Surge suppressors now mandated at electrical service

My sister recently bought a house with the plan of moving into it. The house was 1965 vintage everything. One of the contractors was an electrician.

I happened to be visiting and was able to lend a sympathetic ear.

He (and his wife) spend a lot of time looking for hardware. Recent mandates for upgrades to all "services" outran the supply chain. Home owners are not forced to upgrade but any work to the "service" will not pass inspection unless the upgrades are incorporated. He can only charge for the hours he is actually working on the house.

He was not a happy guy. He has overhead. Twiddling thumbs or driving to Indiana to pick up a part does not put money in his pocket.

The Matrix

In the movie The Matrix, humans are an energy source that are farmed. To make the farming process more efficient, the humans are heavily sedated with drugs and entertainment. This is, of course, pure balderdash in the thermodynamic sense.

It makes a lot more sense if you substitute "data" for "energy".

As improbable as it sounds, what if the mandates to install surge suppressors was all about protecting the data collecting microphones and cameras and other sensors rather than protecting the subject's "devices"?

Humor in lieu of actual content

Kamala Harris visited a remote northern Native-American reservation. With news crews following her around as they toured the place, the Vice President asked the chief if there was anything they needed.

"Well," the chief said, "We have three very important needs. First, we have a medical clinic but no doctor."

Harris whipped out her cellphone, tapped a number into it, talked to somebody for two minutes and then hung up. "I pulled some strings. Your doctor will arrive in a few days. Now what was the second problem?"

"We have no way to get clean water. The local mining operation poisoned the water our people have been drinking for dozens of years. We've been flying bottled water in and it is very expensive."

Once again, Harris tapped in a number, yelled into her cellphone for a few minutes, and then hung up. "The mine will be shut down, and the owner is being billed for setting up a purification plant for your people. Now what was that third problem?"

The chief looked her straight in the eyes and said, "We have no cellphone reception up here!!"

Reloading and Delayed Onset Muscle Pain

 

A few .38 Special loaded with MBC semi-wadcutters.

Nothing fancy. Mixed brass. WSP primers. Max listed load of CFE-Pistol which will probably produce 900fps out of a revolver with a 4" barrel. Note that the velocities listed in most manuals use a 7" or 10" barrel with no cylinder-barrel gap that bleeds of pressure...so real-life velocities in revolvers are almost always significantly less than the ones listed in the manuals.

Nothing fancy. Nothing radical. No surprises. Given their 12 BNH hardness and low impact velocity, these bullets will not expand. A penetration of 20" in ballistic gelatin is a realistic guess for this kind of load.

I like the fact that the powder-coating color matches the brass. It makes them look plumbing parts or parts for a gas-stove.

2-1/2" shotgun shells

One of my fishing buddies has an old shotgun that is chambered for 2-1/2", 12 gauge shells. Since the 2-3/4" length was standardized some time in the 1930s, most of the weapons that specify 2-1/2" long shells are old and were manufactured before steel chemistry and heat-treatment was universally understood.

The reloading data 2-1/2" shells from Hodgdon's  is purposely low-pressure out of respect for the limitations of those older firearms. While the maximum SAAMI allowable pressure for a 2-3/4", 12 gauge shell is 11,500 PSI, the Hodgdon data for their 2-1/2" reloads is in the range of 7,000 PSI.

What that means in practical terms is that since the fatigue-life of most types of steel is cut in half with every 15%* increase in stresses, a 60% increase in stresses (directly related to peak pressures) while shorten the life of the shotgun by roughly 95%.

6k-to-7k PSI is in the range of what blackpowder shells generated

So here I am, staring at some Fiocchi hulls and trying to figure out an efficient way to shave 1/4" from their height. If I can't find an efficient way, then I will cut a length of PVC to use as a gauge and shave each one to length using a box-cutter.

Any ideas?

Delayed onset muscle pain

Ooof!

I got busy and stopped hitting the gym. Working out, whether walking or running or biking or lifting weights is good for stress relief.

Based on what hurts, dead-lifts worked most of the muscles in my body. Today, my quads and traps are barking at me.

*For service lives where over one-million cycles are anticipated, the rule of thumb was every 10% increase in stresses halved the life and for service lives of less than 100k cycles 15% was a closer fit. It is hard to imaging a shotgun that has more than 100,000 shells run through it during its lifetime.

Server attacks?

Maybe it is just a sign of the times and it doesn't mean anything, but one of the tinfoil-hat sites I occasionally visit reported multiple server attacks in the past 26 hours.

Or maybe it is related to proximity to the US Presidential election.

Over the past 26 hours we have been taken down 5 times. The TFH* server is one of over 25,000 servers worldwide that are under attack at the moment.

We will be back online just as quickly as possible, but it may be later today before that happens.

For those of you who are fellow computer geeks, here are some articles explaining whats going on out there in our Cyberworld.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-psaux-ransomware-attack-targets-22-000-cyberpanel-instances/

https://www.ionix.io/blog/remote-code-execution-vulnerability-in-cyberpanel/

https://googiehost.com/blog/cyberpanel-servers-compromised/

 

TFH = Tin Foil Hat

God told me to grow food

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.”  

He then said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.”  

He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was distressed that he had said to him a third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” [Jesus] said to him, “Feed my sheep."          John 21:15-17 NAB translation

John is the last book of the Gospels which are the books in the New Testament  that are solely focused on the 30-to-35 years that start shortly before the birth of Jesus and up-to when Jesus returned to heaven. Chapter 21 is the last chapter in John. The quotes are within 8 verses of the very end of the Gospels. They are, effectively, among Jesus's last words as he walked out the door.

While no word of Jesus is more, or less, important than any other words, as a human I perceive them as being like my wife reminding me to perform some mundane, easy-to-ignore task as she heads off to a week-long conference. "Be sure to empty the diaper pail!!!" for instance.

The humor in the passage is that, other than domestic turkeys which were "discovered" in the 1500s, sheep are easily the stupidest and most suicidal of all animals, domestic or wild.

God doesn't tell me to feed His people because they are worthy or awesome or earned it. He tells me to feed them because we are His.

So, if this blog is heavily weighted towards gardening and orchards and hunting and fishing and raising animals on pasture...there are reasons.

Where are the brains?

"Don't trust something unless you know where its brain lives"

"Don't trust something unless you know where its brain lives" is a theme that sporadically pops up in fiction. Most recently in the second Harry Potter book where Ginny Weasley was given a book that was bonded to Voldemort, the Satan figure in the series.

I also vaguely remember the theme being a sub-plot in one of the Foundation books by Asimov but cannot find a reference to which one and don't want to reread the series to find it.

Some of my resistance to autonomous vehicles is that I don't know where its brain lives. I might call health-care provider or the gym and ask them to send auto-uber to my house, but what assurance do I have that the vehicle will actually deliver me to the gym or my dentist instead of J6 Jail or the local Soylent Green/Planned Eternal Euth franchise?

On a more global scale, where are the brains that are running the US Government? Can we be expected to believe that Joe Biden is the brains of the outfit?

Why does it matter?

Personal accountability is the foundation of morality. It is much easier to act in evil ways when there is no accountability, no way it can be traced back to the individual*.

I was an absentee-replacement supervisor in a factory for a while. The largest "group" I supervised had 41 employees on the roster. I learned that the only way to maintain order was to learn names very, very quickly.

I loath people who deflect responsibility. "That broken piece of equipment is not my fault. The skilled trades person must not have used the right size screws." or "Second shift also missed those bad welds, so it is not my fault." I expect people who get paid "grown-up" wages to take the azz-whippin's they earned like grown-ups. If you screwed up, own it...and get better. If you don't "own it"...if you shirk the fact that YOU HAD CONTROL...then there is very, very low probability that you will improve because your coping mechanism of shifting the blame worked.

Organisms like Lord Voldemort's diary and big bureaucracies do not have the inherent checks-and-balances of transparency. We don't know where the brains are. In the case of businesses, shareholders and/or business owners are expected to provide that function. In the case of government bureaucracies, elected officials are expected to provide that function. 

*I get that "character" is how people act when nobody is listening. But there is a thing called "Moral Hazard". Industrial sized systems must be able to function even if somebody with low-character is installing lug-nuts on the wheel of your car...or purchasing IV fluids in a hospital...or sitting at a desk in HR.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Walter Moras was born in Germany in 1856 and died in 1925.

Painted mostly landscapes. Moras was a prolific painter and he relied heavily on suffuse light, water and trees as themes in his paintings. Nearly all of his works show evidence of mankind so they are not "primal" in nature.

I find his work pleasant and peaceful even if they aren't considered "ground breaking".

Bonus Image

ERJ when he is Zh!t posting during an election year.

Actually, a painting by Emma Eckwall...but I could not resist.

Grab bag

I know it is tacky to brag, but I added 920 rounds of ammunition to the ammo-locker.

I use rubber bands in grafting. You cannot beat rubber bands for pulling the cut surfaces of the root-stock and scion together. The only caveat is that UV tears them up faster than they typically heal-together. That is easily remedied with a wrap of masking tape over the rubber bands. #33 rubber-bands work spiffy. I am trying out the #64s to see if I like them better.

Southern Belle and Handsome Hombre

Might be making an offer on a property today. It checks all of the major boxes. It is older and is quirky but they can make it work.

I think it has some major things like roof, decks and drain-field that need attention in the next five-to-ten years. That is scary to some people but HH is in the building trades and it is a lever to negotiate a lower price, especially if the inspection flags it.

Overhead imagery in late winter showing deer trails.

For the record, overhead imagery shows the parcel is riddled with deer-trails. Lots of Gray Dogwood, Hawthorn, volunteer crabapples, Reed Canary grass, Staghorn Sumac and Box Elder. There is an enormous American Basswood in the yard.

The new stove

Mrs ERJ was serious about my having been exposed to enough frustration this month. She is hiring out the installation. He is scheduled to show up in the middle of next week.

I yanked the old one and have the new one parked in the hole. The experts will change the orifices and fiddle with the regulator.

The weather

Stiff south wind today and tomorrow.

Friday afternoon is predicted to have a 7mph northwest wind which will be auspicious for dropping a large pear tree with fire-blight in the crown. The tree is at The Property and is one of the trees marked to be removed. Does anybody know if pear wood is desirable for smoking meat?  I am going to have an abundance of it.

Jeff Bezos

The essay he published explaining why he did not allow The Washington Post to "endorse" a political candidate was as fine of a piece of writing as I have seen in a very long time.

Maybe the glaciers are starting to recede and the remnant Homo sapiens population will not be pushed into the abyss.

Thank-you Mr. Bezos. Thank-you!

Analysis Paralysis

 

Failing to have a plan leads to some very predictable outcomes.

One of those outcomes is paralysis due to endless analysis.

The dynamics are simple. Every test or every additional piece of data has the potential to resolve a finite percentage of the remaining uncertainty.

Suppose each "test" removes 1/3 of the uncertainty. At first blush it might appear that three tests would remove all uncertainty...but that is not how it works.

The first test removes 33% of the uncertainty but leaves 67% of the uncertainty.

The second test removes 1/3 of the 67% or 22% or the original uncertainty, leaving about 45% of the absolute uncertainty.

The third tests removes 1/3 of the 45% of the remaining uncertainty leaving 30% of the absolute uncertainty.

Removal of 70% of the uncertainty might be plenty, especially if the decision is inexpensive and less-favorable outcomes are not really all that bad.

It is easy to lose sight of the ABSOLUTE numbers when you are swimming along and making decisions by the seat-of-your-pants. Every test LOOKS like a bargain because every test removes 33% of the remaining risk.

We see what is in front of our face

Momentum keeps up focused on the problem we were dealing with last week and blinds us to other risks, other costs that are emerging.

Consider a person who is dating and cannot commit because...well, there is always SOMETHING they don't know about the other person.*

The risk is that the other person will get tired of the lack of commitment and look elsewhere. Or he/she will get to an age where they will not want (or cannot have) children. Or perhaps YOU get old-and-ugly or become ill or lose your job and lose your value in the dating market.

In product development, extra time taken up by the design phase is usually at the expense of the manufacturing tune-in phase. The absolute risk is not eliminated by the product development engineers ironing out every fussy, little detail. Rather, risk is transferred to the manufacturing side of the house, and in absolute (or global) terms the risk starts to grow exponentially.

Summary

• Make a plan
• Ensure that the "tests" comprehend a wide swath of operating conditions. In the realm of dating, that means visiting a wide range of venues and activities. It means seeing them when they are tired and/or stressed and/or when they disagree with you....or combinations of the above.
  
• Have a clear picture in your head regarding your tolerance for absolute risk and then pencil out how many "tests" are required to beat the uncertainty below that level. If you just need a pretty girl to take to the company Christmas party...they are easy to find. If you are quirky and unwilling to compromise about several value-like things, you might be looking for one-in-a-hundred or one-in-a-thousand.
  
• Don't let anxiety and tunnel-vision blind you to emerging risks. While you are looking for that one-in-a-million, you have been discarding dozens of one-in-a-hundred girls who would have slam-dunked more than 80% of your requirements and made you very, very happy. And are you really going to live long enough to honestly evaluate a million girls under a wide range of venues and activities?
• Getting plenty-good-enough quickly means you have a generous amount of time to tweak and adjust afterward. As long as the plenty-good-enough choice has flexibility and excess capacity so failed trials are not catastrophic.

*This example was chosen because it is one that most people can relate to. For those who read too much into what I write...Mrs ERJ and I are doing just fine. Thanks for asking.

Buying my Christmas present

Mrs ERJ strode into battle like a hero.

Troy walked over and started working through his list of questions.

Mrs ERJ had all the answers:

• Gas
• LP
• Nothing with a mother-board
• White enamel
• He (she said as she jabbed her thumb in my direction as I stood behind her) can install it
• He needs the conversion kit and any hoses and all the other miscellaneous doo-dads 

I could tell Troy was impressed. He got more out of her in 3 minutes than he could wring out of most customers in 30.

35 minutes later we were parked behind the building and two young fellows loaded the box into the back of Mrs ERJ's minivan.

The stove and LP conversion kit came to $384 before sales tax.

For the record, we found Troy at the West Lansing Menard's to be a very professional and helpful sales-person.

Sometimes, you just have to spend the money and buy new hardware

As several readers predicted, there is a new stove in the future (the very near future) of the ERJ household.

The "universal" safety valve showed up. I had it installed in about 30 minutes. It lit and turned off like a dream. However, the flames were orange and 18" long.

Back to the internet.

This site said to turn the air-shutter to full-open and to make sure that the orifice cover was turned counter-clockwise so it was in firm contact with the bottom of the burner tube to tune the safety-valve/burner-tube for LP use.

The flames might have been only 16" long but they were still too-rich. There was just too much gas emitting from the safety valve.

Mrs ERJ suggested that I had experienced enough frustration to meet my quota for October. A little humility is good for the soul, or so she says

In a few minutes we shall sally-forth to yon big-box store and Mrs ERJ shall pick out my 2024 Christmas present.

My only regret is that I don't have Glen Filthie's personal phone number. I would have loved to consult with him. By his own testimony, he is a world-class expert on excessive amounts of gas. Between the two of us I am sure we could have wrung another 19 years out of the stove.

"MAHA Men" ad (more political stuff)

Make America Healthy Again, an affiliate of RFK, dropped an ad about two days ago. If you still have not decided who you are going to vote for, it might be worth your time to watch it.

According to Google Trends. MAHA is getting getting many hits out of swing-states Michigan (86/100 with Vermont being 100), Wisconsin (65), Pennsylvania (56) and Arizona (51).

The ad is probably not getting much air-time on mainstream media because it is too long at three-and-a-half minutes.

It contains footage of VP Harris saying that she intended to incarcerate the parents of truant students. It also has short segments of some of the parents who were raided by police and who were incarcerated because of her enforcement of the truancy policies in California.

If time is tight, the portion between 0:18 and 2:00 contains the most information.

They need to move about 20k Cajuns to the Everglades

 

Youtube video with three minute run-time

This video discusses a Burmese Python in the Florida Everglades swallowing a mature, Whitetail doe (female). Off the top of my head, my guess is that a 1-1/2 year-old Florida doe might average 90 pounds on-the-hoof.

According to the CDC, the median 12 year-old girl and the fifth percentile 15 year-old girl both weight 90 pounds.

The Everglades is not a healthy place for petite people to become too absorbed in their hand-held devices.

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias

Zeus to the rescue

The ladies of the family informed me that "boogie-men" are a phase that toddlers go through. In this case, Quicksilver's "boogie-men" is a fear of bears.

That fear was put to bed today.

"Zeus is one of God's Guardian angels" we told her. Zeus is our German Shepherd

We called Zeus over and praised his big, sharp teeth. Quicksilver was all ears.

"Bear. Shiny nose?" Quicksilver asked (about 23 times).

"Yes. Zeus will bite him. Bite him lots of times. Chase bear down the driveway" I assured her.

Quicksilver was comical as she would "jab" with her hand and make a biting motion with her hand...fingers and thumbs extended like a dog's teeth. "Bite bear!!!"

"Yes. Many, many times" I repeated.

"Zeus will protect you. He is on Team Xyzabc and he protects us" I reiterated.

I firmly believe that God gave us dogs for that very reason. They are one rank of the phalanx of guardian angels that God arrays around each one of us.

Getting spidered

I am getting a huge number of untraceable hits. It is on the order of 10x my normal traffic and it has been going on for about 10 days.

I must have hit some trip-wires and I am getting spidered.

It is what it is. We live in tumultuous times.

Decorating tips

 

I rarely decorate close to the road but decided to make an exception this year.

A short story (true life)

I got a call from the high school. Kubota was "misbehaving" in art class and the teacher need to have a conference with one of his parents.

Since I was working third-shift and Mrs ERJ was working day-shift, I got the assignment.

I walked into the room. Kubota was sitting there with the art teacher and the student-teacher who she was "mentoring". Kubota looked uncomfortable.

The art teacher did the usual introductory spiel but as she did it she kept picking hard-candies out of a tray in front of her and very fastidiously unwrapped them and popped them into her mouth. Her fingers gave me the distinct impression of a spider daintily picking its way across a spider web on the way to wrap up a newly caught fly.

The impression was hammered home, looking at her body. She had the spindly arms and legs and grotesquely rounded trunk of a very, very heavy drinker. Her voice and diction were very precise and picky-sounding.

Then she turned the meeting over to her student teacher.

The crux of her complaint was that Kubota blurted out answers in class.

Digging a little deeper, she never called on Kubota in class because he didn't follow the instructions she had given the class on the proper way to raise one's hand in class and she refused to call on people who didn't follow directions.

My curiosity got the better of me, I asked "What is the proper way to raise one's hand to get your attention?"

The student teacher demonstrated. "The student is required to hold their upper arm parallel to the floor and to hold their fore-arms perfectly vertical. They are to track my as I walk around the classroom by having their palms facing me."

----"Oh, and they are to be perfectly silent while they do this because I lecture them right up until I select a student to answer."

I sagely nodded my head. "We can end the meeting right now. You made it abundantly clear that we have a problem. I guarantee that I will address it."

On the way home I bought Kubota a McDonald Value Meal. He did a great job letting the teachers yack-away and dig their own holes. I commended him for keeping his mouth shut when it would only make outcomes worse.

That was the extent of my "addressing" the issue.

I pretty much had their number thirty seconds into the "conference". I think the mentoring teacher just wanted to give the student teacher "exposure" to student-parent conferences.

Intuition vs "Rational" thought

There was a very short vignette in the very beginning of either Gladwell's book Blink or Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Two policemen are sitting in their cruiser. It is a hot night in LA and they have the windows down. It had rained recently.

A man in a floppy coat is walking toward the cruiser's driver's side door.

The policeman who was riding "shotgun" glanced over at the person approaching the cruiser, unholstered his weapon, extended it in front of his partner and discharged it through the open window. The bullets struck the approaching man and killed him.

Much excitement followed. EMTs found a sawed-off shotgun beneath the dead man's floppy coat. The patrol car's shotgun was still in the rack.

Presumably, had the cop hesitated, both cops could have been shot and probably died.

The message that I get from this very short story

Bayes' Theorem applies to unfiltered data. Bayes' Theorem is a mathematical representation of the amount of information that is available in each incremental piece of data.

A plot that illustrates the concept that the first data-points remove more of the total uncertainty than the later points

Information is the removal of uncertainty. The first piece of unfiltered data removes the largest percentage of uncertainty of any of the data points but it is a small fraction of the total uncertainty. The second piece of data removes slightly less of the initial uncertainty that the first piece removed...the one-thousandth piece of data removes much less uncertainty then the first piece of data but slightly more than the one-thousand-and-first piece.

The idea of well-calibrated intuition is that the curve is not a voluptuous curve but is almost a square-wave.

Our brains automatically filter the incoming data and fast-tracks the most important chunks. We don't randomly evaluate a loaf of bread a single slice at a time. We scan the loaf and make an instant decision if we see any mold or places where a rodent chewed on it.

The cop who shot the gunman was never able to verbalize exactly what he saw that made him draw his service weapon and fire it. Part of that was probably due to his brain's need for maximum cognitive processing so it turned off all superfluous processing...which would include his flight-recorder function (and auditory processing and peripheral vision). Many people who experienced trauma cannot recollect any details of the event.

I imagine that there were several factors that the cop saw in that first, split-second glance:

• The dude was wearing a coat on a hot, humid Los Angeles night. Either he was hiding a weapon or drugs or was mentally ill
• How the dude was resolutely walking in a straight line directly toward the cruiser (man on a mission)
• Perhaps the cop could hear him splashing through a puddle.
• How the man was holding his arms
• Maybe there was enough light to see his facial expression

Was there a significant chance that the cop would have shot an innocent, unarmed man? Absolutely! But in this case, the evidence was that the man was carrying a lethal weapon.

The summary

While our intuitions can be ill-formed and can lie to us, they are less likely to do so than our conscious, "rational" thought.

Our conscious, "rational" thought processes complex information iteratively. It reaches decisions by "combing" due to capacity limitations in the human "buffer".

Our rational thought unconsciously discounts information that makes us uncomfortable and over-weights information that is in alignment with what we think is correct. Since these discounts and over-weights are applied at each iteration, the uncomfortable information is discounted to zero ( 0.80 ^ 10 = 0.1 ) and the information that makes us comfortable gets over-weighted into total dominance ( 1.2 ^ 10 = 6 ). In this model of "rational thought", after 10 iterations the information that makes us uncomfortable has 1/60th of the influence that the comfortable information does.

Viewed through this lens, the reason why a candidate gives us the ick is not as important as the fact that the candidate elicits a strong ICK! reaction in us. Perhaps the candidate's hand motions remind us of somebody pulling the wings off of flies or maliciously dragging their fingernails down a chalk-board. Maybe their voice pushes buttons in your head. Maybe it is how they structure sentences. Maybe it is how they drag-out certain vowel sounds 

The reason is not important. Your visceral reaction is. You don't have to 'splain why you feel a certain way. Trust your gut. It has a harder time lying to you than your "rational" thought process.

I hope it is obvious that this essay has MUCH wider application than picking a political candidate.

In a nod to even-handedness

Video-footage of Kamala Harris at an event. 4:30 run-time.

Some of my readers are fans of Kamala Harris.

Those of you who are not KH fans don't need to pop the video open. It would probably just piss you off.

Ignore the editorializing. Form your own opinions.

How was Nancy Pelosi able to get 150% return on her stock portfolio?

Insider information was required but insufficient

Perfect knowledge of the future does not have infinite value.

Suppose you knew to-the-penny how much three different stocks would be one month from now. The "value" of that information has value only if the performance of "best" of the three stocks is better than the market average. If all three stocks were "dogs", then the information has zero or negative value.

In that sense, insider-information is limited. To get really eye-popping results there needs to be more than just insider-information.

High-cost producers can produce the highest returns

That is counter-intuitive, isn't it. So it requires a bit of explanation.

Suppose you want to invest in gold and have three choices. You can purchase 10 ounces of gold for roughly $27,000 or you can buy $27k of mining stock in a company that is very efficient and can produce gold for $1000 an ounce or you can buy stock in a company that is a high-cost producer and it costs them $2600 to produce an ounce of gold.

Now, let's say the price of gold goes up by 33% ($900 an ounce). Your return on the physical gold (not including brokerage fees and spreads) is $9000.

The profits of the mining company that was efficient went from $1700 per ounce of gold produced to $2600 per ounce and the company stock likely increased by a similar percentage...so your $27k investment returned about $14k.

The profits at the high-cost producer went from $100 an ounce to $1000 per ounce and since (in our simplified model) the price of the stock also increased by a factor of ten. Your $27k turned into $270k.

So how does Nancy Pelosi come into the discussion?

One year, Nancy Pelosi's stock portfolio returned about 150% which was the average + 12 standard deviations. The odds of that randomly happening is somewhere along the lines of the heat-death of our sun happening next week.

One plausible explanation for how that could happen would be if she not only happened to have "insider" or prior knowledge but she (or her minions) purposely directed Federal contracts (perhaps through narrow language that forced a single bidder) to high-cost producers.

Frequently, the high-cost producer is hobbled by excessive fixed-costs due to obsolete legacy facilities, bloated management and antiquated labor agreements. As their market-share and volume decreases, the fixed costs do not. Producers who have excessive amounts of fixed costs (sometimes called "overhead") are exquisitely sensitive to changes in volume. Decreases in volume are very painful. Increases in volume...like a large Federal contract...cause an explosive growth in profits and stock prices.

So...legislators are doubly motivated to pump business to dying-dinosaur companies: Both to secure the votes of legacy employees with comfortable contracts and paychecks, but also to lard their own personal wealth.

Let me repeat: Legislators are not bound by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act so they free to avoid insider-trading laws that us peons are bound to obey. That means that they can generate astronomical returns and personally profit when they funnel Federal business to the LEAST efficient supplier.

Why some people spend every penny and other people don't

I had a couple of beers on Wednesday with an old work-buddy who happened to be in southern Michigan. While we were talking, he took a call from his stock-broker and had to make a decision. One of his holdings hit his "sell" target and his stock-broker called him to ask if he wanted to sell and take the tax-hit or wait a few more months and push the capital gains into 2025.

While our pay histories diverged in our later careers they were never that far apart. I had kids and much less appetite for investment risks. Work-buddy never had kids and had a MUCH higher appetite for investment risks.

Work-buddy now has a net-worth in the low seven-figures. I assure you that my net-worth is much, much less than that. I never had a stock-broker call me because I had made so much investment income in one year that he was personally concerned about protecting me from excessive taxes. Maybe that is a service that is only available to clients with very high balances.

Perceptions about risk "inform" life-style choices

If you worked in a very secure, union job with outstanding retirement benefits then the perception is that you can spend every penny you make with no downside risks because somebody else packed a parachute for you. Public school teachers often marry other public school teachers. Between the two of them (in Michigan) they are probably grossing $140k a year and have most of June and August and all of July off of work.

And then there is the cultural thing. If all of your coworkers are doing something, then you feel left-out if you aren't it.

If you work in a job with large swings in wages over time and does not fixed pension benefits, then you already have plenty of risk in your financial life and you might be less inclined to spend every penny.

If you have high fixed-costs (like kids) then you are also less likely to have a bunch of discretionary money .and. those obligations mean that you cannot go jetting off to exotic locations at the drop-of-a-hat.

For the record

Work-buddy opted to take the capital gains hit in 2025.

Public school teachers in the United States get paid 19 times more than football players

Public school teachers like to point to what professional athletes get paid as evidence that Americans do not value our children and that teachers are under-paid. I want to be contrary and argue the point.

Looking just at salaries and not including any benefits, a public school teacher in a state with weak unions might average $45k/year and work for 40 years. That nets out to $1.8 million dollars of wages during their career. Inflation is being ignored for this analysis.

There are approximately 17,000 football players on NCAA sanctioned college teams who graduate every year. 259 of them get drafted. Taking into account a average career longevity of 3.3 years (which is probably extremely generous since many of the players who are drafted never play a day in the pros) and an average annual pay of $2.1 million average, annual salary for those who DO get contracts, that works out an average of $97k of life-time income when diluted by ALL of the NCAA, draft-eligible players who graduated in a give year.

If you follow the logic, an average teacher in a non-union state gets paid NINETEEN TIMES MORE over his/her career than the equivalent athlete who majored in FUTTBALL.

And that comes at the price of bad knees, bad backs, concussions and so on. And unless the athlete invests his money wisely, even the ones who do grab the brass-ring and get a contract will watch their income evaporate through their working years and not last very long into their post-pro lives.

Elections matter

What is Trump REALLY like?

Link to very long video that I took the liberty of queuing to start where it gets interesting. The interesting part is about 4 minutes long but you can stop any time you like.

It ends with "For the last eight years, under Obama, we were not even allowed in the building..."

A tip of the hat to Billybob who lives in an unnamed, fly-over state.

You are not a loser until you stop peeling yourself off of the canvas

The third time was NOT the charm

One-in-a-row, two-in-a-row...but three-in-a-row was not to be. The oven burner failed to ignite when Mrs ERJ was preheating it to cook some chicken.

Looking at the assembly, trying to get a grip on the problem, I noticed a glow where none should be. The safety shut-off valve was not closing with authority and the flame ran down the burn-tube and turned the orifice on the safety-valve into a pilot light.

When commanded "ON", the flame climbed with the jet of propane past the venturi and that is what caused the "roaring sound" reported earlier.

The gasses coming out of the ports of the burner were a mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, gaseous propane and oxygen. Sometimes it was rich enough to ignite. Other times...not.

A new safety valve is ordered and I expect to see it in a week. Unfortunately, replacing the safety valve is more involved than changing the igniter.

Hope springs eternal!

Pear Preserves

Jams, jellies and preserves are a mix of fruit and sugar. In days-gone-by, the cook would include half-ripe fruits or crab apples that were know to be rich in pectin to help the fruity-goo "jell". Pectin is a complex carbohydrate that "holds hands" with sugar molecules and stiffens up the fruity-goo. Pectin will also happily hold hands with calcium and/or magnesium ions which is the basis for low and no sugar jams and jellies.

The pears I used to make the "pear preserves" earlier this week were mature enough that they did not supply the necessary pectin and I manufactured bits-of-pear floating in pear-flavored-honey(ish)-syrup.

Not having a firm grasp of The Client's preferences, half of the sealed jars were decanted and additional pectin was added. The Client will receive three pints of pear-preserves in pear-honey and three pints of pear-preserves in stiffer pear-honey.

I hope to get a report back from The Client regarding which more closely resembles their childhood memories.

Seeds

I went on-line and learned that Ptelea trifoliate seeds have a germination rate of around 10%. The seeds are encased in a coat that is impervious to water and they can (presumably) sit in the soil for years as the soil bacteria and fungi break down that impervious coat. 

From Mecosta County, Michigan to St George, Utah to Mexico City to Orlando, Florida...that is a very wide native range.

Pt is not particularly common in Michigan but it is common locally. I intend to visit several local sources and collect seeds. I have a hankering to plant a few of them in Eaton Rapids and at The Property.

10% is a manageable number. If I stratify 200 seeds, I might get 20 that germinate and that would meet my needs for 2025.

I am curious, though, if aging the seeds in a non-sterile medium would accelerate the degradation of the seed's coating. Most instructions advise us to stratify (satisfy the seed's need for a cold period) in sterile media like sand or fresh sawdust.

Things to not buy used

Mattresses

The most dangerous place in the universe is on top of a mattress. Most people in the United States die in bed. That means they died on a mattress.

Do you suppose EVERY mattress that somebody was on when they parted the veil and stepped to the other side was immediately destroyed?

People vomit on mattresses and lose control of their bowels (literally "shit the bed"). Various other unsavory body fluids can penetrate and soak into the mattress.

Even if a used mattress is FREE...it is a NO-GO in my book.

Toys that can be driven hard

Quads, Jeeps, dirt-bikes, 4WD trucks that were driven by teenaged boys...

Anything "modified" with lift-kits and over-sized tires.

There are boys who try to prove their manhood by "breaking" parts on their vehicles. It gives them bragging rights. Unfortunately, every hard landing puts wear-and-tear on ALL of the parts in the vehicle.

Shoes

New-in-box is fine.

Shoes that have any measurable wear can be crippling.

Radiators

Once upon a time it may have made sense to buy used radiators but new ones are not that expensive any more.

Radiators are fragile and now that they are press-fit aluminum and plastic and they are not easily repaired.

Radiators are in the front of the vehicle and frequently damaged in accidents and flying debris.

Bargains

I like a bargain better than the next man but there are some bargains that are likely to be false economies.

Presented without comment

 

Jake Creek Pecans

I bought some pecans Jake Creek Pecans who are pecan growers in Kansas and they were a joy to work with.

I wanted to purchase some "Northern Pecans" for seed-nuts and Lila was happy to sell me uncracked nuts for that purpose (nearly all of their nuts are run through a mechanical cracker).

Incidentally, planting seed-nuts does not result in exact copies of the mother tree. It is more like buying lottery tickets. Most will not be as good as the mother but a few will be similar and perhaps better in one or two characteristics. Progeny that are better across-the-board are very, very rare. Growing trees in Michigan, I will be happy with "meh!" nut size and quality and very early ripening.

We are just a mom and pop orchard so sometimes it takes us a few days to fill orders—especially during harvest, but we always invite customers to our business. Right now, the majority of our customer base is at local farmers markets, holiday markets, and through our online store. We do not typically sell whole nuts after the holidays—we crack and clean our remaining inventory and place it in freezers. This year, however, we are expecting a larger than normal harvest and will probably have whole nuts to sell throughout 2025. We primarily sell shelled pecans in 1 lb and ½ lb bags.

 

Pecan Varieties

• Pawnee
  
• Kanza
  
• Gardner (Selected in Gardner, Kansas)
  
• Shepherd (Selected in Chariton County, Missouri)
  
• Goosepond (Selected from a grove near Brunswick, Missouri)
  
• Peruque (Selected from a grove near St Peters, Missouri)
  
• Canton (Selected from a grove near Canton, Missouri)
  

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Gaku born in Japan and still alive.

He carves fruit and vegetables.

Sometimes the dragon wins

One-in-a-row!

The new igniter seems to have helped.

Sword-fighting with Apple Trees and Autumn Olive .AND. Value of college degrees revisited

 

Growing Degree Days b50, Charlotte, Michigan Oct 20. It looks like a bimodal distribution with one cluster around 2800GDDb50 and another cluster around 3200GDDb50

The beautiful but very-dry weather continues.

I picked up the yard. Then I drove out to The Property and spent two hours cutting-and-dragging brush and pruning apple trees.

In the last few years, my skin lost much of its elasticity and became markedly more fragile. Pruning the trees was like a sword-fight with worthy opponents. I prevailed in delimbing my opponents but they also drew their fair share of blood. My daily 40mg of aspirin meant that I ended up looking like a Halloween decoration by the time I get home.

Value of college degrees revisited

 

Frequent commenter Dan wrote "The impending economic collapse is going to make most of this moot. Even for degrees that most people would consider "useful"."

It isn't hard to imagine those kinds of scenarios.

I recently listened to a woman explain her "plan" to create a super-low maintenance, self-sustaining food production space. The woman has a Master's degree in Biology.

Looking at her plan, I had a few observations.

"You have a lot of open spaces between the young, food-producing trees*. Have you considered planting white-clover and turnips to scavenge nutrients, fix nitrogen and add organic matter to the soil?" I asked.

Her response was that white-clover was a HORRIBLE plant! She had talked to an "expert" and was told that it was almost impossible to get rid of.

How does beat-up, dumb, old-Joe explain to that mindset that white-clover is persistent because it makes its own fertilizer and if you mow it, it shares the nitrogen with its neighbors? How do you explain that SOMETHING will fill that niche and you can fill it with "positives" like clover and turnips or something negative will jump into that space and rip it away from your control?

I did mention the weed issue and she informed me that she had already spent over $1000 on dyed mulch "...because it looks nice...".

Well, alrighty. She spent +$1000 on mulch when $15 of seeds could have done the same thing. The mulch is dyed and will be a recurring expense. It is an outside input which is not "self-sustaining" and that cost will be incurred into perpetuity. The clover and the turnips can be managed at zero cost to regenerate until they get shaded out with the clover fixing nitrogen and the turnips producing edible greens, roots and potentially even oil from the seeds.

She has a Master's degree in Biology and is oblivious to the implications of managing nutrient cycling to create "...self-sustaining food production systems...".

I am not slagging the woman. I am skewering the system that generates such narrowly defined credentials.

If you look at society as a house-of-cards then those credentials have value near the top of the house. Those jobs can only exist in very-low entropy, very-low chaos environments. 

Emergency Room type jobs increase in high entropy environments. More people get stabbed and have accidents. ER people never know what the next patient will require and they have to be very flexible and sometimes have to adjust behaviors instantaneously. Those kinds of land-on-your-feet "gigs" abound in high entropy environments.

Jobs for people who can run machines that sort SSR biomarkers become extinct in high entropy environments**. Those skills don't transfer to a lot of other environments. I have a neighbor who works in a lab that creates genetic footprints for Holstein cows to minimize in-breeding depression. That is a real-deal with AI. BUT, she had never "handled" cows in her life***. That is, she had never moved them from one paddock to another or filled a cow's food bunker or water tank.

I hate to get political, but Trump seems to thrive in high-chaos environments where he must think-on-his-feet. Harris does not exhibit that same weeble-wobble resilience and her events are much more highly choreographed.

* 40 foot spacing between some of the trees! That is a lot of sunlight falling on the ground and not making food.

** The entire concept of "job" is historically recent and is linked to the need to prove future income-flow when applying for credit. Before the Ford Model T, working side-gigs to supplement farm life was the norm. Virtually the only "jobs" were on the railroad. Even steel mills and the people building railroads were day-labor gigs.

*** I was able to remedy that shortcoming.

Which college degrees are worth the most?

I saw this over at ZeroHedge

 

These two entries caught my eye

Net Present Worth assumes a few things. For one thing, it assumes some level of income change over time, generally with pay increasing. Sometimes that is a bad assumption if the degree is trendy and the jobs are over-subscribed.

Another major issue that can get lost in the weeds is that many people who get a degree don't get a job in their field...or don't get ANY job. How do you handle those people? Most surveys ignore them.

The two areas-of-study that I circled are likely to suffer from both of those issues. "Professional journalists" are nearly extinct and AECGGS is such a recent invention that it is foolhardy to assume there is any organic demand for the graduates.

Haitians ==> Quebec seems like a no-brainer

They both speak something that resembles "French".

Surely Canadian politicians crave enrichment.

Wouldn't it be far more cost-effective to import people who almost speak the language rather than to import people from Nepal and Burma or speak a hundred different African tribal languages?

Haitians landing in Saguenay, Quebec (for instance) is a more natural fit than flooding a small town in Pennsylvania with them. Easier on the Haitians. Easier on the town in Pennsylvania. Less strain on the infrastructure in both places.

Win some, lose some

The chainsaw is back together with a new side-plate and air filter. I am VERY happy about that.

I am salvaging some lumber from the deck I tore out. Some of the floor joists were 2-by-10s. I found an old "bench saw" that somehow came into my possession. To the best of my remembering, I had never run it and it was missing the fence.

I remedied the lack of a fence with a length of 2-by-4 and some clamps and peeled  2-1/2" off of the edge of the planks that were most rotted. That left me with 2-by-7 inch planks. Looking at the wood, it almost looks like they were ordinary dimension lumber and not treated.

A lady came by while I was shaving off the rotted sides of the planks and patiently waited for me to turn around to notice her. I was clearly wearing hearing protection. She was handing out election propaganda and was intelligent enough to realize that tapping somebody on the shoulder while they are using power-saws was not likely to endear her to me. We were already going to vote for "her guy" anyway so it was easy to be agreeable.

From that perspective, it was a pretty good day. Two tools brought back into use.

Oven

And then...the oven stopped working. One important clue is that we can hear gas hissing, which is not normal.

In the past, I replaced the igniter (a pressed, carbon or graphite squiggle) at least once and I remember the access as being difficult. One option would be to disconnect the gas and yank the unit out of its location and tip it on its back.

Trouble-shooting gas ovens is a little bit hit-and-miss. Some of the elements are wired in series so a marginal igniter will have a large voltage drop and not be able to energize the safety valve. So even though the igniter LOOKS fine (bright, even glow), the lottery ticket is to install the $30 part with the high failure rate rather than jump to the $200 part that is rarely the problem.

This will be one of those times when next-day part delivery is a very good thing.

What kind of person joins a cult?

Jeffery in Alabama at The Feral Irishman posted on the Tsuchinshan Comet and then Irish added HERE. 

That triggered some thoughts.

Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate was a cult that believed that the Hailey-Bopp Hale-Bopp comet was an Uber to Paradise. 

The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or "The Evolutionary Level Above Human".  Wikipedia

Their leaders convinced them that they had to leave behind their flawed, mortal bodies to get to the comet and that they would get new-and-improved bodies in Paradise. 39 members committed suicide.

Jonestown

Same but different.

Charismatic leader who claims that God talks to him.

More than 900 people died by suicide and murder.

Jim Jones was a Communist and was a political player in San Francisco...something the Progressives don't like to talk about.

End of the Mayan Calendar

Long article on Wikipedia.

The phenomenon spread widely after coming to public notice, particularly on the Internet, and hundreds of thousands of websites made reference to it. "Ask an Astrobiologist", a NASA public outreach website, received over 5,000 questions from the public on the subject from 2007, some asking whether they should kill themselves, their children or their pets...

Order of the Solar Temple

Given the scale of the issues facing the group leaders, it was decided they would "transit" to Sirius. The Order termed the acts a "transit", which they described as "in no way a suicide in the human sense of the term". In their view, traitors would be simply murdered, while "weaker" members would be "helped" to transit, and the remaining members considered strong enough would kill themselves. Members believed that, upon death, they would acquire "solar bodies" in a faraway location in space (typically given as the star Sirius, but alternatively Jupiter or Venus)

Commonalities?

They all were able to find "seekers" who attached themselves to The Cause. "Seekers" is a nice way to say "aimless drifters".

Many probably suffered from anxiety and were inherently neurotic personalities.

Many desperately WANTED to believe that life is "fair" and that they should never experience suffering.

My gut-feel is that many of them lacked mental toughness. We all grow up being somebody's special snow-flake. Part of growing up is realizing that...well...we are not all that special*. And that someday Granny is going to die and someday we will have to pay our own way and find our own ways to cope with the buffeting and chaos and river of life.

One scary part of cults is that those damaged people were very willing to inject poison into their own children and pets and then themselves.

Some of the people join a cult because they want to be sophisticated and cool and a trend-setter. They want attention and recognition for their special uniqueness! Once inside the cult, they cannot get out and they are brain-washed.

Today

Today we have people who have been convinced it is righteous to not reproduce.

We have people who think a 90% die-off in humans would be a good outcome.

Assisted suicide is available in many countries and it is marketed as a human right.

---that is evidence of the aimless drifting part---

We have vast legions of people who are sure the universe is supposed to revolve around them and they have been groomed to be "tools" of the elites.

There is no shortage of neurotic people. The current system seems to manufacture them on an industrial scale.

If Trump wins, it will be a trigger for some of those people to lose their bananas.

*...not all that special...except to Jesus. Christianity has a pretty good track-record of not being a death-cult. Of course, having a 2000 year history and a billion+ followers, it is possible to find "situations", but on the whole, I still think it is the "best game in town".

Bat-house #1 is installed

 

If you look to the right at the bottom of the pole, you can see the 2-by-6, 8' long diagonal brace to help stabilize the pole.

The wire running across the image to the right of the bat-house is the feed from the barn to the electric fence.

You can click to embiggen if you want to expand the picture. The roof is 24" square, ribbed steel roofing and extends 8" past the house on the southwest and northeast and 2" on the southeast and northwest.

Bonus image

A jar of pear preserves with sunlight shining through it. It looks a little bit runny. I hope it "sets" with a bit of refrigeration.

Hat-tip to Handsome Hombre who is in one of the construction trades and spotted for me.