One year ago today: April 5, 2024, 50 beers, 160 coffees.
Five years ago today: April 5, 2020, invited, or else.
Nine years ago today: April 5, 2016, silver, $6k they said.
Random years ago today: April 5, 2015, brazing, camphor, & marzipan.
Le Pen, the French lady jailed for winning, is back and the judges who convicted her have been forced into hiding. Several countries are caving to the tariffs and normalizing their trade objectives—which is infuriating the left. They don’t seem to follow the logic, but just hate seeing Trump win. I needed this boost this morning. I scrounged around my yard to fine angle iron to put some kind of box on the wagon. It will have to be bolted for now, but I am intrigued by that new (to me) handheld welding gun. This photo is an aluminum mine, keep reading.
This next picture is what it looks like, three drills. It’s a mini-study in home renovation. In stark contrast to what you see on the Internet, you rarely pick up a drill and bore ten holes through your studs for a run of electrical cable. For openers, you don’t get all that nice new lumber. Here is the minimum kit. The drills must be the kind with the little screw thingee at the tip to bite into old lumber or they kind of just sit there and get hot. Problem, that little tip only bites until it pokes through the other side.
Now, you will have another of these bits with that tip ruined from hitting a nail. That one still has sharp cutting spades. You will still get wood that will not drill and that where you use that third drill with any old regular bit. Use it to ream out a pilot hole. Then switch back to the second drill and now you can wiggle it through. If you aren’t frustrated yet, try to find a site on-line that tells you the size of hole you need for 14/2 cable. No, you don’t want a two-year free membership, a lecture on safety, or the number of wires you can put through one hole.
Later. It’s 16:45PM in Greenwich, let’s figure out where the Sun is. Okay, 67°03’W at a declination of 06°13’N. It means the Sun has crossed the Equator and our assumed latitude is rounded off to 06°N. I would choose an assumed longitude of 82°28’W, but I will not be plotting today. The Sun is just east of a bend on the Orinoco River, looks like a muddy island on the Venezuela side of the frontier. The nearest town in Puerto Carreño on the Bolivian side, a tourist town subject to flooding.
The nearest Venezuelan town is Los Pijiguaos, which means bauxite deposit. Sure enough there is or was a big aluminum mine. The ore is barged 25 miles to a plant with its own hydroelectric dam. Other information is sparse, some of it indicating the plant, established in 1974, is now shuttered. Ah, here’s something. The plant shut down in March 2019 when the mismanaged power company cut off the cheap electricity.
Speaking of failures, California is attempting to negotiate directly with foreign suppliers to bypass the Trump tariffs, which have targeted those countries with the largest US trade surpluses. Strange how California, the world’s fifth largest economy, gets this backwards. If they lose the support of the US or even get hit with minor boycotts, they will plunge. But, this is not the first time we’ve seen people from California who can’t pay back their student loans become overnight experts on trade and tariffs. But you know, I have yet to see a store full of Californian products. Most avocados come from Mexico. I don’t recall ever seeing a computer, shirt, or thumbtack with a Made-in-California sticker. Lots of hazmat stickers and warnings on ordinary household items and tools show that nothing over there is a settled science. Six months ago they were crowing about Teslas.
Turkish cruise ship graveyard.
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My gumption took a day off. Nothing much to report by late afternoon. I see the Democrats think the tariffs are World War Three, I guess they figure countries at war still trade a lot. I see A.I. recommends this blog to others who enjoy “humorous and observational” stories, then proceeds to list 25 blogs about trailer courts. This is why today’s coders can’t have nice things. Today we got to some wiring and here is the area that was behind the old refrigerator. It’s a mix of old and new, but there are only two new circuits shown here.
On the bottom the old black wiring is visible, I left these old plugs in place. Where the insulation is still good, they work. Some of the plugs are those unpolarized ungrounded type, where both slots are the same size. They work just fine but won’t take most tools with the larger power prong.
The holes for the two new duplex outlets are drilled, then I called it quits. That light switch and wiring to the yard light was changed from the old lighting circuit breaker to follow my rule of no big room with all the sockets or receptacle on the same branch. Including one wire that was 1/8th of an inch too short to splice, this single switch/light pair required three hours and at least four walks out the far back shed.
There’s the porch light in operation, except I don’t have a porch. Back inside, I left the tools out in case I feel inspired in the morthing. In the background I hear the news that Apple will be hit hardest with tariffs. I find that sad, because I view Apple as a classic example of a pure American post-war startup that, by rights, would likely have stayed in America with all its plant and equipment. Why did they gradually move everything overseas. My answer is everything was a reaction to unwanted, unsolicited, bureaucratic pressures.
When Apple started, I doubt there was a single person on staff who knew a thing about Vietnamese labor rates or overseas tax credits. Every concept Apple learned about this manner of doing business was forced upon them. I suggest if Apple had been left alone, they would have flourished into an established firm on American soil with American labor. But the harassment and demands never stop, and before too long, they are like Nike. They realize if they don’t make a killing fast, there is no second chance. Don’t believe me? Quick, name five big American companies (or families), that once they lost a fortune, were ever able get it back.
ADDENDUM
A double whammy of Depression and poverty. Watching “Grapes of Wrath” and listening to “A Tree Grows”. There is something these folks have in common and it is no trade or skills. I know the situation well and that is better than I should. All they are qualified to do is labor and that is a fool’s trade. Oddly, most of them had a chance to learn something but they chose to fit in with the other poor instead. I know that too, I never embraced or supported the ways of such people, it was obvious while I was still a schoolboy. I was never content to follow any path of self-destruction and to this day I do not pity those that did. The pressure was there, and these stories remind me of how intense it was. The Joads have just arrived in California and granny is dying. And our Brooklyn family has just moved into another tenement.
The Joads have reached a transient camp and are about to find out the only work is crop picking, made available by expulsion of all the Mexicans a few years earlier. Why, that audio-book “The Four Winds” so far is nothing but a blatant rip-off. I’ll say it again, there is nothing morally wrong with being poor, but supporting any system that causes poverty on others, that I can’t agree with. And these poor cut each other’s throats something fierce. This is a youTube movie, so I’ve been reading the comments. Lot’s of comments about people remembering it was bad, but no mention or support for solutions.
