When the United States was young, a person had to be 21 years old to be considered an adult. In order to vote, the person generally would have worked for 8 years (a young man would start work at age 13 and become eligible to vote at 21). This changed in the 1970s, according to Wi … | Continue reading
Our HVAC guy here in South Florida mentioned that he formerly installed Mitsubishi mini-split (“ductless”) air conditioners. Mitsubishi has long been considered the quality leader in this market, which they pioneered in Japan and then in the U.S. Since coronapanic, however, he’s … | Continue reading
Readers Tesla Road Trip, in which we spent 10.5 hours on a 7.3-hour drive while saving our beloved Mother Earth. “I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.” describes a reporter’s attempt to drive from New Orleans to Ch … | Continue reading
Common sense measures to fight SARS-CoV-2 are back in various parts of Maskachusetts. “Mask Mandates Are Returning to Schools as COVID-19 Cases Surge” (TIME, May 25) says that the good old days never ended in Boston per se: Boston public schools, for example, have maintained a m … | Continue reading
“U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay” (NYT, May 18): That reality arrived Wednesday in landmark contracts with the U.S. Soccer Federation that will guarantee, for the first time, that soccer players representing the United States men’s and women’s national t … | Continue reading
Happy Pride Month again! Throughout June, the USMC takes #Pride in recognizing and honoring the contributions of our LGBTQ service members. We remain committed to fostering an environment free from discrimination, and defend the values of treating all equally, with dignity and … | Continue reading
“Legal victory for Johnny Depp after he and Amber Heard found liable for defamation” (CNN, today): Depp sued Heard, his ex-wife, for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Th … | Continue reading
Happy Pride Month! Let’s look back at an early champion of Pride. The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (Andrew Roberts): In September 1772, John Wilkes joined other important City figures in criticizing the King’s commutation of capital punishment for … | Continue reading
We are soon to have an exciting power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switch. I need to run a Cat 5e wire (the punchdown block is Cat 5e so we’re sticking with old tech) out to the edge of the back yard to support a TP-Link Omada outdoor wireless access point (example). We have a Synology NA … | Continue reading
Science (it’s actually in the URL: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/community-levels.html) says that Middlesex County, Maskachusetts, where the main Harvard campus is located, currently has a “High” level of COVID-19. How do the geniuses graduating from Harvar … | Continue reading
One reason for the baby formula shortage is that the FDA protects American infants from being poisoned by Swiss-made baby formula from Nestlé, the company that invented baby formula. What flies off a French hypermarché shelf is strictly illegal here. (Let’s hope that it continues … | Continue reading
For Memorial Day, let me recommend The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, a book about the Battle off Samar, in which puny destroyer-escorts and destroyers charged heavy Japanese cruisers and battleships in an attempt to prevent destruction by surface fire of American escort carr … | Continue reading
The previous owners of our house didn’t want to bother taking the TVs off the walls so they left us with 6 TVs, one of which is actually outdoors under an overhang. It is a Samsung UN55D6000 made in Tijuana, Mexico in March 2011. Someone had cut a hole in the exterior concrete wa … | Continue reading
It is rare for engineering to be the subject of literature and entertainment and even rarer for an engineer to be the subject. Audible’s The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon is a welcome outlier. Although I was once a proud Fortran programmer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center … | Continue reading
Whole-house music is great. Buying things from our Swedish brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters is great as a way of showing support for their courageous decision not to order lockdowns, masks, etc. These principles intersect in Audio Pro, a well-established Swedish company th … | Continue reading
The shooting in Uvalde, Texas is dominating my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Here’s an example: It’s time for those who obstruct or delay, or block the common-sense gun laws, we need to let you know that we will not forget.We can do so much more. We have to do more.— Joe Biden (@ … | Continue reading
This year will be the 30th anniversary of the modern text message (SMS). It seems to also be the year of text message spam. I don’t remember receiving even a single spam or phishing text message prior to 2021 and in 2022 it is a near-daily occurrence. Here’s an example: How is … | Continue reading
From 2012, Best LCD television for use as a digital photo display?: must be programmable so that it comes on in “photo display” mode so that there is no need to monkey with a remote control after a power failure (or maybe default to photo display mode if a USB stick is plugged i … | Continue reading
Some friends and I were discussing a kid who was kicked out of a school in Maskachusetts: kids were caught vaping at school. Their phones were searched. The Man saw they bought it from [the kid who was kicked out]. Also an administrator suspended another kid for 1 day because th … | Continue reading
The Science-following states, e.g., Maskachusetts, California, and New York, closed public schools for 12-18 months while keeping alcohol and, at least in MA and CA, marijuana stores open as “essential.” Let’s look at a recent tweet from one of America’s top scientists, an epide … | Continue reading
One of the worst things about having moved from an apartment to a single-family house is that we were kicked out of the AT&T fiber 1 Gbps symmetric paradise and plunged into the dark pit of Xfinity cable Internet service (more money, 1/30th the upload speed). The good news is tha … | Continue reading
“New Yorkers told to mask up again after local patient tests POSITIVE for same genus virus as monkeypox” (Daily Mail): An NYC patient has tested positive for the same genus virus as monkeypox sparking calls from the health department for residents to wear masks indoors – just as … | Continue reading
For the first time in my life, I live in a house with a reasonably nice garage. The floor is a concrete slab poured in 2003. For a lot of neighbors, however, this is apparently not sufficient. Because there are no basements in Florida, the garage is a critical storage facility an … | Continue reading
News on one of my pet topics, the ability of hospitals to hit the unwary with bills for 10X what a service actually costs (i.e., what 95 percent of customers pay via insurance)… “She Was Told Surgery Would Cost About $1,300. Then the Bill Came: $229,000.” (NYT, May 21): When Lis … | Continue reading
A friend was considering enrolling his high schoolers in a Harvard economics class. It costs a modest $7,000 per student. What does one receive in return? An A or a B, unless one happens to be in the bottom 10th percentile (source): (The idea of grading on a curve is anathema … | Continue reading
One of the good things about Florida is that you can walk out of your apartment or house without bothering to put on shoes or more clothing than gym shorts and a T-shirt. The downside is that you are often leaving wallets and keys somewhere inside, thus leading to a search challe … | Continue reading
Ordering two replacement parts for a Bosch dishwasher… Bosch then warns me of the potential for cancer and reproductive harm (to any pregnant person, regardless of gender ID) from the bottom rack wheel and cutlery basket: | Continue reading
I haven’t written too much about the war in Ukraine because I don’t speak the languages involved, don’t know the history, and don’t know anything about military strategy and tactics. The situation for individuals is horrifying, I’m sure, and that is not pleasant to contemplate. … | Continue reading
From the May 11, 2022 NYT, “Don’t Be Fooled. It’s All About Women and Sex”: When I was back in high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.“Abortion is … | Continue reading
From the Journal of Popular Studies: “FDA Grants Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer COVID Booster for Kids 5 to 11.” Children are facing an “emergency”, according to the scientists at the FDA. If there weren’t an emergency, by definition, the shots wouldn’t be available until … | Continue reading
“Paxlovid is a miracle drug,” says a primary care doc whom I know, “because it is a miracle when I can prescribe it. Anyone who is sufficiently vulnerable to serious consequences from COVID-19 is already on drugs that have interactions with Paxlovid.” The other docs with whom I’v … | Continue reading
From the superintendent of the Lincoln, Maskachusetts public schools: Subject: Addressing Recent Violation Across Our CountryIt saddens me to have to write to acknowledge several more racially motivated shootings that have occurred across our country this weekend. They include a … | Continue reading
Japanese women have a fertility rate of about 1.4 compared to 1.7 for potentially pregnant American people (some of whom identify as “men”). The Rise of Modern Japan is a lecture series in which Emory University professor Mark Ravina explains his theory that the fall in Japanese … | Continue reading
Timed to coincide with the national shortage of baby formula, “The Feminist Case for Breast Reduction” (NYT, May 10): Over the next 25 years, my breasts drew attention that I would not otherwise have received. Like a sexual beacon, they signaled to men everywhere. I’d always kno … | Continue reading
(with somewhat unfortunate timing given the tragedy in Buffalo) … the United Nations says that today is International Day of Families. The site has some statistics: Maternity leave, which was offered in 89% of countries in 1995, was available in 96% of countries by 2015. What a … | Continue reading
“White Replacement Theory” is in the news as a potential motivation for the recent mass murder in Buffalo. After a decent interval to mourn the victims, perhaps it is worth asking “Who could be responsible for spreading this false narrative?” “It Was a Terrifying Census for Whit … | Continue reading
Our old apartment was small enough that the AT&T Fiber-supplied modem covered the entire space with awesome WiFi. The new house is just a little too big for a single base station to cover reliably and is currently suffering from Xfinity cable Internet with two Xpods (Comcast’s ow … | Continue reading
I’m still trying to figure out what Twitter is for. Much more so than Facebook, Twitter seems to bring together people with different backgrounds and perspectives. The result is a lot more misunderstandings and opportunities for humor with fake misunderstandings. Here’s my own e … | Continue reading
From early March… Open house today in our neighborhood: There’s a house for sale in our neighborhood (we rent a 2BR for $2800/month). It went on the market about a week ago. The first showings are today, 10a-4p, and “All contracts must be submitted by 5:00pm on March 3rd.” This … | Continue reading
An article from Belgium, translated from French by The Google, “Eight objectives to streamline the approach to unaccompanied foreign minors”: Today, 2670 young people are welcomed in the Fedasil network and by the communities, compared to 1029 in 2019. In 2021, Belgium saw a tot … | Continue reading
“Cryptocurrencies Melt Down in a ‘Perfect Storm’ of Fear and Panic” (NYT, today): A steep sell-off that gained momentum this week starkly illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies. The problem is not that a string of random bits has no inheren … | Continue reading
When coronapanic hit and various public health prophets went on television calling themselves “scientists,” friends who are medical school professors said that, when the predictions of these physicians and public health bureaucrats inevitably failed the public’s confidence in med … | Continue reading
From November: What edge does Rivian have in the truck or EV market? (market cap: $127 billion) From January: How is Rivian still worth $78 billion? The market cap today is $18 billion, an 85 percent loss for those who bought the stock at the time of my November post (or a mass … | Continue reading
Comparisons between the Party in George Orwell’s 1984 and the Democrats currently ruling the U.S. are becoming more frequent, e.g., referring to the Silicon Valley censors as the Thought Police (from 2016), the new Disinformation Governance Board as the Ministry of Truth (WSJ), e … | Continue reading
Tom Cruise is a pretty good pilot in real life and an even better one in Top Gun: Maverick, but my vote for pilot of the year goes to the passenger whose journey from the Bahamas is covered in “Air traffic controller guides passenger to safe landing at PBIA after pilot has medica … | Continue reading
Friends in Maskachusetts, New York, and California have been raging against the potential for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus enabling states to make their own laws regarding abortion. They say that they would personally suffer from any change in the status quo an … | Continue reading
The value of little airplanes has soared in the past two years, more like South Florida real estate than inflation in general. Planes that are reasonably good for transportation, e.g., the Cirrus SR22, are up 50-100 percent in value as used aircraft. There have been substantial p … | Continue reading
Not a great time for us buy-and-hold index investors…. Since Joe Biden took office, the S&P 500 is down at least 6 percent in real terms (up 3.9 percent nominal, but up is the new down in a high-inflation environment). Who wants to get bragging rights by calling the bottom o … | Continue reading