One year ago today: June 30, 2020, on the Cambridge study.
Five years ago today: June 30, 2016, early working conditions.
Nine years ago today: June 30, 2012, cortected?
Random years ago today: June 30, 2015, simply to insulate myself.
Here’s a turkey pie fresh out of the oven. Oops, looks like I did not move fast enough. I was due to fix a roof leak on my van. The sun roof was sealed shut, nobody told me and I hit the button. In the few minutes it took to go grab the ladder and get up there, it turned from sunny to a tropical downpour. Back inside, there was nothing planned so you get pie. Trivia, why are the old ladies who pick up young guys called cougars? Because cougars live by picking off the weakest prey. It was coined by bartenders. Makes sense to me, the winners find each other very rapidly, the rest of the party is for the leftovers—with the exception of a minority who are actually there to just party.
The rest of the morning is taken off to celebrate. I’ve mentioned my method of learning things I find complicated by memorizing small parts at a time. Such it was with celestial navigation, I described how I broke it down to four parts. The sextant, calculating the GP, looking up distance and direction, and finally drawing the LOP. Each one I can do, often having to refer back to the text for fine points, like the direction of the Meridian Angle. I do not pursue these daily, because I know I’ll get it eventually. And today she went “click”. It was a familiar path for me, working backward from the results to figure what the instructions meant. What got me thinking on the topic was a comment that sextant navigation is still the most secure method as it cannot easily be detected by the enemy.
And Biden again loses as he proposes a 40% death tax. This really hurts mainly small family businesses and farms, where the property wealth is not usually in cash. This sort of tax goes against the principle that nothing should be taxed twice. The money that build the businesses and farms was already taxed when it was earned. Having said that, I am against the absolute free transfer of huge sums between generations, even if I can’t come up with a fair method to fix things. It’s personal. Remember when I was 18, I had the treat of working next to a chum who was born rich. He had everything, even his noon lunch handed to him, yet we were both taxed the same amounts. He saved every penny, I was barely able to get by that summer.
Do the arithmetic and don’t underthink the problem. There are 20 working days in most months. I had to work the first 7 of them to take home the rent, and I wasn’t living in the southwest end like my pal. This was my brush with the real world. I had to quit school to get a car to get a job to get enough money to operate a car to get a job that paid enough to go to school to get a good job. I became one of millions of victims to that formula. By local standards, that made me the poorest of the dirt poor in America, and the rich kid gets away with paying the same tax that impoverishes me. This is not the best time to come around asking for charity for the lame and halt who are already collecting welfare, that is already living on my dime.
New York State Prison.
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I had the ladder set up on the van, that’s how it knew to rain all afternoon. In place of that, I worked on the drywall for an hour more. Nope, that is not my trade. One drywall screw broke off in the middle of the largest area, sticking out just far enough to be seen. No way it would come out with pliers or grips, I was finally able to stand on a chair and clip it off enough below the surface to mud the thing over. Another day shot with minimal advance. And from more careful measurements on the flooring, I will have to buy three sheets of plywood or I’ll run short by a 4” strip that I cannot fudge.
Then off to England to become “the Italian Whore”, becoming reputedly point the richest woman in Europe. In the open English society, she seems to have slept with everyone including the King’s (illegitimate) daughter. She was, along with her sister, the first woman to publish her memoirs. It’s a good thing they had all that money, because there is something I just don’t see in most Italian women, and if I did, they [these two] don’t have it.
Looking at REITs, I see there’s a group of like-minded bozos. You’d think if they were truly competing with each other, the one thing they would make easy is finding out the minimum investment. How much do I have to come up with to open an account. I’m now on around my tenth set of search criteria and no luck. I’m thinking these companies are different that when I first looked so long ago, that now they are sold in 100 lot shares. Even so, there have to be exceptions. These funds now specialize, some go only for campus rentals, others hotels only. I’ve noticed many have privately held classes of shares, normally a huge warning alarm.
Hmmm, what’s more likely is finding a mutual fund that accepts even dollar amounts. The minimum seems to be $1,000 and the most usual is $2,500. Many list $0 but don’t elaborate what they mean. As usual, their websites aren’t any help. I’ll keep looking as I don’t like going through a broker unless there’s no alternative.
A persistent drizzle kept me indoors, where I reviewed a considerable pile of the work I’ve done on celestial navigation. Yep, it was accurate, but I did not have confidence until the entire process made sense. You don’t calculate your position, you determine a bunch of information about two points that are contained in the Nautical Almanac and then find out where you are in relation to the point (carefully chosen) that is nearest to you. And you need to do this at least twice at different times.
The first casualty of war, said Churchill, is truth. If so, the second these days will be those GPS satellites. Hitler revolutionized warfare by demonstrating if you destroy an enemy’s ability to make war, you don’t have to defeat his military forces. If any GPS satellites remain after the first day, they would be intentional, since people only think it is them using the satellite. That’s not a receiver in your car, that is a transponder. So, difficult as most would find it, sextant navigation remains the easiest way to find your position without tipping off the other side.
