Boomers explained, Part II

Q: Why do boomers continuously try to talk to people who are wearing headphones? Do they actually think I can actually hear anything through them? Have they never worn headphones before?
A: We use noise-cancelling headphones at the range. It is totally foreign to us that anybody would willingly forgo situational awareness in such a dangerous world. We just assume that you aren't stupidly naive. Let me extend my generation's apology for overestimating you.

Q: Why do boomers have like 40 credit cards you literally only need like 1?
A: I accept this observation as a valid criticism. Some boomers are OCD. Others have two cards and one is frozen in between a bunch of salmon filets and marked "For EMERGENCIES Only". 

Q: Why do boomers pay for concert tickets then just stand there with their arms crossed?
A: Why do you judge? Is there only one-right-way to experience music? Maybe they are just living in the moment and are not producing a video to post on social media.

 Q: Why do boomers make unholy grunting sounds when they go to the bathroom?
A: The demographic with the highest rates of Emergency Room visits for constipation are 25-to-34 year old women. Lack of fiber. Lack of physcial movement. Inadequate water intake. Are you SURE it is the boomers grunting?

Q: Why do boomers scream when they yawn?
A: News to me.

Q: Why do boomers love giving verbal driving directions so much?
A: Your eyes are supposed to be on the road, bozo. How else are we going to communicate with you? Draw on the inside of the windshield with a wax pencil?

Q: Why do boomers think that every single millennial who has ever lived has bought a $5 coffee every day since the day they were born?
A: Because we think you gave up. You accepted the myth that you will never own your own house or save enough to retire, so you pay other people obscene amounts of money to fetch you crappy food and you drink over-priced coffee, whether it is $5 a cup or $3 a cup or $12 a cup. By the way, who only drinks ONE cup of coffee a day?

Q: Why do boomers always have to say “dot com”?  Karen, I know you meant dot com?
A: Dot gov, dot net, dot mil, dot edu...there is a lot more to the digital universe than dot com, Princess. 

Q: Why do Boomers make memes that are just Charlie Brown saying something racist?
A: I cannot comment because I have never seen one of those.

Q: Why do boomers own a 800k house but keep rotted ketchup in a drawer?
A: This is a question that is worth unpacking.

Those boomers do not own that house. The bank does.

In most cases, the rotted (past sell-by date) ketchup is slap-dash, scatter-brained housekeeping.

Sometimes it is gross incompetence and criminal lack of preparedness. YOUR generation did not invent eating three meals a day outside the house. I heard stories of daughters going to babysit and the only food in the house was a jar of pickles, mustard and ketchup. The kids are crying because they are hungry. The parents are at a fancy restaurant. The babysitter is supposed to pull a miracle out of her nether regions.

Don't be like those boomers. Ever.

Q: Why do boomers not use headphones when watching internet videos in public?
A: In my case, it would be my unwillingness to give up my situational awareness.

In the case of others, most boomers grew up in families with a multitude of siblings. We just assume that functional human beings can filter out side-conversations that are not directed at them.

I apologize for assuming your adequacies.

Q: Why do boomers always yell into the phone when they pick up like “HI STACY THIS IS JEFF”?
A: "...always..." is a bit of an overstatement.

Some of us are hard-of-hearing but mostly it is joy at having somebody we love reach out to us.

One of the cruelties of getting older is that your circle of friends shrinks. We get a metric shit-ton of calls from people we don't want to interact with while the people who we were closest to drift away, battling their own dragons, ghouls, goblins, hain'ts, demons and waiths.

Q: Why do boomers sign everything off with "...just my personal opinion...?" 
A: Damned if we do and damned if we don't. It is a futile attempt to find a neutral jumping-off-point for an intelligent conversation.

Much of what you accept as FACT is recycled opinion.

For example, many of your generation would completely agree with the statement "Conservatives are heartless, low-IQ, sub-human primates." But if that is a FACT, then how do you reconcile the data that Conservatives consistently contribute larger percentages of their income to charities even when they cannot "write the donations off"? 

When a boomer leads with "JMHO" he is about to stress you with something that will cause dissonance because it contradicts what that TA told you when you wer back in college. And, if you were perfectly honest, that TA was younger when she told you that than you are now and her pontificating should be subjected to the same critical review you give the new office intern.

And about that TA, not only are you now older than she was, you have interacted with a much wider range of humanity at more levels than she ever did. You met people who are evil to the bone. You met saints. You encountered people who were mentally ill.  Stupid people. Geniuses. Shallow, two-dimensional theories must bow to observation and reality. 

A very short story

The septic guys showed up and pumped the tank. It went quickly. There were no compacted solids on the bottom.

One of the guys was telling me that the owner of the house was standing beside him when he popped off the lid at a different site.

"How's it look?" the owner asked.

Peering in, the sanitary septic specialists said, "Looks pretty good, Mister. I do see a lot of latex-eels, though."

"What is a latex-eel?" the home owner asked. 

"Condoms" the specialist said. Then he looked over at the home owner who seemed to be chewing on something.

"I had a vasectomy twenty years ago" the home owner said. "Are you SURE those are condoms?" pointing at the dozens of floating telltales.

"Yep" the specialist said.

"Put the lid back on. I ain't pumping out the tank" the home owner directed them.

I assume that the house was put on the market shortly afterward. 

A longer version of a similar, sad story 

Callipyge genes (in sheep)

The Woke crowd is in an uproar because Sydney Sweeney, a fairly attractive young woman, implied that she was attractive due to both the brand of blue jeans she was wearing and due to her genes. At one point she quips "...they make my butt look good".

---Full disclosure: I prefer Mrs ERJ's good looks and melodious voice over Miss Sweeney's, but that is a matter of personal taste.--- 

I want to point out that there is a scientifically documented gene in sheep called "Callipyge" which translates from Greek as “beautiful buttocks”.

After years of Progressives telling us that their high BMI is due to genetics and hormonal issues and their paying money for Brazilian Butt-lifts, they decided to have a hissy-fit over a white woman mentioning that she had an attractive rear-end?

Her rear end does not look half bad for being 34 years old

I think the genetic endowment that men find most attractive about Miss Sweeney is that she has two X chromosomes. Maybe that is what has the Progressive panties in a wad. 

Moody clouds, Doe, Boomers explained

This picture and the next one were taken while running, although not on the same day.

 

I think the owner of this goat should get a blaze-orange vest for her before November 15.

All goats are secretly named Houdini

From Back in the Day

 

Boomers explained

Q: "Why do boomers print their emails?"
A: Ink-on-paper can be submitted as evidence in a court of law. Holding up your cellphone and waving it in Judge Judy's face just pisses her off.

Q: "why .. do ..... boomers.. type....... li...ke.... this....... . . .. .?? .."
A: Your generation is addicted to multi-tasking. The dots are there so you know when to..gum wrapper...

Q: "Why do boomers think "it's very...different" is a compliment for my hair like we get it youve had the same style since '68?"
A: We were raised to not say anything if we could say something nice

 

Q: "why do boomers love being rude as hell to waiters?"
A: Wait-staff is very busy. They are not there for conversations. It is not rude to order in a short, declarative sentence like "I want the Club Sandwich with sweet-potato waffle fries." That is NOT rude.

 

Q: "Why do boomers love minions?"
A: They don't argue over every detail.

 

Q: "why do boomers love to say "shame on you!!!" when they @ brands on social media?"
A: News flash: Greta is not a boomer.

 

Q: "Why do boomers think they can outsmart the GPS"
A: All that glitters is not gold. All who wander are not lost. Sometimes we like to see the sights. Sometimes we are carrying 150 keys of white powder and we are avoiding cops. Next question.

Q: "Why do boomers still not understand how to properly use a drive thru speaker?"
A: Are you referring to the fact that I put the truck into Park, turn off the music and turn off the engine so the order taker can hear me talk? It is a matter of respecting the person on the other end of the gobbly-gook speaker.

 

Q: "why do boomers love fighting on the phone with customer service?"
A: Boomers love drilling through to a real, human for a couple of reasons. For one thing, a human has a brain and is more likely to connect you to the proper support person than randomly pushing numbers. For another, if we don't insist on humans, they will be wrung out of the system and they will not exist when we really need them.

 -Joe 

 Bonus image

Source (submitted by Lucas-the-tireless)

Poverty is not good for your health. The fallacy is that people born in that county will stay in that county.
 

Cheesecake

Source

 

Notes on planting a pot-bound tree

 

The root-ball of the 12' tall sycamore tree I planted yesterday

A close-up showing how the roots were running around the inside of the pot. This condition is sometimes called "being pot-bound".

At the risk of spreading what might be controversial ideas, I follow the practice of making four vertical slashes to cut the roots that were running around the inside of the pot like so many NASCAR racers.

Hairspring

My thinking is that if a root starts out on one side of the tree and then travels 270 degrees before striking out radially, then that root will not be capable of stabilizing the tree in high winds. Rather, it is better if the roots' architecture have them strike out radially without first winding around the stem like a hairspring.

I have also heard arguments about the roots "strangling" each other but reject that thinking because roots happily graft when they cross.

The topsoil was deep. The loam leaned slightly toward "silt-clay". The sycamore tree should be very happy there. I staked it to reduce wind-whip while the roots settle in and make themselves at home.

Fertilizing late in the season

The conventional mental-model for trees hardening-off to survive the winter cold is that they accumulate carbohydrates in their buds and bark. In coordination with partial cellular dehydration, carbohydrates form a gel within and between the cells that inhibit the growth of needle-sharp frost crystals that puncture cell-walls.

The plant must execute a precarious balancing act because there are several biological functions that demand carbohydrates, which left in short supply will cause parts of the tree to die.

Ripening fruit is a huge demand. That is why nearly all super-hardy fruit trees ripen their fruit early. The carbohydrates that are created by photosynthesis after fruit drop is available to "harden off" the tree.

Rapidly growing shoots are also net consumers of carbohydrates. That is why it is unwise to use a heavy hand when fertilizing trees late in the growing season. The flush of growth sucks down the tree's supply of carbohydrates and increases the risk of it not being able to survive the winter.

Trees with genetics from more northern and higher elevation sources are less likely to push another flush of growth late in the season even when fertilized. Trees with genetics from warmer sources are more likely. That is why timber companies always include some seedlings from 200 miles to 400 miles farther south than the planting site; one more flush of growth per year might mean 50% more wood volume per year of growth.

Because of that, I didn't fertilize the sycamore tree beyond the three bags of composted cow manure I top-dressed the site with. 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

A woman confessing her sins to a priest

Giuseppe Molteni was born in Milan, Italy in 1800 and died in Milan in 1867.

His artistic career started out restoring old artwork by earlier, Italian masters.

In 1828 he started painting vanity portraits (think "Selfies") and it proved lucrative. Reputation and economics secured, he switched to scenes of everyday life in 1837.

By was appointed a curator of an Academy in the 1850s and he stopped painting. 

Abandoned or destitute woman. It is likely that she had Tuberculosis which peaked in the mid-1800s in Italy. Note the guard walking away on right side of image.

Chimney sweep

 

Close-up of the chimney-sweeps head.

Notice all of the layers of clothing. Maybe the chimneys were not allowed to fully cool down before the sent the boys in.

A bereaved woman mourning her lost lover

This and that (and waterlogged soil)

There were two or three tasks from yesterday that I did not write about.

I excavated the lid to our septic tank. The tank is scheduled to be pumped out on Wednesday. The last time the thousand gallon tank was pumped out was in 2019. 

With just the two of us living here, I thought six years might be a little bit soon, but Mrs ERJ reminded me that for most of that time we had between one and three additional residents.

I also picked the cucumbers. EVERY gardening book tells you to not "work" garden plants when the leaves are wet, especially beans and cucumbers. That has been an impossible requirement this year. Three of the cucumber were overly mature. Two were close. I had enough cucumbers to put six quarts of refrigerator pickles in the refrigerator.

Running notes

I ran one mile on Sunday and 1.5 miles on Monday. Not impressive distances, but I am feeling my way along. I want to get up to three miles and that might be my maintenance level.

I did not take a stop-watch and had a very pleasant run. To my surprise, cardio-pulmonary were not the limiting factors. My lower legs, especially my left lower leg were an issue. Secondarily, my core muscles that "torque" were talking to me.

Weight lifting can make in-plane muscles strong while running involves throwing opposite-corner limbs forward while their mates travel rearward. Basically, you are energetically twisting your trunk clockwise/counterclockwise 800 to 1000 times per mile.

Today my shoulders and upper arms are pleasantly tired and heavy. I can see why weighted blankets are calming.

Grape arbors

Markshere2 suggested pergolas or arbors covered with grape-vines for quick shade.

That is a great idea.

I did that an the house I lived in before we moved to Eaton Rapids. I was ignorant and planted an early, seedless Concord hybrid that split badly after a rain. The variety was a raccoon and Yellow Jacket magnet. In fact, we had a raccoon start to enter our bedroom through the window screen one late-summer night. Nothing like having an intruder push through the screen to ruin the mood.

If I were to go that way, I would stick with very late ripening grapes with outstanding resistance to splitting. I would take a hard look at the Munson hybrids because many of them are noted for vigor and crack/dropping resistance. Champanel and America would be a couple of the varieties I would strongly consider.

There are other vines worth considering. Kiwis and hops come to mind. Many kiwis require a male plant to ensure pollination. Trumpet vines have glorious flowers and there are "improved" varieties. Climbing roses are also used for that purpose although the most vigorous cultivated rose varieties struggle with Zone 5 winters.

Food plants for wet situations

I encountered a gentleman who is building on a two acre parcel. One acre of his parcel is about 6' above the water table. The other half drops down rapidly to the flood-plain of a small creek and is between 12" and 30" above the usual, low-water level of the creek. The flood-plain portion is cut by an old, pre-channelized ox-bow that has some water in the bottom of it.

The forest canopy over the floodplain was mostly ash. The ash died due to Emerald Ash Borer so now that acre is filling up with pucker-brush. 

Due to circumstances that I am not going to discuss, the gentleman wants the property to be capable of sustaining him with minimum inputs of money. His timeline is to have everything buttoned down in less than fifteen years (when he anticipates retiring).

While there are many species of plants that thrive in spite of occasional wet-feet, there are not very many that can take THAT much wet.

Possible candidates to get the most use out of the waterlogged acre.

Wood products

Plantation grown Gray Alder. Nice, straight stems

• Gray Alder (Alnus glutinosa) fixes nitrogen, wood products
• Bald cypress
• Catalpa 
• Purple osier willow (Salix purpurea) 

Fruit 

• Marge European Elderberry
• Low acid Vitis riparia like "L-50s"
• Other grapes grafted onto V. riparia rootstock
• Currants
• Some gooseberry clones with Ribes hirtellum ancestors
• Aronia 
• Raspberries, phytophthoria resistant varieties  ‘Bristol,’ ‘Dundee,’ ‘Jewel’, ‘Latham,’ ‘Boyne,’ ‘Killarney,’ and ‘Nordic’ (St Lawrence Nursery has some of these varieties)
• Persimmons (on the slope)
• Pawpaw (on the slope) 
• Mayhaws (Crataegus opaca and maybe Crataegus viridis)
• Selected clones of Viburnum oplus, lentago, rufidulum
• Highbush blueberries on hummocks 
• Swamp rose (Rosa palustris) 
• Cranberries 

Other 

Hibiscus moscheutos, all parts are edible. The flower petals make a striking garnish

 

• Hibiscus moscheutos
• Apios ("Groundnuts")
• Cattails
• Wild rice
• Chuffa, not cold hardy (added July 31) 
• Hops (they seem to associate with willow)
• Watercress
• Ipomoea aquatica 
• Chives 
• Mint (added July 31) 
• Muskrats
• Beaver
• Ducks
• Geese 
• Fish 
• Clams, suitable substrate (added July 31) 

I intend to make this a dynamic list and to add updates.

You might notice that there are very few "improved" fruits on this list. Picking these unimproved fruits tends to be slow, tedious work although there are various rakes that can be used. 

Summertime, and the living is easy...

 

I went for a run this morning. Matthew W., a fellow blogger, inspired me. He is running a 5k a month.

This is probably where the tree will be planted, just a bit west of the southwest corner of their house.

Southern Belle purchased a shade tree (Platanus × acerifolia cv. "Exclamation!") this morning but Handsome Hombre had taken the truck to work. Guess who was pressed into service transporting the tree to Casa Amor Joven?

Horrock's has their containerized trees marked down 30% and they are getting picked-over quickly.

Blackberries

There is not much color contrast between the ripe berries and the green. You have to squint to see them.

"Shawnee" cultivar. Marginally hardy in Michigan. Thorny.

Corn in Cuba

Traditional, Caribbean agriculture. No fertilizer. Source

 

Corn in the mid-West

I saw this stand on my drive home with the tree. I just HAD to take a picture.

Look at the number of ears!

I am not going to say it is hot, here

But I will share that I am not worried about my salt consumption.

 

Rural life in Albania

Video. Notable for how easy they make canning peaches. Also notable for how under-ripe the peaches are are by US standards. If I were to be doing this in a grid-down environment, I would put ducting around the fire so most of the heat did not blow sideways but ran up the sides of the kettle. Even if an infinite supply of wood was available, the time to cut, split, stack and move it is not. Nor is there an infinite supply of saw blades/chains. If an open fire beneath a tripod/trivet in a 10km/hr (6mph) breeze is 10% efficient and a ducted rocket-stove is 60% efficient...then you only need 1/6th the amount of wood to finish your task.

Also jarring (to me) is that he places the jars into the kettle lid-side-down. Rather than burping air and water vapor, the positive pressure is pushing sugar syrup out of the jar.

There is a huge difference between canning food to win prizes at the County Fair and canning food to make it through the winter. I am not suggesting that you take any shortcuts that increase the risk of food-poisoning. Rather, I am suggesting that 75% of the work-content in some canning books are to improve aesthetics and cosmetic appeal. 

A helicopter flew over several times to dump fire-retardant on wild-fires. The mountains east of the AGNC are on fire.

Mrs ERJ book recommendation

If the heat is keeping you inside, Mrs ERJ recommends The Money Tree by Theresa Slack. It is a quick read. It is "Contemporary, Christian fiction". The book explores the challenges of managing money when modern culture tries to seduce you into "Spend, spend, spend".

Let me know if you found this recommendation useful. 

Modern Problems require Modern Solutions

 

 

Needless to say, I aced the test with 45 seconds to spare.

The Rule of Retirement Inversion

One of my brothers sent me a link to a Kiplinger Magazine article titled "The Rule of Retirement Inversion". The article was about flipping "How to have a GREAT Retirement?" on its head and asking "What would destroy or suck the joy out of your retirement?" Sometimes, there are inexpensive and simple steps that can be implemented to mitigate against those risks.

Everybody's analysis will be different because we are different people. For instance, I have no intention of leaving my house for sunnier climates but many people do leave.

With no further ado:

Preliminary Inversion Analysis Retirement (ERJ's second draft)

Social

• Spouse “leaves"
• Death
• Divorce
• Disease (stroke, dementia, mental health, addiction)

Health (personal)

• Dementia
• Blindness
• Loss of mobility (arthritis, loss of limb(s), stroke)

Economy

• Inflation destroys purchasing power of savings and pension
• Aging destroys ability to work (obsolete skills, lack of stamina, unwillingness to relocate)
• Savings are stolen
• Accounts hacked
• Stolen by trusted people
• House gets broken into
• Mugged

Losing the ability to drive

• Losing ability to connect to internet
• Credit card fraud makes remote transactions too risky 

Losing house

• Fire
• Eminent Domain or is Condemned
• Key systems fail and I will not be able to afford fixing them
• Lawsuit (dog bite, trespassers have accident, hunting accident)
• Squatters
• Medical costs
• Chemical/nuclear spill

Bad neighbors

--- 

Using this analysis as a planning tool might involve asking "Which systems in my house are most likely to fail in the next 25 years?"

If "bathing" is likely, then installing a walk-in shower might be warranted.

If "laundry" is likely, then maybe having a plan to move it to the ground-floor is a good idea.

If health-issues are at the top of the list, then having a plan with Who-What-How-Where-Why-When details inked out is important.

If inflation is a hot-button for you, then what critical needs can you produce on-property with minimal, outside inputs? Can you add those skills to your tool-box? 

Many of the circumstances listed in my Inversion Analysis are beyond my control. The point of the plan is to "mitigate, dilute or delay" if events are inevitable. 

For example, one of the couple we see at the walking track where we exercise is a man pushing his wife in a wheelchair. She has a degenerative neuromuscular disorder and they are fighting it by doing what they can.

Mass casualty stabbing in Traverse City, Michigan

Mass casualty event in Traverse City, Michigan.

Alleged perp of stabbings was stopped by an armed Black man. Video here. 

Traverse City is the northern-Michigan's Liberal Utopia.

The buzz is that most of the victims were elderly. Perhaps because slower targets are easier to stab.

Name of alleged perp has not been released but he is wearing odd, baggy, pajama-like black slacks in the video.

Customers in parking lot seem to be (mostly) oblivious to the drama. One of the victims is shown hunched over from a belly wound as he is standing in the parking lot. Stabbing is silent. It is easy to be caught unaware. Keep your heads on a swivel.  

I would be willing to buy the Black man who stopped him a beer any time he drives through Eaton Rapids. 

Historical solutions

It is worth noting for future reference that women having more children than the family could raise to adulthood is a very old phenomena.

Consequently, we can look to history for (partial) solutions.

• Apprenticeships
• Indentured servants
• Sign up for the military
• Become a sailor
• Signed off to be adopted 

What is notable about these solutions is that the mother was not compensated beyond being relieved of the responsibility for feeding and clothing that child.

Does welfare have a retirement plan?

Suppose mama has nine kids in 12 years. Her income stream starts to dry up when the first kid clocks out of the system at 18 (earlier if he is incarcerated) and is completely gone by the time she is 45 (if she had her first kid at 15).

Maybe she watches grandkids (and her daughters get some kind of daycare subsidy from the state which they turn over to her) but as her daughter's children clock-out at 18, the daughters' welfare income stream starts dying and the grandmother's "daycare" income drops.

I don't think they are paying into Social Security with any of those "entitlement" incomes because they are not wages.

What am I missing? It looks to me like the whole gravy-train hits the wall sometime between when the woman hits 45-and-60. 

Never become a refugee (Water Woes)

Headline news: Kabul, Afghanistan is running out of water.

Some of the articles I read suggested that this curve was overly smoothed. Due to ongoing war, refugees flood into Kabul every fifteen years and cause +50% spikes in the population.
 

From the perspective of topography and the monsoons, Kabul is the flea on the end of the dog's tail. Only high-level clouds vectoring at 330 +/- 15 degrees can put much snow on the mountains above Kabul

Most of the water is pumped from bore-hole wells. Many of them are going dry as the water level drops.

The quality of the water is degrading due to pollutants.

Solving the problem is compounded by ethnic divisions. Roughly 50% of the city is Tajik, 25% is Hazara and the remainder is mostly Pashtun. Most of "up-stream" is dominated by the Pashtun who are also Afghanistan's majority ethnic-linguistic group. The rest of the "up-stream" is dominated by the Tajik.

Think of Kabul's water issues as the prequel for Tuscon, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Atlanta. 

Six Sperm-donors

You only need to watch a minute of this video compiled from single-moms' rants about Tough-love welfare reforms. I scrolled ahead to the vignette that caught my attention. The woman is complaining that she will not be able to buy a house because her food-stamps were reduced. How many couples where both adults work +40hr/week cannot afford to buy a house or have children and yet this woman figures it is owed to her because "...6 daddy-babies". The woman has 8 children from 6 different sperm donors, and yet she thinks the tax-payers should be responsible.

Society gets more of the behaviors that are subsidized. The more times a behavior is reinforced, the more difficult it is to break.

To quote Clarence Darrow "I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure" applies. While I never actively wished any of these women pain, I get deep satisfaction from seeing the playing field start to level out.

Random observation

A statistically significant number of these women seem to lack their upper teeth. Watch their upper lip as they talk.

Technical oddities

I happened to be talking to a tradesman and the conversation turned to diagnosing problems. About a year ago he purchased a Chrysler 200 for 60% of Kelly Blue Book. It had 4 previous owners but appeared to be well maintained.

Two months later it needed a new battery. Two months after that, it needed another new battery. Then another. The vehicle was eating batteries.

He took many trips to Youtube and consulted AI. Finally, he and his boy simply started disconnecting and reconnecting the terminal on the battery...and then they heard the vehicle make a faint noise that wasn't supposed to be there. It was intermittent. It made that noise only about 20% of the time.

"I know it is strange, but the sound didn't sound like OEM MOPAR. We kept looking."

It was a GPS monitor that the first owner, a car rental business, had installed way up under the dash where it would not be seen by customers. They had not bothered to remove the unit before they sold the vehicle. The tradesman's best-guess is that the unit recorded exactly where the vehicle went and was attempting to find a signal to up-load the data. That kind of information might be useful if there were clauses in the rental contract about not taking vehicles four-wheeling, parking them on ocean beaches or using them to pull stumps.

The tradesman and his boy removed the device and the vehicle no longer eats batteries.

I did not see this with my own eyes so I cannot vouch for its veracity. Consequently, I only present this as an interesting story. If you have a vehicle that eats batteries, try parking it where it gets four bars or figure out a way to disable the GPS transmitter module(s).

Pakistan vs. Missouri revisited

 

 

A few more screen grabs showing the roads that supply the convenience/general store shown in the earlier post.

Various commenters on the earlier post suggested that the photos of the store near Kansas City were cherry-picked to make it look worse than it really was. I agree...but when was the last time you were in a Krogers, Walmart, Meijers or IGA and you saw so many empty shelves, especially in the high revenue-per-square-foot produce and meat sections? Maybe during the depths of Covid shutdowns but other than that, never.

If a store in B.F. Pakistan can look THAT well stocked while the store in Missouri which is 1.4 miles from Exit 5-A off of I-70 looks that bad, especially after the taxpayers sank $29 million of subsidies into it... I just have to shake my head in dismay.

Another commenter asked "...which regulations would you like to see peeled back and why?" Frankly, I would like to see all regulations wiped off the books and replaced with regulations which in their totality can be read-and-understood by a person with 5th-grade reading ability in fifteen minutes.

My reasoning is that the majority of the people working on the grocery store floor are not college graduates...They are not MBAs nor do they have degrees in Biology. Sadly, the median American now has a sixth-grade reading ability. Most of the people working on the floor of the grocery store probably have lower reading comprehension skills than the median American. Having grown up watching Pee-Wee Herman, they also have stunted attention spans. So why would you write regulations that THEY cannot understand when they are the heavy-lifters where the work gets done?

Another perspective is that Communists have multiple, highly divergent personalities. One minute they are crying a river-of-tears about wealth inequity and food deserts. The next minute they are writing another two-hundred pages of regulations that pretty much guarantee that new, family owned grocery stores die in utero because they cannot afford a "legal compliance office" to create documentation showing that they complied with every detail. 

Existing businesses love regulatory moats. It reduces competitive pressures.

OK, I can see some of my readers swooning. "It can't be done!!! Food safety is complicated!!!! The regulations are complicated because it is a complicated subject."

Food safety is actually pretty simple until you start trying to carve out every exception and technical oddity. I agree that expressing complex ideas with simple, declarative sentences using the 12,000 most commonly used words in the English language can be difficult. BUT IT IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE. Just because you cannot do it doesn't mean that it cannot be done.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise

I was having lunch with some of my former coworkers when conversation turned to the vast number of devices that will be rendered vulnerable to security breeches when Microsoft stops supporting Windows 10.

The general belief is that Windows 11 is a resource hog in the typical, default configuration. There are ways to skinny-it-down but there is always the risk of somebody performing a reboot and vaporizing all of the tweaks, thereby paralyzing the device(s).

One of my friends provides computer expertise to a small footprint of equipment...somewhere between $0.5M and $1.5M of equipment. All of the devices carry mission critical CPUs and none of them have enough resources to be upgraded to stock, MS Windows 11.

He informed us that Microsoft is aware of the issue and has a solution. He does not know if his class of equipment qualifies for the solution...but he is looking very, very hard at it.

The solution is called Windows 10 I-o-T (Internet-of-Things) Enterprise and its genesis may have been sparked by the vast number of Automatic Teller Machines that cannot run Windows 11 and yet they must be secure (i.e. supported with security patches). Although the issue may have started with ATMs, many other users are now demanding this "low feature" Windows 10 so they would not have to scrap-out functional equipment and spend the money to replace that equipment solely because the old equipment's operating system had been abandoned by MS.

The devices have very simple needs. Ethernet communication. Ability to write to a log and display results on a low resolution monitor at 30fps. Maybe talk to GPS. In most instances, the users don't  want WIFI or to have other devices find and try to shake-hands with it. It does not need to support a bunch of USB ports or manage files with foreign formats.

I wish MS would ease the restrictions on 10 IoT and let us switch our fleet of lap-tops to it.

Bonus Link 

I thought I was out of the moving business

Southern Belle found a bedroom set in an itty-bitty town 45 miles from Eaton Rapids. She negotiated with the lady selling the furniture to pick it up Wednesday. She asked for my help.

The owner of the furniture and her twin sister had purchased the duplex ten years ago and her sister died last November. That left the seller with four (yes, four) bedrooms full of furniture since both sisters had their own room plus a guest room.

It was an old house with low doors and scroll work in the corners. She had shelves filled with antique glass bottles. And of course the bed was a king. So, Wednesday night Southern Belle, Handsome Hombre, Quicksilver and I lugged the furniture out of the surviving twin's guest bedroom and thence through her quaint-and-quirky house. The task was fraught with many twists-and-turns to snake the loads out of the house. Another issue was having to lower the loads so we didn't bang into the lintels of the doors nor bump any shelves chock-full of glass bottles.

It was dark when we got back to Eaton Rapids and there was no chance of rain that night nor the next morning. I went home and left the young people to entertain themselves.

Looking out the window in early afternoon, yesterday, I noticed the tree branches getting blown around pretty good. I popped open a weather site on the internet and it predicted a 100% chance of rain at 7:00.

I called Southern Belle and asked if they had moved the furniture inside.

She responded "Nope. Handsome is at work. Why?"

I mentioned the possibility of rain at seven and wondered when Handsome would be home from work.

One thing led to another and I ended up helping Southern Belle get the mattress and dressers and cabinet inside. We didn't get them up to the second floor but we got them under cover.

The rain hit at 4:00 and it was a gully-washer.

Today feels like it will be a four-ibuprofen day. 

Comparing a store in one of Pakistan's poorest districts to one in Missouri

 

A convenience store in Pakistan's Hindu Kush mountains (Source of images)

Pakistan is nominally "capitalist"

The region is very remote and impoverished

 

Government/NGO run store in Missouri after "millions of dollars invested"

Source

Bonus Link

Living 30 days like a Cuban (circa 2010)