One year ago today: April 15, 2024, the Wiley St, bar is gone.
Five years ago today: April 15, 2020, record trip time.
Nine years ago today: April 15, 2016, early DEI observations.
Random years ago today: April 15, 2009, pfzzzt.
I scrounged this table for a thickness planer and kept it in storage. Now I find it is too flimsy for that occupation. That’s top story, unless you want to hear about my haircut and a shake at McDonalds now cost $4.06. The good news is I just scored a $107 worth of lumber for $16.08. Maybe my red shed will get that shingle siding yet. A major breakfast, and then into the KIA dealership for my $136 refund. But when I walked in, they made me an offer. Normally, they do an alignment after an axle repair along with a high-speed balance. Normal price $190, but if I bring the van in tomorrow morning, they’ll do both for the refund. I’m in.
oday’s chasing around the north end of town means two disks of “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” It is now an endless tale of one hard time after another. While I recognize the hardships, I do not identify with them for one major reason. They have a poor people mentality. On they go about familie ties, and loyalty, and hard jobs for low pay. But they financial advice they give each other and their kids is contemptuously feeble. First you save five cents then you save ten cents is a fairy tale you tell pre-schoolers, not your teenage son who has noticed the connection between girls and fast cars.
If that advice worked, everybody would be rich enough. The mother, Katie, is having a third child, her job is scrubbing floors which she did up until she went into labor. Never do these people give any advice about investing or protecting assets, they do not even provide the means for their children to do so. And yes, I have a lot of experience with that. I know all about people who consider your money to be family property. Our leading lady, Francine, is now fourteen and caught up in the middle of this worthless situation.
There is another aspect to this “poverty mentality” that is also due to lack of infrastructure. Many of the individuals in the story possess talents and abilities that should have got them ahead. Johnny was a good singer, Francine wins writing awards, sissy has rich boyfriends, and so on. Everybody has a job, yet not one of them seems to clue the problem is that they don’t have a framework to get ahead—and their wearisome “we’s-poor-but-we’s-folks” attitude is stopping others from getting there. I think this is why so many university studies of poverty miss the point. Nobody wants to state the ugly truth. The studies are all searching for exterior reasons. Or blame.
Taiwanese microchip factory, Arizona.
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This afternoon, the summer humidity is arriving. I hopped in the Hyundai to collect my $136 refund, and the shop said tell you what. Normally the alignment and balancing are a $190 job, how about they do that tomorrow and keep the refund. Deal! You may recall I mentioned there is a slight shimmy right between 65 and 75, my ideal freeway driving speed. The paper work delayed me just enough to opt for a haircut, siesta, and a Festus episode. Except we actually got to see some Matt Dillon along with the painted backdrops.
Next, I measured a spot for the thickness planer. Hmm, this tool is indeed heavier and bigger than I imagined. Just by a few inches and pound visible in the videos, but enough to give me consternation. If I put it anywhere but the back shed, the planned shop vacuum won’t reach. These planers are notorious for producing a mess. There’s the Yamaha scooter seeing daylight for the first time in a couple of years. The Texan says he has a carburetor that fits.
The radical left in England is arresting people for memes and in the USA there is a proverb that leftists can’t meme. The assumption is leftists are on the stupid side, but today I read a serious explanation that really made sense. The article explained how memes are effective because they are built on the reader seeing things as they are. The leftists fail at this because their viewpoints rely on carefully constructed denials of reality. A meme cannot supply the needed layers of selected context. Such preparation is necessary before leftists can even communicate, much less meme.
ADDENDUM
Enjoy the GP positioning, it won’t be much longer until I have the process down pat and you won’t see it again for long stretches. I was having a hard time “entering” the sight reduction tables and although I can now see the connections, I have to choose one method and stick to it. I’m recording this for my own benefit, so it will not be on the exam. The navigation process involves these basic steps:
1) Take a sextant reading and calculate the Geographic Position of the Sun. (GP)What the problem for me was between steps 2 and 3. There are several types of sight reduction and they use differing terms. Also, there are subtle differences in how this process is approached. Yet I have never seen a set of instructions that makes this clear before you start. In fact, most do not even mention which sight reduction method they are using. It is aggravating to get halfway and realize you have the wrong tables.
2) Choose an arbitrary location according to some rules. (AP)
3) Calculate the readings from that arbitrary location. (Sight reduction)
4) Compare the sextant reading to the calculated reading. (Plotting)
Or the table asks for something you never heard of, or has columns labeled H, F, A, and B with numbers that are used but not explained. My least favorite is the “concise” table that seems to be no savings of time at all. How I approached this was to skip the sight reduction and work backwards from the plotting sheets to figure what was needed. Inefficient, yes, but it finally made sense—and taught me I need a lot of practice. That’s what is going on now.
Another quirk is the tables themselves. Too often there is an invisible meaning to where the number sits in the table in relation to other numbers. It takes a while to wrap your head around that one, but sometimes the number you want is “beside” the one you look up or even the difference between them. Having said that, where is the Sun at this moment? We are in eastern Togo. Around ten feet from some sort of farm house that is six miles north of Kara. Population 94,000 with a current temperature of 95°F and pouring rain. The city exists because the Germans build a bridge there in 1902. The local economy remains at subsistence level farming, it takes far more than bridge to fix that.
More interesting is the nearby Lake Volta. It’s a study in why Africa does not work. Two rivers were chosen to flood a valley into the largest freshwater artificial lake in the world, by surface area. Entirely within Ghana, but dominating the region in supply of electricity. This power was so cheap, the original plan was to smelt bauxite (aluminum ore). But local culture made that so impossible that the aluminum companies got the hell out and Ghana had to resort to importing bauxite. Even so, the largest lake industry is virtual child slave labor in the fisheries.
