Watch Dogs: Legion - Tipping Point Cinematic Trailer Ubisoft
On one hand I hear reports about businesses closing, mass layoffs and the Federal Government borrowing trillions of dollars in an attempt to keep a significant number of people from suffering any economic pain, all of which sounds like a frigging disaster in the making. On the other hand, the only effects I have personally noticed is that I have to wear a mask when I go inside the liquor store, Coors beer in bottles is hard to find, and traffic is considerably lighter than it was a year ago. To bitch or not to bitch, that is the question.
No question about it, bitch is the correct answer. The COVID-19 lockdown is stupid. It is killing economies all over the world and will result in killing many more people than the virus could ever hope to slay. This seems perfectly obvious to me, but apparently no one in the government agrees with me.
Thailand's Insane Motorbike Races - 9 Second 1/4 Mile with 150cc CB Media
This popped up on YouTube. It's great. A little too much narration, but it's still pretty cool. I remember when I was a kid 50 years ago top-fuel dragsters were making 7 second quarter miles, and that was with big monster machines. A 1969 Camaros and Mustangs with the big engines were making 13 second quarter miles and 100 MPH. 9 seconds is hauling *ss.
I've been thinking about long term survival in outer space and now I'm thinking about how our exploration / exploitation of the moon might proceed.
There was an episode of Star Trek (at least I think it was Star Trek) wherein we are told the story of a colony that was established on a planet and due to some misfortune they ran short of supplies. A relief mission was sent, but failure to communicate meant the colony believed it would not arrive soon enough to save them. The leader of the colony then caused half of the colony to die which meant there were enough supplies for the remaining people to survive. Shortly thereafter the relief mission arrived, which meant the leader was pilloried as a mass murderer. If the relief mission had been delayed as expected, he would have been lauded as a hero for saving half of the colony.
I think it was an episode of Star Trek, it was a long time ago and my memory is a little fuzzy about the details, but it brought home to me the idea of how dependent space travelers are going to be on their space ship. Earthbound explorers always had air to breath, and if you were on land you could generally find water to drink. Food can be problematic, but is often obtainable. Space travelers need to ensure they have an adequate supply of all three because there isn't going to be any air, water or food wherever they are going.
If we are going to establish a base on the moon, we are going to want to construct a factory for producing rocket fuel. I don't know how that will go, maybe some whiz kid will come up with a fancy probe they can jam in the ground and with a proper application of electricity will produce oxygen or methane directly from moon rocks. I suspect it will probably be more like earth bound mining operations: skip loaders driving around on the surface, picking up loads of rocks and carting them back to the big rocket-fuel-making-machine. Wheeled machines will no doubt need to be brought 'inside' occasionally for repairs and maintenance. To do this, we are going to need an airlock.
Now the maintenance garage could act as airlock, but it means that every time anyone comes in or goes out, all the air will have to pumped out of the garage, which would take some time. Even if we could generate enough air from moon rocks, it wouldn't be prudent to just vent the whole shop's atmosphere. You might need that air.
So I am proposing a tunnel of airlocks. Each segment would be maybe one hundred feet long with a door at each end. The doors would be like conventional garage doors so that would take up the least amount of space inside the tunnel. The one hundred foot length would allow the skip loader to drive along slowly while the doors closed in back and opened in front. Each segment would be kept at a pressure that was one PSI below the previous segment. When you open the door between two segments with a difference of one PSI, there is not going to be a whole lot of air moving from one chamber to the other. Even if they were to completely equalize during the time the door is open, it is not going to amount to a great quantity of air.
When you get to the last chamber the air pressure will be somewhere between one and two PSI, which is not very much. If you can afford to vent that small quantity of air to the vacuum, you can dispense with the vacuum pumps you would need to evacuate that last chamber, and since the chamber is fairly large and pressure is already so low, it would probably take a very long time, time when the skip loader could be working.
So the tunnel would 1400 feet long, You might be digging it through rock, or you might make it out of plastic and erect it on the surface, or you might use a combination of both. I'm thinking any kind of substantial moon base would need to be inside one of those lava tube caverns that might be lurking below the surface. Being underground would protect you from radiation. You are going to need a tunnel to get to the surface. If the cavern could be sealed, and you could make enough air, you might possibly be able to pressurize the whole cavern, a cavern big enough to build a city. In any case, you could use an similar airlock tunnel just to carry personnel and supplies between the cavern and the surface.
P.S. Evidently, the meaning of the term 'skip loader' has changed. I ask YouTube for 'skip loaders' and I get pictures of tractors equipped with a back hoe and front end loader. To me, a skip loader has four large wheels and a large shovel on one end, much like the machine in the video. Normal skip loaders are taller, the one in video has been squashed so it will fit in a tunnel which is exactly what we would want on the moon.
Update December 2021. I was feeling under the weather yesterday, so I amused myself by thinking about airlocks and I remembered this post and thinking that the amount of pressure on the doors between adjacent sections of the tunnel would not be very much, and then I did some rough calculations and I realized that it's actually going to be quite a large amount of pressure. For instance, a ten foot square door would have 100 square feet of surface area which translates to 14,400 square inches, so with a pressure differential of one PSI you are going to have 14,400 pounds of pressure which is seven tons. The doors might need to be made of unobtanium, but they are going to need to be very stout.
This is just an experiment to see how well all the pieces work together. I recorded this video using my phone. It was automatically uploaded to Google Photos almost immediately (I'll have to check), now I am downloading it to my computer prior to uploading to YouTube. Once that is all complete I can embed it at the top of the post using the HTML editor, still available, just hidden under the pencil icon in the toolbar at the extreme left end, right next to the frame of the video screen.
The video was recorded at 5:52, Google Photos shows 5:54 and right now it is 6:32. It took a couple of minutes to upload, but most of that time was me drinking beer and reading.
While uploading the video to YouTube, it asks whether this is a Premiere, which piqued my curiosity. Google elaborates:
YouTube Premieres lets you and your viewers watch and experience a new video together. It's like a movie or TV show premiere. Premiering your video lets you schedule a video upload and create buzz around the video with a shareable watch page.
Note: Premieres can only be created using a computer, but viewers can watch the premiere on any platform like computer, iOS, Android, and mWeb.
That sounds kind of cool. I can see uploading a video you had been working on and then asked your friends to get together and talk about it virtually. I'm not going to do that here, for one, this video didn't take any more work than making a phone call and while phone calls can be arduous, especially if you are having to deal with some bullshit that you should't have to deal with, you don't get any credit for making it. Only results count.
For another I can already see how it needs improvement. I need to read it through a couple more times until I am sure of what I want to say when I see a word. Why am I, at age 69, still of two minds about how to pronounce 'Stephen'? Is it 'Steeven' or Stefen'? And why does this confusion exist?
On a remotely related note,Matt's Off Road Recovery got a Silver Play Button for reaching 100,000 subscribers. I've watched a bunch of his videos. Most of them are nothing special, he drives his Jeep Cherokee out into the sand dunes in Southern Utahand gets stuck cars unstuck. Occasionally the operation will be more complicated. I can't say as to why I like them, but they are my go-to channel for mindless entertainment.
Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise. An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior. The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition. Modern people must grapple with ideology. The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise that an individual can undertake who wants to stand in truth and by his own lights against the conformist pressure of public opinion, or what dissenters nowadays call political correctness. But this endeavor is complicated by the fact that contemporary ideology claims, of itself, to be a critique of ideology. This verbal legerdemain began with Karl Marx, who identified the emergent industrial order as the ideology that he named Capitalism, to which his own Communism was supposed to be the clarifying antidote. The ability to negotiate such a mental hall-of-mirrors is rarer than it should be. Those who can do it – or have done it – deserve to be commemorated.
He goes on at some length after this, pretty much in the same style. It's not something you can just skim. Well, maybe you can, I had to concentrate in order to follow it. Pretty tightly wound, I think.
We were watching Stranger, a Korean crime drama, last week. Everything is centered on Seoul and then out of the blue Hwang's boss announces that he going to be sent to the USA to see how prosecutors operate over there. His first stop is going to be Austin, Texas, which was a bit of a shock because that's where we met. Makes me wonder how well Austin is known outside of the USA. Might be because it's a known hotspot for music.
The Osborne Effect: Why Big Auto Is Lying To You | In Depth
I can only recommend the first half of this video, after that they go off into weinie land.
I'm watching a video on YouTube about electric cars, the automobile industry and the Osborne Effect and they are giving a pretty good explanation of what's going on, but then, about halfway through, it becomes apparent that one of the reasons these guys prefer electric cars is that they don't like all the mechanical complexity of the internal combustion engine and my reaction is: what is wrong with you? Okay, internal combustion engines are relatively complicated, but this is what the world depends on to keep everything running. If you want to survive in this world, it behooves you to have some understanding of how it works and that includes how internal combustion engines operate.
Then I thought about this for a minute and I realized that understanding and affection are two different things. You can understand something without liking it. Me, I find machinery fascinating. There is nothing I like better than rebuilding an engine. (Rebuilding an engine is time consuming and expensive and unless you are building your dream machine and are willing to dedicate the time and money necessary, it is probably wiser to just buy one.)
Music is something I appreciate but I don't really understand it. Oh, I know all the fundamental terms like notes and chords and I understand how the instruments work, but I never was able to put that knowledge together to make any sounds that could be called music. Apparently my brain just doesn't work that way, and hard as it is to believe, apparently some people just aren't able to grasp how machinery works.
I'm reading a post by Tam and she uses the phrase 'violent felon'. If a person has been convicted of a violent crime, and the crime is categorized as a felony, then the phrase 'violent felon' can be applied to that person. What the mind conjures when you hear that phrase is often an image of a maniac running amok and attacking people left, right and center with all kinds of weapons. However, a normally peaceful, law abiding citizen can be driven to commit a single violent act and because of that he could be tried, convicted and forever after known as a 'violent felon'. Now a violent act may or may not have been justified, and regardless of what you or I might think, the jury may or may not have found him guilty, and the jury's decision is what separates the 'violent felon' from someone with A History of Violence.
The ability and willingness to be violent is hallmark of manliness, the ability to control that violence is what makes a man civilized. Someone who is unwilling or unable to be violent is no more than a sheep. Of course, in a peaceful society a man can live his entire life without needing to resort to violence, so you may never find out whether you are a 'violent felon' or a sheep.
Turkish detective series. Each episode is like an hour and a half, so more like a movie, which is what we were expecting but when we got to the end there is another episode. So, how many episodes are there? 96. Might keep us occupied till Christmas.
On Netflix the show has English subtitles, but I couldn't find any clips on YouTube that had subtitles, though there were a couple that would allow you to add subtitles.
Every episode is like a movie. The first one started with a death that looked like a suicide, but turned out to be one of them Muslim honor killings - her cousin pushed her over the balcony rail. What was that quote? If you can make people believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities.
The second one is about a criminal organ transplants.
The third one starts off with what looks like a revenge killing, but trace it back far enough and it turns out the orignal killing was to cover up some hanky-panky by a government official, or it might have been just plain old jealousy.
Tonight's episode was about a miser being murdered by his son for his money.
Behzat has four women after him. Bahar is an old girlfriend who has recently gotten divorced from her husband, another is a middle-aged woman who sings at the local nightclub, the third is a young woman he met in the nuthouse where he spent a couple of months after the tragic events of the first episode, and the fourth is the prosecutor. I can only conclude that women like violent men, or maybe it's men with guns. Only 92 episodes to go.
All my regular sources of information are all clogged up with the looming election and I've had enough, so I go looking for another source. I dial up Vimeo and somehow I end up on my account there (that I don't remember having) and I find I have a handful of videos. Most are nothing special, but what's this? The Boss Hoss - Don't Gimme That, the video I had lost all hope of ever tracking down and here I've had a copy of it in my back pocket all along. If that don't beat all.
It starts (and ends) with a shot of the Continental Club, which is located on South Congress Avenue, on the South side of the river in Austin, Texas. That's the other side of the river from all the "important" stuff like the Capitol and UT (University of Texas). I know this because I used to frequent the joint 30 years ago. It was a dive back then, and it doesn't look like it has changed. One corner of the ceiling was falling in, and the carpet used to be some color other than black, but you couldn't tell what it was. If you wanted tunes it was the place to go. However, you wouldn't hear either of the kinds of music that are supposedly indigenous to Texas, Country or Western. I really, really, like this band.
My legs are being difficult. Rumor has it that it might be a pinched nerve in my back. Whatever, between that and the Naproxen I'm not being very energetic, so I decided to quit while I was ahead and crack open a beer, Session this time since Plaid Pantry didn't have Coors in a bottle. So I'm kicked back, listening to music on YouTube and playing solitaire when this tune comes on and I said 'here's an easy post', not difficult like to trying get to the essentials of what's going in Lordstown Ohio at the old GM assembly plant where they used to make the Chevrolet Vega. It's something about electric work trucks and UPS and new electric pickup truck, but sorting it all out is more than I can deal with right now, so, Little Lil.
Pictures: Marija J., Hot Rod Pin Up Girl, Belgrade, Serbia. / Photographer: Marko Rosić, Belgrade, Serbia
Wirecard and the missing €1.9bn: my story | FT Financial Times
The guy in the video is Dan McCrum, a reporter for Financial Times, London's version of The Wall Street Journal. Me thinks that the banks that lent Wirecard that four billion Euros weren't doing a very good job of making sure Wirecard was legit. If the Financial Times had not investigated they might still be flying high and siphoning money off into unknown pockets.
I got onto this from a story on Zerohedge, but that story didn't make much sense, possibly because it dumped me into the middle and I had no idea there even was something called Wirecard, much less that there were problems with it.
The Take Official US Release Trailer 1 (2016) - Idris Elba Movie Movieclips Trailers
The Take is action packed. That's about all I can say about it. We watched it because we are big fans of Idris Elba (from Luther & The Wire). There were a couple of clever lines, but the plot was likely pulled out of a book of standard B-movie plots.
Kelly Reilly had a small part as some kind of CIA bureaucrat. I only mention her because I recognized her but didn't remember where I had seen her. It might have been True Detective or possibly Flight.
Richard Madden (Robb Stark from Game of Thrones) plays a pickpocket who hires an attractive young woman to distract the tourists by taking off her clothes and walking down the steps of a tourist hotspot while he steals all their stuff. That nets him a couple of bucks, but he's soon back at it and this time he steals a backpack from a very foolish young woman, a backpack that contains a bomb that goes off 10 steps after he dumps it in the trash. And then we have action.
I am not happy with Blogger's new editor. Seems like every time I write a post I run into some new-fangled crap that gets in my way. This time it's the menu you get when you right click on a highlighted piece of text. Used to be, back in the good old days, back before these dad-burn whipper-snappers started running all over my lawn (get off of my lawn, you dad-burn whipper-snappers) you would get a little pop-up menu that included 'Search Google for blah-de-blah'. Now you get some other menu that does not include the search function. I don't know what any of the other menu items are, and I don't care, all I want it is the search function and now I have to point and click twice as much to get what I want. Bah, double bah and humbug.
Yes, I could move to some other Blogging platform, but that would be a lot of work and take a bunch of time and it probably wouldn't help because they are probably engaged in a feature war with Google and I'll have to deal with the same kind of crap over there besides having to learn my way around their oh-so-intuitive interface.
Eventually I imagine I will either subconsciously adapt, or if something bugs me enough I will take steps to learn how to make it work like I want. Why can't they just leave things alone? The old one worked well enough, why did they have to change it? Cretins.
The internet was full of news when his resignation was announced, but those stories didn't tell me much, so I asked Google to keep me informed. This morning I get a link to a story in the Des Moines Register.
Seems that way back in 1985 Xi Jinping, the current President of Communist China, paid a visit to Iowa where he met Governor Branstad. They maintained contact and this was no doubt a factor in Branstad becoming our Ambassador to China.
A couple of weeks ago Branstad wrote an opinion piece and asked the People's Daily to publish it. It's a straight forward piece that explains just what our problem with China is. The People's Daily refused to publish it and shortly thereafter Branstad resigned.
I've sort of been wondering who this Trump character is. People make a lot of noise about him, telling me he's terrible or great, but I haven't really gotten a sense of who he is until I read this piece by Tom Luongo on GOLD GOATS 'N GUNS. I am not sure I agree with or even completely understand everything Tom talks about in his article, but a couple of things stand out:
Trump understands just how big the problem he’s taking on is. He lacks any sense of tact or diplomacy, understanding only blackmail, extortion and the Big Ask as negotiating tools.
. . .
Trump has embroiled himself in a chaotic mess of interlinked skirmishes with all the major players of the world.
He likes to operate in chaos because that’s how you keep your opponent off-balance, leaving them vulnerable to a mistake, while he keeps his eye on the thing he’s wanted all along.
And in this case it is to restore the U.S.’s sovereignty from the hands of people who are dead-set on destroying it. And he wants this in the worst way imaginable and, unfortunately, that’s usually exactly how he goes about it.
Trump knows what he wants and he's going after it, bulling and cajoling his way along, (and I imagine throwing temper tantrums or sulking) as suits his purpose.
There are a great many more powerful people running around loose in the world than there were 60 years ago when Eisenhower was President, and they are all scheming to advance their position or at least to protect their turf, and I think you would have to have been party to a number of big business deals to feel the effects of these forces and really understand their impact on your world.
Sitting in my cave at the end of a wire, I only get a glimpse of what's going on in the world and I kind of like it that way. Keep all your belligerence away from my door. Best of luck to all those lucky men venturing out to compete against their rivals.
The power steering on Jack's new GMC Yukon quit on him yesterday, so we opened the hood to see what we could see. Not much as you might expect, mostly acres of black plastic panels but there were a few openings where you could catch a glimpse of some metal things. Could not find the power steering pump or even the cap to the power steering reservoir. I mean you should at least be able to see the cap, how else are you going to check the fluid level? Hmm, maybe it doesn't have hydraulic power steering, it might very well have electric power steering.
But then I am looking at the belts. It has a serpentine belt that drives most all of the accessories like the air conditioning compressor, the alternator and the water pump, but then it also has a V-belt that is driving one pulley on the lower left of the engine. You can see it at the bottom center of the above picture. What the heck is that thing it's driving? It looks sort of like a pump, but there is no reservoir. The one hose fitting there connects to the vacuum line that goes to the power brake booster. Could it be a vacuum pump? That's just weird, man.
Normally the power brake booster uses vacuum from the intake manifold, a design that has worked wonderfully for the last half century. Of course, that only works when the throttle is closed. It doesn't work so well when the throttle is wide open. But you wouldn't be stepping on the throttle at the same time as you are stepping on the brakes, would you? No, you wouldn't, but being as these new fangled cars are all drive-by-wire, you may not actually have control over the throttle anymore. The computer has control.
I suspect this vacuum pump is there so you have a chance to win a fight with the computer should you ever have a disagreement over whether you should go faster or stop. That's kind of fucked up. They replace the hydraulic power steering with an electric system to make the engine more fuel efficient, but then they add a vacuum pump to avoid a possible lawsuit the next time somebody dies in a fiery crash due to a stuck throttle, a throttle controlled by HAL, the evil master computer. Welcome to the modern world, and what a fucked up place it is.
As for Jack's problem, it went away the next time he started the car. There also appears to be a massive recall regarding this apparently common problem. No word on lawsuits about this issue have reached my desk, but that's not surprising what with all the worthless crap that has been flooding the internet this year.
P.S. The water pump has been moved away from it's traditional position on the front of the engine off to the side. I don't like it because it's different. Water pumps have always been mounted to the front of the engine. I suspect a commie plot. This might make it easier to change, except it won't because of all the other rigamarole you'll have to go through because of the electric-plastic bullshit you'll need to deal with.
We started watching the second season of Stranger, a Korean crime series on Netflix, and it's taken a left turn off into Constitutional law. Along with some petty crime (that might turn out to be murder), corruption, cover ups and a whole bunch of political infighting, we also have the police fighting the prosecutor's office over who has the authority to issue warrants. Seems if was changed in the 1980 constitution that was written after the military coup, or at least in this story it was.
This got me thinking about how our own constitution came to be. I know the 'founding fathers' got together and hashed it out, but where did they get the ideas? I'm thinking a 'classical' education may have something to do with that. I wonder what kind of constitution people would come up with today. Could we do any better? I kind of like the one we've got, it seems to have served us pretty well so far.
Which makes me wonder just what a 'classical education' is. I imagine it means reading some old books, but do you really get any more out of reading the originals in their archaic language than you would get out of reading a modern summary? Of course there is always the question of whether the summary is true to the original, but then how do you know the original is the one you should read? Someone else might suggest a different book by a different author, one that has a completely different view of people and the world. If you are diligent and a critical thinker, you will probably be able to sort it out. But what if you trust your instructors and they feed you a bunch of hogwash, will you be able to sort it out?
China bombing US Guam base
Original caption: 解放军空军“模拟轰-6K轰炸美军基地”视频
[Google translation: Video of the PLA Air Force "Simulated Bombing -6K Bombing US Base]
[You need to watch this in full screen, the aspect ratio makes it tiny on anything smaller.]
The Chinese are beating the war drum. Not sure what they expect to accomplish, probably hope to intimidate their neighbors into letting them have free reign over the South China Sea.
I hadn't heard of the H-6K before, not sure whether I've even heard of the Soviet Tu-16 which is what they started with.
This is the only picture of this airplane that I found that shows the upper surface. There are any number of photos of it that show the bottom or the side, but apparently none from above.
The Chinese started a program to develop their own jet engines a few years ago, but I haven't heard any more about it. As far as I know, they are still using engines they are buying from other countries.
I've been drinking beer this summer. You can get it in cans or bottles, though you don't always get a choice. Sometimes the store only has your favorite brand in one or the other so unless you are persnickety and are willing to travel to another store, you take what they have.
Aluminum has a higher intrinsic value than glass so even in states that don't have bottle deposit laws, you seldom see cans by the side of the road. Scrappers are out there picking them up and hauling them to the scrap metal dealers to get cash money they can use to buy more beer.
The lighter weight of cans means the delivery trucks can be a little more efficient so they burn less fuel for the amount of beer they deliver, though I suspect the amount of fuel saved only makes a difference when aggregated over a nationwide fleet of trucks.
Bottles are easier to drain. To get the last little sip of beer out of a can you have to tilt your head back so far you are in danger of falling over backwards. I don't have that problem with bottles.
I could pour the beer out of the can into a glass, but now I have to wash the glass. I have a dishwashing machine (the term dishwasher is ambiguous. Is it a person or a machine?) so that is not an onerous task, but it does use energy to run the machine and heat the water. It is a new fangled machine that takes like three hours to wash a load of dishes, but it is supposed to be energy efficient.
Glass containers, bottle or glass, hold more heat (or cold) than aluminum does, so the beer doesn't warm up as fast, but that's not really a problem for me because I finish that first beer in a matter of minutes and the second one doesn't take much longer. After that, well, you need to factor in things like ambient air temperature, relative humidity and how entertaining or tedious your fellows are.
Being as I am lazy, I prefer bottles. No washing glasses, no straining my neck, no fooling with beer koozzies, no chasing empty cans that the wind has blown off the table. Unless it's hurricane season but I don't drink outside when we get hurricane force winds.
Seems to me there are two schools of belief operating in our society. I will call these two camps assholes & old ladies. These two camps do not discriminate between the sexes, though there does seem to be a preponderance of men in the asshole camp and old ladies are generally women.The assholes are the guys that follow the rules and rigidly enforce them. Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino is a good example. The old ladies clutch their pearl necklaces and sympathize with the poor, the miserable and the trampled upon.
The people in the old ladies camp tend to follow whoever will make nice speeches and promise love and kisses for everyone. They will worship the devil if he is polite and well spoken. The people in asshole camp put on their armor and go to war against whatever obstacles are in the way, be it a rock or an army.
Joined the Thursday lunch bunch today for via Zoomand it was like I had never left. I quit going a while back because going out to lunch more than once a week was more than I could handle. But now because of COVID-19 they are getting together via Zoom and I must say it works pretty well. I drug my Chromebook over to the new house, plugged in my cell phone modem, open the email invitation, clicked on the link, and poof, just like magic, there I am.
Iaman bought an electric bike conversion kit and applied it to an old bike he acquired from Dennis.
Took me many hours over a couple days to assemble. Now I could do it much quicker. I had a psychic block about removing the crankset to install the motor. Bought the $799 kit for $900 total with shipping from Bafang USA Direct.
