Intro
This is another of the W.O.O.D. series of semi-regular
Weekly Occasional Open Discussions.
(i.e. if I forget and skip one, no big)
Immediate prior one here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/01/27/w-o-o-d-26-january-2019/
and remains open for threads running there (at least until the ‘several month’ auto-close of comments on stale threads).
Canonical list of old ones here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/w-o-o-d/
So use “Tips” for “Oooh, look at the interesting ponder thing!”
and “W.O.O.D” for “Did you see what just happened?! What did you think about it?”
What’s Going On?
Venezuela draws closer to “regime change”. Watched a video about the involvement of China there. Seems they have pumped in a load of cash in exchange for promises of future oil. Meanwhile another news report showed a Russian Cargo jet loading up – the speculation being it was the 20 tons of Gold that Venezuela had, being sent to Russia as “payment” on their $Billions debt for military gear and such. Looks to me like their Socialist “Friends” stripping the Venezuelan Citizens of their valuables. Then the EU “timer” ran out so the UK, Germany, France and maybe a couple of others recognized the new guy. Italy didn’t nor did a bunch of the Little People Countries, so it wasn’t an EU wide thing. Still, the pile against Maduro getting bigger
In the UK, T.May has decided “Plan B” is to have a re-vote on “Plan A – Satrapy” once the EU again refuses to change it and the timer has run out. Twisting the fork in the roast a little, the EU has said they might, maybe, be OK with a 6 month extension of time to leave. Yeah, that’s the ticket, another 1/2 year of uncertainty and twisting in the wind. Just get it over with already. Then Parliament has voted to NOT accept WTO rules Brexit, NOR to extend the deadline, NOR to accept the T.May “deal”; bit it MUST have a border that isn’t a border with North Ireland – in otherwords, to do nothing and require the impossible. IMHO there is no way in hell that anything substantive can be done in the few weeks left. 20-something Parliament days.
In France somewhere around 17 people in the Yellow Vests protests have lost an eye due to the police “flash bang” grenade guns; so now they are protesting the tactics used against the protesters. I suggest they all go buy motorcycle helmets with strong faceplates. Protects against head banging and sprays directed at the eyes too. (not so good against tear gas…) Or change their Government…
The SPY chart has completed a rebound run to above the SMA stack and right in the middle of the prior range bound area (three tops and 2 1/2 bottoms in a row in the same range) as the shorts covered from the plunge of December. If you didn’t time December right, in either direction, it will either be a loss or a NOOP. (No Op or no operations, a computer term meaning nothing happens). Timing to the week or shorter granularity is swing trading, not investing, and needs daily tending to get it right. Basically, you need to be a computer or a day trader to trade that fast.
Note that while DMI and MACD are “blue on top” (and have been for a while saying “trade in”) volume has decayed to abysmal levels in this up run. That speaks to a direction change and a return to the SMA stack. This will either punch back through in a market rollover, or bounce off the SMA stack to confirm the new bull run. IMHO, it can’t confirm a bull run with that kind of volume decay. Yes The Fed did not raise rates. That isn’t a ringing endorsement, just a removal of a knife in the ribs.
SPY 5 Feb 2019 Year / Daily chart
As 75%-85% of market volume is now machine trading you know what most Big Money has chosen. That is why I’ve been less active, BTW. The market access and trading rules are now highly biased not just against “The Little Guy” but any human being at all. Computers read (scan) the news feeds for key words and IMMEDIATELY initiate trade strategies – even if you have a direct Reuters or Morningstar news wire, you can’t read fast enough. By the time you read “earnings miss” they have already sold short 20%+ of the outstanding shares…
I expect SPY will ‘muddle about’ in the same range bound area for a while before a direction is picked.
I’ve made decent progress on graphing in Python / Numpy / Mathplotlib. While a bit annoyed that you must learn a couple of huge libraries (not just the language…) to get decent array handling and graphics, at least the facilities are there. It’s the usual trade off in Object Oriented design – you can learn the basics of the language fast, but then spend months to years wandering in all the libraries of functions to find what has already been written to “save you time”… Oh Well, I have it running and even made an area proportional map of thermometers last night. For anyone who missed it (the thread already being long and it is in the third update) here’s the graph:
GHCN v3.3 Sine Projection area correct thermometers
Still needs a “border around the world” and removal of the “white border space” Python supplies by default (range beyond 90 / 180) along with labels on the axis and graph, but at least you can see that we heavily sample a few spots on the planet while the rest is very thin or not at all.
Oh, and “Honorable Mention” to the NFL having a football game instead of a Political Rally. Keep it up a year or two and I might watch your games again. I’ve scrupulously avoided even watching the excerpts and snips on the Roku. Inject “Political Activism” into your product, you are dead to me for a couple of years, minimum. Less than zero tolerance for that crap.
It looks like every loose screw Democrat has tossed their hat into the ring for a Presidential Run. I suspect they know Hillary is a corpse in pantsuit and it will be an open field. Then they make the mistaken assumption Trump WILL lose. Um, no. There’s a whole lot of us who are just quiet and waiting. We don’t take polls, don’t answer phone calls from unknown numbers, don’t shout at CNN reporters. We’re pleasantly surprised at the list of campaign promises kept. He’s got my vote for a re-up (something that was NOT guaranteed BTW. I just voted for him to give a Peptic Moment to the Dimocrats and to assure Hillary was out. He’s surprised me by being a good and effective President, so OK for round 2.) Given the field os OMG Dumb Left Wingnuts the Dims have “on stage” at the moment, Trump will have an easy 2nd term. It will up to the Democrats With Brains to decide not to run one of those numb-cortex folks and find a decent President-In-Waiting to actually run. Not someone corrupt like Hillary. Not a Socialist like Bernie. Not a rabid frothing brainless apparatchik like the other 1/2 dozen (Booker, Pocahontas, Occasional Cortex…). Gee, only a year+ to go and already we’re having the Campaign Follies.
Odds ‘N Ends: Spain prepares to prosecute (or persecute?) the folks leading the political movement in Catalonia. Nice way to win over all the folks who supported them /sarc;… Unemployment is still at God Awful levels in Greece, Italy, etc. of the EU; yet Merkel, Macron, etc. ran off to sign the “Flood us with unemployed low skilled 3rd worlders” agreement; so either destruction or revolution in their future – or political change writ large. The Polar Vortex has been having a fine time making big lobes in the jet stream The kind I remember from the ’50s and ’60s (yes, I watched the news as a kid, and the weatherman – it WAS a man – put up jet stream and wind graphs. KHSL Ch. 12 – Chico as I recall it.) So we’ll have alternating Freezer & Warm as the lobes jiggle back and forth with Big ‘Ol “Mobile Polar Highs” freezing your “bippy”… Nothing new, just returning to the start of the cycle.
So no vacations in Europe or The North for us for a while. Nor Latin America… too many refugees / migrants. The South of the USA looks good, as do the Tropical Islands world wide. I’d love to do Australia / New Zealand again, but that’s more money than I’m going to spend right now… See you on the beach in August? ;-) I’m thinking getting the Spouse down to the Florida Keys might be nice. Putter along in an RV from key to key for a couple of weeks? Hmmm….
Musings from the Chiefio 
We don’t take polls, don’t answer phone calls from unknown numbers, don’t shout at CNN reporters.
I will happily tell anyone with a recorder I will support a Sanders/Harris or Warren/Booker ticket. Anything to make their fantasy even more special.
It is interesting 70% of the planet is water and the top couple meters of that water had most of the heat capacity of the planet but we simply have no clue about the historical changes in sea surface temperature and depth profile of temperature. Even the “current” data for that is extremely sparse, so in short we have no idea what the “temperature of the earth” is doing or has done.
@Larry, we also do not know The ocean residence time of disparate W/L insolation, therefore we can not calculate the total energy content to the ocean, let alone the top two meters, from disparate solar cycles.
Therefore the effect of several consecutive very weak or very strong cycles is also not known.
Disparate solar spectrem have very different residence times, which is precisely what determines how much or little energy gain a system has. For instance LWIR from GHG very quickly is used up at the skim surface layer, absorbed in evaporation, and even turned into cloud cover, quickly returning said LWIR energy to the atmosphere ( short residence time vs. surface penetrating S/W, and further limiting ocean uptake of S/W solar rays which add far more energy into the earth – atmosphere – ocean system.
Increase energy residence time with steady state input, and you increase total energy in the system. Just because a material warms the atmosphere, it does not mean it adds energy to the planets energy content.
Your global chart of where there are weather stations measuring temperature is great. But I am perplexed at the section for Australia. It still looks to ‘dense’ a network of stations to be very accurate. From memory there are 700+ BOM weather stations. But Australia is just under 3 milion square miles in surface area.
In South Australia where I am, around Adelaide with weather stations about 30 ks apart. But elsewhere it is more like 100-200 kilometers..So I wonder how accurate the chart is.More tweaking to do maybe ?
By the way the Oz dollar is now low vis a vis the US dollar. Trading around $0.71. So cost wise it’s good time to visit.
@Bill In Oz:
A decade or so back sent my Son to Australia as a “Junior Ambassador” for about a month. He loved it (especially the Great Barrier Reef diving ;-) and I’ve been there once a few decades back (and almost didn’t leave… had a job offer…)
I’d not mind at all doing a ‘do over’ of the Australia run… I’d want to visit some parts I didn’t get to before. Tasmania, Darwin, Perth. More bouncing around by air, less driving. Still want a jeep into the outback for a couple of days too, though ;-)
Per the station density:
Remember that this Stations EVER in GHCN, not present active only. At the peak this was about 6000 at the same time. Last I looked it was about 1200 currently. So about 1/5 the density on the graph is “current”. I’m working on a graph with “baseline” vs “current” but also trying to make it directly from the MySQL database, so it won’t be ‘soon’, but is WIP (Work In Progress). IIRC, Australia moved a bunch of stations around, then closed a lot of the Post Office stations; so a lot of those dots are “history”…
@David A , L.L.:
IMHO that is THE key issue (other than the incessant data diddling…). We have a Wave Length dependent heating profile for the oceans, and we have a known Solar variation in W/L with solar activity (and a known UV influence on stratospheric O3 and other processes that also modulate stuff).
That isn’t in the models.
Then we have Argo buoys showing that the depth of the warm summer spikes down into the ocean are shortening year over year. Less heating at depth and more rapid cooling. How does that show up in surface temperatures, eh? What was it in 1850, eh? So right out of the box we know that measuring surface temperatures says NOTHING about global heat content nor heat balance as that is entirely the world oceans and we don’t know squat about what they do at depth over time (we do, now, have effectively one climate ‘point sample’ in time with Argo). There is very limited (and somewhat diddled) ship data for near surface temperatures. It fails Nyquist, fails quality requirements, and fails spacial distribution (and time distribution) and certainly fails depth / heat content of the ocean information.
So yeah, it is impossible to know when we have no data, and what we do have is mostly unusable.
In my opinion the change to a lower UV regime has more IR prompt surface ocean evaporation (thus the higher rainfall and more flooding) but that also means a lot LESS ocean heating and a lot more active ocean cooling. Now the ocean is a Very Big Thing, so it will take 20 to 30 years to get really measurably colder. Then again, it started this in about 2000 so we’re seeing the first results now. (Hello -30F to -50F in Chicago and the MidWest…) I figure we’ve got about 30 more years of this before we start seeing warmer again. When the sun shifts back to “more blue and UV, less IR” we’ll suddenly have a VERY cold ocean (from 30 years of cooling) AND less “prompt surface heat” from the reds / IR. So cold surface and most of the energy being deposited 40 m to 100 m down will leave us very cold…
Oh Well… maybe once they are frozen to their keyboard the warmistas will realize…
corsair red: “I will happily tell anyone with a recorder I will support a Sanders/Harris or Warren/Booker ticket. Anything to make their fantasy even more special.”
You are so totally despicable! I like it! Instead of blowing off those annoying polls, regardless of who was conducting the poll, I’m gonna be the most enthusiastic socialist useful idiot/zombie respondent EVAH! Lieawatha and Gropin’ Joe 2020! Gropin’ Joe and Lieawatha 2020! Who cares? It’s all good. Where can I get my campaign button?
👍😆😆👍👍😆😆😆👍
P.S. Treat yourself to an ossqss approved Busch light (Try not to Ralph it up. It’s an acquired taste. ossqss has a cast iron stomach; he served me Yuengling out of
pitymercy. I think he had a Busch light while I had the Yuengling. I guess he was trying not to break quarantine. He got the Buckeyes. The neighbors got the Yuengling.P.P.S. ossqss is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a stupid man so I know he didn’t hide the Buckeyes in the garage fridge.)
Thank you, H.R. I don’t drink, so I will hoist a Dr. Pepper. See if you can get video of some questioner’s face glowing with delight with your answer. I try to avoid that sort of thing, but I may go looking for the opportunity just to bring a report. :-)
Just a note on the stock market and contra-indicators (Hi, Chiff!):
On the last investing posting here, or maybe it was a W.O.O.D., I mentioned that my inherited portfolio of individual stocks had two utilities mixed in OGE and AEP.
I mentioned, and E.M. commented, that they seemed to to reliably move counter to my other individual stocks, which are largely manufacturing stocks tied to aerospace.
TODAY… all of my individually held stocks were up except my two utility stocks.
Here’s my WAG for y’all to ponder and shoot down if so inclined. If indeed the computer algorithms and humans traders are ready to switch over from safety (utilities with a given, known return) to the broader market, then I think we may have turned the corner and we are not facing a prolonged bear market.
.
.
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Any ideas or experience on how long we should see ‘safe’ utilities decline and ‘risky’ equities rise before we holler “Everybody into the pool! ??? Is there some rule of thumb that Wall Streeters use to decide whether Bull or Bear is the way to go?
Item: Cesspool that is Virginia politics. Fairfax is claiming that Northam released the rape story to stop Fairfax from gaining support from the party to take over. But then both of them are idiots (as the scandals show) and do not have the intelligence to blow their own nose if their brains were dynamite.
Herring is behind both stories. He has played the good toady, but reference “My fellow Americans” and Veep Ted Matthews, That is Herring. Dumb as a stump, but capable of duplicity. He gets rid of both his competitors and thinks he can waltz into the Governor’s Mansion. I would say the effing state deserves the trio of clowns, but sadly most did not vote for them (the other half and illegals out voted the citizens).
Item: Proof has been revealed that yes indeed, Fauxcahontas did use her lie about being Native American to get jobs. Wanna Bet that is Kamala Harris’ doing?
The next 18 months is going to be fun to watch as the jackals tear themselves apart.
Stories from previous CA power broker is Kamala Harris slept her way up the usual way.
In the Independent, we learn that someone has had a go at Karl Marx’s grave/memorial with a hammer, and done lasting damage. Hate him or really hate him, there’s too much of this “smash anything I don’t like” mindset around, on both “sides”, IMO.
E.M. Thank you for the response.
I once got into a discussion with Astrophysicist Leaf at WUWT on this. After his snark, and some mirrored back, he admitted to our ignorance regarding ocean heat gain or loss over decadal solar flux patterns.
Some people just hate the free market, competition, and new businesses .
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2019/02/06/bucees-gas-price-dispute-alabama-lawsuit/amp/
Chief ! Thanks for the reply re BOM stations..Yes you are right.many are no longer active. I discovered this in my own region when trying to separate out Urban Heat Island Effect in my own rapidly growing home town, from regional or global warming effects….
And yes, so many of the stations were closed for seemingly no reason.
So it will be good to the ‘live weather stations’ chart of the planet ( and Australia ) when you have time.
;-)
Bill
This is the only amusing thing about the whole stinking mess. And it goes to show how every vote counts. 2 years ago, one state house race was tied. They drew the winner’s name out of a bowl. And the Republicans maintained control of the House of Delegates (not commons as some have said).
Well here is an interesting journey in car/truck maintenance issues. I had a neighbor having a shifting studder between 1 and 2 on his automatic tranny. We followed the normal proceedures with a servicing. Still happening. Changed out the solenoids in the tranny, still happened. Keep in mind this was over several weeks.
Ultimately, upon deeper inspection, it was identified with my voltage meter, there were issues with either the voltage regulator or alternator. Turns out they are both in the alternator on this Silverado. Changed it out and Boom, no more shift issue. The shifting module was sensitive to the voltage fluctuations to the point it would studder the shift points. The real give away was seeing the headlights once we got on that track. So, the moral of the story is, if you have shifting issues, check your headlights ;-)
Democratic House Resolution that would destroy our current election system, under the guise of making it better.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/28/conservatives-unite-against-h-r-1-ultimate-fantasy-of-the-left/
http://datechguyblog.com/2019/01/31/democrats-are-trying-to-take-control-of-our-electoral-system/
Bill In Oz says: 7 February 2019 at 12:57 am
“Closed” or just no longer included in the BOM “Acorn” Station list?
Hmm. I’m pretty sure the lowest gas price in AL is less than what’s quoted in that article. Heck, I paid $1.889 a gallon just a day or two ago. It is rising, though. Along I-10, though, they may be correct. I have not been down in LA (lower Alabama) in a number of years. Heck, there is, or was, a fair sized refinery in that area.
That said, there is a law here about gas being sold “too low” or “too high”, compared to others. I don’t recall a law against specials associated with a store’s opening. [Never mind that this law has adverse consequences.] Sounds like some folk don’t like competition.
@CDQuarles:
I just did a posting with photos of gas prices along I-10:
It has a pointer to Gasbuddy.com where you can get a current price map for any area….
Alabama was similar to those arround it. About $1.75 / gallon RUG. Regular Unleadded Gas.
Well good news, the Green New Deal pushed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke is not only stupid and impossible, but out right insane.
Seriously what sort of drugs are these people smoking?
http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/07/ten-most-insane-requirements-green-new-deal/
Several states have laws against selling fuel too cheaply. They were originally created to prevent predatory price wars where large corporate owned station groups would undercut all their competition and drive them out of business. A friend of mine was running a fuel ethanol plant in Wisconsin, and his fuel plant got driven out of business by a law suit claiming unfair pricing as he was selling ethanol blended gasoline at a profit “too cheap” according to the local dealer association. He was buying raw gasoline directly from the rack at the local refinery and doing the blending on site at his fuel ethanol plant (which allowed him to get the fuel blenders tax credit). He was selling fuel for less than the local gas stations could buy the same fuel from the refinery, so the refiners put him out of business.
OMG! The description of the GND In L.L.’s link is just amazing. “Replace all
carsvehicles” in 10 years with some mystery meat e-Thing? Do they realize the production rate of vehicles can not possibly do that even if we were building e-Things today at that rate, and we are not?Also, just how do they plan to get me the 5 vehicles I’ll want to replace my fleet? Admittedly, 2 are on their last legs and headed for decommission. So I got the 2 4×4 to replace them – Florida Hurricane and Chicago Winter friendly 4 x 4’s with 300 to 400 mile ranges. What 350 mile range (in winter at 5 below zero…) e-4×4 do I get? Hmm? The third “keeper” is able to stand for weeks to months at a time, then start up instantly and run for 450 miles. It will be based at whatever side of the country we are not on at the time. So the intent is we are in Florida with the 2 x 4x4s and I fly back to continue prepping the house for sale; that Diesel is waiting for me ready to go even if it takes 4 months between trips. Do you have a zero self-discharge EV for me? (Electricity will be turned off and repair work done using a generator, if needed… though small lighting and such will be done using an inverter from the car…)
Don’t even get me started on the idea of replacing all the Diesel Locomotives and Long Haul Trucks…
A. Occasional C. has no real Economics education and clearly didn’t have the micro-econ linear programing / production optimization classes I had. Near as I can tell, she has an education in Marxist Political Economy. That’s what her statements indicate is her “Strong Suit”.
Well, one Very Good Thing:
We now know that ANYONE who endorses this Green New Deal is a certifiable idiot and to be avoided and removed from office at any and all costs.
Oh, the Stupid Is Strong in FireFox these days…
I think I may finally have the motivation to abandon it in Devuan. So I’m running THE newest version of FireFox ESR (as I do update, upgrade fairly often to add things like Python). It came with “Pocket” crap. Now every “new tab” has AOL like teaser photos with “click bait” stories. Not the list of my frequent sites I know and love (they seem to be way down a page or two, maybe).
I made the mistake of clicking one that looked interesting. I was informed that my Squid Server / DNS trap / PocketPi setup had forbidden it as it was just a click bait advertising site.
So I go to shut it off. DDGo search returns this page:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-pocket-for-firefox?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=disable-pocket-firefox
So first off, disabling “Pocket” will not stop the SPAM. OK, but they have another thing that does. OK. I go to shut them both off.
about:config has never heard of Pocket.
The cogwheel has no idea what Pocket is.
Sigh.
So let’s summarize:
Firefox has become a fat bloated thing that can’t fit in memory with a lot of tabs open without spilling it’s guts to Swap (not bad on the XU4, crappy on my Mac-on-uSD card). It has instituted SPAM by Default, and does not let me turn it off; while violating their own manual page about it.
OK…
I’m going to whack a while on SQL in Python and selecting stations to graph over time; BUT:
When it’s time to pause and reflect on that, I’ll be looking for “alternative browsers” to install in Devuan on Arm systems. I know this is a hard row to hoe, as many of the browsers are NOT ported to Arm; and many of the choices that are ported are limited text oriented “small things” for “small hardware”; not realizing that octocore 2 GHz A72 Arm is a fast chipset. So I’m not sure I’ll succeed at finding something I like. But “we’ll see”. What is sure is that I’ve reached the limit of my tolerance for FireFox Follies.
Yes, Chromium is in Debian, but on the XU4 there’s “some issue”. Is it that I need to do an even newer update upgrade? Is it that I’ve installed something incompatible? Is it the Debian -> Devuan conversion as this board is running an Armbian “uplift”? I don’t know… But if it takes a swap of board, I have a couple I can also use as my Daily Driver. (that RockPro64 is a good candidate and it’s about time I did more than First Fire on it… and there’s always the Pi.M3 thought it’s a bit slow for some things, but having it as the browser station would be fine and it is a direct Devuan install, if that’s the issue)
root@odroidxu4:/SG2/ext/chiefio/SQL/bin# apt-get install chromium Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: chromium : Depends: libavcodec57 (>= 7:3.2.10) but it is not installable or libavcodec-extra57 (>= 7:3.2.10) but it is not installable Depends: libavformat57 (>= 7:3.2.10) but it is not installable Depends: libavutil55 (>= 7:3.2.10) but it is not installable Depends: libcups2 (>= 1.4.0) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.9.14) but 1.8.22-0+deb8u1 is to be installed Depends: libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.24.0) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libicu57 (>= 57.1-1~) but it is not installable Depends: libjpeg62-turbo (>= 1:1.5.1-2) but 1:1.3.1-12 is to be installed Depends: libpng16-16 (>= 1.6.2-1) but it is not installable Depends: libre2-3 (>= 20160901) but it is not installable Depends: libsnappy1v5 but it is not installable Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 6) but 4.9.2-10+deb8u1 is to be installed Depends: libvpx4 (>= 1.6.0) but it is not installable Depends: libwebp6 (>= 0.5.1) but it is not installable Depends: libwebpdemux2 (>= 0.5.1) but it is not installable Depends: libwebpmux2 (>= 0.5.1) but it is not installable E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.So I’m hoping some kind of “clean up on isle 7” apt-thingy will fix this and let me at least install chromium (the open source clone of Chrome) while I look at availability on things like Brave, Vivaldi, Seamonkey, etc. etc.
This guy is apparently one of the brains behind AOC and her progressive nonsense.
https://keywiki.org/Saikat_Chakrabarti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Democrats
Appears to be a Soros puppet
On January 23, 2017, Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski founded Justice Democrats with ten others, including former staffers from the Sanders campaign such as its Director of Organizing Technology, Saikat Chakrabarti, and MoveOn.org fundraiser Zack Exley.[11][12][13] According to the organization, they seek to create a left-wing populist movement to support alternative Democratic candidates beginning with the 2018 mid-term elections, in order to either defeat the incumbent Democrats or cause them to become accountable to their constituents. They require their candidates to take a pledge to refuse financial contributions from billionaires and corporations.[5] In addition, they hope to rebuild the Democratic Party on a national level and to defeat President Trump if he runs for re-election in 2020.
So “refuse financial contributions from billionaires” but NOT billionaire funded NGOs? Gee, I wonder why… /snark;
Hello everyone. I am Phil Younger and worked at the ethanol plant Larry referred to above. I ran the plant’s 18 unattended E85/E10/E20 stations and yes- we were sued by 12 million dollars by a Major Brand C-store network for minimum markup law even though the State of Wisconsin did not agree that we were in violation. The law required us to add 9.18% to the ethanol terminal posted price but we refused to follow the law since the oil companies marked up the exact same ethanol we sold them by $1.00 then if we added 9.18 cents they would effectively made sure they kept an alternative fuel priced out of the market. The law was written to keep Standard Oil of Ohio from building it’s own stations and squeezing out little ma and pa stations but the now huge branded chains used the same law to prevent any new competitive companies or products.
Illinois just keep digging the hole deeper. Chicago might be able to survive it for a while, but downstate is doomed.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/illinois-senate-committee-approves-15-minimum-wage-505497491.html
Hi Phil I think you will enjoy the conversation over here!
Welcome aboard, Phil.
FWIW, “alternative fuels” was one of my hobbies for a good many years, before it was trendy. I have made my own biodiesel in the kitchen, for example.
I’ve also run a Diesel on any of {propane [in the air intake as a co-fuel – ignition via the injected Diesel], 25% Regular Unleaded Gasoline, Kerosene, Crisco / Kerosene blend, Soybean oil, methanol [in the air intake as a co-fuel – ignition from the idle level of injected Diesel]) and likely a few others I’ve forgotten. Most experiments done with an International Harvester Scout with a Nissan 6 cyl inline Diesel and Bosch injection. Some on a Mercedes sedan 240D with Bosch. Both Indirect Injection with precombustion chambers. Doesn’t work well with Direct Injection or very high pressure Diesels like the ~1988 Dodge Cummins truck. (One guy tried it and got a lot of ping… so might be possible with more thought… )
Hey, I started doing this about 1968 or so when I ran my Honda Trail 90 on propane from a converted torch bottle / valve in the air intake – air and fuel adjusted by and with valve and throttle… Start and warm up on gasoline, at speed, turn off fuel with fuel cock… when sputter starts, turn on propane and adjust throttle that is now air valve ;-) It was all great fun, achieved with a file to open the propane can end of the valve a bit as the default hole was small, and a bit of rubber tube from where the burner head was removed into the air intake. Burner head removed with wrench the first time, then only hand tight after.
Did a fair number of miles that way. Refilling from the 5 gallon camper propane tank via inversion and patience (and the occasional ice bath…) Though after a dozen or so miles the can would start to frost up due to evaporative cooling. Got worse as it got emptier and less mass.
Also played with Diesel / Gasoline blends in an old air cooled VW. Just change the carb jets to lean it out… Got up to about 20% – 25% before I couldn’t lean it enough and smoke became an issue… (It is easy to drill out small jets, hard to make smaller the smallest available). A bit hard to start when cold, but otherwise it was OK. Ping on full throttle was starting to show up though…
Ran my old motor-sailer Volvo Diesel on Methanol drizzled in the air intake. Start and warm up, leave at idle, drizzle in co-fuel… The added fuel must have high enough octane to not pre-detonate at the chosen (very lean…) mix… so methanol, ethanol, and propane or methane/ethane preferred. No, this no longer works on the fancy computer controlled monsters.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s was an early user of “Gasolhol” blends (Ford Fairlane ’63, Ford Galaxy, etc.) and it worked well. Just turn the fuel mix screw. Local ’76 station started selling it and it became my preferred fuel for a long while.
I’d love to have a Flex Fuel car. Almost bought a tri-fuel one in California in the ’80s when they had a methanol program in place. A couple of vendors made cars that would run on any mix of methanol, ethanol, and gasoline. Didn’t have the money at the time, though. Then The State managed to kill the methanol program. (You were REQUIRED to sign up with their program and use a special ‘card’ to buy fuel so they could gather data on use. Yeah, right, I want the State to know all about me and my fuel use… so people stayed away in droves…)
Anyway, just know I’m a fan…
A little political commentary humor for your morning.
End of life for a high performance computer to make room for a new bigger faster computer.
Oh by the way the new computer will be using an ARM processor.
The political topography behind Occasional Cortex.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1093712465530101760.html
For now, it is still unclear where Justice Democrats will fit in among the various groups that emerged in big numbers out of the 2016 election, including Democratic Socialists of America, Indivisible, Brand New Congress, Swing Left and the Sunrise Movement, just to name a few. Justice Democrats made a bet that a single giant felled would rewrite the political landscape, and so far they have been proven right.
The Green New Deal, a joint production of Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, has 45 co-sponsors and is embraced by several Democrats running for president. Justice Democrats helped galvanize support, getting 150 people to sit in at Nancy Pelosi’s office just after the midterms.
Shahid, the group’s spokesman, predicted that, besides further agitation on the Green New Deal, the group would attempt to push for free college and an end to mass incarceration. And to force some support, they won’t be afraid to threaten primary challenges against anyone unwilling to sign on.
“We already are a pariah in Washington, D.C.,” he said proudly. “It’s about attention. Either it helps you gain leverage because people are scared of you or you lose leverage because people are annoyed with you. We will see.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/04/the-insurgents-behind-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-224542
Saikat Chakrabarti is the slimy puppetmaster behind AOC. He’s the one running her social media. He’s the idiot behind all her hairbrained ideas including the Green Plan. AOC is just a mouthpiece. Saikat is her Valerie Jarrett.
Fiona Valentine
@realFionaV
12 hours ago
More
Replying to @RedNationRising @prayingcitizen
Saikat is the motor. Soros is the gasoline. Einstein-Cortez is the hood ornament.
The silent war – how Trump is winning in the background with Judicial appointments and the Dems either can’t do anything about it, or do not realize that he is pulling the activist court rug out from under the radical left, and setting the terms for the next 20-30 years of court decisions.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1093696459470446592.html
@Larry:
The key bit is this line:
Supercomputers suck extraordinary amounts of energy. The power bill is one of THE biggest items in the budget. Once you get enough more “computes / Watt-hour” from a newer technology, it pays to swap to it. (Usually inside just a year or three). We once got a $1/4 Million check from PG&E for our “efforts at conservation” because we upgraded from an XMP to a YMP… and cut power use dramatically for about the same computes…
So 100 / 2 = 50 fold difference in Computes/Watt-hr. That means the old one is a waste of space (or Watts…)
For that reason, you can get SuperComputers that are only 5 to 10 years old for nearly nothing. Because running them would cost more than buying a new one to run…
Just an FYI:
I’ve made a map of the “then newest” data in GHCN v3.3 and graphed it. For the final year of 2015. I’ve also made a more-or-less GIStemp baseline graph of 1950-1980 stations.
The “now 2015” map looks just horridly “moth eaten” and there is No Way you can compare it to the “baseline” and get anything valid, certainly not to 1/10 C. It’s in the 3rd and 4th updates of the posting:
I need to do a similar baseline for Hadley (who run a bit later) and get exact ends for GIStemp (their web site was a big vague with 1950-1981 but also 30 years… so I need to read the code again).
Then I need to do it all over again with the GHCNv4 data that runs to the present “now” at the end.
The Green New ” No We Didn’t” lie.
https://amp.dailycaller.com/2019/02/07/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-release
Classic!
“The Left’s Glorious Future of Unicorns & Rainbows”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/02/09/the-lefts-glorious-future-of-unicorns-rainbows/
“Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your wifi passwords, stored in the clear”
https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fiat-lux.html
Via http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/02/09/just-brilliant/
Comparison of heating, electrical, water and sewage rates between various locations.
Larry Ledwick says: 8 February 2019 at 6:08 pm
“The silent war – how Trump is winning in the background with Judicial appointments and the Dems either can’t do anything about it, or do not realize that he is pulling the activist court rug out from under the radical left, and setting the terms for the next 20-30 years of court decisions.”
Don’t be so sure, the Democrats are the party of Lawlessness.
They will try and find some way to subvert or bypass the courts once they get the power.
President Trump is the only thing standing between Freedom & The New World Order which the Globalists so desire.
Regarding that utilities cost table (nice find, Larry):
Paris down there at the bottom is interesting. The individual utility rates are higher than a lot of places further up on the list, but the average total bill seems to be the lowest, as near as I can make out.
My conclusion is that most of the people live in closets.
Firefighters trying to put out flames at an Ocado warehouse had to dodge robots as they battled through the smoke to find the one that started the fire.
The company’s customer fulfilment centre in Andover, Hampshire, has 1,110 robots that sort and package groceries for delivery. It caught fire on Tuesday.
More than 300 firefighters in 20 fire engines tackled the blaze in an area in which 600 robots pick groceries for 30,000 deliveries a week. Some said that the robots on the “grid”, a three-storey aluminium structure, continued to move independently while they tried to put out the fire.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ocado-robots-at-andover-warehouse-hampered-firefighters-gwtj0zqd7
@Jim2: That will be an increasing problem. A friend called me. They were at work and the burglar alarm had alerted. Being just a few block away, I zipped over (while waiting for police to respond)…
No vehicle at the house.
Perimeter intact, no person visible.
Looking backward through the door peep lens, nobody visible.
Faint whirring mechanical sound through the door…
Police arrive and asses…
Owner arrives to shut off alarm.
Had set alarm wrong: They had set it to vacation, not perimeter only… when on vacation, it has interior motion detection…and…. the roomba is off. Regular days it cleans starting at 9am. So the police noted the rogue robot call and left…
Like elevators, robots need a fire switch. Hard to believe no one envisioned something like this. PPP.
A little humor from France, protester plays the Imperial March from Star Wars as the French riot police go by.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1093627594187173893
I thought it was PPPPPP… Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance….
BTW, there is fresh snow on the hills around the SF Bay Area. News reporting roads to places like Mt. Diablo and Mt. Hamilton are shut down. Happens sometimes but not often. Certainly not were we warming…
Just an item to file away for future reference. Some of the folks who follow this sort of thing have noticed US military flights are higher than usual right now. Probably prep for some military exercise etc, or prep for Syrian with drawl of troops or shifting troops to the border, but it is interesting the odd things some of these aircraft watchers have been noticing
https://twitter.com/MilspecP/status/1094664177937993730
On Feb 5th there was a P-8 Poseidon orbiting over LA which was the same night the helicopters did the “simulated” breach of a building in LA. The web denizens who dissect this sort of thing, say the building is owned by a guy that has lots of shady connections. They of course are looking under every possible rock and spinning conspiracy theories, but occasionally that sort of thing outs a cover story.
I just find the web sourcing investigative power of these folks very impressive, once something happens that grabs their attention, they just totally swarm the event with deep deep analysis, looking at property owner records, legal issues the principles have etc. etc.
Kind of fun to watch the process stitch together all the random info they dig up.
The web allows folks to report events to the world that would in past times never had gone outside the close circle of friends or family. It also of course opens a whole new channel of misinformation propaganda so needs to be viewed with appropriate skepticism.
Your internet-of-shit smart lightbulb is probably storing your wifi password in the clear, ready to be recovered by wily dumpster-divers; Limited Results discovered the security worst-practice during a teardown of a Lifx bulb; and that’s just for starters: the bulbs also store their RSA private key and root passwords in the clear and have no security measures to prevent malicious reflashings of their ROMs with exploits, network probes and other nasties. (Thanks, John!)
https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fiat-lux.html
@Another Ian
and Jim2:
Why I have zero “smart crap” in my house or on my network and wiil not; and why my devices are mostly programmed by me on OSs built by me. (Other than the “smart TV” where we don’use the facilities but use a Roku) I don’t need a lightbulb smarter than glowing when power arrives from a switch. I have dedicated WiFi for TV and related isolated by another router from most of the house.
I really do not understand the desire to insert more maintenance and security problems into the home via calling things “smart”. My fridge needs to make cold. Period. Full stop. The dish washer needs to wash dishes when I switch it on. Nothing else. etc… and I certainly never ever want a lightbulb that needs configuration and a password…
Oh, man! I forgot to relate one of darnedest things I’ve ever seen.
Wife and I were headed out to dinner last Thursday. We were waiting at a light on a minor cross street so we could enter onto the main avenue; rush hour, 3 lanes of bumper to bumper and only a dozen cars from our cross street getting through at each light change. (The lights for the main roads in Florida are l-o-o-o-n-g.)
We almost made a light change, but bad luck hit, so we were first in line for the next light change and we’d be on our way.
Through the traffic, after a minute or so, in the crosswalk across the the main avenue from us we see this russet rooster doing a typical chicken strut with the ‘Walk’ light. WTF?!? The critter had waited for the ‘Walk’ signal! (Did I mention long lights?)
Anyhow, about a third of the way across the intersection, he stops, turns around and walks back to the curb out of our sight. But then, in just a short moment, he’s back walking across the crosswalk with four more chickens… all with the green ‘Walk’ in their favor and chicken walkin’ right in the middle of the crosswalk. We could barely believe what we were seeing. (This is in town, not rural, BTW.) They all got across the busy street just as the light was about to change.
Naturally, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” pops into mind. It gets better. On the corner lot they were crossing to, there was……… a Cuban restaurant whose specialty was ‘Pollo’ of course! Makes you wonder if that rooster was somehow trained or being paid to deliver fresh, undamaged chicken to the restaurant or… what?
They all got to the other side just a few seconds before the light changed but I had to be sharp and move out smartly to get my turn into the main avenue traffic flow. We never did see what they did or their next move after crossing the street.
That was so totally out of place and bizarre, yet looked so everyday normal except for the fact that it was chickens crossing with the light, not people. I think we were a couple of minutes down the road before the slack came out of our jaws.
Birds can see in color and are fairly smart. They most likely have figured out when it is safer to cross. There was a crossing (somewhere… where was I?) that had a lake on one side, lawn / grazing on the other. Duck families regularly waited for the green light and took the crosswalk… California or Florida park… near a school…
And yes, really strange when you see it…. ducks milling around waiting… light changes, they head out into the crosswalk….
Yah, but… explain the Cuban restaurant and why they were going there. 😜
For the pork, plantains, rice and sangria, like everyone else ;-)
But, but… it was Thursday, and the pork special is on Tuesday.
Hmmmm… but that doesn’t negate the sangria and it was happy hour after all; 2 for 1. And there were 4 hot chicks with him.
OK. Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker… but I’m still unsure as to the real reason why the chicken crossed the road. Chopping block? Drunk chicks. Chopping block? Drunk chicks… What’s a rooster to do? I suppose if he was a red-blooded American rooster, he was going to risk the chopping block for the drunk chicks.
BTW. On the way home the Cuban restaurant had a sign up: “Special Tonight. Marinated Chicken. $12.99” Totally unrelated, I’m sure.
😜😆😆😆
@Larry, interesting utility cost chart. So $20.00 dollars of water in the dry desert of Vegas costs $68.00 dollars in Seattle.
M.F. was right, only the Government can create a sand shortage in a desert.
Just brilliant! lolol
Just as an FYI:
I’m using the Odroid XU4 as my Daily Driver and analysis station at the moment. 4 x slower cores and 4 x A15 faster cores. It has 2 GB of memory.
It looks like it only uses one fast core for the SQL / Python processing, but that’s quite enough. The other interesting bit is memory. I’m spilling over to swap for a few hundred MB. That is with the browser open with a bunch of tabs and with MySQL being called from inside Python. Even quitting the browser, though, still leaves a LOT of SQL processes with about 5-8% memory each.
At first boot those MySQL daemons only have 1.8% memory each, but there are still a lot of them being auto launched even before I launch idle/Python.
So my big “take away” from this is that one medium-big Arm core is plenty, but you want 2 GB of memory if possible.
At some point I’ll try the same stuff on a plain Pi.M3 and maybe even something smaller just to characterize what’s really needed and what becomes too painful to be usable.; but this gives a starter baseline. It ought to still be usable on a 1 GB memory medium speed Arm core as long as you have some real USB swap ( I typically use a 2 GB swap partition on hard disk. I have used “USB Stick” and it can be fast for reading but slow on some writes. Some USB disks have “had issues” where they don’t spin up from sleep on a swap request and the system hung. Not recently, but a disk from a few years back did that. Toshiba I think. Great disk, but somehow the “wake up the disk” code was an issue… perhaps it got swapped out ;-)
So, to summarize:
1 or 2 cores is plenty, 4 are better but a lot is wasted / idle. A15 @ 2GHz is great so A72 would be better and A53 @ 1.2 to 1.4 GHz ought to still be enough (as I’m getting 10s of seconds response times so it ought to at most be “almost a minute”…). At least 1 GB memory, preferably 2, and with a couple of GB of fast swap space.
Oh, or toss it on Linux on your average overkill box that struggles to run Windoze and it will just scream ;-)
So,,,,, as I watched my Google offline Maps update tonight on my tablets and phone, I wondered how many folks could navigate in a SHTF scenario over any distance? Who has paper maps now days, and if you used a powered device (with no internet) with a time sensitive map like mine, how do you update, or keep them live? Change the date backwards. Just a thought I hadn’t thought about. That old offline Garmin may be worth keeping ;-)
I have 2 Global Atlases. Both very out of date. (One about 1960, the other about 1980) They have maps by State also. I doubt the cities have moved or that the major roads have gone away. New ones added, for sure…
I also have a “Map Bag” for every car. National, Regional, then California & Florida in each. States in between in most of them and when a Trip begins I go to the Big Map Bag in the house (where old or not used at the moment maps go) and fish out any not already in the car.
On trips cross country, mostly just because I need a break anyway and the maps are free and have recent changes if any in them (and are not wearing through at the folds ;-) I stop at the Rest Stop / Greeting Area just over the border in each State and use the facilities, phone home, get a map, have lunch / dinner from the food bag, etc. Sometimes I’ll stop at AAA for a special map (national, regional, something of interest) but now the free ones from the Greeting Stops are about 1/2 my sets.
Yeah, I decided long ago not to toss my maps and depend on EMP exposed / battery issues eMaps.
I’ll use Google Maps or similar for fine detail inside some strange city I’m unlikely to be in again, but for cities like Orlando, San Jose, San Francisco, etc. I have a paper map in the car kit.
I like maps…
I have a full library of paper maps, they are getting a bit hard to get but they are still available if you look around. I have also captured screen shots of online maps for the areas I want to have up to date coverage of (assuming of course you have something to view the images on).
Interesting little side note Hawaii just received its lowest altitude snow fall on record.
https://www.sfgate.com/weather/article/Hawaii-recorded-what-may-be-the-lowest-elevation-13607099.php
You won’t find Trump’s speech tonite on any of the OTA networks including Pubic Broadcasting. *holes.
Don’t forget Surface Stations Project. Some links are dead, some not.
http://www.surfacestations.org/resources.htm
Also, check out this mapping site. U can see quite a few maps of stations and such.
https://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/maps/ncei/cdo/alltimes
Here’s station in the middle of Oz. According to the yearly map, Oz has a ton of thermometers.
Station Details
Name OODNADATTA ALLANDALE, AS
Network:ID GHCND:ASN00017007
Latitude/Longitude -27.6286°, 135.5879°
Elevation 137 m
Period of Record
Start Date¹ 1909-01-01
End Date¹ 2006-01-01
Data Coverage²
@Jim2:
Want Trump?:
https://www.youtube.com/user/rightsideradio
carries him. Here’s tonight:
OMG!: H/T Jim2 – I started watching this (I’d intended to but got caught up in programming…)
Trump just pointed out a small problem in The Green Nutty Deal: It gets rid of airplanes, so how do you take a train to Europe? Or Hawaii?
Mark Steyn pointed out on Carlson that we in the developed world have a carbon footprint 30 times larger than a turd world denizen. Therefore, if you want to save the planet, put a stop to immigration and fast!
@EM, it was tranoceanic trains? LOL
Also, it might be a good thing to avoid main paths in a SHTF scenario. Just sayin.
@ossqss: “That old offline Garmin may be worth keeping ;-)”
Oh, it is it is.
The kids gave me one for Christmas umpteen years ago. It’s still humming along, so I’m keeping it.
We liked it at the time because the only alternative at the time was the Nav systems built into cars. Who needs NAV GPS in your own stomping grounds? You need it when you get to a strange city and if you’re in a walking city like Savannah, Georgia or any town you’re going to get out and walk around in. What good is the NAV system in the car?
My wife is cheap (I love her for that!) and doesn’t like using minutes on her smartphone when we have a perfectly good Garmin she can toss in her purse. So we’re keeping it until it dies.
@E.M. – Yup. I buy a Rand-McNally for the U.S. every 3-4 years and toss it in the car. I also stop at each State’s visitor center that they have just over the state line and pick up a State map.
And many, if not most of us remember the days when you stopped in a gas station and inside the door was a little literature holder or stand with a State map and also any city or county maps that might be useful, and if you were near a State border there was often a map for the adjoining State… and they were always free!
@Ossqss:
In any SHTF scenario, my present plan is “Hunker down and load up”… Just sayin’… Not going to be on the road much…
(Water source about 3 blocks away. Garden “good enough”. Supplies OK. Guns – too many and too much ammo… ;-) So why move?)
Part of the Florida relocation process will be similar considerations… though perhaps with a CCW application… or just always carry a fishing kit with me ;-) (Florida law allows open carry when headed too or coming from fishing… I can live with that ;-) “Hey, YOU! Why are you carrying a fishing pole!?”
8-)
In reality, at present, I’m “un-interesting” in street view and we can “survive” about 3 months without too much effort (which is way beyond almost anyone inside 10 miles ;-) and can “take out” somewhere near 1000 attackers before I need to start cleaning off my reloading equipment… Just Sayin’… I’m a bit of a Prepper who’s Prepped ;-)
On a side note, monitoring WiFi tonight, there is a Direct Roku network listed on my scan from my house. Interesting. Didn’t know that till now. No biggie, but WT? It is coming from my Roku Express +, which is always on (remember I use that through a modulating distribution, channel 3, point on RG 6 for 5 TV’s). The other Preimer + is only powered up when I turn the TV on and applicable USB power is on.
Still checking on that dead battery in the RF remote with the Roku Premier +. Wondering if it is polling while the unit is off and killed the battery by such. We shall see.
A bit bizarre…. A WiFi network from the Roku? The remote ought to be on other net facilities…
Maybe this is relevant:
https://www.howtogeek.com/178691/htg-explains-what-is-wi-fi-direct-and-how-does-it-work/
Looks like you may be on to something…
Not sure I like this “no password need be supplied” thingy… depends on how they did it …
@HR, it was a sad day today. The last Buckeye was emptied out of the carcass holding metal box I found on the kitchen table tonight. I can’t prove it, but I think a 13 year old had something to do with it. I would post a pic, but IMGUR is giving me trouble tonight. I do have the pic however for future use ;-)
@EM, I tried WiFi direct from my garage several times (20′ with a brick wall from the Roku). Doesn’t show up. More to that story. Check your network.
BTW, the Direct Roku net is on the same channel as the assigned router to such. Reminds me of the repeater I have installed.
I would add it is an intermittent signal. Probably polling.
@OssQss:
Do I detect a Beer Influence? And if so, why are you not sharing?
(I know, something about 2800 miles and my bottle of wine ;-)
@EM, Hummm, nobody likes Busch Light. That is my plan, after years of planning ;-)
@ossqss: In a SHTF scenario, your house will be the last one attacked if they know you only have Busch Light…. and no Buckeyes.
That’s a brilliant defensive strategy against marauders and looters.
😆😆😆
P.S. If you really want to tighten up security, post a sign out front with “Free Brussel’s Sprouts.”
E.M. I’ll have to let you open the link
“Training the economists of tomorrow.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/02/11/whats-the-opposite-of-diversity-20/
@Another Ian:
I’ve developed a couple of general rules.
One of them is that if someone needs a “dramatic stunt” to get attention, they don’t deserve my attention. So going naked onto the auditorium stage to “lecture” about BREXIT is a “dramatic stunt” and by that action made her opinion worthless.
Another one is that the more “breathless” or the more “angst ridden” the petitioner, the less valid their petition. Not always true, but increasingly a very good indicator of SJWs with an Agenda.
Then Yet Another is that IF someone brings a Political Agenda to a non-Political event, they are classed as an “activist” and placed in the category of “be highly skeptical, assume they are lying for effect, believe nothing they say or present, at most use it as a starting point for your own investigation”.
By those measures, she’s an angst ridden idiot with nothing of importance to share. (Probably also with some no-longer-hidden psych issues like narcissism or exhibitionism or both – but I’m sure H.R. will be scheduling her for evaluation shortly… You can’t go naked to work and expect a free ride. FWIW, were I a male worker or student involved in this, I’d be seriously thinking about what money might be available from a “Sexual Harassment” law suit. )
@Another Ian – I liked this link to a music video that was in comments about the nekkid perfesser.
(“I Don’t Look Good Naked Anymore” a smidge over 2 minutes)
This stunt is notable for its cupidity.
LOL, including the FAQ’s ;-)
http://www.unwillingtowork.org
Great find, ossqss!
I’m signing up today. 😜
This goldfish says, “Here kitty. Here kitty kitty.”
{https://www.foxnews.com/great-outdoors/kentucky-fisherman-catches-massive-goldfish-with-biscuit}
@H.R.:
Your regular Goldfish is just a carp. In the wild they can grow quite large. Eventually, wild stocks will revert to their greenish muddy color type (as the gold ones are preferentially eaten…)
That said, that Big Boy must have been “let go” from a pond in the yard, not a tank on the TV ;-)
Perhaps a flood at some point connected his ‘ol pond with ‘ol man river… and the rest was just “big fish eating littler fish”…
Interesting snow info here
NWS Seattle
Verified account
@NWSSeattle
Follow Follow @NWSSeattle
More
It’s getting harder to find the Jackson Visitor Center at Paradise @MountRainierNPS! The snow depth is too deep for the sensor so we’re not sure how much snow fell over the past few days 😱 #wawx #wasnow
This item does raise some interesting questions – just were do the coming improvements in technology go from here. The wifi networks are getting fast enough that additional speed is not really useful because humans cannot absorb what they are looking at much faster than they do now.
Like optimizing code, where are the bottlenecks in technology that slow down or interfere with humans gaining value from a web page or interacting with things on their personal devices?
The hidden bug he is not mentioning with predictive technology is what happens if are trying to do something that does not fit the assumptions of the predictive algorithm? and you end up fighting with it to get where you really want to go, (sort of like muting clippy because it was a much greater annoyance than helpful.)
Interesting read on technology and where it is going
https://unherd.com/2019/02/you-are-the-next-tech-revolution/
@H.R.:
I’d show up… I like Brussels Sprouts and can drink any beer ;-) (Might bring my dog though… ;-)
Ha, brussel sprouts and butter, little garlick, and salt. I am in, and my dog is good with dogs EM.
Dangit, now I am hungry again ;-)
Hummmm, now I wonder what bisquit fed Goldfish taste like too!
Probably not as good as corn-bread fed goldfish I’m thinking.
Really cool watershed map.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/the-worlds-watersheds-mapped-in-gorgeous-detail
Chief, just wondering if you have changed a setting on your wordpress page, I just noticed tonight that if I reload the page it now wipes out the email and user id I entered fro the previous comment.
It did not used to do that, allowing many comments to be made without changing that info.
If not wordpress had clamped down on persistent comment email and user id info.
(this is on brave browser I have not tested on others)
If you want prints they are available here:
https://www.grasshoppergeography.com/
Same here, Larry. Started late yesterday or early today. I don’t think it’s an E.M. thing.
I think WordPress is trying to slow down comments on non-PC sites. It happened to me over on the Conservative Treehouse, too; another WordPress site.
Not happening on my android note table. Either one of them with chrome. Did you recently. Clean cookie data?
shutting down the browser and restarting (which clears everything) makes no difference. I see this behavior on two different desk top systems.
It could be that they have not got around to pushing an update for you app yet, might be planning on a bundle update in the near future and jsut stick it all in that or they are still working on patching the app to do what they want.
(simple fact is we don’t know what other hidden changes also occurred with this change, so on some platforms might be a bit more complicated.)
@Ossqss:
Carp is best pressure cooked. They have a bunch of fine floating Y bones that just dissolve that way. 2nd best I learned when I was about 4. The French Couple who owned the laundry lived next to us. Dad caught some BIG carp. Gave them to the neighbor. She had a wood plank they tacked it onto, then oiled, seasoned, and into a very very slow oven. Occasional basting. Not only do the French spices improve the flavor, but the long slow moist cook is almost as good at softening the bones.
The wood needs to be a flavorful wood (i.e. not crap wood but something you would cook over) and not oiled or finished as it is to soak up water then release steam over time in the oven. (And yes, I know the joke about “Then throw away the fish and eat the board…” but it comes from an actual technique for bony fish.)
Flavor? Only ate carp a couple of times like ago (don’t like dealing with the bones) but it wasn’t bad. Gets a tiny bit of that “bottom flavor” but mostly had a “white fish” flavor (plus spices…) That was a California fish, where the Catfish taste like Eastern bream or perch… Don’t know if, raised in Florida water, they would be as inedible as the Florida catfish I tried to eat once…. (Hardhead from Gulf… Yeah, I know NOW that it’s the fresh water ones that are supposed to be OK, but even they get an algae like flavor in the warm / hot water…)
Goldfish, being a carp, ought to be the same. Supposedly if pressure canned they do well and can be treated like tuna…
@All:
No changes by me. I think I’ve noticed it on one browser on another site. Usually it is a cookie setting, some sites have a ‘save this info’ check box next to the info. Clearing cookies and / or shutting of {something… Javascript?} also can cause it.
@Larry L:
Gives you a new appreciation for the reach of Big Muddy Missississippippiii.. River…
An interesting piece called “Lloyds Insurers Refuse to Cover 5G Wi-Fi Illnesses” (at https://principia-scientific.org/lloyds-insurers-refuse-to-cover-5g-wi-fi-illnesses/ )
Compares 5G with asbestos, hummm …
“I presume this is the tips feature.
Another “green” scheme goes bust taking billions of taxpayers dollars with it. “Oh when will we ever leeeeearn? Oh, when will we ever leeeeeearn?”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-to-pull-plug-on-billion-dollar-bullet-train-cites-ballooning-costs?fbclid=IwAR2XWVoZml2KCcHKNmXY0Y7W6tL3aSQ2Zd8lUGv3XM_ff6A8U77eMghgDpI”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/02/12/honey-i-finished-the-internet-28/#comment-1182289
There is a well-established principle in journalism that if a headline asks a question there is always a simple answer. But before we get to that I’d like to look at where I got the idea that 5G might be a CIA plot. It was on a bus shelter in Archway, North London. As I spend much of my life worrying about explaining 5G it was a shock to see a flyposter addressing it and I was amazed that anyone might be strongly opposed to it. Indifference perhaps, I once drove round that very Archway roundabout with Jeremy Corbyn as my passenger and completely failed to engage him in a conversation about 5G. “In my day we only had CB radio” he told me.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonrockman1/2018/09/18/is-5g-a-cia-plot/#3e7e4f581207
I think a good use of Brussel’s sprouts would be to make kimchi from them. Halve the sprouts so the seasonings can get all through the layers and then throw the halved sprouts and seasonings into the jar for the fermenting process.
It ought to be pretty good. I think I’ll try it when I’m back home.
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Kimchi
Crude oil production in Texas has beaten a previous record set in the 1970s, a new report from the Texas Independent Producers Royalty Owners Association stated.
Texas oil wells produced more than 1.54 billion barrels of crude in 2018, beating the previous record of 1.28 billion barrels set in 1973, TIPRO reported in its annual “State of Energy Report” early Monday morning.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Report-Texas-crude-oil-production-breaks-1970s-13606658.php
For those of us old enough to remember this period in history, this is an interesting read suggesting the death of RFK was a CIA action and the likely controller for the action.
something something – what a tangled web we weave – something something
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/02/09/cia-may-have-used-contractor-who-inspired-mission-impossible-kill-rfk-new-book-alleges/
Hmmm well this is interesting!
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/13/devin-nunes-many-people-will-be-criminally-referred-to-doj-after-william-barr-confirmed/
@Larry L:
The best fit to the data to date is that the CIA used a Mafia hit team to take out JFK (the guy who did it spilled to cell nates and a reporter while in a Europen prison for other thing and nearing EOL). The yhs Warren Coverup was ham handed…
The Bobby was making a run for a Do Over and I think the CIA had a Do Over too…
Something about JFK almost starting WWIII and pissing of the Cubans (ALL of them on both sides) while also blowing off a M afia deal (as his Irish Mob ancestors did… )
On the status of RGB
https://truepundit.com/ruth-bader-blackout/
Yes Chuck Giancana son of Sam Ginacana covered that question in a book titled “Double Cross” where he asserted the Mob / CIA connection was involved in the JFK action so it would hardly be surprising if there were similar connections in RFK’s killing.
Supposedly Sam Ginacana bragged to his friends that he killed JFK.
Interesting read.
I wonder what kinda milage it gets, or is it electric?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-12/us-armys-newest-electronic-warfare-tactical-vehicle-was-tested-fort-irwin
ossqss @ https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/w-o-o-d-5-february-2019/#comment-107765
Is that a ROKU I see plugged into that thing?
Great News EM! Now you can load and run full Windoze 10 on your RPi!
https://github.com/WoA-project/WoA-Installer/blob/master/Docs/Raspberry.md
Just a few party animals enjoying the streets of France.
https://twitter.com/starcrosswolf/status/1095827201574952960
Just a few party animals enjoying the streets of France.
https://twitter.com/starcrosswolf/status/1095827201574952960
Seems ANTIFA put on yellow vests and infiltrated the protesters then started causing problems.
Always nice to know you are on the communists shit list.
Hmm thought that post failed to send – sorry about the double you can nuke the first one if you like.
This is interesting.
https://www.oann.com/president-trump-hints-he-will-likely-take-executive-action-to-secure-border-wall-funds/
My prediction – he will sign the bill with the partial funding, then use other means to fund remaining expenditures. Will probably try the diversion of funds angle first if he gets blocked there, stand by for the emergency declaration just in time to feed into the 2020 campaign media blitz.
So it appears that winter weather cuts Tesla battery mileage about in half.
https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/buying-an-electric-car-for-a-cold-climate-double-down-on-range/
So not trips to the mountains for ski trips or home to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Who knew that heater operation in electric cars cuts down on charge mileage where in an internal combustion engine the majority of the heater energy is simply harvesting waste heat that usually goes to the cooling system. (sort of like the old VWs and their gasoline heaters put a kink in their fuel mileage. They would melt your feet and turn the car into a sauna but not so good for fuel economy)
@Taz:
A 32 bit in line processing core at 1.8 GHz… I’d make that roughly one core of a Pi M3. The Arm chip will have some advantage (longer time in the saddle working out efficiency tweeks) but the 1.2 GHz or 1.4 GHz vs the 1.8 GHz ought to more or less make that a wash.
Likely still a couple of years before it is in an SBC you can buy, but if WD is cranking a Billion cores a year, that’s going to catch on.
Why? Because even if you license for Arm IP only costs you 1 ¢ each, that’s $10 Million / year. Making that swap will net someone about a $Million in bonuses, then his friends will find out…
Whenever it’s in an SBC I’ll be getting one.
Last time I looked at the available cores there were about 300 MHz and not cheap, so things are progressing nicely.
Open Source Hardware, the dream coming true ;-)
@Jim2:
I’m sure that IS great news for someone… but why do it again?…
(I can actually see a use for it, and I might even try it, just as a way to take the various Windows crap I’ve accumulated over the years and move it off the old junk boxes… Oh, Wait, Micro$oft makes things incompatible every few years so my old Windoze stuff won’t work on W-10 anyway… Well, saved from purgatory again ;-)
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