07:22 – Barbara is due back sometime this afternoon. Colin and I will be doing our happy dance.
She was going to make a Costco run on her way down yesterday. I asked her to pick up a few items, including a couple 12- or 13-pound bags of baking soda, a 50-pound bag each of flour and sugar, two 10-pound boxes of oatmeal, some more herbs and spices, and bulk packs of toilet paper and paper towels. She made no serious objection to any of these, merely noting that we already had a lot of flour and sugar.
The more Barbara reads and hears the news and watches what’s going on in our country, the more on-board she is with prepping. I’m still the more radical prepper of the two of us, but she’s definitely more of a prepper than she was a couple of years ago. She recognizes now that very bad things can not only happen, but are happening now. She now often comes home from shopping with extra stuff for the pantry, a week or two ago she told me she really wanted to test our wood stove, which was still sitting untouched a year after we’d had it installed, and just the other day she told me that I needed to get on the ball to make sure we were prepared for a power failure.
In other words, I’m very lucky. I get email all the time from people who are serious preppers but have spouses who are actually anti-prepping. That’s probably 30% to 40% of the people I hear from. There’s another contingent, probably about the same percentage, in which one spouse is a serious prepper and the other isn’t actively involved but makes no objections to his/her spouse’s prepping activities. The smallest contingent is the one with both spouses actively pursuing prepping. I’d say we’re in the second group, tending toward the third.
I was thinking more about Dan’s email yesterday, in which he said that fears of a societal collapse are ridiculous. I don’t think such fears are even slightly unrealistic. The reason (eventual) collapse is not just possible but probable is one factor that I believe Dan may not be taking into account.
It probably wasn’t the first time I heard about the concept, but it was while I was in MBA school in 1983 that it first struck me how dangerous the then-new concept of just-in-time delivery was. We had several case studies about JIT, and what struck me even then, when few businesses had yet to jump aboard the JIT train, was that JIT provided an ideal environment for cascading failures.
The benefit was touted as reducing inventory costs by essentially eliminating inventory. If you implemented JIT, you’d no longer have to pay for warehouse space to store all those widgets, nor the cost of money needed to carry a large inventory. But the downside that none of the JIT advocates considered, or at least dismissed lightly, was the potential costs that would be incurred if JIT failed. If your widget factory, for example, required a particular bolt to build a widget and your JIT deliveries of those bolts failed, you were out of business. In the pre-JIT days, you might have kept a week’s or a month’s supply of those bolts on hand, but with JIT your actual on-site inventory might be a couple days’ or even a couple hours’ supply. When what you had on-site was consumed, your entire plant was down, but many of your variable costs continued accruing. You could no longer continue shipping product to your downstream customers, and would often be liable for non-performance penalties owed to them. In short, JIT was and is a cascading-failure catastrophe just waiting to happen.
Nowadays, the potential for disaster is much, much greater than it was when JIT started to become popular. Now, all of your upstream suppliers and downstream customers are also using JIT. There’s no buffer anywhere in the chain. And nowadays, it’s not just widget factories that are under threat of a cascading failure. It’s essentially all consumer goods, from food to medications to infrastructure elements like electric power, water supplies, sewage, and so on.
Some time ago, I exchanged email with a guy about my age, who’d graduated from pharmacy school back in the late 70’s. He spent the first ten years or so of his career working in a small family-owned pharmacy before going to work for a large pharmacy chain. And he’s watched the whole time what JIT deliveries have done to inventory levels at pharmacies.
When he started out, they kept drug inventories in paper ledgers. They re-ordered manually every week and got the bulk of their inventory in weekly deliveries, with an occasional overnight delivery when they’d run out of something critical. They managed expiration dates manually as well. Each time he opened a new bottle of something, he’d check how many unopened bottles they still had in stock and when they expired. They’d do a manual physical inventory once or twice a year, when they’d discard drugs that were nearing expiration.
Nowadays, they don’t do any manual ordering or physical inventories, other than those required by law for Scheduled drugs. They don’t need to worry about discarding old drugs, because they never HAVE any old drugs. Their inventory turns have increased so much that they worry more about running out of drugs. They get deliveries every day, often more than once a day. The deliveries are made up of items that the computer decided they needed, and the computer is not infallible.
In the old days, he told me, they threw out a lot of aging drugs, but they also kept enough of everything on hand that if a weekly delivery didn’t arrive they’d be able to continue filling prescriptions for at least a week and for many drugs for literally several months. Nowadays, if a daily delivery doesn’t arrive, they may run out of some drugs that day or the next day. And that’s assuming there hasn’t been some kind of emergency that leads people to rush out and refill their prescriptions. If that happens, they may run out of many key drugs within an hour of the announcement.
The same is true of supermarkets and grocery stores, which typically have enough stock to hold them for two to three days, assuming normal demand. In any kind of emergency, even just a snow storm, people flock to the supermarket to buy eggs, milk, and bread (presumably to make French toast). In a serious emergency, their shelves empty of anything edible in hours.
The story is the same for just about everything. Water-treatment plants, for example, used to keep large inventories of the chemicals they needed to purify municipal water. No longer. I exchanged email with a guy who runs a water-treatment plant, who told me that they keep at most a couple weeks’ worth of treatment chemicals. If deliveries fail, the water coming out of people’s taps will no longer be safe to drink. Similarly, a guy who works in the natural gas industry told me how the EPA was destroying the resilience of the natural gas delivery systems. Formerly, pipeline pumping stations all had natural gas driven backup generators to drive the pumps. If the electric power failed, they could continue pumping gas by burning the product they were pumping. But the EPA decided that was environmentally unacceptable, so now if the electric power fails, so does the natural gas.
And it goes on and on. JIT and Rube Goldberg systems now dominate industry and commerce. The failure, if (when) it comes may be epic.
I used to live in Indianapolis, Indiana, and it is probably on the threshold for being a major urban area. Over my life, I have noticed a trend toward creeping urban decay that is slowly seeping outward. I’ve never been a victim of violent crime, but twenty years ago, I was burglarized.
Illinois is having a “budget crisis” and therefore they aren’t paying out lottery prizes as small as $50,000. That shocks me a bit, but what is really shocking is that this has been going on for some time and people are still buying tickets. Of course, any thinking person would realize the lottery is not a good bet even when the State pays out the prizes.
These are just some of the things I have noticed as a trend. I’m now in a suburban/rural area and things here in Smallville are not great, but Smallville is wonderful compared to Indianapolis or Tiny Town.
I think I’m in the middle ground, because my wife isn’t very supportive of my prepping activities, but at least she isn’t openly hostile. I bought a shotgun, our first firearm, and she’s wondering why I didn’t get a handgun instead. I can’t very well tell her that RBT said if you only have one gun, get a shotgun. Because she would think RBT is a crazy prepper.
So she’s interested in getting a handgun, and I am not opposed. I am however the one saying that she has to take the NRA class and get a concealed carry permit first. Plus she needs to spend regular time at the range after getting one.
I’m advocating for the concealed carry permit, not because I want her to carry, but because the otherwise gun friendly state says that a loaded gun in the passenger compartment of a vehicle is concealed carry. I think we are both so inexperienced with handguns that we should transport to and from the range with guns unloaded, but it’s good to have a get out of jail free card if we forget.
There is an interesting book exploring this concept, …” Antifragile”, written by Nassim Taleb. JIT is certainly one aspect that is very “fragile.”
Firearms training is definitely a good idea, as is getting the concealed-carry permit, but don’t overlook establishing procedures for when you’re at home. Here’s an excerpt from the non-fiction book:
We received email from a prepper who tells a cautionary tale. He and his wife had established their bedroom as their safe room. Both are physically capable of defending themselves, and both are shooters. They each keep a shotgun under the bed, with full magazines of buckshot but no rounds chambered. He keeps a loaded pistol in his nightstand.
They know exactly what they will do if their home is invaded: barricade themselves in the bedroom with their guns pointed at the door, shout to the intruders to take whatever they want, dial 911 on their cell phones, and wait for the police to arrive.
So, one night before bed they activated their alarm, but instead of punching the “Home” button to activate only the perimeter defenses, they accidentally punched the “Away” button, which also activates the interior motion detectors. In the middle of the night, she got up and walked down the hall to the kitchen, somehow not setting off the motion detectors. As she walked back toward the bedroom, the motion detectors noticed her and set off the (very loud) alarm. She began screaming, thinking there was an intruder in the house.
He was sound asleep. He levitated from the bed in an adrenaline rush, forgetting the guns and their plan, and roared out the door and down the hall, nearly knocking her flat before he realized she wasn’t an intruder. Fortunately, he recognized her in time, or he might have hospitalized her. And even that was by no means the worst possible outcome. The situation might easily have turned tragic if he’d gone for his gun and she’d come running through the bedroom door seeking refuge.
The moral here is that even under the worst, most stressful conditions imaginable, you must train yourself to identify a target with certainty as not friendly before firing on it. Know exactly where your spouse, children, and pets are before you pull the trigger. So-called “friendly fire” isn’t.
When I worked in the print industry, I was in charge of paper purchasing for a large print shop. Over $4 Million worth each year. I reduced our inventory to almost zero and replaced it with JTT. Mind you this was only paper, and I had four local suppliers yearning for my business, and who could deliver what I needed within 2 hours… Heck, I had a paper mill that could deliver to me with 3 hours notice!
We must deal with weather issues differently up in Canada. I’ve never seen panic buying of groceries during storms. In fact, the only thing I’ve ever noticed as being out of stock due to rush buying are snow shovels. The stores simply can’t buy enough of them to keep them in stock…
“JIT is certainly one aspect that is very “fragile.””
Unfortunately, efficiency is nearly always at odds with resiliency. And to some extent JIT has become one of those “we do it that way because we’ve always done it that way” kind of things. You have to remember that JIT began gaining popularity back in the Carter era, when interest rates were 18% and great emphasis was put on using costly money efficiently. Now, with interest rates nearing 0%, that’s no longer a factor.
Of course, the other aspect is inventory storage, and a lot of companies no longer have the space to store anything. When I was a kid, back in the 50’s and early 60’s, supermarkets and grocery stores were supplied by relatively local warehouses that provided significant buffers. Most of what we ate back then was produced pretty locally. Even canned goods mostly came from factories and company warehouses within a 50-mile radius. What fresh vegetables were available out of season were grown in greenhouses, again located near us. Very little was shipped in from California by train. Contrast that with now, when most of what most people eat comes in by truck or rail JIT.
“We must deal with weather issues differently up in Canada. I’ve never seen panic buying of groceries during storms. In fact, the only thing I’ve ever noticed as being out of stock due to rush buying are snow shovels. The stores simply can’t buy enough of them to keep them in stock…”
I just wrote about that recently, when Barbara visited the supermarket before a forecast severe winter storm. No panic buying at all. Things looked just like any other day. That’s because people who live in the mountains or rural areas generally maintain much larger food stocks than people who live in urban areas do.
If my parents could be transported from the 50’s and 60’s to today, they’d probably be considered preppers, and my grandparents certainly would. They didn’t think of themselves that way. They and everyone else at the time simply prepped without thinking they were doing anything unusual. Everyone kept pantries full of commercial and home canned foods just because it would have been crazy not to do so.
There’s one other big factor in having inventory. Tax. I’ve never understood the idea of taxing inventory. Just another government take.
Government taxes everything they can. I’m actually kind of surprised they haven’t placed a big sin tax on prescribed opiates/opioids, which after all are often used recreationally.
But, there always a but.
No one of thought that in crisis time, better, in dystopia times inflation will be an issue, and, going to it the same.
So, inventory changes from a liability to an asset, so, JIT ends with inflation.
You people dont know how to live with inflation, and, not the kind of Germany or our one, they are short time, living with 30/40/100/300 year after year is completely different.The inflation rate in Argentina was recorded at 40.50 percent in April of 2016. Inflation Rate in Argentina averaged 202.25 percent from 1944 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 20262.80 percent in March of 1990 and a record low of -7.00 percent in February of 1954.
My first experience with JIT manufacturing was my first year out of college, 1988. I had just been hired by a very large biotech company as a lowly production tech in a bio lab. The head of our division read some book and decided to change our site structure. Each department was to be a “company” with other departments being their “suppliers” and “customers”. Plus each “company” was supposed to implement JIT.
We usually made batches once a month for each product based on current sales and historical data. All of a sudden we were now making 3 or more batches per month as orders came in. The problem was that batch size made no difference in manufacturing time. A set of calibrators took the same amount of time to make at 100mL or 2000mL. QC took a fixed amount of tests to qualify a batch regardless of its scale.
Me, a naive non-business trained science nerd, saw the problem at the outset and brought it up at the departmental meeting to discuss this new way of working. The other techs also chimed in. The VP summarily dismissed our objections since were just naive non-business trained science nerds. That we actually made the product just didn’t matter. In order to enlighten us we were each given a copy of the book explaining why what he was doing was going to be great. I don’t remember the title, it was mostly about Japanese car manufacturing.
Well, as anybody should have foreseen, labor costs skyrocketed. Lack of any inventory caused stockouts during production problems (common in biological manufacturing) and the customers began to drift to more reliable suppliers.
I left that company less than two years later for a better job. The division was sold off by the big corporation a year after that as being “under-performing”. I always wonder if the VP got a bonus for being so stupid.
I’m tempted to say that JIT is always a stupid idea, unless it’s used internally in a vertically-integrated company, and even then I have my doubts. In a VI company, hold-up issues come to the fore and they will definitely impact the success or failure of internal JIT.
Incidentally, I just dropped a PO that is representative of my inventory policy. Once a year, I order the items we need to produce our prepared slide sets. I usually do that in mid- to late-January, by which time we’ll typically be down to about two months’ worth of the finished sets. I get very nervous if we get down to less than two months’ inventory on anything other than finished kits, which we build on-the-fly.
And actually the Costco run that Barbara made yesterday also reflects my concern about JIT as it affects food supplies. What she bought was about four person-months worth of bulk calories, paper towels, and toilet paper.
As we have seen in our recent history, JIT can be impacted negatively simply by the weather in an area, let alone Grid-down or financial collapse. As has been mentioned, the lemmings rush out to grab their French toast ingredients at any tee-vee warnings of approaching storms, and a really bad one, like the ice storm that smacked into St. Louis some years ago will see the store shelves emptied in a matter of hours, with panicked shoppers breaking out into fist-fights in the aisles. And we just saw the gas station stuff happen last year, where derps roll up, park their vehicles and fill ’em, and block others from getting to the pumps as they call their friends to come. Cute.
I can see it coming now: the State warns us to be prepped with stuff for 72 hours. But we know stuff can last longer than that, so we prep for weeks, months, years. Then we’re accused of “hoarding.” And the State sends out costumed thugs to seize and redistribute our food and supplies. They did this in the old Soviet Union from WWI into WWII and didn’t really redistribute it equally; they simply seized it and turned it over to themselves. Causing massive famine, to the tune of 35 million dead.
We’re likely in for some very interesting times in the next few years.
We’ll use JIT during the Prog/SJW/BLM purge. We’ll deliver lead JIT to their gobs.
JIT always reminded me of those old movies where the cavalry showed up JIT. Nice to have them show up when you need them, but it’s a mistake to plan for that.
We must deal with weather issues differently up in Canada. I’ve never seen panic buying of groceries during storms. In fact, the only thing I’ve ever noticed as being out of stock due to rush buying are snow shovels. The stores simply can’t buy enough of them to keep them in stock…
I’ve seen Canadian panic buying at the Costco in Bellingham, WA, especially milk whenever the US dollar is weak — the store can’t put it out fast enough.
The Portland Apple store is also a favorite destination due to the VAT on IT products (22% IIRC), zero sales tax in OR, and easy access via the Cascades train from Vancouver, BC. The store always looks like a supermarket in FL during hurricane watches.
Not that I blame them. I thought 9.5% sales tax in Vancouver, Washington was bad. The Best Buy on our side of the river *never* made money in four years.
I worked for a large Canadian manufacturer for a while. They had embraced “lean” and JIT, and were pushing it even in the groups that were not “factory.” Our design build and service group was particularly impacted.
some examples.
No access to spare parts- the only parts in inventory were for scheduled production with absolutely no slack. We couldn’t even pull a part out of the stream and just push one unit of production back. So our existing flagship customers sat idle, while we waited for parts to come in from Germany, ordered only as needed.
No bulk purchase of staples- the stuff you use on every project, not the paper joining kind. If a project called for 6 adapters, that’s what was ordered. Never mind that we used the same adapters on every project or that we did lots of projects. Higher costs incurred due to having to purchase from somewhere that would SELL just 6 units, and much higher ‘shipping’ to ‘product purchased’ ratio too. Also missed any ‘case qty’ discounts.
No mechanism to return items to stock- since we didn’t maintain inventory, unused project items were disposed of. And then reordered for the next project.
The end result was increase in costs, decrease in customer uptime and satisfaction, increase in waste, and extra time spent managing lots of small purchases.
We also had engineers who were trained in lowering cost for production spend dozens of hours selecting parts, like washers and bolts, to minimize the unit cost, on ONE OFF custom products. In other words, they’d spend 500$US of engineering time, to save 30c on washers on one project. You are never ever going to make that back.
Lots of dumb things happening in industry.
n
I resolved early on that if I ever started a company, I would hire experts in the relevant fields and NOT MBAs, unless a subject-matter expert just happened to have an MBA. The bad rep of MBAs was caused by MBAs with no subject-matter expertise, who thought that getting an MBA qualified them to run any business endeavor. I never operated under that mistaken assumption. I got my MBA because it taught me things I needed to know to run a business of my own, but I never assumed that it qualified me to run any random business.
Speaking of manufacturing…
Every time I hear someone pontificating or blithely repeating the idea that “manufacturing isn’t coming back to the US” I want to PUNCH something.
Even before Trump, manufacturing was coming home. Enough of it was happening that it even has a name– re-shoring (as opposed to ‘offshoring’.) There are many reasons, but some are: the difficulty of managing remote teams, difficulty of maintaining high quality and tolerances, difficulty with cultural issues, and theft of intellectual property. Shipping times, and uncertainty contributes too.
n
Yeah, manufacturing is coming back. Even at the lowest point, the US remained a world-class manufacturing powerhouse. What’s not coming back is all those lovely manufacturing JOBS.
Fewer jobs in every industry, that’s sort of the definition of productivity, which is supposed to be increased all the time…..
(since we’re holding output the same or lower, due to Real World (TM) issues like declining sales.)
n
This is particularly obvious with highway construction projects. When you drive thru one you are struck by just how few guys there are actually working at any one time.
n
Another reason manufacturing is “re-shoring” is the security nightmare that offshoring has become, especially in the IT field. But I won’t hold my breath, and by the time any of it shows up around here in IT again I’ll be dead and gone, so fuck it. Meanwhile Century Arms has a plant just down the road and they apparently can’t push AKs and other guns out the door fast enough. I tried for a job there but got no interest. Also tried with an independent gun dealer and doing 50-50 gun stuff and web site chit for him but never heard from him again, either, probably a fly-by-night op anyway.
So, still hanging on the Fed sub-sub-sub-sub drone gig and VA disability filing. For now. I’ll have a better idea of what to do next when I hear from either or both places.
Nick wrote:
“This is particularly obvious with highway construction projects. When you drive thru one you are struck by just how few guys there are actually working at any one time.”
This goes back to the Twenties and Thirties. When the Japanese guy who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor was in the US he saw construction sites with lots of machinery and not many workers. He thought to himself that in Japan such projects would be swarming with workers and hardly any labour saving machinery. He decided that if Japan went to war against the US his country would be in real trouble. He was right.
The “Doomsday Clock” moves forward 30 seconds because of:
tttttRRRRuuuummmmppp!!!!!
lol! Libturdian nonsense at it’s best. Even Climate Ejaculation moves the “clock”. You don’t need to prep anymore ’cause the world implodes in 3, 2, …
I think it should have been turned back 8 or 9 minutes.
Yup, whole manf facilities are running at least one shift “lights out”. I started noticing this a couple of years ago in trade magazine ads. Auto load and unload systems, material “magazines” loaded with stock, and everyone touting the ability to run without an operator. One guy runs the whole shift as the machines do the work of dozens.
That’s what productivity increases look like.
n
That would be Admiral Yamamoto, IIRC, who had the quotes about waking up a sleeping giant and how there would be a Murkan rifleman behind every blade of grass. We fixed his little red wagon, as my parents and grandparents used to threaten us with, by later shooting down the plane he was in over the north Pacific. Unless there was some other Japanese guy visiting here before he did.
We have a couple of years-long highway bridge projects going on up here and there are several days per week when no workers at all are there; other days maybe half a dozen. So with all the machinery and robots these deals still seem to take at least as long as it took to build the friggin’ pyramids and Stonehenge, or with swarms of workers on them.
@Mr. Ray; I see from one of the survival emails I get that it was 70 the other day in TN and now it’s snowing? Cool. He repeated the old saw about how if you don’t like the weather there, just wait a few days. Here it’s ‘wait a few minutes.’ And here also it’s different if you cross from our front door to our back yard sometimes, but more normally different between here and Swanton ten miles to our north.
Incidentally, “Swanton,” “Milton,” and “Bolton,” all towns up here along the interstate, are pronounced without the “t.” Same deal down in MA, which also has a Milton and a Bolton. That’s one way you know you’re talking to a local yokel like me. The other, more obvious way, is we don’t pronounce the “r” in a lotta words and put it in for other words. Just remember, we always mangle the “r” and you’re good. One of these days I’ll do a whole post in New Englandese.
What we don’t know (yet) is what idle hands will find to do after the current robotrial revolution kicks in full gear.
Agriculture was made more efficient, so folks went to manufacturing.
Manufacturing became more efficient, so folks went to Information Technology.
IT is becoming more efficient, and robots are taking more & more manufacturing jobs. Where will those hands go?
Some say a base wage, with nothing required. I disagree. Man _needs_ to be needed. Idle hands are the devil’s playground isn’t just a platitude. We’re going to find something to do. It will be better to be productive than destructive, but if destructive is the only alternative, it will get mess.
I would much rather let people starve than feed them. Not because I want them to starve, but because I want them to be driven. We don’t know yet what the next big thing will be, but it WILL be. When you’re hungry, you spend a lot more time trying to eat than making trouble for others.
“The “Doomsday Clock” moves forward 30 seconds”
Excuse me while I stifle a giant yaaaawwwwwnnnnnn. They’ve been doomsdaying us for 70 years. Meaningless.
“…whole manf facilities are running at least one shift “lights out”.
Some PHB manglers were pushing for this way back in the late 80s when I was a systems administrator at DEC for their VAX/VMS and OpenVMS data centers. They told us straight out that they were angling to get to lights-out ASAP, but for some odd reason they kept adding staff to our night-shift team. Even so, a lot of the routine mass backups got done automatically, via DCL scripts and basically just moving the data around to other drives somewhere.
And when I was at IBM four years ago, they just had machines-as-tape-libraries doing it sort of robotically, no more need for shifts of operators. I was quite often alone in any of the four big data centers they had/have there. And then again, for some odd reason, they began adding staff, and once we had eight people in there, they laid us all off. No idea to this day how our “80% hands-on/hardware” jobs are getting done. I suspect that Global Foundry just hires people now to come in and do the work that three people did before, so as a sys admin now, you do all the operator and sys admin stuff and are also expected to know some programming and engineering, and all of it across multiple operating systems and databases. In 40 hours per week or less and be on call 7x24x365. All the while knowing that most likely upper-level manglers, who never get laid off, are scheming night and day to shit-can your job for you.
Good question, concerning what will all the tens of millions of idle hands be doing once the robots take over everything and we have a blanket basic wage for us all.
The Rainbow-Unicorn People say we’ll be able to do all the nifty things we’ve always wanted to and be creative and artsy and workshoppy and happy, happy, happy!
I assume if we have a basic wage it will be enough to cover the three hots and a cot, amirite? Because it sure isn’t now for a lot of people, like up here in the north country, where every winter peeps get to choose between heating oil and groceries or medicine.
All of a sudden, I am now Prime status on Amazon. I did not want this before, nor do I want it now. I went in and canceled it but they are going to leave me on Prime status until Feb something as a test drive. I feel that this is fraud and will contest my credit card charge if it appears there. Cancelling it was a royal pain as I had walk through several dialogs.
On the other hand, my father sold all of his Walmart stock that he has owned for over 20 years. He has been buying stuff through walmart.com and is not happy with the shipping box packing. The topper was that he got a delivery last Friday and the delivery person opened his box on the front porch when my father opened the front door. The guy counted the stuff in the box and noted the counts on his delivery PDA. He mentioned something about that they were having fraudulent claims for undershipped merchandise. My father got incensed about his privacy and swore to never use Walmart.com again. He feels that Big River is going to kill Walmart off in the coming years.
“Should Twitter and Facebook be Regulated as Utilities?”
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-be-regulated-as
Interesting. Apparently nobody is following the “don’t be evil” mantra anymore.
These are not government agencies. They have the right to ban anyone for any reason or no reason at all. If Adams doesn’t like it, he can start his own twitter and facebook.
My last job was working as an engineer at a place that was designing robotic warehouses. Pretty amazing stuff. The prototype facility was about half the size of a football field, and had fifteen levels. Each level contained multiple robots that would speed along at thirty five miles an hour, pulling inventory and depositing it on conveyors that would funnel it to the appropriate truck. They were still working out some of the bugs when I left, but it was obvious the technology would be a game changer. Instead of needing hundreds of people you could get by with a half a dozen or so that supervised the operation and performed maintenance when needed. They pretty much eliminated the need for climate control, didn’t have to worry about injuries, eliminated the theft of product (a big concern with the quality of people that worked at these places) and were able to run twenty four hours with no breaks. On top of this, computers automatically kept track of all the inventory and knew what came in and what went out allowing it to manage orders with little human intervention. On the down side, a lot of people will soon be out of work with little prospects for the future. Good for business. Not too good for those who no longer have jobs.
These are not government agencies. They have the right to ban anyone for any reason or no reason at all. If Adams doesn’t like it, he can start his own twitter and facebook.
Ah, but the Sherman Antitrust act is still in force, is it not ?
Barbara is due back sometime this afternoon. Colin and I will be doing our happy dance.
Excellent news. Barbara seems to be going back to Charlotte every other week or monthly at a minimum. Is the drive wearing on her ? Do you trust her car to make it back and forth without trouble ? Does she have an alternate means of transportation if her car breaks down ? Does she carry a get home backpack now with water, food, and some clothing if she had to walk home? I guess that I am asking if the move to Sparta was worth it. Your previous comments seem to be an overwhelming yes.
My wife is driving her 2005 Honda Civic with 105K miles back and forth monthly to the north side of Dallas to visit her father and take care of his details. Roughly a 600 mile round trip. I am starting to get very nervous about her car’s reliability. I put a 24 bottle case of water in her truck every time she goes. But she does not want food nor gun(s).
I have to say this, my father-in-law’s girlfriend is a trooper. She goes on all of his doctor and dental visits, mostly via ambulance down to the VA in south Dallas, sometimes twice a month. Otherwise my wife would need to be up there semi-monthly and that would just not work.
The progressive fanboy Lawrence Krauss says the last time the “clock” was so close to midnight was 1953. What a tosser, has he never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) or Operation Able Archer (1983) when we really were close to the brink.
He may be a decent physicist but he’s a complete dope where politics is concerned. As was said of James I… “The wisest fool in Christendom.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-27/nuclear-doomsday-clock-ticks-closest-to-midnight-in-64-years/8216458
What can you do that people want enough to pay you for?
Plumbers and Masons have it easy – their fields are well-defined. But what about the former cop / SP / IT Drone? If you haven’t found it yet, you haven’t looked long enough. Sucks, I know. And there are going to be folks that don’t find it. That sucks even worse.
But we’re coming to the point where we have a LOT of excess capacity (labor) and a dearth of things to do with it. Somebody smarter than anyone here is going to figure it out and kick off the next economic revolution.
Something bothered me about Heinlein’s early works. “For Us, the Living” really gets me. The basic assumption is that everyone WANTS to work. At least the heroes do. Those that don’t want to, don’t have to. But they’re not living any more. They’re dead, and just don’t know it yet. Life is about struggles and overcoming adversity. That’s the way we’re wired. And if we don’t have it, we’ll manufacture it.
Maybe that’s what the snowflakes are doing. They’ve never really experienced hardship, so they’re manufacturing it to meet that need.
I think I may be sick.
” But what about the former cop / SP / IT Drone? If you haven’t found it yet, you haven’t looked long enough.”
Sounds like that OFD guy. He’s 63 going on 64 and apparently useless for doing any kind of IT work and certainly too old to be a cop anymore. He muses sometimes about robbing armored cars and banks but that’s too risky and dangerous and he doesn’t need the adrenaline rush like he used to. The available jobs where he lives are either low-level all-night convenience store chit or they’re looking for the equivalent of what used to be PhD’s in CompSci who have loads and loads of current experience across the alphabet soup of IT acronyms plus programming chops and are a cross between a Diversity-worshiping hipster and an MBA. And that’s just for a sys admin gig.
I’m hanging on the sub-sub-sub rub-a-dub-loser-in-a-tub Fed IT drone gig but hope fades each day in a process that began back in September. And VA disability, again, hope fading every day in a process that has taken years.
Failing those, it’s back to the drawing board, and probably ending up like a lot of peeps up here; little part-time and temp gigs here and there, combined with SS or SSDI and/or VA support, etc. Hand-to-mouth and choosing between groceries and heat in the dead of winter, esp. if wife loses her job, too.
S’OK, builds character!
Mary Chervenak and I once had a semi-serious conversation about forging or faking old documents. Barbara and Paul were horrified because we had no moral or ethical qualms about doing so. We were at the level of discussing details of inks, papers, NAA and other instrumental analysis testing, building provenance, etc.
That’s the thing – there are figurative TONS of skilled people out there. The trick will be finding what to do with them. Buggy whip manufacturers won’t use them.
Several gigs you’ve started & it sounds like they haven’t panned out. I feel for you. I’ve had 5 failed businesses before I turned 40. Not for lack of trying or wanting to, but they simply were not things I could make work successfully. Didn’t feel it.
6th time’s the charm. I have work here that requires attention to detail, working inside/outside for 3 hours at a time, and following directions. Medium computer skills. Willingness to dig in & do something. In 10 years, I’ve found a total of 4 people that can & will do the work. Only one that does it regularly. In another 10, I might make enough to quit my day job. Or, if I lose my day job, it’ll be dig in & make it work now. With a wife & 3 kids, I can’t afford to not, and my prospects won’t look any better than yours in the IT world.
The trick is to find the niche. That’s not easy.
If there’s a market for it…
My wife is driving her 2005 Honda Civic with 105K miles
I would not worry until you get to 200K miles as long as you maintain the vehicle.
see from one of the survival emails I get that it was 70 the other day in TN and now it’s snowing?
About right. I was riding my back in short sleeves two days ago as it was 65f. Was in Nashville last night but understood they had snow flurries this morning. Will be in the 20’s tonight.
Just bought me this Lego set as Lego has a store in Nashville thus saving the shipping charges:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/technic/products/bucket-wheel-excavator-42055
Should keep me busy for about four or five evenings. Photos when it is completed.
Meanwhile Century Arms has a plant just down the road and they apparently can’t push AKs and other guns out the door fast enough.
Coming Soon — AKs made in … Pompano Beach?!?
http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/19/news/companies/kalashnikov-usa-guns/index.html
As with Magic Leap, I’ll believe it when I see it from any company based in that part of Florida, but the state has lots of bored money looking for decent returns.
Ah, but the Sherman Antitrust act is still in force, is it not ?
Twitter doesn’t make money, and Facebook makes *some* money, but still not enough to justify their stock price. I think reality will hit in the near future and the market will make the necessary corrections.
As for “Big River”, I doubt they can take down Walmart without getting Fresh covered under the food stamp program. Of course, I believe getting the subsidy is exactly Bezos’ long term plan to grow the balance sheet into justifying the AMZN stock price.
We have a couple of years-long highway bridge projects going on up here and there are several days per week when no workers at all are there; other days maybe half a dozen. So with all the machinery and robots these deals still seem to take at least as long as it took to build the friggin’ pyramids and Stonehenge, or with swarms of workers on them.
Well those projects are designed as payoffs to the big unions and government workers. There really is no reason five miles of freeway should take years to build but you see it all the time.
That there is a problem with prepping too much. If every cubic inch is filled with #10 cans and bales of toilet paper, there’s no place to hide the wild women if the wife gets home unexpectedly early.
JIT was obviously invented by business types with limited shop floor experience, and then pushed by business types who were looking at the quarterly bottom line and their own bonuses. Engineers, at least competent engineers, know not to design systems with failure points that will bring down the entire system.
JIT doesn’t eliminate storage costs, by the way. It simply shifts storage costs from the name-brand manufacturer to all of their suppliers. This was pointed out in a 1980s documentary showing how Toyota (I think; some big Japanese manufacturer) was doing JIT; the suppliers had to stockpile huge amounts of their product because when Toyota called and said they needed 1000 items in two hours, delivering 900 would result in the contract being terminated, even if 1000 was twice the previous maximum order.
Doomsday Clock: yaaaaaawn. As slantedly politicized, and as utterly without redeeming value, as the Nobel Peace Prize.
The power company isn’t a government agency, either. They have every right to turn off the electricity at the home of anyone who’s insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant of the day.
I simply cannot understand why women are so reluctant to get on board with being prepared for emergencies. Most of them want to protect their home and kids, and husband (sometimes not so much the husband), but they don’t want to prepare? I am the one who started pushing my husband into prepping. Now he is manic about it, does all the hard work, and I keep the inventory straight. Sometimes women baffle me.
My wife is driving her 2005 Honda Civic with 105K miles
I would not worry until you get to 200K miles as long as you maintain the vehicle.
I had the head gasket and transmission bearings replaced last year. That is why I am worried. Lots more stuff to die. And those fixes were $6K. And the car is worth $6K. That was not a good investment.
My 2005 Ford Expedition has 176K miles. I am driving it to Norman, OK in a month. 900 mile round trip. If it dies, I figure that I will park it on the side of the road, call Uber, and get a ride to the nearest Ford dealership. My Expedition is not worth fixing with a $4K value at http://www.kbb.com .
Should keep me busy for about four or five evenings. Photos when it is completed.
That thing is awesome, Mr. Ray! I hope we don’t have a crying, frustrated, old man posting in a week or two. Should I prepare you a “safe space” if you fail?
“Sometimes women baffle me.”
Thanks for the laugh of the day.
And welcome to the club.
Mrs. OFD gets that we need to be prepped for winter weather and power outages and is cognizant of the bad characters doing bad things in our AO here. Also OK with the guns and wants to learn more but there never seems to be the time slot we can get to the range. She works two weeks a month all over the country, sometimes three weeks, but that could be ending soon.
But other than that, she’s not interested and doesn’t think much bad will happen in the country, or enough to warrant really serious prepping, more of that normality bias. And my sisters-in-law have no truck with it whatsoever and think it’s all crazy. They live in the Boston suburbs and are evidently used to having everything on all the time and the store shelves full. With no thought of how that could all come to a crashing halt. Severe normality bias down there.
Haven’t seen you here before, so welcome to this bunch of insane geeks, killers, scientists, engineers, and retired and semi-retired eccentrics. As you must be aware, it’s about 99% WHITEY cis-hetero male, but we’re all otherwise harmless. Except for one or two guys but they generally behave themselves.
Just got back from the 1:00pm session at Our Lady of the Dauber. Rocking out to Pat Benatar the whole way. She’s older now, but still has the pipes of an Angel. Plays Vegas all the time.
JIT is also being mandated by the governmental agencies. When I worked for TXU back in the 1980s, the Texas PUC (public utility commission) mandated that we would only be able to keep 3.5 million barrels of fuel oil in our rate base. We had 6.0 million barrels with the idea that we could make some level of electric power for 10 days in an extreme cold snap. So we burned our fuel oil down to 3.5 million barrels as we were building two nuclear power plants and could not afford anything else.
During the infamous cold snap of Christmas 1989 (-4 F in Dallas, 6 F in Houston for almost a week), TXU was burning 330,000 barrels of fuel oil per day. That oil was replaceable at a max of 50 to 100 trucks (180 barrels/truck) per day. 10,000 to 20,000 barrels of fuel oil/day. Burning 330,00 barrels of fuel oil/day and replacing 20,000 barrels of that per day is not a winning situation.
Then the PUC came along and said that we could not keep spare pump and turbine assemblies in our rate base for our base load lignite coal units. I was involved in the cost analysis which were horrendous. We had to assume that we could not get a replacement steam turbine or pump assembly for six to twelve months. With that, the costs of not keeping spare assemblies ran 10X over the costs of keeping inventory. The PUC had simply assumed that we had no idea of what we were doing and denied the expenses. We ended up suing them and winning in state court.
“Have spreadsheet, will control” is the motto of MBAs everywhere.
“Rocking out to Pat Benatar the whole way. She’s older now, but still has the pipes of an Angel.”
She’s older than me by a few months but graduated from high school the same year. IIRC she has some really impressive octave range.
Too bad she’s a libtard fembat.
My PLL (Primary Load List = spare parts) while commanding an aviation company at Fort Drum, NY was about $6 million back in the day. We had Huey engine spares, but weren’t allowed to keep them on the airfield because of the cost and threat of theft. They were centralized at the DISCOM (Division Support Command) level. I had to sign for all the parts plus all the aircraft and other equipment. You sub-hand receipted it all to the right people on the spot.
JIT doesn’t work well in war, but is still being pushed.
FIFY
Too bad she’s a libtard fembat.
You’re just jealous she’s rich, famous and hot. And you’re not. 🙂 Leave my Angel alone if you don’t have any examples.
“Barbara seems to be going back to Charlotte every other week or monthly at a minimum. Is the drive wearing on her ? Do you trust her car to make it back and forth without trouble ? Does she have an alternate means of transportation if her car breaks down ? Does she carry a get home backpack now with water, food, and some clothing if she had to walk home?”
She goes down to Winston maybe every three weeks on average. Her car is a 2011 Chevy HHR with something like 32,000 miles on it. She maintains it well. She doesn’t take along a bike or anything, if that’s what you mean. She generally takes one or two bottles of water and that’s about it, other than what she always has in her purse (multitool, .357 magnum, etc.) No get-home bag. I’ve tried to convince her that it’s no big deal to toss it in the back, but she just won’t do it.
“She generally takes one or two bottles of water and that’s about it, other than what she always has in her purse (multitool, .357 magnum, etc.) No get-home bag.”
Besides not having a GHB in the car, which she’ll wish she had if she gets stuck or disabled out along the road for whatever reason, the off-body carry for the .357 is problematic. I’ve seen women’s purses and imagining what they have to do to whip out a handgun fast enough is enough to make my hair stand on end. There are other options out there for women doing CCW.
“…if you don’t have any examples.”
“In January of 2017 Benatar recorded the song “Shine” to support the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. The anti-Trump anthem was her first original recording in over ten years.”
“…In the memoir, she is quoted as saying, “For every day since I was old enough to think, I’ve considered myself a feminist …”
Well, it’s like a lot of artists and musicians; you admire their work tremendously but in real life they’re not so great.
@Karron
Welcome, Karron. I hope you decide to comment frequently. We need more women here. I know I have quite a few women lurkers, and half a dozen who email me privately but refuse to post comments.
As to your question, it’s not always women who oppose prepping. I’d guess in married couples, it’s probably 60:40 men:women in terms of the primary prepping partner, and men are just as likely as women to be strongly opposed. It’s normalcy bias in operation. “I don’t want this to happen, so it can’t happen.” “It’s never happened before, so it can’t happen.” And so on.
JIT doesn’t work well in war, but is still being pushed.
Can you imagine filling an inventory loss sheet after the battle of Midway ? Or at the Dunkirk evacuation where a million ??? man army dropped to 400,000 ??? men in days ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation
but refuse to post comments.
Easy, use a fake name.
I wandered through the living room just now. CBS News is on. Oh, good grief. Trump is EVIL.
Everything they have their undies in a wedgie about …. all sounds reasonable to me.
Why would I be supporting importing Moslems from anywhere? Or be against enforcing our immigration laws?
It’s a strange world we live in.
@OFD said:
My wife has a couple of very nice CCW purses that have a separate compartment for her water pistol :wink wink:. My firearms shop has a couple of people and other sources of some very nice CCW purses. They are not cheap but actually competitively priced compared to other quality purses.
“Can you imagine filling an inventory loss sheet after the battle of Midway ?”
Worse, what about the speadsheet brigade calculating that the average infantryman fires 27.08 rounds on each patrol, and so directing that each man is issued one 30-round mag before each patrol? (MBAs generally wouldn’t recognise a normal distribution if it bit them, let alone a poisson.)
“In January of 2017 Benatar recorded the song “Shine” to support the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. The anti-Trump anthem was her first original recording in over ten years.”
“…In the memoir, she is quoted as saying, “For every day since I was old enough to think, I’ve considered myself a feminist …”
None of those from the first are her words, you hater! Dr. Bob is a feminist.
From pjmedia.com:
Pat Benatar explains to CNN’s Don Lemon why she doesn’t act like several of the other pop stars we see, and yell about her political beliefs. It’s pretty refreshing!
twitter and facebook are not part of the great internet regulatory scam. They insist they are a common carrier so they don’t have to police content and have no liability for the content they “transport” but they don’t want to be REGULATED as a common carrier (like the phone co. or fiber operators.)
I don’t get how they can accept responsibility for some content, by banning it, or removing it, without accepting responsibility for all of it.
n
Back when I was in B-school, we were discussing JIT as part of a logistics seminar. I suggested that were I a factory manager, anyone who causes the plant to be shut down for lack of normal spare parts would get fired then & there. My classmates looked at me as though I had grown an extra head. Of course, I was the only one in the room who had actually signed someone else’s paycheck, etc.
I didn’t go to business school, but in law school* I was part of the substantial minority in the class who owned a small business and who were in law school to protect the business from thieves rather than from the desire to be a lawyer. There were substantial differences of opinion on many legal and social issues between this minority and the rest of the class.
* Didn’t finish law school, so there’s no need to put me on any better-dead lists. Well, not for that reason, anyway.
She goes down to Winston maybe every three weeks on average. Her car is a 2011 Chevy HHR with something like 32,000 miles on it. She maintains it well. She doesn’t take along a bike or anything, if that’s what you mean. She generally takes one or two bottles of water and that’s about it, other than what she always has in her purse (multitool, .357 magnum, etc.) No get-home bag. I’ve tried to convince her that it’s no big deal to toss it in the back, but she just won’t do it.
Ok, Winston is only 70 miles away from Sparta. I thought she was going further. Wow, I had not even thought about carrying a break down bike on long trips. I just figure that I will liberate a bike somewhere if needful.
Can you sneak a case of water in the back ? I snuck two cases of water in last time the wife headed north and just told her to leave one at her dad’s townhome for her future usage. She caught me carrying out the case of MREs to her car and said NO.
Worse, what about the speadsheet brigade calculating that the average infantryman fires 27.08 rounds on each patrol, and so directing that each man is issued one 30-round mag before each patrol?
The former USMC son went on foot patrol once in Hit, Iraq with seven DRUMS of ammo for his SAW. Once and only once. After that he just carried a spare drum. BTW, a drum = 200 rounds of belt fed 5.56 mm. Also known as a rain of metal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M249_light_machine_gun
“Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft’s)”
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/01/disable-your-antivirus-software-except.html
Bold.
I knew guys who served in Viet Nam who routinely carried 1,000+ rounds for their M-16’s.
“Four more predictions for 2017”
http://www.cringely.com/2017/01/27/four-predictions-2017/
I have been wondering about the bitcoin thing myself. Seems to have a lot of unsavory characters passing money through it.
“…1,000+ rounds for their M-16’s.”
I had the Pig so I hadda hump a belt of a couple hundred rounds and other guys helped with smaller loads in addition to their M16s. My assistant gunner had the tripod and asbestos gloves and his rifle. Sometimes my assistant gunner was Vietnamese or Thai, which was always an interesting caper to be on. In 100-degree heat I didn’t bother with a helmet or shirt; just fatigue pants, jungle boots and a t-shirt and floppy hat. Of course that was a hotter AO and in Thailand, a bit quieter, they tried harder to make us dress more up-to-mil-spec-snuff.
It was easier moving around on the choppers and other aircraft but also more hair-raising and nerve-wracking. Tree-top level flights and occasionally getting small arms fire from the ground and thinking about what would happen if the chopper dropped into the canopy. Probably better to have it blow up and kill us all than be captured by VC or Khmer Rouge.
Oh shit, there I go with another damn war story. It’s RBT’s fault and Mr. Lynn’s.
Mrs. OFD called and she’s in Tulsa and likes it a lot better than OK City. ETA at the airport up here will be 17:00 tomorrow.
And we’re getting another dusting of snow here, kind of icy. With temps dropping into the 20s now and teens, single digits at night.
“Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft’s)”
Bold.
I use that exact approach. The only modification is that I use Zone Labs free firewall on machines I take to campus. Our campus IT people like their security toys with the probing and prodding 24/7, but it is murder on my laptops’ battery life.
10 years of VPN and security for Death Star Telephone, and the virus/malware problems I saw always happened to people who were into something hinkey with their company-supplied laptops after hours — porn, pirated software, and playing illegal movie downloads with Windows Media Player.
Occasionally, I’d see something that happened because an employee clicked on the wrong link in an email, but that only started after we dropped Lotus Notes for Outlook Exchange.
The only AV I run is linux.
I run the free Sophos Home AV software. You can install on multiple computers, and manage all of those computers from one web-based interface. Works quite well. Unobtrusive. Low processor load.
I got rid of any other non-MS AV product when I got the new laptops here.
Did I mention ‘free’? Yes, it is. Recommended. Along with the usual safe computing practices.
“…and the virus/malware problems I saw always happened to people who were into something hinkey with their company-supplied laptops after hours…”
Yup, whenever I was tasked with that aspect of IT security, that is what I found, too, plus online poker and related. One woman got warned about it and then came back in with one of those AOL cds and fired it up that way; fired immediately then. A young guy was looking at porn on his machine during the day with people walking by in back of him; fired immediately.
I have Linux Mint running here with the firewall on and it’s all behind an offshore VPN.
“Believe it or not, there are antivirus programs targeted at desktop Linux users. If you have just switched to Linux and started looking for an antivirus solution, don’t bother – you do not need an antivirus program on Linux.
“There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them. You would only want an antivirus program to scan for Windows malware.”
Why You Don’t Need an Antivirus On Linux (Usually)
If you need to check out your shortwave radio, tonight is good for me. I’m getting reception in the 7.000mhz range that are clear as broadcast am. for US stations.
Lots of cuban stations too.
n
Picked up a like new little sony sw radio today for $10. Cleaned up the battery compartment and it works great. Very sensitive with just the telescoping antenna.
Took a walk around the house looking for RF noise with it. LED can lights, led strips under the cabinets, and very surprisingly, my new refrigerator. It buzzes like crazy. Must be the inverter driven pump motor. Fortunately it’s not loud so distance is my friend. The absolute worst was the strip lights.
On another topic, first harvest from the salad garden, english radishes.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1oc6bedt8l7lr5t/20170122_133406.jpg?dl=0
n
Speaking of shortwave radio; I’ve had a little Sangean SG662 for a while and I made the mistake of allowing Somebody to borrow it to keep where they were working on stuff and I got it back recently with the volume and tuning knobs missing, the band selector on the top missing, and the battery compartment cover also missing. It’s only a $30 radio but otherwise it works well.
So my question is this: does anyone know where I might find replacements for these missing items? I suppose I can whittle replacement cork knobs and tape over the battery compartment but I’m not sure how I’d replace the band selector.
Or should I just write it off?
Could look on ebay for a parts unit. But it doesn’t sound like there is much left.
I haven’t had any luck with those small analog radios. There just isn’t enough room to tune the crowded parts of the band, and no way in hell you’d get the hams.
The one I picked up is the Sony ICF 7600D, which sells for ~$5o on ebay depending on condition. So far, I’m really impressed considering it’s an older unit. Mine is mint in the box. It’s the first of half dozen small SW radios that I actually like.
n
added- one of the sangeans sold NIB for 15$ in Dec on ebay. I wouldn’t replace it though. I’d upgrade.
Thanks for the info, Mr. Nick. I kinda thought that would be the case, but it bums me out that Somebody basically trashed it, probably by dropping it on the cement floor a few times. It had a useful little life, with trips to northern New Brunswick summers and suchlike.
I’ll look for the Sony ICF 7600D based on your experience with it. I have a big-ass Grundig Satellite that takes 6 D batteries but we’ve had trouble pulling in any stations with it here for some reason. And I’ve got a CountyComm GP-5/SSB to play with, too, in the meantime. I think you’re probably right on the small analog units and I’d like to pick up the ham activity, also.
DH wrote:
“Or should I just write it off?”
Did Someone suffer any retribution?
(Yeah, I know. I just figured you needed a laff.)
Dave! Dave! A job that could have been designed with you in mind: Microaggressions Professor!
@dave, you’re pretty set with the countrycomm I think…
You just need to throw some wire up into a tree for an antenna. Since it’s receive only, doesn’t really matter what you use or how long it is.
n
“A job that could have been designed with you in mind:…”
Oh yeah. Ya know, I don’t even think I could fake it. Then there’s the course they apparently have “The Problem of Whiteness.” I didn’t realize there was a problem with whiteness. Gee, maybe that’s my problem; I am so blinded by my white rayciss privilege I just can’t see it! Oh well, what’s another disability…
https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/schindler-americas-emerging-nationalism-crisis/
“You just need to throw some wire up into a tree for an antenna.”
Roger that; I need to do a little more research; I may use the TecSun 880 for desktop use and the CountyComm for portable, and pack the latter along with my Yaesu FT60. I can do the wire-in-the-trees thing with the TecSun and pack a roll of wire with the CountyComm.
As Nick said, a random length of wire is fine for a long-wire antenna for a RECEIVER. You can’t do that for a transmitter/transceiver, unless you connect an antenna tuner between the antenna and the transmitter. Otherwise the SWR will be huge, which means you’ll burn out the final stage of the transmitter because the mismatch.
For every day or casual tuning around the bands, you can’t really beat a table top radio, in analog, with a big tuning scale. LOTS of mi-70s and mid-80’s sets available.
I love my Panasonic RF2200. It’s been running over a year on 6 or 8 D cells. I fire it up and tune around several times a week, for a few minutes, or a couple hours, depending on band conditions.
Lately I’ve been using my Yaesu FRG 7700 which is analog with a digital freq display. It’s great too, but is running on AC.
I’ve got a Kenwood R1000 that needs a bit of work to be really great, but it is a workhorse too.
I don’t usually use the smaller pocket sized digital tuner radios to dial around. They sit in a drawer. I’ll recommend against a pocket sized analog too, mainly because the dial and tuner doesn’t let you tune accurately, but also because they are generally poor performers.
Spend a couple of bux more on a portable tabletop unit.
nick
Yeah, I’m just receiving at present, which is way more important than transmitting anyway.
And we got another inch or two of snow overnight. There may be enough out in the woods and hills for us to go snowshoeing this coming week. Need to GTFO of the house more often and I wanna see how it works with my continuing back and sciatica issues.
I have been wondering about the bitcoin thing myself. Seems to have a lot of unsavory characters passing money through it.
Said to be currency of choice for ransomware, illegal images of children, etc.
From an earlier 2017 prediction of Cringely:
But if you dig through the Comcast financials you’ll find that not only does the company make more profit from providing Internet service than it does from selling video service — Comcast pretty much makes no money at all selling video. The fees Comcast pays to cable and broadcast networks and independent stations take all the money.
Bur Comcast owns NBC/Universal which has a large number of cable channels. It’s no coincidence that all the NBC/Universal cable channels are carried by them. They sell the cable at cost and pass the profits to NBC/Universal (and Disney, CBS, etc.) so that they can can show local regulators that they aren’t gouging on rates.
Say, you know what else is used for a lot of illegal transactions? US greenbacks. There’s only one thing to do: arrest everyone involved in the production, distribution, receipt, or holding of greenbacks. Arrest their bosses and funders. Seize all of their assets as proceeds of crime or the implements of crime.
Seems harsh, but that’s the way several electronic currencies have been treated by the US government, so it’s nothing but fair.
FUSA must maintain its monopoly on currency and will brook no interference. Recall also that our former English cousins took a very dim view of counterfeiters and forgers, and one of their most vehement persecutors was one Ike Newton.
I am in favor of exploring alternatives to monopolies, esp. WRT currencies, and while it’s true that Bitcoin and others have had some very distasteful users and press, I think it will eventually gain ground as a perfectly legal and aboveboard means of engaging in financial transactions. This will become more evident as the zillions of sheets of FUSA currency keep rolling off the presses and filling wheelbarrows for loaves of bread.
Silver and gold? Who will you get to recognize and accept them among the general population? I try handing over some Liberty silver dollars or a five-dollar gold piece to some hayseed down the road for firewood and he’ll laugh in my face and then probably beat the shit out of me on the spot.
” I try handing over some Liberty silver dollars or a five-dollar gold piece to some hayseed down the road for firewood and he’ll laugh in my face and then probably beat the shit out of me on the spot.”
Actually, I bet he’s likely to prefer them given your location. Now, try it in Joisey, maybe not so much, unless you’re buying at the Stop and Rob. Those immigrant guys know the value of shiny.
n
Guys in my age group, maybe, but no one younger, who won’t know WTF it is and be suspicious I’m trying to pull a fast one on them.