Sat. Aug. 28, 2021 – out all day

Hot and humid to be sure, unless it’s pouring down rain…

Got the show loaded in yesterday morning with a minimum of sweat. Thanks mostly to Mr Carrier and his desire to not sweat to death.

Sold a few things right off the bat, and a couple more later in the day. I’ve had the same guy come by the table and fondle one item multiple times. I’m thinking he’s gonna be a buyer at some point.

Taking the kids with me today. Hopefully they’ll occupy themselves with a minimum of fighting.

I’m taking more stuff to sell today too that I didn’t get rounded up in time for yesterday. Wife wants to put an offer on a lakehouse, sight unseen. I need cash suddenly 🙂 (I don’t think she will, the price is too high for what’s on offer.)

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I know we talk about being on lists, and about the surveillance machine the online services have built, and how they have you profiled to the tiniest detail…. and we give some sort of shrug and move on. Think for a few minutes about the taliban having access to that same sort of information. Think really hard, because tech trickles down, and they will be the legit government in Afghanistan. Consider how MUCH some of the ‘Karens’ and lefties here profess to hate some of us for our beliefs, skin color, age, or success in life. Now think about google and facef#ck selling those detailed dossiers sorted by street address.

Think REALLY HARD about your response if they showed up at your door. Think about expanding your options before the need, like a prepper should, and a prudent person would. Suddenly your wallet, phones, computers, and vehicles are all worse than useless, and will remain so for some period of time. What ya gonna do when they come for you?

It’s much more likely that we all suffer when the SHTF. Stacks will help. Having a plan to drop it all and walk away when you see the heat coming down your street wouldn’t hurt. Lately a lot of really unlikely things have been happening. The baying crowd always wants someone to punish, and it’s a bonus if they have stuff to steal too. Just sayin’.

nick

35 Comments and discussion on "Sat. Aug. 28, 2021 – out all day"

  1. Nick Flandrey says:

    Very tired this am and the kids are too. THEY at least went to be early….

    I’m not smart enough.

    n

  2. brad says:

    Think REALLY HARD about your response if they showed up at your door.

    “They” could well be law enforcement. Just to take the most recent outrage, still bouncing around the tech world: Apple searching your phone for pics that match a set of hashes, and reporting matches to law enforcement. They claim its “for the children”, but the tech world is convinced that its “for the government”. Maybe they check for pics of kids being abused, but in China they will *also* be checking for “tank man”. The search can – and will – be extended. Ultimately, there’s no reason to stop with pics: End-to-end encrypted apps like Signal are great, but they are not encrypted on the end-points or you couldn’t read your messages.

    Law-enforcement agencies all over the world are drooling into their shoes. Surveillance, not subject to most legal restrictions, because it’s being performed by a private company. And we supposedly consented to that surveillance when we clicked our acceptance of the ever-changing ToS.

    Even those who lead completely ordinary lives are hardly safe. The matching algorithm is known, and has already been demonstrated to produce false positives. Who knew that your picture of Aunt Sally’s 80th birthday party has the same hash as…whatever? You’ll find out, when they knock at the door…

    I’m in a dour mood today…

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  3. Ray Thompson says:

    Who knew that your picture of Aunt Sally’s 80th birthday party has the same hash as…whatever?

    Or that cute picture of your child in the tub at the age of six months now gets flagged as child porn. That picture having been sent to the grandparents or siblings. Now the police can come to the door, a dozen of them in full swat gear, with no warrant, break it down, body slam anyone in the house, including 95 year old Thelma in a wheelchair, to the floor with M-16’s pointed at everyone’s head. Confiscate all electronic devices and cash. Now it is up to the homeowner to prove innocence, then appeal to the courts to return the property, which the police have probably already sold, at great expense in lawyers in legal fees. With no legal repercussions to the officers involved who were “just doing their job”.

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  4. MrAtoz says:

    Quite the threatening letter from the Navy:

    EXCLUSIVE: Active Duty, Retired Naval Intelligence Members Told They Cannot ‘Disrespect’ Biden Over Afghanistan Debacle

    Whoever came up with this should be immediately cashiered. Of course, plugs is Obola 2.0 and nobody is punished in the administration. What’s next, a retired officer says plugs is a fcuk-up and you are called back to Active Duty and Courts-Martialed? Ridiculous. The Perfumed Princes are off the rails. They must be thinking of running for office in 2024.

    Hi Mr. DadCooks.

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  5. MrAtoz says:

    Tough SFC Lesbian on how she’ll shoot you during Martial Law because you will be the enemy:

    Woke soldier says she’ll shoot Americans who disobey her if martial law is declared. She must not realize how many of us veterans have the same training and won’t be on her side

    I wonder how the plugsy McSpongeBrain chain of command will react. Oh, yeah, lesbian so she’s good. In my day in the Army, anyone posting this would be immediately relieved of duty. But, WOKE!!!

    If this is real, I hope she is completed outed (LOL), disgraced and cashiered.

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  6. drwilliams says:

    @MrAtoz

    No such policy ever showed a glimmer over the horizon when Trump was in office. What’s the statute of limitations on that?

  7. ech says:

    The mandate on not showing “disrespect” to the uniformed and civilian leadership is not new for active duty military. First I’ve seen of it being applicable to retired military.

  8. Greg Norton says:

    Tough SFC Lesbian on how she’ll shoot you during Martial Law because you will be the enemy:

    Rush Limbaugh’s “All Amazon Battalions”.

    Folks, he was *kidding* when he created that concept. I clearly remember the afternoon he first dropped the bit and refined the structure with callers providing insight into regiment, battalion, and company structure/numbers.

    God help us if someone at the Clinton-era Pentagon was taking notes.

    What’s next? Feminazi trading cards from Tops?

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  9. drwilliams says:

    @Nick

    I did away with Google long ago, except for a few odd bits. 99% DDG.

    Anything in the cloud is out of your control. Apple’s iCloud is only protected in storage by their universal key. In China, Apple’s iCloud building has space for the Chinese government, whom they have given those keys to.

    So upload to the cloud anything you’re going to post anyway: feeBay, Farcebook (sure, marketplace and business; personal, Shirley you jest?), NeztDoor, etc. No personal pix, nothing with geolocation.

    Assume the metadata on any photo (or document) has been inspected. “Well, sir, where is this camera, and what is in photos #1002-1075 taken between Date A and Date B?”

    J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts) started her near-future “In Death” series of police procedurals in 1995. One of the features: Licensed computers, all connected to the internet.

    S.M. Stirling wrote Conquistador in 2003. Cops found the world-gate by tracking the movements of people after the fact from years of logged records.

    D.F. Jones wrote Colossus in 1966. World-controlling computer monitored it’s builder by video.

    Windows 11? GMAFB. Anyone thinking the features are for the security of the public is proving their room-temperature IQ.

    Ring video doorbells? Anyone want to bet that JFB can’t turn them on with one command from his bedside remote?

    Apple and John Deere sell you machines. They will give you the horsepower you pay for, and you have no right to mods in your favor.

    Doom. Doom I say.

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  10. drwilliams says:

    @Greg Norton

    Tom Kratman, The Amazon Legion

  11. Greg Norton says:

    Tom Kratman, The Amazon Legion 

    I’ll give credit to Limbaugh since he pitched and refined the concept in the early 90s.

    I think even Rush was a bit unnerved by the possibility of someone at the Pentagon taking it seriously by the end of the afternoon, but the concept still made his … first? … book.

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  12. Geoff Powell says:

    I see an increasing tendency among TPTB to treat Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual, not a cautionary tale, e.g. Ring video doorbells. I’m surprised “smart” TV manufacturers haven’t started making an equivalent of Orwell’s telescreen, and offering footage from it to LEO.

    Not to mention all the “smart” speakers.

    I refuse to use, or even contemplate buying, any such device, even though UK law, at present, does not allow blanket access by LEO to such things. Having the likes of Amazon and Google snooping on my life more than they already do, is not something I am willing to accept.

    Oh, and CoViD “Track-and-Trace”, at least in UK, is a potent source of “Who met Who” data, in perpetuity. I should coco, even though such pings would be useful to such as me.

    G.

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  13. Greg Norton says:

    Windows 11? GMAFB. Anyone thinking the features are for the security of the public is proving their room-temperature IQ.

    Windows 11 is about Microsoft starting to move away from making an OS for general purpose PCs. The ARM systems will be locked down like Apple’s iPad Pro.

     

  14. drwilliams says:

    @Greg Norton

    Sorry, wasn’t clear.

    Not taking priority from Rush, just an example of a more serious approach.

  15. drwilliams says:

    In the remainder of the long (nearly 2000 words) blog post, the Windows team reiterated the principles it’s relying on to justify the new system requirements. Enforcing the stricter standards, they argue, will make Windows 11 PCs more reliable and more secure than their predecessors, in addition to being more compatible with modern applications.

    In terms of reliability, Microsoft says its telemetry makes a strong case for the new standards. “Devices that do not meet the minimum system requirements had 52% more kernel mode crashes,” the company reported. “While devices that do meet the minimum system requirements had a 99.8% crash free experience.”

    That’s a curious change in scales there. Converting those two statistics to a common scale suggests that the older PC designs, absent other issues, should still have a nearly 99.7% “crash free experience.”

    Microsoft is on more solid ground when it comes to the security argument. The TPM 2.0 requirement, for example, supports hardware-based authentication and also enables secure storage of Bitlocker disk encryption keys. The UEFI Secure Boot requirement has already been part of the Windows PC requirements since 2013 and is effective at blocking pre-boot ransomware attacks such as NotPetya.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-11-microsoft-stands-firm-on-hardware-requirements/

    More reliable: 99.8% vs 99.7%, by their own ill-presented numbers. whoo-whoo!

    More compatible with modern applications. Yes, it’s a tremendous problem that the MS OS’s are incompatible with modern MS applications. The obvious fix is to increase the complexity of both to solve the problem.

    ADDED: Does anyone believe that MS does not retain the capability to gut a computer like a fish and expose every bit stored to governmental inspection? I’m sure it’s more complicated now than typing “Bill Gates is the Bull God” into the CLE.

    which leaves: More secure!

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  16. drwilliams says:

    geez, my coffee pot is empty and so, apparently, is the kitteh dish.

    time to do real work.

  17. Greg Norton says:

    ADDED: Does anyone believe that MS does not retain the capability to gut a computer like a fish and expose every bit stored to governmental inspection? I’m sure it’s more complicated now than typing “Bill Gates is the Bull God” into the CLE.

    That is the job of Intel/AMD. We’ve discussed the Intel Management Engine here before.

    In theory, the hardware manufacturers can disable the IME, but only Apple pays any lip service to actually having done so in their systems.

    Among other capababilities enabled by the IME, once you have access to a complete dump of memory contents, encryption keys in RAM managed by most crypto library implementations exhibit certain characteristics which are amenable to discovery by a fast scan. I wouldn’t be surprised if the IME has an API call to do the dirty work.

  18. SteveF says:

    UK law, at present, does not allow blanket access by LEO to such things.

    Hahahahaha!

    And US law doesn’t allow domestic spying on US citizens. Anyone else want to get in on the “surely they would never do that” game?

  19. Greg Norton says:

    In terms of reliability, Microsoft says its telemetry makes a strong case for the new standards. “Devices that do not meet the minimum system requirements had 52% more kernel mode crashes,” the company reported. “While devices that do meet the minimum system requirements had a 99.8% crash free experience.” 

    Redmond creates their own problems. Fixing Spectre resulted in Microsoft breaking a lot of legacy graphics drivers which were previously WHQL certified and solid going back to Windows 2000, and the endless minor changes of MSVCRT, unique by UUID, not version numbers, create lots of headaches for developers mixing DLLs unless every binary comes out of the same build machine or the application manifests are managed very carefully.

    Video game companies poorly managing Python integration alone probably account for a major portion of crashes reported by telemetry. At the Death Star, I used to get every game company’s Python.DLL crash records if the user also had our *properly implemented* embedded Python and C++ binary installed.

  20. Geoff Powell says:

    @stevef:

    Anyone else want to get in on the “surely they would never do that” game?

    Did I say (or even imply) that I believed that? What part of “1984 as instruction manual” did you miss?

    G.

  21. SteveF says:

    Understood, Geoff. It was more of a “how stupid do they think we are?”

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  22. ech says:

    More reliable: 99.8% vs 99.7%, by their own ill-presented numbers. whoo-whoo!

    But, when you have hundreds of millions of installations, that small percentage is a big absolute number.

  23. ~jim says:

    T-Mobile was is throttling my hotspot tethering to about 500 kBs. A little Googling yielded a simple solution. Edit the “APN Type” under the APN to include ‘dun’. VoilĂĄ! I’m now getting ~2.5 mBs.

    I had to create a duplicate APN because T-Mobile had locked their entry.

  24. Lynn says:

    I drove down to Victoria, Texas and took my dad to the Cinemark at the 2pm showing. We had a private showing as we were the only people in theatre 9. We saw Jungle Cruise. I give it 4 out of 5 stars. Good, not great.

  25. MrAtoz says:

    The plugs administration continues with it’s Obola 2.0 policy. Two critical ISIS-K planners killed in an airstrike. The PinHeadAGon won’t release the names. Huh? They say that’s not necessary. What better way to screw with ISIS minds. Similar to Bin Laden’s death. Where’s the body. Obola: “We gave it a proper burial at sea.” Geez. plugs/Obola are the worst. Should have been hung on a pole in front of the White House.

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  26. Greg Norton says:

    I drove down to Victoria, Texas and took my dad to the Cinemark at the 2pm showing. We had a private showing as we were the only people in theatre 9. We saw Jungle Cruise. I give it 4 out of 5 stars. Good, not great. 

    Part of the PR push for “The Jungle Cruise” included money for The Rock’s series, “Behind the Attraction” on Disney+, pieces of which are worth the time.

    Interestingly, the hour on “The Jungle Cruise”, the first episode, is actually the weakest of the first batch of shows released to streaming. “The Haunted Mansion” is the strongest, but Disney doesn’t lack for background material related to The Mansion.

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  27. Greg Norton says:

    The IRS is still going back and reviewing 2019 returns for mistakes, both theirs and those made by taxpayers.

    I received another letter today about a mistake they made looking for errors on the amended return I filed in December to correct a mistake I made with regard to some compensation my wife received directly from two insurance companies at her last job. Fortunately, the Feds owe me money … this time.

    Last time, I had to send them a check for $120. This time, they’re sending me $300.

    My wife has heard from patients who work at the IRS in Austin that the vaccine mandates aren’t sitting well with the staff. Hopefully, there will be a mass exodus.

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  28. MrAtoz says:

    LOL plugsy Van Winkle:

    ‘Sleeping or thinking?’: President Biden appears to be catching a power nap during meeting with Israel’s prime minister [video]

    Our senile Commander In Chief. No wonder the Tolli-bon took back Afghanistan in days.

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  29. drwilliams says:

    We’re probably safer when he sleeps.

  30. drwilliams says:

    More specifically, researchers found that consuming one 85-gram serving of chicken wings translated to 3.3 minutes of life lost, owing to sodium and harmful trans fatty acids, while a beef hot dog on a bun resulted in some 36 minutes lost “largely due to the detrimental effect of processed meat,” study authors wrote. What’s more, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were associated with an increase of 33 minutes.

    https://nypost.com/2021/08/23/eating-1-hot-dog-takes-35-minutes-off-life-study-suggests/

    So, one hot dog, handful of peanuts, and a peanut better sammich are very nearly a balanced meal?

    Let’s see, where

    a = hot dogs per week
    b = pb&j per week
    c = pb&j per week after reform
    n = number of weeks in deficit
    m = number of weeks after reform

    0 = n (36a-33b) – 33cm

    Since a- b >> 1, this equation has no solution in this life.

    Time for a beer.

  31. Nick Flandrey says:

    Well long day but the kids are in bed, call to wife is done, and I’m sitting down at the pc…

    Related to a comment in the last couple of days, this from Tx Governor Abbott

    NEW COVID-19 THERAPEUTIC INFUSION CENTERS LAUNCHING ACROSS THE STATE

    In partnership with local officials and health leaders, Texas launched a second infusion center in the Rio Grande Valley and a new facility in Nacogdoches.

    I urge Texans who test positive for COVID-19 to talk to their doctor about receiving this free and effective treatment.

    He’s also reinforcing his position that the state can ban mask mandates. FWIW, about half the attendees at my show were masked. More masked up for some activities that involved being crowded together, or when in line, and then unmasked. The ballroom was large and not at all crowded with massive airflow. There were handshakes, lots of talking in ones and twos, and even a couple of hugs between old friends.

    Only a couple of coughs heard, and they got attention… and no sniffles, no runny noses, no red or irritated noses. It’s a lot different than before. The general public’s tolerance for your sick @ss dribbling all over the place is very low. If we break the idea you have to go to work sick, or send your sick kid to school, society will be better off and at least one positive will come out of this mess.

    I’m off to bed. Early day tomorrow.

    n

  32. Gavin says:

    More specifically, researchers found that consuming one 85-gram serving of chicken wings translated to 3.3 minutes of life lost, owing to sodium and harmful trans fatty acids, while a beef hot dog on a bun resulted in some 36 minutes lost “largely due to the detrimental effect of processed meat,” study authors wrote. What’s more, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were associated with an increase of 33 minutes.

    https://nypost.com/2021/08/23/eating-1-hot-dog-takes-35-minutes-off-life-study-suggests/

    I’m going to ignore all such studies until one is released which conclusively determines how long an individual’s* life span is. If that can’t be determined, I can’t see what possible validity any “three minutes less / four minutes more” can have.

    *per individual, not as an average or as part of a population

  33. brad says:

    Two critical ISIS-K planners killed in an airstrike.

    Afghanistan is chaos at the moment. The Taliban is not exactly friendly to the US. ISIS is hiding from both the Taliban *and* the US. Yet somehow the US can identify who the ISIS planners for a specific attack are and where they are hiding? That would require unbelievably good and reliable human assets. And the Pentagon willing to expend those human assets…to kill two planners?

    I don’t believe this for a minute.

    The PinHeadAGon won’t release the names.

    Because they killed some random people, and have no idea who. Publishing names would let ISIS show this for the lie it is.

    Why lie? Why blow up some random people? Because it makes good headlines, as if the Pentagon is actually in control of something, anything in Afghanistan.

  34. drwilliams says:

    aw crap…

    lost another one

  35. drwilliams says:

    much abbreviated:

    CBS Sunday Morning today

    visit the website and watch

    50 year anniv of “Deja Vu”

    Afghan interpreter resettles in small town (scroll down, it’s in News)

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