Cool and clear, still windy. That describes Friday too. It was back down to 48F when I went to bed.
Spent the day on some phone calls, and a pickup. Calls paid off when a different septic guy called me back. He’s supposed to go out to the BOL today and do a perc test, and THEN we talk about design options. I don’t have to be there, so I’m not driving to the house today.
Over the week gas prices have come down somewhat. Some other things have gone up to the moon. Crab for instance. Snow crab clusters, which used to be a cheap alternative to Alaskan king crab are over $43/pound here. King crab isn’t even in the store, except Costco, and is over $100/pound. I can remember when it was $9 at Kroger in Cali. My sibling says they canceled the season this year, so that price increase could be demand driven and not just inflation. The bacon I buy was back down a few cents, but the quality was down too, and there was only one 3 pound pack in the cooler.
Takeaway is that shortages continue, as do price increases. All signs point to more of both coming.
When Tucker Carlson tells his audience it might be time to start stockpiling, it’s already mostly too late…
Get to stacking.
n
Then whom/what is at fault? The software company? The programmers? The maker of the system? The owner of the truck? I see a field day for lawyers getting high levels of compensation while the victims get basically nothing.
My brother retired from commercial flying a few years ago. His last plane was the Airbus. Pilots disliked the plane because of the automation. The plane has the capability, and has been demonstrated, that once a pilot taxies to the start of the runway, the plane will take off, make the journey, and land with zero input from the pilot.
The upper panel is a dark panel, no lights. In case of a problem the flight computers will illuminate the button that is to be pressed. The glass cockpit has few screens and instrument displays displaying only the items needed for flight. In case of issues, such as an engine problem, one of the displays for the pilot and co-pilot will change to show the problem. And the display will display the action that should be taken. Checklists for problems and disappearing with the glass cockpit and automation. Even starting the engines used to require several steps on the part of the pilot. No more. Just press a button, the computer takes care of the process.
My brother with new planes only two things are required in the cockpit. A human pilot and a dog. The human to feed the dog and keep it company, the dog to bite the pilot if they touch anything.
Gasoline prices are down about $0.35 from their high a couple weeks ago, bringing price inflation down to a little under 100% in 14.5 months.
Food prices are universally up, sharply for the most part. I don’t buy expensive cuts of meat or truffles or gourmet chocolate so I don’t know about the price or availability of such things. The meat chests in the stores I got to are full and the stores have not been rearranged to have fewer coolers but the products have been rearranged and the selections are different and mostly cheaper cuts. (Though stores do rearrange things from time to time so maybe that doesn’t signify much.) Fresh produce continues to be plentiful and of good quality but sometimes there isn’t much of an item such as celery stalks. Shelves for the boxed and canned goods continue to have gaps and shortages, sometimes persistent and sometimes changing from visit to visit. The new normal, in other words.
Fast food, mostly McDonalds or Dunkin (with an eyeroll for dropping “Donuts” from their name) for the kids, is up sharply and getting into painfully. I’m not sure when the jumps happened, because I normally just send the girls in with a credit card or a handful of cash and let them get what they want, but prices are up probably 50% in 14.5 months, and that’s working from the baseline of the dempanic lockdowns and reduced hours and shortages and staffing shortages. (With a note that if they go into a Stewart’s convenience store for ice cream cones while I’m getting gasoline, they generally get extra-large scoops, possibly bringing the price per ounce below what it was two years ago. They’re attractive teenage girls and the clerks are usually young men, so go figure.)
I don’t buy enough of anything else regularly enough to have any idea of price increases or availability.
People on both sides want something ugly to happen, including members of the FBI.
Even if the Feds didn’t win a conviction, they still managed to stir up a lot of loose screws this weekend, which was probably the intent.
Full Self Driving is still a long ways off. The promise has always been the “camel’s nose under the tent” to get the public to accept “drive by wire” systems in the fleet which will enable automated (note the difference) vehicles under a central authority, but even that capability is out of reach for now, with at least one major player’s effort here in town scrapped and personnel scattered.
(A German name you would recognize. I may need a job there at some point. I never thought I’d be employed where I currently collect a paycheck.)
We may not be smart enough to implemented FSD, and I’ve long believed that Hot Skillz has led us to a computing cul-de-sac since even hipster languages like Rust and Go are LLVM based and hence syntactic sugar for C++, itself sweetener for the fancy assembly language that is C.
“Science” really has jumped the shark. All branches.
Up. 43F outside and clear. Sun is coming over the horizon.
Headed to my club meeting.
n
I think the impetus behind self driving long-haul trucks in the continental US is novelty, like Edison electrocuting the elephant. It’s not necessary or even very useful, as it reinvents the wheel. We already have a separate road network for long-distance transport of goods all over the country. It’s called a railroad. I think we’d be better served by using the railroads more, and having them re-open the depots in every town, than by putting these “self driving” trucks on the road with passenger vehicles.
But then, instead of “high speed rail” gimmicks, I want ordinary passenger train service back for every town the tracks go through.
The ProgLibTurds will use the protection gun makers get to justify letting their trucks roll over anybody they want. Guns aren’t floating around controlled by AI, though. Different situations.
Hmmm. Maybe this will justify autonomous gun turrets on the corners of my house? No more nerf rounds, real bullets.
Anymore, every transportation project ends up becoming someone’s “gravy train for life” in the words of one transportation consultant I overheard riding the bus from Downtown Seattle to my crash pad in Issaquah one afternoon during my only brief employment tenure in the Northwest.
The consultant was speaking about the planned light rail across the new Evergreen bridge in Seattle, speaking to a (assuming here) friend, but he went on to talk about his decade or more of work implementing the light rail in Oahu. It was a weird/fascinating bus ride that day; usually I read a book.
At least in the Northwest, the “gravy trains” deliver something useful from time to time. Amtrak does kinda-sorta work between Portland and Vancouver, BC, but that comes at a tremendous political and financial cost in WA State. Lone Star Rail is the poster child for what happens to similar efforts in places like Texas or Florida.
Florida has semi-high speed rail opening in 2023 between Orlando and Miami but that is a private effort driven by the freight rail company who understands that the key is to link the airports as much as politically possible.
Rick: Re Just Hosting.
I moved my sites from GoDaddy to Just Hosting three (?) years ago. I never got them to run properly. Only one would display at all. I called them many times and spent hours on the phone with them. The HTML worked find on my system using several browsers. I transferred the HTML to Just Hosting (using FileZilla) and “NADA” for two of my sites. I could only see one of my sites. The other two just disappeared.
I could make make changes on my system and upload then changes to Just Hosting and see the changed code on Just Hosting but the sites could not be found. A year ago, I finally went back to GoDaddy and the HTML code works fine.
Just Hosting didn’t work for me. I spent hundreds of hours trying to get my HTML code to work when I didn’t have a problem.
Bob
@BobSproul – hmm….not the experience I have had for 10+ years with JustHost. YMMV, I guess.
Dunno what the issue was with your sites on JustHost. When I am working on sites, I code locally, then upload the changed file to the site, and test the page on the live site. Process works just fine – the changes are immediately implemented.
It might be more efficient to code locally and have local instance, but I am careful about making changes to a live site. Sometimes will create a full ‘test’ instance of the site in a subfolder of the main site, so I can use the production database. Once the new test site is working, I backup the old site, then move the new files to the site’s home folder. Probably not the best programming practice, but it works for me, and I am the boss.
I just bought a new domain a couple of days ago and started coding for it. JustHost automatically added the SSL to the domain – in less than an hour. The site has a ‘coming soon’ page with no links to other site pages for the main/home page (just in case someone stumbles across it), and then I develop all the other pages on the live site. Databases are created with the cPanel stuff, modified as I develop the code and test the pages.
For WordPress plugins and themes, I have a development WP site. Themes and plugin codes are developed and tested on the live site. When the coding and testing is done, I zip everything together and upload to the WordPress plugin/theme repository. Then install the theme or plugin on the live site and configure there. That’s what I did on this place with the latest theme update and new/updated plugins.
So, my process, while not the best coding practice (maybe), works fine for me and with the sites on JustHost / BlueHost. (I’m the boss, so I can do what I want.) No hosting issues with either place. And I have lots of domains running on those sites.
YMMV, of course.
What? Scott Pilgrim’s drummer can sing?!?
At least, I assume that is Allison Pill singing on “Picard” this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E03gKT3AHbc
@Pecancorner, you made an excellent statement regarding railroads.
Like many solutions to our problems, the problem is that it is politically incorrect.
I am not just a Model Railroader, but I have been fascinated by railroads for nearly 72 years now. I grew up in the Chicago area and took every chance to be around trains and ride trains. I learned a lot about the infrastructure, which is sadly a tiny fraction of what it was, but there is still enough to make rail viable.
The recent advances in rail motive power are impressive. Before this, rail provided the least expensive and ecologically responsible way to get freight and people from wherever, and now it is even better. But, politics prevents a sound decision.
So what else is new?
If trains were financially viable more than they are today, politics would not be a factor, would it? The big problem, IMHO, is eminent domain. And I have a real issue with using that for a provate company.
>> I think the impetus behind self driving long-haul trucks in the continental US is novelty, like Edison electrocuting the elephant. It’s not necessary or even very useful, as it reinvents the wheel.
One big difference is that the autonomous trucks can run 24×7 whereas humans generally are limited by the DOT to 11 hours followed by a 10 hour break.
.
>> We already have a separate road network for long-distance transport of goods all over the country. It’s called a railroad.
There’s a lot of logistics involved in getting goods from the shipper to he train, mostly involving…trucks.
>> If trains were financially viable more than they are today, politics would not be a factor, would it? The big problem, IMHO, is eminent domain. And I have a real issue with using that for a provate company.
Anything these days that’s financially viable and who’s scope is as large as the railroads involves politics. (Good opportunity for my occasional plug for term limits for all political offices – no exceptions.)
>> Full Self Driving is still a long ways off. The promise has always been the “camel’s nose under the tent” to get the public to accept “drive by wire” systems in the fleet which will enable automated (note the difference) vehicles under a central authority, but even that capability is out of reach for now, with at least one major player’s effort here in town scrapped and personnel scattered.
Interesting article discussing the difference between self-driving and fully autonomous.
>> Fast food, mostly McDonalds or Dunkin (with an eyeroll for dropping “Donuts” from their name) for the kids, is up sharply and getting into painfully.
Wife wanted Mickey D’s yesterday…a Big Mac was $5.49 and a large fries was $4.99. Yikes! And had to ask for both napkins and ketchup packets. I guess they figure why give them automatically, saves a few cents per customer.
Railroads run 24/7. easily changing engineers at every shift. And, railroad tracks today still run through almost every town and hamlet in the continental USA. The only thing causing any logistical problem is the previous closure of depots and rail yards in those small towns. As it is, there’s still heavy railroad transport to within ~100 miles of anywhere. So the only truck transport needed is for a hundred miles or so.
Many spurs have been closed, but they were closed because the companies they led to shut down. The rights of way are still there to bring them back where needed. I don’t have any problem with immanent domain in a world where we have to pay property taxes.
And passenger traffic lacks only a passenger car attached to any freight train, other than those few carrying hazmat, and a depot at which to offload the passengers. The buses have even forgone those now, in favor of dropping people in convenience store parking lots on the edge of town.
My wife and I were out earlier today, so we stopped at Five Guys for lunch. She had a single patty hamburger, I had a double. 2 drinks, no fries. $22.00. Now I remember why I hardly eat out anymore. That’s money for ingredients for a weeks worth of lunches for me.
Home from club and two pickups. Back out with the Ranger for a trash run and another bigger pickup.
Gorgeous day, sunny, blue sky, and 91F in the sun. Much cooler in the shade.
n
WRT passenger or “light rail”, the politics killed it from the get go. I’ve been told by someone that worked on it in Seattle that anything designated “light rail” uses a different track gauge, ON PURPOSE. I found that to be so stupid I’m not sure I believe it still.
RORO car carrying trains would be great on certain corridors. Most of the coast of Cali, forexample, would link the major cities and you would still have your car when you arrived.
There are a lot of schemes which could work but they would all trample someone’s hard won historical rules.
n
Roasting a duck for supper. $14 at Aldi’s, a few months ago.
We had lamb chops a couple of days ago. Also from Aldi’s.
Our local stores all ignored any market for lamb or duck because we are “too small a market”. When they did deign to carry a special shipment of them, they charged such high prices that we couldn’t afford them. So: a self-fulfilling prophesy by Corporate Buyers.
We love Aldi’s.
Seattle has two commuter rail systems, Link and Sounder. Link is considered “light rail” and shares space on city streets and the extended tunnel/station under the city with the bus system. Sounder is “heavy” rail which runs traditional passenger cars on freight lines running north and south from downtown.
BNSF runs Sounder for the transit authority so Warren Buffett and, thus, politics are involved, his “moat” protecting the revenue stream.
Both systems have their caveats and, for now, do not extend into the Eastside, where Microsoft and the three major wireless carriers are based as well as where many people live who work downtown.
Passenger trains were a money losing proposition long before the Fed took it over. The only reason the train companies ran passenger service was because it was subsidized by the US Post Office. When the USPS stopped running mail on the trains, the train companies stopped passenger service. Amtrack was the Fed trying to keep it alive. Passenger rail is slower and more expensive than flying even accounting for the TSA.
Train RORO would seem to make sense but it is more expensive than flying and getting a car rental for 2 weeks. Well, it was 20 years ago. With todays car rental situation, it might work. But I did look into the price and schedule and it plain sucked.
Several of the companies I have worked for have been asked to bid on a boxcar tracking system. It seems the RR’s can’t keep track of railcars even when they stay on the tracks. Hundreds of cars lost a day! And theft on the RR is crazy, especially by the RR employees.
Railroads ought to be good, but between government regulation, the unions, and lack of competition they just don’t work well other than long haul.
Shortages here in the California Hugh Desert:
WinCo is almost out of canned cat food – no new shipments for a few weeks I think. They had, perhaps, 100 cans left on Wednesday, and had moved other stock to hide the diminishment. I picked up 20, which will get my three cats through a week or so. There seems to be plenty of dry food.
OTOH cheap 35” (nominal) blinds are back in stock at Lowes next door, they were out for months.
“Overclocker Takes Intel’s Core i9-12900KS to 7.45GHZ on LN2”
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/333818-overclocker-takes-intels-core-i9-12900ks-to-7-45ghz-on-ln2
At the speed of light in a vacuum, 186,000 miles/second, 7.45 Ghz is 1.6 inches. 1.6 inches to process the instruction before another instruction comes down the data bus.
How about Californication’s BULLET TRAIN costing $100 billion to build between Fresno and Bakersfield?
“Sixth Column” by Robert Heinlein
https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Column-Robert-Heinlein/dp/1451637705?tag=ttgnet-20/
A standalone science fiction book, no prequel or sequel that I know of. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Baen in 2012 that I bought new on Amazon. The book was written in 1940 by Robert Heinlein and first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941. The book was first published in hard back in 1947 by Gnome Press. The book was published in paperback by Signet in 1949 as “The Day After Tomorrow”. Heinlein habitually sold his stories to a magazine, a hardback publisher, and a paperback publisher to maximize his revenue for the first twenty years of his career and advised his writer friends to do the same.
Heinlein actually wrote the book as a project from John Campbell who provided a detailed outline for him. Campbell had already written a novella about the story which, he did not foreclose to Heinlein, but his employers forbade him to publish it, especially at a competing publisher. It was Heinlein’s second published book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein_bibliography
This is a controversial book. It has the USA invaded by the PanAsians, a conglomeration of Japanese, Chinese, and Russians, taking out the main population centers of the USA using nuclear weapons and then landing troops, lots of troops. The year of the invasion is not identified but it could have been anywhere from 1942 to 2050. Plus the book has a large amount of handwavium for the mysterious Ledbetter effect, a new type of rays.
The book has a forward by William H. Patterson, Jr. and a afterword by Tom Kratman. William H. Patterson, Jr. wrote a very large two volume biography of Robert Heinlein. Tom Kratman addressed the times that the book was written in, at the very beginning of the time that the USA joined WW II, already in progress in Europe and in the Pacific. People already knew that there was a lot of crazy going on in the world already. By the beginning of 1941, the Germans had already defeated or occupied Austria, Poland, France, Netherlands, etc, the Japanese had defeated China, Korea, etc, and the citizens of the USA well knew it.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (489 reviews)
We’ve been buying canned cat food from Chewy.com for a couple of months.
Home. Stopped at the Goodwill bins after all my errands.
Grabbed a $150 golf club, some tiffany & co crystal, and some media for me… Laserdiscs for my museum of obsolete media, along with some 3.5″ floppy disks, and some sony camcorder tapes. The funny thing about the tapes or any old media in shrinkwrap, it sells on ebay, sometimes for really great prices.
And more dvds for the server…
It was nice to see my club friends and we had another new member. Club is growing. Very unusual for old white man hobbies.
n
Oh, btw, I finally got my “custom” map products from the geological service. And they were not what I expected. I thought it would combine each “area” grid map into one bigger map for the grids I selected. That’s not how they were delivered though, each grid came as a separate pdf.
I was hoping for big maps.
n
You never now where someone’s workflow will depend on “obsolete” media, particularly in government.
When we went for passports a few years ago, the office at the Austin Main Post Office still had Mavica floppy disk cameras.
We have a miniDV camcorder around somewhere. Sony – the camera is 20 years old but runs like new save for the battery. Really nice Zeiss zoom lens, and the camera will double as a web cam.
Will Goodwill still take DVDs? We have a bunch of third rate kiddie movies to purge.
Even starting the engines used to require several steps on the part of the pilot. No more. Just press a button, the computer takes care of the process.
I love the autostart on my F-150.
I don’t buy enough of anything else regularly enough to have any idea of price increases or availability.
I find that the prices of gasoline and bread are enough to determine inflation by themselves. Plus milk if you want.
We may not be smart enough to implemented FSD, and I’ve long believed that Hot Skillz has led us to a computing cul-de-sac since even hipster languages like Rust and Go are LLVM based and hence syntactic sugar for C++, itself sweetener for the fancy assembly language that is C.
Musk is claiming that he gets in his Tesla, sets the destination, and never touches the steering wheel over the next 100+ miles.
Ford is claiming that they will have FSD in their F-150 for all the major interstates in the 2022 models.
BTW, I love C and C++. Never formally trained though.
>> We already have a separate road network for long-distance transport of goods all over the country. It’s called a railroad.
There’s a lot of logistics involved in getting goods from the shipper to he train, mostly involving…trucks.
The other problem is the rails for human rail cars require welding and special ties to go above 60 ??? Mph. 90 mph is a whole another level of safety.
The bullet trains are an extreme level of safety with a fence cage required. Hitting a cow at 175 mph is a big disaster. Plus grade separations at all intersections.
“Hitting a cow at 175 mph is a big disaster.”
Yeah, means the 40mm cannon is out of order.
Who knew that some Lego builds are “illegal”, and they have people that police such things?
The primary reason seems to be forcing connections between pieces that are not meant to fit together, placing too much stress on the parts.
Just more evidence that Lego is for sissies.
Erector and Meccano forever.
I’m looking at an auction listing, and the auctioneer has so far misspelled “pneumatic” “lure” “vacuum” “upholstery” “adjustable” “Rudolph” “pedestal” “armoire””wrought iron” and those are just the ones that jumped out at me. This despite figuring out how to get the accented “e” in “decor”.
n
Sounds more like a sales catalog for hookers.
It could be worse: You could be wasting your time on the DMM 201 flexibility standards and get presented with “Secant Modulus, 1% elongation” before you realize that you scrolled to far.
“Hitting a cow at 175 mph is a big disaster.”
Yeah, means the 40mm cannon is out of order.
I’m not sure that 40mm would be big enough.
>> Musk is claiming that he gets in his Tesla, sets the destination, and never touches the steering wheel over the next 100+ miles.
Put Tony and his Model S in Mumbai and see how far he goes before having to grab the wheel.
Drove from Anchorage to Girdwood with family and kiddo’s friend for lunch today. We were awed by how gorgeous the mountains were when we left the house this morning and the drive was spontaneous. The drive along Turnagain Arm is breathtaking. Good weather, blue skies, mild wind.
Intended to dine on soup and bread at The Bakeshop in Girdwood, two minutes too late – they were just closed when we arrived. So we stepped next door to the Sitzmark. Long wait made entertaining watching the skiers coming down the mountain. Lots of toddlers on skis with more guts and skill than an adult. Three burgers with fries, bowl of chili, order of deep fried cheese curds was $65 and delicious. We drank water. Stopped at Bird Point and scrabbled amongst the shale on our return. Great day and everyone is content and tired. Need to do a lot more of this.
A woman and her dog were killed at Bird Point earlier this week. It’s common in Alaska to use the railroad tracks for walking. With the predictable occasional fatality. I’m sorry she was struck. Not going to judge her, it is such a common behavior I doubt she thought twice about the risk. The wind usually howls along the tricks, they’re on top of the Turnagain Arm and that combination of ocean inlet and mountains whip any air current to a gale. Hearing a train there is pretty much impossible.
GoogleMaps has some good pics of the area. And it’s even better in person.
And to cap a pretty great day? The Aurora borealis is out.