One year ago today: November 9, 2019, no practical need . . .
Five years ago today: November 9, 2015, “fungicidal green”.
Nine years ago today: November 9, 2011, the Pistachio Effect.
Random years ago today: November 9, 2010, Arduino Uno blog coincidence.
Another perfect day, it’s a pity they report that as much as the historic highs & lows. Walking the dogs up on Lebanon Pike, the gate to the drainage swale was open again. We went down there and took videos of the cave. The one everybody said was my imagination. Yes, it is dangerous. It looks like a small hole in the ground that you could step over. Here you go, a real Tennessee cave plus or minus a million years. This morning’s top picture has a name, “Sparkie’s Eyes”. Here is a classic pose, a right-sized tree and a bed of maple leaves.
The people who monitored the Biden election say it is so difficult to prove he cheated that he is in. I’m still reserving opinion on that for many reasons, top of which why is it so difficult? Meanwhile, let us move on to fantastic topics like the ultrasound machine. Fully aware of the self-limiting aspects of competition, the numbers I ran show the one lady doing this in the area is up $2,250 per week. In terms of medical income, that’s only decent. Compared to other prospects these days, I should really take a deeper look, get it, deeper look, ha-ha. Keep this on one of the burners.
If you notice an upswing of typos recently, my keyboard is acting up. My supply of spares is back at the cabin and the spellchecker on LibreOffice Writer is, how can I put this politely? Twitter-grade? Just say suitabe mainly for today’s law school applicants.
Can I go back to Florida? You can sift through things yourself. I don’t want to leave until I can, but is my [own] presense here delaying matters? Note how easily l slip these deep philosophical questions into the mix. (Blogster’s license, maybe?) Anyway, the point is I’m no magic bullet, but when I’m here fewer things go wrong, and even then at a slower pace. Nothing unique or special. I feel a bit caught in the middle, where very few useful courses exist. (This makes sense if you view college entrants these days as largely winners or losers.). This is something for later historian types to decide, hey, graduates who are basically still quite stupid are the very reason student loans became predatory.
The remainder of today is flitting over topics that got into our conversations. Chloe, the super-size cat, was not always fat. I did not know (in those ancient days before I arrived on the scene), the Reb let others look after the cats. One lady did something called “free-feed” which is what it sounds like. Since then, Chloe has been doing Oprah imitations. Aw, is that a bit mean? If so, this isn’t your blog, go to an inoffensive blog. Tell him I sent you. Seriously, it is much the same reading as this blog but without the option to learn anything new. His research quotient is 0 out of 10.
How about the dish cables breaking at Arecibo, the satellite dish in Puerto Rico? It was supposed to be hurricane proof, now they are talking about a lack of maintenance money. I’m certain that shortage has nothing to do with the shortage of discoveries by that facility for the past 45 years. Or this news leaked in Europe about a ban on end-to-end encryption, like my e-mail account. It will just cause the encryption to morph into another form. Most private information I e-mail is encrypted before it hits anybody else’s mail server. I use on-line encryption, but that is far different than saying I trust them.
Tundra.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Bluetooth, what a boon to the socially inept. Is is possible somebody is making fake units merely to allow weirdos to wonder around talking to themselves? Bluetooth may have inadvertently opened an entire behavioral blind alley. I knew this guy, Ken Sanchuk, who was a people watcher. That’s the guy, that if he went to an auction, it was to watch what other people were buying. I got ten bucks says he has a Bluetooth device in each ear these days and a spare tucked away.
One topic the Reb & I will never see eye-to-eye on is poverty. It’s not an argument, but amusing to hear little things from each other on the subject. Today was a classic. As we drove out of Jackson Downs, she observed the big stores were open but the smaller shops were vacant. She sees it as a result of the COVID lockdown, I view it as a far more fundamental decline in American business practice that began back in the 70s, and the lockdown as merely the factor that peeled off the veneer. Back then, cash was king and if a business went under, it was from not setting aside enough moolah to weather a bad storm.
To me, the real downslide began as shops began relying on credit rather than good business practice. The inventory was on credit, the sales were mostly credit, and it only takes a single spill to bring down such a house of cards. Why I noticed more than others is because I always pay cash, and a credit-based system will always cause prices to rise. Can’t afford it? Put it on payments and pretend you can.
To me, the real downslide began as shops began relying on credit rather than good business practice. The inventory was on credit, the sales were mostly credit, and it only takes a single spill to bring down such a house of cards. Why I noticed more than others is because I always pay cash, and a credit-based system will always cause prices to rise. Can’t afford it? Put it on payments and pretend you can.
This led to a follow on look at Jim Carrey, the comedian. He lived in a van and to the Reb that means poor. I thought she meant he personally lived in a van while pursuing his early career. If so, my question would be if he was poor, where did he get a van? Where did he get tires, and licenses, and insurance, and how did he store food or cook it? You see where my questioning goes on that, but I fully understand by some standards he was poor. Just not my standards.
I looked it up. It was his family that lived in a van after losing their house, the story goes, and he quit school at 15 to work as a janitor to support the family. Sounds like a real sob story until you consider the facts. I’ll skim the surface. This van thing was in Canada. Nobody can live long in a van in Canada, you will freeze to death, so his stay was maybe 90 days max (the "frost-free" season). Nobody, repeat nobody has to quit school to support anybody in a welfare state like Canada (except single white males). He spent hours making comedy faces in the mirror in his room. He had a mirror? He had a room?
He grew up in Newmarket, Ontario, for crying out loud, don’t talk to me about poverty. Sure, there’s poor people there, but poverty? Give me a break. He worked comedy clubs because he was able to live near comedy clubs to work in. I understand the guy rose from nowhere to stardom, but don’t hand me the guff that he was poverty-stricken when he had support and access to things some of us could only dream of. At least have him living in some lost cause like Admiral, Saskatchewan, before laying the lack of opportunity donkey on me.
ADDENDUM
I took the evening off to write letters & make phone calls. Here’s an article says Berners-Lee, the Internet guy has come up with another form of Internet which he claims keeps your personal information safe. Has he been reading this blog? The guy should know by now he doesn’t have a clue what will happen with things he invents. He’s talking about the one thing you do not want—all your data personal and private—stored on-line. If it is on-line it is unsafe. The worst thing you can do is trust private information to an unknown entity, yet that is what he is plugging.
It involves putting your data on a so-called cloud, the very concept is evil. The, anyone who wanted it has to get you to allow them access. What could go wrong? I mean other than the government seizing the files British-style, and what’s to stop the person you give access from selling the data? Ethics? Talk to my ex-cardiologist about that.
Read my lips, once you put your data on a computer, any computer, you have lost control of it in some way. If you want to get rich, develop a way to share data that cannot be copied and self-destructs after one usage. I hate to tell you this, Tim, but anything less is pissing upwind. The database to which you refer would make its owner the most dangerous entity in the known universe. Then again, your proposals are what we would expect from a man who cannot type and has serious, serious, almost IBM-esque issues with punctuation and capital letters.
