One year ago today: June 5, 2018, imported apples coincidence.
Five years ago today: June 5, 2014, the height of non-originality.
Nine years ago today: June 5, 2010, censored by Craigslist.
Random years ago today: June 5, 2008, remember Leif?
This morning we talk money. I grabbed a small order of fries from Five Guys. I don’t recall it costing $3.29 before. A newspaper was $2.50 and I passed on the small tube of wood putty. I was expecting $2, it was $7. There is a lot more of that on the way. I had a shopping trip to Mt. Juliet and it was easy going. The stores were all empty. Mind you, empty of staff, too, so I could not buy my lumber. The talk is about the tariffs, but that is barely the surface of the problem. Here’s what I saw and you decide where this is going. For years now, I’ve preached how inflation is rampant, but how it is cloaked by the availability of Chinese imports. You could walk right past the expensive American goods and pick up a cheap knock-off. At low prices, you could throw out the crap and buy new several times over and still save money. A week ago, the shelves were not filled with Chinese merchandise, it was all Chinese copies of American designs. That’s important.
The guy a Home Depot told they had 7,800 price increases in the past week. I spotted that myself. I doubt any price has gone down. A check valve I bought last month for $26 is now $58. A set of chisels was $7, now each chisel is $24. Small drill bits are now $6 each. This is existing stock, not new deliveries. And I can see it. Like back in the 80s when inflation ruined many small businesses, it did not bring prices down as it says in the textbook. The businesses that remained were not more efficient, nor better managed. They were survivors and they were, same as today, intent of getting back lost profits. Chinese stuff may reappear, but right now the big American stores are not ordering anything until the situation stabilizes. And American producers are cranking up the price tags. Somebody is going to pay up for all those employee benefits, sick days, and sexual harassment lawsuits.
Most of today’s photos are around the house. Repairing cat damage, cleaning cat boxes, flowers, and cracking up (home-owner style). A flash rainstorm kept us all cooped up inside, what do you expect. It’s not like we waste our time watching Pope-rah.
It’s wallpaper.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The Home Depot guy said they had let 22 people go because of the tariffs. This doesn’t surprise me as American businesses have had to adapt to the wrong market pressures since the trade deal fiasco began in 1988 with Canada. That was the first rotten deal for America, as Canadian social welfare means items like their lumber products an undercut US companies who have to pay for employee benefits themselves. The US Trade people have never had any success recruiting intellectuals, so they thought NAFTA would result in higher-paying US jobs because we had the more educated workforce. Stupid, since Canada and Mexico instantly set to work prying open the loopholes in the agreement and gearing up their economies to gouge where they could.
One of my most-admired people, Becky Stern, is plugging something called Patreon, so I’m taking a look. I got to the site, but it is full of jargon without explaining what it does. What is a “thriving membership business”? Or a “subscription content service”? It seems to be a site where users pay a monthly fee for—something. Patreon claims to empower membership businesses with the tools they need to acquire, manage, and energize their paying patrons. I’ll keep looking for an explanation in English, but I don’t know if as a user, I’d want to be acquired or energized by anyone whose primary “platform” is Facebook.
As for Becky, I don’t know what she changed, but she is lookin’ good these days. I thought to take a peek at what projects are topping the charts for Arduino, Make Magazine, and in general. Okay, we got one outfit using a laser cutter to make patterns in the seaweed of sushi wrap. There’s a heat gun, dremel tool, and dog bowl arrangement for roasting your own coffee. My favorites are still from Make Magazine and include a cantenna that jams drones. (Said drones operate on the 811.2 format, it may be illegal to jam certain frequencies.) There is a move toward controlling wireless devices using a smart phone. While I would study the technology, is it wise to send non-standard software commands that would definitely set off an alarm somewhere? Plus, more and more of the tutorials are carrying a warning to use the Arduino projects for educational purposes only. I’d love to know why.
I’m still reading “Death on the Patagonian Express” past the point where it has become painful. She gets videoed in a crowd near a mysterious explosion and the only thing on her mind is whether she should have been wearing something different. And this blog is now in danger of being demonitized. Among the roughly 20 things in this universe I really don’t like, which I’ve mentioned here, some are identifiable groups. I don’t like idiots, guitar players, and liberals. It seems youTube can now deem that I don’t like these people because I have phobias about them. They could take away all the money I make from this blog. Hey, wait a minute!
ADDENDUM
It’s kind of interesting how most of what you hear in the tech news today is data breaches and privacy issues. It’s ironic that two years ago I had a split with my cardiologist, who said my concern with computer security was because I “had not realized how the world had changed”. I wonder if he remembers my response. He was a nice guy, but had that nagging defect of thinking he was personally smarter than me because he had a medical degree. I get that, time to time, but usually it is with guitar players and musical ability. Not talent, ability.
Last day I linked to an undersea drone the US is building. It’s one of around 15 different underwater vessels and forms part of a new “unmanned systems” concept of war, with the usual horrendous waste as each service pursues its own objectives using different and incompatible technologies. Each weapon presumes that an enemy known as “Norachi” will react in a specified and predictable manner with known capabilities. All of its WMDs are stored at facilities where US sensors can detect “abnormal movements of vehicles”, because they have been so successful at tracking vehicles in the past. Or am I thinking of the DMV?
Before you move on, this is a shot of said cat damage. Yes, these critters can knock pictures off the walls. Note gained expertise at small repairs, you may think this was a normal part of everybody’s life. But I’m just learning it now.
The US effort will be seamlessly coordinated by our Joint Chiefs of Staff, using mainly secret satellite radio in the 17.2 to 50.2 GHz range. The same hush-hush frequencies will be used to guide the unguided swarms of robot weapons, which we are assured will have a human in the loop whenever there is a lethal decision. Myself, I think the enemy has no intention of going toe-to-toe with any US military branch. There is talk that a worldwide system of cheap underwater drones that position themselves on the seafloor with satellite uplinks will soon make the ocean transparent. This will render the entire US Navy, not just the aircraft carriers, into sitting ducks.
For the record, in the last big submarine conflict, World War Two, we are indoctrinated to believe the US won the U-boat fight, and that the US could build ships faster than the Germans could sink them. It’s bull, since the US only built around 2,700 Liberty ships. In reality, the Germans rarely had more than 50 U-boats at combat strength, the others were traveling to and from the combat zones. We are never told how many Allied ships those few U-boats sent to the bottom. Are you ready? The U-boats sank 23,300 ships. Hmmm, if you want to know how things really went, the textbooks printed in America after 1945 are not a good starting point. You see, even if we assume the Germans actually had 50 U-boats on operations all the time, that’s still a 466:1 kill ratio. No potential enemy is ever going to let that happen again.
And somebody is for sure going to find a sinister use for all those drones that just got banned from US national parks. Banned, like the forestry service owned the parks, or something.
I’ve got another point to make. I differentiate unmanned vehicles for military or commercial use from the totally recreational “drones”. Part of the reason is the so-called social phenomenon aspect of the privately owned drones. They may like to see themselves as pioneers, but I have reservations about the role of slobbering, mouth-breathers as innovators of our culture. I’ve been around and know the fantasies that some gomer who can’t read or write and likes to fly his drone over nudist colonies is the champion leading mankind to a new era. I’m more likely to trust that new software than can predict what you look like by your voice.
I say to hell with the right or wrong behind that software, because it has proven to be so accurate. I say there is an equally strong correlation between IQ and social behavior. Contrary to the belief that high IQ people are narrowly educated and nerd-like, I find it is low IQ people who behave predictably. Nobody who’s had to ride a city bus on welfare Wednesday is going to dispute that point. And the dorky white males who dominate the drone community are not today’s heroes. People with high IQs don’t normally show up at press conferences wearing a toque like it's some badge of honor.
