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/2019/03/22/w-o-o-d-22-march-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
Russians are in. People are still leaving. USA is making grumble noises about the Russians. Brazil is making nice-nice with Trump. The Army continues to back Maduro. Interesting test case in the minimum public support needed to remain in power. Keep the Army happy and screw the people seems to work.
Also a good test case for what to do to prepare for social collapse. Anyone with “goods” or what looks like goods gets them stolen by gangs and / or armed thugs. You need to keep a low profile. It is also essential to have means of defense. Food & water along with the ability to generate your own (minimal) electricity are also very important. It may well be years, so ration your stocks from the start AND there’s the question of how to have a “secret garden” so it doesn’t get raided. I think things like Famine Foods that look like flowers or inedibles but ARE edible deserve more attention. Things like yam leaves and bean leaves, mustard greens (hot spicy) & horseradish (the greens are tasty ;-) along with “Mangle beets” (horse / cow fodder beets but the greens are tasty), etc.
Brexit:
Only 4 Days Left!!!! Unless legally you really left on 29 March. Unless T.May and the Eurocrats decide you don’t leave until June 30th. Or a year from now. Or two years. Or never.
The UK is stuffed.
The Aristocrats running the UK and EU have no intention of letting such a plum escape their grasp. Enjoy your Satrap status, or get out and let the Muslims have it. There is little future for a free people ruled by unelected remote sovereigns. Speaking of sovereigns, yours has clearly chosen to just be an irrelevant figurehead so long as her fortune is left intact. Wonder how long before a Muslim Asian majority votes in Sharia and a Caliph and dumps the Monarchy? Demographics says you have about 20 to 30 years, max. I see no stomach for the “reconqista” it would take to stop that in the present British European population of Britain.
Oh Well. Not my problem. Does settle that question of “Should I get a British Passport?”. I qualify and had thought after Brexit I would. As a pure British thing, not as an EU Satrapy. Now just not interested. Not looking like a club I’d want to join.
The Weather:
We’re continuing to have lots of rain all over the place. 30 years of UV / blue warming the oceans at depth getting sucked out via more IR / red prompt evaporation at the surface. How long will it take? A decade? Or longer?
Snow levels are remaining VERY high. This is a good test of the GHCN and other temperature sets. If places we KNOW are under 20 feet of snow don’t show as cooler this “spring” than in the ’90s, you know the books are cooked. An A/B of last snow dates vs notional temperatures would be enlightening.
Other Stuff:
I’ve started a “garden in pots” and it is doing well, despite the cold nights and overcast occasionally drippy days. This is a cold spring in California.
Yesterday I took the pruners to the shrub weeds in the garden. I’m going to use Roundup on those not in garden planting areas, and try “deep repeated pruning” on the stumps in the garden area. I just don’t want a load of glyphosate in the soil causing issues for my garden plant roots; if at all possible. If it is not possible to get the overgrowth (including some squares with Bermuda Grass – YUCK!) extirpated by hand / heat / plastic mulch / Diesel spray; then I’ll resort to more Roundup / Glyphosate.
Worst case is just doing a lot more “stuff in pots” and less “potting on” into the garden squares this spring.
Looks like the Aristocratic / Authoritarian class has decided they just can’t stand free speech. Dubai has arrested a visitor for calling the woman who stole her husband a “horse” (a few years prior in Britain in an online comment). The UK has proposed (passed?) laws making it a crime to be unpleasnt on line. France has instituted a tax on digital speech (but for now only aimed at the really big USA internet Giants). Guess it’s time to start developing that “Personal Dark Net Tech” package so folks can continue to be free, even if it requires care and hiding your identity.
Oh, and “Note to self”: NEVER EVER vacation in Dubai, and likely not in the UK or France depending on how their laws evolve. As I’m “active” on the Internet, and can’t keep track of what every loony Authoritarian Government around the world decides to criminalize, the best I can do is just “not go there”. It’s much easier to just note where freedom has died and avoid it. Paris under riot isn’t very attractive anyway.
Dark Net here we come…
Musings from the Chiefio 
Some local in Adelaide to ponder & wonder about at Adelaide airport :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-04-10/livestock-feed-crop-cools-down-adelaide-airport/10962938
They are growing lucerne ( alfalfa to you folks ) on the empty ground around the tarmac & terminal. And have discovered that it lowers the temperature up to 4 degrees C.
And then they discovered that this lowering of temperature made it easier for jet planes to take off with a full load..
This is part of the bigger picture of what placing temperature guages at airports doe to the temperature record.
Very curious !
Just a reminder. Could be quite good, or not ;-)
https://www.popsci.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-watch
On BREXIT.
SATRAP
MAY-TRAP
RAT-TRAP.
Hmmm isn’t this interesting, they all have their fingers in the environmental till.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/17/company-co-founded-nancy-pelosis-son-charged-secur/
I think it would be easier to make a list of politicians who have no financial connections to the environmental investing scene than to go the other way.
The more I see of Candice Owens the more I like her. She is going to be a major power in politics that the left better respect, because she consistently rips them a new one.
Those Hilary emails that the dog ate…
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-uncovers-cover-up-discussions-in-latest-production-of-clinton-email-documents/
About Candace Owens, well, that *used* to be the way in the Black American community, especially during Jim Crow and shortly after Jim’s death (helped by George Wallace ;), too). That started to change after Kennedy was shot. I talk about it, Dr. Sowell and Judge Thomas also talk about it. The “MSM” and their lackeys in politics/media, do not talk about it and do everything they can to promote Black Americans as victims of “The Man”, where that means “White Men”. Thing is, though, Black folk did themselves in way more that Whites ever did, helped by Democrats (the party of Slavery/Fascism/Communism).
Reference survival gardens, the books by Dmitry Orlov he mentions how during the collapse of the Soviet Union you needed to guard the gardens or people would steal your crops right out of the ground at night. (grandma in a rocking chair with a shot gun sort of thing). One of the things that saved the citizens of Russia as the wheels came off the Soviet Union is nearly every family already had a small walled garden plot. He mentioned that during the first year when it got really bad, they lived mostly on squash grown in their garden some of which was traded to a neighbor for fish he caught.
Part of the “don’t look prosperous” thing is to not look too well fed.Even if you have good stocks of food as a survival technique you need to lose enough weight to look like you are struggling for food too – (maybe some oversize clothing from the thrift store that looks well used for when you have to go out in public, to make it appear you have lost a lot of weight?)
This article by Dmitry Orlov in 2009 has some important points in it (it also clearly shows some biased thinking from that period right after the economic down turn of 2008 and his natural bias toward Russia)
Points to note, his comments on what is good in good times becomes bad in bad times and how important the “kitchen gardens” were. In the context of the times he was pretty much right on the nose, however President Trump may have pushed all this back 20+ years if he can have a successful 8 years as President, and keep the Dems from spoiling the dinner party.
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
Well they actually did get an image of a Black Hole, er, or event horizon would be a better description.
I love this quote from one of the scientists. :
“At the event horizon, light is bent in a perfect loop around the black hole, meaning if you stood there you would be able to see the back of your own head.”
I seem to remember something similar after a big night of partying when I was younger ;-)
On the images of black holes :
https://www.space.com/first-black-hole-photo-by-event-horizon-telescope.html
Interesting “more to the story” on Nebraska flooding.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/nebraska_flooding_when_the_government_cares_more_about_birds_than_people.html
An explanation of Brexit:
Well that link didn’t load. Try this:
E.M.
I haven’t seen this term before – “The Seedier Media”
https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/2018/10/everyone-is-smart-except-donald-trump-rabbi-dov-fischer/
I think “if you stood there” you would be flattened into an atom thick pancake as your were sucked by astounding gravity onto the event horizon faster than light could circumnavigate it….
Then, in other Science Whore Hype, they say it is a picture of the Event Horizon. It is NOT.
While a great feat and an accomplishment of some merit, it is a photo of the “Stuff accelerating toward the event horizon”. At the event horizon, a hypothetical infinitely thin layer, stuff crosses over to where no light can escape and everything is black to the outside world. You can’t actually see or photograph it.
What you can do is photo the stuff approaching it as it accelerates and heats up a lot and bangs into other stuff. You can also get the edge on view of it as a bright ring and the “through” view of the bit closest to you showing mostly dark. Then you can claim the dark is the “Black Hole”, but it isn’t either. It is just the lower level of light from the surface of the accretion crap.
By Definition, you can’t see what isn’t there to see and photons don’t come out of the event horizon, so you can’t see it or photograph it.
That “tidy mind” bit said: Great photo of the stuff that happens NEAR the event horizon!
@Ossqss:
Nice catch.
Yeah, that’s the whole Agenda 21 / 30 thing in action, ‘re-wilding’ and driving people off the land, into a few major urban
penscity centers.It does at least provide constraints on the physical size of the black hole object (if you can call what ever matter packed that tight is). You now know it must all fit inside that visible horizon.
Well this is interesting President Trump has now explicitly described the illegal investigation actions against him as treason and an attempted coup. I am inclined to think he does not use those words lightly.
https://kagdaily.com/2019/04/trump-steps-to-microphone-fires-shot-that-will-echo-throughout-us-history-video/
Vukcevic put up a good comment (WUWT) on the image item, not sourced, but makes sense in basic manufactured imagery we get from various devices like MRI type visualizations. Cut an pasted some of it below.
vukcevic April 10, 2019 at 9:35 am
In order to reconstruct the brightness distribution of an observed source, VLBI requires cross-correlation between the individual signals recorded independently at each station, brought to a common time reference using local atomic clocks paired with the Global Positioning System (GPS) for coarse synchronization. The resulting complex correlation coefficients need to be calibrated for residual clock and phase errors, and then scaled to physical flux density units using time-dependent and station-specific sensitivity estimates. Once this process is completed, further analysis in the image domain can refine the calibration using model-dependent self-calibration techniques”
“At the calibration stage, instrumental and environmental gain systematics are estimated and removed from the data so that a smaller and simpler data product can be used for source model fitting at a downstream analysis stage.”
“The correlation coefficient may vary with both time and frequency. For FX correlators, signals from each antenna are first taken to the frequency domain using temporal Fourier transforms on short segments (F), and then pair-wise correlated (X). The expectation values in Equation (1) are calculated by averaging over time–frequency volumes”
In short this is not an image of a black hole but an assemblage of complex mathematical calculations obtained from electronic signal processing, put together to give a time aggregated ‘electro-mathematical visualization diagram’ of what that particular part of Galaxy might look like.
ossqss – something like that happens between your eyes. The image is always sharper with both open.
Well, about a week? ago someone (H.R.?) admonished me to “read my email”. Today I’ve finished both accounts. 1500 emails in one. about 400 in the other.
Not sure what I was supposed to find. I didn’t see anything urgent and I replied to everything that wanted a reply (other than the junk mail).
So did I miss something? Donno…
E.M.
Saving an email
Re that Queen Elizabeth 2 cartoon – remember she was an ATS truck driver in WW2
‘Twarn’t me that said to read your email, unless it was my evil twin and best I know, I don’t have an evil twin.
“Well, about a week? ago someone (H.R.?) admonished me to “read my email”. ”
HR – full confession on the left boot – ’twas me re that cartoon. It came as an email without links to source. That came later. And knowing that E.M. tends to stay clear of emails and might miss that cartoon – –
E M : Well I sent you an email back in December & you replied today. But no I did not admonishing you for not responding..Just figured it had . got lost..Such things happen.
But there is one things that sits in the back of my mind : Is there an easier way to get access to your old posts at least on “Global Warming ” ? I’ve tried a few times and I get just 3 at a time..When there is a huge number of them..Slow going ! Any chance of an eaier way with say 20 at a time ?
Or is this a WordPress thing ?
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a scheme to neutralize the Electoral College. I note that Colorado has joined already. LL could sue on behalf of voters whose voice will be silenced :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Aw, yes, the cartoon. It’s in the ‘memes’ posting too.
FWIW AOL is now demanding a phone number ( I had to give it one to get logged in to read my email and then it sent me a ‘confirmation code’ I had to enter) so I’ve just had a priority bump on the “get the hell off of aol” task.
I’ve set up a proton mail account, but I need to get back into it. Did some tests a month or three ago and liked it; but now I find out if they delete it after being idle {some unknown limit of time} or not. My preference is to run my own email server, but the anti-spam effort is huge after a while. Hopefully since the last time I did that (about 15 years ago?) there something like PiHole for email SPAM. A cooperative filter BlackHole List (there are several so needs a bit of a dig).
I’m thinking of setting up a minor “Cloud Server” image that does email (so someone else has to keep the whole thing running 24 x 7 and all) with a Black Hole sidelook filtering stuff. Then I can pick up email remotely from my box and the only “finger to me” is on my server image that I control. Billing can be by “Credit Card” that typically accepts the disposable debit cards, making that a dead end.
Didn’t really want to start Yet Another Project just yet, but looks like AOL is entering the SPAM and Snoop business and adding trackers… so “time to go”.
RPi mail server with spam assassin.
https://samhobbs.co.uk/2014/03/raspberry-pi-email-server-part-4-spam-detection-with-spamassassin
@Another Ian, look up Rabbi Dov Fischer. He’s been using that term for years. He has a column on Jewish World Review and The American Spectator, if I am remembering correctly.
@Jim2:
Those are likely to be Democrat dominated States. It will be interesting to see what happens the next time a Republican gets the popular vote and all their electors get assigned to them ;-)
CBS This Morning had Jay Inslee on. He cited the Midwest flooding a Cali fires, both of which we know were augmented if not cause outright by the government. Of course, the “journalists” on the show are silent on these facts and don’t challenge him. He joins the Dimowit chorus wanting to somehow negate the Electoral College and implement “democracy.”
Here’s an article and video of this idiot.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gov-jay-inslee-urges-end-to-filibuster-electoral-college-its-time-for-us-to-have-democracy-again/
@Jim2:
Now that looks like fun… A R.Pi as mail server… I still slightly prefer the Cloud Server solution as it avoids fingering your IP address and physical location and some other bits. One other issue is that you must have a domain registration. Now both the “postmaster” information and the domain reg info are public (see what “whois” returns…) which means things like your name, address, phone number, ….
Which further means that if you want some privacy you will need to have indirection on those, too. Now I have “3 me’s” at most times. Physical addresses, phone numbers, etc. But ATM I’m down to just 2. Before I’d be willing to set up an email server of any kind using my own domain name, I’d want to have something standing between the Real Me and the public bits. Corporation filings must include that kind of information also, so putting a corp in front of you (at least in the USA) doesn’t help much.
I probably wouldn’t care that much were it not for the Tallbloke Raid (just for being a Skeptic in the UK who was contacted by the UEA leaker) and for the fact that I was SWATted (well, my house was…) in California while I was off in Florida (intrusion reason unrelated to Climate Stuff and nothing was taken once they figured out it was a mistake). After “2 near misses”, I’m on the cautious side…
Once you know skeptics are being targeted by SJW Idiots, Antifa, etc. etc. and see that the Government(s) are often “on side” with them, well, caution is warranted.
My name being “Anonymous Anonymous” in function works well, right up until you can tie it a domain reg with exact address and phone number… So I need to obfuscate that…
BTW, I’d also figured on putting up my own VPN on the Cloud Server image too so that I’d never be seen as originating at any physical address. I’d have it done by now but for the Florida Friend deciding to have a coronary operation and then losing the notes somewhere in the pile here upon my return. I’d picked out a nice low cost cloud provider and everything… So something else to restart…
All That Said:
I’ll likely set up one of those Pi Email Servers just as a test / demo case. It can be a “Third ID” if nothing else. (Never hurts to be able to say “There’s my email server” knowing it has nothing of interest on it… just letters to the kids and spouse saying “buy milk” and “visiting Nov.”…
FWIW, for about 10 to 15 years I ran my own email server here at home on my own domain. It was on a “White Box PC” of about “one Pentium past 486 speed” and worked very well, other than that SPAM slowly accumulated to the point where it was hours of work per day fighting SPAM.
At major companies, like when I was at Disney, they have one guy assigned full time just as the SPAM guy. Now the corporate email is much larger than “just one person’s email”, but still that gives you the context. A full headcount just to deal with SPAM. IF you have a domain name / address long enough, you end up with that level of crap showing up.
The only real question for me is “Has group work sharing like SPAM Assassin gotten good enough to reduce the workload to small?:” And I just don’t know yet.
Oh Well… Guess it’s time to “Grasp The Nettle” and find out.
Private Domain Registration
http://www.register.com/masking/index.rcmx
Free WhoIs Guard?
https://www.namecheap.com/security/what-is-domain-privacy-definition/
Email server in the cloud, plus discussion.
https://jeffreifman.com/how-to-install-your-own-private-e-mail-server-in-the-amazon-cloud-aws/
(San Antonio, Apr. 10, 2019) — The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has been tapped by The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to join a team that will build homes for human habitation on the moon and Mars. As exploration missions beyond Earth become more ambitious, NASA must consider new technologies to keep habitats operational when they are not occupied by astronauts.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/11/utsa-tapped-by-nasa-to-help-build-homes-on-the-moon-and-mars/
Looks like Julian Assange has been arrested. Just saw it on France24 as 7 British Police hustled him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and into a van.
Now the show trials begin. There’s talk of resurrecting the “rape” allegations (condom with a hole in it.. and consensual sex… iirc) from Sweden, the USA is en queue for extradition, the UK is doing the “jumped bail” prosecution up front.
But at least he gets to see new stuff ;-)
@Jim2:
Thanks for the pointers… saves me some search time ;-)
Just a new, sort of random question here:
Folks in OZ, do your addresses not normally include the Australian state if you give your mailing address to someone outside of OZ?
In other words, if we send something to you in OZ, and we omit the state, is that fine?
Random, unrelated question here:
Folks in OZ, is it unnecessary for your mailing address to include your state if someone overseas addresses snail mail to you?
Interesting comments on how the Left tries to change word meanings and the emotional content of words to facilitate subversion of the public’s view of reality.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116405409806520320.html
Needs little comment:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/john-kerry-thomas-massie-climate-change
Power Grab
These days postal service here you’d probably better have both state and “post code” – (equivalent to a “zip”), which is actually by state.
Without either it might get delivered if there is only one town of that name in Oz
One wonders if something parked recently on the dark side had a role in the failure.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/beresheet-spacecraft-fails-moon-landing
“In today’s paper:
“I am not interested in seeing the tax records of a millionaire who became a politician.
I want to see the tax records of a politician who became a millionaire!” ”
https://www.yesterdaystractors.com/cgi-bin/viewit.cgi?bd=ttalk&th=2047683
This is what I was alluding to with the prior comment on the failed Israeli lunar Landing today.
https://www.history.com/news/china-plans-historic-landing-on-dark-side-of-the-moon
@Ossqss – I don’t know why the Chinese are bothering with the ♯♪♫Dark Side of The Moon♪♫. Everyone knows that the only thing there is a bunch of lunatics. Might be in for some daisy chains and laughs, however.
SpaceX successfully landed 3 of 3 boosters today for the Falcon Heavy launch.
https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-arabsat-6a-launch-landing-webcast.html
@ Another Ian:
Thanks! :-)
@H.R.:
If you want to set up a base that is NOT subject to observation from Earth, the Back Side is where you go. We’d be forced to put a lunar orbital station in place to see what’s going on… But by then, they could be well established underground and with little ability to figure out what the comings and goings might mean.
@Larry L:
I think they have it pretty much worked out now. Absent extreme events (like 2000 ft/min down bursts or rogue waves on their landing ship) I doubt we’ll see issues going forward.
@Ossqss:
More likely the just ran out of fuel. Folks forget that our first moon landing was down to single digit seconds of fuel at engine cutoff. The other possible is that the dust kicked up by the landing engines was mis-read by some light or radar distance measuring sensor as “landed” and so engine cut-off was done- but too high. Other option is “landed on a crater rim / slope and rolled” – remember that Armstrong had to take manual control and dodge boulders and craters…
It’s not easy to land on the moon and it’s harder for a robot.
BTW, if you ever played “Lunar Lander” you rapidly learned that keeping the right balance of thrust is critical. Just a little too little, you whack the moon hard and crash. Just a little too much, you run out of fuel before landing all the way, and crash. It’s a very narrow range. The only thing that makes it wider is excess fuel, which means excess rocket to get it there, which is $10,000 / lb so folks don’t do that as several tons more rocket are needed…
Re a statement on this page:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1115961838364168193.html
This much:
“Socialism is the ideology of state slavery. It’s a system that places the alleged interests of a collective over the life and free will of an individual, turning people into lifeless shells incapable of self-reliance …”
I get, but this statement puzzles me:
“… and indoctrinated with an ideology of struggle.”
Why would it be called “an ideology of struggle” if the desired end was that the populace would stop struggling and just go with the flow of allowing the leaders to dictate everything for them?
This question reminds me of one or more episodes of the original Star Trek. I can’t provide titles right now, but I remember that Captain Kirk was put in a position of having to explain why man has to have something to struggle against. He can’t just sit around and live a life of ease, with all his needs supplied by a [supposedly] benign high power.
At least four Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications sold or made available to enterprise customers share security flaws, warns the Carnegie Mellon University CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Response Center (US-CERT).
VPN apps from Cisco, F5 Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and Pulse Secure are impacted, CERT/CC analyst Madison Oliver said in a security alert published earlier today, echoed by the DHS’ US-CERT.
All four have been confirmed to store authentication and/or session cookies in an non-encrypted form inside a computer’s memory or log files saved on disk.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/some-enterprise-vpn-apps-store-authentication-session-cookies-insecurely/
Apparently Connolley cannot lie any more about AGW on Wiki, so now he and his cronies have turned into democrat lap dogs: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/04/12/wikipedia-editors-post-fake-news-on-summary-of-mueller-probe/
This is pure Connolley.
@jim2
Pulse Secure is Juniper. So they just nailed the major Firewall vendors to big business.
And for the record, the F5 product has a lot more problems than that.
@Power Grab:
Having been forced to study Marxism (as it IS an economic system, if a daft one…) for my degree, I now find that study useful… to whit:
Central to Marxism is the notion of a Class Struggle. The notion that the Aristocratic Class will never share the just fruits of their labor with the Proletariat Class (“The Workers”) so they must take it by force in a “Revolution”. That’s why every socialist enterprise has a “Revolutionary Guard”. It has special meaning to them. That is why the Labor Movement and Labor Unions are prime targets for Socialist Agitators. The only way The Worker will get their righteous due is via The Workers Revolution as they “struggle” against the “oppressor class”.
Thus statements like “You didn’t build your business” your workers did… and “Income Equality” as something evil (since it represents the “class struggle” for “equality”.
It really IS useful to have studied their ideas, as it lets you understand where they are Bat Shit Crazy…
In comparisons, Free Market Capitalism says that you will get stuff in proportion to your knowledge, skill, and effort. That “Protestant Work Ethic”… (which is why there is a Socialist War On Christianity – though they think maybe they can coopt the Catholics… Protestants not so much… Catholics also have that thread of oppression / guilt running through it so more readily buy into the notion of Class Guilt. SIDEBAR: Anyone wanting to accuse me of anti-Catholic Bias will want to know my Father was born Catholic, and my Mother and Spouse converted to Catholics… and we get along fine…)
So that reference to “an ideology of struggle” is a reference to that Class Warfare and Income Inequality line of bull.
@Jim2:
Nice to know. Kinda confirms my notion that the NSA / CIA / TLA’s have gotten the various Big Names to include just enough “breakage” for them to exploit but (hopefully…) nobody else… Why I don’t use “Big Name Gear” at home… (Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, etc. etc.)
Major media will probably not touch this. Remember the huge hack of OPM and files of folks who had security clearances? Well President Trump is talking about shutting down the agency and splitting up its responsibilities into 3 other existing departments.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/12/office-personnel-management-trump/
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3318238/the-opm-hack-explained-bad-security-practices-meet-chinas-captain-america.html
“The early Dem candidates for 2020 – part 1.”
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/the-early-dem-candidates-for-2020-part-1/
But as our magnetic field continues to get weaker and weaker, even much smaller solar storms will have the potential to be cataclysmic. And once the magnetic field gets weak enough, we will be facing much bigger problems. As you will see below, if enough solar radiation starts reaching our planet none of us will survive.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-12/weakening-earths-magnetic-field-has-greatly-accelerated
@Jim2:
Aw, yes, yet another hype article from Zerohedge…
NOT mentioned is that during a pole reversal the magnetic field does NOT go away. It becomes more chaotic (multiple N and S poles pop up). Nor is it mentioned that all life has come through this thousands of times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_excursion
I don’t remember any mass extinctions tied to 40k years ago… with a reversal and 5% strength.
@Larry L:
I was one of those folks, so I rest in the comfort of knowing the Chinese have a dossier on me… (Yet Another Reason for my security behaviours…)
@ EM re Catholics, Communists, etc.
I’m glad you have spent time digging into those putrid philosophies like that of the mooslims and commies…I don’t have the stomach to tolerate spending much time with their writings. I appreciate your sharing your insights with us.
I have had some lovely friends who were Catholic, but I know other people who hate that establishment and see nothing good in it.
On another slightly different tack, I am noticing that GEBs have a tendency to demand mindless, instant obedience from their minions. It’s like GEBs give the order “Sic ’em!!” and their minions flood into the fray to destroy the opposition or even just neutral parties.
I generally believe that before criticizing something, I ought to read their stuff and see what they say is their system of beliefs. Then I’ll either choose to endorse, critique, or ignore…
I generally like the Catholic pagentry but find this Pope too Marxist and bought in to global warming lies. Then the pedo aspect was handled badly…
Yes, most “organizations” demand obedience. Why I’m not much of a “joiner”…
Political organization especially on the left, like a group of shock troops on tap or at least a rent-a-mob.
We were brought up in my family hearing practically nothing in the way of prejudice or derision of others. I have liked that upbringing. It meant we could be at peace around anybody.
However, I have to confess that these days I have to look away whenever I encounter people who look Muslim. I guess some people believe former-prez BO when he said they had a “peaceful” religion, but I never believed it.
I have seen secretly-filmed videos of how they train their small children to hate “infidels” and practice attacking them. And I have been “charged” by Muslim rugrats voicing their war cry. Their mother came after them and caught them, looking very embarrassed and guilty. I tried to maintain a poker face, but I knew what the kids were doing.
Interestingly enough, those same kids came up to me in a friendly manner months later when I exited my place wearing my winter coat with the hood up over my head.
@ EM re Catholics
I find no fault in your opinion (everyone is entitled to one) and it is not insulting to me (a practicing Catholic). But I am not a blind obedient either. I am very upset with this Pope. He has a lot of time to advocate for things that have nothing to do with the faith, yet no time to advocate for things that are core to the faith – like the abolition of infanticide and the selling of baby parts.
He is an embarrassment to every Catholic, regardless of your political persuasion.
E M I agree with all your comment above re checking out before deciding what to think & do.
But what is GEB ?
Bill – GEB is Greedy Evil Bastard or Globalist Evil Bastard depending on context, and as often the case the GEB in question is both.
Some GEBs are nameless and faceless, but certain incidents are obviously backed by GEBs because the actions will make someone an obscene amount of money (the Greedy part) and the actions aren’t going to benefit the local Girl Scout Troop (the Globalist part).
Oh, IIRC, the GEB term originated here on this blog, though I’ve caught it bleeding over into a couple of other blogs.
So, I been thinking about this black hole thing. I have some issues with what was purveyed. First, upon looking deeper into things, anything they got with their radio telescope array, was 55 million years old based on what they say. 2nd, they used modeling to reconstruct whatever they produced through man made algorithm choices. 3rd, they were looking at something that was so microscopic at distance, 55 million light years away, with non-visable regenerative means, so that is a “take my word for it” scenario. Kinda like climate science now a days.
This is simply manufactured SYFY, and I am hitting a BS button. I mean, even if that thing was the size of a galaxy, at that distance, it would be like looking at a subatomic particle from here. Talk about SPECKulation.
“Talk about SPECKulation”
Lol, you got that. A computer rendition of a 3 way speculation. Even IF you could see that area you still wouldn’t see anything like that “picture”. What you would see is an hourglass of plasma leaking from the poles of that massive celestial body or “Blackhole”. that torus of energy is a computer simulation of those energies from beyond the “event horizon”…pg .
Synthetic aperture techniques are very well developed to resolve very fine detail at long distance. Keep in mind that is a digital image created to visualize radio signal strength, it is not a “direct image” of the event horizon.
Synthetic aperture digitally synthesizes a radio dish as big as the distance between the most distant stations, which vastly increases fine resolution due to the much finer Dawes limit of such a large receiving dish (objective if done in the optical)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes%27_limit
R = 11.6/D D in centimeters, R in arcseconds
where:
D is the diameter of the main lens (aperture)
R is the resolving power of the instrument
Note resolution of a perfect objective is directly inversely proportional to the diameter of the receiver. They can also use this method by taking observations at different points in orbit. As an example, if we had a high quality radio telescope on Mars we could do simultaneous observations of a distant object with a synthesized radio dish the size of the maximum separation of Earth and Mars at their most distant points in orbit from each other.
On a totally different topic, Mexican drug cartel influence in the US.
JennyK
@c0lettea
10 hours ago
More
Replying to @GOOD_vs_evil @piprincess
Mexico has the third largest poppy fields in the world. it is not mainly China it is mainly Mexico. The Sinaloas cartels which were lead by El Chapo have infiltrated the U.S.. They are flooding this country with heroin and fentanyl .The orange on the map are the Sinaloas areas.
People need to recognize we are at war, – it is just that the averge person on the street does not know it, and the 70,000+ deaths each year due to this war are simply lost in the noise as the media will not report it with any context regarding how the cartels are seizing control of the country at every level – like the old Mafia only much more wide spread.
@Qssqaa – I was thinking the same thing. It looks as expected, because that is the way the model was built. It is a nice art project, but not really scientifically significant.
Looks like behind the scenes the administration is starting to plug a bunch of loop holes and close down sloppy operations.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/senate-it-office-hit-with-housecleaning-in-hassan-aide-scandal_2878451.html
Cher shouts her support for Trump! LOL
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/04/14/trump-magic-cher-tweets-ultimate-nimby-message/
But she is not smart enough to realize what she just did.
@Larry, I hear ya on the image, but it is only a reciever in the end ( 8 actually spread across the globe), on a rotating/orbiting planet with maybe a conservative million similarly emissive objects between them and a more than 55 million light year smaller than microscopic point in the Heaven’s. There are no formulas for the unknown. When you dig into it, it boils down to modeling what we recieve through a man-made filter. IMHO, I want to see what they conveyed reproduced by someone else. Just my take on data output verification. In today’s world, I have been exposed to too much to trust science news in general.
In other news, my hockey teams are getting their butts kicked. https://www.nhl.com/scores
Oh the Pain!
@OssQss:
Well at least you didn’t have the indignity of checking on your team and finding the Golden Knights got double your team score and thinking “Who the heck are the ‘Golden Knights’?” ….
Guess I wasn’t paying attention when they were added last year… I had Sharks season tickets for about a decade, then the kid went off to college and tickets got crazy expensive and suddenly there’s something called Golden Knights out of Las Vegas beating my team? WT?
Ice Hockey in the Nevada Desert Southwest?… Sigh.
@Larry L:
FWIW, there were a few CIA and FBI positions open on a job board I was looking at… (indeed.com) one wonders… The CIA listings were interesting. One was basically a User Analyst Liaison in Washington, which would be a way cool gig to have, but I’d have to live near D.C…. or maybe Virginia… I’m pretty sure it would not be your regular “how to I get this spreadsheet to loop?” stuff ;-) The other one was a field support position… Some travel required for a month or two, or 1 to 3 YEARS and with ability to cope with rough environments and harsh conditions… For an IT Guy… who needs to be able to keep radios and other communications working along with computers… Sounds like a tent in the back of Afghanistan to me ;-) I’d be willing to go for the D.C. gig, except I’m pretty sure my comments about wanting to keep TLA guys out of your gear might be disqualifying ;-)
They had a listing for FBI “Special Agents” too, but it had an age limit. Something like 24 to 37. Guess they want them out of college for just a year or three, then shaped and molded to their liking.
Every time I look at a government job listing that starts out interesting, I end up in the weeds of their mandatory hoops to leap through and just think “Naw… too much trouble.” Oh Well…
No idea if that’s normal listings for them, or if the shine is off the shoes what with them being all over the news as having quasi-supported the soft coup attempt on Trump… Maybe recruitment is a bit slow, what with being caught lying to the FISA court and having the Top Dogs looking like, well, dogs…
“Pursue Those Indictments!”
https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/13/pursue-those-indictments/
Via http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/04/15/when-the-fbi-does-it-that-means-that-its-noto-illegal/
Probably not going to see much coverage of this in the major media:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/04/copenhagen-in-flames-after-right-wing-protesters-provocatively-throw-the-quran-on-the-ground/
A degree latitude different and this could have been HR yesterday ;-)
https://mobile.twitter.com/nilwxreports/status/1117453265891921920
Stunned to see this item on twitter – has it showed up yet on major media?
Notre Dame Cathedral is burning!
More on Notre Dame
BBC has it so comfirmed
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47941794
Not surprising, France24 tv has coverage live
Word is the fire broke out just after the Cathedral closed for the day.
Drone shot of the building at night
One of the great things, is as one of the most photographed buildings in the world we have good references for rebuilding.
I shudder to think how much money could be raised by a you fund me account to rebuild and restore.
So what are the odds, arson, construction accident, kitchen accident, electrical short, heater etc.?
Not reported much in the major media
Who knows the veracity, but France24 is reporting it started after closing for the day, no evidence of arson, and appears to be a construction accident.
I’d still take a close look at who was working just before the fire …
One of the problems is that the stained glass was the best of very old methods. It may be that nobody can recreate the same look and colors. The old secrets of the best artisans are lost to time and modern methods are not yhe same.
Per the other fires:
Gee, fill your country with people who despise Christianity, think churches ought to be destroyed, and think depictions of people, but espdcially the “Prophet” Christ, are sinful, then surprised there are attacks on churches…. sounds lije a Progressives Problem to me…
Just a note on the 737 Max crashing “fix”:
Saw a video by Mantour where he explained why he took down one of his videos (it was speculative about cause and he didn’t like speculating) in which he said that during simulator trials the airplane went into unexpected and bad behaviours….
Then another one that pointed out a big problem with the proposed fix.
Mix those together and this story emerges.
The Max has a problem with pitch up divergence. The nose is longer, the engines make more pitch moment, etc. So it tends to get into a nose up stall all by itself under some circumstances. Elevator authority is not enough to get the nose back down, you must use stabilizer trim.
The MCAS System was added to automatically trim down in a hurry if stall was detected. It was supposedly cranking the nose down due to a faulty sensor when not in danger of a stall. Normal stall recovery involves adding engine thrust.
The “fix” is to use both attitude sensors for the MCAS and if they do not agree, shut off MCAS. Pilot direction is to shut of MCAS manually if thing go wrong.
BUT the pitch up divergrnce is made worse at higher speeds. Stall recovery involves nose down to gain speed, and added thrust… See the problem?
Right at the time you most need MCAS to avoid stall, when in a higher speed mode and higher thrust, so more pitch up moment from the bigger engines, you shut it off and try to pull up from the nose down posture while cranking on trim up. If then you suddenly have a pitch up divergence, you can only recover by rapidly reversing your trim changes and reducing engine thrust, which is counter to stall recovery training…
Basically, MCAS was added to prevent bad handeling from causing stall that a pilot could not respond to in time, so you shut it off when in the circumstances that make the bad handling worse; and the pilot is left with a bad handling aircraft in an emergency situation… so bad that a couple of them crashed.
I think I’ll not be riding in a Max until they fix the basic handling problem. Not just patch around it.
Interesting the cross still stands in the Alter vestibule at Notre Dame
What it looked like before the fire.
This will have people talking – candles near the alter never melted
The roof structure must have been made of wood and flamable. But how does a fire start in the roof 40-50 meters high above the ground when it was closed and nobody around ? Electrical short maybe ?
Very puzzling.
After reading this from last month, I am shifting the Vegas odds. Just sayin.
https://www.newsweek.com/spate-attacks-catholic-churches-france-sees-altars-desecrated-christ-statue-1370800
Add this and you raise some interesting questions
It will be hard to sort out but this is on twitter now.
Fox News’ Neil Cavuto hung up on Catholic League president Bill Donohue on Monday when he refused to stop speculating that the catastrophic Notre Dame fire could be related to other recent attacks on Catholic churches in Paris.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/15/cavuto-donohue-notre-dame-cathedral-fire-accident/
@jim2 – Well, now we know how the YSM is going to play the ND fire.
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.
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I was in a choir that toured Europe in ’71. We sang in the Cathedral Notre Dame and it was quite an uplifting experience. Cathedral acoustics enhance choral music; blends all the parts nicely.
The stained glass windows there made such an impression on me that when I saw the photos of them above, it was like I was just there a few days ago and they were fresh and familiar. By chance, I spent 5 years in a factory making beveled and stained glass leaded windows and there was no comparing our commercial product to the artistry of those windows. They are truly amazing.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/developing-french-media-confirms-there-were-no-construction-workers-at-notre-dame-cathedral-at-time-of-fire/
And the plot thickens – cue ominous music.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/pariss-notre-cathedral-is-on-fire/2019/04/15/c487906e-5fa1-11e9-bf24-db4b9fb62aa2_story.html
This will make it much more difficult to sell the notion that the fire was completely accidental and probably a construction related fire.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/11/europe/france-notre-dame-attack-plot/index.html
I have heard several reports saying there was no arson. Strange to say that when they also admit they do not know the cause.
One more minor tidbit of good news.
Kim Willsher
Verified account
@kimwillsher1
23 minutes ago
More
Emmanuel Grégoire, a Paris deputy mayor, says the #NotreDame organ is “intact”. Firefighters still verifying there are no pockets of fire in the roof framework.
The problem with their protestations that no arson was involved is they put that out while the flames were still lighting the sky and burning timbers were falling into the sanctuary. Waaaaayy too early to do that unless they have a plumber standing beside them admitting he was soldering pipe with no fire extinguisher handy or something similar like someone witnessed a coffee pot blow up.
The fact they pushed it so early and so hard makes everyone highly suspecious and wondering what is going on in the back room.
I am concerned that Macron could use this like the Reichstag fire to justify a major crackdown on protests or similar jump toward a police state.
On a different topic, the BBC has an article about using genetic analysis to trace who came to Britain in 4000 BC, from where, and the route they used to get there. And what color of eyes they had.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47938188
Well, THEY didn’t do it, they have plans for it as a mosque.
@Larry Ledwick,
Sitting outside Shakeseare and Company,left bank.
Can see clearly in the negative space of the repair scaffolding where the roof was yesterday.
Yes, if one does not know what caused the fire, it is logically impossible to rule out arson.
@Larry Ledwick,
suspecious
I’m not being the grammar police here. I believe you misspelled suspicious but you have created a wonderful new word. Suspicious + specious.
How convenient to be able to say to ” This situation is suspecious. I am suspicious of your motives, program, etc, because your data, analysis, etc. is specious.”
Are you accusing me of committing Freudian typos? ;)
https://apnews.com/18c41215284d4b65b6206488fe37b6cb
https://www.businessinsider.com/whats-inside-notre-dame-cathedral-could-be-destroyed-2019-4#notre-dame-houses-10-bells-that-weigh-up-to-four-tons-each-9
One of the great stainglass windows has survived intact, others were lost as the lead holding the glass pieces melted in the heat. No word yet exactly what all the damages is.
Perhaps in the effort to restore those great windows, artisans will re-discover the methods used to make the beautiful glass. If the glass elements have been broken as they fall from their mounting they will now have the opportunity to test those fragments for the exact recipe used in the colored glass pieces – something that would have been unthinkable on the intact windows.
Great picture documentary of the death of the great Lady of Paris.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6926257/ROBERT-HARDMAN-witnesses-inside-ravaged-Notre-Dame.html
There is much left to rebuild on, and she will one day be restored. Perhaps not in my life time as it took over a century to build, but in a country reluctant to spend money to restore a time worn landmark perhaps the fire is a blessing as it will re-ignite the passions of the French to restore their heritage.
I guess that’s one benefit. Fragments can be run through a mass spec and we’ll know exactly what is in it and how much of each, then just need to work out the processing (that is likely fairly straight forward “heat stuff and pour”). Biggest issue would be figuring out if particular compounds needed to be added in a particular order to get a certain product ion / compound. But given information about what reagents were around 1000 years ago (not many…) it ought to be a small set to search and a small set of possible combinations.
I suspect that some particular “dirt” or other was used for some of the glasses to get a particular effect and it was not known at the time that it had a small contaminant of a minor element (like barium in a calcium source) that gave a subtile color change. A mass spec will catch that. Then, even without knowing to use a particular ore body (that may no longer exist) we can know what to mix to get that ratio of ions.
Also things like thickness, flatness, and inclusions can be found in the fragments, so some aspects of the processing can be inferred from those.
A Freudian slip is when you think about one thing and talk about your mother.
A Freudian slip is what J. Edgar Hoover wore under his dress.
After the fire picture of the interior of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Well this is an interesting twist to the plot.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/772495/al-aqsa-mosque-fire-jerusalem-notre-dame-islam-muslims-jews-israel-palestine
https://www.rt.com/news/456655-al-aqsa-mosque-jerusalem-fire/
The saddest part about the fire, regardless of the cause, is that half of the people will never believe what they read in the papers. ANd that is because the press has destroyed their credibility. We know they lie. We know they hide things that are detrimental to their pets. So even when they report the truth (if they ever do), no one believes them. Their side (the non-useful idiots) accept it as a coverup. And the intelligent folks are reminded of the old adage “fool me once….”.
I used to live by the the slogan, “If it’s not a Boeing, I’m not going…” They have to make adaptions to the tail section, redesign the horizontal stabilizer and restore the center of gravity again instead of screwing around with sensors and software. There is no viable alternative in my book.
Increddible how a company like Boeing is screwing up it’s business. First we had the Dreamliner debacle with the burning battery packs (I predicted that this was going to happen) and now they have screwed up the 737, the most reliable aircraft that took to the air.
All indicating to me they have a serious management problem as well. Accountants making the decissions not listening to their engineers. Progressive Rot takes place wherever we look.
This is interesting. This is bad for the leftist identitarians, but also bad for the future of free markets I fear.
As for the Notre Dam fire, shit happens and churches do burn. It will be restored as we did with all the big churches that were bombed and burned during WWII like those in the cities of Dresden and Cologne. Rebuilding today is much easier now because most historic buildings like the Notre Dam have been digitized and laser measured to produce the entire building in 3D. Someting the people who had to restore the Frauenkirch in Dresden or the Dom of Cologne had to do without.
I am more worried about many of our museums. A lot of irreplaceble objects are kept in old buildings without modern security- or fire alarms.
Let’s make Britain Great Again: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-17/tory-support-splinters-nigel-farages-brexit-party-nearly-even-polls
Farage: What we have seen is the willful betrayal of the greatest democratic exercise in the history of this nation. Our leaders continue down the path of managed decline. We are lions led by donkey’s.
Farage will clean out West Minster and completely wipe the Conservative Party of the map. Even if May reaches an agreement (new EU Treaty) or even a har Brexit, time has run out.
West Minster is now empty as all MP’s are off to their holiday destinations. After that it is election time and Farage will do the unthinkable. If he’s lucky he will make his comeback in the Euro Parliament, no longer alone but with an army of Brexit party members. So he has created the opportunity to win on both fronts, at home and in the EU. Just watch the depressed look on the face of power hungry Verhoffstadt and the EU clique. Watch the faces of the West Minster clique and know these are most interesting times. Farage is going to need personal protection.
Just like Trump has.
Netflix in strife
“Delingpole: Walrusgate – Attenborough Exposed in #FakeNews Netflix Eco Documentary Scandal”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/04/17/walrusgate-the-netflix-attenborough-scandal-gets-worse/
Nothing new here, Attenborough has been a warmist climate liar from the beginning. He hates people.
Food Control, Food Terrorism, Takeover and Control
If any of the information in this is true, the mess with the Clintons and Bengahzi is much bigger than we think. (no way to vet this other than to watch events so take with the appropriate dose of salt)
If the item on the Davy Crockets has any truth to it this would rank more serious than the Rosenberg treason.
@Larry L:
I have some issues with that “story”.
The biggest is just that the Davy Crocket is 1950s tech. By now the cores would be significantly degraded IF we still had any in existence. Just seems non-credible to me.
Then it reads like a “Get Hillary” bit. Yeah, she deserves to be got, but… why write it that way if it it is a “just the facts” tech guy talking about something he saw?
Then there’s the simple fact that you can’t set off a nuke and NOT have it be global news…
In short, I’m not biting without a whole lot more information a whole lot better vetted.
@R. de Haan:
Why do you think I have a garden? Think I like digging dirt with a shovel?
Nope, it’s all about preventing control via food control…
Although those are very legitimate issues, the design of the warheads is more valuable than the actual warhead, as they are the smallest possible practical nuclear demolition. That is why I qualified the statement with (if any part) Even if they functioned at a much reduced yield or even failed to function fully (think try one and yes it actually works although degraded – They were still in service until the the early 1970s’)
They were deployed with US Army forces from 1961 to 1971.
Even if incapable of significant nuclear yield, the mere fact that Iran or Syria might have control of one or more physical examples is terrifying.
a) they would reverse engineer it and have a known workable small yield device small enough to fit in a suitcase. That warhead is basically the base design for the back pack nuclear demolition charges the special forces would have used.
b) Second with their centrifuge capability (Iran) they could re-process the special nuclear material and have a fully functional full yield device.
c) Third if they had more than one physical examples Iran (or Syria) could sell it to Russia for a boat load of money.
Nominal yield on that warhead is only 10 – 20 tons of TNT, so degraded it would have a yield comparable to some of the larger car bombs so would not stand out other than the radiation and flash signature (if detonated above ground). If targeted against something like an ammo dump it would hardly be noticed.
If and this is a mighty big if – if one was actually detonated, would anyone actually make it public?
The national press would go ballistic.
Sure the satellites might see the flash or prompt gamma signature but since it has an air burst option, fallout would be relatively insignificant (that was one of its design goals to have a low enough residual radiation level that you could occupy the territory.)
As always these sorts of items are posted on a (FYI) basis, so that folks know the info is out there. Even if not true, it has value as “someone” is pushing the story for some reason. We know that Hillary Clinton was selling ship load quantities of stolen Libyan arms, so on a tonnage basis a few small rockets would be small potatoes and easy to hide in a mass movement of arms.
It took something over 20-30 years for the Israeli – South African test to be confirmed, and accepted as a fact. Situation here would be very similar. It is entirely possible one was set off, was detected and the info on it gag ordered to keep it quiet. How long did it take for the public to learn of Glomar Challenger raising a sunken Soviet Nuclear submarine? or learn the details of the K-19 disaster?
While we are talking conspiricy theories here is new web cam video of someone on the roof of Notre Dame after all the workers had left for the day.
Tim Pool
Companies Take OUR Faces Without Consent!?
Tim Pool on Facial Recognition
Interesting thought… IF I copyright / trademark my face can I then use DCMA clout to demand it not be copied or reproduced?…. Hmmmm…..
@Larry – interesting videos.
I wish the clarity was better and not certain why it is not.
https://gellerreport.com/2019/04/notre-dame-fire-whatwe-know.html/
Both of the videos were out takes (blow ups) of video from distant security cams so the atmospheric distortion and lack of native resolution of those type cameras both are magnified as the image is blown up. Would be great if the images were movie quality but the source video is simply not capable of it.
My immediate impression of the video clips above is someone walking around on the roof and lighting road flares and dropping them on the roof.
Note that this is a tactic often used by ANTIFA protesters to light cars on fire, they punch out a window, ignite a road flare and toss it in the back seat of the car. A road flare has a built in igniter like a giant match head under a protective cap, you take off the cap and turn the striker over and like lighting a giant kitchen match light the flare which produces a brief flash then settles into a small hot flame.
That video fits with the Geller clip you provided as it looked like the guy on the roof lit two flares to me.
AG William Barr Holds Press Conference Regarding Mueller Report
Bottom line Russia did attempt to influence the election.
No US person and specifically no Trump administration staff knowingly participated in or colluded to assist this attempted influence.
(parenthetically – everything you heard from major media was BS)
Right Side Broadcasting feed
Right Side Broadcasting Video channel
This tally of death due to Islam is a sobering read. While reading it, I had an interesting thought.
Given the magnitude of this culling of the world’s population I wonder what the Darwinian effect of this was on the populations that survived and thrived along side (or inspite) of its impacts?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/05/the_greatest_murder_machine_in_history.html
Is the dominance of Northern European cultures directly traceable to their ability to throw off this threat in Spain (1492), Vienna (1683), Barbary pirates (1801–1805 and 1815–1816), Ottoman empire ( 1922-23)
Meanwhile you have the complicated interaction between the Chinese and Muslim peoples which continues even today, but is marked by strong measures by the Chinese to counter and to hold the expansive tendencies of Islam in check.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/23/the-uighurs-and-chinas-long-history-of-trouble-with-islam/
From twitter:
Catturd
@catturd2
1 hour ago
More
Catturd poem of the day …
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Liberals are losing their damn minds and I’m laughing my ass off.
I know, turds can’t rhyme or rap.
Searchable pdf version of the Mueller Report to AG Barr
https://reason.com/2019/04/18/heres-a-searchable-version-of-the-mueller-report/
Speaking of unusual news sources – this sarcastic independent news feed called Chinese Uncensored.
Personally, I don’t think any more attention needs to be attended to any additional investigations of typical behavior of politics.. This countries law makers have been stymied for a couple years now. There is much more important stuff out there. Perhaps, stymied is the game plan, not a good one for the population in the end however. Just my two cents :-)
What looks like a fascinating computer (that I’m unlikely to buy, just covet ;-)
https://ameridroid.com/collections/single-board-computer/products/nvidia-jetson-nano
For $99, you get a (roughly) $50 SBC base system with an added 192 “CUDA Cores” of GPU for General Purpose Computing along with 4 GB of fast memory, a 16 GB eMMC for a fast OS, and Gb Ethernet.
Has a honking big heat sink on it too (though I note the picture has what looks like fan screw attachment holes so may want a fan). The reason I didn’t buy one of the first Jetson boards was the reports of overheating and lots of fan noise,
So why would I not buy one now?
First off, I found that the Climate Model code is not all that interesting and not already ported to run on a parallel cluster, so certainly not ready for GPU computing. That is, it would be a MAJOR porting effort to get it to run in parallel. Like years of effort. The makers of the code are doing that port, so better if I just wait.
Second, I need to get my present cluster more loaded with work before starting a whole new project direction.
Third, and likely most important, I’ve found that One Fast Core matters a LOT more for the things I do the most. In particular, the FireFox browser is particularly stupid about multi-core, especially when editing an article in WordPress – to the point where it will peg one core at 100% on the Pi M3 (and be entirely unresponsive) while I go make a cup of (drip / Melita…) coffee while it does whatever it is that needs a core for several minutes. I’m presently using Chromium browser to edit articles as it doesn’t have that problem. Lights up all cores right out the gate.
Then there’s the fact that the RockPro64 has been a bit of a disappointment on the software front. It’s a nice VERY fast system, and “the basics” work; But: No Devuan, I get to explore the “uplift” path myself, then the Arm-64 port is still a bit “has issues” and then in Python the Matplotlib is buggy. So OK as a browser station, but sound is PulseAudio afflicted and hard to make go. Basically the “new Hot Board” is a nice concept, but stable and debugged software is necessary for actual production work.
So were I to get Yet Another Hot Board, it would likely be this one as it ought to have fewer hardware quirks than a Jetson (and with that honking big heatsink, looks like it has the thermal balance right):
https://ameridroid.com/collections/single-board-computer/products/odroid-n2
$65 and has 4 x A72 cores at 1.8 GHz and 2 A53 cores at 1.9 GHz and your choice of 2 GB or 4 GB of fast memory. But I’m not keen on Ubuntu / SystemD as my only Linux choice, and it will have the same “young port” problems with the A72 cores as the RockPro64.
The testing / use of the MariaDB for temperature stuff has shown that having a lot of Fast Cores doesn’t speed it up all that much. Once you are at about 1.5 GHz to 1.8 GHz of A53 class core, it’s IO bound anyway. (Why using the Pi M3 has not been much of a bother…)
The added memory and an eMMC for the operating system, along with USB 3.0 disk, likely matters more.
Then for the Browser, again more and faster memory helps and about 1.5 GHz to 1.8 Ghz gets the speed up to where it needs to be. So the “Super duper Hot New Board” isn’t needed. Things like the Odroid C2 and the Odroid XU4 (a 32 bit arch) work fine.
Well, so there you have my latest Hardware Lust Objects, and why I’m not placing my order now ;-) It is simply better to wait until the software is more mature, the available choices larger, and the Early Adopters have uncovered all the pitfalls and filled them in.
But I still want one, of each, to play with ;-)
Well, with that out of my system, time to go back to loading graphs into that North America posting (ALL of it done on the Pi M3… Because Devuan 2.0 just works on it…)
Per the roof person and “flashes of light:”
It looks like a very blue-white flash. Road flairs are very Strontium Red. To me it looks more like a specular reflection of a setting sun off of some metal object.
I could easily see something like a worker “signing off” for the day, with his vest off in a pack / pocket and his lunch bucket or stainless steel thermos making a sun glint.
But I only looked at the one “better” close up video and even then only saw one big flash…
Jerry Niggler is on CBS This Morning saying Congress can “criminalize” some of the President’s efforts to impede the investigation, i.e. obstruction. He is also making noise that a case can be made for “collusion.” Look’s like the asshat circus will continue. I can only hope that more people will get fed up with this and be verbose about it.
@jim2 -Quelle surprise!
Jerry No-nads is following the Alinsky script; Never shut up, never back down, and never admit you are wrong. Attack, attack, attack.
The Republicrats (the right wing of the Uniparty) would join the Demlican’s (the left wing of the Uniparty) impeachment effort in a heartbeat if the polls showed President Trump’s approval was low.
The good news is that despite 90-some% negative Orange Man Bad press coverage, President Trump holds and is slowly adding to his approval ratings across all demographics. Funny that Alinsky never got around to writing a Plan B for when the rules aren’t working. Also, I’m not sure that Alinsky had a backup plan for when people who value individual liberty get fed up with the Alinskyites’ yammering and just plug ’em to shut them up.
But you knew all that.
Also, I’m not sure that Alinsky had a backup plan for when people who value individual liberty get fed up with the Alinskyites’ yammering and just plug ’em to shut them up.
Important observation, manipulation methods depend on consistent behavior but in a world where the internet can red pill millions of users in a few days, behavior can undergo large shifts too.
See CNN ratings nose diving after the Mueller report showed almost everything they have alleged for the last two years had no basis or was literally 180 deg out of phase with reality.
It does not take folks long to figure out that if someone is screaming that the sky is falling and it is a beautiful spring day, that perhaps the chicken little is doing bad drugs.
Ref Notre Dame fire:
https://www.dcclothesline.com/2019/04/19/notre-dame-fire-heres-what-we-know-about-what-started-it/
On the topic of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/how_to_defeat_the_national_popular_vote_interstate_compact.html
On human fitness for space travel, twin genetic studies.
https://www.wired.com/story/are-humans-fit-for-space-a-herculean-study-says-maybe-not
Someone is hacking the Iranian hackers
https://www.wired.com/story/iran-hackers-oilrig-read-my-lips/
Doh! Gotta redo that marketing material…….
http://www.brusselstimes.com/business/technology/15050/electric-vehicles-emit-more-co2-than-diesel-ones,-german-study-shows
Re space travel:
I just found an article today (https://drmicozzi.com/what-nasa-astronauts-are-teaching-us-about-our-health) that had some interesting discussion of the study of the Kelly twins …
“Time in space disrupts immune system
“We already knew that spending extended periods of time in space, without the pull of gravity, can lead to muscle and bone loss. But we now know it also disrupts the immune system.
“This discovery came from NASA’s Twin Study on Mark and Scott Kelly. Scott is a NASA astronaut who recently spent nearly a year living on the International Space Station, while his identical twin, Mark, remained on Earth.
“It turns out, spending time in the sterile space station significantly altered Scott’s immune system. In fact, scientists say his immune system is now going into overdrive.
“’It’s as if the body is reacting to this alien environment sort of like you would a mysterious organism being inside you,’” said geneticist Christopher Mason of New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College.
“This finding doesn’t surprise me much, as I talk a lot about the importance of exposure to bacteria in your environment.
“But in space, there’s no natural exposure to bacteria, including healthy probiotic bacteria, which appear all around us on Earth. These healthy bacteria actually “colonize” us—on our skin, respiratory tract, and GI tract. (You might even call it “colon-ization.”)
“Studies show that natural exposure to bacteria helps keep our immune system healthy and balanced. It also helps stop inflammation, the No. 1 cause of disease and aging.
“Despite this serious side effect, Scott Kelly said he would like to go back into space on a mission to Mars. Well, he’s also running as a democrat for the Senate seat of Martha McSally (who replaced John McCain) in Arizona. So, I say go ahead and take your political campaign to Mars if you want, Scott.
“As for me, I’ll stay here on Earth—with all the healthy bacteria. It seems our bodies need it.”
Here is another source for the original article:
https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/15/scott-kelly-nasa-twins-study-immune-system/
Two very interesting TED talks on sleep and its effects.
How sleep removes wastes from the brain
The natural sleep cycle
“When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/04/19/when-the-fbi-does-it-that-means-that-its-not-illegal-80/
I wish I had a “natural sleep cycle”…
Near as I can tell I’m “tidally locked” to the moon. Wide awake when it is overhead. Drowsy and Must Sleep when it is just below the horizon. As that varies vs the Sun, it is a bit of a challenge when an employer wants me to work 9-5 as my body doesn’t.
I can (and sometime do) go “split shift” with sleep at the two low tides…
Sometimes I think I’m first cousin to a sea anemone or crustacean… There was a study that put a bunch of them in a tank in a basement somewhere like Utah. They continued to be active at “high tide” and inactive at “low tide” despite no way to know…
Right Now it’s “sleepy time” at about 4 pm and moon (full) right over head at 3 AM thus my posting graphs of GHCN between midnight and 4 am….
The only good thing is that at least now I know why… Up until about 40 years old I thought maybe, but wasn’t sure. Up to about 25 I had no clue why.
Now I have developed a good set of coping behaviours. Coffee (Massive Quantities!!) as needed. Doing “long sleeps” on weekends when work prevented a normal cycle. Finding jobs with “Flex schedule”. Sneaking naps. etc. etc.
Near as I can tell, there are many “natural sleep cycles”. The spouse is “down at 9pm up at 4 am like clockwork most of the time. I’m way not.
Oh Well….
(I like to imagine that after at least 3 documented, and potentially even more before that, generations of sailors, we were self selected for “sail on the tide” regardless of day, night, or whatever. )
I also have a moon effect I frequently find myself unable to sleep at full moon – like a deer grazing in the meadows under the moon light I want to be doing something. I routinely catch myself bumping around the house at 3:00 am and realize I probably ought not move furniture or hang a picture this time of the morning. I am wide awake but my neighbors are probably programmed to be sleeping right now.
I often get up at 04:30 or so putter around for a hour or so then go back to bed and sleep until 10:00 (I can do that since my shift is a swing shift and I don’t need to get to work until 1:00 in the afternoon local time.
I also will take cat naps over lunch break rather than eat and snack while I work later in the afternoon.
It is nice to know that a period of quiet time in the middle of the night is not “insomnia” but a natural part of the sleep cycle (likely helped keep small human groups alive as someone as always partially awake late at night and would hear the panther as it sniffed around the hut.
Does anyone else see similarities with the cult experience discussed here and the modern extreme left?
I am beginning to think the modern hyper-left progressives have crossed over into cult programming induced insanity, because some or the stuff I see on twitter etc is so far from a reasonable commentary on reality – often exactly the opposite of clearly evident facts. They simply turn things completely inside out to fit their expectations. Classic examples of trying to fit reality to some mental template of approved doctrine.
Oh God… I couldn’t resist…. I fell to the allure of New Toys…
I’ve ordered the Odroid N2 with 4 GB memory and an emmc card with Ubuntu on it. Even though I expect it to have bugs and software limits / issues and who knows what.
Even though I have more SBCs than I can use at any one time anyway.
Even though I have a RockPro64 (2 x A72 cores so single cores are fast; where the N2 has 4 x A72 and likely the same issues) that’s not in play at the moment due to software immaturity.
I’m just a Hardware Whore.
What can I say.
I’m weak.
Doh!
So in a few days I’ll do a hardware and software review on it and post my assessment.
FWIW, I did a test BSD on the Pine64. My best guess is that it booted, but to a serial console, but nothing on the HDMI. So I’m still not ready to bring up my first BSD SBC. It WILL happen, but not, I think, today…. I have an x86 box that would make a nice BSD box, and I may do that just to ease the transition. I don’t really want to leave Linux, but the BS being brought to the party is “not cool”, so time to start bringing up an ‘escape route’ option for at least one box,.
Red Hat is now IBM. Microsoft is on the Linux Foundation (and with clout). SystemD is corrupting most of the domain. Then there is a “Freedesktop.org” bit with a mandated identity file (for a posting “soon” when the Saki wears off ;-) so time to start prepping “options” in case sanity does not return fast enough to Linux… “There’s always options. -E.M.Smith” so time to explore some of them…
FWIW, I’m seriously considering making my own “Distro”. Privacy focused and based on a secure kernel with bloat and spyware protection built in. Would there be interest in that? Basically, I’m being forced step by step, into doing it for myself anyway, so why not make it a “community” thing? There’s a Devuan project doing that sort of thing, and this would be a polished, tuned version (they would be my “upstream”) with my selection of packages and with a fix and patch screen.
So far I’ve stayed ahead of the creeping spyware and black-hats by a set of behaviours, but I fear it will take “build from source” and selective rejection of co-opted “upstream” folks “going forward”.
Well, I think it’s time to launch some YouTube music and refill the Saki Cup ;-)
@Larry:
The Left near as I can tell, consists of 2 groups. A set of “useful Idiots” who are easily controlled by a set of paradigms (divorced from facts, just “the story’ is enough to motivate them) and the Evil Manipulators who know they are just BSing folks and feeding bull shit to the Useful Idiots but don’t care as it pays so well. I think some of them positively enjoy the “blowing smoke” and “duping” aspect. (Remember Bill Clinton saying “What, you think we ought to let you keep your money and decide how to spend it?” or something near that…)
We have the case of “sheeps & wolves” on one side as a strange corrupt dance, and “rational but not many” on the other side.
Unfortunately, almost 1/2 the population is below average intelligence. Of the other “about 1/2” a significant percentage are immoral and / or evil. Match those two Democrats and you have over a majority. It is very much a minority who are all of smart, sane, and moral.
That, in short, is The Problem.
Representative Government was supposed to fix that by putting the smart, sane, and moral in power more than the alternative. We are now being sorely tested on a global basis. I have no idea how it will turn out. Prior to Trump and Brexit, I thought we were screwed. Then they gave hope. Now, with Brexit being derailed and the Muller Report saying “no there there” yet the MSM still shouting “Collusion! Impeach! Obstruction!”: etc. etc. I’m not so sure where we end up.
So we are at a “Hinge Point Of History” (my term for it), and inside 2 years we ought to know if evil wins (and I move to the hills of Kentucky in a bunker ;-) or if The People woke up in time to stop the EGBs from winning.
So all I can do is watch and run a small cheer leading section. Oh Well.
“Go Trump, Go!” “He’s Our Bull, it’s Their China, Go Trump Go!”…
OMG! I heard a radio show talking about slow roast muskrat with creamed corn… I was sure it was a lark… but nooo…..
https://www.cooks.com/rec/sch/0,1-0,muskrat,FF.html
Muskrat Pie? Oh Lordy!!
And here I thought they were just for .22 LR “moving target” practice… ;-)
(In the Sacramento Delta, they drill holes in the dikes for their homes, and can cause lots of flooding, / loss of homes, and more. Not something to value…. But somehow Muskrat Stew never called my name… until now… )
Perhaps a nice, hot Muskrat curry? Could be anything … ;-)
CIO, RE https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/w-o-o-d-9-april-2019/#comment-111348
When and if I make it to retirement, I would be interested in contributing to some of the OS projects. For example, instead of piling stuff onto X windows, why not just modify it into a modern desktop? May or may not be doable, but if not, I’m sure there are other rational approaches to streamlining the Desktop software stack.
I’ve started turning off the TV when a Columbine piece comes on. I’m sick of it. The dead bodies are being used to stoke the gun control movement. I guess it’s OK if they do that, but it’s also OK if I ignore them. They will never understand the true role of privately owned guns in a free society.
It has become blindingly obvious that the loony left has gotten into most positions of power, even in the TLAs in the US. This is true throughout the Western world. In a country like Australia, if the wrong person rises to power, the government will be able to subjugate the people in short order, executing any that resist. It would be much harder to do this in the US.
Just a reminder France is burning and the media cannot be bothered to cover it.
Please forgive me in advance. I could not stop my mouse, errrr, rat in this case!
I was thinking of the same song – no forgiveness needed.
Meanwhile in Copenhagen they are celebrating diversity and spring time with 4 days of street riots.
More on France apparently the Yellow vest folks are miffed that their wealth inequality protests are being over shadowed by the Notre Dame fire and its fundraising efforts for restoration.
Kind of hard to push a wealth inequality agenda (translation workers protest – socialist ) or anti EU protests prior to the movement getting hijacked by the Left when other groups are busy creating other social disruptions which take the public’s eye off the ball.
Looks like the yellow vest movement has become co-opted by the left now and is no longer focusing on the EU and Macron but is devolving into everybody riot about their pet peeve issue.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/france-yellow-vest-protest-notre-dame
Mean while on the Mexican border – – – – Ooops, Never mind.
(spoken in a Rosanna Rosanadana voice)
https://www.oann.com/two-u-s-soldiers-stopped-by-mexican-troops-on-u-s-side-of-the-border/
A bit more on the border incident, problem is that the border barrier does not exactly follow the legal border. The US troops were south of the fence but still inside US territory.
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/04/2-us-army-troops-disarmed-detained-by-mexican-troops-in-tx/
Nielson apparently is making a big push for a new monitoring system.
I have been selected to participate (not going to happen) but they are willing to give me $50 gift card if I sign up.
Apparently their new “people meters” monitor an audio tone embedded in the program audio and also catch snippets of program audio which they process into a digital hash some how to verify what users are watching.
They apparently have not figured out lots of folks listen to programming wearing ear phones but that is not my problem.
https://www.wired.com/2004/04/nielsen-people-meters-draw-fire/
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2307109/psychoacoustic-encoding–what-nielsen-uses-to-track-tv-viewing.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter
https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/7-things-you-need-know-about-nielsen-s-new-tool-146053
@Larry L: I can’t recall you mentioning your TV viewing habits, but as I recall, most readers here are rather light on watching the boob tube or perhaps it’s on while doing something else.
Sign up! $50 bucks will buy some toy or other. If you generally don’t have the TV on, that’s a valid data point for them and they get no info from you. Win-win!
Essentially zero TV, what little I do watch right now is either purchased DVD movies or Amazon prime video with head phones on the computer. Although on occasion I do watch direct over the air TV late at night (maybe 6x a year)
I thought of that, but decided importing unknown electronic bugs into my house is not high on my to do list.
Although the evil twin in me wants to sign up and toss the device under the sofa cushion but their motion sensor would mute it – perhaps clip it to the dogs collar if I had one, and play lots of old dvd and cd rom movies or my local college FM radio station or a stack of CDs on random shuffle so they could try to figure out what the heck I was listening to.
Or attach it to a wind chime on the balcony where it was in constant motion?
(never mind I hate wind chimes)
Well, I have looked at these for several years, but have decided to probably add it to my collection. It is just unique. I have a 10-22 takedown, but this thing is just so compact and self contained.
I had a friend that had one of the original AR-7s when they were manufactured by Armalite.
Seemed to be a serviceable .22 LR rifle, only shot it a handful of time, not something you would want to use to beat a zombie to death (a bit light on the construction) but for a general purpose lightweight back pack rifle it fits the bill. I wish there was one available in .22 WMR but there are not many rifles available in that cartridge. It would have to be a bolt action probably as the WMR is just hot enough it requires centerfire type actions to keep from beating itself to death.
I’ve had one of those AR-7s. It shoots OK. I’d not call it a survival rifle though, not much you can do with iron sites on a modest precision .22 LR.
The Air Force had (maybe still has?) a folding survival rifle in .22 Hornet / .410 shotgun with ammo in the stock. I liked it much better as a survival rifle. (The LAST thing you need in a survival limited ammo situation is a semi-auto chewing through your supply…) so the single shot nature of it was fine. The .410 would not be worth beans on things like pheasants or ducks on the wing, but for potting “some critter” or a “sitting duck” would be fine. Then the .22 Hornet is just so much more than a .22 LR and lets you get bigger stuff. But expensive to shoot ;-)
Here’s one in .22 LR
https://fishgame.com/2018/02/m6-folding-survival-rifle-22lr-410/
I’d rather have it than the AR-7 in a real needs situation. Put a box each of .410 shot and .410 slugs and you can pretty much guarantee you can hit something. Add a brick of .22 LR and your set for a good long while.
But the one I always wanted, yet never bought, was this one:
https://www.guns.com/news/2013/03/20/savage-model-24-rfile-over-shotgun
Yes, it is heavy and a full sized gun. But when you NEED a GUN it’s nice to have a real one…
While they have a .22 LR / .410 the one I wanted was the .22 WRM / 20 Guage or the .223 Rem / 20 Guage.
They made lots of variations, even a ‘survival model’ with ammo storage in the stock. Sadly, the stopped making them in 2010. Just about the time I finally decided what one I wanted…
I suppose with that long a manufacture they ought to be available used… but by now I’ve lost the urge…
I ended up with a Marlin Lever Action / scope in .357 Magnum (also shoots .38 Spl) and a matched Ruger single action pistol in .357 with 9mm cyl. option. The .357 shot shells are not a .410 even, but for small stuff like reptiles and ground critters it’s OK. Then the .357 will take down things as big as modest hogs and small bears, or you can put in a .38 and pot a rodent without destroying it. (Single loaded in the breech it can shoot .38 S&W too, but I’d rather just light load my own longer cases) Being able to use what was then the common police rounds and military rounds is also a nice touch. I used it for the DCM qualification with iron sites and qualified ;-) It’s much easier with the scope… Then the large case size of the .357 is big enough you could reload with black powder if ever forced into that mode, and I have a bullet mold for it.
So that’s my SHTF set… IF time or carrying capacity allows, I’ve got a nice .22 LR /scope that would go into the car with it, and a brick… Then a 12 Gauge “Defender” type shotgun with a minor crate for the ammo – turns out 100 rounds of 12 Gauge is heavy ;-) I have interchangeable bbls for it in Deer Hunter (rifled 24″), Defense (smooth 18.x “) and Bird hunting with interchangeable chokes. Oh, and the .22 has a mated Ruger .22 LR / .22 WMR single action revolver… (No matching sidearm for the shotgun… they frown on 12 gauge handguns here ;-)
So essentially depending on circumstances, one, two, or three of the long guns gets “grab and go” along with their mates and anything else that fits the time window.
HOWEVER:
With the kids grown and gone, and just me and the spouse, the major strategy has shifted to just stationary defense and “ride it out”. When I’d first got this kit, we had a military base just near enough to be in a big mess if a sub launch nuke hit it, but far enough away we’d survive; and a nice back door road into the hills with camping / hunting / fishing opportunities “one tank of gas” away. IF we booked it out in the first 5 minutes, we’d be outside the Big BOOM ICBM range before they got here.
Now the base is a Google Playground, the escape route is full of new houses and traffic, and The USSR doesn’t exist anymore… So times change. Better at this point to do static defense and low profile (think Venezuela issues, not nukes) with a garden for 2. When we get to Florida the spouse will be wanting to live in a metro suburb, I’m hoping to lobby for “just barely rural” ;-) But then we’ll be back to the “load and go” scenarios for hurricanes. But then you have days to do the “load the car” part. (Sorry Dear, no room for the jewelry, clothes and dogs, I’ve loaded all the guns and the car is full. ;-)
But that’s still off in the future.
Quadrant magazine of the churches being vandalised & burnt in France – including Notre Dame. Informative.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/the-desecration-of-frances-christian-symbols-and-heritage/
Finally scrolled down past the photos in that Over / Under gun article and it said Savage came out with a near cousin:
https://www.range365.com/savage-model-42-takedown-gun-review
$500 so not cheap… more plastic (so better as survival gun, not so much looks).
I already have too many guns, and don’t have a spare $500 kicking around, but that’s a nice package. Take-down so small. 26 inch long “go bag” just for it. Lighter weight at under 5 lbs. And in 22 Magnum. While I’d still rather have the .20 Gauge, you can now get .410 shells in 3 inches long with a decent sized load of shot in them.
@E.M. – I didn’t recall you mentioning before that your .357 was single action. Sunnuva gun!
Oh, the same holds true for fishing rods and guns. If you know how many you have, you don’t have enough.
I’m there on fishing rods.
I need a few more guns.
;o)
@H.R.:
I have both a Single Action .357 and the Double Action .357 (in Stainless Steel) revolvers…
So if just talking about a .357 I don’t say which one. Only if it is important to the particular point (like the swap to 9mm cylinder) do I bother saying, as otherwise it would be the choice of the moment… Like were I going camping in bear country. Dry weather? Either one. Rain probable? Stainless Steel…
On you other point:
I wonder how many fishing rods I have?….
I know I have some salt water gear lost in the garage at the moment. Not used in 20 years. (The ONLY time I got sea sick was on a medium-large rent a spot fishing boat and didn’t go back for a looooong time. In Florida, on about a 25 footer a few years back, I was fine – but using my friends gear). Then I bought some fresh water Rods in Florida… I think it was 4? Then my older gear, and the stuff I bought for the kids (who lost interest about 12 years old) and the “survival” gear… Do you count “hand line” rigs too? I made some nice little “emergency fishing” kits… one in each car bag.
For a while I was rather fond of the telescoping rods as you can store one about anywhere. Penguin, IIRC, was sellig them for about $10, so I bought “a few”. Never broke or tossed any of them, so they ought to be in the garage somewhere too… Maybe I need to clean out the garage ;-) The Florida rods / reels are in the corner of my office, so ready to grab ;-) Unfortunately, California is way overfished and the license is expensive and the rules are getting crazy. In some places you have to know how many feet you are from some object as segments of the river are off limits, and in others you need to be a biologist as 2 almost identical species will have different rules. Then you must have your (paper) license glued to your body somewhere above the waste and look like an idiot. Just put me off the whole thing. Florida was a lot better ;-)
So, I wonder if HR has one of these dudes ;-)
@EM, that 42 looks nice, but I prefer multi-shot capability. Considering I would have a Judge, or a Glock 30s on my hip (I found my 45 ACP shot shells yesterday in with my .223’s), I would not be short on power if needed with a .22 LR. The 1,640 FPS ammo is not too bad. The 10-22 Takedown is much more gun than the AR7 after pulling it out for inspection. In particular with a 50 round BX flip clip and an integrated laser site. The AR7 is just so small (16″ unassembled) and convenient to toss in a trunk or under a seat as a backup however, and for 2 bills at the pawn shop…….
Happy Easter to those that celebrate it.
@E.M. re 2 x .357: OK. I do recall when you’ve mentioned your .357 and you discussed the feature pertinent to the discussion. As best I know, this is the first time you’ve done a ‘compare and contrast’ between two different .357s. So that clears up all that.
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Yeah, at the Chiefio Blog Winter Gala in Lakeland, when you took a gander at my salt and freshwater gear just before you left, you mentioned you had a lot of that “it’s around here somewhere” fishing gear. It seems that you have even more gear that’s buried somewhere that has come to mind.
I have just one collapsible rod/reel that I picked up 2 years ago. Actually, I bought 3 of them and gave one to my former boss and one to my dentist of 30+ years who is a fishing nut. He has lots of the really good stuff – money not particularly an object – but he didn’t have anything like that little collapsible to throw under the seat of his truck. That’s where mine is along with a few jigs, spinners, some hooks, split shot, and a bobber.
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.
@Ossqss: Those were being advertised on TV when I was a kid. It looked cool then. My dad remarked that it was designed to catch fishermen, not fish. I guess I was in my late 20s and I came across one in a yard sale or second hand store or some such, new and in the package. Cute gimmick, but I passed. Dad was right. They are pretty much worthless.
I never fish (at least not in the last 55 years or so) but I do have some fishing gear – just in case. I have a small 40″ inch long “childs” rod that I keep in the camping gear in the van along with a bit of tackle a few spinners and lures etc.
It is there simply as a “better to have one if you need one than need one and not have one” sort of preparedness thing. Only cost a few bucks at walmart.
Here in Colorado fishing is not nearly as productive as it would be for those of you living along the coastal areas with large rivers, so is pretty much an after thought but in a few locations you can get a couple pan sized fish if you find the right spot to drop a line.
I got a roughly 2 foot long rod (plus handle) when in Florida just for jigging for bait fish off the floating dock (my
trailer parkR.V. Resort was on a lake). It beats a “Pocket Fisherman” and is cheaper and almost as small.FWIW, my little hand line fishing kits are better at being a “pocket fisherman” as it actually fits in a pocket. IF ever needed, you could cut a stick to use as a pole.
Film Cans are hard to find anymore (I sill have bag of them) but one that was neat had hooks, sinkers, very small lures and mini-bobber inside the can, then about 20 foot of line (depends on the weight I’d wind on) wound on the outside with the end caught under the cap.
I got rather good at doing a “swing the weight in a circle and release” and then (while holding it by the cap end) let the line spin off the spool rather like an open faced reel. I could certainly cast it out to most of the line length I had available.
Maybe I ought to photo a couple of these and post it up…. I have one in each car and a smaller version in my “always with me” bag. (It uses one of those flat leader line plastic spools – hope they are still made – with a small weight and hook tied on, then slid inside the spool (pry up an edge with a fingernail). The whole thing will fit in a watch pocket… It’s THE most minimal fishing kit I could make that was still self contained. Can’t really cast with it, but for “found pole” or just jigging off the dock, it’s fine.
I’ve also made bigger ones with the larger ring like leader rolls of ocean strength leader. You can cast with it using the “bolero throw” and the disk flat to the direction of the cast (Hand in the center hold from the inside or just “make a fist” in the hole to fixture it), but sometimes it hangs up. I decided I liked just having a regular open faced reel and call it done ;-) But that’s not very minimal and I always ended up including a telescopic pole anyway ;-)
The same “bolero casting” trick works with many other kinds of “spools of line”, BTW. Just some are harder to hold without putting a finger on the line, and you are NOT going to need 500 feet of 10 lb line if casting that way ;-)
@Ossqss:
I did mention that I bought the AR-7 but only coveted the Savage/Stevens… so I understand. Similar reasoning. “With a .357 on my hip, and able to hit ‘deer sized targets’ with it at about 100 feet reliably, that’s enough of the ‘enough gun’ – so let’s add something for ‘squirrel at 200 feet’ and 50 rounds in a shirt pocket.”
I DOES fit nicely in a regular day pack backpack – both very light and small. For a while it was in the emergency backpack in the boot of the car (bright red backpack / day pack size), but when I moved to a wagon decided California Law would take a dim view of gun and ammo in the same space as the driver and not in a locked box (even if not assembled – here even having JUST A MAGAZINE and having it touching one shell even if not IN the magazine, is legally a “loaded gun” and you go to the pokey…. so don’t toss your magazine in the same box as any shells…)
So one really nice feature of it is that you CAN put it in a day pack and nobody will suspect there’s a rifle in there… And it is about the same weight as my heavy revolvers ;-)
More on Firefox that may explain some issues
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/20/0234249/did-google-sabotage-firefox-and-ie
Here is another option for take down light carbines
Weight of 6.8 pounds vs the AR-7 at 3.5 pounds, the Ruger PC (pistol caliber) carbine is another option. It accepts both glock and ruger magazines (although you need to change magazine wells to make the switch) and can be taken down for easy storage.
Chambered in 9mm
https://www.cabelas.com/product/RUGER-PC-CARBINE-TACTICAL-CF-RIFLE/2737504.uts
Larry, I have a friend that standardized on 9mm for just about all his guns for ammo consolidation. He has this fold up one and loves it. I have always had my eye on a Keltec bull pup, but still a bit to pricey for me. I think this sub 2000 is around 6 bills.
NEW TOPIC: The Buick I paid $1000 for and drove for 12 years is at the body shop. I hit a deer at night on the highway outside of town. It didn’t really even slow me down, and it continued to function fine, so I hightailed it for home. There is a bull’s eye in front of the driver in the corner of the windshield. There was a split second when I even could have said “Hi” to the deer. The driver’s door doesn’t want to open fully. Long story short, the shop’s estimate is more than $4,400 to replace the 2 doors and windshield and fix damage to lights, etc.
I’m sad about having to (likely) give up this car. Even though it has lots of cosmetic issues (inside and out), it has served me faithfully. I’m afraid I won’t be able to find a similar heavy, faithful car to replace it…especially not for $1,000 or so. I’ve kept up the mechanical parts and even put 4 new tires on it last summer. It loves to get out on the highway and run. It takes hills without a blink. It’s not even scary to have to gun it on an on ramp.
The insurance adjuster said that if I had had major mechanical stuff done (e.g., overhaul engine, replace transmission, etc.) within the last 6 months, that could make a difference in the amount I get out of it. I usually spent a few hundred dollars on it most summers, just to take care of maintenance issues, but I never had to have it overhauled.
I’ve never had to deal with this before. Do any of you Village Elders have any words of wisdom for me in this situation? I don’t own any property that I could park it on and part it out.
@PowerGrab:
Your choices are going to range from bad to worse.
It is an old car so no, your insurance will not be helpful. Mostly they will give you low blue book for it and hand you a salvage title so that if you DO fix up the car, it becomes hard to sell it to anyone after that. ( Once blue book is under about $5k I drop comprehensive as I just don’t want the “salvage title” for getting a fender fixed and the car repainted).
Body work is very expensive. Doors can be very easy. Check local junk yards for a car with matching color for the doors. Then it’s just an unbolt / bolt up… provided the body around the hing isn’t bashed up too… Windshield in another matter. Make sure the glass guy knows YOU are paying for it, not an insurance company…
Most likely, hitting up Craigs List for a replacement same car is your cheapest route, then move your new tires and rims onto it ;-) (Allow one beer per tire…)
I don’t remember where you are, nor do I know what kind of Buick you have, So here’s a random search in Atlanta for Buick under $2000 and there are 95 to choose from at the moment:
https://atlanta.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=BUICK+&max_price=2000
So set it to where you are (or the nearest metro area) and select your make, model, year, whatever. I can usually get a pretty good car for about $2000. I got a fine Mercedes Limo Sized deluxe sedan in Orlando for $1600. (The alternative was a rental that would have racked up about $3000…) It had some seat wear and one bit of trim was bent some. You do need to have someone who’s decent at spotting mechanical issues make sure all the major parts are working right ( I do that for me…)
FWIW, I played “whack a deer” with my Mercedes SLC (1980). As you might guess, it did keep driving, but the cost to repair was way high. I gave it to a friend who is able to DIY auto repair and bought a replacement for about 1/2 the cost of the repairs (though a different model – I got tired of climbing up hill to get out of the SLC… it has about 9 inches ground clearance and low seats ;-) While it pained me to let go of the car, what was done was done and paying to undo it was just too much.
So one decision is “Do I just ‘Muldoon it’ into a beater / daily driver with doors that almost match and a few wrinkles in the sheet metal that doesn’t prevent things working?” Or just walk away and start over with a new cheap car? IFF neither of those works for you, and you really want THIS car, then you try to negotiate down the cost of repair by telling them it’s you paying, not the insurance, and that if it is too much you just won’t get it fixed.
Personally, given the amount of damage you described, the cost, and that the car is pretty old and used already, I’d be most likely to just buy a replacement same year / type and swap my new tires onto it.
Slight segway : Is there a movement in the US to keep & restore older cars & trucks and maintain in good condition ?
I’m not involved but it is a real big thing here in South Australia with annual processions, carnivals etc for older type cars. An example is the annual “Bay to Birdwood” : http://baytobirdwood.com.au/the-event/
Restored old cars & trucks sell for more than the cost of new cars here..
E.M. writing to Powergrab: “You do need to have someone who’s decent at spotting mechanical issues make sure all the major parts are working right ( I do that for me…)”
@Powergrab – That’s key to getting a good, reliable used car. There is a car repair shop nearby me that charges a flat $85 to go over a car and evaluate it. I used that service to buy my 2005 towing truck.
They tell you the condition of the car systems; engine, fluid leaks, brakes, transmission, tires, air conditioning, suspension, alignment. As they told me, they go over the car just like they were going to buy it. And then they give a repair estimate, so you will know what to add to the price of a car or negotiate down off the price. They don’t bother with appearance items as they figure you are competent to see if the car is a rust bucket and if any plasticky bits are cracked or missing.
They cannot find every little thing. Something may be fine when they go over the car, but just due to age or mileage it could fail the next week, but at least you’ll know what is good and what needs replaced or repaired at the time you are buying a particular used car.
They have no skin in the game. You’re paying them for the inspection report, so you’re going to get an unbiased evaluation of the vehicle you are considering.
First, first, first, find a shop that does used car evaluations before you even look at a used car. Talk to them so you know what that shop will be checking and how they will fit an evaluation into their schedule; by appointment or just drive in unannounced.
Make any car purchase contingent on the results of the vehicle inspection. If the seller won’t cooperate with and agree to an inspection prior to sale, it’s probably a good sign that you shouldn’t be buying that car anyhow.
Once you have a shop that you like lined up, THEN go looking for a car. It’s not like you will be taking a dozen cars in at $80 – $100 a pop for evaluation. It should only be one or at most, two cars before buying. You will have already shopped for something you like that looks good to you at the price you want to pay. You think you have a winner, but the mechanics at the shop can confirm your choice or steer you off of a bad decision.
Stick with a used Buick sedan. From the ’90s up through today, they have been using a reliable V6 and V8 in the older ones that is fairly bulletproof. The changes have been incremental improvements over the years to their base engine. You’ve already experienced that with your old Buick. A 10-12 year-old Buick should be another good car for you.
The Buick sedans are not popular with collectors or the young crowd, so demand is low and the supply is good as they mostly come from geezers whose kids have forced them to give up the keys on a car they didn’t drive much in the first place.
Keep us posted, on your quest, eh?
@Bill in Oz,
Yes. That is what my nephew does for a living, outside of being a landlord. I think it is mostly in the old American South (now known as the Southeast, mostly; and maybe Texas and/or parts of California. The ‘smog’ rules for the old stuff happens to be more sane.). Nephew has a ’68 Buick Wildcat that runs. The downside? You can’t easily get the old style bias ply tires and the new radials are mostly low profile; so the tires rated to handle the load are quite wide and scruff in the wheel well during turns. Now I wish my grandmother had let me keep that ’68 Galaxie 500 I had when I was 16.
@Bill in OZ – Collectable cars are very much a thing here in the US. It started with hotrodders in the ’50s and ’60s souping up and customizing old ’30s and ’40s cars to race or cruise. Then in the late ’50s and particularly the ’60s, Detroit started selling muscle cars which were just hotrods-in-a-box.
Now there is a huge market for the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s cars as many baby boomers are at the end of their careers and have the cash to buy a car or two that they may have owned or wanted but couldn’t afford way back when.
My neighbor across the street has a ’66 Dodge Charger R/T with the original 426 Hemi and a ’69 Pontiac GTO with a hot crate engine that replaced the original engine. Having the original engine that matches the car adds quite a bit to the value.
A neighbor 3 doors up has a pristine, low-mileage ’81 Corvette that he inherited from his mom. Another neighbor a few doors down has a ’65 Ford Mustang he’s in the process of restoring and yet another neighbor has a ’60s Jeepster. There are only 42 houses in our development, so that’s a lot of collectable cars by percentage.
I’ve been shopping for a collectable vehicle myself. Since I’m retired and I don’t have a lot of money to tie up in a car that will sit in the garage most of the time and only be out and about for sunny day cruises or local car shows and collector get-togethers, I have been taking my time looking for an appealing old hunk of iron that is in the right condition at the right price.
On my list of candidates is a Triumph TR6, a pickup truck from the ’30s or ’40s and just maybe the ’50s, a ’55 – ’56’ – ’57 or ’61 Thunderbird (Mrs. H.R. is lobbying hard for a Thunderbird. She had a ’93 Thunderbird Supercoupe that was hard to keep under 100 mph.), a ’30 or ’31 Ford Model A sedan, a late ’60s International Scout, and if I can find one, a ’65 or ’66 Dodge Dart with the slant 6 motor.
I really, really, really want a ’67 Jaguar XKE roadster, but they are about $20,000 for a junker that needs complete restoration with another $50,000 poured into it. But… $$$, so that is not realistically on my list.
My budget is $10,000 to a max of $15,000 as that is all I can afford for what is essentially an occasionally drivable very large paperweight taking up garage space.
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I do read a bit on Australia hotrodding and classic cars. Oz classic cars for sale and speedshop articles pop up when I am surfing the web searching for a car. From what I’ve noticed, it is a different scene in Australia because the cars are much different from old American iron, but the gearhead mentality, love of classic car lines, and quest for more power is the same as in the US.
LoL, this is making its rounds. Classic!
https://mobile.twitter.com/SICKENLAW/status/1118873752031285248
There are basically two factions to the old car market, a small group of folks who take classic cars and return then to near new or fully restored condition, and a much larger group that like you have discovered the economic advantage of buying a well used car and driving it until it falls apart.
Most of the advice above is the same I would give, first option would be to find a similar model and swap wheels and tires.Other options would be to donate it to a charity for a tax deduction if that would be helpful, or send it to the shredder for the scrap fee.
To salvage the tires and wheels you could also sell them on craig’s list to someone who still has a car that will accept that size wheel and tires. In the general motors lines the same wheels will fit a huge number of different makes and models.
The other option would be to sell it on craig’s list as a parts car. In most states if you list it “as is” and for parts only you are exempt from emissions issues. Here in Colorado if you sell a car without those limitations you are required to ensure it will pass emissions which can get very expensive. Depending on condition of the mechanical bits the parts can be worth more than the running car to someone who knows how to peddle them.
I strongly concur with the idea of a paid check up on a new used car as a condition of sale, especially if you don’t have the time, skills or work place to properly inspect a used car. You can sometimes work a deal with the seller that even if it fails the inspection, you will share the results with them and split the cost of the inspection report, cutting your cost in half for the failed inspection and they also get a half price inspection to help them decide if they still want to sell the car or fix it.
If it passes the inspection you agree to eat the full cost of the inspection and give them full asking price, or maybe even a bit above asking price. Or you can use the failed inspection report to negotiate a better asking price and take the car but knowing what you will need to fix.
Each market is different so I would haunt craigs list for a while to see what prices are in your area and see how fast cars in certain conditions move (it also helps if you see the owner previously listed the car at a higher price and had to relist at a lower price. Sometime using the right search terms you can see the owner has listed the car 4 or 5 times over the last 6 months, that can be a warning that prospective buyers are seeing a problem or the seller is asking too much for the real condition of the car. It can also tell you that a cash offer a couple hundred under list might just fly.
I like to pick up used cars that have had recent repairs of often serviced items like alternators, power steering pumps, replaced radiators etc. as that sort of stuff seems to all fail about the same time and just about the them the owner gets sick of nickle dime repairs they have actually fixed almost all the issues and if you fix the one remaining issue that was the last straw you might have a trouble free car for a long time (the experience of the inspection mechanic is very useful here to find out if that model car tends to have certain problems at some characteristic mileage milestone).
,b>Just a public service announcement :
Today is earth day 2019
Make sure you have all your lights on, the heat turned up, while running the AC set at 66 deg F, and idle your car while reading a oil exploration and fracking report.
Well I guess the good news is that the mental illness called “Global Warming” is self limiting.
DeBlasio has just announced he is destroying New York City.
Those are not the words he used because he is so clueless he does not realize he is killing the golden goose.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bill-de-blasio-says-green-new-deal-will-ban-inefficient-steel-and-glass-skyscrapers
It will be interesting to watch the economic consequences of this play out as people cancel high rise building and renovation plans and property owners realize they are going to get royally screwed on resale of their property while folks involved in real estate figure out they will be hard pressed to sell office space at the prices necessary to pay for this boondoggle.
This is getting fun! Trump the citizen, just filed a TRO against Elijah Cummings! Democrats are just too stupid to realize how bad they are stepping in it. They are trying to make Trump sympathetic to the 1/4 that do not hate him and are not yet his supporters! https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/22/trump-organization-sues-elijah-cummings-subpoena/
New York is officially insane now. No steel skyscrapers? Does he realize that there is NO alternative material to make a skyscraper (with the possible exception of titanium… but I believe nobody can make large girders of it, and certainly not for anything less than astronomical costs.)
I wonder if this could be a backdoor assault on Donald Trump and his R.E. Holdings in N.Y.?
So if you eliminate the use of plastics, steel, and glass: What is left from which to make things? Pine trees and cotton? Rocks and cement? (Will iron rebar be allowed?…)
Oh, the insanity, it is such a pain to watch folks afflicted by Cortical Insufficiency attempt to think…
Sidebar:
The last roughly 36 hours have been spent driving 40 miles out in to the rural hinterland to a Tractor Supply Store to get “Bean Inoculant” and nobody at Home Depot or Lowe’s or anywhere else here in the city had a clue what it was (so I got to painfully explain to the Garden Experts at each about nitrogen fixing nodes n the roots of legumes and the need for the right bacteria, all to glazed looks of “A GED doesn’t cover biology or chemistry much and biochem not at all”… )
BUT….
After shutdown on Sunday at about noon, and finding Tractor Supply closed, the car would not start. (This relates to the Old Use Car thread, so hang in there…) This is a 1993 Mercedes 190 E with 185,000 miles on it. I know from several replacements that a Mercedes tends to fail the starter motor at about 160,000 to 190,000 (depending on percent long freeway drives vs. 5 miles to the store and back with 2 starts).
Well, since then I’ve learned 3/4 of how to hot wire an old Mercedes (my mechanic taught me how to jumper past all the interlocks and switches and stuff and put power to the starter solenoid). I’ve banged the starter (that sometimes knocks the brushes loose for one more start). AND I’ve paid a few $Hundred to have the car towed to the mechanic… Probably about $400 to $500 more once the repairs are all done.
Now I happen to be OK with that, more or less. I know Mercedes parts are obscenely priced. I know I was off in Hell And Gone when the starter failed, so not a cheap tow. I know I paid extra to be towed to a mechanic I know. I also know I’ll be driving this car for another 100,000 miles or so of cross country trips and that I just spent about $800 on gas going coast to coast. Then did it again. And will do it sometime this year again. So in the grand scheme of things, better now and here than 100 miles from Van Horn Texas in the middle of “Bake-In-The Sun” 1/2 way to “Wish-You-Had-Water” and right near “You always wanted to fly, now you will, in the belly of a vulture”…
Had the car been a stick shift (my preferred kind) I would just have “roll started it” and driven to the mechanic. There’s a long reason why I have more automatics than stick shifts, mostly related to women in my life… but I digress…
So here I am with a, roughly, 26 year old car that failed on me, paying around $750 by the time all is done to get it towed and fixed. Why? Because it rides very nicely, gets very good gas mileage. Has about 150,000 more miles before the engine and transmission and such are wrung out (which is more than I will put on it) and it has nice tires and paint and the upholstery is fine.
Which gets to how I evaluate a car for purchase.
I know roughly the cost of various things to “make it right” for vintage Mercedes (figure about 4 x the price on any other car…). So paint is about $2000. A major dent is between $1000 for a simple dent and $2000 for a bit one with involvement of hinges or lights mounting points and lights. A starter is about $400 to $500. Power Steering stuff about $500 to $2000 depending on how much is toast. Transmission is $3000 and Engine Swap Used is about $4000.
So I look at a car and I figure “What is it going to cost to replace what needs it?” An engine with 150,000 on it in a Mercedes is only about 1/3 used, mostly the same for transmissions. Typical cars I buy those have a few decades of life left. Paint, upholstery (another $2k item), etc. all get a guess as to cost to “make right”. Then I compare that to what I think a full up condition car would be worth TO ME. (NOT Kelly Blue Book…). So a nice 4Matic selling for $2000 with $3000 of likely repairs needed is still under the roughly $6000 to $7000 it is worth. (And WAY under the $60,000 to $70,000 of a new one…) A used one selling for $6000 but where the paint is bad and the upholstery is shot is really a $6k -$2k -$2k = $2000 car.
Now the fun part is often you will find a car where the pain, upholstery, wheels, tires, miles etc. etc. are all GREAT, but (as an example) “It just won’t start any more – must sell”. That is, effectively, what I had Sunday. On Craigslist that will list at about $800 and sell for about $400.
What did I pay for this particular car? $400.
(It’s a long story, but the neighbor had a sister who had tickets and …. ) She had replace the suspension (about $1500) and some other work. I figured the car was worth about $2600, and needed about $2200 further work. In the end, it was about $2400, but close enough. I’m happy with the deal.
So NOW I know the engine is fine, the transmission is great, the tires are mostly new, the paint and interior are fine, etc. etc. etc. And it is just a bum starter. What’s it worth? $2600 – $500 = $2100. What would it sell for? About $400. So I fix the starter and turn $400 of value into $2600 again… I’m happy with that. I *know* the rest of this car very very well. I like it and how it drives. So, OK, the starter went. It’s right in the middle of the miles where they go. It’s just a cost of operations, like putting gas in it. Now I’ve got another 150,000 miles of starter…
Compare the Banana Boat: I’d used up the paint, interior, engine, transmission, and the body got rust from a few years in Chicago. The tires and rims where good… and the glass… So about $5000 to $8000 to “make it right” for a $4000 car IF it were “right”. OK, I swapped a set of crap tires and rims onto it and kissed it off. Over about 20 years (maybe 25?) I “used up” that car. What was my purchase price? $2500. So about $100 / year… I generally allow about $2000 /year for maintenance on an old Mercedes. That was basically my cost of ownership. Call it a bit under $200 / month. Gas & Insurance tend to be about that much… (or were when I was commuting a lot ;-) For that, I have gotten to drive a lot of Fine Old Mercedes.
Even the one I bought to avoid rental car costs in Florida, that had the engine blow up (a $4000 price tag item I chose not to pay) cost me $1600 and we drove it about 8 months. For $200 / month we had great fun driving around in a 420 SEL “Limo” like model. Folks treating us like rich people at Disney Venues. ( I even got a chauffeur hat and had the wife ride in the back to some places where she was suddenly treated like royalty or a dignitary). For about 1/2 what a lot of folks make as a car payment on a Bland Mobile…
So that’s how I buy a car, why I buy old Mercedes, and why I’m not really upset at an “unexpected” $500 + $250 towing. Because my payments no the car have been zero and repairs have been zero for the last 9 months. That means I’m at the $1500 point in the year. So with only 1/2 that showing up, I’m ahead about $750 on my expected run rate… and now I know the starter will be pristine again and one more thing is back “up to snuff”.
So, all that said: SINCE I’ve spent the last 2 days learning how to hot wire the starter and do Muldoon Field Fixes and following tow trucks and all: I’m going to be a couple of days late on dong the Australia / Pacific graphs…
Or much else, really. It seems Trader Joe’s sells a passable Irish Whiskey for $16 / bottle… and as I’m a bit wind blown, sun “kissed”, driving worn, (4 trips to / from the car trying things) and a bit muscle sore (leaning over an engine for a few hours reminds you how out of shape your back and arm muscles are – not to mention laying under the car asking “Now where IS that starter?”.) So I’m thinking of taking 2 aspirin (no, not as pain killer, as alcohol liver protection) and then a few shots of Irish as pain killer / wallet soother ;-)
So don’t be surprised if I seem a bit more, um, “opinionated” than usual in a few hours ;-)
Sounds pretty similar to my car buying method (and incidentally to my situation when my van broke down at Bonneville due to a bad fuel pump).
I knew it was probably a fuel pump but I had no way to safely lower a full gas tank to get it out, and if it was not a fuel pump I would have wasted time and money on a needless repair – and since I had just had a new fuel pump and gas tank put in a few months earlier it was probably a free warranted repair. All things considered I would rather pay to get it home (trailered it behind a U-haul truck and knowing I would get home for work on time and be able to get it fixed was worth the cost)
I’ll put a few thousand more miles on it and sell it as trade in for a newer van.
By the way if you did not get the inoculate you can buy it on line if you still need it.
Dang, E.M.! While you were at Tractor Supply, why didn’t you think to pick up a cattle fence panel for a trellis?
Yeah, yeah, sure. You were distracted by that little starter issue, but think, man! You could have tossed a panel or two onto the tow truck and solved the mystery of how to get a 16′ panel home in a Mercedes… Well you don’t, actually. You just get your car and the panel(s) home via a tow truck.
;o) and just in case you missed it, another ;o)
P.S. You can really stretch out a bottle of the good stuff if your first glass is the high end pour and then you switch to that $16 Irish Whiskey, but you knew that. It wouldn’t work for me. We have strange liquor laws where a store like Trader Joe’s is limited to selling dilute liquors with a max of 42 proof, so I doubt if I’ll ever get my hands on a bottle to give it a try. Sounds interesting enough, though.
@ EM: I have been looking for a similar car. I found one about 75 miles away that they were asking $800 for. It was one year newer and I’m pretty sure could have used the my wheels/tires off my current car. I guess he sold it to the buyer who came to look at it Friday. They said they would let me know, but I’ve heard nothing back.
I have been feeling a bit sick at the thought of giving away all the newish parts and the new tires until I realized I bought it for $1000 and drove it for 12 years. That helps my frugal heart not feel quite so sick.
I also found a station wagon model that was only one year older (or newer?) than my current car. It was in Texas. The seller said he wanted to get rid of it over the weekend. I don’t have the cash in hand yet to do that, so I didn’t even contact the seller.
The was a year-younger model (also in Texas) that looked really sweet in the pictures. The only reason I didn’t contact the seller was that the photo of the instrument cluster had “Ford” on the steering wheel instead of “Buick”. Well, that and there were two different odometer figures given. LOL!
Not that long ago, a neighbor had a car for sale that was similar to the big one my dad used to drive. I took it to the mechanic who has done most of the work on my current car, to get his opinion. He found more than $1000 of work that it needed, so I gave up on that.
I have been looking at Craigslist, checking out cars that are about an hour away. I don’t know how likely it would be that those dealers would allow me to bring it home and let my mechanic inspect it.
@ Bill in Oz: Yes, there is quite a lot of restoration that gets done here. One time a car show came through (it was associated with a magazine, but I don’t remember which one), and they parked hundreds(?) of restored cars all around my building. Some of us went to the roof and watched them drive in and park. Then I went down and walked all through the cars. Some really brought back memories. Almost all of them were lip-smacking luscious to look at!
@ Larry: We don’t have that headache of smog rules around here. Heck–we don’t even require an annual inspection anymore! :-0 But it’s rare to see any vehicle trailing smoke behind it.
@ H.R.: Good tips on the inspection strategy. :-) And I’ll let y’all know how it shakes out. I really thought I’d end up with that $800 car Saturday. I could have swung that without waiting for the insurance money, however meager it might be. I also suspected that the demand for Buick Century cars (especially 28 years old, or so!) would be low enough that I might be able to score another one that still had life left in it.
BTW, I bought a Toyota Cressida off eBay one time. It was in Houston. I’m in Oklahoma. Heh-heh. I did have a phone conversation with the seller. He was able to provide the paperwork for the service he had done to the car. It was almost Thanksgiving. I arranged to get it by spending Thanksgiving at my sibling’s house in Texas, and getting them to drive me to examine, test drive, pay for, and drive the Cressida home. It was a lovely 1990 pearl white model with leather interior. My ex ruined it. That’s what he does. And he never wanted to pay to repair anything. There’s no way he would have kept up the 1991 Buick for 12 years!
@ EM: I’m pretty sure they have the inoculate here in town. My ex planted soybeans one time and I’m sure he used it.
Thanks to all! I have no idea what I’ll get from the insurance. I finally did check my credit score on Credit Karma. I’ve been afraid to look at it since the divorce and bankruptcy that my ex drove me into. The score was decent, though. Now I’m kind of wondering if I shouldn’t raise my sights a bit to maybe a Buick Rendezvous from the early 2000’s. A bank wouldn’t want to finance something that old, would they? Would I just have to have the dealer finance it?
My kid is supposed to graduate next month. I assume a second car will be a necessary thing when that happens and said kid gets a job. If it weren’t for that, I would just sit tight and keep an eye on Craigslist and eBay.
Depends on the bank, most banks draw the line at about 5 years old (obviously more money in long term loans for expensive newish cars). Check out the local credit unions, not all require you to work for a specific employer now days. I financed my 2004 Forester through one of the credit unions here and they had no problem with a car 10+ years old. They also tend to approve smaller notes than you will get from banks under 10k auto loans are a big part of their business.
All I am gonna say is get AAA with the 100 mile tow thing. It covers you, not a car. Think about that for a second. Well worth what the cost is here. Cali, dunno.
There is a National Car Museum at Birdwood about 30 ks away here in South Australia. It has hundreds of restored classic & vintage cars, bikes and trucks..I’ve been there a couple of times when it was quiet so i could just spend time looking and checking them out. When the Bay to Birdwood annual drive happens it’s chockers all day with thousands of cars, bikes, tourists and locals..But at quiet times it’s almost like one climb in them.. Nice
EM – since you have at least another car available, it might be possible to simply replace the brushes in the old Mercedes starter-motor to give you another 100k miles or so even without the full re-cutting of the armature or buying a factory-new starter. It’s probably too much to hope to find a workshop that specialises in starter/alternator repair and can do it for you, though there used to be one of those in the Forest when I lived there. The DIY version may require buying brushes that are almost-right and cutting them down to size, or making new ones from block Graphite, and such things should be available on the net somewhere. It’s maybe worth taking the starter-motor apart and looking at the brushes to see if it’s possible to replace them. If you can’t do it, no loss because it was scrap anyway. Cleaning off the old lubricant on the gears, and adding a trace of the right Moly-loaded grease, should make the motor act like a new one.
@ ossqss: I’ve been a AAA member for a long time. It’s a good investment. I even gave a membership to my grand nephew when he started college out of state.
Incidentally, for Power Grab: I had such a close encounter with a sheep in the Forest once. I was doing around 50mph, and the sheep jumped out from behind a bush and ran into my path, so no way to avoid it. Killed the sheep, and made somewhat of a mess of the front right corner of the car. A bit of hammering and a secondhand headlamp fixed the problem well-enough for not a lot of cost and no need to contact insurance (which would likely have written the old car off and raised my premiums).
For the windscreen, it depends how it’s fixed. Most these days are glued in, but the old Buick may well have a rubber seal holding it in and it’s possible to replace that if you can get one from the scrapyard. Lay some string in the gap in the rubber and use that to lift the rubber sequentially as you push the screen into place (may need help). If you’re not worried about the dents on the doors too much, you can pull them out to be almost-OK and keep driving. It’s only steel, and you can use hammers, hydraulics, or vacuum-pullers to get the dents pretty-well fixed. It’s not going to be perfect of course, but the question is whether you are that bothered with perfection in basic transport. If it goes and stops and passes inspection, I’m not that worried myself. Others drivers will likely give you a wider berth when they see the dents, anyway. Just make sure the bare metal is protected with paint to avoid rust setting in.
@ Simon: Thanks for the ideas. I actually had had the windshield replaced a few years ago. When I bought the car, it had a long crack almost the length of the windshield (horizontally). I kept hoping a hail storm would take it out, but … no joy. So after a few years, I finally got it replaced. I’m sure they put a fresh gasket on with it. I think it cost a bit less than $200 to the job done.
The driver’s door will only open about 4-5 inches. The guy at the body shop pointed out the bent place at the front edge of the door where it is binding (if that’s the correct word) and preventing it from opening. He didn’t try to force it while I was there watching. I didn’t try to force it because they were predicting thunderstorms in the next couple days. I wasn’t convinced I would be giving it up, so I didn’t want to push it to the point where it wouldn’t latch.
The paint on the car is so weathered that it’s almost as good as driving something that has lots of actual body damage. It really had no damage, except for a soft dent in the rear corner on the driver’s side where someone backed into it in a parking lot. They were honest and left a note, so I got some money out of it, but back then the body guy said he didn’t want to fix and paint it because then that corner wouldn’t match the rest of the car and, as he said, “…you wouldn’t like it.” Humph! Well, I decided to keep the money, but I wasn’t convinced that a mismatched corner would be a source of dissatisfaction.
I think it would be more painful to me to have a new-looking car that got a dent than having one with paint “issues” that others tend to give a wide berth to.
I also kept a well-used hard hat in the back window, so it would appear that it was owned by an able-bodied redneck sort of dude. If it had been a pickup, it could have easily passed for a work truck owned by an oil patch worker. Since it was a car, I told myself it looked like it was owned by a really poor redneck sort of dude–since pickups tend to retain their value, etc. Or maybe it was driven by the wife of a really poor redneck sort of dude….
My grandmother kept a fedora in the back window of her car, but when I went looking for a used one, I couldn’t find one. I found the hard hat in an antique mall. It’s probably a better fit for this part of the world, what with all the fracking that was going on back then. ;-)
Per towing insurance:
I’ve used a tow so rarely that I think I’m ahead just paying cash. Call it about $800 over 20 years or about $40 / year. And half of that was one particular time (WITH AAA…) where I wanted to to go to MY mechanic that was about 100 miles away and AAA picked up all of $89 out of $400…
This car has Geico insurance on it and they only cover “to nearest repair station” inside 25 miles (and only if you pay extra). Since lots of “repair places” don’t work on old Mercedes that’s essentially useless for me. (In Orlando there was ONE Mercedes Mechanic who would work on cars older than 2000 year of make and he was on the far north side of town). So having it towed to Pep Boys and being told they won’t fix it doesn’t not appeal.
So having had AAA for years I did find it convenient, but not a net win on cost. (I do not use them for jump starts, gas delivery, flat tires, etc. etc… just the “will not move” problems).
Per Starter Repair:
I’ve replaced bushes in generators and starters (old VW decades past), but the work to get it out is the hard part (on this car back near the firewall on the top side of the engine under the air cleaner and past the oil filter…) so once into it $250 for labor, just putting in a clean part is worth it (and I don’t get sink-eye from the mechanic when I say he can just leave the car on his rack for 2 days while I rebuild the starter at home ;-)
Autozone has a “house brand” (Durlast) starter for about $125 and I think I’ll have the mechanic put one of them in. I’m not driving the car another 100,000 miles anyway. I’m presently buying “a tank of gas a quarter” other than coast to coast runs. So figure 5000 miles / year? I don’t have 20 years of driving that car left in me ;-)
Speaking of which, I think it’s about time to visit the mechanic and tell him to do an oil change too ;-)
Oh, and per the trellis wire: The car wasn’t going home, it was going to the mechanic… and he doesn’t need a trellis ;-)
Power Grab – it sounds like $200 for the windscreen and a bit of creative work with a crowbar and hammer may well restore the car to a state where you’ll be happy to drive it until you can’t. bear in mind the pull-hammer, which is a cylindrical mass with a hole in the middle that slides up a bar with a right-angled bend one end and a big nut the other (for the weight to hit). If you can get it into the remaining gap, you can likely pull the distortion out far enough to open the door, then after that you can take the door off and do a nicer job with mallet and wood-blocks.
EM – agreed that Mercedes are somewhat crowded to work in and a lot of work to get to the point where you can take out/replace what it is you wanted to at the start. Sounds like the Durlast starter motor is a good idea, since I was reckoning the Mercedes spare as costing $500 and then the work to get to it on top of that. Then again, I have space to use ramps or blocks rather than needing to go to a garage to get it high enough to get under it.
Meantime, a couple of days ago I found out that Macron has changed the rules on old Diesels that will effectively take all Diesels from before 2000 off the road, so I’ll need to replace my 1988 Renault 5 this year when it goes in for its test. I also only use about a tankful a quarter (probably less) so going to a petrol/gas car won’t be much of a problem, except for the almost-total reliability of the old Renault (older petrol cars tend to get unreliable). In order to save the emissions of CO2, I’ll need to change from a car that uses around 4 litres/100km to one that uses around 7 litres…. Not sure what I’ll do with the old car – maybe the engine will get moved into a tractor, and I’ll figure a way to add electric motors to the shell and annoy the authorities, since the car will be worth almost nothing after the rules change.
This has been a long time coming but looks like they are starting to pull the reins in on uncontrollable bureaucracies and environmental laws abused to make even trivial changes in a property a crime under those laws.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-supreme-court-moves-to-overturn-conviction-of-veteran-fined-and-jailed-for-digging-ponds-on-his-rural-montana-property/
@Larry L.:
I love this line from your link:
“or reimagine statutes in ever more creative way”
“Reimagining” is what gives us a Black Romeo or a gay Juliet. It’s just left wing BS on steroids.
Glad to see the Supremes realized that…
@Simon:
Will you be unable drive it at all? Not just “not in Paris”?
Could you maybe ship it to Florida? (And how much would you want for it?…. )
I once coveted a (roughly) 1985 or so Renault… So if you can get it to Florida, I’d be “up for that”… Just sayin’…
Larry
Re Earth Day
“Earth Day: Not a Single Environmental Prediction of the Last 50 Years Has Come True”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/22/earth-day-not-a-single-environmental-prediction-of-the-last-50-years-has-come-true/
Maybe they should just celebrate it as Lenin’s birthday?
Power Grab
Re dents that stop doors opening. From practice with kangaroo damage you can make a tool that grips on the inside of the bent mudguard and hook on with a chain type fence strainer to pull them out.
Levin “I’m using plain English so even Joe Scarborough and Jake Tapper can understand this.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/04/23/april-23-2019-reader-tips/#comment-1201681
@ Another Ian: Hmmm…so roos like to practice their fighting technique on vehicle doors? Does that mean that most folks in Oz drive around with doors kicked in by roos?
That was supposed to be funny. Sorry if it’s not…it’s been a long day. After work I had to pinch-hit and play for a dress rehearsal tonight because the regular accompanist’s mom (who had major surgery yesterday–the mom, not the accompanist), and is reported to be having complications today. Supposed to be something like internal bleeding.
I may end up playing for the concert Thursday night. The regular accompanist usually cobbles together quite a lengthy piano solo to give the singers a break in the middle of the concert. A comment was made about that. It wasn’t a demand that I instantly come up with a piano solo, but I thought I’d see what I had that might be reasonable to make presentable in the short time I have before the concert.
Powergrab
They don’t restrict their collisions to doors unfortunately. The reason a roo bar is a usual addition to rural vehicles.
But a hit on the end of a mudguard will usually make that door unusable.
And the collisions aren’t so much kicks as, like the grasshopper, “If I had the guts I’d do it again”
EM – I haven’t been to Paris for around 17 years. It seems like the intent is to remove all the older Diesels from all roads – maybe a bit silly round here when all the tractors are Diesel and some are pretty old (my MF 135 is from 1959). As such, the car won’t be able to be driven anywhere on the public roads, and becomes effectively worthless. I’ve no idea how much it would cost to ship to Florida, though. Maybe $2k or more? Then there’s the problem with regulations over there that may impede you being able to drive it there, and maybe import duties too. It’s starting to sound somewhat expensive for a car that is pretty battered after over 30 years of use (one careful owner, but the rest don’t seem to have been). Driver’s seat has worn through at the edge, too, and the paintwork is not in top condition. Down here, of course, no salt on the roads so it’s surprisingly non-rusty.
It’ll likely be around here for a while until I figure what to do with it, since scrapping is not a desirable option. I may get a petrol R5 to replace it, since the basic design is reliable and a lot of the parts should be interchangeable. If I work out how to make a car fly, then having a shell to work with could be fun.
@Powergrab, it’s not just the roos we need to watch out for.
Wombats are smaller but very solid.
They do a lot of damage if you hit one
And invariably it’s night time
and in the middle of no where
@Bill in Oz – Hitting a wombat may be an inconvenience, but it could be worse. They could start carrying cell phones to call their lawyer. Nothing worse than an angry injured wombat with a lawyer on speed dial.
;o)
Around here, it is deer or cows you have to worry about; and more recently, armadillos. My sister’s hit a deer. I had one close encounter, but no collision on state highway 17. Washington or Choctaw county, which I forget; since that was about 25 years ago. Cow bars are a thing used on the grill. Doors? Plenty of those at the scrap yard.
@cdquarles: I had moved back to my home area from living out in California for about 3 years. I needed a car, so my brother sold me a ’66 Dodge Dart (w/ slant 6 motor) for $25. He was using it for a fishing vehicle as it had a large trunk for gear and decent clearance for gravel/mud roads. The color was the factory Turquoise. The driver’s door was bashed in.
A trip to the junk yard yielded a pristine scarlet! replacement door, for which I paid $35.
I had that car for around 2 years and then my brother-in-law needed a car, so I gave him the car but charged him $35 dollars for the door :o)
@HR, so you could be the inventor of the 2 tone car ! :-)
Well that was easy…. I just installed OSMC on a chip in my R.Pi M3. It is now a TV set…
https://osmc.tv/
Copy it to a uSD card, boot (first time takes a few minutes as it formats the card and does set-up) then it reboots. Add channels (there were a few hundred to choose from) and watch.
The only “strange bit” is the interaction is more “game controller” oriented than keyboard. So you navigate with the arrow keys, select with the return key, go back up a level with the backspace key and get all the way back to the top menu with the escape key.
The channel choices are not as full as on the Roku, but there’s still some nice ones. There’s a LOT of weather stations in other languages ( just watched the Italian weather ;-) There’s ABC Family and CNN, also Newsmax and it looks like InfoWars survives there too.
It looks like it runs 1080 p OK, but 4 K isn’t going to cut it. That’s OK as I don’t have anything more than 1080 p anyway ;-) Right now I’m watching some “Council Films” from a British Council library – covering the “Technical Geography” of the Atlantic, that is really an interesting summary of the history from when Arab Muslims drove Europe to search the Atlantic, and found America. Lots of emphasis on sea routes, history of them, and the countries along the way. B&W and I’d guess from about the late ’50s.
If anyone want’s a “How To” posting I could be talked into making one.
Part of the Roo problem is that the roads shed water to the edges, so they get watered more than the desert around it. There ends up a nice flush of edible greens right at the road edge when the rest is too dried out. Then in stead of just sitting off the side of road munching, they like to dash away, but may choose “away” by crossing the road in front of you…
I did OK driving at night in the Outback just by slowing down some and running with the brights on. My rental car didn’t have a Roo Bar on it, so I was a bit concerned but did OK and didn’t hit anything ;-)
Clearly OSMC / Kodi is using the GPU to get that much video without artifacts (pauses or jitters). Then, as it was running a Canadian News show I put a finger on the heat sink. Hot, but not TOO hot. I think it is well below thermal limiting temperature.
All in all, it looks like they did a good job.
Now if only the Linux / Debian / Armbian etc. folks would properly code for full use of the GPU and all 64 bits of word size… (Some of the BSD releases are 32 bit ARMhf and some are even v6 soft float code so not even running a full v7 instruction set… while I’m wanting v8 with GPU, NEON and hard float)
YouTube on the OSMC runs full screen full motion seamlessly. I’m presently watching game 7 of the Sharks Hockey highlights (so lots of motion lots of pans lots of fine detail in the crowd) and it’s just perfect. I’ll be preferentially using this to watch YouTube videos on the pi as it is just so much better than the Linux / Debian (thus Devuan too) code that can barely do 780 p at 1/2 screen size. I’m driving 1080p full screen full motion. I like this!
I’d been thinking of getting a Roku that could use a wired connection so that I could turn off the WiFi at night when the spouse is sleeping and I could still watch some TV. I think there’s enough news (plus YouTubes & more) here to satisfy that need. If nothing else, it has Pluto TV as one of the “channels” and that has basically a small cable service worth of channels inside of it. Lots of news, movies, etc.
I’m still going to run the Roku a lot as it has some things this just doesn’t have (like Amazon Prime and Netflix) but as an essentially free thing (already own the Pi, the chip, etc.) this is a very nice alternative video source.
It can also run wireless, but I like the idea of a wired connection from my desktop to the router (all of 3 feet away…) and not clogging up the WiFi with 2 TVs at the same time. While it hasn’t been an issue, it’s just comforting to know the “stuff in the air” is reduced by 1/2 ;-)
Supposedly this code will also run on a Pi M2 (or even the Pi 1 but speed limited…) so I may well put a chip in one of them and see how well it does.
ANZAC Day
@EM, Roku Ultra would do the trick. Headphone jack remote too!
https://www.roku.com/products/roku-ultra
@Ossqss:
Yes, it was the “plan”, but not having spare money it was going slowly… then I saw this YouTube on installing OSMC and it looked way easy, so now I have it running ;-)
Many of the channels, so far, have had some minor issues. The “pro” channels seem more reliable. Infowars, for example, had lots of buffering as did RT and Pluto. ( I suspect the ISPs are likely starting to favor their own video products and only serve the “competition” on a 2nd tier basis… I’ve had some of that, though a bit less, even on the Roku).
We’ll see if that clears up “after dinner hour”… it was not there on first bring up so I think it is not inherent to the system.
Eventually I may well get a Roku_Ultra ‘someday” but until then, for my late night stuff, this gets me Sky, RT, etc. news and some more.
The Odroid N2 has arrived. I’ve applied the Ubutu eMMC and booted. Running a video on YouTube it is using about 25% to 45% of CPU for “theatre mode” size at 1080p depending on motion in the video. The giant heat sink is barely warm at all
Sound is working fine too.
In general, it’s surprisingly fast. Looks also like the basics work. I’ll try Python / matplotlib later and some more exotic stuff. That the browser and Youtube with sound work is about 80% of what I do.
I’m going to try leaving it As Is (Ubuntu) and see if I can get used to it enough to use it for videos / web page editing, database processing.
So, downsides so far:
It does NOT work with the HDMI / DVI adapter. Don’t know if it is an HDMI 2.0 thing or if there’s a setting to get it to go like the Orange Pi. But at least for now I’m stuck with using it only on my TV / monitor. Folks who only have an old monitor on an adapter are SOL. I have to put the TV in “Game Mode” to reduce overscan and see the menus.
Ubuntu / Mate: Not my preferred desktop ( I like LXDE better). It’s also way green. So, OK, I can (eventually) change that if I want. It’s also SystemD (but has enough “configure by menu application” that it looks like a lot can be avoided). As trying to install an OS onto the eMMC of the Odroid XU4 resulted in a non-working eMMC (and a long winding process to recover it as the boot sector stuff is different…) I’m not going to do any changes to this OS on the eMMC card other than update / upgrade. It also has a popcorn-click sound every time their is a mouseover of something on the menu / dropdown. I’ll need to learn how to kill that off…
The 8 GB eMMC card is 73% full just with the default Ubuntu… OTOH, with 4 GB of main memory it’s running about 1.35 GB used and the rest free even with browser and video open, so I don’t need my usual 2 GB of swap space… so that 1.8 GB free doesn’t need to go to swap… and I’m unikely to add too much more software. Might need to relocate the Maria DB out of /var though… “We’ll see” ;-)
This is a really interesting video segment, the comments by the guests leave little doubt that somebody should / is going to jail over the FISA abuse and related hanky panky in the FBI and intelligence agencies.
It would probably work better if you had the video link:
Gov. Huckabee sit in on Laura Ingram show
“A video for my friends in Australia and New Zealand on Anzac Day”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/24/a-video-for-my-friends-in-australia-and-new-zealand-on-anzac-day/
E.M.
Maybe you need to be leaving faster?
“California Politicians Hiked Gas Tax, Now Demand Investigation Into State’s $4 Per Gallon Gas Prices”
Via http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/04/25/o-sweet-saint-of-san-andreas-31/#comments
“US Navy patents anti-gravity aircraft which looks like an alien UFO.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/04/25/april-25-2019-reader-tips/#comment-1202298
Or maybe this should be on the 737MAX thread
@Another Ian:
Yes, our “government” is remarkably good about creating a crisis in order to exploit it for talking points and “investigations” and higher taxes… I’m leaving at the rate reality allows…
Per the anti-inertia Navy aircraft: IF it is true… Maybe P.G. needs to read over that patent….
@Per the N2:
Well, I got rid of the slime green and the popcorn clicks. Still working on how to stop it from opening every new window as a full screen instead of just a normal sized panel… (Someone at Ubuntu really likes snapping windows to cover the entire screen and hide all the other stuff you are working on…. I get tired of needing to resize 100% of new windows so I can still see the other stuff I’m working on…)
I did an update upgrade and it survived. The “locale” is still not set. I’ve done the usual mantra for setting it, and it is still unset. Mostly this means some programs that want to use it to do things like choose a language or currency symbol are a bit confused. I’ve had this problem on other systems. Used to be you could just edit a file and “move on”. Now there’s at least 3 things to futz with and some of the files say “automatically generated by FOO” which would be fine if FOO were doing its job right. So still a bit of “some assembly required”.
This web page claims to have the Magic Sauce, but so far no joy…
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Configure_Locales_in_Ubuntu
So far the experience is acceptable. Not much worse than other fresh installs of an OS, most things are working as intended, and only “locale” is broken. It does make a kind of sense to ship systems without a default location, but really, it ought not be this hard to reset it. (It was easy to install ntp and reset the time zone / clock. “Locale” ought to be just as easy).
After all the updates and attempt to change locale I did a reboot, and had no screen visible. Tried swapping to the DVI adapter, nothing, swapped back the other HDMI cable and had monitor on the TV again. That might have just been the TV blanking during the boot and not getting a wakeup on reboot. This “Insignia” brand cheap TV likes to sleep / shutdown on lack of signal sometimes, so maybe instead of a full shutdown it was just resting ;-)
It is damn fast though ;-)
The system bring-up has so far been no more bother than any other Ubuntu bring-up I’ve done and a lot less trouble than many other system installs.
So as of now this will be my main Youtube playing station (as it has to be on the TV anyway) and used for some postings / browsing. I won’t be able to use it when I want the TV on, since it conflicts over the screen so most of my “work while news runs in the background” will be on a different system. That means this will NOT be my Daily Driver, or even my main system.
It will be a “use when you need something fast and for YouTube stuff” system.
With that, since I want to check some news, and I’m done fighting “locale” for the night ( I’ll pick it up “another day”…) I think I’ll swap back to the XU4 on the other monitor.
Well, this is an odd twist… The DVI adapter monitor no longer works with the XU4 or either of two different Raspberry Pi systems.
I’ve powered everything down for a while in the hopes that some badly confused setting or register can bleed off charge and reset…
But it sure looks like the N2 caused the ViewSonic to go to lalaland. I’d never have thought that sending signal from an HDMI device, through a DVI adapter, could twig out the monitor, but it sure looks that way.
I have another one of these that’s basically unused (as it is a bit older, square not as rectangular, and just not as sharp) so I can be operational again anyway, but it is a darned inconvenience.
It is also possible that something in the “live plugging” put too high a volts on a line. I’ve done it a lot over many years without an issue, but some electronics are less durable than others and it is not advised to hot-plug monitors.
So, for now, I’m going to run the news on the TV while I ponder monitors (instead of doing constructive work on temperature data… Oh Well, it can wait a day…)
Per inertia reduction:
This claims to explain it but a lot of “may” involved.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/if-these-us-navy-patents-are-made-then-we-are-in-a-star-trek-technology-world.html
The words sound good but phrases like “vacuum polarization” sound a bit like bafflegab to me.
Ok, read the Inertia/gravity patent. Lots of techno-baffle, The Patent seems to be a basic proposal of invention rather then a announcement of creation of the device. However my reading is that the “inventor” has the correct vision and points out previous work of others that also indicate the possibilities of creating reduced Mass/Inertia of a craft.
All of that “Vacuum polarization” is just dancing around not saying “Aether” which is a no-no among “Educated” physicists. His basic argument seems correct to me…pg
pg – not so much techno-babble but QM, and the technique has bits of Alzofon, Banduric, and McCulloch in it. McCulloch seems to be progressing nicely at the moment (http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2019/04/models-experiments-theory.html ) but I haven’t checked on Richard Banduric for a while – he used charged spinning disks and achieved around 10gwt thrust.
As far as I can tell, what they are meaning by “vacuum polarisation” is to stop all the little eddies (virtual particles) in the vacuum (which we might as well call Aether since it certainly isn’t empty space). That in turn means that all waves have a node at the point where the vacuum is stilled, and that will have the stated effects on inertia and gravity because it separates a small section of volume out of this universe and into another new one. Hal Puthoff seems to be involved, so they are using the idea of zero-point energy here and that is probably not actually real energy you can get at.
Since the Navy has the bits needed sitting around, it’s likely that this has been tried and also that some sort of effect was seen. Still, the patent is out there in the open, so it’s likely also that it wasn’t found to be useful at the moment and there’s not a US-built UFO actually flying. Still, it might suggest something extra that Richard Banduric could add, and also raises the probability of the Alzofon experiment actually working from a very long shot to just a long shot. Whereas the Navy idea seems to lead to a partial quieting of the virtual particle cloud and thus partial reduction of inertia and gravitational attraction, Alzofon is supposed to lead to total removal of the virtual particles for a substantial distance from the device and thus a total shielding.
It certainly looks like this may be some of the answer, but maybe not yet enough of an answer to build something that will drive a spaceship. Still, even a partial result that is measurable infers that the standard theory on how the universe works inst’t accurate.
Well the monitor isn’t fully dead. Connected via serial connector to an old PC (last booted in 2016!) it works. So now I get to sort out if it is the cable or the input that’s hosed.
Originally I’d used a separate adapter and regular HDMI cable, then swapped to an integrated adapter cable, so “whenever” I find the old cable / adapter I can do that test.
For now I’m looking at a single core 32 bit x86 running Devuan 1.0 and thinking some speed tests vs the SBCs might be interesting ;-) I think that first I’m going to bring it up to Devuan 2.0. I’d also been wanting to try a BSD Desktop and those are scarce in the SBC world. The intersection of the “embedded” mind set thinking the boards are ONLY for headless and BSD attitude of “if you really want it you can build it”. There is a pre-built PC BSD with desktop. Just wonder if they still make the x86 32 bit build of it (as folks are starting to depricate that in favor of “Everybody is running AMD64 64 bit machines now, right?…)
@Navy UFOs:
So, OK, either they likely found a minor effect, or they know “the other side” and their friends are already doing it so might as well put it in production (but not give enough hints to make it go).
Could also be a general “distraction and get them to spend $Billions on a blind alley we found”.
Gee… when your first “apt-get update; apt-get upgrade ; apt-get dist-upgrade” cycle is after 3 years… it takes a while ;-)
I’m pretty sure this was an early release on the x86 and likely a lot of bugs fixed and enhancements added since then ;-)
Probably don’t really need it all, as I’m going to a Devuan 2.0 on it Real Soon Now and likely a BSD of some sort (for various compare and contrast stuff) but it is generally something that’s good to do…
Or it could be a carrot to induce the other side to go chasing something that does not work or create FUD to distract the other side.
The cover story for the globar challenger when it was being built to recover the lost soviet sub was that it was going to retrieve mineral nodules off the ocean floor. Never did that, but the news of the cover story induced a lot of venture capital to go chasing that scheme
California is again exploring the extreme 1984 police state with a new “pre-crime” law that in time could be morphed into a real life Minority Report system.
https://californiaglobe.com/legislature/california-pre-crime-bill-to-root-out-potential-criminals/
@EM, check your input settings on the monitor and your box (if there are any there). DVI’s can be flakey if there is any debris/corrosion on the adapter pins also. IIRC, pins 14&15 are the power pins. :-)
Had a funny Laptop story last night. The neighbor called in a panic that there was a problem. It turns out his daughter inadvertently hit Ctrl-Alt and right arrow, which turns the screen into portrait mode. I went over and saw what had happened and did the same thing with the up arrow and the screen was now landscape, but upside down. I told him that was the best I could do since he permanently changed it. He was about to toss the thing in the garbage and I fessed up and told him to simply do the same with the down arrow. Interesting to see a face go from severe rage to relief in about 2 seconds. We played a similar trick on an office associate when he went to lunch years back. His screen was upside down when he came back. He proved to be quite adaptive, as he just flipped his monitor upside down and went on with business reversing his mouse usage, until he noticed our hidden laughter in the background.
Well, I guess I’ve committed the sin of starting a topic on one thread and continuing it on another…
I’ve got an old Evo x86 32 bit box plugged into the monitor with a Serial Cable and it is working. This shows the monitor guts are fine. Now we’re down to “adapter cable or monitor interface?”.
I originally used an adapter dongle and regular HDMI cable but swapped to this integrated one for less stresses on the cable attachment to the monitor. “Whenever” I find the adapter and cable in my box-o-stuff I’ll swap that in to eliminate “It’s the cable” issues.
I’ve also tested the various SBCs by plugging them into the Real HDMI ™ on the desktop TV/monitor… They are all working fine with that.
So: Not the boards / boxes / computers.
Not the monitor guts / fundamental settings (or i’d not be watching it right now).
Maybe the HDMI / DVI adapter cable. (Test rig available “somewhere”…)
Maybe the DVI interface on the monitor (no way to test but swap cable ought to do)
That’s where I’m at right now.
As soon as the Evo is done with the upgrade / dist upgrade / backup / etc. etc. I’ll be using it as “box #2” for a while. I’d been thinking it would be a fun thing to put a BSD on it and see what I thought of the whole thing. (There are “desktop already installed” BSD releases for the PC, SBCs not so much…) So this is in some ways just a “Round Tuit” for me on that.
First I’m going to get it up to Devuan 2.0, then do some minor “disk surgery”… then I ought to have a space where I can install FreeBSD or similar.
As I’ve not run this box since 2016, and even then it was a few years of not booting the windows partition on it: I’m really really wondering if I need to keep that Windows XT install for being able to deal with “Windows stuff” ;-)
So probably in about an hour I can take the DVI Adapter Cable off and inspect it and the socket. It was bought new and installed (and never removed) just a couple of years ago so ought not to have corrosion or wear issues. But you never know… If nothing else, removal and reinstall can sometimes “fix it”.
What I’m most happy about is that the monitor guts are shown to be working fine (at least with the serial port), so I do still have a working monitor – just not for HDMI ATM… Worst case is just that i finally give up on keeping a 15? maybe 20? year old monitor in play and buy an honest to gosh HDMI monitor. I kind-of thought I’d done that with the TV, but the brightness / contrast isn’t quite the same as a Real Monitor, so it’s a bit harder to read things on it. (Probably why the Real Monitor was $100 more ;-)
So if the worst case is that this monitor gets permanently assigned to the era of hardware i first bough it for some unknown decades back, well, I’m OK with that. And if it turns out to be a cable problem, then that’s an easy one.
There’s also the outside possible that some register thingy got munged by the N2 and unmunged by the serial port and whenever I do the shutdown retest it will all be fine again. Not expecting it, but aware it might spontaneously rise from the dead…
Well, looks like time to get back on the EVO and finish the work there….
As a general rule of thumb, when you get a lot of folks asking “How in the heck do I stop this!?” about your product, you ought not ship it with that set automatically. Then, if you find a dozen suggested ways to “fix it”, it is clearly unclear how to fix it. Fix that too.
So I finally got the window snap to maximize shut off and my irritation level with ubuntu is slightly lower now… But as to why I’m no big fan of Ubuntu, Mate, and SystemD, it’s stuff like this. Here’s the “how to” fix it thread:
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/how-to-stop-automatically-maximazing-window/554/12
After trying the first 1/2 dozen things suggested (and having no effect on what i wanted but who knows what it DID do the system), the “fix” was this one (a ways down the page):
I’ve not done the “compiz” thing (yet) as it was just the “auto take over and hide my whole screen” feature that was a pisser. Besides, one of the other things seems to have stopped the “snap to huge on touching an edge”…
First rule of customer service: Don’t DO things TO your customer unless they request it.
Given a few more days I may actually be able to get this thing configured to “acceptable”… I’ve almost got it basically housebroken… at least it no longer feels like it is pissing on my foot.
FWIW – note caveat at the start
“Leaked letter shows British collusion”
https://www.pickeringpost.com/2019/04/26/new-information-would-if-genuine-prove-that-britain-colluded-with-obama-against-trump/
Looks like the extremists have finally made a move I have been expecting for a long time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2138758/Unleash-Hell-New-Al-Qaeda-magazine-describes-start-huge-forest-fires-U-S-instructions-make-ember-bombs.html
This is going to get really messy for high density neighborhoods in wooded environments, as almost none of the people who live in such areas even think about wild fire and fire safe landscaping and building practices.
Seems that letter re British collusion is fake
What I real,ly like about the odroid N2 is that I can just click on a video and it plays. Full sound, nice size, full resolution, no need to worry about what else I’m doing.
That’s just nice.
Obstruction of Justice – such sweet irony … from the article …
The federal government is charging a Massachusetts judge and a courtroom officer with obstruction of justice after the pair allegedly helped a twice-deported illegal alien escape out the back door while an immigration enforcement officer was kept outside the front door.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/25/feds-indict-sanctuary-city-judge-for-helping-illegal-alien-escape-arrest/
Jack Posobiec ✝️
Verified account
@JackPosobiec
1 hour ago
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To be clear:
We have now confirmed that the wife of a former Pence chief of staff was working as an FBI analyst for Peter Strzok and an ‘unofficial backchannel’ while Strzok was investigating General Flynn
Let that sink in
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https://saraacarter.com/breaking-fbi-texts-show-agents-discussed-recruiting-white-house-sources-to-spy-for-bureau/
Boy it looks like the fur is about to fly on this thing, more and more bits are being exposed that point to massive coordinated attack on the President and his staff.
A fun little summary of the players in the 2008 mortgage collapse and their political connections.
@Larry L:
The one big thing I’ve learned out of all this is that despite my being Incredibly Pessimistic and Jaded and Absolutely Certain ALL politicians are grubby: I was massively under appreciative of just how dirty, corrupt, and despicable place it is in Washington D.C.
I’d thought that surely there were some limits they just would not cross… But NOOoooo….
Sidebar On Systems:
Well, after most of the day sunk into Systems Stuff, I now have a reasonably up to date Devuan desktop running on the “questionable” monitor. It’s the old Compaq Devo ( a 32 bit Pentium “something” from bout 2005? with 2 GB of memory running at about 2.5 GHz (or near that).
Oddly, the BIOS says it’s a quad core but the HTOP display only shows one no matter how I try to configure it. I suspect the BIOS is fibbing ;-)
In any case, it’s nice and fast. (About like the Odroid XU4). It’s also fairly quiet as the fan is nearly silent. All in all nicely usable.
I’d packed it off as the thing was not doing the video driver right and would twig out” from time to time, but the last update seems to have fixed that.
I was planning to try a BSD on it, but now I’m thinking maybe I’ll just let it be a while. IIRC the CD / DVD drive was also dodgy. Then it won’t boot from USB either ( I’d used a CD to boot the USB.. but now that’s out.) So all in all I think “just let it be” might be best.
The really good bit is I’m back to two working screens and two systems again.
Sometime tomorrow or the next day I’ll go back to further diagnostics on the DVI connector / HDMI adapter etc.
For now I’m a couple of days behind on all the things I’d planed to do, so need to get a bit of hustle going on it.
One of the Oh Bother complications today was that the system update was so big I ran out of free space. Then could not install gparted to work on the partitions as the install failed and the disk was full. After transplanting /var to a USB stick and getting the upgrade to complete, I could then install and use gparted to shrink the MS Windows partition and make a more permanent real disk space for /var and /usr … ( now 3 GB free on / :-)
Nothing like moving your home directory, /usr and /var around on a live system with a broken install / upgrade to test how many tech tricks you remember ;-)
FYI, this post is becoming a bit lethargic in size for viewing. Just sayin….
Larry, I would expect any exposed vulnerability to be exploited. The Cali folks made many of such obvious through history on fires and forest management problems.
@Ossqss:
Oh, I know, believe me, i know… Remember I run on things like the Raspberry Pi and 15 year old Pentiums… It was on my “Really must do” list last Sunday when the car died… and yesterday when the monitor died… And top of my ToDo right now, now that I’ve got a workable setup again.