The mind quails at the thought of all the work I need to do, but I can cope with that: just concentrate on the next step rather than the entire project, and we'll get there.
Still, with the room now empty (mostly) it is a job that's well begun. And, most importantly, we can have our HVAC ducts cleaned out, finally.
* * *
In his bid for President, the mayor of New York City has issued a FAWPA on process improvements.
"Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency". Because Democrats would much rather crush everyone under their heel than allow our society to follow a path that could eventually lead to greater freedom and prosperity for everyone in it.
So: if a company wanted to automate a process, it would first have to submit its plans to the federal government for approval. The plans would have to include finding new jobs for the displaced workers, or else giving them a severance packaged based on their seniority, and the severance package would have to be approved by FAWPA.
Secondly, the dipshit wants to put a tax on robots.
de Blasio proposed a "robot tax" that would be imposed on large companies "that eliminate jobs through increased automation and fail to provide adequate replacement jobs." Those firms would "be required to pay five years of payroll taxes up front for each employee eliminated" and that revenue would be used to fund new infrastructure projects or jobs in new areas, including health care and green energy. "Displaced workers would be guaranteed new jobs created in these fields at comparable salaries," he says.See that? Workers would be guaranteed new jobs!
This is due to the fact that Democrats operate under the mistaken notion that companies exist to employ people, that they are somehow responsible for ensuring that they employ as many people as possible and that profits are meant to be their owners' reward for doing what is convenient for the government.
The Luddites would approve of de Blasio's horseshit.
* * *
Everyone's aghast over the DoJ ordering Apple to tell them who used a certain app.
But there's a reason for it, and it has nothing to do with gun rights. It's about ITAR. "International Traffic in Arms Regulation". The app may have (probably has, judging from that description) violated ITAR, which is heap serious juju.
This is a highly sophisticated piece of ballistics kit, and it's not something we want to be selling overseas, for obvious reasons.
So, no, not worried about this one. That latter link is from a highly pro-gun blog.
* * *
Remember that guy who protested outside a nail salon because they kept a black woman from getting away without paying for services rendered?
He is somehow connected to an incident of vandalism against two nail salons, though he distanced himself pretty quickly from the latest developments because people are going to jail.
Second City Cop summarizes it best:
Pretty soon it'll be necessary to travel a few extra miles, AND pay in advance. Then we'll see the "racist" card played again.I notice that the owners of the salon are not black, but Vietnamese. Interesting how these kinds of conficts always seem to arise along that axis.
* * *
Last night I went to pick up Chinese food, and on the way there I saw a pile of low-profile tires sitting by the curb in front of one of the houses in the neighborhood.
Garbage collection is normally on Friday in my neighborhood, but this week it was on Saturday because of Labor Day. It's not difficult to infer what happened here. Guy got new tires for his vehicle and took the old ones home to avoid paying the "tire disposal" fee. He put out the tires with the trash, but the trash service does not take tires because of environmental regulations--which is one reason people in Illinois must pay a "tire disposal" fee when they buy new tires--and so the trash service took everything the guy put out except the tires.
(As an aside, if you're buying $1,600 worth of tires--that form factor is not cheap!--you can afford to pay $10-$20 to dispose of the old ones. Don't be a douchebag.)
(And if you can't afford that $10-$20, you should not be driving a car that requires those kinds of tires.)
Now, I figured, this can go one of two ways.
Scenario A, the guy takes them in, and either asks why they weren't taken on Monday, or tries putting them out next week only to end up asking next week why. Either way, he learns that he can't just throw them out, that the "life hack" he thought he discovered does not work, and has to (and does) find another way to dispose of them.
Scenario B, he leaves them out there for next week, because "the trash men were supposed to take them!" Code Enforcement sends him a warning letter. Then he gets mad because he "feels" that he did nothing wrong and that the garbage service is who didn't do what they were supposed to do. Depending on how stupid he is, this way lies ruin.
* * *
It's not really news that leftists are hypocrites but I think it's amusing that in San Francisco, the fine for letting your dog crap on the sidewalk, and not cleaning it up, is something like $640--but if you crap on the sidewalk and leave it, it's tolerated.
"Public health" has become a joke.
* * *
Did you know that American CO2 emissions were at 1980s levels? Of course you didn't. I certainly did not.
...we're using a lot of natural gas to produce electricity these days, and it's lots cleaner than coal--and thanks to fracking it's incredibly abundant. I don't have a problem with this; I'd be happiest with all-nuclear, but natural gas is acceptable. And we're still making and using as much electricity as ever.
But since CO2 is not really driving climate change, that doesn't really matter all that much. I approve of it from a cleanliness standpoint; we are all better off without the crap spewed by coal-fired power plants. (Parents had their boat at a marina literally across a river from one such plant, for a couple of years. Believe me.)
* * *
England's government still trying to avoid Brexit. I'm not sure how their gambit turned out--the one to make "no deal" illegal--and probably won't know that until Monday or Tuesday. But overall it looks as if PM Boris Johnson still has some tricks up his sleeve.
Vox Day says:
Notice how the various national legislatures across Europe have gone from being popular and democratically elected to openly election-avoidant and anti-democratic. This is another indication of the social mood trend having peaked and reversed. We are winning, whether you recognize it or not yet.They don't want the people to vote because the people will vote against them, in other words.
* * *
The life of a test pilot is fraught with peril. Some of it is self-inflicted. Heh.
(Yes, it's an amusing story.)
* * *
Pixy Misa has a good bit today:
Google knows your grandparents' names, addresses, phone numbers, and middle initials. (Forbes)Yes: the idea was to make it easier for people to find phone numbers without calling the phone company itself. Having a call center of operators to run "directory assistance" was more expensive than printing 3-inch books on thin newsprint and distributing them to all subscribers.Beyond that, Google knew their exact addresses and their middle initials. I couldn't even have told you those things about my grandparents...Could someone explain the concept of phone books to these idiots? I have some kids I need to get off my lawn.
And so the number of every subscriber, along with his street address, was printed in this book. So if you knew someone's name, you could find his address and phone number in a couple of minutes. These books were even attached to public phones. Everyone who had a phone had a phone book that listed all the subscribers in their town.
If you wanted to keep your name out of the book, you had to pay a fee. Two reasons: 1) it was a premium service, and 2) generating the phone book from the subscriber database was largely automatic and it took human intervention to remove a name from it. (Of course that "intervention" amounted to a flag in the computer's database saying "unpublished number" but someone had to manually set that flag.)
* * *
WoW got hit by a DDOS attack yesterday. Mrs. Fungus wanted to get our trolls to level 10 but we couldn't log on for a couple of hours. Maybe today.
One very funny thing we discovered was that when you issue the emote tag "/no" the male troll will sometimes say, "Hell no." Which is hilarious.
* * *
Rained today, so no grass cutting will be done today. Maybe tomorrow.