Forest Fire in Croatia

Orebic, Croatia

Iaman is off gallivanting around Europe. He lands in Orebic, Croatia, a nice little vacation spot on an island in the Adriatic. And what happens? The local forest catches fire.


Orebic Croatia forest fire

Waste of Time

I don't know how I got onto this, and it's probably a waste of your time and mine to even think about it. I mean the Kavanaugh debacle is a more important / bigger waste of time, but this is what I've got and I find it irritating, so here we go.

The EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) posted this story about home heating and cooling. Therein I found this line:

Households may also use less energy than they would prefer; 11% of households surveyed reported keeping their home at an unhealthy or unsafe temperature.

Okay, what is "an unhealthy or unsafe temperature"? This is official government agency, so I asked. I expected some kind of real information, but that's not what I got. Seems they conducted a survey and asked people how they felt:

Fricking morons.

FranLab

The 45rpm Record
Jack recommended this gal. Her videos are a little long winded for my taste. This one is 20 minutes long. She takes a while to get rolling, but in the second half she gets into some really obscure technical stuff, meaning things I was not aware of.

Records are kind of weird. With all our digital technology we shouldn't need them at all, but some people won't listen to anything else. There is a certain purity to them, at least to the ones made before everything went digital. Nowadays with all the compression and boosting and who-knows-what-all, the relation of the sound that comes out to the sound that went in is tenuous at best.

The Biggest Criminal

Milton Friedman Pontificates

Bayou Renaissance Man has a post about crime wars, i.e. wars being conducted by criminal organizations. They differ from conventional wars only in that the participants are not 'legitimate'. Looking on Reddit for a relevant discussion I came across the above quote, which echoes my feelings on the subject. It's a sad state of affairs when the people in charge of making the laws, laws that we all are trying to live under, are the biggest criminals of all.

I've heard of Milton before, but I've never quite figured out just what was so special about him. I mean he blathered a bunch of blather about money, but so what? Everyone blathers about money. So I looked him and read enough of Wikipedia's article about him to find this passage, which gives a pretty good summation of the man.

Friedman was an advisor to Republican President Ronald Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school vouchers and opposed the war on drugs. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice.

Batteries & Warranties

Battery

 

 

All the squirrelly problems with the Mazda went away with the new battery. My experience with automobile batteries over the last 30 years is that they last about five years, and when they die, they do so suddenly. I tried to keep our Ford Windstar running when its battery died, but that only lasted a couple of days before I threw in the towel. I've had a couple of batteries die in the truck and at least one in the Mitsubishi. When the batteries in those vehicles showed signs of flaking out I replaced them post haste. Don't bother with jumper cables or voltmeters (though I always check the voltage because that's the kind of guy I am). Just go to the store and buy a new battery.

The business with the brake pedal kind of threw me. I still haven't figured that one out. It could be psychological, or it could be some kind of electro-mechanical gimcrack that doesn't come into play until the battery dies. And then there were the flashing lights and the instrument panel going crazy, but all that stuff is presumably digital now and can operate with just a breath of power like you might get from a dying battery, so that is probably just the kind of behavior you should expect from a nearly dead battery.

Quickest, easiest and cheapest solution is just to replace the battery. It only takes ten minutes, unless you count the time spent going to the auto parts store. Then it takes an hour. The battery was $150, which is chunk of change, but nothing compared to having the car towed to the dealer so they can replace whatever computerized doo-dad has died and gone to meet Mr. Jobs.

Baxter's only offer 18 and 30 month warranties. The last few batteries I bought all had 5 year (60 month) warranties, and that's how long they usually lasted. I can't imagine the quality or durability of batteries has dropped that much, rather I think the terms of warranties have changed. I think my previous warranties were basically prorated for the life of the warranty, i.e. you pay for all the time you have the battery. This new warranty offers free replacement if the battery fails in the warranty period, which is very different.


The battery we are replacing is only two years old. (The car is a 2016 and now it's 2018.) I am surprised that it failed. I suppose it could have suffered some internal injury when the car was wrecked, or maybe the Florida sun cooked its goose. Whatever. I just hope it isn't going to be a habit.

Odds of needing to use the warranty are slim. I use warranties to judge the quality of the product. I figure a more confident manufacturer will offer a longer warranty. These days, they have probably collected enough statistics on battery life and failure modes that they can calculate to the penny how much they need to allow for warranty returns.

The oddest thing about this whole operation is that there are no auto parts stores in downtown Portland. We had to go seven miles down Interstate Five to get to Baxter's. I noticed on Google Maps that there was a Fred Meyer that was closer and Freddie's sells some basic automotive supplies, like oil and batteries, and most of them do, but not this one. I always thought that auto parts stores were pretty much evenly distributed according to population. I remember when I lived in Ohio there was one 24 hour auto parts store in Columbus and it was right downtown. This exclusion of auto parts stores from the downtown area in Portland smacks of elitism. More likely the space / rent squeeze had just forced out anyone who cares about how much rent they are paying. Or maybe cars are better built now and we just don't need that many auto parts stores.

New Age Car Lingo

How a Brake Booster and Master Cylinder Work
The Mazda is being difficult, which is foxing dutiful daughter. It won't start and when you try if acts squirrelly. Being a modern car, you need to push the brake pedal before you push the start button, so according to delightful daughter it's a 'push-start' car, which foxxed me when she said it. To me, push-start means a couple of guys pushing a car to get it rolling and then popping the clutch to start the engine. This used to be common knowledge. I wonder if anyone under the age of 30 has ever done it.

Anyway, back to the Mazda. Under normal circumstances, when you push on the brake pedal prior to trying to start the car, it moves, not much, but you can feel it move a bit. But now, devious daughter tells me, it doesn't. Being an independent sort, she did some Googling before she called me, and now she wants to know how power brakes work. I explained it as best I could, but then I thought a video might help, so I went looking and found this one and it's pretty great. There are some subtle funnies mixed in with explanation, and it's all technical all the time, so I enjoyed it.

Mary Jane

Merry Jane

Rumor has it that a quarter ounce of high quality marijuane (7 grams) runs $75 from the local dispensary while prices on the street are a fraction of that at $25 a quarter. Seems there is a glut in the marijuana market. There are over a million pounds of the stuff in legal* inventory in Oregon right now. The marijuana business is in for some interesting** times.

*for some definition of the word 'legal'. Cannabis is legal under Oregon law, but it is still illegal under Federal law.

**interesting as in the ancient Chinese curse.