Silicon Valley Redneck

Now, let me get this straight:

I mustn't be allowed to have a high-deductible, low-premium, catastrophic-only medical insurance policy, because if I got really sick I could end up having to spend as much as $10,000 of my own money on treatment.

Meanwhile, with the comprehensive health plan I have now (which, at last report, was the cheapest coverage someone my age could actually get in California, and that only because it's a grandfathered conversion from a group plan), I'm guaranteed to spend over $10,000 of my own money on premiums every smegging year.

This makes perfect sense.

Gah.

Just needed to order some urgent parts from Digi-Key, or Mouser, or some such.

I chose to order from Mouser, because there's another part that I'll be needing sometime next week that they carry and Digi-Key doesn't, at least not in one variant I want to test.

So I ran down the shopping list: connector housing and pins that I thought I had on hand already, but didn't: check.  Trimpots for another project: check.  Um... pogo pins for something that's coming up in a couple of weeks.  Check.

Pick a moderately pricey shipping method, type in credit-card number, done.

Um.

Except for the Mouser-only part.  Everything else, I could have ordered from Digi-Key with lower shipping cost (and, I think, about the same merchandise cost).

Never try to do important stuff when you're distracted (pain in leg, frantically-screeching parrot in living room, purring 10-pound kitten on keyboard: pick any three).

Again, where's the market?

So now ReGovernor Moonbeam's high-speed-rail ego trip is being upstaged by Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" thingy, which would allow convenient travel between SF and LA in just over half an hour.

The question remains: just how many people actually travel between SF and LA on a sufficiently regular basis to make this worthwhile?

As a wise fool once remarked:

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.

Yeah, parts of the freeways between SF and LA are crowded.  They're not crowded with daily commuters from SF to LA and vice-versa; they're crowded with daily commuters making much shorter hops among the in-between cities.  A high-speed SF-to-LA connection would benefit only a few really special individuals... plus of course some high-end construction contractors.

Like Insty always says: "Unexpectedly!"

NBC reports that businesses all over the country expect to cut employer hours in response to the Affordable Care Prevention Act.

Gee, ya think?

I really need to put together the definitive list of conceits of central planners, though making it "definitive" might put it in the same class as the Great Task of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged; here are just so many.... Anyway, one of the great and obvious conceits of central planners is this:

• People and organizations respond to the incentives intended by central planners, not to the incentives with which they are actually presented.

Trofim Denisovich, call your office!

Paper vs. plastic: ya just can't win, can ya?

Those who've been paying attention may recall that, a few years back, our esteemed masters in Washington decreed that those who made small purchases with cash instead of cards were to be regarded as suspicious, as paying cash for a pack of gum could be the action of a terrorist who was attempting to appear normal (by buying a pack of gum) while not leaving an identifiable transaction trail (by not using a credit or debit card).

Well!  Now the IRS thinks small businesses that sell things to the public for cash or plastic must be underreporting cash transactions if too many of their customers are paying by card.

Well, maybe the customers are trying not to look like terrorists trying not to look like terrorists?  Or maybe hardly anybody carries cash anymore?  Or maybe consumers are using their credit cards, and desperately hoping to be able to pay the bills eventually?

Unproductive

Bursitis is still around... so far this morning, slightly less crippling than the past couple of days.  (Since it tends to be worstish first thing in the morning, barring excessive activity on my part during the day, I guess this is a good sign.)

There's much urgent work I should be doing, but the way things are set up, doing any of it requires bouncing back and forth between desk and workbench, which after a few trips brings the pain up to "can't focus on the task at hand" levels.

I'm reminded of an Inconvenient Fact someone - McMegan? - brought up during the run-up to the Obamacare "vote".  While medical problems precipitate a significant percentage of personal bankruptcies, the actual mechanism of ruin is not, as a rule, medical expenses but loss of income.  (This is of course not addressed by the Affordable Care Prevention Act, which is more concerned with siphoning off the income of those who have it on behalf of the big financial institutions whose lobbyists wrote the law.)

Not that it's clear how disability insurance would work for the self-employed, but still: my medical expenses for this episode will likely be in the single-digit dollars (a large bottle of store-brand ibuprofen); loss of income, in the thousands.

Oh, well.  If I can't bounce back and forth between desk and workbench today... well, there's some lower-priority (but still billable!) work than can probably be done at my desk, after just a little workbench time.

And furthermore:

Interesting piece at New Geography about the Silicon Valley oligarchy.

Couple of notes, offhand:

Google, for example, employs 50,000 people; Facebook, 4,600; Twitter, less than a thousand, while GM employs 200,000; Ford, 164,000; and Exxon, more than 100,000.

I presume these are direct-employee numbers.  All these enterprises depend on large numbers of suppliers, subcontractors, and so on.  Thing is: the suppliers and subcontractors of GM, Ford, and Exxon are companies with large numbers of paid employees.  The "suppliers and subcontractors" on which Google, Facebook, and Twitter rely are largely (apart from purveyors of server hardware, bandwidth, and office supplies) unpaid individuals who produce the content.

After losing more than 108,000 high-tech jobs from 2000-08, there has been a net gain of no more than 20,000 to 30,000 positions since 2007.

Meanwhile, there's a huge boom in construction of both large office buildings and $750K high-density condos to house the office workers.

Addendum: from this article at Listverse:

Unless we’re totally psychotic, most of us are aware that no one would be homeless out of choice.

Apparently that depends on your definition of "choice."  I learned a couple of years ago that a long-vacant house in my neighborhood belongs to some character who owns several such properties around the South Bay, but who prefers to live under a bridge.  Since he's legally sane, nothing can be done about him nor the blighted properties he owns.  Though I guess he's not, strictly, speaking, "homeless", even if his preferred lifestyle does give that impression.

Nightmare Monday

Gah.

Wake up Monday morning.  Bursitis level: crippling.  Stagger to bathroom, then to office to check morning Internets.

My server had died during the night.  Died, as in: BIOS kinda-sorta signs on, but no boot, no setup, nor no error messages neither.

CPU fan was failing to go 'round.  Let everything cool down for a while, then apply power again.  No improvement, so maybe the CPU got damaged?

It's an old Core 2 Duo.  LGA775?

Wait until 0740, then drive to Fry's, wait for the doors to open at 0800, stagger in, buy a new CPU cooler (it's not like the fan can be replaced conveniently) plus some other odds & ends, then home...

...and conclude that trying to fix that server, per se, is probably impractical this morning, what with one thing and another.  But!  The old workstation, currently sitting idle, is also a Core 2 Duo (a slightly faster model).  So:

Confirm that the old workstation is still in working order.

Transplant the hard drives, two extra Ethernet cards, and TV tuner card from the server.

Praise Linus!  Unlike Windows, Linux will happily boot and function when its disk image is transplanted to a whole new motherboard.  I just had to mess with one of the udev files to make the new motherboard's on-board Ethernet come up as eth1 (where the DSL plugs in).

But... apparently the failure happened during a freshclam update, so clamav won't run, so exim won't accept messages.  So, I have to run freshclam manually, then restart clamav-daemon and then exim4... and now mail is working.  Apache is running.  Subversion seems to be OK.  NFS must be working, or I wouldn't be typing this on the workstation.

So there's that dealt with.

The other great Monday-morning stress item is the latest political outrage: this morning's Murky Snooze has an editorial that's all rah-rah for a proposal to impose sales tax on services as well as goods.  So they want to impose sales tax on my gross earnings (in addition to federal & state income taxes and self-employment tax) and on my spending the pittance that's left to me?  This calls for an epic rant, later.

Oh, and the kittens think a non-running computer up on blocks in the living room is a playground.  That having been taken away now, Top Hat thinks I'm the playground.

I guess we're not getting a puppy.

The kittens were most emphatic on the subject.

A short while ago, Huckleberry ran away from the front door, fast.  I looked outside, and saw a little waggy-tailed dog on the doorstep.  (About the same overall length as Huckleberry, but more body and less tail, and considerably heavier.)

I opened the door and the critter scampered in, and commenced trying to make friends with the birds, and with any kittens he could see.

The kittens were having none of this, and are still prowling cautiously around the living room with raised hackles and bottled tails, after only about a minute of intrusion before I rounded the critter up and sent him on his way.

This might have potential

Rumor has it that the production version of Google Glass will be a $300-ish item.

Which could put it in quasi-mass-market territory.

At that price, I'd buy one, probably within the year.  Not that I'd be likely to wear it around, mind you, but one of my back-burner projects has a potential variant that piggybacks on Glass, and with Glass in that price range the market for it would be worthwhile.

Good thing I have a soldering iron.

My old cordless phone system had been deteriorating for a while, and was about due for replacement when a totally modern Panasonic system with 5 handsets and all the trimmings turned up on sale a while back.

I think it was on Woot.

Anyway, I bought it, and eventually unpacked and installed it.

A few days ago, the handset in the bedroom started beeping at irregular intervals, then croaked, with all the symptoms of a dead battery.

Oh, well.  A new pair of AAA NiMH cells should put it to rights, and won't cost much.

Except that it still failed to charge.

Swapping handsets with the garage points to the charger being the problem.  The handset beeps and reports "Charging" when set in the cradle... but never reaches "Fully charged", and slowly drains its battery.

So: have a look at the charger.

Inside the cradle, power from the "5.5V DC" wall wart goes through a fuse, two 1Ω resistors, and a diode, then to the charging contacts.

At the charging contacts, I see 6.6V no-load (eh?) and 2.8V with the phone connected.  That would explain why it thinks it's charging, but doesn't actually charge....

Swap wall warts with the garage.  Same behavior.  The wall wart isn't getting dragged down; the drop is across the diode.

So: remove the diode, and look for a replacement.  I have some quite adequate 30V, 2A Schottky parts... but they're in SOD-323 packages, and the original is more SMA-sized.  I think I have some SMA-packaged diodes somewhere, but....

Poke the original with a diode tester, to see what's wrong.  It looks healthy enough.  So....

Re-install the old diode.  Now I see 4.5V at the phone when it's charging.

Apparently there was a bad solder joint.  (Not visually apparent; those consumer-grade lead-free SMT solder jobs always look defective anyway.)

And the phone now claims to be fully charged, so I guess it's working.

The ongoing demise of Silicon Valley

Surprise!  Someone in the financial-news business has noticed that Apple doesn't innovate anymore.

Well, DUH!  Big, publicly-traded companies haven't innovated in a long time.  Their structure and modern accounting rules make it nigh-impossible.

Remember: NIH no longer stands for Not Invented Here.  These past many years, it's been No Inventing Here.  Engineers in established corporations, even moderate-sized ones, are forbidden to do anything new and exciting.  Management's attitude is: let the little guys do the innovating, and if they look like they might succeed we'll buy them.

But... the little guys are increasingly crowded out of Silicon Valley.  The old hotbed-of-innovation habitat is being bulldozed at an accelerating pace.  There's still plenty of talent here, but there's no room for their little shoestring-budget speculative ventures*.

As with much else, the collapse is currently in slow motion, and masked by an aggressive Potemkin economy.  I just hope the current "rebound" keeps on for another year, as I fumble for the striped handle.

 

* Yeah, there are hackerspaces, and TechShop.  Cool if you're doing an open-source group project, but have you looked at the cost of renting a private space for a group to work on something commercial and confidential, which needs to be left set up rather than being torn down and put away after each work session?

Argh.

Supposed to be working at actual work today, getting a test station put together and delivered.

As of waking-up time this morning, I can barely walk from one end of the house to the other, not exactly a great distance.

I hate bursitis.

Update: What's more, I keep having to retrieve the little brown bag of parts I bought yesterday afternoon for finishing the test station.  The kittens think it's a toy.

Update 2: I more or less made it through the day, though with one thing and another we didn't get the test station ready to deliver yet.  By 1400 the leg pain had developed into leg muscle spasms, which then (as three years ago) developed into lower-back muscle spasms.  Made for a less-than-productive afternoon.  And there was already an urgent project I should be getting done over the weekend, and a new (albeit small) chunk of urgent (and paying!) work came over the transom while I was tied up....

So: the future of the Doctor?

Ted Kissell is all bothered that the Twelfth Doctor is, predictably enough, male.  And white.  And British.

Hey, it's the nature of the character.  He always regenerates British for the same reason the aliens always invade London (or Cardiff, or just possibly New York City).

You want a female Doctor, wait for the Thirteenth, already played by Joanna Lumley.

There are other interesting possibilities, of course.  Given that the Doctor is currently on borrowed regenerations (since being poisoned by Malady Swamp or whatever her name is this week)...

He could regenerate as an AI, in which case he could be played by Matt Frewer, or Norman Lovett, or (if you insist on a female) Hattie Hayridge.

He could completely fail to regenerate, leaving a void to be filled by his daughter or granddaughter.

Or, given that the universe has been entirely rebooted, all bets (in particular, those related to pre-reboot history) are off.

And what's to keep him from regenerating as a sort of talking kangaroo, or a Jatravartid, or something?

Seller's market

Just for giggles, I pointed Zillow at my corner of Sunnyvale, with the filters turned off.

Everything in my little working-class neighborhood has an estimated price tag well north of half a million dollars, and nothing's actually listed for sale.  No wonder the real-estate agents keep calling!

The new-ish condos nearby are all in three-quarter-million territory.

And my parents' neighborhood, in Palo Alto?  Very slightly upscale working class? 1.4 to 2 megabucks for more or less basic Eichlers*, on not-very-big lots.  Again, all estimated; nothing for sale.

Meanwhile, during a moment of semi-enforced idleness yesterday, I had a grand idea for an Appalachian business opportunity.  Sorry, no sharing; it's something I might just follow through on, though it would need about a megabuck in starting capital, which I don't have in the pocket of my pajamas at the moment.

 

* Built by Ler of the Eich, about the same time Doc Smith was writing the Lensman series.

Yeah, that'll work.

So, the Ear Leader has a solution:

“Let’s put construction workers back to work repairing rundown homes and tearing down vacant properties,” Obama said in prepared remarks in Phoenix.

Um.

The visible signs of blight are a symptom - albeit one which creates positive feedback* - not a root cause.

This calls for dusting off the question: why don't libertarians invade Detroit, buy up a bunch of blighted properties at less-than-fire-sale prices, and build a prosperous free-market haven?

Answer: because, obviously, there's a reason those properties are blighted in the first place.  In the case of Detroit, there's an existing government in place, with taxes, regulations, and the authority (thought not the ability) to enforce them.  In blight zones, there's no point trying to enforce anything... but you can just bet that the moment an area starts looking safe and wealthy, the tax collectors and code enforcers will show up.

In general, fixing up blighted properties makes little sense unless the root cause of the blight can also be fixed, or the properties are to be put to some novel use.  It's like re-planting a field after a crop failure without addressing the soil fungus that killed off the first round of plants.

 

* In the engineering sense: it reinforces the trend, leading to uncontrolled oscillation, latch-up, or suchlike generally undesirable behavior.

Owwww

Apart from a nasty allergy attack the past several days... it seems my bursitis is back.

Couple years ago, when my hip/thigh area started hurting like this, I ignored it the first few days, continued with morning walkies, and made it a bunch worse.  Then, before there was any opportunity for recuperation, I had a string of Family Stuff that involved yet more walking.

This time I'll be sensible.  Gobble dried frog pills ibuprofen and avoid aggravating the afflicted area until it gets better.  Which I hope will only be a few days....

Update: Second morning, still owie, and worser.  Gotta run some errands this morning (apart from anything else, I'm down to my last ibuprofen), and do some work, but should mostly be able to stay off my feet.  Consulting the archives, I find that the last time was October, 2010.  The entire month of October, 2010.  Ow.  Well, maybe taking appropriate measures early on will keep this outbreak from eating my entire August.

Coyness fail

Really, the network censorship of Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges Mythbusters gets awfully lame.

Take, e.g, the latest episode to hit the Internets.  They're trying to dissolve a pig in a bathtub, and the bathtub too.  Having determined that hydrofluoric acid doesn't do the trick As Seen On Television (duh!), they switch to sulfuric acid plus a mystery ingredient....

Lessee, mystery ingredient.  Increases the etchitivity of sulfuric acid.  An oxidizer, no?  And it's a clear liquid that comes in plastic jugs at 30% concentration.  Hydrogen peroxide?  Yup.  (The closing Hyne-hint about lots of oxygen and hydrogen seems consistent with this.)

And, mixed exothermically in situ with the pig, it gives dramatic results, as one might expect.  But when it fails to eat through the cast-iron tub, do they toss in a jug of HF to attack the porcelain?  Of course not: no imagination (or maybe that would have created a little too much of a disposal problem afterward).

And was there some remark about the process for making mercury fulminate (alternative name: fulminate of mercury, not fulminated mercury) being classified?  Uh, guys: it's been in the open literature since forever.

Side note: my reference books on such matters are inaccessible at the moment, but I recall that one of the older primary explosives (which might have been mercury fulminate) gets unreasonably sensitive at larger crystal sizes.  So, maybe tweaking the process to get larger crystals would result in a more impact-sensitive product.

Hmmmm.

Went to a party yesterday evening, with (mainly) a group of people I hadn't seen in 13-25 years.

Most of them had changed, a lot.  There were a few I recognized immediately, and even a few I would have recognized out of context.

Everyone (except for one who hadn't seen me in a really long time) recognized me.  Many remarked that I hadn't changed a bit*.

This is a sure sign that it's time to vanish, and reappear in some other place, before the local life-forms get too suspicious.

Another thing: the host has an honest-to-Ghu pizza oven on his patio.  20 years ago, I had the notion of constructing such a thing... or perhaps a combination oven and forge.  But... no space to put one, safely.  Need.  More.  Elbow.  Room.

(Now having encountered Real Homemade Italian-Style Pizza, I'm thinking I may see what I can do with a thin crust, the old pizza stone, and the gas oven cranked up to Volcano Heat.)

Anyway... getting back in touch with some of the old crowd, thanks to a couple of former co-workers who were inspired to pull this gathering together.  I gotta brush up on my social-networking skills, especially if I actually do relocate and need to build up a new network.

* They somehow overlook details like my being 40 pounds heavier, and my whiskers being on the gray side.

The doublethink is now explicit

So the "progressive" faction in U.S. politics has been all riled up for some time now about the Citizens United ruling, because Freedom of Speech is clearly only for individuals, not for corporations*.  On another front, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms only applies to the sorts of muzzle-loading weapons that were in common use in 1789**.

OK, fine.

But!  It seems that Freedom of the Press is only for the corporate press, not for some guy with a manually-operated printing press in his shed***.

Glad that's all sorted out.

* Except that not-for-profit corporations supporting Progressive causes must have freedom of speech.

** Which, generally being over .50 caliber, must be prohibited as Destructive Devices.

*** Nor his modern counterpart, some guy with a blog.