One year ago today: June 3, 2020, LayLay R.I.P.
Five years ago today: June 3, 2016, still moving in.
Nine years ago today: June 3, 2012, not another band . . .
Random years ago today: June 3, 2015, real estate hunting.
The Pig is free [see note] and Italy is outraged. I remember back in 1996 reading of his arrest and that he was put away for life. In Italy, life is 25 years, because he’s back on the streets. Still, that’s one up on America, where only Republicans get jail sentences like that. It’s a soggy morning in central Florida and today my big plan is to get a haircut. Nice, if you day is getting underway so casual. I stocked up on groceries and confirm inflation is 33%. This won’t hurt me as bad as them, but still. I’m going to sock more money into some Internet business shortly, it’s my opinion that those who fail are largely underfunding their startups. What say you?
Here’s a great shot of the peach tree. New leaves keep appearing but at a slower rate. I’m happy it’s still growing but have not seen any peaches yet. I know so little about these things.
Employees quitting rather than return to the office. I could have used this some thirty years ago, since I was smack in the center of the corporate cubicle environment. The office politics was ferocious, the cost of commuting took a whack out of your pay, and I never gave a hoot about being popular with the work gang. Only once did I ever go out drinking with the boys, and they dragged me into a strip bar with no live music. I’d rather such people stayed home. A lot. Because I believe natural dumb bastards at large should stay at home out of courtesy.
Take NASA and the Marscopter, now barely managing a few simple maneuvers. Read the fine print, it is things like timestamps and navigation errors. Folks, these things do not exist in Nature, they have to be injected into the scheme intentionally by malicious idiots. Machinery tested in Death Valley does not mysterious wait to be flown to Mars before suddenly revealing mission-critical defects unless somebody built that capability in. I mean, who even builds a copter that can’t fly itself?
How can I say this? Because I am a trained programmer, two advanced degrees. I know it is considerably harder to build a copter that screws up in said manner than to build one that works properly. I hear a squeaky voice in the background saying if I can do this, why don’t I work for NASA? All I can say is that person is you really have not been following along, have you? Why should I ever again get stuck doing all the hard work without being paid extra? It’s not like you can walk into NASA and say, “Hey, I’ll program your damn rocket but first get rid of all these slacktards because I am not working with mental midgets."
Wait, there’s more. The computer era is infamous for failure when it comes to descriptive terms. This has spread to the user level, where I just got the runaround again. There are several types of MRI, being that MRI is the description of a process or the clinic that performs it. So where to medical offices get off using the word as if you know what picture of clinic they are referring to at the moment. They confirm they got my MRI, of which I’ve had four this year. They never specify which, so I’m stuck contacting them back to find out. What a waste of time.
[Author's note 2022: The Pig is one of many nicknames for the Mafia hit man Brusca. Here's how they caught him. He had a mobile phone which the police were tapping. In those days, they could not track phones, so they could only listen. The police motorcycles in Italy have a characteristic exhaust sound. One day they were listening and heard of of the motorcycles drive past in the background. A careful check of every path driven by the policemen at that time led them to where Brusca was having dinner.]
English driftwood shop.
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Finding the A/C block kit was easy compared to finding a shop that will order them. Turns out there is some difficulty with even the bigger shops with using anything but their own suppliers. Then I discover there are many known issues with Chrysler circuit boards. My right real signal light kind of works when it wants to. And I had a squabble with a Wal*Mart employee who would not give me a straight answer. I see they are still selling the 18V drills, but not the batteries, so I know the batteries exist. It’s useless to tell me there is no such thing when I’ve got a picture of it. Oh, I know what she meant, but that was NOT an answer to my question. She represents the bottom of the American Food chain. And don’t stand there playing on the phone on my time.
Who remembers that Ron guy who plays guitar? He was at the coffee shop and wants to start a full band. He got some kind of job transfer that gives him time again so I listened closely. Here’s the synopsis. Him and his brother, both pool sharks, sing harmony. Ron is from Nashville and has a better idea of entertaining the audience than the most locals. Yes, I said he wants a big band, but let's be realistic. The raw materials for such a group do not exist in this vicinity. But I’ve jammed with him and he knows the trick is to form a small band and add on later.
Most duos I’ve played in got that way by other people not showing up, so I’m amenable to the idea. Ron tends to dominate a stage and he knows a band is like joining family. I can’t recall his guitar style, it was too long ago. But give me somebody who strums on time and the audience soon figures out what’s really going on.
ADDENDUM
The leftist are on about somebody turning down the microphone of a speaker who tried to abuse Memorial Day to make racist comments. Such actions are unpopular, but Democrats don’t care about that. They want Freedom of Speech to mean they can say anything they want anywhere and any time they want. Then whine about the consequences like a Southern Airlines union mouthpiece. Amazon rebrands its exhausted workers as “industrial athletes”. I don’t like Amazon, but I cannot blame them, for the following reason.
As I’ve said, American capitalism is not horizontal. You cannot open a shop, Brit-style, and make a decent living for your family. In America, you must continue to claw upwards. You must continually expand, franchise, and borrow, which is our sorry substitute for competition. Try to just run your shop at a comfortable level and you’ll get either a long, slow decline, or get wiped out with a superstore opens on the edge of your town. Do I feel sorry for Amazon workers and their 10-hour “megacycle” shifts, or do I say they are getting exactly what they bargained for? They want to be one big happy family, let them.
Enter MicroSoft with the new Windows 11. Total spyware, user tracking, and rumored to turn your unit into a crypto-mining device between keystrokes. It will also allow your neighbors to tap into your unused bandwidth and is chock-full of “features” that cannot be disabled. As for performance improvement or anything really new, that has not happened since 1995. Expect this to launch in 21 days. There is also talk of making your search requests public. Yep, as I said two decades ago, time for a new Internet.
Latest American business trend? Fake a cyber attack to double your prices. There have been plenty of warnings from sources (like this blog) about letting your entire business operation become dependent on computers. Latest scam? Meatpackers from Brasil. Ask yourself, what is it they are doing that makes a slaughterhouse vulnerable to computer hackers? The answer is easy—setting you up. That’s a big part of the gig economy.
The lumber, computer chip, and pipeline scams show you there is no such thing as a “temporary price increase”. My business is done on computers, but they are hardened to attack. All functions except communications are shielded from the Internet. Only the “finished” product is ever linked to the outside, and even then I turn off my router when leaving the keyboard for any length of time. Inconvenient? That depends on how large a ransom you can afford.
