AOC speaks out about Brazilian Supreme Court Justices and Elon Musk 🔊
— drefanzor memes (@drefanzor) April 9, 2024
(satire/parody) pic.twitter.com/Rf9vKdafwf
Lawfare
Kangaroo Court
We all know that Trump lost a case in a New York court, and the court demanded that he either pay the fine or post a bond before he would be permitted to file an appeal. The left laughed and partied at the thought of bankrupting him, with the state poised to begin seizing all of his property to pay the judgment when he couldn’t provide the bond.
Then Trump posted the bond, and the left stopped laughing. Then the judge in the case rejected the bond, claiming that the insurance company couldn’t prove that they were solvent enough to pay it.
This isn’t about crimes, nor is it about the law. This is about using the law to destroy someone whose only real crime is to not be a leftist piece of shit. It’s OK though, because the left is only doing this to preserve democracy and destroy fascism.
He is persona non grata, and an enemy of the state. They will stop at nothing to destroy him. This is all about keeping him out of the White House.
As I have said before:
The left simply won’t allow Trump to return to the Oval Office. The Federal Bureaucrats simply can’t allow it, or he will begin swinging the metaphorical budget slashing machete. Should Trump regain the Presidency, a lot of Federal careers will come to an end- perhaps even entire departments.
The left simply HATES Trump, and will see him dead before he is permitted back into the White House. They can’t let Trump ruin their communist takeover.
For those reasons, expect violence when lawfare doesn’t work. Perhaps Trump will even be assassinated. I don’t think that they are desperate enough to take him out like Sadat was killed, but I don’t see Trump ever again being President.
Once he is out of the way, the left begins working their way down the list.
economics
American Dream
From wirecutter, we see yet another article lamenting the loss of the American dream and how it isn’t possible for a family to live in a home with only one breadwinner. I call bullshit.
I hear this all of the time, and I have to say that I disagree with it. Americans don’t want to have the lifestyle of their grandparents, they want to live a life of unbelievably expensive leisure and luxury.
Degradation of the Family
The idea of a basic family: The Father, Mother, and 2.4 children is no longer the case in America. The share of one-parent families with children under the age of 18 has grown from 7.4% of all families in 1950 to 34.3% of all families today. It’s harder for a family to make it when there is only one adult taking care of what used to be taken care of by two adults.
My mother made most of our clothes, and what store bought clothing we did have wasn’t expensive designer stuff. For jeans, we wore Sears Toughskins because my mother claimed that they lasted longer than the stuff she made at home. I was lucky, being the oldest. My younger brother wound up wearing all of the stuff that I handed down after it no longer fit. My brother and I owned two pairs of shoes at a time- tennis shoes for general wear, and dress shoes for church and other “nice clothes” events.
Mom cooked all of the meals. We almost never ate out. When there were dinners out, it was Mom and Dad going out and we got a babysitter.
Owning a home
The average home built in 2023 is 2657 square feet. Just 50 years ago in 1973, the average new home in the US was 1660 square feet. Seventy five years ago, in 1948, the average size of a new single family home was 983 square feet. In 1938, new homes were slightly larger at 1173 square feet, but it was also more common to have multigenerational households then, with grandparents, parents, and children all living under the same roof.
Children shared a bedroom. I remember when I finally got my own room- I was a teenager and thought we had become rich. My parents bought a new house, and my brother and we finally got our own rooms. Looking back, I remember thinking how large that house is. Built in the late 70’s, it’s a four bedroom house that is only 1854 square feet, small by today’s standards.
Materialism
Technology has played a role as well. Everyone in the family now has a smart phone with a data plan that permits them to be online 24/7. Multiple televisions in a house, something virtually unheard of in 1973, are the norm.
The stay at home mom didn’t sit around all day and watch TV 50 years ago. No, the woman of the house cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, made her own and the children’s clothes, and all of the other household chores.
Back then, Dad had the only car, and the upper middle class families had a second, family car. If one of the kids wanted their own car, they paid for it themselves by getting a job.
School
In 1970, only half of Americans graduated from high school, less than 10 percent went to college. When you were 15 or 16, you went out and got a job. You didn’t spend your whole life in school majoring in smoking weed and getting laid while studying gender roles of non-binary sexual predators. No, you became a mechanic, a farmer, or a factory worker. You did something productive with your life and didn’t waste it making TikTok videos about sex toys.
If you want to live like Americans did in the 50s through the 70s, it is still attainable.
economics
Part Time
This post over at GFZ reminded me of a story that happened to me 15 or 20 years ago, while I was still a street medic. I was partnered with another medic, a female who like to seem like she was jaded, but really wanted to believe the best in everyone.
There was a prostitute who had diabetes that we would run on every month or so. The call would usually follow the same path. Her “customers” would call 911 every time she would pass out at “work” and we would check her blood sugar to find that it was low. We would start an IV, give her some glucose, then she would wake up and refuse to go to the hospital. We did this for several years.
Then we didn’t see her for awhile. After not seeing her for 6 months or so, we got a call to a local convenience store and there she was. My partner says to her: “Hey Dianne! We haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?”
Dianne replied: “Things are great. I got me a man, now. We have a good job, and moved to Orlando.”
Partner: “Good for you! So what brings you here to town today?”
Dianne: “Well, my husband says that now that we are married, we have plenty of money, so I only have to work part time.”
Electric and Power
Load Shedding
One of the things that we talked about in our energy posts was load shedding. That is, it’s perhaps cheaper and easier to shed loads than it is to buy a larger backup power system. That’s especially true if we are going to use a portable backup generator. Those units, having only 10 kilowatts or so of available power, require that we only power the most essential of loads: a refrigerator, a freezer, some battery chargers, and the like.
In my case, when we have had power failures in the past, I fill the refrigerator with bottles of water to increase the thermal mass and slow the rate of warming. Then we use the generator to power the refrigerator, the freezer, and a few other loads like battery chargers, TV, and a small air conditioner.
Like I said before, I feel like a prepper should be able to do better than that, so we are looking at entire home power sources, but it’s far cheaper to power fewer loads than it is to buy more power capability, and that is what we are going to look at today.
One way to do this is simply to go out to the garage and flip the breakers on the loads I want to get rid of. Or simply not turn them on. Or we could get a SPAN panel. After taking a careful look at my budget, my needs, and the panel itself, I don’t think that we are going to get one. The reason is that, at $5,000 installed, it is the most expensive way of shedding loads. Let me explain:
I have been analyzing my electrical loads for the past several weeks so I could get an idea of just how much power I will need. My loads break down like this:
- General household loads are about 3 kwh per day. That includes lighting, television, ceiling fans, and all of the vampire loads like clocks, cell phone chargers, and the like.
- My refrigerator in the kitchen is another 1.5 kwh per day
- The deep freezer in the garage is 1.1 kwh per day
- The clothes dryer uses 3 kwh for each load
- The water heater uses 7800 watts, and even with no hot water being used it sucks down about 4 kwh per day. That number goes up if you are using more hot water.
- The oven uses 3,000 watts.
- The cooktop uses 6,700 watts with all elements on
- The main air conditioner uses 6 kw, the upstairs air conditioner uses 3 kw. The big question is how often they run in the summer.
In the case of the smaller loads like the refrigerator and freezer: we don’t want to shut those off. That’s the entire reason why we have backup power, to preserve the food that is being kept cold. Those loads, combined with the smaller loads, are about 5.5 kwh per day.
You can see that most of the largest loads are ones that we have direct control over: the dryer, cooktop, and oven. If we want to shed some electrical loads, all we have to do is not use them. There is no need for load shedding there. The exceptions to this are the water heater and air conditioners, all of which turn on and off without direct input from a human. If we aren’t home and our backup power kicks in, we need to shut those loads off. If we are going to have an automatic power backup system, I believe that load shedding should also be automatic.
We can have some sort of automation to turn them off automatically whenever conditions dictate. I am opting for an automatic system with a manual backup. With that being said, there are cheaper ways to accomplish this. My air conditioners are already controlled by Ecobee thermostats, meaning that they can be controlled with a smart home controller like Home Assistant or SmartThings, or even through the cloud using IFTTT. For the water heater, you can get a smart water heater controller like this one (EDIT: there is an updated post on this water heater controller. Read before you buy), and use IFTTT to integrate it to your backup system, or you can use a smart relay and have a smart home controller to regulate it. These methods work just as well, and won’t cost you five grand to install. Then you can use the extra cash to add capacity to your backup system. In my case, that is most of the cost of another solar battery.
To sum this up: You can install two Ecobee thermostats for $149 each, and a smart relay for $164. This will give you automated load shedding for less than one tenth of the cost of a SPAN panel- saving you more than $4,000.
Me
Complaint
I recently had a complaint made against me at work, which is a rare occurrence. This was a 50 year old woman with a history of diabetes who came in because she had an open wound on her ass. We were admitting her because it was a diabetic sore. When you admit a patient, it takes a couple of hours to secure them a bed and send them upstairs.
She had an A1C of 12.6, meaning that her AVERAGE blood sugar level is 315. At that level, your blood gets thicker, meaning that it can’t perfuse as well, and as a result she had already had one leg amputated. She just isn’t managing her diabetes.
After six hours in the ED, we managed to get her blood sugar down to “only” 177, and had been refusing to feed her because her sugar when she came in was over 400. When I told her she couldn’t eat, she said she would fix that, and took some of her insulin when I wasn’t looking, which caused her blood sugar to drop into the 40’s. Then we had to give her an ampule of dextrose, and it really complicated her care.
She was upset with me that we were sending her upstairs without “fixing the problem” that she came in for. I told her that her problem was caused by her not managing her diabetes, and that continuing to eat sugary foods and not taking her medication would mean losing other body parts, and would eventually kill her. This wound was not something we could “fix” in the ED, and would require a stay in the hospital with specialized wound care nurses working on the wound, and with her constantly trying to eat sweets, it likely would never completely heal.
So she complained about me for being rude. My boss agreed with me, and told me that sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth that they need to hear.
Me
Builders
We called the builder to complain that the sink in the upstairs bathroom had no hot water, only cold. The bathtub that is right next to the sink has hot water, though. So after a couple of weeks, a plumber shows up. He runs the water in the sink for a couple of minutes, then declares that the sink is piped incorrectly. He says that he will have to cut into the drywall to get at the pipes and will need the boss’ permission to do it. He says he will be back.
An hour later, he returned with a second plumber. They said that they would be cutting into the drywall to repipe the sink. I have a complete set of photos of what the house looks like without drywall in place. I show them where the pipes are, and they cut a 2′ square hole in the kitchen ceiling. In the wrong spot. They are mystified when they wind up under the upstairs air conditioning plenum.
I again point out to them that they are in the wrong spot. This time, they cut where I tell them the pipes are. There is the hot water pipe, and they tell me that the pipe was mislabeled during construction. They then cut a third hole so they can tap off of the bathtub’s hot water.
The sink upstairs still doesn’t have hot water at that point. They keep trying to figure it out. At this point, they have been at it for over 4 hours. There are three giant holes in my kitchen ceiling. There is insulation raining down all over the kitchen. My house is in a shambles. We can’t use the kitchen.
I asked them if they checked to see if the faucet is bad. They looked at me like I was a moron, so I continued: “What if there was some construction debris in the pipe, and it made its way to the faucet’s hot water valve, clogging the valve.” They asked how I would figure that out. I replied: turn off the cold water valve under the sink. If the faucet still works, it’s piped wrong. If the sink doesn’t work, it’s the faucet.
It was the faucet.
They plumbers apologized profusely and said that their boss would call me to figure out how to repair my ceiling. This is what it looks like.
I understand that mistakes happen, so I call the builder. He tells me that it’s a warranty issue, says he will put in a work order, and according to the warranty documents that I agreed to at closing, they have up to 15 business days to repair it. They will, he tells me, get to it “when they get to it.”
I tell him that he needs to do a better job of reading the warranty. A warranty item is described as a “defect in materials or workmanship that occurred during construction of the home.” This didn’t happen during construction. It happened because his subcontractors were incompetent morons. This means that it is a claim for their insurance, and they have exactly one week to get it fixed. If it isn’t, I am going to hire someone to fix it myself, then I will sue them to collect my costs.
I can’t use my kitchen. There is drywall dust everywhere. We are finding blown in insulation all over the house, because when the plumbers tried to clean the insulation that had fallen from the ceiling, the shop vac they used just blew it everywhere. That cardboard patch that is duct taped to the ceiling in the picture below? It fell off 15 minutes after they left.
Now every time we open a door or the air conditioner comes on, insulation falls from the holes. Bugs crawl in at night. So I got some pieces of cardboard and attached them to the ceiling using staples from my nail gun. These are essentially holes that open my house to the outside.
I am more than a bit pissed off about this. If it isn’t fixed by Monday, I will start calling my own drywall guys and an attorney. This is complete and utter bullshit. I’m not nearly as mad about the plumbers fucking up as I am about the attitude of the warranty supervisor. You handle things like this by saying “I am so sorry this happened. Let me tell you what we are going to do to fix this. It will be a priority item for us, and I will see how quickly I can get someone out to help you. In the meantime, one of us will be over right away to secure your home from the elements.”
What you don’t say is “I don’t control the drywall company’s schedule. I will put in a work order and they will get to it when they get to it.”
In the meantime, posting may or may not be sporadic as I deal with this and still have to go to work to pay the mortgage on my now trashed house.
Uncategorized
Earthquake in NJ, just outside of NYC
An earthquake of magnitude 4.7 just hit New Jersey at about 10:30 this morning. The center is in Readington Township, about 30 miles west of New York City. My brother in law, who lives about 80 miles north of the epicenter, said that it was enough to feel the walls shake in his apartment. He lives in a two story building and said the walls were shaking.
A friend of ours who is a banking executive in NYC said he thought that the furnace in the house had exploded.
The Collapse
Everyone Gets Paid for Everything, or Nothing
People have lost their minds and think that they should get money because they want it. Now some stupid whore has decided that, because she got cream pied by some random dude at a college frat party kegger, that businesses or someone should pay her because she is having to care for her crotch fruit.
“I think that at the very least, stay-at-home parents should earn the equivalent of working full-time on minimum wage,” she tells Yahoo Life about what inspired her to make the video. “In Michigan, this would be about $1,600 a month. However, I think to really make this work you should offer all parents either a monthly [stay-at-home parent] stipend or a voucher for free daycare. This would allow parents to have more freedom to make the decision that will work best for their family without sacrificing their career, if they would like to continue working.”
Say what? Then she doubles down:
Whether working outside the home or inside the home, we are all raising our children. However, only the parents working outside of the home are being compensated for the time spent working.
I just can’t fight the stupidity any longer.
