In recent weeks, there's been a lot of chatter about global warming, and the great catastrophic events coming. The chief topic that accompanies this....we need to redistribution of money....mostly to go to poor nations (never West Virginia or the hill-country of Kentucky, or Selma, Alabama).
After much reflection, I've come to the better solution.....it's basically too late, and we need to put the money into transport (of some type) and just leave the Earth.
I've watched just about every single episode of Stargate, Star Trek, and Lost in Space (probably totalling 3,000 hours), and feel that it'd just be a better investment to haul up and leave (like when the trailer is no longer inhabitable or when neighbors have made a mess of things).
So what's our priorities in finding a new planet?
1. No bug-people. I've come to notice that things tend to go badly when you have to deal with them.
2. Preferably a planet with 24 to 36 hour days. If this is a planet with 134-hour days....it'll be a problem for me to adjust my sleeping hours to 60-plus hour per day.
3. Preferably a planet with no snakes.
4. Preferably a planet with ongoing climate change business. The climate needs to be rock-solid and not changing sixteen different ways every year.
5. Preferably a planet without any Amazon ten-foot tall women. It'd just draw a guy's attention around the clock and make it hard to concentrate.
6. Preferably a planet with no cable new networks or political business going on.
7. Preferably a planet with no giant eels or forty-foot alligators.
8. Preferably a planet with no tornadoes.
9. Preferably a planet with freaky monsters that you might have seen off a hundred of the Stargate episodes.
10. Preferably no robot creatures.
Thursday, 6 December 2018
Wednesday, 5 December 2018
Knowledge Essay
Everyday that you walk around....you are forced into a situation where you have to retain a fair amount of knowledge....not only to survive, but to conduct most all of the little taskings in your life.
If you take a 1936 car....there's about fifteen general things that you needed really know about the car, and maybe eight total controls that mattered on the car (brakes, accelerator, lights, key, horn, fuel display, speedometer, heat control, and window 'roller').
If you take a 2018 car....after you've read the ninety-page manual....you will reach the conclusion that there's about three-hundred significant things about the car that you need to know and remember. The sixteen different warning symbols on the dash? Well....yeah, you need to remember what exactly they mean. The forty-odd controls now at your disposal? Their significance matters. Every year that passes.....they add another two or three characteristics that add dynamics onto the way you operate the car.
GPS devices? There's probably a hundred features now that matter (you could program it to tell you where all the Sonic-burger 'joints' are located as you pass through town after town). You could use your GPS capability on the smart-phone to tell you about gas prices along the sixty-mile route to work and where you ought to stop to fuel up and save 4-cents per gallon.
Your refrigerator? You might have the newest model with forty features connected to some massive memory device.
Your heating system in the house? In my house, the system (from 2007) has seven control items, and I can arrange it to drop the temperature after 10 PM by fifteen degrees, and 'wake-up' at 5 AM to heat the house back to normal. Some folks have AC units which work in the opposite fashion.
ATM machines used to be dirt-simple, with only four options (besides dispensing money). Even their functionality has increased.
The problem is that you now need expertise there to answer very technical questions. In 1975, if you'd stopped at some hardware store for a home-project....'Dandy Dave' would have been able to answer every single question and you would have left in eight minutes with the right items. Today...'Dandy Dave' is gone, and you have his nephew 'Leon'.....who barely got out of high school, and he only knows of four types of hammers, while there are officially 23 models and types of hammers in the 'real world'. 'Leon' is worthless but he's all you got.
The burger kid at McDonalds? In the 1975, that kid knew the entire grill operation and any problems could be resolved in three minutes. Today, the kid has to call some technician out to repair the grill....mostly because it's too complicated for the real world. Same way for the coffee maker, the soda apparatus, and the fryer.
We each now walk around with 40,000 index cards of information that we have to remember....to survive and operate all the gadgets in our life. Will this actually double in the next twenty years? It's possible.
If you take a 1936 car....there's about fifteen general things that you needed really know about the car, and maybe eight total controls that mattered on the car (brakes, accelerator, lights, key, horn, fuel display, speedometer, heat control, and window 'roller').
If you take a 2018 car....after you've read the ninety-page manual....you will reach the conclusion that there's about three-hundred significant things about the car that you need to know and remember. The sixteen different warning symbols on the dash? Well....yeah, you need to remember what exactly they mean. The forty-odd controls now at your disposal? Their significance matters. Every year that passes.....they add another two or three characteristics that add dynamics onto the way you operate the car.
GPS devices? There's probably a hundred features now that matter (you could program it to tell you where all the Sonic-burger 'joints' are located as you pass through town after town). You could use your GPS capability on the smart-phone to tell you about gas prices along the sixty-mile route to work and where you ought to stop to fuel up and save 4-cents per gallon.
Your refrigerator? You might have the newest model with forty features connected to some massive memory device.
Your heating system in the house? In my house, the system (from 2007) has seven control items, and I can arrange it to drop the temperature after 10 PM by fifteen degrees, and 'wake-up' at 5 AM to heat the house back to normal. Some folks have AC units which work in the opposite fashion.
ATM machines used to be dirt-simple, with only four options (besides dispensing money). Even their functionality has increased.
The problem is that you now need expertise there to answer very technical questions. In 1975, if you'd stopped at some hardware store for a home-project....'Dandy Dave' would have been able to answer every single question and you would have left in eight minutes with the right items. Today...'Dandy Dave' is gone, and you have his nephew 'Leon'.....who barely got out of high school, and he only knows of four types of hammers, while there are officially 23 models and types of hammers in the 'real world'. 'Leon' is worthless but he's all you got.
The burger kid at McDonalds? In the 1975, that kid knew the entire grill operation and any problems could be resolved in three minutes. Today, the kid has to call some technician out to repair the grill....mostly because it's too complicated for the real world. Same way for the coffee maker, the soda apparatus, and the fryer.
We each now walk around with 40,000 index cards of information that we have to remember....to survive and operate all the gadgets in our life. Will this actually double in the next twenty years? It's possible.
Criticizing the Criticizer
I sit and watch around three to five hours a week of YouTube lectures. Often, after opening up for questions.....you have these 20-year old types stand up and open up with criticism on the lecture guy and it's the left-wing versus right-wing type of dramatic situation. The 'kid' wants to make some melodramatic moment for his 'cause'.
In 99-percent of these breathtaking moments....the student basically drives a 'stake' through their own argument and you end up watching some theatrical defense of a fifth-grade kid wearing adult clothing.
So I often sit there wondering....the kid has at least a year or two of college....maybe even closing in on four years of university time. Can't he sit and develop his basic argument and present it with a fact or two, and avoid stupid commentary, or protest-like singing, or yelling enough to shut down the lecture?
A lot of these university kids have tuition and living costs that amount to $25,000 a year and you would sit there and think about the limited capability that they are getting out of this deal. A hundred years ago....debate was an actual class and you had to show some marginal skills in this....to graduate.
After you've seen enough of these, you just shake your head. They obviously want to shut down the lecture....there's too much information flowing from the lecture guy. There are ideas being suggested which 'just blow the mind' of the kid trying to oppose or hinder the hecture. You can sense that they'd really like to stop this lecture chatter because some people in the audience might fall for this stuff and move away from the kid's beliefs.
As each one of the episodes occur....you kinda wonder.....if the kid realizes his dramatic failure at this lecture, does he go back to his professor 'mentor'....the guy giving him the basic for his arguments, and admit failure....or does he just go to the routine of marking his criticism of the lecture as a 'win'?
It's a sad thing to consider, but we are perhaps pumping out idiot university graduates, with huge debts, and debate skills are still that of a fifth-grade kid.
In 99-percent of these breathtaking moments....the student basically drives a 'stake' through their own argument and you end up watching some theatrical defense of a fifth-grade kid wearing adult clothing.
So I often sit there wondering....the kid has at least a year or two of college....maybe even closing in on four years of university time. Can't he sit and develop his basic argument and present it with a fact or two, and avoid stupid commentary, or protest-like singing, or yelling enough to shut down the lecture?
A lot of these university kids have tuition and living costs that amount to $25,000 a year and you would sit there and think about the limited capability that they are getting out of this deal. A hundred years ago....debate was an actual class and you had to show some marginal skills in this....to graduate.
After you've seen enough of these, you just shake your head. They obviously want to shut down the lecture....there's too much information flowing from the lecture guy. There are ideas being suggested which 'just blow the mind' of the kid trying to oppose or hinder the hecture. You can sense that they'd really like to stop this lecture chatter because some people in the audience might fall for this stuff and move away from the kid's beliefs.
As each one of the episodes occur....you kinda wonder.....if the kid realizes his dramatic failure at this lecture, does he go back to his professor 'mentor'....the guy giving him the basic for his arguments, and admit failure....or does he just go to the routine of marking his criticism of the lecture as a 'win'?
It's a sad thing to consider, but we are perhaps pumping out idiot university graduates, with huge debts, and debate skills are still that of a fifth-grade kid.
Tuesday, 4 December 2018
The Odds of a Government Shutdown
In this period of 2009 to 2013, being a government employee.....this 'threat' continued to come up and began to really affect morale of personnel around me. I look at the approaching threat of a shutdown, and think this might go longer than ten days....maybe even past the thirty-day point.
So some observations:
1. Within the DC area, there are a heck of a lot of people who work for the government and have themselves in a massive mortgage mess....with fifty percent of their check going to car payments and their mortgage. These are people who have enough 'extra' money laying around to handle a max of thirty days, and after that.....they go into emergency mode.
2. If this were to go 45 to 60 days? I could see banks having to send out warning notices and getting fearful of a massive collapse.
3. If Amazon was up and running with their new headquarters? That's a curious thing.....I think they could go and recruit 10,000 new employees and have them hired in seven days.
4. If the shutdown went past 60 days? A whole new door opens up with a 'all or nothing' political fight.
So some observations:
1. Within the DC area, there are a heck of a lot of people who work for the government and have themselves in a massive mortgage mess....with fifty percent of their check going to car payments and their mortgage. These are people who have enough 'extra' money laying around to handle a max of thirty days, and after that.....they go into emergency mode.
2. If this were to go 45 to 60 days? I could see banks having to send out warning notices and getting fearful of a massive collapse.
3. If Amazon was up and running with their new headquarters? That's a curious thing.....I think they could go and recruit 10,000 new employees and have them hired in seven days.
4. If the shutdown went past 60 days? A whole new door opens up with a 'all or nothing' political fight.
Monday, 3 December 2018
Harris Running?
If you read the front page today.....Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) says that in the next couple of weeks....she will come to a decision on a 2020 presidential bid.
My take?
She has three problems. First, beyond the borders of California....she's virtually unknown. In the south and midwest, she won't be able to run a four-star campaign effort.
Second, the Iowa-affect. I think she falls into the category of being less-than-desirable with most Iowa Democrats. Confrontational and prosecutor-like.....that's not an agreeable value to run a campaign there.
Third, personality-wise.....having seen her confrontations in the senate, she's a very difficult person on handling conflicts. In a debate, she'd really lose votes. A Trump-Harris election? It presents a tough dynamic to figure.
So if she goes forward....I think she's there mostly to run as VP. Otherwise, there's not much in wasting time and money in 2020.
My take?
She has three problems. First, beyond the borders of California....she's virtually unknown. In the south and midwest, she won't be able to run a four-star campaign effort.
Second, the Iowa-affect. I think she falls into the category of being less-than-desirable with most Iowa Democrats. Confrontational and prosecutor-like.....that's not an agreeable value to run a campaign there.
Third, personality-wise.....having seen her confrontations in the senate, she's a very difficult person on handling conflicts. In a debate, she'd really lose votes. A Trump-Harris election? It presents a tough dynamic to figure.
So if she goes forward....I think she's there mostly to run as VP. Otherwise, there's not much in wasting time and money in 2020.
Thursday, 29 November 2018
A Fake Story?
I sat today reading over the story from the London Guardian.....that suggests that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met privately with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Three times, I should note.
Manafort? He says it's totally fake and suggests that he will take legal measures....to sue the Guardian.
So how did the Guardian suggest this story? The comment is one single “well-placed source.”
The three meetings? 2013, 2015 and 2016.
Did they occur? Well....the only single source that might have some legit say...would be the Ecuadorian Embassy. The British police? They might have some team sitting there 24-hours a day and monitoring the place.....but to identify all of those who enter?
The only explanation on how the Guardian knows this stuff? Bond, James Bond. He was standing across from the embassy on all three occasions waiting for "M" to arrive to have an Ale and get new instructions, and he happened to see Manafort enter.
The odds that someone fed the Guardian some fake story.....to lead Mueller on a wild-goose chase? They'd have to go and get Assange in on this situation....then Assange leave the embassy with the US demanding to grab him. Then Assange would spend six months leading Mueller on....with some suggestion that he might know something. A deal would be made.....no charges on Assange, with US residency allowed. Then Assange lowers the 'boom'.....there were no visits.
Manafort? He says it's totally fake and suggests that he will take legal measures....to sue the Guardian.
So how did the Guardian suggest this story? The comment is one single “well-placed source.”
The three meetings? 2013, 2015 and 2016.
Did they occur? Well....the only single source that might have some legit say...would be the Ecuadorian Embassy. The British police? They might have some team sitting there 24-hours a day and monitoring the place.....but to identify all of those who enter?
The only explanation on how the Guardian knows this stuff? Bond, James Bond. He was standing across from the embassy on all three occasions waiting for "M" to arrive to have an Ale and get new instructions, and he happened to see Manafort enter.
The odds that someone fed the Guardian some fake story.....to lead Mueller on a wild-goose chase? They'd have to go and get Assange in on this situation....then Assange leave the embassy with the US demanding to grab him. Then Assange would spend six months leading Mueller on....with some suggestion that he might know something. A deal would be made.....no charges on Assange, with US residency allowed. Then Assange lowers the 'boom'.....there were no visits.
Wednesday, 28 November 2018
Understanding the GM Decision
Go take an hour's drive around any rural or urbanized community. Count the more modern vehicles (less than eight years old)...divide them into the category of sedan, truck, SUV, or crossover. The bulk of cars you see fit into trucks, SUVs, or crossover vehicles. Where you do find sedens....it's high-end type....sporty models....Asian models (Japanese or South Korean), or normal US-made sedens driven by folks over the age of fifty.
GM set up a strategy and stuck to it.....the customer base? They went to something else over the past decade.
When they did try to build a seden.....they scored marginal point with pieces of crap like their Impala model (loads of noise, jolts on every bump, poorly designed seats, etc).
If you went to some eighteen year old kid who will graduate this year from high school, and they'd like to get a new car for college coming up.....it won't be a US seden.
Should they have realized this impact back around 2010? I suspect that the statistical crowd was telling them every quarter that they had a problem, and they refused to change their strategy.
GM set up a strategy and stuck to it.....the customer base? They went to something else over the past decade.
When they did try to build a seden.....they scored marginal point with pieces of crap like their Impala model (loads of noise, jolts on every bump, poorly designed seats, etc).
If you went to some eighteen year old kid who will graduate this year from high school, and they'd like to get a new car for college coming up.....it won't be a US seden.
Should they have realized this impact back around 2010? I suspect that the statistical crowd was telling them every quarter that they had a problem, and they refused to change their strategy.
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