As I mentioned on the Zoom last Friday I helped my FIL move and came across this milkshake mixer. So I took it home, tore it down, cleaned it up a bit and let it rip.
Does it work? The switch isn’t as tight as I would like , but yeah it works. I’m taking protein shakes to another level.
¡enlaces!
Update to Commie Pope Watch: as of this writing Francis is still not dead.
USAID was, not because it’s an elaborate money laundering operation where the government funnels your tax dollars to achieve communist objectives. No, USAID is colonialist.
It’s not a plane crash in Bolivia, just a bus crash.
Curious about how Journos are counted in death tolls in Mexico? Apparently you need actual press credentials, and to be dead.
The Orange Caudillo.
Okay, now for the elephant in the room. Trump’s tariffs go into effect as of this morning. The stock market predictably takes an enormous shit, as if Wall St. in no way couldn’t see this coming months ago and hedged accordingly. Although I might argue cancelling foreign aid to Ukraine had more to do with that since most of that money went to US companies. Canada and China did impose retaliatory tariffs but Mexico only said they would but provided no details. They’re likely in the weakest position to do so. The trouble I have with this whole thing isn’t that tariffs are bad. I know they’re bad, you know they’re bad. Anyone with a typical understanding of the Great Depression was taught this in schools. The problem I have is everyone whining about this said JACK SHIT about every dumbass economics decision made in the last 20 years, let alone what really started most of this in the 70’s. In no particular order: Stimulus checks, Smoot-Hawley, TARP, “The Bailouts”, Cash for Clunkers, Dodd-Frank, more stimulus checks, lockdowns, travel restrictions, vaccine mandates, Build Back Better…all interventions that lead to terrible downstream effects these assholes ignore. The second the Orange Man desires to fuck something up himself, everyone becomes a classical economist.
Here’ a tune, only because I saw their bumper sticker on the back of a Camry this morning. Enjoy your Tuesday..
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA"An inside peek at the Vatican…
Le sigh. Get it right this time, moron…
It’s time to start packing and loading the trailer for the annual vacation to the deep south.
Forecast locally is rain, winds gusting to 60 mph, snow/sleet/ice, and other general mayhem over the next 24 to 30 hours.
Someone upstairs doesn’t like me.
Just curious — how deep is your South? Are we talking Vicksburg here?
Hattiesburg, MS
Nice… unfortunate that your annual trip isn’t a little further to the sleepy little town of Pascagoula…. you might distract the server squirrels when you go to church there. (But yeah — that’s certainly Deep South by anyone’s reckoning….)
I’m not dead yet . . . .
You’re not the pope either!
Pope kinnath…
I like that!
SCHISM!!!!
We’ll have none of that shit here. Double tithes for Zwak.
Sorry, Jimbo, but your sliver sect never had any traction.
You’re the splitter here.
Note that we serve mead for Communion.
What does Jimbo have to offer?
Meh… it probably was. They won’t like my gut response to their cries of “Stop oppressing us Global North” though… because I also disagree that we owe them Jack over Fecal Matter.
So I’ll happily stop all “colonialist” programs (which is to say… everything. Let them stand on their own already… look to the Argentine Chainsaw for inspiration, please…)
I think it was. Much of it didn’t get where it was supposed to go, but a lot of the programs were meant to impose lefty values on other countries. Support for trans groups, etc.
The entire argument was a commie claptrap about how aid was a colonialist front to extract resources, using aid as a means to keep people poor.
Like welfare here was used to keep blacks poor? Of course they know that.
To a point.
I don’t see utopia arriving if the “aid” ever goes away, though.
I remember PSA’s in the ’60s for the Peace Corp. How are things going I n those places all these decades later?
So what y ou are saying is we should save our money?
Even with a Land Bus you have to watch out for the candygram…..
I’ve heard that Bolivian snow is extra dangerous to drive on
Sounds like we need to experimentally verify their methodology.
I nominate the WHCA.
I was expecting that — and was happy not to be disappointed.
voodoo economics
Thank you Simone.
Bueller
A bus crash in Bolivia? So…another day ending in Y? Why is this making the news? To distract from the royal raping the pommys are getting?
Yes, its Tuesday.
Captain Cameron Fry’s least favorite day…
I’m not sure I do know that tariffs are a bad thing. I am know longer convinced the Ricardian Model is correct in reality. It’s a bit into the ‘imagine a spherical cow’ territory at this point. That we have completely hollowed out our manufacturing and financialized our economy to the point we struggle to make even the basic things needed to make the things we need undercuts it. I am open to the idea that low regulation at home and high tariffs on goods from abroad may be a net benefit to the United States and her people.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
This.
I have no idea. Our economy is fucked up beyond belief – way more than the average American is willing to admit to himself – and as Mexi pointed out the Resistance is completely silent about everything that got us here.
Yep.
I also suspect that part of it is playing chicken. A gamble, which is probably a correct one (even if it’s still foolish), that our economy can bear any negative consequences a lot better than those we’re at trade war with. That they’ll give in sooner because their economies won’t be able to absorb the sting for long.
For instance, Canada is in no position to be in a trade war. Their economy is already in the tank. Ditto most of Europe, especially now that they’re going to have to shovel even more money to Ukraine, while shoving money into building a military. And with their ultra-expensive power? Ours is not in great shape, but it is more robust than theirs.
Oh right. They buy like 90% of their shit from us. I would just cave quickly if I were them. Trudeau’s a lame duck so I’d be willing to walk back special interest tariffs. Who gives a shit about their votes now?
Yeah.
I just look at it as the guy with the most chips bullying everyone at the table.
I like the matching tariffs – where our tariffs are the same as that country’s tariffs on our stuff. How can you retaliate against them?
I can’t keep up with other beefs Trump is using tariffs to retaliate for. I knew Canadian banks operate here (Toronto Dominion/ TD) but our banks can’t do retail business there.
I would like a clearer picture of what we are looking for in negotiation here.
Matching the bullshit other countries does for us seems like a good tactic at least.
I think I am, but we shall see soon as your buying power should begin plummeting. If it doesn’t drop over the next few weeks then holy shit. Left, center, and ring wing economic theory is all wrong.
“I’m not sure I do know that tariffs are a bad thing. I am know longer convinced the Ricardian Model is correct in reality. It’s a bit into the ‘imagine a spherical cow’ territory at this point.”
Concur. Worst case, they are effectively a (selective) sales tax on foreign made goods. Distortive of a Spherical Cow Economy? Sure. Able to be abused with bad effects? Of course.
Now do every other government tax and fiscal policy.
There are rumblings now that tentative compromises have already been reached.
So, chalk another one up to people with low blood pressure just willing to wait and see if true.
CA gets it. In a spherical Cow world, tariffs are bad. We do not live in that world, we live in this one, and, as he says, so much else is going on that seeing if this is actually bad is a lot to tease out of a lot of data.
For some, this will be good. Others, not so much. Just like everything else.
I think I’ve made the same journey as CA from being a free trade purist to being open to a bit of tariffs.
For me, the turning point was the lockdowns and seeing how dependent we were on other countries for some basics. Whether we needed China to give us our drugs or Taiwan for chips, it wasn’t good.
Uh oh, Green Day has spoken. https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/green-day-goes-off-jd-vance-20202212.php
Wow. Never could have seen that coming.
Who?
Leftist musical outfit.
Why the hell would I care what Green Day has to say, about anything, like quite literally ANYTHING?
Because otherwise you wouldn’t know that you cant hug your children with nuclear arms?
*That was the first time I realized that performers should keep their mouth shut about politics.
Do you have the time to listen to him whine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTGr5t3MoY
They should have named the band ‘Brain Trust’.
Derpetologist:
I actually liked their first two albums (Kerplunk and Dookie). Would put them clearly in the pop side of pop-punk, especially with what they came out with later. Hell, I was at this show.
Don’t care about Green Day? How about SIR Elton?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elton-john-slams-trump-administration-over-aids-program-cuts/
If entertainers don’t tell us how to think what are we supposed to do?
Sensei:
Last year, at Punk Rock Bowling, I got to see a band turn off an entire crowd in just a couple of minutes. They decided to start talking about the Gaza genocide, and how Israel must be stopped. Watching the crowd melt and hearing cries of “Nazi punks fuck off!” warmed my heart a bit.
That’s awesome.
Yeah, Dookie has some great pop songs.
No idea what came after that.
Neph, that reminds me of when I saw Santana in Dallas. The temp in the whole stadium dropped when he made some lefty political comment.
They’ve always done a pretty good job of the catchy bubble gum pop with punk aesthetic.
Their politics have always been fervently anti-current republican.
I think they already backtracked on stuff like that.
Nevertheless it is not the responsibility of the United States to prevent every death around the world, Mr. John.
AIDs program cuts? Why do we still have an AIDs program? We know how to avoid it and we have very effective treatments. We dont need a special program.
Suthen, it’s not a problem we’ve been assured that Chinavis going pick up all this aid and gain influence.
Problem solved.
Hey now, someone has to bravely speak truth to power. I’m sure they also did that during COVID and the rest of the Biden admin.
I think I mentioned a couple years ago I was at a local rock show where the female singer did a huge rant about how they should kill all the trump supporters who are Nazis.
Then they played a “song”.
Then there was an extended monologue about how we all needed to just love one another and it was so important.
Public education….sorry, Commie indoctrination.
I don’t care what the fake punks have to say.
RJ gets it.
To be fair… I don’t care what “real” punks have to say, either.
Not even if they feel lucky?
This Soviet propaganda film has an amusing perspective on how certain aspects of American aid and cultural exchange were perceived:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9CKXz24pxw
Mr. Yankee shows up around the 3:25 mark.
I thought you were being humorous and posting a trailer for a show on Netflix.
You can’t compare the disastrous tariffs during the GD to what Trump is doing. Trump is imposing tariffs from a position of economic strength, to create a specific outcome in trade, and other issues. We can absorb a little short term pain for longer term gain. During the GD, we were sucking wind economically, and the tariffs were a desperate attempt to put money in the government coffers. And it failed miserably.
I don’t like tariffs, but if it results are other countries reducing there’s to stave them off, I consider it a win.
Well, yes. If it works, it’s great. If it doesn’t it sucks. I already am feeling like my buying power is down.
Even on the day the tariffs take effect?
This. Reciprocity is not exactly 4-D chess.
It will likely lower tariffs across the board.
The rest of the world should have to compete with us on a level field. That will make everyone better off. If they cant compete…fuck ’em.
Someone earlier mentioned the last housing bubble as an example of market failure….ugh.
The last housing crash was 100% engineered by Barney Frank and Charlie Wrangle.
My late wife was an SVP for BofA. She was a stake holder when they were discussing the Credit Default Swaps that sank the market. She was in risk, and the only person saying “what the hell are you thinking?!? Don’t do this!”. Yeah, the sales guys were salivating, so they went for it. And we bought a big house in Idaho for dirt cheap a couple of years later.
“We don’t make anything here anymore.”
Yeah, right.
As Muzzled said, our economy is bigger and more diversified than any of the other players. Trump has already shown he is willing to slap down the regulators in order to get production spooled up.
Do I think a trade war is stupid? Yes. But “free” trade is a mythical beast.
I think that’s a good assessment.
There is no free trade anywhere that exists outside of theory. There never will be.
There are no solutions, only compromises. And I’m pretty sure there are concessions beyond the economic that Trump is looking for. Border security being one.
The British of 1846 would strenuously disagree. Unilateral free trade is fine, and works.
404
Reality strikes again
The European Commission said Monday it will change the way it calculates emissions targets for carmakers in a bid to help the deeply troubled industry.
——-
Green groups were quick to condemn the decision.
“Weakening the EU clean car rules rewards laggards and does little for Europe’s car industry except to leave it further behind China on electric vehicles,” William Todts, executive director of green NGO Transport & Environment, said in a statement.
Go ahead. destroy your economy.
Hopefully they were a group funded by USAID.
They’ve already hurt the foundation. It’s just a matter of time before the house built on sand is exposed.
I like how the dumbest shit imaginable has become assumed truth to the left.
Trans women are women!
Smoot-Hawley was just a warm up. This time we’ll get it right.
I don’t believe the government that can’t teach kids to read is competent to come up with a fiscal/monetary solution to anything. Central planning has never worked and now we are giving the government/Fed more power?
Doesn’t make sense to me
“The debt increased by $8.18 trillion during Donald Trump’s presidency, but experts say a large proportion of this was due to relief during the coronavirus pandemic.”
While the bloc debates the future of the combustion engine, Chinese carmakers are racing ahead with EVs, producing cheaper models equipped with better technology than their European peers.
I think the jury might still be out on that one.
Even if we could get them here, there’s no fucking way I’d ever buy a Chinese any car, much less an EV.
Of course I wouldn’t buy the finest American made EV either.
Everything the Chinese do is a scam. Of course they are racing ahead with EV’s. To a person with a brain this is what is known as ‘a clue’.
The free market requires some things to work well: private property, prices, profits, and competition.
Protectionism weakens that last element, which results in lower quality and higher prices.
A low revenue tariff for funding government is fine (since we supposedly have to have a government), but setting up protective barriers to foreign competition reduces the pressure on domestic firms to innovate, create new products, improve the quality of prices, and lower prices.
In our current situation, getting rid of government intervention in the domestic economy does more to further free trade than eliminating tariffs.
That’s almost certainly true.
As noted earlier, I had a conversation about tariffs with my former boss (and majority owner of the Company). He hopes Trump is just bluffing Canada to win some concessions as it makes no economic sense to impose tariffs on them. Said Company imports 100% of its raw products from Canada. If the tariffs stick, profitability will go from around 10% to break even. To open a plant in the U.S. comparable to the one the long time vendor operates in Canada is about 3 years and would cost about 2 times annual revenue. The last delivery crossed the border on Friday night.
There is now about a seven month inventory built up in the U.S. The Canadian supplier will be telling their employees to write the Ontario premier to come to terms with U.S. because layoffs are ahead for them. The Company cannot raise its prices to the customers because of stiff competition.
Other actions contemplated: suspension of dividends (yay, I lose $8 K/yr.), salary freeze and possible layoffs until tariffs are rescinded. Longer term: sale to one of the larger competitors and closer of the hq and branches. Tariff war = everybody loses.
Deal has been made.
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1897049410229690455
That’s the theory anyways….
I figured it was more of a bargaining chip than prolonged economic strategy, and is a situation where trade policy is only part of the point.
setting up protective barriers to foreign competition reduces the pressure on domestic firms to innovate, create new products, improve the quality of prices, and lower prices.
Setting a price floor of the affected sellers.
I actually had to work (*gasp*) all afternoon so I couldn’t comment, but: almost all of you are fundamentally wrong about PBJs. The bread is a delivery vector to make the PBJ package tractably messy, and otherwise unimportant. There should only be one slice of bread, lightly toasted if you want to impart some structural stability to the sandwich. The PB should be a natural variety, only peanuts and optionally salt. Will you end up wearing some of the PBJ around your mouth? Yes, it is an essential part of the experience. You have* a tongue.
But wait, you say, I’ve got fancy bread! Save it for your avocado toast, hipster, the bread is a bit player in this show.
*Probably.
Unrelated, I want to know what the guy who first discovered that egg whites can be whipped stiff was trying to do, ’cause that shit takes forever, you don’t do that accidentally.
Don’t rule out kitchen punishments “Whip those egg whites, insolent assistant.”
I’d rather eat lutefisk than a PB&J sandwich.
The project of backing up my current DVD/BluRay collection had finally completed.
The backups take up 2,238 Files in 168 Folders occupying 782.9 GB of disc space.
Backup or transcoding? That’s pretty small for a backup.
Who would do just a raw dump to disk?
A backup needs to remain in suitably watchable quality but need not take up all the excess space.
Besides the jumbled and/or fused way some of this stuff was on the optical discs in the first place means it had to be sorted out regardless
I make backups then transcode from those. There have been times I’ve gone back to transcode smaller versions for viewing on a tablet or phone, or update using a newer algorithm.
I am not going to do that – that sounds too much like work for no return.
You must have some good compression. Or not that many DVDs. (Looks at du output… and sees 15T for “TV Shows” and 3.2T for “Movies” in the NAS backup from the Mac Mini…)
I used Handbrakes 1080p preset, though I did adjust it to mkv files later on when I realized I could get blueray subtitles to work unmodified that way.
I started a project like that. Got about 100 deep before I quit.
I also digitized audio that I still listen to, and have more or less kept up with new purchases since then. I probably have a lot more to do that I’d like to admit though.
I’m close to complete for video. I still have a lot of audio to do.
For me it’s 0 compromises on ripping audio.
Bit for bit copy, fully tag, archive in FLAC.
I didn’t have any audio to rip.
Muzzled, audio is FLAC, but on video I’m ok with relatively high compression on both audio and video of non music sources.
Concur.
If it’s an audio video (like a live show) I’ll at least preserve audio.
I’m not certain how much compression I’d be OK with. I watch a lot of old movies, and the blacks in nighttime scenes of both B/W and color movies on YouTube TV are pretty dire. You can see all sorts of artifacts (I think that’s the right term); it’s not just black.
I may pick up the project again, but it’s untenable now when I’m using a 2011 Mac mini. Perhaps when I get a new one I’ll continue again knowing that it will take a fraction of the time.
Daily Ray of Sunshine?
Or how long before this husband hates technology?
I can’t get “wirehead” out of my mind watching that… someone’s going to do that operation soon, I’d bet. (Context, if needed.)
I’m assuming Larry Niven and Luis Wu?
I’m whining. I’ve been whining for 40 years about all the stupid shit, and I’ll keep on whining. I’ve been saying jack shit for decades, thank you very much. Everyone else might have just discovered basic economics or world history or foreign wars bad….some of us have known a long long long time.
These tariffs are bad for our standard of living and plain stupid, full stop.
My position on any of this has not changed since b-school; none of this is new or news or hard to understand.
Glib apologies for dumb Trump stuff is the worst thing about this site. The worst apologies possible for anything is that you don’t like those criticizing and the other guy did it too……so beneath us, such small beer. Grown up critiques should be substantially on the issue, not on whose tears or on enemy-of-my-enemy nonsense. The tariffs are dumb because tariffs are dumb always and everywhere, not because Trump deployed them or who cried about it.
I agree on 90% of what I read here, but geez Trump is stupid and jacking off to his mindlessness is shameful.
I’ve been whining for 40 years about all the stupid shit
Then its not you I’m referring to.
“These tariffs are bad for our standard of living and plain stupid, full stop.”
Thus my argument for reciprocity. Force the other guy to reduce, eliminate or stop paying them. Giving in to terrorists or con artists just encourages more of the same.
No tariff on tits.
https://archive.is/HFWta
Titty Tuesday.