This ounce bar of silver bullion is the biggest occurrence today. The heat and humidity are so high I’m not going out again until after sunset. I’m staying indoors and close to my industrial fans. This bar was minted in 1973, looks like for some Xmas celebration. It’s even signed by some dude Vitr. Silver was selling for around $2.50 per ounce for most of 1973, roughly $12.71 in today’s money.
It is customary to blame the Texan Hunt Brothers for the high silver prices of 1980 but the fact is many people had become aware of lagging silver production and low stockpiles. This had persisted for several years at a time when production of them new-fangled computers was increasing industrial demand for this metal. I knew one idiot who convinced his mother to borrow $40,000 against her house and buy at the peak price of $25 per ounce (almost $70 per oz adjusted for inflation). You might say he lost her shirt. He still today would not have made the money back. I laugh whenever that happens to somebody whose job title ends with “ologist”, the more because he was a divorced marriage counselor.
Trust me, that guy knew exactly how not to get along with the opposite sex. If he ever shows up here I know exactly who to introduce him to. I know this one gal that if she thinks you like her, she immediate stops paying her share of the bills, wants to get paid for wiping her own ass, and starts telling the neighborhood you and your friends are faggots. You think I’m making this up, don’t you?
See my big wide open eyes? My new prescription may be keeping me awake. In my case, that means I’ve gotten some extra study time. Bit arithmetic, the process of binary math, is one of those subjects that is damn hard to understand the how, much less the why. Couple that with trying to turn it into worthwhile computer code and you’d be up late yourself. It requires about five times as much deep concentration as working the Sunday crossword, I’d say that’s a fair comparison.
To any prospective students on the topic, I suggest you pick the most useful bitwise operator, the AND which is the ampersand “&” and study it until you completely understand that 1+1=1. The other operators will seem easy after that. I’ve been boning up on LCDs, Liquid Crystal Displays, and they are better and more logically wired up than most other parts I’ve seen.
I also re-wrote the English Traffic Light code after remembering a lesson I’ve learned too many times over. When the normal flow of logic does not work, you have to reverse it before it will work in C+. This bears out that the creators of C+ were world-class geeks, but that probably explains why nobody remembers their names. The trick was to make the crosswalk the standard operation and operate the traffic lights if the button was not pressed. The exact opposite of the real world.
There must be a term for those dismal Internet advertisers that try to snag you for a spelling mistake or similar error. For instance, instead of typing flalottery.com, just type flalotto.com and watch the garbage that comes up. Or type Goggle. Or Disnye instead of Disney. I never do business with such people. Ever. I encourage you to follow suit. The particularly loathsome sites emulate free government services such as the passport office or vital stats. Why the US still allows this is beyond me. Didn’t those azzclowns get elected so the buyer didn’t have to beware on his own all the time?
Reading O’Rourke, I see his logic in the difference between communism and capitalism. The communists control the means of production and capitalists control the means of consumption. If you can get food under communism, you can eat it. But in a capitalist system, people are free to produce anything that makes a profit. So you can buy a car, but you can’t park or drive it anywhere you please. You can buy drugs anywhere, but you can’t legally possess them. Also, advertising tends to channelize what you are supposed to want even if it is against your common sense. Fascinating concept, this control of consumption, for the more stupid the population, the better it works.
Oh, and ant poison around my new trailer works super fine. I paid extra for a brand that would not harm the birds. The eighty dollars? Well, it would have been cheaper to put sugar on my neighbor’s lawn. But I’m not that kind of guy.
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