09:35 – I was going to black out this site today in sympathy with the SOPA/PIPA protests, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn the whole page black. If SOPA/PIPA does pass, I’ll have to make some changes around here, starting with disabling comments.
I’m still cranking away on my final pre-editing pass of the lab sessions. There are quite a few missing images, which I’m just putting in placeholders for for now. I created a to-be-shot images list, and I’ll go through and shoot those in a batch.
USPS introduces a new regional-rate box today, to join the current RR Boxes A and B. The new RR C box is considerably larger—12x12x15” (30.5×30.5x38cm)—and might actually have been useful had the USPS not priced it ridiculously high.
The smallest RR box, A, requires postage at the Priority Mail 2-pound level, and can be used for up to 15 pounds. The mid-size RR box, B, which is what I use for kits, requires postage at the Priority Mail 4-pound level, which means it costs me $5.81 in postage for relatively nearby destinations up to $14.62 for zone 8 (the west coast, Hawaii, and Alaska). It can be used for up to 20 pounds. The new RR Box C is priced at the Priority Mail 17-pound level, which means it would cost almost $15 to send to nearby destinations and about $45 to send to zone 8. It can be used for up to 25 pounds. That’s not a very good deal, considering that the large flat-rate PM box (12x12x5.5”, up to 70 pounds) costs only about $15 to send to any address in the US, including zone 8.
There’s a lot of discussion about this new box on the forums frequented by eBay sellers and other vendors. Many people thought the 17-pound rate was a typo, and that USPS really meant to say the 7-pound rate. That might have been reasonable, but as it turns out they really did mean the 17-pound rate. In effect, the USPS has made this new box useless other than for a very small percentage of shipments: those that weigh between 18 and 25 pounds, are too large to fit a large flat-rate box, and are going to distant addresses. Otherwise, it’s cheaper to use UPS or FedEx. Sometimes far cheaper.
If USPS had been smart, they’d have made the RR box C a 12x12x10” box with a 25-pound limit and priced it at the PM 7-pound rate. That box would have been very useful and very widely used. But a RR box C that costs from $14+ to $45 is simply a non-starter.
Okay, I gotta ask, why would you turn off comments if SOPA passes?
Because if a commenter posts something containing a link to a site that allegedly violates a foreign country’s copyright law, then the ttgnet.com domain name could be revoked without warning.
Right. D’uh. I gotta finish my coffee before posting. Must remember to start doing that!
That’s interesting. The Recent Comments sidebar isn’t showing today’s date, just the poster’s name. Or does it do this everyday, and I just haven’t noticed before?
What is shown in the column on the right is the title for the post the comment is on. Usually, Bob titles his posts with the date. Today he left the title blank.
Maybe you need another cup of coffee?
Make a blank HTML page with a black background. Put some text on it if you want (white text on black). Save it as index.php. Go into your host file manager. Find the index.php in the main folder (usually public_html). Rename it so you can get it back later. Upload your new index.php to that main folder.
Alternately (depending on your WordPress theme) you could change the background image to a blacked-out image, so you would have a black border around your content.
Sorry about that. My Internet service has been going up and down this morning. At first, I thought maybe someone was doing DDoS on the whole Internet to protest SOPA/PIPA. At any rate, when I got a short window I posted the article and forgot to give it a title in my hurry to get it published before the Internet went down again.
Dave B. is correct. If SOPA/PIPA passes, I simply can’t afford to risk allowing comments because one comment in violation of the new rules could cause me to be shut down. Talk about a chilling effect on free speech.
I’ve already phoned my congressman and senators to ask them to vote against these ridiculous bills.
I’m not experiencing a blackout of anything I use — including Wikipedia. Maybe it is due to using AdBlock and NoScript.
Anybody besides me notice at Monday’s debate, that when the question was asked, “What is the highest tax you would consider fair to Americans?” most chose 15%, Ron Paul chose 0%, and — most importantly — Romney said 25%.
Then, in a later question, and post-debate comments, Romney said he paid 15% in taxes.
The guy is a scumbag.
If you are running a javascript blocker, you can bypass their “black wall”.
All of them except Ron Paul are scumbags. Gingrich is the sleasiest of the group, not to mention being a religious nutter. Santorum is truly a religious nutter; he favors a theocracy, basically. Perry (is he still in the race?) is another religious nutter. And Romney is as sleazy as any of them except maybe Gingrich, not to mention also being a religious nutter.
Robert Bruce Thompson said:
Perry (is he still in the race?)
Yeah. In fact, George Will’s wife is now his political adviser, and he is making a solid comeback. In voting on who won the Monday debate, many said Perry, and Romney was dead last.
LOL
I’ve already phoned my congressman and senators to ask them to vote against these ridiculous bills.
You mean your congress critter actually knows how to use a phone. You must have one of the smarter ones.
Ray, congresscritters aren’t necessarily stupid. They’re unwise and/or unprincipled.
RBT wrote:
“…not to mention also being a religious nutter.”
Ron’s a religious nutter too.
Why don’t *you* run for president? We could have the religious nutters verses the atheist nutter… 🙂
After Monday’s performance, I am convinced Paul will NEVER become president. Even if he got the nomination, he would be as dead as Goldwater as a winning candidate. I did not listen to the whole thing, but twice, he just stopped in the middle of saying something, paused with a hint of senility, and took off in an entirely different direction. One time he said, “Blah, blah, blah, because….[insert senile-like pause]….And another thing, blah, blah, blah.” It was a very embarrassing moment for Libertarians.
How he got this far I’ll never know.
Where is Bill Weld when you really need him?
People said the same thing about another Ron in 1980 (and 1976) and he turned out okay. Ron Paul makes more sense than Obama and most of the Republicans.
Ray, congresscritters aren’t necessarily stupid. They’re unwise and/or unprincipled.
You give them too much credit. I think many of them are smart enough to get out of the rain. Unless some lobbyist is coaxing them with shiny trinkets and beads.
Are NOT smart enough……
All the clearly RINO candidates suck, a bunch of circus freaks that all came piling out of that tiny little car, every one of them a goddam mutant loon. With the exception of Paul, except he’s a couple of hundred years old and is mainly useful for pushing more people toward the side of liberty and paving the way for his kid’s political career. Then we have the hadji Indonesian socialist creep in the WH now, probably for another four years, so the country can really begin to suffer and get a lot angrier.
I’m sitting this one out and stocking up on ammo; my firing squads will be working overtime after the revolution.
NONE of these candidates (except Paul, who is unelectable) are going to set any kind of correction course that will make a difference.
You really think Ron’s senile? I thought your ideal president was one who spent most of his day on the golf course. Since Ron doesn’t believe in government he sounds like the ideal candidate. (Johnson’s dropped out of the Republican race and is going for/has got the Libertarian party nomination. That should be worth about 2% of the vote.)
Sadly, I have to agree with what everyone else has said. The Republicans have not understood, and almost all of the candidates they offer are from the same country-club group that Bush came from.
Ron Paul is one of the few exceptions; he might have had a chance if he were (a) 20 years younger and (b) more charismatic. He isn’t, and he isn’t.
Herman Cain was probably the most electable candidate they had, and they killed his candidacy quickly and efficiently.
How can the Republican leadership can still be so isolated, so cut off in their little fantasy world? Is it part of the job description to believe that they are right, in the face of the Tea Party, in the face of OWS, and all the other signs that the same-old-politics are just wrong? I really do not understand. With this bunch of losers, they have almost certainly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I keep hearing people telling me no, but there really are no Repubs or Dems; it is all one big War Party. Paul is the only candidate against our endless failing clusterfucks, and for that he is anathema to our lords temporal.
I say Presidents should be on the golf course to keep them from screwing up the Republic. Paul is a barely acceptable Libertarian to me. He cannot articulate why we should not have a military with bases in 130 countries. He says ‘we have caused the 9-11 attacks.’ He KNOWS that is an unacceptable statement to 99.9% of Americans, who sincerely believe America can do no wrong, even if it does not do right. There are FAR better ways to put that, but the anarchist Libertarians will never be able to do that. Only Bill Weld and Harry Browne seem able — and even Browne fails from time to time.
It is hard to take — that somebody with Paul’s significant tenure in Congress — cannot organize and express himself better, but there you have it. Anybody who has been in office for as long as Paul, ought to know by now what appeals will be rejected — but dammit, what does he do? He keeps saying the same things at the debates over and over that ALWAYS elicit vociferous boo’s. He is unelectable.
I have decided that I will never run for public office, because I am not stupid enough or corrupt enough. I guess that is really what is wrong with politics for people like me. The whole thing is about electing self-centered idiots who can cause the most destruction in the least amount of time, and I am not good at picking those.
I’d vote for Ron Paul in a flash against the incumbent, but I’d prefer that Gary Johnson or Rand Paul was the candidate. William Weld backed Obama over McCain in 2008, so it’s hard to take him seriously. I had to Google Browne, and I guess he won’t be running as he died in 2006.
Browne can still run in Illinois, Greg.
Hey Chuck, I am a lot more stupid and corrupt than you so I may still have a chance at something, maybe cemetery commission? Highway? Who do I gotta grease?
I had been thinking that Browne could do well in the primaries in Illinois if the Chicago machine endorsed him.
I’m always bemused that the US has so many elective offices: Judges, Sheriffs, Town Dog Catcher…
I wish we had the same here. Instead these jobs are often political appointments and, apparently, jobs for life for the heavily unionized.
I suspect if you were as corrupt as you claim, you would already know the answer.
Yeah, but I gotta test Chuck, because he was outta the country for a long time and may have forgotten a few things and how they work here.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-20/perry-bows-out2c-endorses-gingrich/3783728
From the article:
“Marianne Gingrich told ABC America that she learnt her marriage was over in a phone call with her husband in 1999.
“I said to him, ‘Newt we’ve been married a long time’, and he said, ‘Yes, but you want me all to yourself. Callista [Callista Bisek – now Callista Gingrich] doesn’t care what I do’,” she said.”
What sort of woman “wouldn’t care” what her husband was “doing”? There’s a number of aspects to this but I’d be worried about my partner getting and transmitting a STD. Gingrich really is a creep. How the following person can be so blase is beyond me:
“Karen Martin, an original Tea Party member, says they will not change her mind, and she will do anything but vote for Mitt Romney. ”
Is Mittens that bad?
Mittens is a multi-millionaire space shot who is pretty much totally out of touch with ordinary schmucks like you and me and not too worried about that, either. His cultish beliefs are akin to hadjis’ visions of the 72 virgins, etc., or the Reverend Moon’s, and believes he will be a god someday, so meanwhile he donates zillions to the cult and funnels more zillions to the Caymans. Not only that but he was president of the LDS Stake in Maffachufetts. The icing on the cake is that he is as slippery as they come, and that’s saying something in the world he and the other RINO asswipes inhabit.
Frankly I would rather have another four years of The Prophet so this country really gets a snootful of how rotten things are here and how badly we are all being fucked over. Maybe then they will get angry enough to do something, or maybe they won’t lift a finger, and stupidly and violently at that, when the store shelves all go empty and the power and lights go off. We shall see.
Yeah, I have forgotten a lot of things, and having them force-recollected is like a bad trip.
Been gone so long, I didn’t know Browne had died. Back when I lived in Boston, Browne had a heart attack while live on David Brudnoy’s #1-rated radio talk show. I was listening at the time. Brudnoy had the highest-rated radio show for a couple decades in Boston, and was a Libertarian. Before Brudnoy knew he had AIDS, he would occasionally — very late at night (he was on from 7pm to 1am for a long time) — launch into the most articulate attacks I have ever heard on narrow-minded callers, or those who pretended to know more than they did. When Brudnoy was finished, it was all I could do not to rise to a standing ovation.
Browne’s book “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” (1973) was my in-depth introduction to Libertarian thinking, and has influenced my life more than any other single event.
As far as Weld endorsing Obama, anybody can make a mistake. A lot of my Democratic friends now think Obama was one of the biggest mistakes that party has ever made. Although just like 1996, it looks like Republicans are headed towards picking a candidate who cannot possibly win against Obama, when any dog-catcher in Massachusetts easily could.
I also read Browne’s book back in the day, along with Murray Rothbard’s stuff and the old Rothbard-Rockwell Report which I got in the mail. But the I got turned on to Chronicles Magazine and the Rockford Institute and gradually, since the 80s, became more of a paleoconservative than a libertarian.