October 19, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 19, 2023, remember Synthesia?
Five years ago today: October 19, 2019, tropical storm day.
Nine years ago today: October 19, 2015, off to Kansas.
Random years ago today: October 19, 2019, 9 days behind.

           Silver is approaching $34 for the first time in years. It’s a bank panic as they dump certificates (see addendum). The price of $35 is a ceiling, if exceeded, lets silver take a run. The trick is always the timing. I guessed wrong last time. How about a hearty breakfast as my food mention and we tackle the scooter shed? Nothing else is going on, I was in the shed four hours before noon, a beautiful Florida day. Shown here is a box panel I am staining with an oak finish. Mind, don’t move here for the weather. If I had been in charge, I would have changed a lot of things in this place.

           One is that I would have made it far easier for people to live here between November and May, where there actually is nice weather. Florida should have taken advantage of that, but no. To live like that, you pretty much have to own and operate two places and most people struggle with one. I wrote abut this long ago, how the property laws and utilities and tax system is geared to gouging the housing and labor markets until it becomes too expensive to show up just for the season. The prime example is the phone and electric.

           Both offer “plans” to hold you phone number and electricity while you are away so that you don’t have to pay the expensive new connection fee each time you arrive. Then your realize the “plan” is more expensive than just paying the regular bill. The way to imagine Florida is an analogy I’ve made before. Imagine that somebody showed up here and found if you left everything alone, it would get along just fine. So he went over each aspect and feature and wrecked or spoiled something so you now have to pay to be left out of his loop. It’s probably not true, all I’m saying is if you think of it so, you’ll avoid many an unpleasant surprise.

           Just when you think nobody could possibly make speakers any cheaper, you find something. This photo shows the nice metal casing but the speaker would “frap” at very quiet volumes. Thinking the cone must be cracked, I took the cover off and found there was no cone. The speaker was actually a square piece of that political lawn sign material. Once I stopped laughing, I threw it away, this picture shows me ripping out the speaker core for the magnet. The rest is not worth throwing away.

           When is a political rally not a rally? Let’s ask Harris. She has taken to appearing on stage for as little as six minutes. Just long enough to rattle off some rehearsed talking points. She is doing so badly there is no doubt the Democrats can only win by a massive steal. They must plan to get away with it or declare martial law if anyone tries to stop them. It is now down to the last possible moments for anything to happen that would have real impact. They will never certify the election if Trump wins, they’ve been quietly giving themselves the power to do that over the past five election cycles.

Picture of the day.
A.I. generated white girl.
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           I built a box for my biscuit joiner, took a couple hours this afternoon. A perfect day in the shade. The box is plain, with rabbet joints glued and screwed, no lid, solid 3/4 inch planks. No finish other than sanding with 60 grit. It’s for storage, not transpo, so skip the lid for now. I’m going to stain some wood later and call it a Saturday. A lot of smaller chores got done and I realize I’m out of breaker panel slots. The original service had just 12 blanks. Double slots are needed for the stove, water heater, and sub-panel. It seems to me there are too many breakers.

           There is the stove, okay. The hot water heater. And when I moved in they had one of those monster combination A/C and heater units, which was junk. There is also a double breaker that services the sub-panel . Maybe I’ll get lucky and find there is a 240V line already installed and I just have to run the wiring.            I did some of that in the shed. I’ve opened a doorway into the compressor room but it me
ans relocating some of the circuit wiring around the cutout. Fine, instead of junction boxes, what I do is just install another outlet at the nearest handy location. Hence, whenever you need a plug in around here, check around before reaching of an extension cable.

           The next pic is the open-top box for the biscuit joiner. It can be changed into a rather nice box by adding a lid, but for now it can serve as a tray for the joiner. I neglected other things to build this box and it got this far in record time. No errors, all cuts, pilot holes, everything in the correct order, no back and forth. So finally, eight years later, I can build a box to roughly the dimensions I want without driving myself bonkers.

           Oh, goodie, we get to talk money again. Over the years I’ve made both fun and sarcasm that by the time I’m hurting, others will be crying. I can’t speak for others, but I’m hurting. Two items will slay in the next 100 days. Property taxes and auto insurance. They are standard and predictable but they have also gone up enough to cause me a headache. There will be stretch between November 15 and December 26 or 29 when no amount of brains or planning will suffice if anything goes wrong. The Reb and I only share data on the finances in common, but I’m an old hand at inferences. Equally alarming is that the effect of the recent calamities will not recover until sometime in May 2025. Hey, at least I know what’s coming down the pike.

           So I did the logical thing for Saturday. I drove over to Bartow and attended the oldest club mentioned in these books since I got here. I predicted the downfall of both revenues and atmosphere and I was right. The regulars that kept the place going are gone. It’s down to one or two good weekends a month and that is not going to cover the nut. (TMOR, cover the nut is an American expression meaning the minimum amount you have to bring in to keep the doors open.) This was a payday weekend yet there were only 14 people present, only 4 of whom I vaguely recognized. The regulars are gone along with the atmosphere.
           I’ve warned many clubs that Karaoke is not live, it is a long-run non-starter. It will fade away and by then you have lost your people. The process is irreversible, you cannot unscramble that egg. No way I could have known this club would decline so rapidly but nor does in surprise me. The locals have moved on and once they find a comfortable spot, kiss them good-bye. I sand a couple tunes to the almost empty room which garnered a consistent audience response. An audience of strangers who will not be back here next week.

ADDENDUM
           Why silver and not gold? Be practical, if you need a loaf of bread, nobody has change for an ounce of gold. And if you try to sell ounces of gold for cash, you will quickly learn the only buyers are the dealers and they all know each other, ahem. The way silver manipulation works is by quoting both real silver and certificate silver on the same chart. If real silver rises, banks can force the price quote down by trading masses of paper silver at a lower price.

           Here’s the US space drone. It’s huge, around a quarter the size of the shuttle. Thirty feet long and ten feet tall. It’s been undergoing tests for years now, far more than I would have expected. Notice it has the ablative tiles, so it is designed for re-entry. But why bother, doesn’t the Air Force have all those they need, plus the upcoming SpaceX launchers.

           Called the X-37, the total cost is hush-hush, but each launch sets the taxpayer back around $200,000,000. To me, it is another useless boondoggle. It does nothing that cannot be done better and cheaper and it embodies no new technology. It flies around in circles testing crackpot ideas like “space domain awareness”. NASA has gone woke. If there are any cost savings, it will be via SpaceX. Anything “reusable” NASA touches winds up costing hugely more that the throw-away components they were supposed to replace.

Last Laugh