One year ago today: March 31, 2024, the end of Dollar Tree.
Five years ago today: March 31, 2020, remember Forex?
Nine years ago today: March 31, 2016, no silver, no trails.
Random years ago today: March 31, 2018, “the kitchen is worse”.
It’s awake to Bird City, what music, I slept in until 8:00AM and I feel like working today. First, the big breakfast and check the news. Here is a list of the countries that sent relief to Thailand when USAID was not available. That was one short list. In another revelation of how much my world has decelerated, this morning I was on-line looking for a good small frying pan. The one I have is that Korean brand that is never supposed to wear out, but somehow it now sticks a bit, and I like my pans slippery, insert groupie joke here.
I fired off a letter to Mitch to make adequate repairs to that wall. The water damage can be seen on the siding. No king studs, no trimmers, no jack studs, he’s asking for problems ten years down the line if he doesn’t upgrade. He is very active, snowboarding and tryking, but I know his brother and the family is prone to aftereffects of any harsh exercise. He does not want to be repairing floors like I am when it’s the 2030s.
MicroSoft has slipped in a command requiring new Win 11 installs to open an account. Good luck if you don’t have Internet. I have not seen it, but there is apparently a “new” version of Win 98 on the market that works with the latest hardware. What do they know? Is something about to change. And it appears somebody purchased a fortune in platinum futures just before the market closed yesterday. So, here’s some trivia. Rain that falls on the far western area of Lake Superior takes 204 years to reach the Atlantic.
The mayor if Istanbul.
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A wasted afternoon. It was plenty of work. I finally said to hell with trying to figure out how the last guy repaired that kitchen area, so I tore out the lower half of the walls to the bare studs. This involved moving the temporary counter I build, which proceeded to fall by itself, as the studs it was supposed to be screwed into were not there. I forgot the last guy was left-handed. Anyway, I’ll need another hour to sift through the dirt to find what fell there. I had planned on moving some wiring but it is now nearly 7:00PM. Don’t start wiring just before dark.
April will bring change. Good or bad, Trump has disrupted the Deep State. They are still powerful and deadly but they will never have the sway of ten years ago, not in our lifetimes. If Trump flops tomorrow, someone will take his place. He continued to pursue policies that have overwhelming approval rates—although his slowness at deportations and zero arrests so far are biting into his popularity.
Strange behavior in the gold market. It is up a thousand bucks in one year but hardly a ripple in silver prices. A pressure cooker? And April makes end of a second year of stagnant house sales. Nobody coming in at the bottom. It’s not the same but similar to what brought the market to a standstill in 2006 – 2008. But that was not the collapse it should have been. Something like a million homeowners were saved because the banks didn’t have money for enough lawyers to foreclose on them all. Miami, even if it is far away and not that big, is your indicator. Nothing is moving and existing houses, insurance rates have tripled in the past few years. Statistics say the average housing insurance, which is required by banks if you have a mortgage, is now $11,000 per year.
ADDENDUM
Keeping an eye for unusual investments, I looked at Interlune. That’s the outfit that wants to mine He-3 (Helium 3) worth $9.5 million per pound. Problem, it’s rare but there’s some on the Moon. That crunchy stuff the astronauts walk on is regolith or crumbled rock and it seems to be ten feet thick. It has been bombarded by cosmic rays and samples from the Apollo missions show the He-3 is present—but I’d need convincing there are larger deposits. It is estimated there are less than 50 lb of it on Earth. What is the stuff used for?
I don’t know the process, but He-3 has the property of remaining liquid down to just above absolute zero. It is used to cool the cores of quantum computers, a kind of super-refrigerant. What is the primary demand for quantum computers? Well, it seems there is a stop-at-nothing demand for the government to read your e-mail. I use protonmail, reminding people that encryption only works if both parties use it. You are wasting time encrypting then sending it to somebody with gmail or hotmail.
In theory, the most secure current key (2,048 bits) would take 100 centuries to crack, but a quantum computer could do it in less than ten hours. The Chinese have learned to harvest the He-3 from old nuclear warheads. Don’t look for it on eBay, since it is also used to cool super sensitive military radars that can actually see through walls. So the government won’t let anybody else have it. The gas used in party balloons is He-4, which behaves similarly. It is being looked at as a substitute.
Meanwhile the race continues. He-3 can be used to detect medical conditions without using radiation. It is already used by customs to scan for smuggled nuclear weapons and I know nothing about how it is used to detect non-metallic land mines. This element caught my eye since it is the most expensive commodity, makes silver a joke. He-3 can also be used as a power source. It would half the time needed to get to Mars and back. End of research for now.
