One year ago today: June 9, 2021, I peek at Gab.com.
Five years ago today: June 9, 2017, You must read “Actual Innocence”.
Nine years ago today: June 9, 2013, no plastic parts.
Random years ago today: June 9, 2014, early crowdfunding comments.
Five minutes out there this morning and I was ready for an air-conditioned movie. Except the nearest theatre is 15 miles away. Here’s my lawnmower crash kit, inspired b Lem, this is a set from Harbor Freight. I wonder if those colors match my socket set? Later, they don’t match up at all, way to go HF. I see the pawls on my lawnmower are hooped. I’ll try to find a video, but right now they are on there with a screw that will strip long before it will loosen. This is what the once-great America has sunk to for allowing “tolerance”. It gave every weirdo and crackpot a free hand.
Ticket 01: 12-18-19-20-32
Ticket 02: 12-16-25-26-29
Ticket 03: 05-14-22-28-29
Ha, I warned you no good would come of the $600 transaction reporting law. They are going after people who use on-line services, which I also warned you about in 2004. These services are not your friends and they are not the same as cash. Those who’ve been flip-selling on eBay, Etsy, or Craigslist are now IRS targets. If you clean out your shed once a year and sell your old stuff, if you can’t back up what you paid for it, that is all taxable income—and you can bet they will get aggressive.
I’ll tell you who is a pain in the neck. People who link to pay sites, these [links] go by a number of names but you don’t know they want you to pay until you get there--which is probably not what you wanted. It's bait and switch. The sites themselves you can’t avoid, but I mean the asswipes who post a tempting link on a free site, but when you get there it is NYT with their mitt out for money. And since these outfits do nothing about it (a warning sticker would be nice), here’s a workaround I’m surprised more people have not figured out.
[Author's note: I'm familiar with copyright laws and realize a lot of what is free was lifted, but I hark back to the warning I issued in 1996. If you don't want something copied, don't display it on the washroom walls. I warned these companies to develop a parallel technology to sell things like painting, music, and news. Because anything on the Internet stands to be copied.
Instead, they went for the quick and easy "me first" money. Now, to make up for it, they want you to pay twice, once for a "membership" and their sites are still plastered with intrusive advertising. My take is if they somehow rope you into even looking at such sites, they've been paid by wasting my time. I have a policy of never doing business with such people.]
If you think battery fires are confined to English buses, try smart phones. More than one house has been set ablaze. And 3D printers should always be monitored. Now somebody is suing the manufacturer and retailer for not warning that the thing gets kind of hot. A Chinese guy died in the fire. I located an on-line video on repairing starter pawls. It was one complicated job on a Toro, but the unit I have lets me get right at the mechanism by removing the housing.
Another change is now that I know a bit, I can spot who else is doing this kind of repairs. If you’ve read this far, you know to deal only in cash, boys. Always pay your taxes, but no sense making life any easier for the feds. It’s not like they give you any breaks. Actually, in a way I see their point. There must be thousands of people buying and selling on-line without the paperwork. But attacking the peasants just means they [the hoi polloi] move on to the next thing and they [the feds] can’t really shut down the flea markets, can they? Ha, the way things are going flea markets may be the economy by November. Florida gas is now $4.75 a gallon.
In tech news, MicroSoft is again tinkering with solid-state boot ups, a job normally done on by HDD. It’s a thinly-disguised move to prevent piracy and will make remote monitoring and control of your machine both easy and undetectable. Known as SSD (solid state drives) they are already common on laptops for faster starts but they are generally too expensive a way to boot desktops. Since they are not about to try raising the price of office size computers, you can bet Redmond has some other motive for even considering this change.
Lockheed silent 8-hr electric drone.
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The brutal humidity kept me indoors, which includes some work in the shed. I need a much larger fan in there, maybe something through the wall. The transplanted papaya tree likes the weather, here it is growing onl once it reaches the height of the shed where it is in full sunlight. The mower is apart, I have the pull start mechanism on the bench and the brass screw keeping the pawls in place is jammed in there. I don’t have a bolt extractor kit or impact driver. Otherwise, the entire housing has to be replaced with an identical part, or I could just use an electric drill with a big socket, if I knew the right size. This mower was sold by Sears and not one of the exploded diagrams shows this part or the size.
Javelin anti-tank missiles are still popular, despite a horrifying price tag, around $200,000 per shot. For all the talk of the Russian T-80 costing $4 million each, the more likely opponent in the Ukraine is the upgraded T-72 at about $2 million a piece. The Javelin has a 95% hit ratio, so that’s a bargain in military logic. And it still vastly outperforms the LAW series that was somewhat of a joke in Viet Nam. The Javelin operator needs to think ahead, since it takes several minutes to cool the thermal site before the missile can seek.
The warhead has two charges, the first to defeat reactive armor, the second is hollow-point. The missiles range is longer than the tank’s machine guns, which is handy in flat open terrain like you got around Kiev. The missile is slow and leaves a vapor trail. It is too slow to shoot down most aircraft. Did you know the B-52 is still flying? At a cost of $70,000 per hour to fly, we have 40 of the H models as the only “recallable” deterrent.
Here’s some trivia, the remaining B-52s (around 60 total) are being retro-fitted with Rolls-Royce engines. Why? Because the advent of hypersonic missiles means these airplanes can launch a (rumored) 116,000 lb payload from 1500 miles away, something no other military airplane can rival. They no longer have to approach the target, so size and speed aren’t that important. They will be networked in flight, each plane becoming an airborne control center. Not bad for an old tub, that regardless of what you hear, was always a piece of junk that never worked right. The original jet motors had to be started by explosives that emitted poison gasses.
ADDENDUM
Muslin riots in England over a movie. That country is ripe for a dictatorship that will crack down on these immigrants who have no intention of assimilating. Russia has sentenced captured mercenaries to death, as it should be. Watch the liberals leap to their aid. That’s an interesting question. Are captured mercenaries prisoners of war? Or are they considered volunteers? The same question reworded, are they in it for the money or the cause?
That’s quite the racket, you sell a billion tickets and the prize is only $1 million. That’s a joke, but still, a lot of money seems to be falling through the cracks in that system.
In similar news, Google ganged a group of Xenon computers together and calculated Pi to 100 trillion places, beating the old record of 63 trillion +/-. The operation took around five months. Ordinary computers cannot store results on this level, so allow me to explain. The computer does not actually keep dividing 22/7. It used the Chudnovsky Formula, which looks like this: 1/ π = 12 ∑ k = 0 ∞ ( − 1) k ( 6 k)! ( 13591409 + 545140134 k) ( 3 k)! ( k!) 3 640320 3 k + 3 / 2 (as usually stated, with no superscripts. It spits out strings of number 14 at a time on each iteration, meaning any error is compounded but who cares?
The stock market is a step closer to crypto-currency, meaning it will become a complete gambling den controlled by insiders. It is to be sold as “commissionless”, but it means truncating the decimal points to rake off their cut. The danger, of course, is they can RobinHood you any time. But nobody said gamblers were intelligent. In fact, anyone intelligent enough to come up with a winning idea is banned from the casinos. Expect the same at Wall Street.
