Canned Heat

Back when I was younger (weren't we all?), there was a pop group, Canned Heat. Turns out, it's a present tense entity, although just barely.

Well... there's another canned entity of some use: canned air.

Back in my younger days (you do remember the reference, yes?), I become enamored of a particular trackball, the Logictech TrackMan Marble FX. As you can see, you can still buy them, sort of. They went out of production decades ago; by legend due to a patent troll who had some patent, but never made anything and Logictech quit. Whether any on sale are NOS, I can't tell. At ~$200 a pop, kinda steep. Anyways, in today's innterTubes, just four buttons is not really enough.

Letting my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles, led me to this beauty. Doesn't have the two-sided control, but it's not a thumb drive ball. I tried a Microsoft (thumb ball) one years ago, and my thumb went south after about a week. Nah.

The Elecom is quite not fatiguing. But... early on, it was clear that the ball dragged noticeably. Going back to the Yellow Googles, revealed that the 'ruby' bearings were dog shit, and need be replaced. There are various carbide spheres available from your local innterTubes supplier. I got a set of zirconium oxide, as that was mentioned in the pages I found. Later, it turns out, that silicon nitride bearings are said to be better. One has to disassemble the unit to the bare bones to make the switch, and the bearings are teeny tiny that aren't really stable until the unit is reassembled. IOW, you have to keep the little suckers in place while you fiddle with the unit. I'll stick with the zirconium.

Which led me to the recurring problem: double clicks. Now, to be fair, most mouses and trackballs (all?) source those teeny switches from China and all are prone to fail in less than due time. Some, possibly non-chinese sourced, are said to be more reliable. So, I ordered a set.

While I was waiting, a Gyro Gearloose light went on. What if the issue isn't busted parts, but dusk, grime, and such? Well... bring out a fresh canned air. In order to do the deed, the point is to not disassemble the beast, but to open it up as much as possible without. So, pop the battery door; drop the batteries; drop the ball. Stick the air wand in the space between the button latch and the frame and blast away. It's been a few months since, and no double click problem. The switches are here, and the soldering iron is too. Just rather not have to engage. .

Give Us Barabbas

While The Real President Trump, bought and paid for slurps the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts and Prosperity Gospel hypocrites, the last (and perhaps only?) truly Christian President has died. 100 ain't a bad run, for sure.

"We are prepared to act with the compassion that has traditionally characterized the United States when confronted with such situations of human crisis," Carter said in a statement released by the White House as he announced the new policy. "Thousands of human lives are at stake."

Can you imagine the Make America White Again el Chefe doing anything for those not of the Billionaire Boys Club class? Of course not.

Long ago, in political time, the first person (I've no idea who, for sure) noted about The Yellow Bellied Jesus lived by the code: cruelty is the point. Although this likely establishes some copyright.

It's Funny - part the first

We're starting to see that soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© and his merry band of billionaire thieves misjudged the scope of MAGAnaut-ism.

They clearly figured that the MAGAnaut conspiracy was made up of, exclusively, sub-GED knuckledraggers who were infinitely gullible, and that such would be pleased as punch if the over-educated, over-paid city folk took one in the neck. Well... turns out, not so much. A fair portion of MAGAWorld are a cut above sub-GED knuckledragger, and expected that they'd be the beneficiaries of the various crackdowns on the immigrants and Elites and the various tax cuts. After all, they're the deserving ones. They didn't expect to be in the firing line of the ever-greedy Musk Ox and soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© and that Indian Guy.

There is no honour among thieves. As it ever were.

"If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win," Musk wrote on X.

Of course, the winner isn't the TEAM, but the owner, remember??? Cheap labour is the theme. As it always has been, since New England manufacture moved to the slave holding South. "We're in the Money".

It bears repeating: these Indians, and others, come to US university to get the BEST engineering/medical/etc. education; not the shit they get in Peshawar. The ones that do get their degrees in Peshawar (and such), come here as "Freshers" to do the low level shit work for pennies. I've known dozens of them in IT. You can check it out.

The Musk Ox and the Indian Guy are lying, of course. Just as New England mill owners in the 19^th century went for the cheapest labour, so too does "Tech" today. The problem is age old: if everybody does what you do, what happens next? If all labour is reduced to slave wages, as in the Red States, who'll buy the stuff that does get made? From the 50,000 foot perspective, slave labour states export to high wage states; the latter, of course, are the importers. All those cheap (Boeing hopes) 787s made in South Carolina go to rich states. That's been the case for millennia. soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© isn't going to change that, even if he could.

In the past it sort of worked because white people were expanding into Indian (sorry, but that's what it was called then) territory, breeding like cockroaches, and in need of basics. Manufacture was there to help. These days, manufacture has gone off-shore for yet cheaper labour, and employment is shifting more and more to financial services which cater to the well-to-do. In other words, not the general population. The MAGAnauts are merely cannon fodder in the continuing Culture War.

The Blue Collar Middle Class, RIP, existed because the Damn Gummint supported their war with capital. Not so much now. Way too many MAGAnauts won't connect the dots. They rail against The Elites, yet MAGA politicians are nearly all (MTG excepted) of the financial elite. Name me a handful of billionaires who are Progressive, or even middle of the road Democrats. You can't.

Journey

It's likely that your professor/instructor/TA said something like this as s/he began the first meeting of your Calculus 101 course:

Calculus isn't all that difficult. If you can grasp the concept of The Limit, you're 90% there.

Well... not so much. There's a fearsome amount of algebra along the way of your 2, 3, or 4 semester (term) journey. If you get through unscathed, you might opt for diff eq next. Unless you're a maths major, in which case it isn't a choice.

It's also likely that your professor/instructor/TA said something like this as s/he began the first meeting of your Baby Stats course:

Statistics isn't all that difficult. If you can grasp the concept of Correlation, you're 90% there.

Well... again, not so much. There's a fearsome amount of algebra along the way; if your intention is beyond Baby Stats. Many take one semester/term Baby Stats courses without any intention of further study, and their previous experience with something math-y was whatever constituted Senior Math in high school; likely trig. High schools now routinely offer calculus, but not as a requirement.

And therein lies the rub. I suspect it's because sports data are routinely referred as "statistics", that the general population views the study as trivial. 99.44% of folks think that's all there is to "statistics". It ain't so simple. Of the myriad fields of study that are categorized as STEM, I'd wager stats is the one mostly (only?) viewed as something one can 'pick up at work' or such. And that is the result of a host of stat packs that go all the way back to big iron mainframes and the likes of BMDP, and have continued to SAS and SPSS and R run on the PC. Anyone with a pile of data, a stat pack (and R is 'free'), and said PC can 'do statistics'. Gad.

Would you drive across a bridge that was designed by a civil engineer who 'picked it up' watching a real one in the office? I thought not. But you'll consume "statistics" run by folks who don't have a clue and/or a nasty (from your point of view, of course) agenda. You get what you pay for.

And there's a problem

I know more about nuclear weapons than he'll ever know.

So sayeth the BA in real estate econ. That link is a treaure trove more. It's disquieting seeing them all in one place. There will be more, I guarantee it.

It's going to be a rocky ride. The Office of Data Integrity will likely be run by Trump's Chef. And the Office of Media Integrity by Steve Bannon.

Bait

You'd think by now that the Lamestream Press would have figured out soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^©. Apparently not. He starts a fuss over stupid shit he threatens to do: Panama, Greenland, Canada, death penalty; knowing full well that the Lamestream Press will take the bait. "He's such an ass!!" And so forth. While the Lamestream Press is all up in high dudgeon over this stupid shit, soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© gets the lap dog Congress to do what The Musk Ox (and the rest of his Billionaire Boys Club buddies) want: a trillion or so dollars off their tax bills. Not paid for of course. As if making the obscenely rich even richer will propel GDP growth.

By The Numbers - part the eighty second

Just to catch y'all up on Tweety Syndrome. Here's more news

Over the past 30 years, half of around 900 people diagnosed with bird flu around the world have died. Even if the case fatality rate is much lower for this strain of the bird flu, covid showed how devastating a 1% death rate can be when a virus spreads easily.

Ya think soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© might notice that death rate? I don't think so either.

As discussed in the ongoing essays on The Greatest Threat, here's another case where not having data allows the bad people to say, 'Well, there isn't hard data available to allow us to take such a costly decision, so we won't. We're not going to spend money and impact commerce on the word of you pointy head science types. The Bible promises that God won't send another plague."

The Greatest Threat - part the sixth

Well... that didn't last long. The Greatest Threat is burying the actual data so that the pols and the populace don't know what the pols are doing. And, most importantly, whether the pols' fiat is good or bad for the populace. And, most importantly, not just the minority that made the fiat happen. Not too surprisingly, one area of general concern is what the results are for the push for abortion bans following the Gang of Six's cockamamie decree to overturn Roe.

New reporting documents that the data is being suppressed!! Who wooda thunk it!! The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts would never lie about such a thing, would they??

In fact, we found that in a few states, political leaders who backed the bans have stood in the way of measuring their consequences.

We can expect, as dead as a Lame Duck is, that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© will order that all data assembled, created, or distributed by the Damn Gummint must first be approved by the (soon to be created) Office of Data Integrity. You Betcha.

Where never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not clouded all day.

And... as one might expect, the quintessence of data suppression is... wait for it... Texas!

When Texas delayed publishing its maternal mortality report in 2022, an election year, then-committee member Nakeenya Wilson, a community advocate, spoke out, saying "withholding data that does not make us look good is dishonorably burying those women."

The next session, Texas lawmakers passed a bill changing the requirements for the position that Wilson held, effectively removing her from the committee. State officials appointed Dr. Ingrid Skop, a Texas OB-GYN who is the vice president of a prominent anti-abortion organization.

The sub-GED crowd should relish their time in the sun. I predict that the Red States will experience significant Brain Drain to the Blue States in less than a generation. Smart people won't stand for this shit.