One year ago today: November 2, 2022, old tactics.
Five years ago today: November 2, 2018, MLM still finds suckers.
Nine years ago today: November 2, 2014, China is 1/4 desert.
Random years ago today: November 2, 2017, paying the toll.
A cold spell and I’m out of hot chocolate. I know, I’ll use this as an excuse to drive to Winter Haven, mail letters, buy a money order, do some banking, and grab a coffee. No wait, what’s this? I turned the page on my calendar and see that once a year, sometimes, I’m allowed to eat a cheeseburger with fries.
That would normally mean the 15th, but I’ve got a hankering now. Here’s a picture of the ultimate electric bass speaker. Now, what was the name of that restaurant in the NE end that I liked so much? Boost confirms they don’t automatically update your due date, but they definitely will take your money. Also, once your plan “detunes” itself, it develops a preference for Zoomer sites like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, which I never use. Never.
Yep, my taxes went up 28% by the ruse of revaluing my property 30% higher than last year. There were no changes to the criteria normally associated with “improvement”, the siding on the house has been the same since the 1940s. It’s a money grab, pure and simple. The more expensive the house, the more City Hall knows they have you over a barrel, remember that when you buy in America. They know you can’t just pack up and leave. One aspect that sticks in my craw is that the way the gradient works, I have to pay around 88% as much property tax as somebody whose property is worth up to seven times more.
Everybody around here knows I got the last good deal in America, a two bedroom for $18,000. My tax bill is over $900 now, but somebody whose place is worth $125,000 only pays $122 more than me. Caltier is technically supposed to pay enough to cover that tax, but only pay it in an emergency where it cannot be paid any other way. For October, Caltier paid only $74.37. The Caltier on-line statement has a curious statistic, the percentage of return. This figure grows as the year progresses and this month stated 5.75%. But I don’t know of what. If it is my return, that must be quite the calculation as my balance varies every month. Maybe it is the average return for all of Caltier, who knows maybe the two figures are the same.
Other outfits that don’t look good this week include Ford, whose stock fell 15% from disappointing sales of their Evs. And Moderna as fewer than 2% of Americans go for their latest vaccine, causing a serious loss on their bottom line. The rumor is they also lost 15%. These wild fluctuations do not affect me directly, but millions of Americans are some combination of gamblers and credit junkies, only they call themselves investors and speculators. JZ, for example, considers lottery tickets to be an investment.
This got me thinking how Biden intends to draft women. He has no choice for cannon fodder since he’s ruined any chances of recruitment by turning the US military into “Careers for Queers”. He needs an army with no loyalty to the country, only to who issues their paychecks and feeds them. There are still a lot of traditional soldiers that few people believe would obey Biden if the country goes south.
Some wind turbines.
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By noon, I’m not feeling so great. I stopped at the Thrift, the gals there were, in their day, quite the adventuresome lot. Mulberry is a small town that gives you two choices. Watch TV all day or fool around. The one gal, when she was in her early twenties, dated a divorced man. Unheard of back then. Well, he took her on a vacation trip to some port in South America, starts with a B. Anyway he takes off on her and leaves her stranded for three weeks until she found her own way back. They bought a bunch of takeout-food they could not finish, so I had breakfast tere instead of downtown.
I wonder how many they lost, you see, the radiators and other vital parts of the plane were under the wings and the Germans were only bad shots in the Hollywood movies. Any strafing runs could expect a flurry of well-aimed rifle and machine gun fire. A single bullet in a radiator and you’ve got five minutes max to find a place to land. I found accurate documentaries on the Spitfire in this regard difficult to find, and even then they were laced with propaganda. That Hitler “seized” power and Hitler “began rearmament”, (In reality, Hitler was elected and he began to replace Germany’s forces after it became clear the Allies had not disarmed as agreed.)
Have you seen the new YouTube format? It really isn’t new, it’s become more television-like. The shift is plainly away from information and toward entertainment. It is far more difficult (time-wise) to find anything but the “most viewed” topics which have the most appeal to morons. It reminds me of the old NOVA fake robot club, where you were expected to look things up rather than learn anything.
Some time in the library and that made up the day. They had some router and table saw books on sale, I bought two. Sat down to read them a bit and it was almost 6:00PM when I woke. Yep, the fallout from my insomnia, and the Reb calls. Awake now but yawning constantly, I’m going to let you go early today. I soon became unsteady, it’s lack of sleep. Enough that I won’t do any work in the shed today. Don’t trust myself around paint or tools. For several hours now, I’ve been sitting still and drinking ice cold water to settle my tummy. No, it’s not COVID. I’m quite off balance. Class dismissed, except for the following addendum, which is not required reading.
While I lack the patience for Arduino projects, I keep an eye on trends and beginning around 2020 I note an increase in IoT themes. There is a move away from scientific and robotics usage and more toward health and IoT that signals a dumbing-down of the microcontroller clientele. It reveals the disconnect between what is useful and all the aspects of IoT that foretell the horrors of doing it wrong. At this time it is plant sensors and pet feeders. It is only a matter of time before these connections begin to interfere with each other. Your fridge blows a solenoid and a mission to Mars fails. You’ll see.
It’s amusing to see ten years later so many of the projects and concepts I came up with on my own are now standard and you can buy them as kits. One of my first ideas was a sun-tracking module to keep your solar panels pointed at he best spot for maximum output. There are a dozen variations on my theme now available. Yep, somebody is making money at it where I could not have gotten much further than the idea itself. Robots, my friend, are expensive. But reading is not, so there is an addendum today about some reading.
More correspondence to Orlando shows the tiny toothpick H-square as the smallest size are almost an ideal project for 3D printers. The size and the square itself are what they seem to do best. Dozens of on-line videos show demos that tend toward square or rectangular shapes. Hey, how’s that for anticipating a use 20 years in advance? Ta-da.
ADDENDUM
I’ve been reading up on some scaling functions with the Arduino. I may dig out my supply cases and take inventory of what I have. Maybe build a box that holds all this stuff? Scaling is where you have a sensor (for example) that takes readings from, say, 0 to 1024, but your display ranges from, say -40° to 212°. None of this happens by accident. I also know somewhere I have an Ethernet shield that I would like to operate, just to say in my life I had done it. Right now, I’m going to go get a haircut. And listen to more of the space war audiobook that has not yet got to any action. Instead, everybody is riled up not because of what the President said, but because he delivered the speech from the space station. Typical small-minded crap but what does that tell you?
There is a reason I looked at scaling and it has to do with the fact that all available Arduino (and robotic) sensors in general are very short range. I won’t go into detail, but the military operates in miles, not inches. What could I do (sheer speculation) that would be of any potential value. To start, take a look at this latest generation of super-tiny gear motor. The gears make them slow but surprisingly strong. I think these sell for around $2 each, which I’ll get to.
I thought of the range of military sensors. There ia a tradeoff. They must either be located a safe distance behind the combat zone, or brought close enough to be vulnerable to counter-fire. Either way is expensive and makes them costly assets. My thinking continues that the transmit range is at least double that which the reflection can be detected by the source. Thus, you can see him before he sees you and simply getting him to know he’s been detected can cause him to shut off his transmitter, which is as effective as destroying it at the moment. How could I, a non-military type, accomplish something like that?
First off, none of this is fact, it’s all conjecture. I often quit a project at the stage I simply know I could build it if I have to. But I’ve completed enough such projects in my life that only a fool of a detractor can suggest a lack of capability. So the challenge for the next 24 hours is how can one, on a budget of $50 or less, cause an enemy to shut down a million-dollar radar station using readily available materials? Return tomorrow for what I come up with. Arduino, Spitfires, gear-motors, hmmm?
