We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Will Rogers was one of the most interesting men of his generation (1879-1935), which is saying something indeed. His bio says he was a "stage and motion picture actor, vaudeville performer, American cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator." There are a lot of people in contemporary society who have gained notoriety trying one or two of those descriptors. Every actor is a social commentator now, for instance. However, as far as I know, Will Rogers was alive in the 1930s, but only acknowledged that Hitler was Hitler. He didn't have a laundry list of Hitlers ready for awards ceremony speeches. And he had the guy's number as early as 1933:
Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me like it's the Ku Klux Klan that he is copying.
As far as newspaper columnists go these days, none have the resume of Will Rogers. I'm fairly certain George Will was never a cowboy, for instance.
There was a bedrock of observation and wisdom behind the gossamer jibes, but never any malice. I know of no comedian today that could claim that. Malice is on the marquee these days. But malice doesn't last, I think. Malice appeals to the mob, and the mob gets tired from rioting and heads on home when their torches start to smolder and their pitchforks get heavy. No one will quote Amy Schumer in the year 2100. No one quotes her now, and I don't think she'll ripen none in the interim. Anyway, I decided to see if Will Rogers wisdom still applies to the news today. I report, you decide:
Sears, the one-time titan of American retail, filed for bankruptcy ahead of a $134 million debt payment due Monday and announced that it will close 142 stores. For years, Sears has contended with the threat that it would become the latest big-name retailer to fall to online competition and crushing debt. The icon once known for its pristine catalogs, and more recently known for decrepit showrooms and a controversial chief executive, saw its stock price plunge last week after reports that it had hired an advisory firm to prepare a bankruptcy filing ahead of the Oct. 15 payment.
There are three kinds of men: The ones that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
Called GH Lab, Amazon's new, experimental pop-up store has opened in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. It carries merchandise recommended by Good Housekeeping, though the store has no inventory. It's more of a showroom than anything else. Each item on display has a special Amazon SmileCode, which is Amazon's version of a QR code. Using the camera function in their Amazon app to scan the SmileCode, customers can pull up the item's product detail page and add it to their Amazon cart. When the purchase is complete, Amazon handles the fulfillment/shipping process.
We are the first nation to starve to death in a storehouse that's overfilled with everything we want.
The papers from the lab of Dr. Piero Anversa, who studied cardiac stem cells, “included falsified and/or fabricated data,” according to a statement to Retraction Watch and STAT from the two institutions. Last year, the hospital agreed to a $10 million settlement with the U.S. government over allegations Anversa and two colleagues’ work had been used to fraudulently obtain federal funding. Anversa and Dr. Annarosa Leri — who have had at least one paper already retracted, and one subject to an expression of concern — had at one point sued Harvard and the Brigham unsuccessfully for alerting journals to problems in their work back in 2014.
Letting the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back.
The modern traveler has a supercomputer in their pocket. Smartphones can help you do a whole lot more than call home or pass the time in the airport with games or videos. Travel apps for your smartphone make it easy to plan your whole trip, from tracking flights to arranging for car hire. They can also help you deal with unexpected hiccups on the fly.
When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.
Dow Jones futures fell solidly Monday morning, along with S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures. A stock market correction began last week due to heavy selling in the major averages and leading stocks. In a stock market correction, investors should largely stay on the sidelines but remain engaged and build their watch lists. Pay attention to top stocks that are holding up well, such as Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Ulta Beauty (ULTA), UnitedHealth (UNH), Boston Scientific (BSX) and O'Reilly Automotive (ORLY).
"Don’t gamble"; take all your savings and buy some good stock, and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.
Social Security checks will be 2.8% bigger in 2019. That's great news for retirees, but there are some important things every Social Security recipient needs to consider about the increase. These include the fact that some retirees might not see the full amount of the increase reflected in their checks, and the cause of the increase could indicate that retirees don't make any real progress toward financial security in spite of the bump-up in income.
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
There have been months — or is it years now? — of bad news about the social network. Last month, Facebook revealed that a security vulnerability exposed up to 50 million accounts to being hijacked by hackers. Through the vulnerability, a hacker could take over your account — meaning anything you ever posted on Facebook, or even apps that you connected with using your Facebook account, could have been infiltrated.
The New York Times is only marginally better. A big banner ad for a luxury brand at the top of the page, plus two smaller ads for the same brand. And if I click through to an article, there’s a massive ad for a slipper (and I’ve seen this ad a hundred times), and several Amazon ads as I scroll down the page. But it gets worse, because those slipper ads are animated. These are the worst type of ads, the ones that distract you and make it harder to read the news you have paid for.
Advertising makes you spend money you haven't got for things you don't want.
Tuesday's laws made clear that authorities want tech companies to play their part in the surveillance, policing, and silencing of the Uighurs. Beijing justifies its crackdown in Xinjiang — also known to Uighurs as East Turkestan — as a counterterrorism measure, though it's denied UN inspectors access to the region. Google could be complicit in this persecution if its secretive plans to launch a censored search engine — codenamed "Project Dragonfly" — become a reality.
When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, "I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with."
After struggling to fix manufacturing problems at its sole auto factory in Fremont, California, Tesla has started the process of building a plant in China, the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. The unprofitable carmaker is in the process of procuring land in Shanghai for its first manufacturing facility outside the U.S., pushing ahead with its plans after months of tumult involving Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.
We hold the distinction of being the only nation that is goin' to the poorhouse in an automobile.
The U.S. economy is in its 10th year of economic expansion, and state government budgets are benefiting from a solid growth in tax revenues. State general fund revenues have grown 40 percent since 2010. Many of the nation’s governors have used the growing revenues to expand spending programs, whereas others have pursued reductions in taxes.
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Dylan never recorded this little ditty commercially. My guess is that he filled his sweet little tune with nonsense verse (as he has been known to do) until some good lyrics might emerge. Evidently, they did not.
There is no youtube for it, but this guy covered the tune.
We're getting towards Brussel Sprout season. Delicious baby cabbages with a strange appearance in the garden.
A tip or two to make them better: People who grow them in their gardens leave them standing all winter and harvest as wanted. They taste better after frosts or coated with snow. If store-bought, throw them in the freezer for a couple of hours or days.
A secret warm salad family recipe: Steam them (still firm, not mushy), cut in half, toss with pomegranite seeds, pecans, goat cheese, and a maple syrup vinaigrette. Then try to tell me you do not like Brussel Sprouts.
I am not talking about either hiking/walking on well-built trails where sneakers are fine or, the other extreme, technical climbing. The great in-between is what we enjoy taking on. Rugged hikes with steeps and some scrambling requiring fitness and hands and knees at times.
Some people claim Tuckerman's to the top of Mt. Washington is a great example of that sort of thing. Most outdoor people in New England have taken it on at least once.
Hiking is an all-weather sport. Our favorite hiking gear:
Pants: Prana and Montane Medium-duty hiking boots: Meindl and Vasque Light, layerable packable all-weather jackets: Many choices, but Patagonia way too expensive. Daypacks: Osprey Knee pads: Any cheap ones on Amazon. If you have bony knees, they are handy on rocks. Hiking poles: Glorified walking-sticks. Not needed for well-build trails but handy for rough hill hiking and useless on rocks. In Euroland, everybody uses them. On our Dolomites hikes we could have used them on scree slopes - everybody else did and they would have spared Mrs. BD some knee damage on the steep downhills. Ordinary LL Bean poles are fine. When there is scrambling, just stick them on your daypack. Most daypacks have pole-holders.
Pic is part of the Giant's Playground/Arching Rocks bouldering route at Mohonk
In Yankeeland we are in prime hiking season. No bugs, no heat.
I am finding rock scrambling to be more interesting than regular hiking or even hill hiking. Demands agility, judgement, full-body conditioning, and a bit of stress-tolerance. I have no interest in technical climbing, though, although it is fun to watch people do it in places like The Gunks.
One item that might help me a bit with scrambling is some knee pads. I have bony knees which do not enjoy too much time on rocks. Scrambling means a fair bit of hands and knees, high step-ups, and steeply-angled boulders. In other words, fun with just a whiff of danger.
A few cool scrambling trails in the Northeast that we are familiar with:
What do people do to be in shape for this type of "hiking"? Stair-climbers, 2 steps at a time - and sideways stair-climbers. Rule of thumb for rock hikers: almost never go down the way you came up. Down is rarely safe.
Barbour waxed-cotton jackets are made for cool weather and cool drizzle, not for temperatures below 25 degrees (F). They are tough though, and can take a beating. Their appeal is to tradition and style nowadays, while Gore-tex is more practical and cheaper, and take no breaking-in time.
You may never have observed one of these predatory songbirds, but it's the time of year when they come down from their tundra breeding grounds for the winter.
They look a bit like Mockingbirds, but their behavior, and a good look at their plumage and beak, makes the ID clear. They are typically seen hunting from a perch or wire over open areas.
Are Italian Gardens English Gardens, or vice-versa? The Brits had a multi-century love affair with Italy. We're in Italy, doing hikes on sections of the Via Francigena, but with my Costco International Mercedes wagon we never pass up famous gardens. Like this one:
I have always loved them. I love ships and boats, and even canoes and kayaks. Some of my life-long favorites off the top of my head:
Moby Dick Two Years Before the Mast Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World The Patrick O'Brian series Carry On, Mr. Bowditch Perfect Storm The Nagle Journal Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
I learned from O'Brian that the original use of the term "skyscraper" applied to topgallant masts which reached up to catch the highest breezes. What is a mast and what is a spar? You can figure it out yourself.
Whether true stories of fiction, the sea is a dramatic setting for tales. What are your favorite sea stories?
The only self-help book you’ll ever need, from a psychiatrist and his comedy writer daughter, who will help you put aside your unrealistic wishes, stop trying to change things you can’t change, and do the best with what you can control—the first steps to managing all of life’s impossible problems.
I have a headache. I have a headache that has zip codes. I have a headache that should join the circus and be exhibited. I have a headache that would make Dante buy a Spirograph and get back to work. I have a headache that can only be described with Latin nouns. I have a headache that makes the back of my eyes behave like a stripper's tits.
But I don't mind my headache, really, because somewhere in the back of my throbbing skull, there's still room for a sunny little spot that reminds me that I have never had a Facebook page.
As I made my way through the meandering hallways of Tokyo Station, I felt like a pilgrim making a monumental journey, before my actual trip. I was headed to the mecca of ekiben – beloved boxed meals created specifically for long train journeys. Like the crowds bustling around me, I had a train to catch, and my last order of business was to find myself some lunch for the ride.
I filed this essay under, "Every culture but my own is wonderful."
The woman, unnamed for security reasons, deposited 62,500 Canadian dollars into a bitcoin automated teller machine believing she owed taxes. It was a fraud. A man claiming to represent the Canada Revenue Agency called her, threatening the new immigrant with arrest and deportation for tax default.
She's new in town. She didn't know that the Canadian government only accepts Canadian Tire Money to avoid deportation.
Alerts on Da Boss’ iPhone warned that his Google Nest surveillance cameras with views into and outside the apartment had picked up movement. Outside, a full cast of law enforcement personnel from the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the local police department were primed to swoop in. Inside, they found piles of marijuana and multiple firearms. More intriguing, there were bundles of cash alongside fake-ID-card printers, 36 credit card blanks and reams of printouts containing American citizens’ personal data. Investigators spotted the Nest cameras and would soon make the first publicly known federal government demand for customer information and surveillance footage from Google’s smart home division.
Men who yell singsong doggerel into microphones held at a funny angle used LEO surveillance equipment to steal money from boosted credit cards, but their thermostat ratted them out. Man, I have a headache reading that.
Earlier this week, Tesla filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the name for a “distilled agave liquor” and “distilled blue agave liquor,” according to a CNBC report.
Speaking of headaches, sing along with me: One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor...
In a cease-and-desist order against Voya Financial Advisors, the investment advisory unit of Voya Financial, the commission used the “Identity Theft Red Flags Rule” to censure the firm for allowing hackers to access social security numbers, account balances and even details of client investment accounts.
There's a new sheriff in town, isn't there? Exxon spills a little oil and some birds get gooey, and they get a billion dollar fine. Data loss causes a lot more damage. Start treating it like an oil spill, and these little code monkey CEOs will wise up fast.
A smaller slice of people were more heavily affected. About 400,000 people served as the hackers’ entry point to the 30 million others on Facebook. For those 400,000, the attackers could see what the users see as they look at their own profiles. That included posts on their Facebook timelines, and names of recent Facebook Messenger conversations.
You know, I can solve this online privacy problem in about ten minutes. There are stalking laws on the books, aren't there? Make them apply to the internet. One big button required on every website that says, STOP FOLLOWING ME, AND ERASE MY INFO. If they don't, prosecute them like any other creeper ex-boyfriend or jilted bunny boiler.
On the same day Facebook announced that it had carried out its biggest purge yet of American accounts peddling disinformation, the company quietly made another revelation: It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government. Facebook said Thursday that it had removed any accounts associated with SocialDataHub and its sister firm, Fubutech, because the companies violated its policies by scraping data from the social network.
Please note that Facebook regards these sorts of things as an accounts receivable problem, not a security problem. If you paid them, you could do it all you want. They have an app for that, I bet.
While tackling this question, a team of Stanford researchers found a remarkable result: Simply seeding a few more people at random avoids the challenge of mapping a network’s contours and can spread information in a way that is essentially indistinguishable from cases involving careful analysis; seeding seven people randomly may result in roughly the same reach as seeding five people optimally.
Yes, but you can get into trouble for simply seeding more people at random. Ask Antonio Cromartie.
Amazon India has been told to pay Rs 10,000, besides litigation costs of Rs 2,000, to a law student for causing mental agony by retracting an offer of a laptop for Rs 190 after the complainant had placed an order for the same
If my math is good, which it's not, because I have a headache, 10,000 rupees is about 135 bucks American. I think Bezos the Clown can swing it.
Instead, this is about the Federal Aviation Administration bill that President Trump signed into law a little before 3 p.m. Friday--just before the moment when everyone else in Washington was watching a key senator's speech about Judge Brett Kavanaugh. To be clear, there's no suggestion that the White House intentionally picked a time when people weren't paying attention to sign the bill. This law had passed Congress with overwhelming support, and industry players and airline lobbyists have been watching it like hawks for a long time.
I'm a pretty fair writer, even when I have a headache, but this guy has me beat. How does he manage to write about something so mundane while twisting himself into manifold contortions like an origami, short-bus, Ida Tarbell? That's talent. Of a sort
Give this a listen. It covers child-rearing, victim identities, reflexive empathy, care for the elderly, and the importance of responsibility for meaning in life. Of course, life is difficult and painful. The youth know nothing. Of course life is unfair. You are not all you could be. Everybody is a victim. You have rights so you can meet your responsibilities. Feeling sorry for someone is not a moral virtue. "I don't care about you. I care about who you can be." Be more than you are. Treat yourself like somebody who wants to help you. The consciousness of time. The evil in taking revenge against God for the structure of reality. Etc.
A splendid North American bird in the woodpecker clan. Very fond of eating ants, too. Noticed an influx of them in the past two weeks and learned that they are in the semi-migratory category. Their northernmost breeders move south a bit.
Guten Morgen to all you farmers, and all the ships at sea. It's me, Roger de Hauteville. Bird Dog is having his teeth sharpened at the veterinarian/day spa. So you're stuck with me.
Say, do you speak German? Guten Morgen is German. Like most greetings, it says, "good morning," but really means, "Screw you, get away from the coffee pot, I've got spreadsheets to lie to."
What I find fascinating about guten Morgen, and similar greetings, is that they appear to be accusations, more or less. Now, I've declined very few German verbs, and no invitations to cocktail lounges, but just saying good morning should be guter Morgen if you're just assembling words out of the dictionary. Guten Morgen is correct, however, because it's in the accusative case. Guten Morgen is really just a truncation of a really long sentence in German (is there another kind?) that directs you to have a nice day. Like howdy, or hiya, or howyadoin, or hallo fellow well met, it's an abbreviated, handy way to express a longer thought in a short burst of syllables. It appears to my not very well-educated eye that all greetings are in the accusative case.
So, from now on, to flesh out my greetings with the appropriate sentiment, and stay within the spirit of the accusative, I'll say, "Have a nice day, or else."
Facebook said on Thursday it purged more than 800 U.S. publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically-oriented spam, reigniting accusations of political censorship and arbitrary decision-making.
I'm sure this was accomplished in their usual, even-handed, transparent, and non=partisan way.
Early measurements seemed to indicate that it was an asteroid — a dry rock much like those found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then by this past summer, astronomers largely came around to the conclusion that it was instead a comet — an icy body knocked out of the distant reaches of a far-off planetary system. Now a new analysis has found inconsistencies in this conclusion, suggesting that ’Oumuamua may not be a comet after all. Whether it’s actually a comet or an asteroid, one thing is clear: ’Oumuamua is not quite like anything seen before.
They named it ’Oumuamua? The name starts with an apostrophe? Okey Dokey then. Let's pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the largest single source of demand for American stocks is the American companies that issue them. Companies are on track to repurchase more than $770 billion in their own stock this year, according to research from Goldman Sachs. That’s more than twice the size of the next largest source of demand, exchange-traded funds, which last year bought $347 billion in shares.
So, according to the Times, companies have been buying gobs of their own stock, which is bad, but they stopped for fifteen minutes to fill out some paperwork, which is also bad. I blame Trump, which I believe is conclusion I'm supposed to draw if I read anything in the Times.
More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed a particular relationship between the size of a tree’s trunk and the size of its branches. Specifically, the combined cross-sectional areas of a tree’s daughter branches are equal to the cross-sectional area of the mother branch. However, da Vinci didn’t know why tree branching followed this rule, and few explanations have been proposed since then. But now in a new study, physicist Christophe Eloy from Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France, has shown that this tree structure may be optimal for enabling trees to resist wind-induced stresses.
I'm not buying it until I hear from Bob Ross. He can paint trees a lot faster than da Vinci, so he must know more about it.
Electric carmaker Tesla Inc said orders for cars placed by Oct. 15 will be eligible for a full federal tax credit of $7,500 and these customers will get their cars delivered by the end of the year. Under a major tax overhaul passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress late last year, incentives in the way of tax credits that lower the cost of electric vehicles are available for the first 200,000 such vehicles sold by an automaker. The tax credit is then reduced by 50 percent every six months until it phases out.
There are welfare queens, and then there's this guy.
Built in 1867, Punta Carena is one of Italy’s most important lighthouses, and is one of the last in the world to employ a full-time operator. But after being manned by a continuous line of 88 lighthouse keepers predating the dawn of Italian unification in 1871, D’Oriano is its last guardian, and these are his final months on duty.
The Italian government still pays a guy to flip a switch twice a day? Good work when you can get it. Of course Amazon Echo users shell out scads of their own cash, and surrender all their privacy, just so they can shut off the lights in the room they're in without flipping a switch. You decide which is crazier.
A consortium led by a prominent Seoul plastic surgeon purchased a controlling stake in South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange, reports said Friday. The hyper-wired South has emerged as one of the world's top Bitcoin markets, at one point accounting for more than 20 per cent of global bitcoin transactions - about 10 times the country's share of the global economy.
I still keep all my money in greenbacks. They're real, and they're spectacular.
Shortly after taking off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin reported a problem with the rocket's booster. The men were forced into a "ballistic descent", with their capsule landing a few hundred miles north of Baikonur. They have been picked up by rescuers.
First, picture in your mind flying in a spaceship built by the lowest bidder. Now picture flying in a spaceship built by the lowest bidder in Vladivostok.
Arts, culture and other quality of life issues were top of mind for Amazon.com Inc. officials in discussing Toronto as a possible location for its second headquarters with the city’s mayor. Housing affordability, immigration and transit were also hot topics in the talks earlier this year, Mayor John Tory said. “They spent what some people would probably find a surprising amount of time on what we’ll call, the sort of arts and culture, the general kind of life in the city,” Tory said at an interview at Bloomberg’s Toronto offices.
I'm trying to conjure up a name for someone less hip than Jeff Bezos, but I'm drawing a blank.
Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun.
I blame Sesame Street. No, really. The minute children learned that the alphabet was supposed to get up and dance before you paid attention to it, every succeeding generation was doomed. Me, I prefer to snarl, "Good morning" to everyone at work and then scratch in my ledgers to fleece the customers and lord it over the employees. Jeez, kids these days.
"There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters."
Cross Training shoes are designed for minimal cushioning, good floor-feel, light weight and as close to barefoot as possible.
We're getting towards Brussel Sprout season. Delicious baby cabbages with a strange appearance in the garden.
You may never have observed one of these predatory songbirds, but it's the time of year when they come down from their tundra breeding grounds for the winter.
F*ck Feelings
