I went to the funeral of the 102.4 year-old man today.
There were about 80 people attending, which is a really good show for somebody who has outlived nearly all of his peers.
I was surprised to learn that the man was baptized at the age of 84. Please note that I am NOT recommending that you put it off that long if you feel called to get baptized.
Jobs that won't fare well during hard times:
Personal Fitness Trainer
Reason: People will be walking six or more miles a day. We won't need the gym to get exercise. We will not need a "cheer-leader" to motivate us.
Exception: Massage specialists. There will be boatloads of people with sore muscles.
Internet Influencers
Internet Influencers exist to goad people in to spending more and consuming resources that the viewer didn't know existed. The tide will be running in the opposite direction during hard-times.
Event Planners
Events to commemorate rites-of-passage in our lives will no longer be a competitive sport. Weddings might be a handful of friends and a few family members from each side. Graduation parties might be playing disc golf in the park.
Lawncare specialists
Large lawns that are professionally cared-for are a historical anomaly. Some of the lawns will likely be turned into gardens or orchards. Some will be abandoned and allowed to revert back to native scrub or prairie.
Please feel free to add to the list.
Today's goal is to get to a funeral in downtown Lansing.
My friend's father died. It was not unexpected. His father was 102.4 years-old.
Investing in semi-precious metals
A pretty good price for a good product.
An even better price but they might not work for you.
The word of the day
The word of the day is "eye-ballie".
Used in a sentence: Bucks use their nose to explore the world. Does are eye-ballie and will bust you in a tree-stand quicker than a buck will.
The iron law of supply-and-demand
It is my perception that women often do not feel "valued" by men. They complain that men treat them as a fungible commodity like nose-tissues (aka Kleenex).
It is also my perception that most of the women making those complaints are in areas that have a gross over-supply of women vis-a-vis men. To be specific: College campuses are now dominated by women. Large cities are magnets for women. Some professions like HR, education, advertising and the social "sciences" are dominated by women.
If you are a woman and do not feel "valued", consider finding pockets within your society where women are not in over-supply. Adapt, improvise, overcome. Leave your comfort bubble.
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| Women start looking like this when they are competing with other women. |
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| No man ever looked at this and swooned "OMG! She is gorgeous." |
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| Nope. We are far more likely to say "Do you need your EpiPen or should I call 9-1-1?" |
Warren Buffet was famous for his annual letter the the shareholders of Berkshire-Hathaway. He used those letters to explain his thinking in various investments.
In one of those letters, he explained why he opted for "quality" especially when the economy seemed to be hitting a rough-patch. Even though I present the following in quotes, they aren't actual quotes. Rather, it is my best remembering of his logic.
"I bought shares of Coca Cola last year and I was asked why I didn't invest in companies with stronger positions in the lower market tiers...companies like Shasta, Faygo and companies that bottled 'house-brand' soda-pop."
"The logic my questioners bring up is that people change their consumption habits when money is short. They expect consumers to shift to cheaper products and the "quality brands" to take a beating."
"My logic is that the pricing power of premium brands means they have a much greater margin for price decay. Coca Cola doesn't pay more money for sugar or flavoring than commodity brands yet it can command twice the retail price. That difference in pricing power falls directly to the bottom-line."
"Yes, they spend a lot more on advertising, but that is a discretionary variable-cost that they can temporarily economize on."
"When the price of a house-brand drops by a dime a bottle, they lose money. When the price Coca Cola can command at the cash register drops by a dime a bottle, they are still very profitable."
"The same thing can be said about Hersey candy bars, Marlboro cigarettes, Dior lipstick and a host of other comfort/luxury items."
---Disclaimer: I am not a Professional Investment advisor. This blog post is offered for entertainment purposes. It is your own money. Do your own research.---
In 1967 a movie that supplied profound insights into economic booms was released by Disney Studios. The title of that academic study was The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin. The book that was released was simply titled Bullwhip Griffin. The book is better than the movie.
The story is set in California in the early days of the 1849 Gold Rush. The underlying message is that the surest and most durable path to wealth is not the obvious path. For every miner who struck it rich in the gold fields there were 99 that could not pay all of their bills. Nope. The surest path was to supply the miners with tents, shovels, pans, apple-pies, pants, shirts, alcoholic beverages, fried oysters, quick-silver, lumber, barbering services, a hot bath and so on.
A conversation with a friend
My friend is a pretty sharp guy and he shared a few investment insights with me yesterday.
Like me, he sees inflation as a major threat to the wealth he saved up through his working years. Unlike me, he can afford some very high-end analysis people to sort through the details.
The obvious AI plays, NVIDA, Microsoft, Open-AI, Oracle are over-bought and have very high Price/Earnings ratios. The every-increasing revenue that is reported by those firms is reminiscent of the washer-women in Hooverville who survived 1932 by taking in each other's laundry. The speed-of-money between those firms is an ever accelerating merry-go-round.
Another complication is that it can be difficult to determine if a firm is a viable concern when capital is flooding into it. Large volumes of incoming capital will mask structural flaws and weaknesses in organic demand.
The less obvious investment plays are to buy stock in companies that mine or smelt copper. To buy stock in companies with proven reserves of rare-earth metals. To buy stock in utilities that serve states with a permissive, regulatory environment toward nuclear or fossil-fueled plants. Even if AI collapses, there will still be markets for copper wire, rare-earths and for electricity.
If you aren't comfortable buying individual stocks then another way to balance your investment risk is to move some of your savings into a mutual fund that focuses on "Value stocks". Value stocks are typically boring, mature (i.e. not rapidly growing) businesses that generate profits the old-fashioned way.
Why not sit on cash?
Well, that would be a great move if you could predict if/when the stock market will crash.
But history tells us that inflation and deflation can exist within the same economy and that the inflationary parts of it will vaporize the wealth that is stored as "cash".
Wait a minute. How can an economy be both inflationary and deflationary at the same time?
Consider the Wiemar Republic in the early 1920s. The nominal value of a producing apple tree or garden full of potatoes or a cord of firewood sky-rocketed while the nominal value of certain luxuries like musical instruments, fancy clothes and pensions dropped to zero. Some sectors went up (way up) and other sectors collapsed.
The ones that preserved wealth were assets that served the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy. The assets that collapsed were ones that invested in the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy.
Even if you lose money investing in productive assets, you will lose even more buying power if you squirrel away all of your assets as cash.
This observation comes with a caution. You need to have enough cash-like assets on-hand to pay your taxes and currency-denominated debts like your mortgage.
A final word
The movie contains a "fight" scene where (seemingly) prissy "Bullwhip" Griffin beats the hell out of a street-brawler. Hence his new nickname "Bullwhip".
There are times when the only viable coin-of-the-day is to be able to vigorously defend what is yours, your honor and the honor of your woman.
Today was off-kilter right from the beginning.
Most kids wait until their teenage years before they start pushing their parents' buttons.
Last night, Quicksilver, now three-years-old, played with Southern Belle's alarm clock.
Consequently, Quicksilver and Southern Belle showed up in my driveway exactly an hour before I expected them. That set the tone for the day.
Mrs ERJ had appointments all day long, so I was the one to drive Quicksilver to her Tuesday play-date. I also got to pick her up and she kept me company while I did various errands in the early-afternoon. She fell asleep for about 20 minutes in the truck, so of course she didn't take a nap once we got home.
Over the course of our multiple in-and-outs of the truck, I misplaced her "bunny" and that had consequences. Fortunately, I had plied her with a cheeseburger and had cookies to distract her with.
It is a good thing that I had today penciled in as a "recovery day". It wasn't so much a tragic series of unfortunate prat-falls as it was a high-speed, syncopated hobble as we staggered through the day.
Some days are like that.
Maybe I can kill something tomorrow.
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Edvard Axel Rosenberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1858 and died in 1934.
His artwork captured the special quality of the low, slanting light of winters in Scandinavia.
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| Looking north out of the office about 45 minutes before "legal light" ends. The dusty-beige weeds are the tops of goldenrod. The goldenrod is about 3' tall. |
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| Looking west out of the office. |
Yes, Virginia, I was wearing a coat and a hat.
The light was rapidly fading. I was watching the time like a hawk. I could hear hooves crunching through the leaves in the swale east of me. I still had five minutes of "legal light".
Then I saw blobs 120 yards out, but only one-or-two at a time.
I did not want to take one of this year's fawns. I wanted to shoot a wall-hanger buck or a mature doe. I could not see any antlers nor could I determine if any of them were larger than the others.
Finally, they started moving in my direction through the frost-killed goldenrod.
I was tracking them with my scope. That is generally considered bad-practice because folks will do that to ID targets they are not certain of...but I had already ID these animals as Whitetail Deer and they were definitely not humans.
Two minutes of legal light left.
I could see their ears. Still no antlers. There were five of them. Three of them were might have been small. Two of them might have been "shooters". I look at the size of their ears relative to their heads. Like a dog's paws, a deer's ears get their full-size early. If the ears look large relative to its head, it is a small deer. If the ears look small, it is a large deer.
I looked and looked and looked. I could not make out their bodies as they moved through the goldenrod. If I can't see their bodies then I don't have a target. Some people take neck-shots but I avoid them because heads bob around and move, making the shot a time-urgent thing.
They passed within yards, YARDS, of the base of the Orchard stand.
Alas, the clock ran-out and legal light ended.
I waited several more minutes for them to clear the area before exiting the stand. Perhaps my luck will change. Maybe their alarm-clock will go off a few minutes earlier another day.
They call it "hunting" rather than "shooting" for a reason.
Pronouns
Preferred: "Belongs to I AM". Optional: The name I was given when I was baptized. Unacceptable: They/Them.
The mandatory listing of "pronouns" is a mandatory declaration of ideology.
Language is holographic in that conventional grammar mutually reinforces the ideas being transmitted. Outside of technical communications, 80% of the words can be omitted (or skimmed over when reading) and the core message is still transmitted with fidelity because tense, gender, plurality and relationships are redundantly captured by the transmitter's choice of words.
Deliberately bastardizing this system with fantasy and inaccurate "pronouns" sabotages efficient communication.
The SJWs are now telling us that "They/Them" are the new, generic "Y'all" or neutral pronoun. My objection to that is that unless you are a mental health profession who is providing care to me, you do not have the authority to diagnose me as having multiple personalities or being bipolar. That is what calling me (one person, singular) "They/Them" is...it is stigmatizing me as being mentally ill.
It also means that my evil-twin, Skippy, can murder you and you cannot hold my other personalities accountable and you cannot punish us. Are you sure you want to go down that road?
Dumpster fire
Things in D.C. are turning into a first-class dumpster fire. Just drop the Epstein files.
Darwin is probably watching the evolution of media with great interest. Mainstream Media is tracking in one direction. Social media platforms are ALL over the place.
It would be interesting to take a survey of waitresses and how many of them are aware that the Democrats in the Senate stopped the passage of legislation that will remove the Federal income tax on their tips. The irksome thing about taxes on tips is that the IRS requires that business withhold pay based on estimates of what the customers might have tipped. That is, taxes are levied on phantom income.
It would also be interesting to take a survey of people who are paid "hourly" to determine how many of them realize that the Democrats in the Senate stopped the passage of legislation that reduced the income tax they will pay on their over-time?
It is my perception that the Democrats are kicking their historical constituents squarely in the wallet. Most of those constituents are not stupid. The information is out there. It is percolating through non-MSM channels. They are going to look at Chuck Schumer (estimated family net worth of +$60 million) and think "Maybe this guy really doesn't represent my best-interests any more"
The man with the trencher called and said "I don't have any jobs lined-up for opening weekend of Deer Season. Do you still want me to come out and cut the roots of the walnut trees? I can do it Saturday or Sunday."
I was pierced by the horns of dilemma. I consulted with Mrs ERJ. We decided that we could attend different Masses on Sunday and I could support-and-direct the man with the trencher by attending an earliest Mass on Sunday.
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| The man operating the trencher. Note that he is wearing high visibility clothing. Good call during firearms deer season. The massive tree on the right is a Black Walnut. The multi-stem tree to its left is an American Basswood. The tree sprouting out of Mr Trencher's head is another Black Walnut. |
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| Looking down, into the trench. Cut walnut roots are the strings that seem to span the 6" wide trench. |
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| Some of the debris spit out by the trenching tool. |
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| Looking up the length of the trench. The shifting between black-and-white photos and "color" is due to the clouds/sun which changed by-the-minute due to the high winds. |
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| More debris. |
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| Foreground-left is the pile of dirt beside the trench. Background-dark is where I was back-filling using a shove. |
Nearly all of the Black Walnut roots came from the east. The leg he cut on the south side of the Hill Orchard only had walnut roots for the most eastern, 30 feet. Then he hit clay and mulberry roots. Then sandy-loam and pine roots.
Given the number of walnut trees surrounding the property, I could see this as a once every 10-years maintenance task.
Through my fault,
through my fault,
Through my most grievous fault.
I was reminded that I once wrote on this blog that a "typical, Eaton County doe..." yielded 70 pounds of edible meat.
I was wrong.
If a 1400 pound steer with heavy muscling only yields 600 pounds or 40% of body-weight of meat, then there is no way a 120-to-150 pound doe will yield 70 pounds.
My error traces back to the business that processed deer. I learned that customers did not receive the same deer back that they dropped off. I learned that after a deer that I donated to a coworker served some of that venison at his daughter's wedding reception. Smitty accused me of knowingly giving him venison from a deer that had been gut-shot. The deer I had process had not been gut-shot.
Also, I saw, with my own eyes, folks at the processing place scoop packages of ground venison out of a common tub to "square out" a box. The meat had been commingled and if the customer received ground meat from the deer he had dropped off, it was only by accident.
If you have faith the size of a mustard seed...
As Christianity diffused across Europe, Asia and parts of Northern Africa, itinerant preachers memorized as much of the Holy Word as they could and pressed on-and-out.
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| Yellow Rocket leaf |
A large number of plants in the family "Cruciferae" or "mustards" were common weeds throughout south-Asia, Europe and northern-Africa and local people frequently used the seeds for seasoning and leaves for pot-herbs. This plant-family was named for the many, narrow, oppositely-opposed leaflets that reminded the early botanists of the cross that Jesus died on.
The fact that Jesus pointed to a mustard plant while delivering his sermon on the power of faith was an inspired bit of foreshadowing. Those itinerant preachers undoubtedly exploited that foreshadowing and wove it into their sermons. It wasn't generic faith that could move mountains and hurl massive trees into the sea, it was only the faith contained in the seeds that fell from the cross.
Scamming on the rise
I walked into an auto parts store a couple days ago. The manager was informing the clerks about increased "scamming".
Lately, several people returned parts with copied receipts or with the old part in the box.
The new policy was "If the part was over $X and it is returned more than 24 hours later, tell them it has to be approved by management before the purchase price can be refunded."
I know that many of my readers have ordered your lives so you are not severely jostled by the misfortunes of the economy. So consider this a heads-up that scammers are shifting into overdrive. What better way to learn AI than to scam senior citizens out of their savings. See? More work that was done in India and Nigeria that has returned to the US.
One of the stories floating around is that about half of the states complied with DOGE requirements that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance benefits enrollment documentation be sent to the Feds for analysis. About half of the states chose to ignore the requirement with California, New York, Illinois and Michigan being in that number.
It comes as no surprise that some people in the states that chose to submit their enrollment documentation were receiving benefits that they were not legally entitled to. Others were receiving more benefits than they were legally entitled to.
The Trump administration is pursuing the states that ignored the request.
One possible outcome is that Trump's administration prevails in court and since the basis for the benefits that were transferred from the Federal were fraudulent, and since the states-in-question did not exercise due-diligence even after pressured by the Federal government, the fraudulently obtained benefits will be "clawed-back" by the Feds. That is, future SNAP transfers from the Federal government will be reduced by the amount of the fraud over-and-above the amount reduced to bring the rolls into compliance with the law.
It will then be incumbent upon the states to claw-back the monies in dispute...or to find other money in their budget to make up the shortfall.
It is my estimation that the states are exhibiting excessive optimism. They are hoping that Trump is bluffing and that they will be able to continue to spread Federal "loot" on their favored groups. They are also (optimistically) assuming that they will not be held accountable for (now) being accessories to criminal-fraud and being required to make the Feds "whole". That is beyond what their victimology oriented mindset can conceive.
The other possibility, one that I consider unlikely, is that the states are diligently "purifying" their SNAP benefit rolls before handing them into the Feds.
We live in interesting times.
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I left the stand at 1:00 p.m. The stand was swaying and I wasn't even seeing very many birds.
Totals for the day:
Five deer (no antlers, no ethical shots)
One skunk
One rabbit
One feral cat.
Countless squirrels, both Red Squirrels and Fox Squirrels. One of them was bold.
Some Blue Jays and Cardinals.
Three crows (An attempted murder? When does a group of crows become a "murder"?)
I heard geese (The proverbial Canadian Air Force fly-over).
I heard Sandhill Cranes.
One Redtailed Hawk.
One goshawk-like hawk. I am not smart enough to identify which one.
Shotgun was in the Taj. It is much more protected than the Orchard stand where I was hunting. It is in a bowl and the sides of the bowl are covered with trees.
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| Michigan 2025 archery harvest by county. Saginaw county leads with 2200 deer harvested so far. |
I hope to be in a deer stand by the time you are reading this.
Winds are predicted to be out of the southwest gusting to 30mph. Temperatures between 50F and 60F.
First legal light at 7:00 a.m. and last legal light at 5:45 p.m. (in round numbers).
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| San Francisco mall sold for Eleven-cents on the dollar |
I bet the purchaser was standing in line at the Tax Assessor's office the very next day demanding that the "basis" for property taxes be marked-to-market.
Next up:
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| Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk |
Businesses with high fixed costs (like high rent) are exquisitely sensitive to changes in sales volume because such a large portion of their monthly revenue goes toward paying those fixed costs. Changes to things like taxes, even though they might seem like a small percentage to a politician, are devastating to the after-tax profits left after all of the other costs are deducted from the revenue.
Swanky, retail outlets that sell $30k handbags and shoes and bling are extremely vulnerable to purse-snatchings, pick-pockets and smash-and-grabs. People with the money to shop at those kinds of outlets are adverse to getting bloody noses and broken hips. Even a very small up-tick in perceived crime will dry up their foot-traffic.
Gratuitous editorializing
The fragmentation of the Democrats into the moderates (who seem to care about their constituents) and the radicals (who seem to care far more about some smaller groups of constituents than the rank-and-file) is worrisome.
The right is also seeing fragmentation as the anti-semites and loose-cannons are running their own plays.
It is pretty easy to calculate the orbits of two masses in space. Adding a third mass, especially if it is not orbiting in the same plane as the other two, makes it very, very difficult to predict future outcomes.
It is like the old joke:
Daffus owns 49.5% of a business.
Duckus owns another 49.5% of that same business.
Daffus and Duckus hate each other with the passion of a white-hot sun.
Who controls the business?
Answer: The person with the least to lose, the one who holds the remaining 1%.
One of my neighbors shot a deer this morning. It ran on to our property.
He called me on the phone. We tracked into tall grass when the blood ran out.
I started walking the perimeter fence to look for sign that it may have crossed the meadow.
The hunter started an ascending grid search pattern starting at the last blood.
He found the deer.
A few minutes later he was able to drive his tractor on to our property and collect it. He had a boom on the front of his tractor which he used to elevate it for tagging and then to drive off of the property.
He made a great shot. He was in a tree stand and the deer was quartering away. He hit it high on the right side about where the diaphragm joined the ribcage. The arrow angled down and across the lungs and exited low near the front of the chest.
It may have run 150 yards after he hit it.
Bonus images
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| "Walnut Hill" pear is a variety selected by Louis Pittman. It is notable for not dropping its fruit as soon as it ripens. As soft-mast gets scarce later in the season, this tree turns into a wild-life magnet. |
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| Lehman's Delight. It had more fruit on it but the coons and the possum have been picking it over. |
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| I am freezing these for ease-of-transport |
I met a very nice lady who uses persimmons to make persimmon custard. Who knew? These fruit are ripe to the "jelly" stage.
I have a few rules on this blog.
I don't show pictures of minors.
I don't list their real, searchable-on-the-internet names.
If I am working for somebody, my time belonged to them and I don't share any details that might prove embarrassing in the future.
I can share that I did help the young guy out today.
I was able to be productive for about three hours.
No money changed hands.
His two dogs liked me.
He invited me back if I ever want to burn calories outside of a gymnasium.
One of the joys of being an old-geezer is that I can pop-in to a situation, do-my-thing and then pop out. Nobody expects me to work 60 hours a week.
My mental image is of a sprite who flits about with an oil-can. An axle that squeaks calls the sprite who administers a drop or two of oil. Then a hinge that moans when the door is opened. Then a motor that screams under load...
The amount of work and the volume of oil that is applied is microscopic. The benefits are enormous.
Sometimes simply having another set of eyes to watch the bubble in the level's sight-glass and hands to hold two-by-fours in-place while the young-dude shoots the screws is priceless.
Or to have somebody at the electric fence energizer to turn it on-and-off while somebody else walks the fence clearing trash that is shorting it out can save miles-and-miles of walking. God bless cellphones!
Rust, rot and depreciation never sleep. There is always work that needs to be done. Piles of lumber to be restacked. Pallets to be moved. Brush to be cut. Weeds to be sprayed. Items to be cleaned. The tops of tall furniture to be dusted. Trash to be picked up. Items to be picked up at the grocery store or pharmacy. Dogs to be walked. Drywall to be patched. Chickens to be let-out in the morning and locked up at night. Older people in need of company to make going for a walk doable.
Most of that work does not require the stamina of a marathon runner or the strength of a weight-lifter. An accountant has a hard time putting a value on the benefits of that kind of work, consequently much of it goes undone for want for somebody to do it.
We all have our special gifts. There are many tasks that are not-my-thing but you will be hard pressed to find a better person to walk a fence-row and graft the volunteer apple and pear seedlings to more desirable varieties. I am also fair hand at listening to somebody who needs a sympathetic ear and digging holes in the ground.
There are others who are gifted at organizing and cleaning. Some have the gift-of-gab or who have instant rapport with children and animals. There is plenty of work for all of us.
I have been on the receiving end of the generous old-geezer network. Mrs ERJ flew down to visit her sister during peak-Covid. There were absolutely no rental cars to be had. I reached out to another old-geezer who owed me absolutely nothing and he drove to the airport and transported her to her sister's house. That doesn't sound like much except for the fact that it was a 180 mile round trip. There are some things that cannot be purchased with money.
For the record, I have a gig lined up for tomorrow. I will be helping a young guy get his farm in apple-pie order for winter. Even though I am old and feeble, I still have more upper-body strength than his petite wife. Also, if he hits his thumb with a hammer and a bad word slips out...I am hard of hearing when that sort of thing happens.
In return I will get the satisfaction of knowing that I am still useful. And if I find myself needing a "real" job I can always list him as a reference.
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| Not your typical English flower. Biographical details are lacking but he may have traveled to Italy or Spain as many British artists did |
John Dawson Watson was a British painter born in 1832 and died in 1892 of a respiratory infection.
His "business model" was to produce very large numbers of small paintings that he could produce quickly. The large number provided a fairly even stream of income. The downside is that the format does not scale up well; the enlarged images either lack detail or the positions of the human bodies seem "off".
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| Tryst |
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| At the cottage |
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| Gathering winkles (small, edible sea-snails) |
Intuition
Pay attention to your intuitions.
One of the downsides of the Feminization of our culture (for lack of a better term) is that ideas that resist analysis by verbalizing are dismissed as unimportant or result in endless argument. For example, I was showing somebody how to prune a tree and told them how to hold the by-pass cutters to reduce the effort to cut the limbs. I was demonstrating this as I told them.
To my consternation they insisted that I use words to explain why that worked. I said "It works. Just try it." No go. They refused to do it "my way" unless I could use words to describe friction and vectors and bending moments and the distribution of compressive stresses in a beam. Some concepts resist verbal explanation.
Much of what we call "intuition" falls into this "resistant to verbal explanation" category.
A hunch or gut-feel might be triggered by an unusual swirling of a crowd that avoids a certain vehicle idling beside the road or maybe pedestrians giving one particular doorway and extra 3' of distance. It might be a smell that is out of place or a conversation switching to a foreign language or a high-pitched whistle and heat felt on your cheek. Only after-the-fact can those cues be teased out of the deluge of information we operate within.
While you are in the maelstrom, get off the X. Don't stop and analyze. Move to safety. Drag those who depend upon your wisdom with you. If others follow, that is fine.
Sylvester McMonkey McBean
Quicksilver is busy reading about Sylvester McMonkey McBean and Thing One and Thing Two giving me a minute to throw together this quick post.
You know, if the government shutdown inconvenienced the IRS, I will cheerfully support moving tax-day from April 15, 2026 to November 1, 2026.
I went to our quarterly "high-school buddies" lunch yesterday.
I sat next to one of the men who was in the same Boy Scout troop that I was in. In fact, he was one of the kids who twisted my arm to join. Consequently, I owe him a debt of gratitude.
Tim always thought before he spoke and is invariably economical with his words. His observations are incisive and cut to the heart of the matter.
I asked him what he did that gave him satisfaction or a sense of fulfillment.
He shared that he is very active in the Knights of Columbus (a fraternal organization) and that he delivers a two or three minute lecture or "fable" once a month. The content is highly variable but his goal is to connect-the-dots in a way that makes baffling events snap into focus.
I joked that he didn't deliver TED Talks, he deliveres TIM Talks.
He agreed that was more-or-less true. He also shared that it takes a huge amount of time to compress that degree of information into less than 180 seconds. It isn't just the amount of information, but creating the flow that makes it seamless and easy for the listener to absorb.
That is an interesting ministry.
Kentucky and West Virginia to tax Pepsi Corporation profits
When Mamdani was asked about the risks of companies headquartered in NYC leaving due to higher taxation rates, he blew-off the concern with an interesting legal solution. "If they continue to do any business in New York, we will continue to tax them."
Also up for grabs are the profits of any network that broadcast content in Kentucky or West Virginia, advertising firms whose work is carried by those broadcasters, profits of banks that finance any activity in either of those two states, law firms that ever filed a brief in either of those two states...
Yessirree, that Mamdani fellow is bringing joy to Appalachia with his profound insights on capitalism and taxation.
Weather
It will be cold on Monday with a low of 21F. That is not cold by January standards.
The mid-West has a "Continental climate". That means large excursions in temperature are to be expected.
Seed collecting
Seed collecting is in process. I-115 persimmon seeds, Goosepond and Kanza pecans are packed away. Bald cypress seeds are being hydrated before being packed in sand and stored. I still need to pick Lehman's Delight persimmons and process them for seeds. I purchased some Red Oak acorns from a vendor on eBay but they haven't arrived yet.
I also have about 70 Red Haven peach pits that my sister saved for me.
My focus has shifted over the last few years from "Collect lots of seeds" to "Plant the seeds I collected". I am very good at running from twenty-yard-line to twenty-yard-line. I struggle to punch the ball into the end-zone.
Continuing to pilfer from Midwest Chick's hoard
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| Midwest Chick posted this meme in her Saturday meme dump |
Curiosity piqued, I did a little bit of digging.
On January 1, 2018 California's law decriminalizing of not-informing a sexual partner of a positive HIV status went into effect. Knowingly exposing an uninformed sexual partner had been a felony punishable by 3-to-8 years in prison but it was downgraded to a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of a six-month jail term.
The logic was that criminalizing not-informing "blamed the victim" and decriminalizing not-informing HIV status brought the penalty for recklessly exposing others to HIV in-line with sharing other sexually transmitted diseases like Gonorrhea and Chlamydia.
The problem I have with that logic is that Gonorrhea and Chlamydia can be treated with $40-to-$200 retail-price drugs and be cured. HIV, most often acquired when the person is 30 +/-5 years is for life and while costs-per-month for anti-virals is highly variable, $3000/month is not unusual...FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.
So, every new case of HIV represents a $1,500,000 bill that will be paid for by the general public through higher healthcare insurance premiums and/or from the public coffers. $1.5M represents 3000 well-baby doctor visits (including Uber rides) that cannot happen because the money was spent on something else. $3000/month would keep 25 diabetic patients in glucose test-strips.
If you go with the estimate of 1,200,000 HIV positive patients in the United States, then $1.5M life-time drug costs tots up to $1.8 TRILLION which is not chump-change.
Can you name any other single willful-event that can cause $1.5M in damages and NOT be charged with a felony? Can you think of any other action that can F-U a person's life as much as learning you are HIV positive and you were never informed of the risk?
Yes...I wholeheartedly believe in monogamy. I do not believe in breaking my skin for tats or to shoot up drugs. I don't approve of men having sex with men. AND/BUT, if reinstating felony penalties for not-informing of HIV status saves one life (or $1.5M) then it is the right thing to do.
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| This is the wood-pile a few days ago. |
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| This is what it looks like today. |
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| The wedge you see on top of the log was hammered in to keep it from rolling off the length of firewood I am holding it up with. I used another wedge on the other side. |
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| The brace at the 17' mark |
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| A short while later. I moved the X brace up another 8' to the 25' mark. The trunk was cut into 15" lengths. |
