One year ago today: February 26, 2014, I never made Charleston. Yet.
Five years ago today: February 26, 2010, early Arduino project.
MORNING
Not a libertarian? Then you must enjoy surprises like this when you go to pay your bills. Strange taxes, er, pardon me, “protection fees”, for obscure causes. I thought my property taxes already paid for police and fire protection. This is the type of crap you get when you let liberals run the show. This is clearly a tax based on your “perceived ability to pay”. Get it? If you can afford a phone that means you have enough extra cash to support somebody else’s agenda. They don’t have the guts to steal it directly, so they use the system.
And some people need a reminder that all your e-mail is recorded, they only need a warrant if they intend to use the information as evidence. They don’t need a warrant to use the same information to set you up. Ask Aaron Swartz. Oops. Too late.
The other day when I said I’d get a PhD if college is free, um, that was a joke. But if I did, I’d get if fast before the college system goes haywire, where they have to pass every dumbass or get sued. America doesn’t need more doctors. Heck no, we want all these millennium people to stay as dumb as they are so we can cut off the need for foreigners to do the dirty work. But free education? No way, education should be reserved for those who value it enough to get it themselves.
Last for the AM, I find the need to remind all that this blog is for entertainment. I understand some people make decisions based on what they read here, but that is wrong. Always independently confirm your facts. I’m no expert. Well, okay, I do know about history and robots and navigation and physics and computers and motorcycles and writing and music and warfare and research and outer space and a bunch of other stuff, but I’m no expert.
Mind you, I do know several people who are experts on it all. I know, because they told me. Sorry, I cannot direct you to their blogs because, now that the subject comes up, I have never actually seen any of them write. But I was aware they posed for the “before” pictures of the Dunning-Kruger Effect long before that theory arose in 1999.
May I add that as far as the Dunning-Kruger concept, I personally think that there is a parallel in measuring talent as well as performance. The overestimation of the lesser mentalities is not confined to intelligence, but all other positive aspects of human existence as in all guitar players think they are fantastic. And those people who audition for America's Got Talent don't have a clue how bad they really are. Didn’t Darwin speculate on this, indirectly I mean? I myself as a teenager observed “the tendency in Nature is toward the mediocre”, though I could hardly have understood the full significance. But I was on the right track, even back then!
NOON
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” --George S. Patton
This is the popular pill bottle in America these days. It is recyclable and has a two-function lid. That blue thing can be screwed on as shown for a regular bottle, or turned “upside down” to for a claimed child-proof cap. That is a joke, and I’ll tell you why. All you have to do is carry these pill bottles in a plastic bag and the caps will come off by themselves. One of my procedures when I go to any doctor is to take my actual pill bottles with me so they can read the labels direct.
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Still off balance from my shots y’day, I plunked into my fave armchair and read the first book I found. A lengthy treatise on knitting. What did I learn? Primarily, that knitting is not a fad, but that its popularity goes in cycles. The first knitted garments are found back in Egyptian times, but likely predate that. Early European knits were so tight was to be reputedly waterproof. Military codes have been disguised in stitch patterns. And shepherds used to knit. Shepherds?
Yep, it seems they used to use stilts to walk between the herds. They could cover more ground and see further. They kept busy by knitting on stilts and often, it is said, they made a good second income from knitting “balaclavas for the military”. That’s your trivia and you lesson for the day. I overcame the sudden urge to knit socks and headed for the bakery. Which, I found out, has received an unsolicited offer. And the offer is apparently enough that if it goes through, coffee for me is free for life.
And that’s like a $120 raise per month. No sale yet. The present owners would stay on for a while to train the new people, but the atmosphere will never be duplicated. My interpretive horoscope readings are not included, and that is a big part of some people’s day. This is popular because first, it is just me and all ladies, second, contemporary horoscopes tend to be written with elements that don’t directly translate into other languages. Good luck finding somebody who is not a professor to even try to give examples to, say, a native Hungarian speaker.
AFTERNOON
Another several hours configuring the XP unit, I’m delighted to be back on familiar territory. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve successfully used iPads and Androids. I’ve even taken advanced courses on using those, but they are not computers, they are toys. I’ve dabbled with Linux, but those people with their “flavors” and general strangeness have missed the boat. (Where they could have put all the device drivers in a folder called “Device Driver Folder”, they instead called it “usblib protection”.) I will probably never stop using XP as the last operating system that allowed the user to do the steering.
Remember back in early 2014 I took exception to the big band’s policy of making me stand actually behind the guitar player? I finally was able to extract segments of that, see photo. So you’ll know, I was unaware of this strange situation until after we got on stage. Was it deliberate? If it wasn’t, that is even scarier.
The first couple gigs I wrote it off to small stages, but soon discovered this was on their program. The bassist as a semi-necessary nobody, certainly never allowed to detract from the magnificence of real musicians. Seven months I put up with it, so it’s not like I’m over-sensitive because in a band, that is an eternity. In these four random video stills, you can barely tell I am even on state. This situation was only the culminating incident, there were other serious issues with this, the most inflexible band I have ever met.
Now, I got an e-mail from that band way up in West Palm that I contacted a few years ago. They take the opposite tack of playing fewer songs, but doing an intense presentation of them. These guys are not full-timers, but take on opening acts, corporate events, gigs that involve throwing on a great show for maybe an hour. That’s why the push on the XP computer this afternoon.
I need to extract the few scenes from said video where I can be seen to send these guys. It is not the steady-work duo I seek, but if I recall, one of the band members outright owns a booking agency. Important: this is all conjecture. I’ve never me these guys and would not be able to connect with them unless I move to Boynton. But the concept of a few big gigs and the rest of the time a country duo has far more appeal to me than playing hide and seek on stage.
Anyway, the XP will soon prove it’s worth. I’m so used to those machines I’m having straits staying on the topic. The XP machine takes overnight to render a video, but at least it does it right. And if anything goes wrong, it hands you enough information to do a workaround.
EVENING
Speaking of workarounds, how would you handle this one? I know that Alaine’s computer will play MOV files, and I have a conversion app. But it is a trial version that only allows 20% of the original file to be converted. After that, they want $39.95. Well, first of all, I am going to cheat them because they advertised the app as “free”. Free means free, so I’ll help myself. Have you figured out how? C’mon, Patsie, this is child’s-play for a genius like you.
So, there I am turning up features on my $40 XP computer, and in the background, I hear the complaints on NPR. People saying they can’t pay their bills, but you listen and their bills are a $400,00 mortgage, a $60,000 SUV, and $16,000 in credit card debt. You want me to feel sorry for such people, forget it. They had it coming. It’s especially disgusting to listen to the ones claiming they had "no choice" but to plunge into debt. That’s bull. They had the same choice I did and I was there to see it.
Thirty years ago, that 1985, I was poised to take on any amount of debt. I had an impeccable work history, a perfect bank account, and a job that paid a lot. But I saw the fallacy in it all, the beginning of the mass insanity. Everyone around me was signing monstrous mortgages and bragging about the money they were making. But like drunk gamblers, none of them knew when to quit. Each house sale was followed by another larger, more precarious loan. Oh, I was tempted.
But I saw through the mortgage trap. Every time I’d sit down with a coffee after work, I could figure out in fifteen minutes that there was no way I could afford a mortgage. But could I afford a house? If you read my records that far back, you’ll see how I fell into despair because house prices were climbing faster than I could save the money to buy with cash. The madness was real, everybody was wishing they’d borrowed more earlier.
What put the brakes on was I knew to the penny what I could afford. I knew had twice the disposable income of the workers around me and I still balked at mortgages. Then, like now, I am not likely to buy such expensive things unless somebody is forced to sell. As long as I was comfortable (and I was), I saw no need to go into debt or tie myself down to standardized investment schemes. That means I did not buy stocks and bonds either, since the same calculation showed that after taxes and inflation, they were a guaranteed loss.
I also calculated that wages were not keeping up with prices. My purchasing power declined from 1981 onward. Not as much as others, mind you, because I had not committed myself to ongoing payments. My money was always mine. I had no cable TV and bought my Cadillac cash, so right there I was up $400 per month over the next guy. Yet, throughout, I had that nagging feeling that I was falling behind—until I ran the numbers. That always brought me back to Earth.
Then along came Florida. I was doing fine, I knew the housing bubble was on the way, I was banking $500 per week and driving two cars. My plan, and you can go back and read it, was to wave $50,000 under somebody’s nose and take over his fancy house in Las Olas. I was halfway there when disaster struck. To this day, the question remains, did I err in not buying a fancy house? Or going the credit route instead of living my life in rental units and, lately, mobile homes?
It’s hard to say. You don’t hear me moaning about the wolf at the door. I’m quite comfortable, though of course, I’d like better. But that’s the other side of the coin. I’ll not resort to credit to get it and have no empathy for those that do. This stupid lady in Greece was going on how her kids had no schools and no vaccinations and on about how she lost all these free services, while she is sitting in an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. People like that can go live in a cave as far as I'm concerned.
Personally, I’d like to see a huge collapse and a major, major depression. As I’ve said before, I can survive 90 days, that’s 60 days after the rest are completely wiped out. Their house, car, food, everything poof gone! Forget the doomsday riots, the police are totally militarized. Did the borrowers have a better life than me? That depends on how often you’ve seen them constantly worried about paying the bills. I don’t classify 30 years of worrying as fun.
One more thing that gives me a laugh is how these credit junkies complain about their austerity measures. Like having to share an apartment, or share the hall closet. Poor babies. Maybe they should move into a trailer court. No problem with roomies there.
Ah, the workaround. Converting files. I often wonder who is stupid enough to use the on-line converters? You know, the one where you upload you file to a stranger’s computer and they send you back the results. Not only do they keep a copy, they own it. The workaround? You string together five copies of the file you want to convert. Then let the trial program convert the first 20%. QED.
ADDENDUM
Few Americans noticed what happened in Greece. Yet it is a microcosm of exactly what is going on here. The government was no longer representative, but engaged in the massive purchase of votes via “social programs” which the economy could not support. In America, we call them “entitlements” and where the Greek government borrowed the money, our government merely prints it up. Make no mistake in your thinking, the printing of valueless money is thievery and every citizen is the victim.
Like Greece, the politicians will insist that “we are all in this together”. Actually, we are not. Did you or I add another 217 government offices since 2000? Did we hire 237,000 new people in 2012? Yet, because there was no public outcry against these actions, they were accepted as the inevitable cost of running the empire. Make no mistake, it is an empire, albeit a financial one.
Like Greece, America has passed the point of no return, for there can never be another free or honest election. There are too many special interest groups voting, not for national best interest, but for their own paychecks. I know zero about politics, but I’ve lived in other countries where this happened. You get a huge block of voters who will never support any kind of change or tax cuts. And the politicians love them.
The thing to watch for is Greece to claim “Odious Debt”, a concept from 1898. It maintains that illegally borrowed money between nations does not have to be repaid. The problem there is if Greece claims it, so can most of the third world. The corrupt leaders, not the people, borrowed the money. Anyway, what is the deadline for Greece? July 1?
While I don’t like the idea that people get away with not paying back borrowed money, personally, I hope they default. Just tell the central banks to go to hell. First Greece, then the PIIGS, then everybody else. There will be no anarchy, the system is ready for any troublemakers this time around. Especially the ones who had nothing to hide.
Last Laugh
Beverly Hills High Marching Band, 1965. Okaaaaaay. . .
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