The Ultimate Answer to Kings

…it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what the 2008 “recession” did to it.

The linked article is ostensibly about Amazon exploiting an unorthodox resource in filling its need for seasonal workers (apparently robots don’t do quite as big a percentage of the warehouse work as Bezos has implied) but the interesting part is about what retirees do when their savings are stolen by bankers and they’re left on the street. I suppose they’re expected to quietly wander off and die somewhere, but you know how actual people can be so troublesome that way – they have a bad habit of living on and clogging “the system,” and they’re doing that by the thousands and tens or hundreds of thousands.

I suspect Obamacare’s “single-payer” successor will have a plan for that. Then things will all be neat and tidy and workers won’t ask any intrusive questions. But in the meantime all those troublesome older people insist on living on after their usefulness is expended. What can a giant corporation do but exploit them?

Meet the CamperForce, Amazon’s Nomadic Retiree Army

Before the crash, the Apperleys had been doing all right. Bob worked as an accountant for a timber products firm, and Anita was an interior decorator and part-time caregiver. They thought they would retire aboard a sailboat, funding that dream with equity from their three­bedroom house. But then the housing bubble burst […] Bob compared the “slow-dawning reality” of his new life to waking up in The Matrix: learning that the pleasant, predictable world you used to inhabit is a mirage, a lie built to hide a brutal reality. “The security most people take comfort in—I’m not convinced that isn’t an illusion,” he says. “What you believe to be true is so embedded. It takes a radical pounding to let go.”

I know exactly how that feels. It feels like terrifying shit. There’s a life past it, though I have to admit a camper in Quartzite never sounded very attractive to me.

h/t

LB can’t be fooled or forced into swallowing pills. It’s like his superpower or something. So I have to crush them and serve the powder with canned dog food. He’ll snarf that down without question or pause.

So he’s gonna love this.

While I was out that way anyway, figured I may as well fill the chickens up on their pellets. So everybody but Uncle Joel is feeling well-fed at the moment.

In fact I think I’ll cook up some lunch.

D&L said their dog Butch went through the same thing a few months ago and could actually see crystals in his urine. Put him on filtered water, problem went away.

But as one commenter said, we really are guessing. At the moment he isn’t even showing any symptoms. I let him out when I got home for a nice long comfortable-looking pee that didn’t have a trace of blood in it.

Me: I buried my dog two weeks ago.

Vet: (long pause) Oh.

I’ve actually had that conversation. Word for word. It sort of stuck in my memory. And I’m not saying the vet was responsible for that particular dog’s death, in fact I don’t believe the dog could have been saved. I do think the trained professional I took him to could have been a lot more pro-active – or at least just admitted he was useless. Instead he gave me the impression something was being done, and I waited too long before trying anything myself.

I’m not even a very pet-intensive person, and I can think of three times a vet failed to save the life of an animal under my care. In the other two cases, either misinformation or general uselessness led directly to the death of the animal. In Fritz’s case above, as I said, I think the vet’s fecklessness wouldn’t have mattered in the long run.

I’m not saying veterinarians are bad people. Maybe your experiences have been far more positive. Mine indicate they’re not very useful people.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: If LB had a bone sticking out, I’d have been in a vet’s office yesterday if I had to illegally and hazardously drive him there myself. That’s a condition I’d expect any doctor to know how to handle. But in cases like this, where even the cause of the symptom isn’t known and can’t be learned very well, I know exactly what a vet would do: Prescribe a course of antibiotics and say “go with God.”

Well, I’ve got that covered already. I just needed info on the dosage, which (thanks to the daughter of a friend of the blog who has my phone number) I now have.

I’m off this minute to a large-animal vet in town to purchase amoxicillin. Whether or not it helps LB’s going to love this: He’s absolutely immune to pills – he can spit them out or vomit them up no matter how you inject them down his throat or wrap them in food. So pills must be ground up and hidden in canned dog food. Twice a day. For two weeks. Yeah. He’s gonna love that.

Sorry if this is poorly written or unintentionally offensive, I’m in a big hurry. Have to catch my ride to town or wait till Monday.

BTW, LB actually seems fine. He had that one spell, and I’ve watched carefully and it hasn’t happened since. So far. Still gonna doctor him, though. Also I’m changing his water.

Except for one growth on a paw that went away on its own, LB has never apparently had a moment of ill health in his life. He’s pushing nine years old, though, and I think we’ve found one. On the mid-day walky, he had some blood in his pee.

That was … alarming.

Now, I’ve been a bit concerned for him lately because he has been peeing strangely for him. He’ll have one enormous squirt at the beginning of a walky and then seems to labor to squeeze out a few drops, several times along the way. “Urinary infection” came to mind, and I always put it out of my mind for lack of anything I can do about it, but now I’m seeing blood.

So I went to the internet. Most popular suggestion: Urinary infection. Not normally life-threatening, but I need to read up and get more serious about what I can do about it.

Second suggestion: Kidney stones. And you know I never really thought about that. I give him tap water because I don’t like hauling around all the water bottles I’d need to give him filtered water. But drinking the tap water damn near put me in the hospital a few years back, because it’s super hard. Blood in the urine was the least of my problems. Since then I’ve hauled around bottles of filtered water, and I’ve been fine. Now I’m thinking I should be doing the same for LB. I’ll have to move some things around to store that much water every week, but I’ll be in the process of shifting things around soon anyway when the addition’s done.

What’s the usual treatment for a urinary infection in a dog? Anybody know?

Or you could visit Venezuela and do it the Socialist way. Not as peaceful, probably, but you’ll starve just as surely.

Maduro Drops All Pretense, Vows to Become a Dictator to Ensure “Economic Peace” in Venezuela

“I want to do it nicely, but if I have to do it the bad way and become a dictator to guarantee [low] prices to the people, I will do it,” [Maduro] added.

To the successor of the late socialist leader Hugo Chávez, that means more price controls. The recently elected Constituent Assembly, made up only of regime loyalists, has taken up vast powers, overruling the legitimate Parliament controlled by the oppositon.

It is now setting up an Economic Commission that will, along with the “productive and distribution sectors” and “the consumers,” determine mandatory prices for basic goods such as milk, chicken, pasta, and cooking oil.

The socialist regime’s stated goal is achieve economic prosperity “as natural as a creek, like a water flow that cleans itself. To rinse the waters of chaos and speculation by smugglers,” Maduro said. “Venezuela needs stability, a win-win situation.”

Because that always works. Shit, those evil, destabilizing smugglers are the only factor keeping people fed at all.

You think all those rich lefty celebrities who urged on Hugo Chavez will get around to moving to Venezuela before or after it achieves that desert-like peace that’s just around the corner?

“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

– Robert Heinlein

…since first I learned to love it.

Winter must be coming; the phone rang and people wanted me to haul off pallets and junk wood.

Last winter I didn’t use half my cut firewood, so this autumn will be an easy one for cutting. I’m gonna fill my nice new woodshed, and then it can glaciate for all I care. I’ll have the woodstove and a winter’s worth of wood already cut, and even a backup propane furnace for when the nights are really cold.

Obviously before that happens I need to get the addition insulated and walled inside, but that’s going to start in a week. Things don’t start getting seriously cold here till middle or late November, most years. Plenty of time to finish the room and get moved in.

I’m feeling pretty good about this. 🙂

Dig this: After months of anticipation and leaked excerpts, virtually every minute of which has been filled with negative criticism, Hillary’s big book What Happened Is That It’s Totally Not My Fault has been released.

To…exclusively five-star reviews on Amazon? Really?

No. It seems…not really.

Watch As Amazon Deletes Hundreds Of One-Star Reviews Of Hillary Clinton’s New Book

In what many have dubbed a flagrant intervention by Amazon itself to seemingly boost the rating of Hillary Clinton’s new book “What Happened”, the Telegraph first reported, and subsequently many others observed first hand, that Amazon has been monitoring and deleting 1-star reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book “which was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released.”

The article does point out that the one-star reviews are likely as bogus as the five-stars. But take them out and leave the glowing reviews, and all you’ve got is hundreds and hundreds of advertising blurbs. Hell, we already know what Hillary’s PR flacks say about her.

Okay, in fairness we already know what everybody says about her. I’m happy she’s not prez, I’ll be even happier when she finally shuffles into the shadows. But in the meantime her meltdown is quite entertaining.

There’s probably a book about this somewhere.

Oh, hell. Who am I kidding? There’s probably a whole literary genre about this. People like to mock selfies, and I’ve joined in even though – just like probably 98% of the other mockers – I’m not above stooping to it myself for a laugh.

It turns out that, to go with that shelf-full of theoretical books, there’s a whole technology involved. No, I’m not talking about selfie sticks, available even in the crappy market in the crappy town nearest where I live, right next to the – er, spinny toy thingies, whatever they’re called. No, I mean gadgetry built right into this cool Magic Elf Box* that Landlady gave me last week. I discovered by accident the button that turns the iPhone’s very high-quality camera into a creepy stalker gadget and decided to see if I could get a pic of me and LB.

But it’s difficult to hold the damn thing out in such a way that you not only get what you want in frame but also have a digit free to push the now not-very-ergonomic button. So I accidentally mashed the button while trying to get us both properly in frame, and the phone/camera/tablet/PDA/federally-mandated covert surveillance device started making an alarming whirring noise exactly like one of those motor-driven SLR cameras the sports photographers used to get decent shots at tennis matches and the like. And upon examination it turned out I’d just shot 45 pictures and would I like to review them? Yeah, I figured I kinda would.

Most were trash, of course. Most of the expensive film in those even-more-expensive motor-driven SLRs was wasted too, but with digital files you can afford to not give a damn. There actually was one or two I wouldn’t have rejected even if they hadn’t been accidents.

This thing is fun. 🙂 Probably could have chosen a better background, but that happened to be where LB happened to be lying so it’s his fault.

—
*Courtesy of Tam.

In Surprise Vote, House Passes Amendment to Restrict Asset Forfeiture

Civil asset forfeiture is a practice by which law enforcement can take assets from a person who is suspected of a crime, even without a charge or conviction. Sessions revived the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allowed state and local police agencies to take assets and then give them to the federal government — which would in turn give a chunk back to the local police. This served as a way for these local agencies to skirt past state laws designed to limit asset forfeiture.

The amendment would roll back Sessions’ elimination of the Obama-era reforms.

No, of course it won’t make any difference. The senate will stay squishy, or there’ll be a veto or signing statement or some damn thing. Cops love 1033 and they love civil asset forfeiture like an earlier generation loved free donuts. It has led them into terrible habits and eventually it’s going to destroy them, but you can’t tell them that. As long as his administration lets them play soldier and steal the stuff they claim to be safeguarding, Trump knows he’s got one constituency solidly behind him. And, apparently, screw everybody else.

So no, this won’t make any difference. It’s worth a mention whenever I see somebody in congress doing something that isn’t completely contemptible*. I was just as surprised when Obama put the squeeze on those programs in the first place.

h/t
—
*though I might have a different opinion if I looked into whatever the hell the “Make America Secure and Prosperous Appropriations Act” is. I’m quite sure I’d hate it, so why look it up and harsh the buzz?

I never badmouth a gift. I got two high-dollar inverters for free, okay?

The idea of two of them was that my benefactor had the notion he could wire their outputs together and that didn’t work out. Which means I’ve got two 600-watt inverters but I’m only running one of them*, and 600 watts is sometimes kind of an awkward size.

For running the cabin, 600 watts is normally just fine. I think this inverter could even run a small refrigerator, though of course it would stress such a small battery bank after dark. But any time you introduce a power tool, you’ve got a question to answer.

Today I borrowed Ian’s shop vac…

…and the answer turned out to be yeah, sort of, but only for a few minutes. Actually the problem isn’t the inverter, which ran the vac just fine but I didn’t notice how fast it sucked down the battery voltage. And as soon as it hit LO VOLTS, it just switched off.

So that happened. Which I should have been paying more attention to, since we’ve been getting afternoon rain and it’s currently all cloudy…

Sigh. Think I’ll just turn the ‘pooter off now…

—
*One’s a spare, of course. Spares are always good. My power system may be small but it has 100% redundancy, baby, and that’s the only one in the neighborhood. 🙂

Last year somebody published a book by that title, a polemical rant about the “Progressive” agenda and how hostile it is toward religion (except Islam, of course, because it’s much safer to oppress Episcopalians) and those evil tools of the patriarchy we like to call “traditional values.”

Over the past several years social justice warriors have proven themselves immune to reason, rules of civilized conduct, and logic. It seems they’re also not much bothered by irony.

I do occasionally wonder: At what point do the normal people get to see this posturing as a threat to be dealt with?

British girl finds sword in legendary pool

A young British girl swimming at a lake in the United Kingdom believed to hold the legendary King Arthur’s famous sword happened upon a shiny sword herself.

Matilda Jones, 7, was swimming with family at Dozmary Pool while on vacation last Tuesday, when she discovered a shiny sword beneath the water, The Sheffield Star reported.

Apparently not a joke, though nobody’s making any Arthurian claims. Yet.

“I told her not to be silly and it was probably a bit of fencing, but when I looked down I realised it was a sword. It was just there laying flat on the bottom of the lake,” Paul said.

Paul said the sword is 4 feet long, which he said is “exactly Matilda’s height.”

He also believes the sword is just a film prop, and can’t be more than 20 or 30 years old.

Yeah, okay. But if Mordred shows up I’m moving to the southern hemisphere just to be on the safe side. I’ve already seen the violence inherent in the system.

Since changing email addresses there’s been a (small, so far) downside I was too clueless to anticipate: I’ve re-entered the world of email spam. And since the new address is technically or at least sounds like a business address, it’s “business” spam. I guess. Sort of. If seriously meant, it’s not very good correspondence.

Behold…

2017-9-129:40

Dear Manager:

Good days. So glad to introduce our company. We are special do the electric actuator: The electric actuator for the ball valve, butterfly valve, or the other part-turn valve.

The Electric actuator for the ball valve: Like the torque as the 50Nm, it is only 55.00USD/PCS, AC 110v, AC230v.

It is can part turn 0-90, 90-180, 180-270.

I would appreciate if you forward this letter to Technical Manager or to other expert responsible for technical integration of new products in your company, or provide me with his contact for we could discuss all the details of our future cooperation.

Are you interest it?

waiting for your reply.

Best regards.

Mr. Tony Kong

Global Business Development ！

[Redacted Gibberish that might have meaning if you can read Chinese script]

There’s not a single misspelled word. Or a single intelligible sentence.

I can actually think of applications for electrically-actuated ball valves here, oddly enough. Not important enough to run 300 yards of wire or completely rebuild the water manifold. Plus I distrust complications built into an essential system just because it sounds kinda cool.

I also distrust spam in oh, just the worst way. But sometimes it’s funny.

I really must be becoming an old hand because once this would really have freaked me out. You know what a tarantula hawk is? It’s an enormous wasp with bright red wings, very distinctive, and it’s said to have the second most painful venom of any insect. Curiously it’s not actually poisonous, but that’s another story. They say if you get stung by one there’s nothing to do but lie on the ground and scream till the pain fades.

They’re very common here. Fortunately they’re not the least bit aggressive unless you look like a tarantula and a female feels like laying an egg. Then you’re in for a very bad day. But lately there’s been a couple that seem to want to make sure I’m not a big brown hairy spider before they go off and do something else. Yesterday I slammed the Jeep into gear to keep one that seemed hell-bent on flying in the driver’s-side window from getting its wish. This morning I had one land on my shoulder, which is not as heart-warming as it may have imagined.

And then later this morning, between morning chores and the Monday water run to town, as I was greeting D&L on the road,…

…this big ol’ red-winged wasp started flying back and forth past my nose, finally settling on a heartfelt desire to leave through the passenger-side window, which was mostly closed. Why it couldn’t have left by the driver-side window, which was wide open, I really couldn’t say.

So I had to lean over to the wasp and roll down the window to get rid of it. Like I said, there was a time when that would have freaked me right the hell out. Now it’s just part of the local color.

Not a lot going on today. I’ve got Ghost duty, so I need to be at S&L’s several times today. Just finished baking bread and it’s cooling on the counter. Kind of nodding off in the reading chair whenBEEEPbuzzzBLEEEPbuzzzBLEEEPbuzzzBLEEEP

Wha! Whathuhell…?

This new smartphone Landlady gave me is rigged to respond to “Amber Alerts,” it seems. Because it’s gonna do everybody a hell of a lot of good if the smelly old hermit three hundred miles away knows all about a kid being snatched in Al_{fergod’ssake}buquerque.

Oh, there’s got to be a way to turn that off…

ETA: Fixed, hopefully.

Did you evacuate your chickens?

I got some good news this morning. You might recall my brother and sister-in-law bugged out a few days ago from their lifelong home which happened, through no fault of its own, to be right smack dab in the frickin’ path of frickin’ Hurricane Irma.

My brother takes pride in his hurricane preps, and he’s been doing this a long time – judge for yourself how there came to be 40-year-old storage food in his utility shed – but he also had the wisdom to look at a danger and see that his preps would not save him from it. So Thursday morning in the wee hours, before the morning traffic started and having boarded up their and step-mother’s houses very securely, BB and SIL split the state.

Sounded like the thing to do at the time and I applauded the decision. But then Irma did what hurricanes often do just to keep us guessing, and hung a left. Last time I checked it wasn’t quite decided that it wouldn’t hang another hard right just for the express purpose of flattening Big Brother’s house. But as of the moment of last communication, things were looking good for the east coast – and really, really bad for the west coast.

I am sitting here (laying actually) a happy and slightly confused man.
It’s too soon to count my chickens, but it appears that I may have won the
hurricane game this time. As I wake up this morning, I find our home
officially “out of the cone”.

But just like with a classic zero sum game, the only way I win is if some
other poor schmuck loses. In this case the loser will be the entire west
coast of Florida. How can any moral person be happy about that? Like our
recent example of Houston, our west coast has flooding huge danger. For
the east coast the storm would have been mostly about the wind. On the
west coast they will have the same wind that we would have had, but they
will have massive flooding on top of that.

So if I win the hurricane game, my celebration will be muted.

Have a nice weekend Joel.

Yeah, you too, BB. For my part, though maybe it won’t buy me points toward nirvana, I can multitask. I can be sad for the west coast and happy for my brother at the same time.

I’ve been officially done wiring the addition several times now. Always turns out there’s another tweak I should have thought of. Earlier in the week I laid out the bedroom furniture for my guests to ooh and ah over…

…and the first thing out of Ian’s mouth was, “You ought to put an outlet behind that nightstand.” Which I had to admit was a pretty good idea.

Plus they had just brought up gifts of Romex scraps, so there was exactly zero excuse not to drill more holes and pull more wire.

And while pulling wire – and it turned out that first scrap didn’t quite make it all the way to the end of the closet wall anyway…

But! I must be officially officially done with the wiring, because there are now seven outlets in the addition…

And the bag-of-scraps that Ian donated to the cause several weeks ago contained seven identical outlet covers. It’s a sign. See? I’m a low-budget hermit, so I’m not expecting a burning bush or anything requiring expensive CGI graphics.

It occurred to me last evening, as I was settling in with a book before bed, that I’ve created a rather pleasant thing.

I’ve got to haul all this furniture out of here now so I can clear-coat the floor and (soon) get to work on the walls. The bedframe and nightstand is just work, but I’m actually reluctant to move the chair out of there. That corner is a very pleasant place to sit and read in the evening, with breeze through those windows on two sides. Imagine how much nicer it will be with insulation and walls that don’t involve naked studs.

Funny – I’ve lived in the Secret Lair since November 2011, so going on six years. And it never seemed the least bit cramped to me till I kicked out that wall. Now I can’t wait to finish and move into the new room.

First of all, apologies for no post yesterday; (don’t tell anybody but) I overindulged a bit the evening before at a get-together at Landlady’s house, and woke feeling a bit, er, wretched. Just wasn’t feeling the urge to tickle the ivories. But I’m better today.

But I rose this morning to the news that SF writer Jerry Pournelle has died rather suddenly in his mid-eighties. Pournelle, I confess, wasn’t my favorite fiction writer, I mostly knew his fiction from the Niven/Pournelle potboilers from the 70’s and 80’s, but he was around for so very long. And he maintained a blog that was always good reading. And it’s from that blog I derive probably the most poignant thing that will happen today – here’s the very last thing Jerry Pournelle, the long-time veteran writer, ever wrote…

More later I’m experiencing a wave of nausea.

Bye for now.

He thought he had come back from a Con with the flu. Died in his sleep the next day.

Honestly, that’s kind of a cool way for a writer to go.