This was a rare catch. Kiki, the older grey female on the left, barely tolerates Marshall, the young tomcat. Maybe they are finally getting acquainted after about 5 years(?).
Trump's Latest Distraction
The Commander in Chump’s current obsession with Amazon is truly entertaining, to say the least. Despite their relentless late-night attacks, it’s easy to see why the comedians just love the Trumpmiester. You can’t make this shyt up. Stumbled upon just now:
“How much longer are the Lemmings going to support this idiot? FACTS: The Post Office makes a tidy profit carrying Amazon packages. Unlike the junk mail we are still deluged with. When will Herr Drumph go after those folks? Next fact: Amazon collects and remits sales tax in all the states which charge it. Unlike many other online businesses – most notably eBay. Trump is going after Amazon because its founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post which keeps annoyingly publishing stories that are less than flattering to El Douchee and his Cabinet of misfits. Donnie – how about we discuss how you and your cabinet are fleecing taxpayers so you can vacation all over the world? Trump didn’t drain the swamp, he restocked it with new species of cretins and grifters.”
Thank you Micheal Steel, whoever you are, for posting the truth. Amazon is probably one of the few big companies currently doing an ethical, good job. They pay decent wages and provide employment to thousands of Americans in an expanding business, meeting growing demand. Comparing or tying that to the USPS in any way whatsoever is so flagrantly absurd only the Trumpster could come up with it.
He should be talking about privatizing the Postal Service (not the VA!). USPS has been a losing proposition almost since day one. What’s that old adage about “…good money after bad?” Would it take much more than re-painting a few thousand trucks and have about half their employees fill out new employment paperwork with FedEx or UPS?
It's Time to Shut Down Facebook
It keeps getting better. Funny how the closer we look, the more dirt (and vermin) we find under the Facebook rock:
“It’s interesting to note that none of the apps examined asked for user permission before starting to track individuals.”
A GooglePlay store review found that over 40% of the most popular Android apps are surreptitiously back-channeling to the Facebook “Audience Network.”
The cocksuckers need to be properly dealt with in court – every single one of them, starting with the Z-boy himself. That little bastard has been attempting to deflect responsibility at every turn, feigning a lack of “deeper technical knowledge” about the issue in his own company. Today he declined a formal invitation to speak to the UK Parliament. Sorry dude, but if that is the case you shouldn’t be running it. Facebook is like a gallon of milk that’s been sitting in the fridge too long. There’s bad stuff going on in there, and the country had a big gulp during the most recent national election. It’s just one of those things that seemed great upfront, but turned out to be a really bad idea because nitwit college kids did not think it all the way through. And when the problems started cropping up YEARS ago they basically ignored it, favoring bigger piles of money instead. Dump it. Full story here.
“Facebook: Yeah, Maybe Now Isn’t the Best Time to Launch Our New Speaker Designed to Spy on You.”
“A lot of people don’t actually believe that Facebook feels bad that user data fell into the wrong hands. They just believe that Facebook feels bad it got caught.”
The bottom line insidious truth in all this is they always knew exactly what they were doing, and continued doing it with impunity for years until they got caught. This is the fundamental issue: the business model is paradoxically flawed. The more people crank up the privacy, the less revenue from targeted advertising and data analysis – in whatever form that takes, legal or not. It just doesn’t work in favor of the people they claim to support.
Don’t Just Delete Facebook – Delete Well.
Media Stupidity
Hopefully people are becoming more aware of the pitfalls involved with today’s media-enhanced society. Russian electioneering and Facebook foible outrage seem to be vying for eyeballs everywhere right now. But the problem runs much deeper and into just about anywhere you look online. Here is a perfect example of how a well-respected medical journal gets it wrong by trying to be everybody’s everything: WebMD Does BBQ.
Of course the findings are preliminary. I’m sure the data is good and they mean well. But where’s the chef? Or Grillmaster? Or just about anybody who understands cooking meat from a culinary standpoint – not just potential hypothetical scientific outcomes thereof. The data and study findings get lost in translation. They warn against high heat and flame as the means to avoid over-cooking meat, but the heat source is irrelevant. Intensity and time are the issues. Whether it is on the BBQ grill or in the kitchen frying pan makes no difference. The best steaks are quickly flame-grilled medium rare, IMHO.
The correct message they are trying to convey is “don’t overcook your meat.” Grilling and broiling do not necessarily over-cook your meat. Newbie BBQ buffs might need to develop better timing and heat control for this purpose. Apparently the problem also afflicts WebMD article authors. They overlook the carcinogen factor in searing meats, but that’s a different topic. Sort of.
After all, they’re just doctors, not chefs. Just presumptuous doctors – or maybe their inexperienced lab assistants? It’s hard to tell from across the Internet.
I wonder if this Includes Pharma Execs?
President Trump on Monday will release a plan to combat the opioid epidemic that includes the controversial move to use the death penalty for some drug dealers.
Last Blast of Winter
This was after the most snow we got so far this season (2 weeks ago) around 7-8 inches:
That was only the 3rd time we had any appreciable accumulation all winter and it’s been bone dry since. The forecast shows no precipitation coming anytime soon, so about half the state is considered back in drought status. Daffodils are up, so watering flora around the house has started again for 2018.
Looks like Spring is here in Northern Colorado – albeit a dry one!
Bye-bye Russians!
Please come back, but just let me know you are a legitimate subscriber! Otherwise get another email address and try again. And OBTW, it wouldn’t hurt to go vote in your upcoming election, with fresh knowledge of why you and/or your bots may not be welcome here.
New Tech Meets Old School
TV’s are now so thin and light! The new 70″ Vizio replacing the 15-year-old Man Cave Sony weighs 61lbs – just over half the weight of the old 60″ unit. They are all designed for wall-mounting these days and the stands, seemingly an afterthought, suck. At least this one does. It’s basically just pieces of bent wire rod bolted into the bottom and not the least bit stable or safe. A few welding, finishing and painting sessions later and we have a proper stand for the new TV:
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I ordered a cheap wall mount from Amazon rated at 80lbs. The wall attachment part was replaced with a horizontal pedestal using an old washing machine hub, bits of pipe and various other scraps. It is securely screwed to the entertainment center bottom middle section, with a (properly installed) TV attached. The factory stand mount points in the bottom corners are tied into the cabinet sides with steel brackets, providing a sturdy 3-point mount. I’ll fabricate 2 more brackets to connect into the cabinet top if/when the time comes for the stand to move upstairs supporting a really big OLED one of these days.
Parenting is Tough!
Especially in the Firemouth Cichlid realm of our tiny little aquatic animal kingdom:
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They spawned about 3 weeks ago, and it’s been hell for the others in that tank ever since. I moved the smaller guys downstairs but the remaining 7 fish, including a Jack Dempsey of equal size to the mother Firemouth have been pinned to the far west 6 inches of the tank ever since. At one point early on they were being held against their will in just the one top-rear corner.
My fish guy in Boulder says Firemouths are pretty good about being aggressive towards their tankmates compared some others, and nobody’s been hurt yet, so far so good. There were literally probably over 500 fry initially. It looks like about half of them have since been predated. We’ll see how many remain to be captured and sent off to the fish store before they overrun this 190-gallon tank.
Elon is (not) “the Man”
Falcon Heavy just opened a new outer space chapter, with exactly the right point of emphasis. It’s Space-X and Musk all the way – no government B$ to muddy up this rocket program:
The level of achievement here is massively impressive considering guaranteed profit scams sheltered by government regulation and unfair trade practices are the only consistently produced U.S. business ventures in recent decades. Lockheed and Boeing must be drawing big question marks around plans for their horribly subsidized United Launch Alliance – the U.S. government-run space launch monopoly.
They wanted “heavy lift” so a 2-ton car should do the trick for demonstration purposes, right? Where did they want it? Mars? OK, no problem. Track Starman’s progress here.
Go for it Elon!
Man Cave Done
It will be an ongoing hobby of course, but the work involving the project portion was recently finished.
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It’s not like I needed another project. This one was “in process” for 14 years – just low priority. Back in 2003 we moved here and I put most of “my” crap in the basement, and the process of working, raising kids and all that went on for the next decade+ until I eventually retired and had more time to do the optional stuff. Finishing the home theater ended up being the kickoff to a larger, seasonal winter basement re-org and cleanup.
This always was the “good” system, with Klipsch Forte-IIs backed by Carver amps. But over the years it was cannibalized to keep the main room system upstairs running and fell into complete disuse for at least the past 5 years or so. You can still see evidence of the well-served girl’s parties on the walls. So I committed myself to getting it properly refurbished this winter. The system sported the full array of DBX analog processing equipment, now obsoleted by digital signal processing technology. So another Outlaw 975 processor to replace the 80’s-era Yamaha DSP unit was procured along with a plethora of used Carver amps from eBay sellers.
At some point I realized the old-school audiophile stuff like Carver amps was getting scarce and prices were going UP. We got lucky on a couple of those after morons shipped them improperly packaged causing damage. BUT they didn’t want them back and eBay issued refunds. One is inop, but probably repairable. The nice AV-505 (5×100-watt) literally looked like it fell off a moving truck, but the Post Office left it on the doorstep. It was impacted so hard the weight of the transformer inside bent the mounting brackets. But it works fine and I was going to take the handles off anyway.
It was time to splurge on a proper sub, so a PSA V3601 was ordered. This thing is something special. I took Francie and Michelle to one of the nicer cinemas near here a few weeks ago, just to confirm what I already knew. This is what the movie theaters are trying to achieve. It’s the real deal, weighing in at 250lbs. That should give some idea the size of the voice coils and transformers in this beast. An active room-correction equalization processor is calibrated on initial setup to dynamically compensate for placement and room acoustics producing thunderous, clean, clear, tight bottom ALL the way down, almost everywhere in the entire >10,000³ foot basement – no mean feat.
I’m going to go ahead and upgrade that 2003-era Sony 60″ LCD rear-projection TV next, despite still having a spare projector bulb for it. I measured the 70″ Sharp upstairs before building the aquarium shelf, intending a >80″ replacement at some point and moving the Sharp Aquos down to the Man Cave. But attempting to keep electronics in service for decades with the way quality is trending down lately no longer makes that seem like such a good idea. Research indicates the Vizio M70-E3 now on sale at Costco again after several markdowns is probably one of the best bang-for-the-buck models in the small field of good candidates to fit in this space.
Fuck FaceBook
I’ve been harping on this for years. Glad to see people are starting to wake up. How they were doing it wasn’t clear, but the fact they were making huge bags of money manipulating people was pretty obvious. The fact they provided a vehicle for electioneering is just disgustingly insidious. We need more high-visibility celebrities like Jim Carrey coming out against this Social Media stupidity that is ruining society. Mr. Carrey put it bluntly and correctly: we need Capitalism with a Conscience.”
Looks like SBIRS is Done
My history with this program goes all the way back to 1983 when it was DSP (Defense Support Program), as a new Airman 1st Class at Buckley Air National Guard Base. The next chapter came 18 years later as a civilian Systems Security Manager in 2003-4, after it became SBIRS (Space-Based Infra Red System) at some point along the way. In 2003, the program was still riding high with hopes for the 3-tier constellation alive and money flowing. There were over 400 people working in the Boulder facility, with hundreds more scattered at various places all over the world.
15 years later, The country’s biggest, most expensive, longest-running space program has run it’s course and holds an oddly satisfying place in my career experience. The program’s future seemed all too obvious to me, after my last trip around the SBIRS 3-ring circus in 2014-15. Lockheed had already been engaged in an adversarial relationship with the Air Force for quite a few years before I returned for my last taste of it. That episode only demonstrated just how bad it had become by then.
So as expected, egregious mismanagement and government fiscal stupidity now delivers 4 GEO’s, 2 HEO’s and a requirement for an all-new missile warning system – instead of the fabulously comprehensive umpteen sat, 3-tier (LEO-GEO-HEO) mega system originally planned. That cash cow is now just so much dust scattered in Lockheed’s enormous DoD contracting wake. The thing they don’t tell you in the Satellite Today Article is this was the last SBIRS bird ever expected to see a launchpad. GEO-5 is scheduled in 2021 IIRC, but I doubt it will fly if they even finish putting it together. The program managed to set a new Nunn-Mcurdy record with no less than 4 separate budget breaches big enough to invoke the Congressional re-certification process. Those are just the biggest of the publicly available examples of fiscal malfeasance exhibited over the now 40+ years of total program timeline up to this point.
We as a nation have spent Billions of dollars on the highest of the high tech space systems the world has ever seen. It really is an amazingly effective, useful system that has proven it’s worth in our national defense many times. But it technically “belongs” to Lockheed, and as the final “affordable” piece went up last week, it was already being declared unsupportable, with new RFP’s now being developed for industry as I type. At least this time around the Air Force will not allow the contractor to maintain control over whatever they come up with next.
SBIRS never approached half the capability engendered in the original 3-tier constellation and ended up costing taxpayers orders of magnitude more than was ever officially budgeted for it. When will the Big Business USA scam ever be collectively recognized for what it really is? Big Business = U.S. Government. There is literally no distinction. My Lockheed pension will be guilt-laden for the rest of my life. As far as I am concerned it is dirty money. Not long out of high school I unwittingly joined the dark side, earned both government and contractor pensions, and now receive a fully-funded retirement from age 56 for my contributions to the War Machine. My entire working life from the time I took the oath of enlistment until the time I left Lockheed supported the insanity.
Take any industry sector, be it DoD Contracting (one of the biggest), Oil & Gas, Transportation, Pharmaceuticals – you name it, they all have correspondingly big government agencies populated with industry insiders and lobbyists with one common goal – extract as much revenue and profit from American taxpayers and consumers as possible. Who is buying what product or service, collateral damage and what companies grow or die fairly or not from the policies and laws they enforce matters not, as long as everybody on the inside gets paid. Elected officials are merely prone-to-human-exploitation gatekeepers and election-derived course corrections are just ripples in the economic vibe. When or where was the tipping point at which the government stopped being of the people, by the people and for the people?
The Foundation of My Career Launched only a Year-and-a-Half Before I was Born:
6×9's in a Standard Cab
This part of the restoration was unexpected. When I discovered the factory speakers screwed into this space on an open-air piece of stamped sheet metal, the course of action was clear: New speakers:
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The stockers sounded just OK with the Infinity sub I had behind the seat, but that went bye-bye along with the door a couple years ago. Paired up with a JL Audio HO-110 sub, these should take it into the realm of true Hi-Fi. Only two pieces of the old system remain, so a new head unit and amp for these speakers is apparently called for now.
Hindsight Really "is" 20/20
I can see it so clearly, 17 years ago, preoccupied with defending USAF networks, oblivious to what Scott Adams had already recognized:
I jumped on the Internet/Social Media warning bandwagon about 5 years later, sometime after I retired and smartphones really took off. This particular aspect of the spectre of rampant, destructive capitalism has been on my personal radar for well over a decade. Awareness is building now. Finally, society is beginning to wake up from their electronic gadget-induced narcolepsy.