April 18, 2021

Yesteryear
One year ago today: April 18, 2020, smarter than the user, anyway.
Five years ago today: April 18, 2016, everybody likes Arkansas.
Nine years ago today: April 18, 2012, I sang corporate Karaoke.
Random years ago today: April 18, 2017, served with tea.

           Just when you think they’ve gone too far. This is the latest I’ve seen in the poisoning of the American food supply. The problem is corporations, which were designed to limit liability claims to the investor’s equity in the company. But they’ve evolved to where they give immunity to investors, the corporate staff, and the line workers. GMO means genetically modified, so what does non-GMO modified mean? Do we want to know? This doublespeak is a strong indicator of how the current administration has adopted a we’ll-show-you-whose-boss attitude.

           The Reb reads it to mean the corn starch which is modified can from corn that was not modified. I say it is the round of doublspeak fomented by the Monsanto-Cargill axis of evil in their ongoing quest to make food labels ever more difficult to read. So let me get this straight. The corn isn’t modified, but the starch from the corn is. Nope, back on the shelf it goes.
           Here’s an update for you people with nothing to hide. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (how’s that for a euphemism), a group of non-elects, has pushed through legislation that allows debt collecters to go after you on social media. That’s one in five of you and the the law is so loosely worded it means 24/7 haranguing. They are not supposed to put in your dating comments that you are a deadbeat who hasn’t paid up, but if they do, the penalty will be as effective as it was stopping the scam telemarketers.

           I cut the new step y’day and am in the process of giving it two layers of undercoat and three of paint. I don’t intend to fix it again in this life. This work was under the scooter canopy as was this photo of the progress on that cabinet from Agt. R. If it gets looking any better, I may keep it. I figured out where I saw the design before. It is in the booklet that comes with some of the pocket hole drill sets. They suggest you build this cabinet for practice. This shows the plywood with pecan stain, the top and interior are not finished yet.
           Buried down here is the next event. My broken tooth finally fell out. I did not spend the $1,000 to extract it because it did not hurt and the gap, which is two teeth wide, cannot be seen except from the front. The dentist said the tooth hole will grow over, complicating surgery later, but there may be no later unless things happen that I can afford it, in which case the cost would not longer be hurdle.

           Bradford called. It seems I was not the only one who didn’t show for the jam. Friday’s are not good jam nights, I would only go if there was totally nothing else. The mention is due because lately his material has become much more country-music style, no easy change for that guy. He’s southern rock, Eagles, Young, and Allmans. I ain’t saying nuttin’, but there comes a time in every musician’s life he realizes waiting for the band of his dreams is stopping him from getting on stage now.
           I’m about to frame one wall of the fictional shed. This will contain a cutout for the air conditioner. It’s a Florida must-have even in a 48 square foot shed. One site that always gets a bad word from me is DoItYourself.com (no link). It typifies the shallow-minded click-bait website of the era, with near-useless instructions. No pictures or diagrams, the majority of pages have grand titles. But the “instructions” are a bastard-rat collection of low-effort blabber. The steps to frame a cutout for a wall airconditioner basically said measure the hole, cut the hole, insert the unit. Some help, huh?
           There is a budget for hurricane tie-downs left over from the other projects, but I thought I’d go on-line and find any home-made ideas. I was wrong. Unless I’m using the wrong search criteria, there appears to be not a single person on the planet who has published any ideas how to make these out of tin cans or surplus door hinges, or whatever. Not one.

Picture of the day.
Border wall prototypes.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
           Okay, I backpedal on the modified corn starch issue. My real objection was and is to misleading food labels. I still maintain if they are required by law to list something other than a pure food ingredient, it is a warning, not an alert. In this case, corn starch, is modified by an enzyme, so it is not genetically modified. Other processes add chemicals or make physical changes. However, I’ve read too many cases of reactions like dizziness, bloating, and hives. Thus, I avoid modified starch even if made from non-GMO ingredients. Avoid does not mean exclude. And remember, when a Democrat insists you do something, she is persistent. When a Republican says he won’t, he is stubborn. Keep your terminology straight.
           In another huge confirmation of the gang-band theory, Daimler has announced it will be hiring programmers by the thousands. That’s your primary clue they are suffering from IBM-think. You can bet they will be C+ coders, not real programmers, and the results will be as great as what you get on your GPS, namely truly millennialized bullshit. Imagine an electric car running on code written by graphics artists who cannot spell, read, write, or punctuate, and who know nothing about mechanics, steering systems, or history before 2011. You need maybe five good programmers and around 50 assistants, that folks, is all it takes. Instead, they opt for code junkies by the case-lot. Expect a matching number of fatalities.

           Why ten assistants? So the programmer can focus on the code. The assistants proofread, catalog, review comments, and fetch stuff. In my graduate year, a third of my time was taken up with tasks that could have been done by anybody. But, my code always worked. My average program in those days was around 350 lines of code. Yet around me were people who regularly took three times that to do the same. Most of my code back then was output instructions, often the actual working part of the program was 7 to 15 lines.
           This was one of the blessings of COBOL. You controlled the input and output, there was no need to rely on third party applications for any part, which is what is actually going on nowadays when the code calls a print module. It happens regularly that somebody comes along unannounced and changes the module without saying anything, then issues an update that you are supposed to somehow know about but more likely learn when your system quits working. The solution? You pay me for updates. That would put a stop to the nonsense instantly.
           Something I used to do a lot was compound statements. That’s where a single command line performs a variety of tasks. That was the mark of a great programmer, so it is no wonder this has fallen out of favor. In the past decade, I’ve programmed only in C+ (the Arduino) and BASIC. But I’ve coded in CSS, javascript, Python, HTML, and SQL. None of which I like.

ADDENDUM

           Ha, did you read about the Tesla crash. Did I just laugh? Yes, because they were warned and warned and warned. That’s two less millennial moron oxygen wasters. Go ahead and glorify them as heroic pioneers, because I can imagine them in their last moments desperately trying to find the “topiary eschewal circumvention” button on their idiotic flat screens. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, NEVER trust anything programmed in C+ by a millennial. These people’s brains are permanently altered by indoctrination, political correctness, and genetically modified consumables. That makes 23 self-driving accidents that we know about. You cannot fix stupid.
           Note that even had they found the button, they would still have to sign up for a 30-day free trial and skip the ads.
Last Laugh