08:40 – Yesterday, Barbara put a reserve hold on Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out. There won’t be much if anything in the book that I don’t already know, but it’ll be interesting to see Koppel’s take on the issue.
Most of my readers are already aware that a long-term grid-down situation is the worst nightmare imaginable for any prepper. Being without utility power for an extended time would literally destroy our country. It would probably kill off 10% of our population within weeks, and perhaps 80%+ within a year. Call it 250 million dead, just in the US and Canada. Modern society simply cannot survive without electricity. That’s the point Koppel is making, along with the fact that there are many different threats that could cause such a disaster, from hackers taking down the computers that control our grids to a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) to an intentional electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
It’s difficult to estimate the probability of such events. The best probability estimates I’ve seen of a catastrophic CME are 1% to 1.2%. Per year. Those estimates come from NASA and various scientific journal papers. I don’t know enough about space weather to judge their validity, but they seem convincing.
An EMP attack is within the capabilities of various nations and groups who hate the US. All it would take is one small fission device detonated at very high altitude over the central US to cause incredible and long-lasting destruction to our power grids. North Korea has already demonstrated such a device, as has Pakistan. Iran probably isn’t far from having them, if it doesn’t already. Note that neither a fission warhead nor even just a fission bomb is necessary. All they need is a fission device. That’s because the device will detonate in space. That makes it a couple orders of magnitude easier to achieve. Designing a warhead to survive re-entry is the hard part. Any number of nations, including China, Iran, and North Korea, have missiles capable of boosting such a device to the required altitude. It could be done easily from a freighter outside US waters.
As to hackers, who knows? The fact that parts of our grid are controlled by Internet-connected PCs running Windows XP makes me think it’s just a matter of time. When one considers all the possible threats, it seems reasonable to me to assign a tentative probability of 10% per year to a catastrophic grid-down event. And that’s much too high to be acceptable.
The recovery time would depend on the cause of the event. A cyber attack would probably cause the least physical damage of the three, although there’s still the potential for significant physical damage to distribution. If we were lucky, we might see power start to be restored within weeks and a return to normal within months. A Carrington-class CME would cause more physical damage, although that could be limited to some extent because we could expect to have at least several hours’ to a day or so notice of the actual impact. Things could be taken off-line and protected against the flux. Whether or not that would happen would depend on the decision makers. They might well hesitate to cause a complete disruption of the power grid, even knowing what was about to occur. The EMP attack would cause incredible damage, because it would happen on essentially zero notice. There would not be time to take any protective actions. High-voltage transmission lines would be destroyed, along with the transformers and other gear required to control them. And those aren’t things you can just order from Amazon Prime. Most of the equipment is made outside the US, and even if the factories that make them were unaffected (a big if) the lead times on them run to months or even years.
On a lighter note, here’s another example of why I despair about modern eduction: Can you solve the 50 cent maths exam question that is dividing the internet?
Anyone who needs more than a fraction of a second to come up with the correct answer doesn’t understand basic geometry. Those 12-sided coins have interior angles of 30 degrees (360 degrees / 12 = 30 degrees). The angle in question is twice that, or 60 degrees. That should be obvious at a glance to anyone who’s passed basic geometry.
10:37 – A few minutes ago, as we were binning seed bags, our real-estate agent in Sparta called. The second-mortgage holder countered our $5,000 offer verbally with $7,000. We agreed, so at this point we’re waiting for the second-mortgage holder to sign the agreement. When that happens, things will start to move quickly. We’ll close on the house in a couple weeks.
Funny about the coin question, for a couple of reasons.
I looked at it, immediately got the answer, thought, “that can’t be right, this is supposed to be hard” and did it two other ways (3 if you count direct inspection.)
To read the student comments is to weep for the youth of today….
1- a large number of them apparently can’t make the step from the physical to the abstract, not recognizing that the coin was a polygon….
2- “where’s the application in real life” complaints, still and again….
3- “I don’t know how to do it so it must therefore be unsolvable” narcissism
4- “It’s so unfaaaaaiiiirrrrrr!!!!11!!11!”
5- no problem solving skills, visual inspection rules out 3 of the answers
on the flip side (see!) there are the students mocking them for the ease of the answer. Ethnic names…
and apparently this WAS a good question for the exam as it separates the one’s who know the material, from those who don’t.
nick
Our local rag’s publisher does a tidbit column three time a week. About a year ago he mentions what he called an unbelievably hard problem a student had encountered on a test. It was anything but. It state there are five liquids in a container and identifies them by color and density. The clear one they state is water but does not give the density. It asks the order from top to bottom.
Well myself and many others blasted him. Yeah he might have a degree in journalism or english. I would only consider it common reasoning, not science or math. If you get a high school degree and don’t know the density of water I’m afraid you are an idiot . I probably knew that in third grade but maybe that’s the result of out current education system.
Picked up a reference book, “Game in Season:The Orvis Cookbook”.
Well, it will offer some (admittedly fancy) recipes for whatever is catchable post-SHTF. And perhaps I’ll try one or more ahead of time, since they aren’t just ‘throw some protein in a pot with whatever veg you can find, cook until mushy’ meals.
A lot of the side dishes are from foraged foods.
And it was only a dollar.
The classic “Joy of Cooking” which is a yard and garage sale staple, is a great cookbook for everyday use (I refer to it often) and has a section on cooking game. It also has a ton of explanatory material, and it is funny as well. The best thing for me is that it completely lacks the passive aggressive (and sometimes militant) tone of modern cookbooks wrt salt and fat.
nick
5- no problem solving skills
+1000
MrsAtoz and I see that all the time working the immigrant community. Does Common Core even teach word problem solving?
I read the headlines on the Internet about the German town that was being required to accept 750 migrants, but didn’t realize until today that the town has a population of 102 before adding the migrants.
Adding 750 people from a completely different culture is crazy. Resettling 750 Israelis to such a town would not be a good idea because their cultures are so different. Israelis are much more Western than the 750 migrants they are getting.
“On a lighter note, here’s another example of why I despair about modern eduction:”
Ya gotta make allowance for them being Victorian students.
Hasn’t the US already tested nukes high in the atmosphere or in outer space? ISTR they knocked out power in Hawaii for a while:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
The damage doesn’t seem to be too high, although the yield (1.4 Mt) seems to be higher than you envisage and it was a fission/fusion, not just fission.
It seems to me that hadjis or North Koreans might try something like this on, but surely not China. They know what the response would be from North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Those silos/missiles are hardened against EMP.
German town,
yup, and they are to be housed in a disused office building. The pics show rows of cots in what looks like a temporary structure though.
The text mentions that food will be cooked in the cafeteria. Who is cooking, what they’re cooking, where it comes from, where supporting staff will be accommodated, none of THAT is addressed.
If I were gearing up to provide living accommodations for a temporary work crew of 750 I’d need a LOT more than a couple of tents. Waste disposal, laundry, food, medical care, telecoms, transportation, staff (and housing for) of at least 50-75, not counting specialists.
Where will their food be warehoused? How will it be transported to the town? What is the capacity of the local sewer system, or comm infrastructure? How many OB/GYN doctors are available? Will the juveniles be schooled? Who and where? Who will maintain order? Police the ‘refugees?’
100 retirees, and a minimal local .gov will not and cannot provide the necessary services, even on a subsistence level, and you can be sure that the ‘refugees’ will DEMAND more than subsistence.
So no matter what, the town and it’s residents are changed forever. They are invaded not just by ‘refugees’ but by all that is needed to provide for them.
And what will those 750 do all day? Sit on their cots quietly? I don’t think so.
nick
Yep. Starfish Prime in 1962. But in 1962 the effects were pretty small. There were few transistorized electronic components connected to the grid, and none that used ICs. There weren’t any computers in vehicles, and most radio equipment still used tubes.
The yield of the explosion is almost immaterial. A 10 or 20 KT fission device at the proper altitude would create as large a pulse as a huge fusion bomb.
The problem would be figuring out who did it after the fact. Not just the actual perpetrators, but who was behind them. A missile launched from a tramp steamer could have come from anyone. And you can count on the people responsible killing everyone involved and sinking the ship in deep water. It’d be a suicide mission and everyone involved would know that from the beginning, but moslems have no problem finding volunteers for suicide missions, nor would the Norks.
And I suspect the US military and government would get some nasty surprises concerning things that were supposed to be EMP-hardened but actually weren’t. Probably not the missile silos and missiles themselves, but I suspect the command and control network would take a bigger hit than most people would expect.
As to our military, they’re just as dependent on JIT deliveries as civilians are. And that would break down catastrophically. The military can’t do much without JIT deliveries of fuel, ammo, spare parts, etc. Not to mention food.
“The fact that parts of our grid are controlled by Internet-connected PCs running Windows XP makes me think it’s just a matter of time.”
Not just that. I believe there are industrial controllers involved. Those can’t be made secure, and never should have been connected to a WAN. I know more about water systems than electric in this regard, so perhaps there are some here who know more specifics.
A more relevant question for us here is what would YOU do if this was YOUR small ex-urban retirement community?
Would you blockade the roads? Snipe at the buses? Burn down the building? How EXACTLY would you prevent the same thing from happening near you?
And if you don’t start the shooting war over this, what DO you start with?
nick
one thing we see over and over in history is the belief by TPTB, who couldn’t tell you where a chicken breast comes from, that there is a tremendous surplus ‘just lying around’ outside the cities. Infrastructure is built (by and large) for current needs and is usually overwhelmed immediately after being put into service. How will your little town deal with 10 times the population? or accommodate the sewage? the trash? the water used to flush toilets? Will your local cell site support 350 more users? We see what happens in boom towns, with oil and gas exploration, but in those cases, a cr@p ton of money is sloshing around, and still the result isn’t pretty.
An EMP attack would probably be a first salvo in a war. It would designed to knock out communications hindering command and control.
Today’s electronics are far more sensitive then the early transistors used in the 1960s. An EMP pulse would probably affect 1000 to 1500 miles radius that would cover most of the continental US.
It would be followed up by an attack on the missile sites that we have left along with the hand full of bomber bases and naval bases with submarines.
We sued to keep a command a control aircraft with a General on board who had the authority to launch a retaliatory strike if no civilian authorities could be contacted. we no longer do this.
A few missiles would probably survive, but who do we launch them against? was the attack from China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran?
Also remember this missile have sat in holes in ground for years. even today with careful preparation, rocket launches often fail. In theory we test them every so often, but only after they have been carefully inspected and refurbished to make sure they don’t fail.
We used to have a certain number of bomber war loaded and ready to go on a 5 minute notice. this was stopped many years ago. ti would take a minimum of 12 to as many as 36 hours to prep and load the bombers we have left.
There would be a few subs at sea with war loads, but no where as many as there used to and once again who do we launch them against?
It a surprise attack likely? I don’t really think so, but the best way to prevent it would be to be ready for it and to assure everyone we would hit back.
I admit I an an old SAC guy who turned wrenches on B52G Bombers. while missile and subs have their roles, only bomber have actually drop weapons in war time conditions. We practiced dropping them constantly, and unlike missiles we could launch on warning and be recalled if it turned out to be a false alarm.
@ Jim B,
from articles in trade magazines, it’s clear that there are a huge number of PLCs that have been connected to networks, and that many of them are very old, and completely open or only protected by default passwords.
I have some experience with control systems, and it isn’t [edited: wasn’t unusual, maybe it is since a bunch of effort and money was directed at improving infrastructure under the mantle of ‘homeland security] unusual to find win98, win2000, or even OS/2 warp running on process control computers. They were cheap, easy to program, and they broke the instant you updated them, so you didn’t.
It didn’t matter as long as they weren’t connected to open networks, but as budgets got cut, staff reduced, and the demand for remote access and remote monitoring increased, more and more came online. There are techniques that mitigate those risks, and they are being used by some, but presumably not all.
I can drive past oilfields and look at every wellhead. They all have little antennas pointed into the distance, where that data is combined and sent home.
Stuxnet and the iranians demonstrated that it was possible to disrupt industrial processes remotely and subtly. That technology filters down and becomes commoditized. When large areas of the country are served by a few food processing plants, or one wastewater to drinking water plant, or a national provider has a highly automated facility, there is potential for real, far reaching disaster.
nick
Jim C
no more racetrack, no looking glass?
nick
I thought we started that back up?
It comes down to fragility caused by complexity and dependence on JIT deliveries. For good reason, engineers love elegance and abhor the Rube Goldberg complexity of modern systems. There are simply too many single points of failure, and the way our current systems are designed, those failures cascade.
One of the first things I plan to do once we get moved is buy an off-grid solar setup that will suffice for us to run the well pump as well as minimal lighting, comm and other small electronics, and so on. That setup will go on the shelf, in Faraday cages. I don’t expect to need it, short of a disastrous grid-down situation. We’ll have at least a month’s supply of water stored, along with battery-powered lighting and comms.
Any cyber or EMP attack on North Murka would irrevocably change all our lives for the worse for a very long time, the minority of us who would survive, that is. And as things stand now, our brilliant leaders are doing their damndest to make our lives much worse anyway. And to make it easier for someone to pull off a cyber or EMP attack, evidently. The globalist elites would love a mass die-off.
As for Windows XP, I just saw an article yesterday on the huge number of sites that aren’t about to give it up, regular businesses, governments, etc. They were still using it on the manufacturing floor of that dump I slaved at for six weeks last year. I even still have an XP CD around here somewhere, with the license key, and might find a use for it yet.
The German town: an obscenity concocted by the “authorities” with malice aforethought; as Mr. nick indicates, they have zero preparation for this invasion and the Germans will end up having to turn it into a big refugee camp run by their troops. We are hearing, however, that hordes of young male hadjis are “disappearing” from European refugee camps and no one knows where they’ve gone. Perfect! I also saw a list of countries who’d given out their numbers for how many Syrian refugees they’d be willing to resettle, and the U.S. number was “open-ended.” Sure, why not? It’s open-ended for our southern border anyway.
Cookbooks: My all-time favorite and standard reference for years has been James Beard’s “American Cookery,” but I also have books and videos from Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. And my growing pile of magazines from the Cooks Illustrated Empire.
Gorgeous fall day with no wind; time for me to do a bunch of stuff, kitchen and porch windows, yard, etc., etc.
“…buy an off-grid solar setup that will suffice for us to run the well pump as well as minimal lighting, comm and other small electronics, and so on.”
Did you have a particular solar setup like that in mind already?
Bob,
The interior angles of a 12-sided regular polygon are 150 degrees, not 30 degrees. Formula for the interior angle of an n-sided regular polygon is (n – 2) * 180 deg/n. The answer is still 60 degrees for the angle between the two coins, but that can readily be determined by using supplementary angles.
@nick, thanks. I have read as much. Our pols constantly harp about spending to update infrastructure, but I’ll bet a cookie they don’t understand it is way more than bridges. Someone needs to get more attention on this subject. Start by unplugging critical vuln points. Reduce regulation, but expose needs. I would rather have a secure water supply than an insecure one that meets the ridiculously low federal arsenic standards. Balance spending priorities.
Every day, our water company (private, not municipal) drives their trucks by almost hourly “inspecting.” While this is good, one wonders if some of those resources would be better spent on more secure remote monitoring and control.
@Jim B,
Judging from the trade mags (and I get a WIDE variety) industry is aware of the problems, and working on it. DHS is funding a bunch of upgrades, and the companies are lining up with their buckets to get some for themselves. Security industry is touting surveillance, verification, and access control. Process industry is touting gateways and other networking tricks to hide systems that can’t be upgraded. Control engineering industry is pushing for standards, security built in, and upgrades. Everyone is pushing the Internet of Things, while acknowledging that security is an afterthought or left out entirely…
It’s a bit of the blind men and the elephant. Each sees the problem and solution thru their own lens.
Add to that the power of magical thinking as legislators and regulators pass laws and regulations. There are lots of remote facilities that are now “protected” entirely by compliant SIGNS. Yes, they really are that stupid. It’s gun free zones for infrastructure. [added: sometimes literally as my CHL is specifically not valid at those sort of ‘critical infrastructure’ facilities, and places like flood control ditches.]
One thing that will counter balance the doom and gloom is that history (in the US anyway) shows that in an emergency or disaster people will find a way. They will bypass dead systems, manually reset facilities, ignore bad directions, and cobble stuff together to just make it work.
Until all the old guys, who really know how things work and have the institutional knowledge are all gone, there is a chance for the recovery and comeback. The skilled trades still have a preponderance of git-er-done guys who know how to make things happen. They are constrained and frustrated by the suits and the layers of SOPs and directives, and EEOC/HR seminars and guidelines, but they know what the really essential parts of the job are. Strip away that nonsense and productivity goes up by an order of magnitude.
nick
Who is cooking, what they’re cooking, where it comes from, where supporting staff will be accommodated, none of THAT is addressed.
Well, given the prominence that pork products have in German cooking, there could be some problems.
The problem would be figuring out who did it after the fact. Not just the actual perpetrators, but who was behind them
It’s known that the fissile material in a bomb has a “fingerprint” from the source reactors and you can ID who built the bomb.
Someone mentioned the crisis with public “eduction?”
Somewhat long, but yet another writer/speaker gets burned by the witch-hunter SJW’s in academia:
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/good-little-maoists/
And a kinda sad thing for me: the email address of the guy who hasn’t replied to Kunstler (at the time of writing) belongs to a former fellow grad student of mine down in Maffachufetts nearly a quarter-century ago. He was helpful to me when I was working on my MA thesis and a presentation I did on Dante at Yale, and had also been excoriated and victimized himself down there by a coven of radical fembat harpies when he read a paper. (not having included the latest and greatest radical fembat psychopaths in his reading). I guess he’s seen the career writing on the wall. What a shame.
That’s what I’d be serving if I was in charge.
You must be hungry after your trip so you can have all the free food you want, bacon, ham, pork loin, chef salad, german potato salad, shrimp, rattlesnake, mussels — take your pick.
We know you’re traumatized, so these emotional support companion dogs will be here for your petting and hugging pleasure, and will be sleeping in your barracks every night.
We’re gonna allow your yodelling from loudspeakers five times a day, but the local rabbi asked for some time on them too, so he’ll be reading something over them the rest of the time.
You can have all the free clothes you like, here’s your shorts and bikini’s.
Since we’re Germans, in an attempt to help you assimilate, the TVs in every room will be showing porn, specifically schitzen videos, 24/7, but stay as long as you like!
nick
Sehr gut, Mr. nick!
يا كافر الخنازير الكلب!
Yes. Shorthand. The interior angles between the sides are 150 degrees, which means that each side is a 30 degree bend from parallel relative to the adjoining sides.
“The interior angles between the sides are 150 degrees, which means that each side is a 30 degree bend from parallel relative to the adjoining sides.”
Now run that concept by any hundred names in any North Murkan phone book, or for even more boffo laffs, any typical freshman college class. I could do the same with basic English grammar and parts of speech. Epic fail, as the kidz used to say.
For several years doing installation of very high tech gear, with very precise geometry in 3D space (well, not machinist precise or NASA precise, but pretty damn precise) involving spheres, cylinders, boxes, and other shapes, in fairly large volumes (40x40x20 ft) I used geometry and trig pretty much weekly.
I was able to locate points and establish relationships between points quickly and accurately using plumb lines, string, and measuring tapes combined with trig and geometry. Sometimes (usually) in combination with plumb line lasers, and line projecting lasers. I could work faster, and as accurately as another engineer with a Total Station. (laser and optical digital theodolite, with built in computer- a precise and high tech measuring and survey tool) In some cases I was able to quickly layout points that the Total Station guy couldn’t figure out how to do.
All of my layout tools fit in a shoebox and would have been familiar to ancient greeks and Egyptians (except for the lasers, which were really just a way of projecting onto surfaces that would have been harder to do with string.)
Admittedly, some things are much easier to layout with the Total Station, if you know what you are doing, and you’ve already done the math (like irregularly spaced points on a spherical section surface.) But a lot of the time, a Total Station, or even a construction level, theodolite, or transit is not available.
Old school rules.
nick
1.) They’re not like us.
2.) Our dear leaders evidently would like this system in place in the West now.
http://news.yahoo.com/graphic-video-shows-afghan-woman-stoned-death-eloping-071332458.html
“”Merkel: We must hit climate target to avoid refugee waves”
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20151103/eu–germany-merkel-climate-0773add3e3.html
Oh my goodness. What a crock! This is mostly about overpopulation in the middle east, no jobs and constant war being sponsored by the USA.
” This is mostly about overpopulation in the middle east, no jobs and constant war being sponsored by the USA.”
Or, it’s mostly about globalist desire to break down national sovereignty, and move toward one world government, with them in the catbird seat.
Soros, and the Davos crowd. Who is funding these movements? Why is the navy not sinking vessels? Why is there no army invading Turkey or the other transit points? Why no naval blockade? Where is the 24/7 media blitz that making the trip is a bad idea? Why were there NEVER any attempts to turn them back? SOMEONE WANTS THIS. Someone engineered it. Someone is paying for it.
nick
“Oh my goodness. What a crock!”
Merkel, plump little hottie that she is (LOL!, still can’t beat Cankles for sheer fugliness), is well versed in dispensing lies and agitprop, as a former Communist Party apparatchik in the former East Germany. More importantly, of course, as a lifelong political hack and bureaucrat.
“Or, it’s mostly about globalist desire to break down national sovereignty, and move toward one world government, with them in the catbird seat.”
BINGO! Mr. nick wins the innernet for today! Also, mass die-off would suit them just fine. They’re positioned, mostly, to survive most major calamities. The rest of us can eat shit, per usual. Been like this since the beginning of recorded history, and the several attempts to overcome it, as with our own constitutional federal republic, have either failed outright or eventually been poisoned and are now dying a slow, lingering death.
Soros, and the Davos crowd. Who is funding these movements? Why is the navy not sinking vessels? Why is there no army invading Turkey or the other transit points? Why no naval blockade? Where is the 24/7 media blitz that making the trip is a bad idea? Why were there NEVER any attempts to turn them back? SOMEONE WANTS THIS. Someone engineered it. Someone is paying for it.
The Goths will not stand for this much longer. “Migrant crisis pushing Germany towards ‘anarchy and civil war’”
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/320651-germany-refugees-crisis-bavaria/
Merkel does not realize that she could be swinging from a lamp post by the end of the month. I did not realize that she is former communist official, why would the western Goths even consider her for a leader?
I considered an off grid solar installation to power our sump pump, and found that the most expensive part of it was the inverter. I’ve decided instead of getting the cheapest sine wave inverter that would do the task, to spend $10 less and get a twelve Volt backup sump pump. Even then it is going to take a few panels for the task.
If I were going to do what you’re going to do, I would think about using a 24 Volt inverter with pairs of twelve Volt panels and pairs of twelve volt batteries, rather than doing a twelve Volt system.
@RBT,
I recall that you were critical of the science in One Second After, so what do you think the author got wrong?
Hmmm,
Anyone who reads UK Daily Mail and wants to get a preview of what will be tomorrow’s headlines should be checking :
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/
Seems like UKDailyMail has been looking to them for news for the last few days.
nick
@RBT, if you are handy, large inverters can be had cheaply from old UPSs. There are several guides online.
They may not be designed for high efficiency, but that is changing with all the green building codes.
‘Course, we’ve had this discussion before 😉
nick
Off to vote in local elections. Where it still makes a difference.
An EMP attack is within the capabilities of various nations and groups who hate the US. All it would take is one small fission device detonated at very high altitude over the central US to cause incredible and long-lasting destruction to our power grids. North Korea has already demonstrated such a device, as has Pakistan. Iran probably isn’t far from having them, if it doesn’t already. Note that neither a fission warhead nor even just a fission bomb is necessary. All they need is a fission device. That’s because the device will detonate in space. That makes it a couple orders of magnitude easier to achieve. Designing a warhead to survive re-entry is the hard part. Any number of nations, including China, Iran, and North Korea, have missiles capable of boosting such a device to the required altitude. It could be done easily from a freighter outside US waters.
Am reading the second book in the Perseid series. Six years after the Jakarta Pandemic, someone detonates a nuclear weapon over Boston. The nuclear weapon did not make it up to LEO so they got a pressure wave and a tsunami. I’m not sure that Boston survived at this point as the the EMP killed the grid and most vehicles in Maine. The cops are stopping people driving in the streets and seizing their vehicles since so few are running. The cops are also seizing all guns. The tsunami came ten miles inland and flooded the first story of homes and basements up to forty feet above sea level. I’m not sure of this guys math since he over exaggerated the flu kill by ratio 5X in his previous book but it does make for a good yarn.
http://www.amazon.com/Perseid-Collapse/dp/1493695649/
“The tsunami came ten miles inland and flooded the first story of homes and basements up to forty feet above sea level.”
That would normally be four stories high. Such a wave/storm surge moving ten miles inland along the east coast would pretty much render said coast underwater and devastated. Boston to Newton, say. From Campobello Island (where Pharaoh Roosevelt II liked to hang out) down to Floriduh. Most of Floriduh would be underwater, of course. Thus disposing of around a million veterans quite nicely. And good luck to cops trying to seize vehicles and weapons in Maine or other pahts of New England; maybe that’ll work in the urban and suburban areas but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m guessing a very large percentage of cops would bail and head for home anyway.
Once things got bad enough, though, we’d see significant numbers of them becoming brigands and criminal thugs, of course; how else would they survive?
The Current Situation in the U.K. and the West, in general. As the State is unable or unwilling to perform its supposed obligations to its citizen-subjects, we step in:
http://www.thisblogisdangerous.com/the-retreat-of-the-state/
Well pump was the first mention. There are DC marine pumps that can provide enough well water for anyone but teenagers. Sump pumps are a different story. Wherever I go next, it will not be somewhere that requires sump pumping to remain dry. Been there in Boston; did that.
Nick said:
Speaking of Boston, I found it chilling that there were signs everywhere pointing out reservoir and watershed locations, clearly marked as providing the public water supply. Great! Nobody needs that information except our enemies, so let’s post it so there is zero research necessary to poison the water supply.
Then I get back to Tiny Town, and what have they erected? Signs at every single deep limestone well location where there is a pump for the public water supply.
“Speaking of Boston, I found it chilling that there were signs everywhere pointing out reservoir and watershed locations, clearly marked as providing the public water supply.”
Yup, been like that for decades; big-ass signs proclaiming the public wotta supplies; Boston gets its wotta from several reservoirs west of the city and also Quabbin, which, when built, flooded out four existing towns and sent the inhabitants and the dead from their cemeteries elsewhere. There still might be some very ancient peeps around who remember that caper from when they were children. I knew a handful of them when I lived out in West Warren, MA back in the 80s and they were still bitter. Last I knew the public wotta supply sites were/are run by the MDC, or Metropolitan District Commission, which had its own police force back in the day. Perhaps Mr. JLP or others down there can give us an update.
“There are DC marine pumps that can provide enough well water for anyone but teenagers.”
Do tell; I assume they run on electricity; I’m looking for something we can pump wotta from our well with that doesn’t require it. If the juice cuts out for a long while, I don’t wanna be humping buckets from the lake and then purifying each one.
Chuck W,
incidents mean money for responses….
just sayin’
nick
@Miles_Teg re:
“Ya gotta make allowance for them being Victorian students.”
+1
On the other hand, this wouldn’t happen in NSW. Yeah, right.
As an aside, I’ve thought that Ted Koppel was one of the last Big 3 network anchor/reporters that really tried to be unbiased, to love his country, to ask good questions of his guests, to treat everyone with respect, but still press points home. From some things I’ve seen him do after he left ABC, he seems to be center-right in his politics, but I may be projecting.
Geez, you’re almost as cynical as I am.
Went to vote, and that single Libertarian is in a ward I cannot vote for. It never said that on the sample ballot, and since it was for an ‘at-large’ city council member, I thought I could surely vote for that.
Anyway, when I cast my ballot, it warned me at every one of the last 3 steps, that of 13 possible offices, I only voted for one.
With no contests in all but one office, Tiny Town is definitely not open to political change. No wonder it is a ghost town.
Re: Marine systems. Yeah, small electrics just right for some SHTF events. Providing electrics still work. I once had a copy of this book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071432388
but I see that now it is only available on Kindle for anything like a reasonable price. I loaned the hardback to somebody who never returned it, and I have no idea who that was. They’re sitting on a goldmine, apparently.
On the Linux front. I am going to have to move from Mint sooner than later. In addition to being far, far behind in keeping Evolution up-to-date, a Mint update has screwed up my Rivendell radio automation experimental platform. Although I have everything major related to Rivendell pinned at current versions (like MySQL and Apache2), there are audio libraries that belong to Debian/Ubuntu/Mint that get upgraded, because I have let Mint upgrades on, in order to get the latest improvements to video editor Cinelerra, which is currently on an active upgrade curve. Rivendell now randomly freezes before actually getting audio out of a new “next event”, and is happening about once every 2 to 3 hours. I did Mint upgrades 2 weekends ago, and the problem surfaced after that. No wonder the Rivendell developers will only support it if installed on CentOS. Cannot take this falling over of Mint much longer.
And now, Adobe has abandoned upgrades to Flash for Linux. Sometime last week, Mozilla’s Firefox people issued the kill order, so Flash will no longer operate on Firefox for Linux. It is a complicated process, but the only way to get Flash to work in my Mint installation, is to keep clicking on the video/audio in question, until a dialog appears asking if I want to allow Flash to run. I have to do that for each and every video/audio that I want to see. Beyond exasperating.
Oddly, the HTML5 video/audio rendering engine must be called by the website you are visiting, but Adobe’s announcement that they will progressively abandon Flash altogether is not motivating anyone so far, to switch code to the available HTML5 tools. For a week now, Flash will not play anything on any website without my intercessions. Adobe will continue to support Flash on Chrome, regardless of the OS, so I will be switching to Chrome as soon as I have time to install it. I am getting pretty fed up with Firefox. They have instituted something that causes the search bar to use a random search engine after about every 5 or 6 uses—ignoring my default search engine—and I can find no way to prevent that. Seems like there are becoming fewer and fewer real alternatives to Google these days. Long past time for Mitchell Baker to go at Mozilla. By now, she is clearly not on the side of users.
When I get no real results in google, I run the search in duckduckgo. Google is actively censoring results for lots of things and I no longer trust it. It’s ok for day to day stuff, but anything technical that might also bring up ‘pop culture’ results is useless on google. duckduckgo reminds me of altavista which I clung to loonnnnggg after google won, mainly because they returned more useful results on technical searches.
Also, google no longer has a clear divisor between sponsored results and organic results. I’m getting tired of seeing Grainger as a result on every conceivable search.
Bing is useless, even for searching windows issues on MS own site.
I don’t have the random switching of search engines, FF 41.0.1 with an update downloading, on win8.1
nick
“No wonder the Rivendell developers will only support it if installed on CentOS.”
Do those guys say everything works swell on CentOS? I’ve got CentOS 7.1 and RHEL 7.1 here at home; you can install them however you want in terms of server/desktop configs, and of course the former does not require a RH support contract/license for you to get updates, etc. Exactly the same except for the trademarked names. I plan to use the CentOS machine to run everything firearms-related up in my slowly developing attic workshop; you might like it.
Just played some music vids via the Toob on the CentOS box via Firefox and they were fine, so if they needed Flash, it was apparently working.
(x-posted w/Mr. nick) We kinda gave up on Chrome here because it became wicked slow; and yeah, only using Google for mundane stuff now, duckduckgo for everything else, and getting better results, too.
Big day today down in Houston?
http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/11/sexual-predator-threatens-rape-as-houston-bathroom-ordinance-faces-voters/
Big day today down in Houston?
http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/11/sexual-predator-threatens-rape-as-houston-bathroom-ordinance-faces-voters/
Knowing the Houston mayor, she will probably ignore the down vote and do it anyway. I shudder to think of how many lawsuits that the ordinance is going to trigger. And, yes, the lawyers are salivating.
I do not understand the world of today. I understand that there are boys who want to be girls and girls who want to be boys (trigger Lou Reed). But you really need to go to the restroom that your clothing and equipment is setup for. And, there are sexual predators out there. However, if you are a male who is wearing a dress, just go in the Ladies and sit down. Don’t go into the Mens wearing a dress, I guarantee that one guy will take it badly.
Actually, the biggest problem in Houston is finding a restroom that is unlocked and works. Many of the small office buildings inside Houston have had their copper pipes and bathroom fixtures stolen. I was in one in the Museum district a couple of years ago. The bathroom was totally locked down and you had to get a key from my doctor’s receptionist. Unreal.
“Debt ceiling lifted, and the same day, debt jumps $339B”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/u.s.-national-debt-jumps-339-billion-after-ceiling-is-lifted/article/2575568
Wow. The apocalypse will be financial at this rate. Maybe 10 years. Maybe longer. Maybe shorter (shudder).
The federal debt has now doubled since Obola took office. When people say his name in the future, someone will spit.
That is the question of the day, do you want men to be able to use women’s bathrooms.
This is a whole sordid mess, and the original bill is apparently 29 pages long. That would be longer than the US Constitution. If it takes that long to define a new ‘right’, maybe you’re wrong. Just sayin.
And they could have copied bills that passed and were found legal in other TX cities, but they didn’t, so now this fight to eat up more taxpayer money and enrich lawyers.
nick
“Knowing the Houston mayor, she will probably ignore the down vote and do it anyway.”
Sure, it’s the way the Left has always operated; just like her CINC, Obola, with his “executive orders,” etc. Voting is a joke to them; if the masses don’t vote right, make them keep voting until they DO get it right, as with Brussels vs. Ireland and Denmark not too long ago, or simply ignore the results and do whatever you want. No accountability, nothing anyone can do about it, evidently, or is willing to get off their asses and do. And someone will pipe up that not only did not enough peeps vote the right way in the last election or didn’t vote at all and let this happen, but all we gotta do is wait till the next election and vote this pig out of office and all will be well. Except it never seems to work out that way; the only people who run for office seem to be mostly assholes and parasites, and they either have the money to do it themselves or can get the funds from somewhere else.
“The apocalypse will be financial at this rate. Maybe 10 years. Maybe longer. Maybe shorter (shudder).”
They’re doing their best to speed it up and so far they seem pretty successful; this could happen in five years or LESS. Now combine that with a partial or full Grid collapse for a few weeks, let alone months. And/or another major hurricane on a coastal city or a big-ass earthquake out in Kalifornia.
“When people say his name in the future, someone will spit.”
A lot of us have been spitting since he was elected. And yet we can’t dump it all on his narrow ass; this has been coming for a long time. Repub douchebags did their bit, too. Too easy to pin the tail only on this particular jackass.
“Think Fortran, assembly language programming is boring and useless? Tell that to the NASA Voyager team”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/31/brush_up_on_your_fortran/
I had a job offer back in 1982 to go work at NASA programming the computers on the Space Shuttle. Except for this little thing called a federal hiring freeze.
Y’all still going to stay home next November?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-04/clinton-calls-for-us-minimum-wage-increase/6912406
“Y’all still going to stay home next November?”
Nope, not for the local town/country elections; be right there marking the ballot. Won’t waste my time with anything above that level.
Cankles is gonna ratchet things up nicely here; bring it.
@Chuck W., I have been meaning to post some comments, and to thank you for your comments on your Linux experience several days ago. I also remember when you posted comments on your Linux experience some months ago. I have been using Mint 17 KDE 32 bit for all production for about a year, and agree with most of what you say. I don’t do radio broadcast stuff, so that is off the table.
Until about a month ago, my main beef was with the application software. That is a mixed bag: some is brilliant, and some just OK, but some is buggy doing everyday things. I can’t stand that. (I am being purposely vague, because I am not interested in the details and troubleshooting here.) I don’t have time to try too much, and certainly can’t simultaneously use several different apps that all do the same thing just to see which is best. In other words, I am not in the business of testing. I am also not in the business of reviewing.
Oh, I just can’t resist: I use both Firefox and Chromium. I find that both are good, but one is better than the other at times. Not had the Flash problems reported – yet. I also have used DuckDuckGo. At the time (less than a year ago,) it was at least unfamiliar, and seemed to me not as good. I used to LOVE Alta Vista, and used it to the bitter end, but only for the less popular searches. For pop stuff, I have been impressed with Google. Will have to look and see if I can catch Google censoring. That’s just stupid. Haven’t noticed the wonky Google stuff Nick reported. Not sure why. Will say that both Chrome and Firefox on Android work well. (off topic, but I sure like Android!)
For about the last month, Mint had been getting slower, with two or three failures of the GUI, and one or two of the kernel. This is on two machines, so I doubt it is hardware. I planned to either reinstall or maybe upgrade to 17.x, but haven’t had the time or interest. FWIW, about a week ago, for no apparent reason, all was well again. Although a relief, I am worried about why this occurred in the first place. I still remember the old days of big iron, and the thoroughness that often went into fixing the slightest problems, so you might appreciate my concerns. OTOH, I wouldn’t want to go back to those days.
At the same time, I have been accumulating newer hardware, and will deploy it as soon as I can. Hopefully, that will be in about a month. That hardware will run Windows 7, and probably 10 when it is ready. My mind is made up that the Linux production experience is just not for me. I will still continue to play with Linux, but will not use it for work. That is too bad, because I have been playing with Linux since about 2006. I am grateful to have learned a lot. If I were a programmer or a web designer, I might have a different attitude. I know a few of those folks, and they are happy. Interestingly, they don’t use desktop Linux for their daily business. Mostly, this is the decision of their employer, but I have challenged them to at least run an alternate setup, even at home, to see how well they like it. So far, not one has taken me up.
Part of my decision is influenced by a retired friend who simultaneously runs and likes Ubuntu Linux, Windows 7, and Windows 10, on three machines. I recently saw his setup, and he is successful with all three. He uses them for different purposes. I think he can make anything work well. He has helped me with my Mint setup, but it would be too much to ask him to solve all my problems. I need to have at least some fun.
It’s late, and I appreciate this forum. Thanks for the opportunity to post my thoughts. Aint computin’ wonderful?!
That’s okay Dave, when Hillary’s goons come to take your gear in January 2017 I’m sure she’ll let you keep an air rifle or some such.
In exchange for ah, personal services… 🙂
The 50p math problem is pretty easy. I’ll disagree about the “fraction of a second”, but a realistic student shouldn’t take more than a minute or so. The only excuse I can imagine is that lousy teachers (or a lousy required curriculum) have been handing students identical problem after identical problem, never requiring any sort of actual thinking.
I wonder at the excuse from various students “I was overthinking it”. What the heck does that mean? I expect it means that they started writing random numbers down and doing random things to those numbers, hoping a magic unicorn would jump out and give them the answer.
Anyhow, as Nick says: it apparently was a good question, because it is utterly clear, and yet separates those with a clue from those without.
– – – – –
Ah, back to the immigrant problem. Occupying these people is a huge part of the problem. They are not allowed to work, which is just stupid: it means that they will be bored out of their skulls, which is just an invitation to discontent and trouble. They need to be occupied, doing whatever they can. Some actually are educated: they were interviewing a doctor, who said that he would be happy if he were just allowed to do even volunteer work as a med-tech. He didn’t speak German, but he did speak fluent English, which would get him by. But no, not allowed. That’s just idiotic.
Some local towns are finding their own solutions, organizing activities, and asking the refugees to do things like voluntarily cleaning up parks, etc.. It can work, but it requires a lot of time, effort and initiative by individuals – the government is pretty clueless.
The sheer scale of the required language instruction is also not really addressed. There are language classes, but these should be for hours every day – that could be a large part of the activity – total immersion. And anyone who refuses to put in a real effort should go straight home. Of course, the planning and resources required for that simply don’t exist.
50 cents math problem, not pence, which I think is a different shape, IIRC.
Took me about five seconds.
“Getting old is hell.” ™
I wonder at the excuse from various students “I was overthinking it”. What the heck does that mean?
I do that all the time, in maths and programming. I come up with intricate solutions that may or may not be correct, when there’s a simple solution.
So it seems Hillary met with the mothers of the suicide “victims” who have been in the news for the past couple of years. Including the mother of the famous suicide by cop in Missouri. I have real questions about excessive use of force by the police, particularly in the cases of Eric Garner and Walter Scott.
It’s certainly a real problem, but those who are protesting it do themselves no favors by conflating justifiable shootings like that of Michael Brown with flat-out murders by cops.
Agreed. Pardon me for making the socially conservative remark that of all the big cases in the news, Eric Garner’s death stands out as the only one I noticed whose parents are still married to each other.
The problem on the cop side has no single cause, and no simple solution. I have some small insight into the issue as a result of the classes I’m taking. I imagine I’ll have more after my ride along shift tonight.
I’ll admit to some self censorship in an open forum, and that in itself is a problem.
There are several contributing factors, as I see it.
Personality, training (or lack), op tempo, support, environment, mass media, culture, politics.
Each could easily fill an essay.
Personality- cops are people, and the job traditionally draws two types, the idealist who genuinely wants to help society, and the one who wants power over others. There is a third, those who are seeking excitement/stimulation. No matter how they start, within time they become jaded and cynical, and socially isolated. That engenders a range of behaviors and beliefs that are more suited to enforcement, than security or policing.
Training- some cops do not get enough. Some is structurally bad (trains the wrong things), some cops are not equipped mentally to understand and remember some of the training, some don’t have enough refresher. A lot of training is devoted to PC issues. When cops don’t have a clear understanding of where their authority comes from, or the limits on it, they start to ‘make sh!t up.’ That’s when you get the video of cameras being confiscated, or ‘you’re obstructing my investigation.’ Those situations quickly become physical. Some of the training doctrine is out of date, or just wrong. Some has not been developed (like how to deal with ‘sovereign citizens’ on a traffic stop.) The ‘shoot no shoot’ training is an example. They don’t train to identify if the object is a threat anymore, they just respond if there IS an object in the person’s hand. The ‘no shoot’ targets have silhouetted open hands. THAT’S what you need to do if confronted.
Op Tempo, they never have true down time. Once they learn the mindset, they can never relax. There is never a completely safe area (at least that is the perception.) This takes a heavy toll psychologically. They end up unable to ‘turn off the cop.’
Support- they are very isolated socially, and the culture uses shunning as punishment. They don’t get support from family or community, because some aspects of the job are really too horrific to share with loved ones. The isolation is a reinforcing feedback loop.
Environment- they spend their days surrounded by horrible people, at their worst behavior. Even a traffic cop is subjected to a constant barrage of hate, lies, supplication, and stress. Just think about the stress of driving in traffic for 8 hours a day. Then add the wife beaters, gang bangers, runaways, child abusers, drunks, assh0les, mentally ill, burned up bodies, car crash victims, days old dead people, missing kids, illegal imigrants, and all the other unsavory people they HAVE to deal with. Then do it in the worst physical surroundings, decaying shotgun shacks, slums, no go areas, rain, sleet, snow, temps in the hundreds, or below 0.
Mass media, culture and politics- related so together. A mass media that glorifies violence and depravity, with a culture that glorifies the ‘thug life’, ignorance, and an ‘us vs them’ attitude, and a political agenda that seeks to divide, exaggerate differences, and perpetuate greivances is a toxic stew that will warp anyone who comes in contact with it. So much more that could be said here, but I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader. I will say that most of the people here DO NOT spend a great deal of time immersed in the mass media that supports this culture. If you don’t, watch afternoon broadcast TV for a couple of hours (the gotcha type shows, like Dr Phil, Tyra). Tune your XM radio to HipHop for 3o minutes and LISTEN. Watch a sitcom on WB at night.
In short, modern cops operate in an environment that is guaranteed to produce the results we are seeing. Isolate a group physically and emotionally. Stress them beyond belief. Tell them they are special. Tell them they are oppressed. Allow them to write their own rules, which always increasingly protect themselves at the expense of others. Feed into the existing feedback loops.
This doesn’t describe every cop, nor every department. But it makes sense to me.
nick
@dave. and he was the business owner, wasn’t he?
nick
Re: Flashbulb of God and Electronics. There are 4 main effects: Neutron Flux, Gamma Dose Rate, Gamma Total Dose, and EMP. The first 3 are relatively short range. If you are hit by them, you are also suffering serious radiation sickness. We’ll ignore them.
EMP effects are not much more debilitation than a lighting strike. Really. Basically if the device can withstand a nearby lightning strike, it will withstand EMP. The only real problem is that the EMP is not localized. Cars will be fine. The grid will get hit, but not enough energy to destroy the transformers, I believe.
A Carrington event is more dangerous because of the amount of energy it has, IMO. While an EMP event will last nano-seconds, a Carrington class event will last, what, minutes? Hours? I think that would bring the grid down because of real damage to the transformers, not to mention fires and communication failures.
All my opinion. I have no access to classified documents. I have designed equipment that passed Army Initial Nuclear Weapons Effects testing, however.
There are supposedly EMP-enhanced weapons that can generate 100,000V/meter out to the horizon. And the rise time on an EMP is a tiny fraction of that from a lightning strike. You’re correct, of course, that damage to vehicles would be nowhere near as bad as PA novelists portray it. The metal body of a vehicle provide significant protection, as does the typically metal box that contains the electronics. That was one of my main objections scientifically to One Second After. I think that’s PA novelists’ shorthand way of portraying the follow-on effects. Having 100% of recent vehicles killed by the EMP is just an easy-to-understand way to portray what really happens when only a fraction of computerized gear is killed, but the geometric effects of a long chain of critical components ends up dead anyway. Even if 90% survive, that’s .9 x .9 x .9 x .9 x …, which ultimately results in survival of critical chains that so close to 0% as not to matter.
What concerns me about a CME is that our “leaders” would probably fail to take measures to ameliorate damage even when they *know* what’s going to happen. A catastrophic CME could do so much damage to the grid that power would be down for at least months and probably years. But the way politicians think is that intentionally taking down the grid to protect against an imminent CME would kill at a minimum many thousands of people, and voters will blame them for that. They can’t think far enough ahead to realize that if they don’t do everything they can to minimize damage there would be orders of magnitude more deaths and no more elections for a long time.
@Mr. Jim B:
You don’t say what form your production use takes but just at the outset I’d probably not have tried to use Mint for it. My take on Mint, which I’ve used myself, is that it’s mainly a personal desktop and laptop o.s. that works nicely for people who are just now moving from Windows. For a production server environment I’d choose Red Hat or CentOS, but of course that depends, again, on what sort of production and apps I’m using. Just as in the Windows world I’d be running the Server for production and given the choices nowadays, 7 or 8 on the desktops and laptops.
Excellent summary of the cop situation; true when I was doing that gig over thirty years ago and even more true now.
“They end up unable to ‘turn off the cop.’”
Still true for me all these years later. My experience was compounded by the time in military police and then after that, the civilian street cop times down in MA, including going through the MA State Police Academy and a pile of training courses with the MA Criminal Justice Training Council. In fact, if you put me in a uniform again now with the badge and gun, I could do the gig very easily and not screw anybody over. But no thanks; I had more than enough of that long ago.
I understand that there are boys who want to be girls and girls who want to be boys (trigger Lou Reed).
The Kinks used that line in “Lola”.
But you really need to go to the restroom that your clothing and equipment is setup for. And, there are sexual predators out there. However, if you are a male who is wearing a dress, just go in the Ladies and sit down.
Except in most of Texas that is illegal unless you have gotten your birth certificate updated, which is damn near impossible (and very expensive) to get in most of the state.
I have to take my mom to doctor’s appointments and the like and she is usually in a wheelchair, as she can’t walk very far even with her walker. When she has to use the restroom, it’s always a concern for me, as I have to wheel her in and help her get up. I’ve gotten some strange looks for coming out of the ladies room, and despite knocking loudly and asking if anyone was inside, we’ve come across women that didn’t respond and were in the stalls.
The sexual predator issue is a smokescreen, pure and simple. San Antonio and Waco (Waco! of all places) both have similar ordinances to HERO and they have had no uptick in sexual assaults in bathrooms. And the discrimination against the transgendered and others covered by HERO is real – fired from jobs for being transgendere or gay, denied jobs because of being a veteran, harassment on the job and elsewhere, getting beaten up, etc.
I’d maintain that it’s a pretty wacky society and culture now that we have to fret interminably over who has what “equipment” that qualifies them as male or female and subsequently affecting their use of public bathrooms. We’ve opened yet another Pandora’s Box.
“And the discrimination against the transgendered and others covered by HERO is real ” so is discrimination against assholes. So what?
All the consequences you list happen to assholes too. Should they be ‘protected?’ And it’s not a choice. Some folks are just born d!cks/b!tches. As a whole, they are probably a bigger group than transgenders too.
Did I read you correctly that you are afraid of legal consequences when helping your mother use the bathroom? Grow a pair. You probably commit 10 other crimes a day that are harder to explain and less likely to get a sympathetic ear if caught. Or take her into the men’s room with you, like I take my daughters. Or use the family restroom that almost all new construction has.
How many prosecutions of that law have there been? How many were unjust? No one has shown me that this is a real problem that needed a new 29 page law.
And if the Mayor wanted to get it passed like Austin, she could have used the wording that passed. She chose not to.
Lastly, the whole thing stinks. If you have an issue that needs to be addressed in a new law, write the law for that issue. Stop bundling dozens of unrelated bits into one piece of legislation. Is it for veterans or QUILTBAGS? Pick one, write the law. Vote.
“The People” weren’t asked if they wanted this addressed by lawmakers, and when they found out it had been, they acted. Lawmakers have been acting on their own stick too long. This is an example of ‘the people’ correcting an overreach.
nick
That would also be my take on the situation; various political “leaders” don’t get what they want in a straight-up, honest referendum or vote so they just do whatever they want and make it so, anyway.
Put the shoe on the other foot: I carry firearms concealed, but I feel this discriminates against my right to bear arms under 2A and thus believe I should be able to tote my slung-over-the-shoulder AR or AK in and out of restaurants, banks, and courthouses. I gin up a petition and get a referendum going but it fails. So my next move is to get the mayor or city manager to simply make it so via some sort of quasi-executive fiat instead. And thus my “right” to walk tall with my AK-47 at Applebee’s or the TD Bank here trumps everyone else’s “right” not to be made nervous and tense and fearful when I do so, and frighten children.
(Actually I don’t open-carry, even though I can here in Vermont, because, really, why advertise my armed status and why give bad guys the first shot at an obvious target?)
The Second Amendment restricts government bodies, not private businesses. If I want to put up a sign out front of my business that says “No Guns Allowed”, that’s my right. If you carry a firearm onto my property, you’re trespassing.
Of course, I wouldn’t dream of entering a business that had such a sign, even if I weren’t carrying a gun. The free market rules.
I voted locally. Plenty of uncontested races. Of the most interest to me was the nearby city – every seat went to an uncontested democrat. In the county, there was a good mix of both parties, and both parties won seats.
City is broke. Has been for years. Hasn’t seen a conservative in at least 50 years. And they keep voting for the same rascals.
My rascals, at least, live down the road from me. They get my phone calls & call me back. Local politics, at least, still work. Until the UC come out.
Environment- they spend their days surrounded by horrible people, at their worst behavior.
A friend of mine’s son is a Harris County (mostly Houston) sheriff’s deputy. He has had the same beat for many years. He had to respond to a dead person call this year. A dead baby. The mom had the baby sleeping with her. She rolled over on the baby during the night and suffocated it.
This is the second time! The deputy called his mom, crying, and said that he cannot do this anymore. But he has bills and a family to support like everyone else so he cannot quit. He was also the responder on the first time she killed a baby several years ago. She has 5 or 6 more kids, no big deal to her.
“He was also the responder on the first time she killed a baby several years ago.”
Very nice. I had three suicide calls to go to on my year as a small-town copper in Maffachufetts back in the late 70s; plus a couple of very nasty motor vehicle accidents, one of which involved me picking up a head from the highway and placing it near the body it belong to for the responding EMTs. Plus innumerable domestic disputes and bar brawls.
During my entire time as a LEO, I never had to shoot anybody but came within nanoseconds of doing so on three occasions; also had knives pulled on me and wrestled with drunk hockey team players and other assorted assholes on dirty pavement and in mud. That year in the small town department I was just 24.
Second time for the same mother? Really?
We had a case just a couple of months ago that I heard on the scanner, and then later saw on TV. Sheriff’s office arrives at the suburban home to find the mother in the driveway stabbing her toddler son in the genitals with garden shears. She’d been at it for a while before someone called.
I heard the deputy call that “you might want to get life flight ready for this one” when he arrived on scene. His tone of voice is what grabbed my attention. Even that amount of peripheral non-involvement has left stuff in my head I’d rather not have.
Again, it doesn’t excuse the cr@p we’re seeing, but it is part of the explanation for how we got here.
nick
@ech, I didn’t mean for the example of an assh0le to be you in any way.
If you are really concerned about the existing law, then work to get it amended to exempt caregivers. That is a much cleaner, limited change, that addresses your concern, while limiting the possible unintended consequences.
nick
the fact that any aspect of it needs to be legislated at all is an indictment of our culture.
Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/055341996X
I used to like watching Ted Koppel on Nightline occasionally. Well done show. I wonder why he could not find a unique name?
http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-David-Crawford/dp/0615427359/
I understand that there are boys who want to be girls and girls who want to be boys (trigger Lou Reed).
The Kinks used that line in “Lola”.
Oops. Sorry about that.
“Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls.
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world,
except for Lola. Lo lo lo lo Lola.”
I’ve always liked 10 Years After’s I’d Love to Change the World
“Everywhere is freaks and hairies,
dykes and fairies. Tell me where is sanity.
Tax the rich, feed the poor
’til there are no rich no more.
I’d love to change the world,
but I don’t know what to do
so I’ll leave it up to you.”
Mr. Lynn may be thinking of the late Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAfP5BMKgjc
And like I keep saying, apparently into a deep dark void, so much for our precious right to vote here these days:
http://humanevents.com/2015/11/04/destroying-your-vote/?utm_source=hedaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Peachy-keen and hunky-dory. Most of the problems on the forum relate to Ubuntu derived OS’es. The only CentOS problem is the original install. There is something about the logic of the partitioning process—it is not American thinking, and few people can get past the partitioning. In fact, I tried CentOS on another computer, and never could get it to partition properly. The default requires 500gb or higher drive, and I had only a 300gb drive at the time. So do a custom partition, the devs said. I tried, but it was one of those Catch 22 things, where what I wanted seemed straight-forward, but the installer would not accept my partitioning and would not tell me why. So I gave up.
But yeah—Rivendell has LOTS of abilities like GPIO for manual pushbutton control of the ‘cart wall’ and the start of the main 2 cart machines (the paradigm of all radio automation is the old analog continuous loop cart machines). There is touch-screen support. It can also control Livewire, which is a broadcast/recording-studio audio interface standard that will allow control of fader levels, on/off switches for audio channels, and lots of other stuff for controlling the all-digital audio mixing boards of today. No problems with that stuff on CentOS, but plenty in Ubuntu and Debian.
So @Jim B—I agree with OFD that, even though I love the Mint Cinnamon interface—Mint is just not a serious system like some others. As my experience is proving, just ordinary Mint updates are breaking things in various apps.
Here’s what I think has happened to Linux in general. When the financial SHTF in 2008 and tons of people lost their job, many of the geeks kept themselves busy working in the open-source/community experience. But around 2011, real jobs started appearing again, and the competent geeks needed money and had to abandon the non-paying ‘contribute to the world good’ projects. GnuCash for Mint is now 8 versions behind. Mint is being abandoned by developers that could keep it going.
If I had serious work to do, I would 1) pay for Red Hat, 2) use CentOS, 3) use Debian 8—in that order for reliability. At Ubuntu and Mint (Mint is kind of a fork of Ubuntu, but is still built on the latest work in Ubuntu), clearly there are not enough developers with Mint to keep all the balls in the air. Mint was fine until about 8 months ago, when it really started falling seriously behind. It started with the sudden lack of updates to the Mint repositories for Evolution, and that was in about February this year. Libre Office is now seriously behind in Mint, GnuCash which I just pointed out, as is Gimp; Firefox has been taking longer and longer before updates are available for Mint. Just wish there were more hours in the day, because after getting a computer working for all my needs, it is a massive task to switch things, whether that is to upgrade Windows, Linux, or Mac.
In the work environment we have Mac’s and PC’s mixed. I have no problems (except price) having to deal with that—we had that at the Monitor: I had an Atex (news services feeds—AP, UPI, etc.—and newspaper page publishing) terminal on big iron; DEC’s latest running Word Perfect and a bunch of stuff I can’t remember (that was probably big iron, too, no?); a Wang terminal (tied in to all the secretaries—Wang was the only computer on their desks) and those tiny first Mac’s that looked like cartoons in retrospect. The Wang disappeared shortly after I got there replaced by DEC’s, and the Atex and DEC were combined into one terminal somehow but the specifics escape me. The DEC had our first email system that was inside company only, but did provide email to all the bureaus worldwide, communicating via phone overnights to send/receive mail. So in the end, I had one terminal with Atex/DEC and a separate Mac. Windows appeared there after I left, although an MS-DOS computer ran the Dalet radio automation that controlled the 3 feeds to the shortwave transmitters (that system cost a couple hundred thousand—I think it was from the Dutch).
We used a Radio Shack portable laptop device that ran on AA cells or AC and could send copy via phone lines from anywhere with those little acoustic coupler cups that fit on receivers of hotel phones at that time. Although I do video on Cinnelerra in Linux, the pro shops around here use Final Cut on Mac’s, and most use Pro Tools on Mac for audio work. I do audio in Audacity on Linux, but I don’t do looping, Foley edits, and other stuff the video guys in the edit suites do.
Earlier versions of the Rivendell radio automation would run on Mac’s, but I have not read of anybody trying for years now. There is a major generational release due for Rivendell. It has been using QT3 as the display engine, and that is about to be changed, because QT has advanced to the point that QT3 is archaic and no longer supported. Not sure what they are switching to, but it needs to support touch screen.
Meanwhile, I am probably looking at the down time between Xmas and New Year’s before I can get myself off Mint.
“… DEC’s latest running Word Perfect…”
Wow, that’s right; I’d forgotten about that; my first full-time IT job had me running a PDP-11 for CAD ops and a microVAX for the software engineering. A new female mangler rolled in and had me photocopying the 400-page WordPerfect manual which is when I bailed outta there and went to work directly for DEC. Where they had All-in-One, a software suite I found a bit later at another IT gig, part-time at a law firm while I was in grad school down in MA.
“If I had serious work to do, I would 1) pay for Red Hat, 2) use CentOS…”
Agreed 100%. I pay $99/year for a RH developer’s license, which gives me the full support boat for my measly one RHEL machine here, plus updates, email notifications, etc. Works great. And I also have a CentOS box; so Mr. Chuck, if and when you start cranking on either of those near the end of the year I may be able to help out a bit. Partitioning should not have been a major hurdle, but maybe there was some other issue going on then.
Yeah, it was their English, I’m sure. I did not get it, and likely did not even see the answer in the instructions.
It’s like “purple people eater”. Is that a people eater who is purple? or a an eater who eats purple people?
What was their first language? Very easy to mess up English if it’s not the primary.
As for partitioning, there is normally, in my experience anyway, a point during the install when you can do that manually, but if not, you can do it later at some point, too.
Lots of rumors out there that Microsoft may buy Red Hat:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2015/11/05/first-microsoft-loves-linux-now-microsoft-loves-red-hat/
“Very easy to mess up English if it’s not the primary. ”
Judging by what I see, it’s pretty easy to mess up English even if it is the primary.
Are we talking about USA English, the King’s English, Indian English, or trade English? There are about a 100 more as far as I can tell. Don’t even go into colloquialisms.
Color = Colour. Aluminum = Aluminium. etc …
I’m talking about any English. Even printed books are full of barbarisms.
“…it’s pretty easy to mess up English even if it is the primary.”
Through laziness, ignorance and indifference. It’s messed up by ESL speakers and writers through no particular fault of their own; determined furriners can get very good at it indeed. But there is little or no reward for doing so, which is why we have bilingual Spanish signage all over the country now and subjects in the NYC publik skools are taught in 100 different languages at last count.
I have zero sympathy for native speakers of English who manage to get their stuff published full of errors and ungrammatical constructions.
“There are about a 100 more as far as I can tell.”
And let us not forget the academic English used in college and university humanities and social “science” departments; replete with jargon and pseudo-scientific gibberish only intelligible to other practitioners.
M$ and Red Hat hooking up, another giant corporate merger, in part; I wonder how this will shape up in the next year or so. Everything cloud now….but what if the juice cuts out???
I have zero sympathy for native speakers of English who manage to get their stuff published full of errors and ungrammatical constructions.
Don’t you be critiquing my software manuals now!
https://www.winsim.com/doco.html
M$ and Red Hat hooking up, another giant corporate merger, in part; I wonder how this will shape up in the next year or so. Everything cloud now….but what if the juice cuts out???
People do not realize that MS is the world’s largest custom software vendor. Over half of their employees work on custom software. Red Hat sells custom software services. What can go wrong?
The juice will stay on. Unless we get a pandemic, asteroid hit, EMP’d, invasion, financial collapse, etc, etc, etc. What did I miss?
“What did I miss?”
Some punk-ass hadji kid who’s graduated from clock-making to sending packets to our network of Windows XP machines on the Grid?
A couple of goblins climbing over or through a fence at some Northeast substation and cutting or burning or blowing up the stuff inside?
Previous huge blackouts had pretty mundane root causes; I don’t see how hard it would be for dedicated screwballs to replicate one or more of those or come up with something new.
“What can go wrong?
I dunno; RH being assimilated by the M$ Borg?