One year ago today: October 2, 2019, only in other people.
Five years ago today: October 2, 2015, the ugly Zundel affair.
Nine years ago today: October 2, 2011, it’s planned, I tell you..
Random years ago today: October 2, 2007, computer manuals suck.
I’ve got the therapy tape back on my arm and we have progress. The two areas of pain that bother me the most have been somewhat isolated, I mean, define progress. I wanted a bottle of port wine, which I don’t drink but use for cooking chicken once in a long while. So I walk into this shop on the south side of Lakeland. Gasp. I had to walk around the place, there must be every major brand on the planet displayed. I estimate 2 or 3 thousand different labels. At checkout, I asked the clerk if he knew roughly the retail value of all that. He estimated $1.3 million. And said in the twenty years he’s been at that location, I’m the first that ever asked.
The southside Thrift is bankrupt. Thifts and I go back a ways, so I took a look around. They have lots of parking, but by the time you see their sign, you’ve breezed past. They need a sidewalk sign, the town allows them one day per week. There’s ways around that. The rule says advertising, not every sign qualifies. I bought a couple DVDs, as customary, and they had a crossword booklet on the counter. May I? I did two of them in 24 minutes. They timed me. Due to mixed reviews and slower cooking times, I’ve opted against the air fryer. Instead, we go for the cheapest microwave at Wal*Mart, they work for me.
To get at some of the bolts changing the water pump, we removed that skirt in behind the wheel. Now I can’t figure how to get in back on. The pattern is different than the other wheel. Once again, walking in the door somehow tells my system to take a nap. Today I fought it. French roast coffee, I even keep a stash of CrackerJack popcorn in the freezer, try it. No luck, I’m bagged. I even made French toast, which did not even perk me up. I don’t just nap, I read a book until I drop off, so I wake up smarter than before. Works for me. Can I catch up with you later?
Some war trivia for you. An ace pilot is one who has shot down five or more enemy combat aircraft. (Except in America, where shooting down enemy non-combat planes counts, and shooting airplanes parked on the ground is a half-kill.) So, of the thousands of pilots who fly in a war, what portion become aces? The answer is 3%. The follow-on question is of the total enemy planes shot down, how many were by this tiny group of aces? Over half.
This question came up over a technical point. If a pilot launches a missile at an enemy airplane 100 miles away, is that considered “combat”. To me, not so much. Even a long-range sniper has to see the enemy. I don’t know this answer, how about you look it up and leave me a comment. If you believe the tall stories of American superiority in WWII, read up on the history of how the best American planes were junk compared to the Luftwaffe. The change came when the British started ripping out the Allison (GM) engines and replace them with Rolls-Royce Merlins. The most famous conversion was the P-51 Mustang. The Merlin engine is still popular with vintage aircraft restorers, but remember, you also have to buy a specialist Rolls-Royce tool kit and they ain’t cheap.
Garlic grading machines.
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Silver is edging down toward $24 per ounce. The advertising for Biden has ramped way up, they are spending even more than last round. Here’s another scene from St. Augustine, the famous bench confo, well, famous around here. We accurately predicted the outcome of the electioneering process so far—with the codicil that the Democrats would resort to outright lies and totally empty promises this time around. This is no longer a contest between Republicans and Democrats, this is a fight between two polar ideologies. If the Republicans are fanatics, the Democrats are lunatics.
You see, the blabber about Trump talking over Biden has now been analyzed in hindsight. If you watch closely, Biden was “framing” his answers, a traditional dirty political trick. Trump was cutting him off at that point. Not all the time, but mainly. Here’s a framed question, ask yourself if you would let it go. “Now that you have quit beating your wife, how are you today?”
[Author’s note – for a while I had the impression I was the only person who noticed what was happening at that debate. Everyone I talked to said they had not thought about that. Then hours later Trump gets on Hannity and says much the same thing. This reinforces my suspicious, and that’s all it is, that somebody on his staff at least reads my writing. No, I have no proof, but I am tuned to that frequency and always notice when such coincidences occur for any reason.]
The radical left plan to abuse mail-in voting is drawing flak. They don’t seem to get it, you cannot use the old tactics on the new President. He’s asked the polling stations to be vigilant and of course the left is saying that is voter intimidation. The press claims 208,000 flu deaths, but the actual number after removing the padded medical forms appears to be more like 32,000 which is nothing really. I expect all bans and lockdowns to be removed by early November so there is likely another trip in the works. This time I have better knowledge to plan—this is important because I had never traveled with pets before, and this time Sparkie will be as old as I feel sometimes.
There is no mechanism for me to gauge people’s reaction to my posts about travel, although I gather by comments these mini-journeys are popular reading. Trust me, it is the trips you make between the time you are around 54 to 64 years old that set the stage for your best memories and set the pace for your retirement. I imagine with it being late fall, we would get east of the mountains. Yes, the presumption is that the Reb and the boys will be there. I have not cleared any of this yet. You see, the right travel companion is hard to fine and one thing you don’t want is somebody you have to babysit. This has never been an issue between us.
I’ll tell you who has issues. China. I’ve been running numbers after shelling out so much money for that car battery. It is made in China, and cost double from last year. Tariffs. There is a fact that few economics textbooks mention. If you want to sell goods in America, you must build American style factories. And anybody in Russia before 1989 can tell you, this is not cheap. You need billions of dollars, which China, an agrarian society, does not have. Where do you get the dollars? America. Bonds, trade deals, Bidens. You see, the world wants to be paid in American dollars. And their supply just got red-pilled, if you’ll pardon the pun.
If that battery is any indication, China is not going to be able to pay back a lot of that money they borrowed. The built American-style factories. Even their military is carbon-copies of last generation American weaponry. Look at their push into the South China Sea. Building islands also costs. I even heard they want to reactivate an old gold mine in Bougainville. Bribery on this scale also costs dollars. I stress dollar, not just any money. Their economy, or at least the modern part of it, is built on copycatting US technology and financed with borrowed US money.
My question is, as it becomes increasingly economical for America to build Its own goods, how will China pay back all that money. In fact, how are they paying back anything right now? I saw this coming long before the Trump tariffs. The People’s Republic is about to get its their credit card cancelled. Then again, they have a lot of experience with famines and revolutions over there.
There, lots for you to read today. I spent the entire afternoon and evening quietly at home, listless, but I did finally read the entire opening chapter of the book on arrowheads. The cardinals are ignoring my feeder with the squirrel modification. The experiment continues.
ADDENDUM
Three comments on the Sony Assumption. I may have called it other things, but so what? It is not a fixed concept. Allow to explain the development so you’ll know the process whatever I call it. The digital copyright people constantly barrage the lawmakers over how much money they are losing to piracy and how this stifles new artists, and so on. It is mostly bunk, as most new artists do not begin at the recording star level, and don’t make that much at it per unit when they do. The money goes to the corporations that own the music rights and you will not get far preaching about the plight of corporations in America. They are the people that would label a potato “no added sugar” and crank the price.
Let’s get to marketing. The 45 caught on because it was smaller and could play one piece of music with reasonable clarity. They came with a special spindle where you could stack your disks and kick back. The alternative was the larger 12” albums that played at 33 rpm but had fixed tracks. The record industry has issues with both sizes and has always labored for some way they could sell you an entire album when you only wanted one or two of the tracks. This was ellusive until the mid-1960s when a phenomenon literally broke the mold. A band arose that had enough hits at one time to fill an album, and the recording companies danced in the streets.
The Beatles could be manipulated to condition the market to buy albums instead of singles, thus creating the opening to sell junk “filler music” along with often a single title hit. The reasoning is simple, this was the first time one band had up to 6 out of the 10 top selling hits. It made sense to sell them as an "album". I was taken only once, when I bought a Juice Newton album to get “Queen of Hearts”, something like $12 bucks back then. This was just too expensive for many people and caused the rise of pirated copies. First was the cassette tapes, whose quality was good enough, but suffered from each generation of copy. The big studios howled how much they were losing and instead of reacting to market pressure, they opted to hire lobbyists.
Hence, the Sony Assumption. The dollar amount they report as a loss to the lawmakers is based on presumption. If you have 1,000 pirated MP3s, to Sony that means you have $20,000 worth of stolen music, the logic is you would have otherwise spend $20 on each CD they market that contains that one single song you wanted. And this was the dominant view when they pushed through the DMCA. Apple quickly caught on to what the public wanted and began selling single tunes for 99 cents, which is roughly the same price rate as the whole CD.
However, by this time the piracy industry was well-established. The only thing stopping most people from pirating all their music is they lack the technical know-how to download exactly what they want. I know whiz kids who cannot complete a download if even one tiny tech detail goes wrong, nor can they edit it if it has anything they don’t want, like a lengthy intro. Nor can they download any other format and often have no clue what the file suffix means. But there are enough people out there, such as myself, that I would have to be backed into a corner before I’d pay for recorded music or to get into a concert hall unless the Beatles came back.
Make no mistake about the intention of the DMCA. They want the right to monitor who you are and what you listen to, charging you a fee for each instance. They will fine you if you share the music to anyone not on the list you provide them for approval. I call it their Juke Box law. They want it so you can only listen to the music when alone and if you want to hear it again, you pay again. My major standing objection to that is my usual—that enforcement involves them tracking you 24/7 and it would only be a matter of time before they abused that.
To wrap up, I heard the most interesting euphemism for strippers today. Somebody called them “cheerleaders”. Ha, I like that.
