Silicon Valley Redneck

Er... connection?

Headline, via Insty:

Food Expiration Dates Aren't Based on Science. Here's What You Can Do Instead

Yeah, pretty much true.  But the article itself starts off with:

Florida's outbreak of listeria has so far led to at least one death, 22 hospitalizations and an ice cream recall since January.

Er, hello?  What does listeria have to do with expiration dates?  Listeria doesn't appear by spontaneous generation when food has been sitting around too long.

Reading on:

One industry group, the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association, suggests that its members mark food "best if used by" to indicate how long the food is safe to eat, and "use by" to indicate when food becomes unsafe.

Kinda screwy, if true.  I always assumed "best if used by" meant it might start to taste funny (stale, rancid, etc.) around that time - a quality thing, not a safety thing.  And what's the distinction between how long the food is safe and when food becomes unsafe?

Much of the article seems wonky.  I dunno how much is wonky writing, how much is wonky editing, and how much is reporting on wonky policies.

Background-priority plumbing stuff

We finally got around to summoning a plumber to find and fix the leak under the master-bathroom shower stall, which had been an issue for a couple of weeks, plus a drippy faucet and sluggish drain in the kitchen, which had been issues for many months.

This all could have been DIY stuff, but I hadn't been getting around to it, and my body doesn't like working in awkward positions nowadays.

Anyway.

Shower leak: no problem.  Demonstrated, found, fixed.

Drippy faucet: the plumber wasn't too sure about the identity of the faucet.  I'd earlier acquired a pair of valve core cartridges for a Delta faucet that looked similar, but he wasn't finding any Delta markings on the faucet.  He tried anyway.  Turns out I did have the right parts, and he managed to replace the cold valve (which turned out not to be the leaky side, go figure), but the handle/cover on the hot valve was just not coming off with any reasonable amount of force.  Looks like we may end up replacing the faucet (which would also resolve the problem with the sprayer not working right, and no replacement of the correct style and finish being available).  It's a slow drip, so not exactly a panic.

Sluggish drain: he disassembled the rather peculiar drain, and found a wing nut (which Joy had lost), a plastic straw (must be from the previous owners), and rather a lot of ick.  Some cleaning later, it's running better.  Looks like it needs more hot water, and maybe an occasional dose of ick remover.

So, one problem solved, one improved, and one not fixed.  Such is life.  Joy will be looking at new kitchen faucets.  Either of us could install a new faucet, if sufficiently motivated (after all, we were doing that stuff back in 2018).

Stainless aircraft cable identifies as white PLA.

Wait, isn't the PLA Red, kinda by definition?

OK, rewind.

Out to the garden in the oppressive humidity (as in, heavy fog) but not so much heat yet.

Drive the last three T-posts for the dinosaur pen.

Next step... well, there's the gate frame to be put up, but that waits a little while.  I think that's a tomorrow thing, when the ground has had a chance to dry out a little.  This morning is very muddy indeed; something to do with 1.88" of rain yesterday morning and very humid conditions since.

So, time to do the wire across the top to support the anti-pterodactyl netting.  Fetch the roll of small-caliber stainless-steel cable, the crimper, a couple of crimp ferrules, an S-hook, and a turnbuckle (eye one end, hook the other).  Remove the zip-ties that hold the roll together.

Crimp a loop in one end of the cable, feed it through the eye atop one pole, and commence pulling.

Oops.

Spend the next hour or so untangling enough of the cable to get the job done.  Then pull it through, secure at both ends, and tension.

And what to do with the rest of this mess?  Well, do I have some sort of empty spool around here?

Indeed I do!  I used up a spool of white PLA last month, and saved the empty spool because you just never know.

More time untangling the remaining cable, then wind it onto the spool, dirt, grass, moisture, and all.  How stainless is it?  Tune in a couple of months hence!

Today, more work on the dinosaur hut.  Tomorrow, the gate.  Real Soon Now, wire on everything (probably after the hut is in place, because it'll be easier that way).  Top netting comes after wire.  And, gotta plant clover and grass and some bushes for shade, now that the weeds seem to be adequately subdued (another pass with the tiller awaits drier soil conditions).

Whyfor aren't thornproof gardening gloves an actual thing?

I have heavy leather gloves.  They're OK for some kinds of thorny plants.  The particular nasty weeds that need pulling at the moment, not so much: they have very thin spikes that poke through the leather with moderate application of force.

So, check Amazon.  Lots of thornproof gardening gloves.  Most are leather, just like what I have already, and presumably equally not-thornproof.  A few are rubberized nylon, and have reviews that say they're not at all thornproof.

Howzabout gloves with a couple layers of Spectra or something in the gripping surfaces?  Or some other high-strength, puncture-resistant film?  (Woven Kevlar is useless for pointy things; sheet-type material is required.)

The grand conceit

Spotted somewhere:

Look at all those cars on this freeway!  Everybody in all those cars would fit on a single train!  Wouldn't that be so much more efficient?

No.  No, it wouldn't.

That's akin to pointing out the traffic jams on Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco, and suggesting that high-speed rail direct between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the solution, when nearly all the traffic is local.

The train goes from Point A, being a train station, to Point B, being another train station.  Yes, it may stop at intermediate stations... all of them at fixed locations along the track.  The people in the cars are going from diverse locations to diverse locations.

So even if they're mostly going from a city that has a train station to a city that has a train station - a dubious assumption! - they have to have a way to get from their homes to the station at Point A, and from the station at Point B to their offices.  This requires a vast amount of coordinated ground transportation.

And if they're wanting to do their shopping on the way home from the office?  Yeah, just try carrying a week's worth of household supplies on any sort of mass transportation.

The grand conceit of Communists, Socialists, and Fascists alike is that they can plan and organize such things as a transportation network, build out the vast and complex infrastructure (or, rather, order it to be built), and have it work.  Efficiently, like.  Because passenger transportation demand is perfectly predictable, isn't it?  If all else fails, we simply force all the workers to live in giant concrete blocks next to the train station at Point A, and work in giant concrete blocks next to the train station at Point B.

Decentralized personal transportation, which is to say personally owned and operated cars, is self-organizing.  People make decisions about where to live, work, and shop, taking commute times into account.  As demand changes, a responsive government will improve infrastructure to follow demand, rather than building infrastructure and then commanding demand to change to use it.

One of these days, I need to write the Trotsky vs. Ford essay (the Big Idea vs. the little idea).  This is not that day.

Afterthought:  Just a little reminder that people with big ideas for efficiency value your time and labor at zero.  To Planners, you are less than a slave.

Meanwhile, around the world

They're rioting in Panama (dee dee dee dee dee dee dee).

The Italian parliament (including the Clown Movement) has gotten tired of playing Super Mario Dragster.

Truckers are blocking ports in California, because the courts have finally and definitively ruled that an owner-operator can't be an independent businessman but must be an employee of some corporate overlord.

The worldwide consequences of insane ESG policies dictated by Brussels are being blamed on nearly-as-insane monetary policies and of course on the Mad Tsar (with whom Western governments are busily making deals behind the scenes, and most likely preparing to trade Lugnuts and Donuts for a temporary supply of natural gas to get Europe through the winter).

And female impersonators have somehow gone from an adults-only burlesque act to a specially-protected gender identity to be promoted in public schools.  (I still think red-state schools should offer NASCAR Queen Story Hour as an alternative.)

Addendum: Stonks were perky yesterday; unhappy today.  CNN explains: Russia broke the stock market.  Uh, riiiight.  Try: insane policies, including the bizarre notion that the global economy can be turned off and back on again, broke the real economy.  Production is down; transportation is expensive; consequently, prices of real commodities are up.  But that sounds too much like supply-side economics, which we all know is A Total Lie™.

Weather, or not.

As of bedtime, the forecast called for a heavy storm delivering an inch and a half of rain in a short time not long after midnight.

As of waking-up time this morning, the rain gauge showed 0.3 inch, and the forecast was for maybe some scattered thunderstorms and another tenth of an inch or so of rain for the day.

Now it's an hour later, the storm is loud and vigorous, the rain gauge shows an inch and a quarter so far, there's lightning everywhere (we're in a relatively low-lightning area, but some of it is still pretty close), and it looks like it'll continue for a while yet.

I guess I won't need to do any watering today.  And things will be too muddy to do any yard work.  Well, there's plenty of stuff to be done indoors.

Confusion....

Been having a lot of Amazon stuff vanish lately.  Well, virtually vanish.  Official records show the packages having been handed off to some agent or other for final delivery, just at the moment they were delivered to the mailbox here.  So I have the actual physical goods, but delivery thereof is in limbo.

And, today... I got a notice from UPS that my package from Amazon was arriving soon.  Which seemed a bit odd, as I hadn't gotten the usual coming-tomorrow notice yesterday, but whatever.  Late afternoonish, I checked the status: delivered, location "Other" - as in, presumably, not the porch, garage, nor driveway.  Hm.

Look around: no package.  Check Amazon to see what was supposed to be in the package: only one package coming today, which arrived via USPS.  Nothing scheduled to arrive via UPS.  Several things in USPS limbo (delivered but misreported).

Well, I didn't get the notification that the package was delivered.  Just that it was coming soon.

Computers.  Can't trust the dang things.  Whom the gods would destroy, they first teach BASIC.

Theology ain't rightly my strong point, but...

Seems some of the loopier activists are now proclaiming that the Supreme Being of the Universe wants abortion on demand up to the fourth trimester or some such.

Seems to me, if the Supreme Being doesn't want you to have a baby, said Being could prevent you getting pregnant in the first place, no?

... Unless we're dealing with a bunch of Moloch-worshipers, which seems increasingly likely.

Where'd I put my brain this morning?

Time to start cutting openings and drilling mounting holes for the windows and vents on the dinosaur hut.

Let's start with the solitary window on the front end.  On the side that doesn't have the entrance, top of window frame 4" from the top of the wall.  Mark the location, and get it centered between the frame bits.  Drill holes for the threaded inserts.  Drill the corners of the window opening.  Cut the opening with the jigsaw.  Clean up the holes.  Confirm that everything lines up.  Install the inserts.

Notice that I'd ever-so-carefully placed it 4" from the bottom of the wall, not the top.  Grrrrrr.

Oh, well... I can put another one in the proper place.  They can have a view from the bottom of their hut as well as from the perch.  Or I could put in a blank panel, or a vent, or a cover plate with cryptic warnings on it, maybe written in Silurian or something.

 

Then I check my e-mail.  One message has a title mentioning "superior organ transport"; I immediately conjure up a vision of the Mighty Wurlitzer held aloft.  Though I guess "superior" could have the more modern meaning of "better" rather than "above", so perhaps Neddie has acquired an improved instrument for his new attempt at setting the world land speed record, or just for driving to work?

A call from the bank

No, not any sort of emergency.  Someone from the local branch of my everyday bank called yesterday, just keeping in touch.  No, I don't need any new banking services just now... though if I manage to get my business started back up, that'll change eventually.

Of note: interest rates are going up.  (Yeah, heard that.  I pay off my credit cards before interest applies.)

Of particular note: lending interest is going up.  Deposit interest isn't.

Which points to a complete disconnect; apparently the Fed has somehow become the lender of first resort, so lending banks don't need to have lots of deposit money, so there's no need to pay enough interest on deposits to attract depositors.  Or something like that, anyway. Something to do with the rules for fractional-reserve banking.  (Or is it the Fed?  Are the digital dollars lent by banks simply conjured out of thin air?  Have we progressed from monetizing the national debt to monetizing all debt?)

I seem to recall noticing this over a decade back: essentially no interest on deposits, unrealistically low interest on preferred types of loans, and crazy high interest on other loans.  It runs contrary to the way the system worked back when I learned about it... back when it worked.

Fun fact!

While chickens are not technically cats, they can be entertained with a laser pointer.

A short day's yard work

Today, that is.  Yesterday was more productive.

Yesterday afternoon: mowing of a now-shaggy area having been blocked since spring by a large fallen branch, I figured 'twas time to move the branch.  The original plan was to cut it up and have a brush burn, but I decided it made more sense to scoop it up with the loader (and, what the heck, I still had the pallet forks on) and dump it in the pond as fish habitat.  So I did that.

And, as long as I was out with the tractor, the tiller was still on and rain is in the near-term forecast, I did some shallow tilling around the topsoil-spoil zone from last summer's pond project, then adjusted the seed/fertilizer spreader, loaded it up with grass/clover pasture blend, and scattered seeds around the roughed-up areas.

Then some mowing.  Nowhere near caught up, but making incremental progress.  There's a large flattish area that I could do with the tractor if I removed the tiller (which it's now time to do) and put the mower deck on.

And this morning?  By the time I got outdoors, it was already getting hot and feeling stormy.  I managed to drive four more T-posts; the last two took an unreasonable amount of pounding.  My hands were getting sore, so I fetched my padded vibration-repellent gloves.  They're padded, and stiff, so just wearing them makes my hands sore.  Ugh.  Well, maybe the last few posts will be easier after the rain comes and goes.

The painters, meanwhile, are at the barn.  They've got it mostly masked up [insert picture of barn wearing crocheted chin diaper here], including having the rollup door covered, so I won't be using mower nor tractor today, weather or not.  Probably not making a gas-station run with the empty cans, either.

And, the painters are trying to use an electric sprayer over at the barn, so I had to fire up that portable generator I'd bought a year or so back because it was on sale and seemed like a good idea.  I guess this'll give it a proper test.

Storm's still a few hours out, but I don't want to be doing anything that puts me underfoot of the workers.  Maybe I'll work on the dinosaur hut.

Sunday morning before it gets hot

Driving my teapot around the yard.

I'm sorry, I'll read that again: T-posts.  Driving T-posts in the yard.

Before it got too hot for doing manual labor, like.  But it was darn humid.

I got about half the posts for the Pygmy Dinosaur Containment Facility driven.  After that's done, it'll be time for the frame for the gate, then the gate itself, then wire on everything.

I think I may need  to run some high-strength fishing line around the tops of the posts to help line them up; some of them are visibly lead-free out of plumb.

(Technically, lead-free is plumb out of plumb.)

Somehow, it got to be Saturday already.

Garden status:

• We're getting lots of tomatoes.  Eat some, dehydrate some, give some away....
• Soybeans, some of the other sorts of beans, and buckwheat look promising.  I think we'll get a modest amount of corn this year.
• Delicate little pea plants are getting overrun by weeds of various sorts, as are the small grains (wheat, oats, barley).  I may have to kill & till those patches, and try to have them in shape for next year.  (Or... some of those things grow fast, if not outcompeted by weeds.  I might yet manage to sneak in a crop this year.  But probably not, given how much time other matters are taking up.)
• The squash and melon vines are running amok, and flowering abundantly.  This bodes well.  Next year, gotta give them more room.  (I think they'll get that entire end of the garden patch, with tomatoes, peppers, and legumes being pushed into the middle.)

Work:

• I think the current ToasterCo panic is sorted out, though they still need to figure out how some wrong resistors got installed on the prototype board, and what else may be wrong in the assembly department.  I should do a little final testing and then check in the tweaked code.
• I need to find a bunch of half-days to work on an actual project for the next-gen toaster.

Home stuff:

• We just finished up the special monitor protector to keep Joy's upstairs monitor safe from errant hula hoops, so that's out of the way.
• The dinosaur hut is taking shape, but there's a bunch of work yet to be done on it.
• I'd meant to drive the T-posts (or at least n-1 of them) for the pygmy dinosaur containment facility this morning, but the before-it-gets-too-hot time somehow went away.
• The painters are back, resuming work on the trim and trying to figure out how to fix a couple of oopsies on the deck-staining front.
• I got the mower back into reasonable shape: new blades (need to resharpen a bunch of old ones sometime), new anti-scalp rollers, and determining that somehow the deck-leveling linkages had gotten out of sync - I seem to recall that one of them lost its hitch pin & washer, and I guess when I installed the replacements I somehow put it at the wrong setting.

Plenty of stuff yet to be done.  Today, probably more work on the dinosaur hut, plus a shopping expedition and some mowing.  Tomorrow or thereabouts, gotta make a gas run with the truck and a bunch of cans.  And more mowing.  It's summer; there's always mowing.

Ah, more discomprehension.

Consumer goods, such as (to pick a random category) food, are getting scarce and expensive.

This bears the label inflation, which is blamed on money-printing.  Seems reasonable, right?

But.

The money being printed doesn't seem to be ending up in the hands of people who buy most of the regular consumer goods.  (Where it is going is possibly The Wrong Sort Of Question.)

And... someone noted recently that the price of gold was off its peak.  Like, trending down the past three months or thereabouts, despite all the fiat dollars being conjured into existence.  How can you have monetary inflation and the monetary price of gold dropping at the same time?

This kinda suggests that all the usual cures for inflation are likely misguided.  Curing inflation with a recession, now... well, in dollar terms we're officially not in a recession.  In terms of production, methinks we are.  And the retail price increases (and shortages) are more the result of production being down than of the money supply being up.

Which points to much of the inflation we're seeing now actually being driven by a recession.  Adding more recession seems counterproductive.

We need the economy working again, to produce (and distribute) more.  Not further crippled, and producing less.

"Efficiency!"

When we moved in here, we got us a brand spankin' new washer & dryer.  The modern, high-efficiency sort.  Less water, less electricity, all that good stuff.  This was a set that was getting tippy-top reviews, mind you.  Takes extra time, but that's not a big deal for equipment that runs pretty much unattended.

Well.

Turns out the washer is so water-efficient that it makes everything stinky unless you run a special washer-cleaning cycle every couple of laundry cycles.  Which, as used in practice, doesn't sound all that efficient, does it?

Adding to the confusion

The painter was back today, for a little while.  Joy clarified what she wanted done with regard to staining of the deck.  Then, well.

He suddenly took off, and hasn't been heard from since.  Mind you, this was while I was at my desk looking up the water situation, so... I suppose he got the water alert and maybe went shopping for bottled water and then home to his family...?

We're supposed to have a couple more good painting days before the rain returns.  And, sooner or later, there's supposed to be a crew making a start on painting the barn, before which time I need to finish moving clutter away from it.

If it's not one thing...

Phone gave a squawk a little while ago.

This is nothing like tornado weather.  Amber alert, maybe?  From the far reaches of the state?

Nope.  Water alert.  The alert links to www.seviervilletn.org, which is not responding, probably because everybody clicked on the link.

Consult some news sites.  Boil water advisory in effect for Sevierville and parts of Sevier County, including this part.

Look around some more.  The problem is indeed with Sevierville water, relating to damage incurred during flash flooding Tuesday night.

Whew!  Our water comes from Knoxville, along with our electricity.  Gas comes from Sevierville, but there's no boil gas advisory.  Yet.  (Given that the War on Natural Gas is rapidly heating up, you just know someone's working on ways to mess that up.)

Software becomes increasingly broken.

Android: my phone keeps unlocking itself and hallucinating user input whenever my pocket is sweaty.  There seems to be no way to control locking behavior.  (When I had on-body detection enabled, it kept locking itself anyway and insisting that it had been locked manually.  Now, it keeps either unlocking itself or not locking in the first place... and there doesn't seem to be any provision for manually forcing it into lock mode.  You'd think that would be one of the options called up by a long press on the power button, but no.)  A phone case that covered the front of the phone as well as the back would presumably cure the sweaty-pocket problem, but would make the phone both more bulky and less useful.

Windows: keeps rebooting itself at arbitrary times to install updates.  Hey, Microsoft!  Even consider that some people use their PCs in lab environments, where random reboots are absolutely unacceptable?  (I'm running one specific lab app on the laptop under Windows, because the app hasn't been updated in years and it's not compatible with current Linux libraries.)

Avast: Joy has this on her Windows laptop.  She'd been using the free version for years, then decided to spring for the paid version.  While she had the paid license that wasn't in use, she couldn't get the software to accept the license code, so she continued using the free version.  Special bonus feature: when the free version approaches its expiration date, it now gradually cripples the entire computer, slowing everything to the point of complete uselessness.  Well!  A few days ago, she finally sorted out the arcane process of activating the paid version.  And what happened next?  Obviously, it started loading compulsory featureware... which bears a remarkable resemblance to spyware, and has quite a reputation as such.  Pay for the antivirus package, get bonus malware at no extra charge!  Spyware that rummages through all your files: what could possibly go wrong?

Update:  Following my fine old tradition of fixing software problems in hardware, I've ordered a new phone case/wallet thingy that will cover the screen.

I may need to buy more summer shirts with outsized pockets.  Or start carrying phone / first-aid kit / etc. in a sporran.