you have the wrong newspaper in the back of the car at a border crossing.
66 F here on the very wet west side of Fort Bend County. We had a serious thunderboomer come through at about 1am until 145am. Dropped a lot of water and the gennie started for about a half hour.
No, I don’t own stock in my employer and options grants are rare. Even the 401(k) matching is cash.
Isn’t your employer still private ? If so, that means that they are limited to about 400 stockholders. Any more than those 400 and the SEC will force them to register with one of the stock exchanges. Your employer already went through that once, the constant quarterly reports and the continuous requirement to watch your statements are tiresome.
Of course Musk just ignores all that but he has a lot of lawyers.
Ray, that is totally cool about the 14 exchange students. Sounds like your wife and you got some neat memories from those years.
Man, I have got to finish building the new home PC. I am coming up on two years since I bought the parts in August 2021. Having audio would nice.
I also need to go to Home Depot after church and buy some chlorine for the house septic tank. I am almost out and hoping that they have the Oweeco brand back in stock.
@ray:
Probably fear of GDPR, and/or they’re in deathly fear of liability for their advertising (read: snooping) practices, since EU legislation possibly opens the way to big fines for such acts.
IANAL, and it’s probably an exaggerated fear, but quite a few media sites seem to share it. I just chalk it up to paranoia, and move on.
Assuming you’re talking about US sites in Norway. If it’s a Norwegian site, I dunno.
G.
I turned 68 today. I remember as a youngster how exciting it will be entering the 21st Century. Now that we are a quater of the way in, it’s kind of sucky.
I’m just glad to be alive. A handful of my high school friends died in their early 60’s.
Nope. They’re publicly traded again, some kind of weird stock swap business through a smaller public subsidiary which was jettisoned last year.
The Chinese relation who is a kind of C-suite Angel of Death for his employers worked for that subsidiary as a low grade VP and got his walking papers shortly before the separation. I should have known that they were on the way out just by his presence on the payroll.
No. No help there getting the current job or at any time during my long term unemployment in the Northwest. I haven’t spoken to him since the Thanksgiving before we left WA State.
I’ve been bitten twice with bad components doing the latest builds at home. One was a bad motherboard, and another was an AMD CPU.
I don’t own individual stocks, just mutual funds. I have no idea what is in the mutual funds leaving that to the experts.
SIM provider is in Germany. I was trying to read the sites from my laptop, connected to my hosts WiFi. SIM is not involved. I have not been able to get data to work on the German SIM. Talk and text is OK, data is not. My former student will talk with the company tomorrow.
It has been much more than memories. Friends overseas. Young ones, now adults, that are almost like our own children. To be able to travel to foreign countries, Spain, Austria, Norway, Germany, Croatia, England, Switzerland, Ireland, and not have to be tourists is awesome. We get taken to places off the beaten path. We have minimal lodging costs, minimal food costs. A trip is little more than transportation.
The program has brought us so much joy, fun, friendship, adventures, and for me, an eye opening education on other cultures. The cultures are no different than our own, the nuances are what make the difference.
@Jenny
“I’ve lost count if the post death belongings disposals we’ve done or participated in.”
Mom and Dad didn’t get a whole lot of things from their parents. Both families were large and came through the depression, so their wasn’t ever a chance to become “collectors”, they were “wear it outers”. Mom had a hutch that she kept her treasures in. Over the years dad picked up a few pieces as his furniture business took him to a lot of auctions. Mom had a practice of writing descriptions and dates on slips of paper that would go inside glassware and ceramics or get taped to the bottom. Made it easier to sort things out.
Jenny, thanks for the advice and the offer, but materially I’m mostly set up. We have an automatic door, but it doesn’t really fit our coop. I might perform surgery on the coop, might build an adapter frame, or might just continue to waffle and put it off. For that second option, I can see about having The Child weld a frame. We can design it together and then she can get welding practice in doing it. It’s such a good idea that I can’t help but wonder how the universe will interfere.
The biggest problem with the coop and the chicken run is that I made a mistake in not building the run around the coop. If I’d done that we’d be able to open the door in the morning and close it at night and the birds would figure it out. I’d still have to check food and water but they’d be safe and it would not need much of my time. With the coop outside of the run, I need to open everything up and then herd the knuckleheads into the run in the morning, then herd them back in the evening or when the weather goes bad as it did yesterday. With most of the birds it’s not a problem but we have a couple who are, shall we say, a bit dim, even for chickens. I’ll see about getting the coop into the run … someday.
For most of the other stuff, it would be a lot easier if everyone else – wife and her mother – would stay away. Wife will once in a while feed the birds or lead them into the garden so they can scratch for bugs, but she’s not reliable even when she says that she’s going out to do it so I still have to make sure they’re fed and watered or in the coop or whatever, as well as check frequently to make sure the birds are secure. The garden is the biggest threat, as it’s not covered and we have a forest with hawks, raccoons, and foxes about four feet away. We’ve already lost one bird because wife let the chickens into the garden and then wandered off. (Hawk, I assume. The bird was lying dead in the garden and the other chickens were terrified and ran into the coop as soon as the gate was opened.) As for Grandma, she keeps flailing hoses around to water the garden and the grapes and the fruit trees, and she breaks things in the process. She destroyed two hoses and three nozzles and knocked a couple of small holes in a third hose … in three days. On her good days she realizes that she has problems but resents it and is determined to keep doing things even if she causes problems in the doing. On her bad days she doesn’t realize that she has problems. It’s at bit of a bother for me, the one who gets stuck with the cleanup and repairs. So anyway, I was going to set up a splitter to run a hose for an automatic filler for the chickens … but it got broken before I was done setting it up.
EDIT: Per usual, it took me most of three hours to write that. Time for uninterrupted concentration? Not around here, bucko!
@Ray Thompson
If there’s a Circle of Life there’s also a Circle of Nerd Things. Always good to get them in the hands of someone who appreciates.
My pencil of the era was a $5.00 Pentel. I still have it and it’s probably worth $20. There are probably a million out there that are missing caps, and you can’t buy replacements. I have called Pentel a couple times and begged and they have deigned to send me a couple freebies. I’ve actually thought about getting a quote to have some made. I figure I could sell 10,000 a month for a year until the factory in China filling my order started selling them on eBay for a buck with free shipping.
@Nick
No ripping on the radial arm, unless you are doing short pieces at 90 degrees.
Bought a very nice set of chisels a few years ago. I’ve hardly used them, but I own them. (He who dies with the most tools, wins. Or maybe now it’s the best toolboxes, but Studley won that competition and retired the trophy.)
One of the YT guys did a good test of parallel clamps (see last week’s post on heat treating) and the Harbor Freight got high marks at half the price.
Misc boxes of hardware are usually a good buy.
BTW, the Angel of Death is currently on the payroll of one of the big Realtor franchise operations, but the company is careful to flag him in his bio on their web site as a “Non-Executive Officer”.
I have no idea what that means legally, but I would take it as a sign of fiscal health (or lack thereof) for the organization.
I could evnsion a “Rings of Power” Monopoly except with the names assigned the characters by the hardcore Tolkien fans who trashed the Amazon series on YouTube and other social media outlets.
The next season is effectively stillborn at this point.
Rite Aid chain has Bud Light on sale this week; however, I will stick with PBR.
Fan Fiction Author Sues Amazon, Tolkien Estate
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2023/04/26/fan-fiction-author-sues-amazon-tolkien-estate/
The Tolkien Estate has since filed it’s own lawsuit against Polychron, but the analysis in the link above is unchanged.
not related, but same site:
What the Warhol Ruling May Mean for AI
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2023/05/23/what-the-warhol-ruling-may-mean-for-ai/
Transformativeness has always been the sleazy back-alley side of copyright law. Having an AI apply a million combinations of filters/distortions and claiming that the result is not copyrighted when the source is instantly recognizable is simply theft*. If artists start protecting themselves by running their works through AI’s and submitting the resulting multi-terrabyte files to the copyright office, digital storage is going to become a major line item in the U.S. budget.
There’s an old joke about the weight of National Geographics causing North America (or the Northern Hemisphere) to sink. It might need updating.
*It would be fitting if someone takes all of Warhol’s work and runs it through AI and files for copyrights.
@CowboyStu
“I will stick with PBR.”
Horrible side-effect of hydrazine poisoning.
Yeah, tried that exactly once. A very useful tool for some things, but not that.
> https://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit/2023/06/04
>
> Lady does have two kids..
The Lady looks young and fair to me.
>> The auctioneer, and judging by his comment while we loaded it, the seller, both seemed to be upset it went so cheap.
@nick, mis-described? Brand name misspelled?
“Claim: The Covid Pandemic Caused Global Warming”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/04/claim-the-covid-pandemic-caused-global-warming/
Pull the other leg, it has a bell on it.
Having fun over here.
I bought a “NEOSMAY Fanless Mini PC WiFi 6 16GB DDR4-3200 512GB SSD (Reliable Quality) Intel Pentium N6005 Upto 3.3GHz Intel UHD …” from Newegg at the end of September for $345 with tax.
I like the PC enough to by another. This time it cost $302 with tax. I added a “WD Blue 1TB SA510 M.2 Internal Solid State Drive SSD – WDS100T3B0B” for $57 with tax. Total order was $359.
Not bad the way prices are going up. Did I mention the new PC came with a $15 gift card?
I almost bought a couple of Orinco external SSD drive cases. But… I waited and I just now used the gift card plus 13¢ on my Discover card.
WD doesn’t make it easy to find Acronis software needed so I could clone the 512GB drive to the 1TB drive. I found a program that does something but no clone drive option. I googled more and hey, what’s this “from the toolbar on the left side of the screen select” stuff? Ok, more software to download. New machine is all up to date with Win11 22h2 and cloned to a 1TB drive. It’s like magic.
I just need to install SlimServer and copy over my music folder after the external drive cases arrive. Then re-name the machine from “whatever” that Win11 gave it to “moa”.
I bought a “NEOSMAY Fanless Mini PC WiFi 6 16GB DDR4-3200 512GB SSD (Reliable Quality) Intel Pentium N6005 Upto 3.3GHz Intel UHD …” from Newegg at the end of September for $345 with tax.
I like the PC enough to by another. This time it cost $302 with tax. I added a “WD Blue 1TB SA510 M.2 Internal Solid State Drive SSD – WDS100T3B0B” for $57 with tax. Total order was $359.
The SSD drives are awesome but the M.2 drives are awesomer (10X faster than SSD). The WD 1TB Black M.2 drive is $50.
https://www.amazon.com/WD_BLACK-SN770-Internal-Gaming-Solid/dp/B09QV692XY?tag=ttgnet-20/
Really Dave?!
https://www.businessinsider.com/dave-ramsey-faces-150-million-lawsuit-over-timeshare-exit-promotions-2023-6
90F, winds at 22mph gusting to 30 from the SW and a grass fire a few miles due W. Should miss this little burg with any luck, if they can’t contain it.
Summer is here.
The NVMe stuff is faster than SATA. I haven’t looked for why. And it’s generally cheaper, too. But I’m over here buying last generation PC hardware. Because it’s a couple of steps up, so, better for me, from my 10+ year old i5 but new machine doesn’t do NVMe.
For surfing the web and e-mail and whatever else, the SATA stuff can read and write around 500+ MBps. Faster than spinning rust.
The NVMe bustles along about 5000 MBps. Is RAM that fast? I don’t know.
M.2 drives are just wacky anyway. How they get 1TB on a stick a little larger than a stick of Juicy Fruit gum is amazing.
Just now getting caught up. Taking a few minutes before packing to come home…
Got the tree debris picked up and moved all the logs to a stack.
Played settlers of catan with the kid.
Now I need to get the liquidtite and cat cable out of the shed and into my truck.
Poison the fire ants, and go…
n
Standard MO of the time share industry is to sue places like Timeshare Exit Team. It isn’t a unique business strategy, and I remember hearing similar services advertise on Bruce Williams’ show back in the day, some with Williams doing the ads himself.
The irony is that Williams was in business with DVC, and the family still owns Jellyrolls at Disney Boardwalk the last time I checked.
Ramsey has really been after the industry lately, however, and interest rate hikes have hit the industry hard. One panel discussion on the Disney/Florida disaster I saw recently talked about DVC not making ROFR offers since December while the company stockpiles cash, and being able to easily liquidate the ownership used to be one of the things that set them apart from, say, Westgate.
And take Insider with a grain of salt. That’s practically a CIA media outlet depending on which conspiracy theory you believe.
The NVMe bustles along about 5000 MBps. Is RAM that fast? I don’t know.
M.2 drives are just wacky anyway. How they get 1TB on a stick a little larger than a stick of Juicy Fruit gum is amazing.
The new ram chips are very fast plus there is a 100 MB of really fast buffer. After that, reads and writes slow down to SSD speed.
The new ram chips are 3D. The transistors are stacked on top of each other. Samsung is claiming 200+ transistors stacked on each other. It is an amazing world out there and the machinery is super specific and expensive.
Standard MO of the time share industry is to sue places like Timeshare Exit Team. It isn’t a unique business strategy, and I remember hearing similar services advertise on Bruce Williams’ show back in the day, some with Williams doing the ads himself.
The problem is that the timeshare industry has a nasty smell to it. I doubt that anything associated with the timeshare industry would fly in a civil case. Everyone knows somebody who has been screwed by the timeshare industry.
An awful lot of things labeled as conspiracy theories have been turning out to have been true all along, so I’m going to go with all of them.
Emails Reveal: Bureaucrats censor radiation risk science fraud by cancelling whistleblowers; Huge implications for nuclear power and more
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/03/emails-reveal-bureaucrats-censor-radiation-risk-science-fraud-by-cancelling-whistleblowers-huge-implications-for-nuclear-power-and-more/
JEP had some very specific counter-examples to the LNT model. IIRC one of them involved a long-term study on a large number of Japanese that lived in an apartment building constructed with contaminated steel that provided a relatively high amount of background radiation, yet people were much healthier than expected.
re: Dave Ramsey
I heard about this yesterday on Steve Lehto’s YT channel.
The comments section had a lot of comments from Ramsey listeners who say he made it clear he was compensated by TET, and also that he believed in them.
He’s not perfect, but he’s generally careful and methodical. If the basis of the case is fraud or being misleading on Ramsey’s part, I’d say it will get thrown out.
Does sound like TET had some pretty questionable practices, though. Based on the accusations alone. Facts won’t be available until there are court hearings.
People dislike Dave Ramsey too because he’s a scold.
re: radiation risk
Consider Radiation Hormesis. As introduced to me by Cresson Kearny in “Nuclear War Survival Skills”, a how-to manual produced by the US Gov at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which directly and specifically refutes the knee jerk doomsday scenarios popular in fiction and environmentalism (BIRM).
Amateur radio operators are now required to do station surveys of RF exposure, and I wonder if similar shading/panicking is being done by the government there as well.
drwilliams says:
Another was houses in Colorado where the gravel/aggregate used in the cement contained some low level of uranium. The only actual hazard there was radon pooling in basements; “radioactive” slabs weren’t an issue.
@Ken Mitchell
Thanks! I knew there were others, but haven’t had the time to go back and look.
Visiting chaosmanor has become painful since the relatives put the pinkos in charge.
Could you summarize why it’s painful, for those of us who quit going there after he died?
People dislike Dave Ramsey too because he’s a scold.
You and I know that Dave Ramsey is a scold. But does the general populace ?
Remember, the general populace does not listen AM radio and they do not go to conservative churches. The civil suit jury will be made up of the general populace. And, the general populace knows that the timeshare industry is a scam.
@lpdbw
“Could you summarize why it’s painful, for those of us who quit going there after he died?”
Dr. Pournelle was a consummate gentleman. He described his early views as liberal, which became conservative as the country shifted harder and harder left, and his brand of conservatism was out of fashion:
“In any event, I suppose I am properly put in some small corner of the paleo-conservative movement so long as it is clearly understood that I don’t agree with all they say.” (June 2005, quoted in link below)
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/2011/10/13/
When last I visited the site I encountered views in language that he would not have expressed, and what-passes-for-liberal-humor that he would not have tolerated to be posted on his site. I do not know if it is still there. He always spoke fondly of his children and sometimes of their careers without describing their political views. I do not know how such garbage came to be posted on his site, but can only conclude that his children have no respect for his memory. If I ever have the unlikely opportunity to express my disgust to them in private I will do so forcefully and with the full command of a very good vocabulary combined with a long study of insult. Out of respect for him I will not do so in public.
Dave Ramsey is a white man worth $4 billion. That’s all Trial Science needs.
Westgate always has a packed house for those “free” Disney tickets. Picking a sympathetic jury will be easy.
There’s not a whole lot of new content on Jerry’s sites.
The “Chaos Manor” site has not had any updates since Jan 2020. The newer “Science Fiction” last post was June 2022.
There is a ‘Jerry Pournelle’ Facebook account, but posts there are not regular. Maybe every 6-8 weeks.
Site visits are under 900 per day, but most those seem to be bots, not actual visits.
The family continues to pay for hosting and domain renewals. I still do the site software updates.
“Westgate always has a packed house for those “free” Disney tickets. Picking a sympathetic jury will be easy.”
Mostly veterans of the high-pressure sales tactics with a few buyers that had the year-on-year realities. Trial Science might be hard pressed.
@RickH
My last visit was some time ago and what I read was shocking, enough so that I commented here shortly after.
Dave Ramsey is a white man worth $4 billion. That’s all Trial Science needs.
The intertubes say $200 million.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/082015/how-dave-ramsey-made-his-fortune.asp
Well, the little grass fire is out.
Someone gifted me a pair of late 60’s or early 70’s (at a guess) Kmart ‘Focal’ 7×35 binoculars the other day and I had them in the truck -Japanese Towa Koegi – and I watched a Chinook being used as a water bomber.
Internal water storage. Very cool.
Nice bino’s, solid steel and glass and crinkly leather. I may just keep them in the truck, no need to worry about plastics.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/as_south_africa_collapses_it_opts_for_full_antiwhite_apartheid.html
The process began long before Ramaphosa–Willie Mandela’s reign of terror in Soweto was mid 80’s.
There’s a scene in Michener’s The Drifters (1971) where a couple from Rhodesia talk about expecting to be killed when they returned home. They were. That was fiction well-grounded in reality that has become wildly worse in the past fifty years. The second quoted passage above is the meat of the thing.
ADDED:
If 10,000 white South Africans managed to get to Mexico and formed a caravan to our border, does anyone think that the Biden Administration would not find a way to keep them out?
I miss Jerry. I haven’t been to the site in years. At they time they had made it very difficult to read old posts. Maybe that has been fixed? I don’t much feel like going back.
On LNT: IIRC he also described a study showing that some people who had received low doses from the bomb actually lived much longer than the average. Something to do with distance from the explosion and receiving just the right, low, amount of gamma.
In a post-COVID world, much of what we touch has QACs
I found out the main ingredients are two types of quaternary ammonium cations or Quaternary Ammonium Compounds (“QACs”). I researched the product and learned that it was developed so that workers wearing protective gear could clean hospital bedrails between patients.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/in_a_postcovid_world_much_of_what_we_touch_has_qacs.html
Also know as “quats”. They do not break down easily, they are easy to detect qualitatively (whether they are present) but not quantitatively (how much). Yes, they will build up.
Chemistry: Ammonia is NH3. Add a hydrogen, and you get the ammonium ion NH4+. Now replace the hydrogens with long chains of organic alphabet soup. Them’s quats.
Ask for the name of the cleaner. Look it up. Find the Technical Data Sheets (TDS) and especially the Safety Data Sheets (SDS). See what PPE is required for the applicators. Pay attention to. exposure cautions.
If applicators are wearing PPE, then there is no way that people in a gym have any business being exposed to wet equipment. Management tells you it’s safe? Fine. Schedule their office and equipment to be sprayed down on the same schedule.
Getting contact dermatitus at your gym? Chuck Norris will tell you that Total Gym is a good workout. Commuting cost is zero.
I miss Jerry. I haven’t been to the site in years. At they time they had made it very difficult to read old posts. Maybe that has been fixed? I don’t much feel like going back.
– which was one of the primary drivers for me continuing to host here, so that it wouldn’t become a static site with every declining readership. And while the only analytics I have access to overcount bots by thousands, our readership is stable. It may have shifted, I know we have new readers and commentors, and I know some people stopped coming by, but the core is there.
And there is a LOT of good stuff, much of it timeless, that you can find with RickH’s search tool or the keywords. Remember that most of the good stuff is in the comments.
n
Got everything squared away and headed home. Made it safe and sound.
Very tired though, and need to get an early start tomorrow at my client’s house…
n
I’m not sure where I saw the $4 billion number.
One of the “expose” articles in the mainstream press somewhere. I’ll have to dig around.
I could believe his mutual fund investments being worth ~ $100-200 million at a minimum if he’s seen three doublings in the last 25 years or so since talk radio peaked pre-9/11.
The long knives are definitely out for Ramsey. He was already in trouble for questioning the pandemic, but I’ve heard him letting callers on the air talking Borrower Defense, the real relief mechanism written into the Federal student loan program which was a fairly obscure section of the law until recently.
Borrower Defense will get serious attention if the Supreme Court overturns forgiveness.
“Saudi Arabia is slashing oil supply. It could mean higher gas prices for US drivers”
https://apnews.com/article/opec-oil-prices-saudi-arabia-russia-8d70999cb8258aebc3edbfdfcae278b7
“Saudi Arabia will reduce how much oil it sends to the global economy, taking a unilateral step to prop up the sagging price of crude after two previous cuts to supply by major producing countries in the OPEC+ alliance failed to push oil higher.”
“The Saudi cut of 1 million barrels per day, to start in July, comes as the other OPEC+ producers agreed in a meeting in Vienna to extend earlier production cuts through next year.”
The Saudis have decided that the minimum price for their oil is probably around $100/bbl. They have the means to enforce that price level.
BTW, the Saudis are buying Russian oil for $45/bbl right now and converting it to diesel in their refineries. The Saudis will sell you anything you want: crude, diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, etc. Of course, they want their price, not the current market price.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
Let’s guess here folks…odds are Jim isn’t chauffeured around in a Ford pickup…
https://jalopnik.com/ford-says-it-may-not-be-able-to-meet-maverick-demand-1850500458
“Tesla price cuts padded by $1.8 billion windfall from Biden’s IRA”
https://www.autoblog.com/2023/06/03/tesla-price-cuts-ira-tax-credits/
“Tesla, Panasonic benefit early from incentives for making batteries in the U.S.”
Wow.
Hat tip to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13zv1cy/tesla_price_cuts_padded_by_18_billion_windfall/
It is morning here in Tønsberg, south of Oslo. Having usable daylight at 23:00, then the sun coming back up at 04:00 is more upsetting to my sleep cycle than the jet lag. I am basically over the jet lag, made that adjustment in a day. Being dog tired, up for 24 hours, the crashing hard, seems to do wonders for the jet lag.
Visiting today in Sandejford, then back to Oslo proper for two nights. Then staying at the hotel close to the airport (expensive) so we can catch a 09:00 flight to Vienna.
We have had a great time with our hosts. Excellent wine with the meals. Last night was a large roast and several family members showed up, I think there were 12 people. I have met all of them before on a couple of occasions and it was good talking with them again.
Their view of the U.S. gun system is interesting. They asked me why the Americans are so obsessed with owning guns. My answer was first, because we can. The next answer was the American west was built on people carrying guns and getting our independence from England was based on carrying guns. Possession was important enough to be part of the constitution and not just a law.
I pointed out that violent, deranged people will find a way to kill or destroy. Guns are not the underlying cause of the violence, people are the underlying cause. Making guns illegal would just bolster the illegal gun trade and not stop the violence issue.
I think they are being fed a lot of liberal media crap. Anyway, it was a good and interesting discussion. We didn’t change each other’s mind, just maybe added some different viewpoints.
So far the weather has been almost perfect. A degree or two warmer would be OK but with blue skies, slight breeze, I am not going to complain. I fell asleep on the patio on a patio couch and had a really good nap.
I have a Pilot retractable pencil that I have had for 50+ years. I no longer use it and when I die my son will probably throw it away. The pencil still works flawlessly. I gave the pencil to our host, who is the regional distributor for Pilot Pens and Pencils. He was really pleased to get the pencil and is planning to mount it in frame for his office. He said it is a rare pencil and will show it off in his office before mounting.
Jens did talk about the designer, apparently Japanese. The pencil was hand assembled in Japan and a flagship product. A fitting final destination.
Based on a few conversations with Europeans, mainly Germans, between about ten and about three years ago, they think that all of the US is like Chicago or Baltimore. This is based on the news rather than personal experience.