Hot and clear today, if the forecast holds up. It was beautiful yesterday, if I wasn’t working outdoors in the sun. I actually got a fan and plugged it in outside because it was so stifling.
I did get a bunch of stuff done. I pealed back the weed barrier to allow the muck to dry. That mostly worked. Since it was wet and squishy, I started moving dirt. Moved a bunch of sand to the garden plot, then more dirt on top. They’ll mix later when I roto-till. I wanted to loosen up the clay soil.
Then I started moving dirt from piles to laying on the ground. Took out a tree stump and filled that hole during the process. When I needed a break I took the machines and dug out a hole in the yard. It’s been there since we bought the place and looked like it might be an animal den. Nope. Just roots, rocks, and an abandoned sprinkler pipe. I dug around then filled it back in.
Used the machine to pull the clothesline T bar. The other one got pulled when we did the septic. Years ago. It’s right at the height to tear up my forehead or poke out and eye when I’m on the mower. Not any more Mr. T.
Toward the end of the day, the muck was still squishy so I had the idea of putting clay power on it to dry it out. Worked, but I had to throw the powder with a shovel. Did about 2/3 of a cubic yard. Then it was time to cover all the prepared area with the weed barrier and put tools away. Oh, during the morning, I installed one of the side boards that will hold the slag in place. I’m using the mattock to dig a narrow trench to hold the board at the right height. Hard work in clay and rock. And the occasional root, or gas line.
Today my slag gets delivered in the morning. Early. I’ll work on finishing the edge boards and start placing it. I really want to get the job finished. Hope I did the math and base layer right and I have enough material ordered. If that goes well, I’ll move on to then next thing on my list.
Always working. Yup. And stacking, goodwill this week…
nick
Sometimes IT stuff is weird. We changed ISPs as of yesterday. Since then, there have been various blips. Most of these are caused by local devices, as some of them apparently detected a network change. Not sure why they care, or how they even know.
Configuring the new router also took a while. For known, unchanging devices I prefer to have fixed network addresses. The new router allocated the correct addresses to some devices, but not all of them. I’m not enough of a network guy to know, but I supposed some devices managed to tell the DHCP server the address they had been using? For the rest, there was a lot of “enter this in the router, restart the device”.
The new router also supports IPv6, but doesn’t seem to offer a lot of control over the configuration, so I turned that off. Anyway, I’m not in the mood to tackle IPv6 just now – maybe some other day.
We’ll see if things are stable today. The only thing still missing is a VPN, which isn’t that high a priority.
Access was all about killing off the cottage industry around Clipper.
I know people who made a lot of money selling Clipper applications to small and medium-size businesses in the early 90s. It just worked.
Microsoft shipped Access for “free” with every PC bundling Windows 3.0 and Office, however, and, as with Word Perfect, Redmond’s knowledge of the secret APIs in Win16 gave their office applications the advantage in the “feels”.
Americans love their gadgets … and Windows apps provided the justification for that high end graphics card capable of running pr0n after hours.
A lot of routers running embedded Linux will use dnsmasq which will issue the same IP address to a client with a specific MAC address even if the lease is expired.
The configuration file also allows assignment of fixed IP addresses by client MAC address.
Does your ISP offer IPv6 or do they say?
I keep IPv6 turned off both on the WAN and LAN. I don’t have a specific need, and firewall configuration gets a lot more complicated without the protection of NAT.
The only time I’ve ever enabled IPv6 on a router was at the Death Star while adding support to the VPN for IPv6 inside the tunnel to meet an IBM requirement.
*Everything* routed down the tunnel when NetClient connected to the IBM gateways at that time. I doubt things have changed.
Also, as I’ve pointed out many times here before, I spent nearly 20 years subsidizing the private practice of medicine at my house, and, if it came to having to prove that in court, my Quicken file is a roadmap for a forensic accountant to establish the facts.
Not to be cold, but my wife’s patients, co-workers, and even many friends/family have an incentive to see things differently.
I’ll keep using Quicken if for no other reason than it is something a judge would understand.
Only Georgia still has the jury decide settlements as an option.
Rare, but you can ask Alton Brown about the effectiveness.
I keep that Quicken file backed up in multiple locations, and having the backups fail yesterday was a scary moment.
I have my own copy of “Sneakers” waiting for the next con opportunity to get Mary McDonnell’s autograph.
I’ve lived her character’s line to Redford in the flick, “You don’t have a business, you have a club … you even have a little clubhouse …”
Preach it, sister.
I actually do have an opportunity for her autograph this Fall.
“We are spending $405 MILLION a day on SNAP.. 10% is going to sugary drinks. If you add candies to that, it’s about 13 to 17%. We all believe in free choice. We live in a democracy. People can make their own choice about what they are going to buy and what they are not going to buy. If you want to buy a sugary soda, you should be able to do that, but the U.S. taxpayer should not pay for it. U.S. taxpayer should not be paying to feed kids foods, the poorest kids in the country, foods that will give them diabetes. And then, my agency ends up, through Medicaid and Medicare, paying for those injuries. We’re going to put an end to that. We’re doing it step by step, state by state.”
https://redstate.com/chase-jennings/2025/08/06/gone-in-a-snap-rfk-jr-and-maha-end-the-decades-long-ca
$40 million a day on taxpayer-funded soda. Another $20 on candy.
The stated goal of Coke’s CEO for several years has been to drive the cost up. It’s approaching $0.70 per can.
I’m drinking more water.
Nuking Japan Saved More Lives Than It Took
1.5 million Purple Hearts were prepared for an invasion of Japan.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/nuking-japan-saved-more-lives-than-it-took/
As do I. I keep copies of Quicken files and Turbotax files on two backups at home, on two computers, and on two different cloud providers.
I have looked at alternatives to Quicken, but they also cost money with an annual subscription. Those that don’t are web based applications. This means my data resides on their servers. I really cannot trust these people with my data as has been proven by multiple compromises of many web companies.
Yes, I despise the yearly cost. I also despise Adobe and their monthly fee. I despise most software that requires a monthly fee.
With Adobe I don’t have the need for the upgrades, the additional camera support, especially the AI junk. But if I don’t pay the subscription, the application stops working. I would rather pay once, a couple hundred, and have the application work for life for me.
72F, bright and sunny. Gorgeous day if I wasn’t working.
Had my breakfast, waiting for my delivery. Still working on my coffee.
Stiff and sore today.
————
On a personal finance front, putting everything into Quicken can help you figure out where all your money goes. The reporting and sorting helped me a lot. I used it for the first time when I realized that I’d had a good year, but still ended with nothing. I couldn’t point to any one thing as the culprit. Quicken helped me figure it out the next year and I’ve been a user since. Although technically my wife is the user. I only use it for invoices now.
————–
I’m still not overly concerned about AI. Most office jobs consist of moving paper or electrons from one place to another, and they can be eliminated without AI. I saw it at Bigcorp, where they had just automated all the stuff that grew up organically over time. Stuff like pdfs being routed thru a particular person before they could be sent out. Because she had a licensed copy of Acrobat, way back in the day. LOTS of cruft to be cleaned out most places.
AI doesn’t have intention. At least not yet. Without intention,ultimately you can’t replace people.
There has to be a person in the loop to spot the lies and making shite up, whether it’s lower level schlubs, or an AI making it up.
How many “rogue traders” have been responsible for huge financial disasters? Who do you blame for million dollar loses when it’s an AI?
n
My Dad’s degree was in Manufacturing Engineering in the early 50’s. He must have been good at it, as we transferred/promoted around every couple years. First with GE, then Allis-Chalmers and finishing with a custom machine tool builder as VPO. He spent an anxious coupla weeks with the Soviets at Kamaz, the purpose built town to build trucks. The Soviets had him in an interrogation room and were complaining about the deflection in their engine block bulkheads when broached at production speed. He mentioned the poor workmanship in the apartment used as hotel: the dining table was laminated with a linoleum sheet trimmed jaggedly with a dull razor knife.
Other engine block lines for Ford V8’s at Cleveland and Windsor were used for testing new formulations for carbide metal cutting inserts during holiday shutdowns. His folks were always kicked out, when just one more test run would be nice, as real production was restarted.
There were 2 lines built for Chrysler’s 4 cylinder block that engined “K” cars. The Mexican line saved a million $ by not having automated transfer of the blocks between stations, preferring manual effort.
There is a disturbing trend for other, more recent series than How Its Made, like Inside the Factory, or Mega- X to focus on snack and candy food processing rather than industrial or even consumer durable goods.
Oh! There were a trio of Soviets that visited us early in the production process for their engine line. Dad had ’em over for a steak dinner one weekend at his executive home. Their business slacks lacked a left hip pocket as a production expedient of the latest 5 year plan. Their faux Florsheim wingtips were a molded plastic slip on with the laces molded in. OTOH, my schoolboy self was trounced 3 chess games in a row. 😛
Those were still terrible engines. Compression was gone by 70,000 miles.
The genius of Lee Iacocca was actually managing to sell those cars along with that awful Mitsubishi in the minivan.
Iacocca knew the Fairmont cross shop at Ford was a POS because he put the design into the pipeline.
The crushed slag has arrived. The first truckload anyway. It’s way more grey than black. I was hoping for coal black. Oh well, it will do. Flexibility.
n
There is an “AHA!” moment when using databases (at least when self-taught).
In my case I was setting up an Access database to prototype/validate the data for a production ARCGIS database, a few dozen tables, some tens of thousands of lines of data from various different spreadsheets.
It was a PITA but it let us check and validate our work as we went, rather than begging time on a seat in a very busy office whose staff were a bit standoffish.
Once you get it, wonderful. I’ve forgotten all the minutia again tho…
OTOH when I started setting up a timecard/equipment-charge/job-tracking database for a small county maintenance division it quickly became clear that the office staff weren’t going to be able to maintain a database. Good, honest, hardworking, but not up to that.
Instead we converted to a suite of Excel spreadsheets, that they understood well and could modify as desired. Templates with lots of data-validation. There were a couple of Vbscipts as glue, and as a final aggregrator for feeding into the counties’ DB (Oracle?) and writing an automated Word report each month.
It was an oddly satisfying job, despite being one of the shortest I ever worked.
Horses for courses.
@Nick: Congratulations!
Don’t overdo it in that Texas sun! Your wife needs a husband and your daughters need a dad.
I’m in denial. 🙂 I don’t need no fancy shmancy software pointing out my flaws.
Access got out of control at a lot of organizations. Some Access savvy superuser would create an Access database complete with VBA to help them with something. It would grow and get more complex. Others would start using it. The creator would move on to another company. Next thing you know, some business critical function is entirely dependent on that MS Access solution. So, you have IT solutions being created outside of IT without any of the checks and balances that a typical IT project goes through. However, after the creator disappears guess which department gets stuck fixing and maintaining someone else’s abhorrent, but business critical, creation? IT. One place I worked explicitly forbid Access. Nobody could have it on their workstation. That’s how they combatted that problem.
Don’t overdo it in that Texas sun!
–taking a break. It’s up to 80F and I’m basically pickaxe-ing thru clay in the bright sun with no breeze at all.
n
Hot Skillz circa 1995.
Everyone working in a white collar gig wanted to get into software development, and the Barnes & Nobles spreading across the country pre Amazon offered a whole aisle of Office and VBA howto books.
85F but a bit of shade is moving toward my work area. I’m doing ½ on, ½ off for now.
cooling vs working.
n
Open Source Orgs Pledge Fealty to United Nations
What could possibly go wrong?
“Is Decapitation a Job Americans Won’t Do?” By Ann Coulter
https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2025/07/23/columnistsanncoulter20250723is-decapitation-a-job-americans-wont-do-n2660854
“Oh look, another American’s been beheaded by a Mexican.”
“This week’s beheader is Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, an illegal alien who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, decapitated 37-year-old Megan Bos, then stashed her body in a bleach storage container. Arrested for the crime in April, Mendoza-Gonzalez was promptly released from custody by Illinois judge Randie Bruno, who is the same physical type — chubby, short-haired, white woman — as the Milwaukee judge charged with helping an illegal sneak out of her courtroom to avoid ICE agents.”
How in the world could a judge release someone like that ?
Read the last sentence of the quote again.
Give that personality type a law degree and a gavel and, as OJ used to say in the commercial, “Look out!”
That was me when, as a security guard, I created multiple versions of a vehicle onsite parking tracking program. Started as a spreadsheet to keep track of parking lot placards, evolved into a vehicle database with an incident tracking utility capable of generating various reports and email notifications for all sorts of things. This wasn’t my idea originally, it came out of a conversation about getting hand-written records into a spreadsheet. Then, every time I said “OK, it does what you want” the security consultant would start another conversation.
How much on Papa Murphy’s pizza?
I’ll have mine with extra food stamps, please.
“REPORT: Plane That Carried Texas Democrats to Illinois Was Funded by Beto O’Rourke’s PAC”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/08/report-plane-that-carried-texas-democrats-illinois-was/
Bozo O’Rourke is back !
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
What crushed her, the realization that no man would ever want to marry her?
I could have been one of them, if I were less trusting in my 20s or my business partner were more honest. -shrug- Lesson learned. Nail down the details ahead of time, put it in writing, and sign in front of a notary before the first line of code is written.
I’ll bet that years ago you bought a copy of Adobe on a once-and-done basis, under the impression that it was yours to use as long as you wanted to use it. And at some point it either stopped working or could not be installed on a new machine when the old one stopped working. And that there were no legal forms of recourse.
I sympathize a lot with companies like Lynn’s, who are charging (what I assume is) a fair price for specialty software. I sympathize not at all with companies like Adobe, who change the terms of the deal after the sale and who pay enough lawyers and lobbyists that the consumer has no recourse.
… No legal recourse. To paraphrase Chris Rock, “Now, I’m not saying that you should torrent it … but I understand.”
Hell, I don’t need Quicken for that. I’m married to her.
While New York is no longer a communal property state, in practice a husband is still responsible for his wife’s debts unless the amount gets large enough to be worth hiring a (high-priced) lawyer.
On the plus side, every day brings me closer to Exit Day.
“BP announces major oil-and-gas discovery in Atlantic Ocean”
https://www.chron.com/news/article/bp-oil-discovery-brazil-gulf-20803547.php
“The Texas energy giant has been pivoting back to fossil fuels.”
“The British company BP, which maintains its U.S. headquarters in Houston, announced Monday it may have found a staggering amount of oil and gas in the Santos Basin oil field about 218 nautical miles from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the south Atlantic Ocean. BP drilled to a depth of more than 19,000 feet below sea level; a spokesperson told Reuters the find likely rivals a 1999 discovery in the Caspian Sea, making it the biggest oil score in at least 25 years.”
“The BBC reported BP with its pivot hopes to increase production to between 2.3 million and 2.5 million barrels of oil per day by 2030.”
Drill, baby, drill !
I sympathize a lot with companies like Lynn’s, who are charging (what I assume is) a fair price for specialty software. I sympathize not at all with companies like Adobe, who change the terms of the deal after the sale and who pay enough lawyers and lobbyists that the consumer has no recourse.
Most of my customers rent my software. Very few buy as I have set the purchase price way up in the five digits.
Are any of the others in the household aware of the approach of Exit Day? How do you expect they will react?
The ‘Science™’ Is Nothing but Organized Crime
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/08/06/the-science-is-actually-organized-fraud-n3805550
Find a nice flat stretch in West Texas and put up a bobwire fence.
Find the miscreants guilty of crimes against humanity, and revoke their human rights.
Pith it like a fog and hang it on the fence.
Build parallel fences for spam callers, identity thieves, etc. as needed.
No fence for politicians, just a row of large post holes and a machine that plants them head first.
Robert Francis has been back.
The primary ballot for the US Senate race isn’t locked until December.
Heck, maybe “Doors” will try it again, but my money is on Williamson County getting a congressional district out of redistricting, where Doggett’s current seat should have gone two years ago. “Doors” would shine a House seat with her ample butt for life elected from Williamson.
“How much on Papa Murphy’s pizza?”
Two specials for about $20 will feed a family of 4 a decent supper.
$20 in soda is water plus a dollar’s worth of impure sugar.
“218 nautical miles from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the south Atlantic Ocean”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone
Just far enough.
Now it’s over 90F in the shade.
Had to come in and cool down. Got the edging in though.
Time to start putting some crushed
hopes and dreamsslag down.n
EBT drove Papa Murphy’s expansion nationwide. I’m not sure that is a good thing.
The Papa Murphy store near us in Austin closed after a decade of operation. I never saw anyone in there.
The store near our house in Vantucky was always mobbed.
Vantucky is the HQ city, however.
“Prison reform? Start with the basics”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2025/08/prison-reform-start-with-basics.html
“City Journal published an article recently advocating that America adopt the Japanese model of prison reform.”
Japanese prisons also have a mostly homogeneous population. USA prisons have a very heterogeneous population.
99F in the shade here. Of course that swamp cooler on the roof picked today to act up, water is pouring off the roof.
I’m not going up until tomorrow morning – the roof heat up there is apparently what killed the previous owner of this place (heart attack after).
The Carnot cycle is your (expensive) friend: the window units can handle 100F.
I worked for a company that did DoD software, and eventually our contract renewal had onerous documentation requirements, to wit:
Cross indexing requirements and tests became quite a time sink, and producing the requirements documents and test plans became a bottleneck in delivery. We were considering adding more tech writers to the staff to handle the load.
Over a weekend, our chief software architext produced an Access database for requirements and test plans. Each requirement was given a unique number, and each test plan listed the requirement number. There were fields in each requirement and each test step for the descriptive text, which was written in a controlled style. He produced forms for requirements, test plans, and test steps. This was a many-to-many match; some requirements were touched by multiple tests, and some tests mapped to multiple requirements.
Writing a new release requirements document then became a matter of writing front matter unique to the release, and auto-generated chapters in Word using mail merge directly from the Access database. Same for test plans.
The Word document even produced the index, so you could look at which test plans covered a specific requirement, and which requirements were tested by which test plans.
Of course, updating the Access database by multiple users was an issue, but we were able to coordinate without too much trouble, and we had an excellent backup/restore process in place.
Fun times.
Access, like Excel (and 1-2-3 before that) satisfy a meaningful need: a tool for a subject-matter expert to organize and explore information, without needing the cost and enormous delays of involving the IT department. Unfortunately, essential information and data flows tend to get bound up in small DBs and spreadsheets that “a guy” put together and kept on his machine, which causes panic in PHBs when Access glitches and trashes Joe’s mission-critical database or Joe accidentally overwrites the spreadsheet or Joe’s on vacation and no one can get at the contract deliverable dates or Joe got laid off as a cost-saving measure and his computer was reimaged without a backup being made. (I’ve seen each of those scenarios and more.)
You would think that the best approach would be to allow employees to create the databases and spreadsheets and other knowledge stores, and to have them translated to real databases or applications if they prove useful. That happens once in a while but not as often as you’d think.
First Colbert now Howard Stern.
Kimmel next.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/howard-stern-radio-show-cancelation-b2802774.html
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw also got put out to pasture … again … this week, but the woke “Sex in the City” reboot was a hate watch thing even for the die hard fans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/sarah-jessica-parker-s-farewell-to-carrie-is-heartbreaking/ar-AA1JTf1L
Thermometer in part sun says 106F. It’s hot. I’m paused again to cool down. Shirt and shorts both completely soaked thru.
Raking gravel into place is teh sux. So is sledgehammering to compact around the edging to keep it straight.
I’m on cool down.
n
The Smarter Every Day YouTube channel has some videos on this topic. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0
Well, my mind just got blown. I just was forwarded a plat of my parent’s subdivision and my parents home lot does not extend down to Lavaca Bay. Instead, there is a property line right behind the swimming pool and there is a private park owned by a separate owner that owns the 150 feet from the swimming pool to the bay, including the bulkhead. Lovely, just lovely. So, my parents house is not a bay house, that is just an imaginary huge bay out there.
@Lynn
Local water access ordinance?
Tax dodge? (i.e, lower valuation if not beach access?)
Is there an easement for beach access?
Who is the separate owner, and does the private park extend across many properties?
Your parents weren’t aware of the property lines when they bought the house?
That isn’t unusual in Florida. For instance, when the small private college which owned this land shut down about 20 years ago, the trustees sold everything inland but retained the rights to the waterfront property to the east of the road for themselves.
The new Indian owners of the land lease the property as an arrangement with the university to develop the parcel as an educational institution. Eventually, the buildings will serve as an MBBS school for Subcontinent only.
Americans need not apply.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/W8q5GeKMwy1YWRmS8
@Lynn
Local water access ordinance?
Tax dodge? (i.e, lower valuation if not beach access?)
Is there an easement for beach access?
Who is the separate owner, and does the private park extend across many properties?
My parents house that they bought in 1986, was built by a local doctor in 1961, right after hurricane Carla. The doctor bought four acres on the bay and split it into five properties, 4 lots at ⅔ acre each, and a park playground between the lots and the bay.
My parents own lots 2, 3, and 4. Their house is on lot 2 and lots 3 and 4 are overgrown.
There is no beach, just a bulkhead. There are four owner shares of the park and my parents own three of the four shares of the park. But the owner shares are not coupled to the lots anymore, they were separated.
“¿Habla inglés?”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/truck-drivers-dekalkb-country-alabama?utm_source=theblaze-dailyPM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily-Newsletter__PM%202025-08-06&utm_term=ACTIVE%20LIST%20-%20TheBlaze%20Daily%20PM&tpcc=email
Your parents weren’t aware of the property lines when they bought the house?
Yup they were. They bought the house in a bankruptcy sale. I just talked to Mom about it. They got the house for such a good deal that they bought it anyway.
Separating the waterfront access from the property isn’t unusual either in Florida.
IIRC, my late sister’s house had no claim on the shore of the lake in their backyard, but that put the maintenance on the HOA. In that situation, the homeowner has to pray that the HOA doesn’t go bankrupt.
The scariest commons situation in FL, however, has to be on a golf curse -er- course pushing a few decades past its prime. I’ve read stories lately about neighborhoods known for swanky courses when I was a kid giving up on maintaining the golf course and selling to developers for high density construction.
What was the Robin Williams line?
Got the mirrored sunglasses … mirrored on both sides.
Son, you’re down below the Manson-Nixon line now.
For the Quicken users out there, I have been using Quicken for a long time, over 30 years. I bought the last version before they went to a subscription model, and have been using that version ever since. Every time I bring it up, it does “call home” and offer me an upgrade at 50% off. I have always declined the offer, because I don’t want to pay a subscription. For those of you that have upgraded to the subscription model, are there any major features they have added that are worth the upgrade? Otherwise, I will probably just continue to use the old version until it no longer runs under whatever version of Windows I eventually need to install in the future.
So it turns out that two truck loads of crushed slag amounts to far more than 16-18 cubic yards. LOTS more. More like 24 yd3. I overfilled the walkway and I still have a huge pile. I’ll find something to do with it, I guess, but I lose the machines this weekend.
The fines and smalls are not uniformly distributed thru the material, so some scoops were all 1″ and some are mostly fines with a few lumps. The big pieces don’t look great and don’t compact without the smalls and fines. I wish I’d have noticed before dumping stuff in place. I have shoveled fines over the big stuff but it’s not the best solution. Also the 1″ pieces are a bit bigger than I’d really like. Fine for a driveway, not so much for a walkway. I may end up topping it with something fine like black beauty sand. We’ll see. It looks great wet…
I’m going to try to rent a small compactor, either a vibratory roller or a plate, or even a jumping jack. I can’t get close enough to the edges to just wheel roll the material with the skid steer. I’ve twitched and banged into the house far too many times. I won’t keep getting away with it.
I think I will have some time on the dock tonight. I am sore but not wiped out like yesterday.
Dinner was pre-cooked brats, and german potato salad from a can. It’s like I’m a bachelor again. No me gusta.
n
See if you can hire a typical blue-haired feminist to do jumping jacks on your crushed stone. That will not only compact them, it will shatter the large pieces into small pieces.
No, wait. Are you anywhere near a fault line? Better check with a geologist before getting the work done. You don’t want a lynch mob after you for causing a 5.7R quake.
I had the final regular version, but the new private equity owners ended the online stock and mutual fund price updates for the holdouts who refused the subscription model so I upgraded.
Looks like 2017 was the last non-subscription year and there is an active secondary market.
Lawsuit: The Regulation Of Untaxed Firearms Under Federal Law Is Unconstitutional
https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/06/lawsuit-the-regulation-of-untaxed-firearms-under-federal-law-is-unconstitutional/
The argument is that the OBBB removed taxes, so the remaining regulatory framework of the NFA is unconstitutional.
This does nothing to litigate the basic question of the constitutionality of the NFA, and leaves the door open for re-imposition when the pendulum swings.
We’ve seen the Roberts Court enable ObamaCare under the color of a tax, and on that same basis there is nothing that would prevent the federal government from imposing any kind of restrictions that could be dreamed up under the cover of a tax.
I don’t recall what we did, incompatible downloading from banks and cards might have forced us to the subscription model.
I did consider alternatives. The existing historical records and the ease of data entry kept us with Quicken though.
——–
I’m headed to bed.
n
Adam Schiff may be in serious trouble in a case that should be easy to prove
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/08/adam_schiff_may_be_in_serious_trouble_in_a_case_that_should_be_easy_to_prove.html
Results in some interesting discussions concerning limitations, if any, on where such lawsuits may be filed.
Congress has chosen to ignore the residency requirement for years, and the number of senators and representatives misrepresenting their residence has been significant. Seems to me that we need a pile of lawsuits filed before carefully selected federal judges so the question can get forced to SCOTUS.
My erstwhile employer allowed local spreadsheets or databases but absolutely nothing was saved to individual machines. Your My Documents and even desktop were virtual folders pointed at a folder on a server elsewhere. Awkward when the network went down. A local caching server would have helped but not in the budget. Although surveillance cameras were easily budget able.
Canada’s wildfires may be impossible to extinguish?
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/08/canada_s_wildfires_may_be_em_impossible_em_to_extinguish.html
There was a report a week of so ago that Minneapolis, MN had the second or third worst air quality of any city in the world, due to the smoke from Canadian “wildfires”. This resulted in government recommendations to limit time outside. The same EPA models that were used to estimate deaths from PM2.5 particulate air pollution can be used to estimate the excess U.S. deaths due to Canadian wildfires, and public utility data can be used to model the direct effect of excess air conditioning needed when people can’t open their windows.
We’re in the fifth consecutive year of having summer spoiled for millions by Canadian wildfires, and it’s past time to that the EPA and the federal government acted to protect U.S. citizens. Litigation would be possible, but given the current political climate it would be much simpler to get and “Canadian Forest Fire Endangerment Finding” from the EPA and have POTUS simply pad the tariffs and create a compensation fund.
Astonishing Extreme Lightning Bolt Recorded
Initial reports claimed it was global warming, bu reanalysis showed a striking correlation to the path taken by Democrat fleebaggers.
Maybe some wizards opened a can of million-volt whupass and missed?
>>I sympathize a lot with companies like Lynn’s, who are charging (what I assume is) a fair price for specialty software.
And then along comes an up-start competitor with an open source version.
Yes, they do. And I’ve read up on IPv6 enough times to feel reasonably sure I could configure it securely, including port-forwarding, etc.. However, having a mix of IPv4 and IPv6 in the local network just seems like asking for problems. Quite a few devices (IoT stuff) don’t seem to support IPv6. Anyway, before I turned it off, things like our server promptly popped up with IPv6 addresses, but other things definitely did not.
So off it stays…
I remember giving my students an overview of IPv6 back in the late ’90s, and telling them that it would be taking over the Internet any day now. At the time, I didn’t realize how utterly stupid the lack of backwards compatibility was. I’ve heard all sorts of excuses, and yes, it would have marred the beauty of the new engineering marvel. Time has proven that lack of backwards compatibility was an inexcusable failure.
Unrelated, but I have to grumble about our new ISP: Their router let’s you set a DNS server, and I put in our pihole. However, the router then ignores that setting entirely. On the positive side, this is how I learned that pihole does DHCP, which solves the problem rather nicely.