Month: April 2019

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Florida Man: Gator Toss

I can see that. I did something similar (though, sadly, harsher), a couple of decades ago, with an American Pit Bull Terrier (whose owner rightly should have been shot) when it had been “sicced” onto my son’s dog. Turns out, choking out a PBT can cause them to release (glad it had a very stout collar on, though). PBT survived. Son’s dog–a large Lab/Shepherd mix–was all, “So, what was that all about, anyway?”–injuries minor. Really calm, almost phlegmatic dog.

(Even sadder, the owner continued to be irresponsible and someone else ended up shooting the dog. . . though not the owner.)

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“Type 1” Bureaucrats Only Want to Do Their Jobs

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

For the last three years, contacts with the public works department here at Third World County™ Central have been rather. . . pleasant, ever since the new director of public works has come on board. It’s exceedingly pleasant to deal with a member of ANY government bureaucracy who just wants to do what his job description asks of him and actually behave as a public servant. Heck, I’ve seen the guy actually get down and use a shovel himself to help get things done faster. Shocking, I know!

Kicker: he’s available, and pleasant to deal with even on a Sunday, and even via his personal cell phone. (And a good thing, too, because the one remaining sore point–poor funding for public works–means that public works has had to keep patching a water line that should be replaced. False economy, of course, because multiple calls for water leaks on public works’ own supply line have ended up costing more than replacing the line once would have been. That’s not on the public works director. It’s on cirty government and its other, non-infrastructure priorities.)

 

Note: None of the above addresses the issue of whether any given bureaucracy has a legitimate reason for existence. That’s a whole different critter.

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Sly Cheats

I have recently bought meat at two different grocery stores. Weighing the packages at hom on two different electronic kitchen scales, the scales agreed: EVEN WHEN WEIGHED IN THE PACKAGING, all but one of eight packages of prepackaged packages of meat were short of the stated NET weight (weight WITHOUT packaging, supposedly), anywhere from 0.15 pounds to just over .26 pounds.

And that was INCLUDING the packaging in the weighing, so NOT even “net weight.”

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Work to Eliminate the Evil Influence of Google in Your Life

Given all the anti-Russia yammer in the Hivemind and elsewhere, I’ve enjoyed sitting back (admittedly behind a decent VPN) and using Yandex for more and more things “Interwebby.” Save for a Gmail account that I use less and less, Google, THE single most evil internet gang, is completely blocked on my computers. Yeh, I know Google says its tracking of me and suchlike is turned off, and what it reports as having on me is the next thing to zero (Google’s lying, of course), but thanks to a decent VPN and other measures (TOR!), much of what Google has on me is ancient history, and much of the rest is. . . not exactly accurate. It’s a pleasure to not have seen a Google ad for years, now, for example.

Yandex is a Russian-based, multi-national company and “is the 5th largest search engine worldwide after Google, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo!.” (Wikipedia) I quite often use its search capabilities to good effect, and the email service it offers is slowly replacing Gmail in my daily use. Slowly. Perhaps because of my VPN use, and a few other things, ads and other obvious intrusions from Yandex just haven’t appeared on my horizon, and I have yet to discover any blatant politicizing of search results, as seemed so common with Google.

And, by avoiding Google as much as possible, I lend as little support as possible to such as this:

BANNED BY GOOGLE FOR OPPOSING INFANTICIDE

As I said in the post title, it is my considered opinion, supportable by evidence such as that which is noted at the linked article above, that Google is evil. Period. IMO, not even Me$$y$oft, Apple, and FarceBook combined approach Google’s evil. Avoid Google “services.” The (as yet) unborn will bless you, if nothing else.

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What We Deserve Ain’t So Great, Ya Know

Every day I wake and have not gotten what I, in my own “righteousness” apart from Christ, deserve, BECAUSE and only because of HIS righteousness and faithfulness, His sacrifice and the power of his resurrection is a day to celebrate. And that doesn’t even begin to count all the other gifts He offers as He continues to work His purpose in me.

Philippians 2: 12-13

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Sucking Up Dust, the Earth is “Getting Fatter”

(Stolen, adapted, and condensed from various sources)

Cosmic dust and meteorites fall to earth every year to the tune of 30 to 100 tonnes1 a year. Going with the high estimate, 100 tonnes per year, (roughly 1.7 E-20 % of the earth’s mass), and assuming it’s all silicate so we get the largest volume (a lot of it is much denser), that’s a total volume of 25 cubic meters a year spread worldwide. Spread over a surface area of roughly 1.25E16 square meters, that’s a thickness of 2.00E-15 meters, or roughly the radius of a proton every year. In 10,000 years the earth’s radius would increase by about the diameter of an atom.

Could this be why CACAs2 think Gaia needs to go on a low carb diet?

1A metric ton, rendered as “tonne,” is 204.6 pounds more than a US/Imperial ton (2,000 pounds), since it is 1,000 kilograms, and a kilo is ~2.2046 pounds.

2Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Alarmism

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(Functioning) Dishwashers Are Evidence that God Loves Us and Want’s Us to Be Happy

Thankfully, our eight year old Bosch (Bosch? Gosh!) dishwasher does still work, though “work” means “as long as it is started with an arcane button sequence not noted ANYWHERE in the documentation or on the Bosch support site, AND I hold my mouth juuuuuust right.”

It has had the electronics replaced once, already–a few months after the manufacturer’s warranty ran out (thanks Squaretrade!), and that seems to be the failure point, now. *sigh*

Since I’m the only one who seems to be able to “dance the dishwasher startup jig,” if when I die, my Wonder Woman will just have to buy a new one. . . unless we replace it before then. Probably a Whirlpool (since, currently, Whirlpool has a MUCH better repair record than Bosch.).

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Diogenes–No, Not THAT One

Seriously cool software:

Diogenes

Of course, it is designed to be used with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae which is available only on paid subscription, and so, absent that, use of Diogenes is pretty well limited to dictionary searches without that, but it’s real useful for quick lookups as opposed to dead tree copies of Strong’s and Liddell-Scott (and seems to have a much broader base than the Strong’s Greek Lexicon).

A handy-dandy lil resource when vocab fails crop up in reading. besides, who doesn’t need more dictionary resources?

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Another Trip to Serendip

(As noted on this blog before, and sung to “Mohammed Ali (floats like a butterfly, etc.)”)

“Katrina, Katrina the cat,
Floats like a butterball, ‘cos she is fat. . . ”

She also had a couple of other issues that have improved in recent months, but not completely disappeared: many, many skin bumps (no detected insect infestation, though frequent flea/lice comb uses) and pretty common vomiting. Still ate like a horse–her food and the other cats’–and kept the pounds packed on, though. Tried lots of things, including diet variations and topical skin treatments (which resulted in angry red rashes abating, but not in eliminating the irritations or the skin blemishes entirely). In fact, thanks to the abatement of the angry rashes, which had seemed to quite literally drive her insane–seriously!–she seemed quite happy, apart from the skin bumps and the irritation they caused her, along with the vomiting.

Other problem: finding a food our 18-year-old male cat would eat more than one bowl of. Sure, new bag of food or new can (of new kind), and he’d eat some while it was “new” to him, but then turn his nose up on further offerings. And we had tried all kinds of the expensive stuff.

So, my Wonder Woman saw a bag of dry food that proclaimed it was for sensitive skin and stomachs. Not even expensive. “Why not?” we thought.

He has liked it for three weeks now. And Katrina’s skin and stomach issues? No vomiting from the first serving on, and within a week of starting on the new food, the skin blemishes almost completely disappeared. Now? Gone.

Hadn’t even hoped that the food would appeal to the old guy, and had little hope it would impact katrina’s issues, but there you are: both positively affected.

Oh, and Pixel (lil rescue kitty)? Makes no difference to her. She already ate anything we put down for her (although she more eagerly eats dry food. *shrugs* go figure) and had no apparent stomach or skin problems. She likes the new food anyway.

Happy trip to Serendip.