One year ago today: August 15, 2018, they lost the bet.
Five years ago today: August 15, 2014, Me: 75, Them: 0.
Nine years ago today: August 15, 2010, my management style.
Random years ago today: August 15, 2012, adventuresome days.
I’m going to the lumber yard, that’s my big morning. The front yard swing is rotted through. I’m having a stab at gluing it back together, but it is now useful mainly as a planter. It’s too far gone for even the dogs to sleep on, which reminds me, it must be nap time. In Tennessee with old dogs, everything is nap time, note the self-deprecating humor. Thursday, I should go for a couple cold ones tonight. Face it, I don’t like hanging around places full of old people, and that’s most of what is in this vicinity.
Up to the recycle bin, then for a walk on the extensive Hermitage grounds. It’s not really lawn, but there are big trees on the property where they mow back the jungle. The dogs love it, but I wonder if we’ll ever go there again. Here’s the tale from the trailer court. There’s a back way in so I usually park on the side to let the dogs run without leashes. Sammy loves it. The morning was hot, so I sat down under a tree. Ten minutes later, this truck shows up with flashing yellow and green lights. Ostensibly to “see if I was okay”, but that’s horsh because I look like a guy walking dogs, nothing else.
The nitty-gritty is that you can’t park there. You can’t sit there. You can’t stand there. You can’t leave your dogs in the car. You can’t let them out of the car. All very polite, mind you, but still. Okay, it is private property, so we left. But I have a little story to tell you about how I view this type of authority. Your task is to figure out which authority figure I identify with. Ready?
During the last real war, Eisenhower got his son, John, drafted as an aide. Dwight gave John a message to deliver to a colonel at the front lines. John tells the colonel, “My daddy says to watch your right flank.”
The colonel responds, “And what does your mommy say?”
Add to that Wikipedia in 2019 ranks Jeff Bezos to be the richest person on the planet. I admire his work but don’t otherwise pay much attention. The reason is he breaks the mold. The most certain way to wealth in America remains to inherit it and he didn’t. (Okay, he did get a lot of help, but so did most of the poor people I’ve known.) This is of interest to me on several counts. One is that although America is still by far the last place on the planet where the born-poor even stand a chance. Such a system can only remain in being by having the rich make sure the poor never have any real influence on public policy. This is around as anti-democratic as it gets and a good example of where capitalism and democracy clash.
Control is maintained by sealing off opportunities to the poor and by taxation. While I don’t disagree with the rich paying more tax, I disagree with the intentions of the people who want that money. They aren’t going to plow it back into opportunities, but dole it out to their favorite minorities. In a sense, that is how corporate America operates. The factories and businesses are run in the manner that benefits the shareholders, not the people who work there.
And the last important factor (that I watch) is the private commercial space program. You’ve now got three billionaires working to bring the costs down (Bezos, Branson, Musk). They’ve succeeded although the ticket price is still out of range for most people, the safety margins are narrow as hell, and the flights don’t yet go anywhere. Besides, Bezos is plain interesting to watch. He holds meetings down to a size that can be fed by two pizzas, coined the “Bezos Principle”, and he recognizes the need for a private cloud because the public cloud is too risky. (However, his proposed use for that cloud, while glossy on the surface, is borderline despicable beneath it. He seems to live in a dream world.) Bezos owns the left-leaning Washington Post.
Different subject, but as for wealth tax (as opposed to income tax), I disagree totally. The intent of a wealth tax is to raise the trillions needed to balance the federal budget. It should be up to the federals to balance their own budget and besides, they should not be let off so easily. Trump should cut the size of the government in half next term, but that will never happen. Remember the ratchet effect. They never trim the budget, they only “decrease” the rate of expansion. A move pioneered by the great Ronald Reagan. The only tax I agree with is a sales tax. The opponents say it causes sales to suffer, but that is only true when people spend their own money. Those using credit could stand to spend a lot less.
Pavilion Hotel, New Orleans.
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Me and the boys cannot get kick started today. It’s the Tennessee summer atmosphere, or possibly something in the water. That is it, I moved some tools around and did a little on the yard swing. I checked the musician’s lists, the majority want to work, not to jam. I’d jam in Nashville, but not Florida. It’s got to do with the odds of it doing any good. The day sapped the whole neighborhood, even the lady next door came over to say she wasn’t mowing lawns until tomorrow. (She does well mowing for all the neighbors, as in couple hundred per month.) We have the biggest yard, but easiest to mow.
Here’s the only video you get here. JeePee waking up. Note the increasing quality of my output, there’s a few frames you can see the little guy blinking. This was impossible last month. Remember, this is produced in minutes, in house, using Win XP applications. The raw video was less than 12 minutes old when this gif was produced. That includes the titling. You gotta love a mug like this guys, facial recognition would work like a charm. Say, did you see the new line of fashion clothing meant to disrupt the software. It looks like shirts and dresses made out of license plates. Here is a generic pattern, called "hyperface", that is reputed to scramble the cameras.
When it gets to this stage, I refer to it not so much as facial recognition, but detection. Time to ask who needs the capability to systematically scan faces of large segments of people for no apparent reason. This is no empty question, since privacy has been an issue of mankind ever since urban living was invented. That was something like 9,000 years ago. You can’t have cities without the need for privacy, and when that privacy is removed, it’s called oppression. These dodges may work for now, but the computer code to ignore them is a ten-minute job.
Seeing a couple of leashes at the far right, I walked over there. What a shock. Face it, dog leashes are a developed technology. A rope with a snap hook on one end. And the price tag on the only remaining leashes? Thirteen bucks each. I needed two. You could see how the leashes had sold according to price and no way was I spending that much. I drove the mile over to Dollar Tree and saved enough for a half-tank of gas. There you have it. Inflation via deliberate stock-outs. No restocking until the last rip-off unit is sold. And this just in, New Zealanders have been warned to stop licking a lichen that grows on roadways. It contains an ingredient of Viagra, but also chemicals that can kill you. The existence of the warning tells us too many NZ type males have been willing to take the chance.
ADDENDUM
This is the $1200 electric bike recently bloggified. The battery is on the frame below the crossbar, and the report is 68 miles per charge, or three times what I got on my model just six years back. The battery is around the same volume. Again, we are talking PAS, or pedal assist mode, the only really levelheaded way to ride these machines. Like myself, Elliott is amazed by the weight that can be carried, for me 60 pounds of groceries was not uncommon.
This numbers take a real whack on hilly terrain. In what you read here, both bicycles were used on pancake flat roads. Elliott and I go back a long ways with music. He concluded in his twenties that his level of skill would not make it worthwhile to pursue it as a hobby and I respect him for being more reasonable than most guitarists. He likes all music as a listener where myself, you’d never catch me listening to a lot of it, especially the white-boy blues. Today for the first time, I forced myself to listen to Shynyrd’s “I Know A Little”. First-class 1980s guitar drivel.
Last, I read some on-line articles from Forbes. Whenever they run out of their usual “anybody can make it” fairy tales, they publish stories of people who were told they would fail. A beloved one is how Leon Uris failed English. Forbes himself failed to make the high school newspaper staff. But I have yet to read a single detailed accounting of the opposite situation. Of the millions who were told the opposite, that they could become anything they wanted, but wound up having to work for a living. Forbes didn’t start the magazine, he inherited it from his father. (But Uris did make it on his own, as far as that such a thing is possible for a member of a community religion. Would any magazines have bought his plentiful articles about Jewish life if he’d been, say, a Portuguese Catholic?)
In present day America, the capitalism aspect of democracy has morphed the challenge of running a business into the dreadful challenge of starting one. Face it, there are not enough smart people in this country who could run the businesses that already exist if the playing field were not so much in their favor. I doubt one corporate executive in ten thousand could start a business from scratch. Fact is, once you get the money to get things going, the odds are entirely in your favor. But don’t expect many exposes on such topics, since the primary source of money of venture capital in America remains family.
