After we lost the house, the wife and I ended up at her Mom’s house. Wendy in the spare bedroom and I live in a very small room in the back of the garage with Bella and my cat. Even though we are saving money and my studio is in storage, I still needed a small project to occupy my limited free time, so I went small scale and cheap. How small?
I found some Sherman tanks in 1/300 scale, ordered them, and then came up empty searching for more tanks, what to do?
I managed to find some scale people that architects use and bought 100 for five bucks, now what?
Off to DT! Purchase glue, spackle, modge, podge, painters blue, florist foam and a strong flat picture frame, oh and some baking soda…
Next we go to Hobby Lobby for acrylic paints and a few brushes, and off we go.
After a few afternoons worth of work this is the result. I love the way the road cuts turned out, the stone looks pretty nice, and the mud/ice mix is just right.
The only thing left is the trees; coming from China, hard to find, but that will wait until next time.
Coming in at a whopping 10 inches square, this the smallest I have done. The men are ¼” tall, the tanks are the size of a quarter, and I’m going blind here. While it’s one of my best, it’s more like a desk ornament than anything else. It may even get sold, but we shall see.
As of this writing, I’m in a motel and the situation is tenuous at best, so this project is in storage til my trees come in. Once they arrive, I’ll bring it out and finish it, hopefully. Lesson learned? Don’t just buy stuff hoping you can find other stuff—Research Dammit! So the next project will be in 1/144 scale, I bought a few, then my friend tells me he has about 14 more, in collectible boxes, these should work.
The story: December 1944
Elements of Patton’s 3rd Army are northbound for Bastogne and have become hopelessly lost. Upon hooking up with an infantry company, they proceed north. There just isn’t much more to add, perhaps a stray mortar shell?
Link to album, some good pix. Also, gas prices are outrageous, and Belarus Women are as crazy a German Women, until next time…
CHANGE YOUR FILTER!
Comments
245 responses to “The Lost Company”
Who’s this Arab guy busting in on Yusef’s turf?!?
Looks, great. 10″ sq?!? that’s got to be a challenge to work with.
and check your thermostat.
SERIOUSLY, Change your filter before it gets hot
But, the filter isn’t one that’s supposed to be replaced. Is it okay if I just washed it out?
Oh, alright, I guess
That’s a very sellable size. As in, if you decide to sell it, let us know.
I shall, thanks
Who’s this Arab guy busting in on Yusef’s turf?!?
Indeed. At first I was thinking “It’s amazing that there are two talented WW2 model makers in a community this size” and then I saw the avatar at the bottom of the article.
Well Sheeet, now I have to finish the kitbash.
Why am I procrastinating?
Because that kind of fine detail work is incompatible with drinking?
*sniffles*
But I haven’t even been drinking.
Then we are all disappointed in you.
*kicks pebble*
True
Neat.
My grandmother had that same owl artwork.
So did my mom. What is it with chicks and owls? I grew up in a house full of them.
Yankee thing?
Southern girls are more pigs and ducks bric a brac
I never thought about it but I guess there are different regional tastes in dust collectors.
*Mrs. Suthenboy is heavily into dragons. Not sure what that says.
She wants to burn a city to the ground?
Well, DC is RIGHT THERE….
Bears for Mrs. Almighty. Not sure why.
Herons and fish in my house. Really, anything vaguely nautical.
Krakens and Selkies!
At least one of each, yeah.
No owls chez moi. Apparently owls are a bad sign in Vietnamese culture, bearer of bad news/death. Here its loons, Mrs Foursquare loves loons ’cause they give their baby a ride on Momma’s back when the offspring is young. We hear owls at night occasionally when the windows are open.
I am continually amazed by the amount of skill and attention to detail you bring to bear on these.
Thanks Bill, it’s a passion
Sorry to go OT, Yusef, but this is exactly why I flyspeck the shit out of our policies on accommodating transgenders:
No, you idiot, the patient was not rightly classified as a man for medical purposes, regardless of whether he should have classified as a man for social purposes. I have pounded my shoe on the table insisting that we correctly identify the biology of our patients, as well as their social preferences.
Very impressive work, Yusef.
Thanks!
I am a horrible human because I always think, “XY = male, XX = female, anything else is an extremely rare genetic anomaly.”
horrible or not, you’re not wrong.
Alternative joke response – That’s not why you’re horrible,
anything else is an extremely rare genetic anomaly
Considering that, in those instances, the person with that anomaly is only able to reproduce with massive amounts of artificial intervention, a more accurate term might be birth defect.
I was assuming OMWC was referring to things like Turner Syndrome, where someone has the wrong number of chromosomes.
That and Kleinfelter’s Syndrome.
The whole transgender horseshit is nothing more than O’Brien demanding that Winston pronounce five instead of four fingers, straight up. That is all it is. They demand that you tell lies and punish you if you tell the truth.
Fuck. Them.
I am perfectly willing to accommodate, as a matter of courtesy, someone’s desire to be referred to by a certain name or pronoun.
I start having problems “accommodating” transgenders when those accommodations start causing other people discomfort, such as in rooming patients or in allowing access to locker rooms and bathrooms. To me, this is a conflict of social conventions, and everybody should make their own case-by-case determination.
The idea that we should disregard biology in fundamentally biological areas, such as medical care, is lunacy.
I am perfectly willing to accommodate, as a matter of courtesy, someone’s desire to be referred to by a certain name or pronoun.
I’m fine with that, as well. As long as it’s a matter of courtesy and not a matter of them getting the state to point a gun to my head and compel my speech.
One issue, is that part of the (at least as I understand it) current plan to go to surgery is to live as the gender you want to transition to for several years. Part of that would be using the bathrooms and such of the opposite gender. Bathrooms I don’t see as that big of a deal, hell, I’ve seen people go into the opposite gender bathroom (usually women going into the men’s room) when lines get too long. Patient safety, locker rooms, showers, and the like I see as a bit different.
Regardless of all of that, medical treatment doesn’t care what you think you are. It cares about what you were born as.
Lunacy is the point of it. To force you to accept lunacy as normal. To make people fear to speak the truth. It is about forcing you to repeat absurdities to break your will to resist. It is nightmarish stuff straight out of every dystopian novel ever written.
Men can get pregnant, identifying as a koala bear makes you one, gun control is for your own good, murdering children is A-OK, higher taxes and more regulation makes the economy stronger, etc. etc. It is conditioning people to accept the party line, the narrative…whatever they say that is today. They turn truth on its head and you are expected to accept it. They rewrite history and you are expected to accept it. Your mind and your conscience are not your own. They own you.
Now, do as you are told.
Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Now, do as you are told.
So you’re the dominant one? Kinky.
Bingo. If Patrick wants me to call him Patricia, ok, fine. Don’t cost nothin’.
If “Patricia” then wants me to agree that she is a woman just like my wife or my mother….then no, I’m not going to do that because it isn’t true. You can cut your frank and beans off, you can have a surgeon carve out an ersatz vagina, wear dresses, etc etc……and you’re still not a woman. You will never be a woman no matter how fervently you desire it to be true, any more than me wishing desperately to be a 6’4″ muscular Viking god of a man makes me one. There are people out there who are insistent than they are Napoleon Bonaparte, or Teddy Roosevelt, or whoever – doesn’t make it so. There are people whose overwhelming desire is to be a lizard, or a cat, or whatever. I sympathize with them, but I’m not playing ball. Once you deny reality for one branch of sociopolitical dogma, the floodgates then open for all of them.
any more than me wishing desperately to be a 6’4″ muscular Viking god of a man makes me one
*updates Tindr profile, haz sad*
Þrymskviða has a sad.
“You will never be a woman no matter how fervently you desire it to be true, any more than me wishing desperately to be a 6’4″ muscular Viking god of a man makes me one.”
For the trans activist what they are is irrelevant. Making you say they are is the end game.
If you think I am going too far, giving them too little credit, consider: There is no honest argument for belief that men can have babies or that putting tampon machines in men’s rooms are necessary because men menstruate. Each proposition they put forward is more absurd than the last and they are long past any kind of good faith argument. It is straight up O’Brien holding up four fingers and insisting they are five.
Relevant
Nic Rider, a transgender health specialist and psychologist at the University of Minnesota, said training isn’t enough.
“There are implicit biases that need to be addressed,” Rider said.
Health records may use male/female templates for gender but “it doesn’t mean that we just throw out critical thinking or think about how humans are diverse,” Rider said.
critical thinking? goddamn i hate that term now. objectively observing the facts is exactly the opposite of what was done here.
and how far along was the fetus that expired from lack of adequate care?
I’d wager far enough along that had they done a C-section sooner, it would have survived.
Hard to know if the person was taking hormone therapy.
According to the article they stopped. (Insurance ran out and couldn’t pay out of pocket)
It does not say the relative timing of the pregnancy to the end of the hormone treatments.
There are implicit biases that need to be addressed
Sure, maybe, whatever, when you are talking solely about social interactions.
For medical decision-making? No, there really aren’t.
Health records may use male/female templates for gender but “it doesn’t mean that we just throw out critical thinking or think about how humans are diverse,”
For male/female issues relevant to medical care, there really isn’t “diversity”. You’re one or the other, and a fair number of biological facts and medical treatments follow from that, with very little “diversity”.
Oh, and props for furthering the corruption of the language by misusing “gender”, you dangerously ignorant “transgender health specialist”.
It’s spelled “transgender health specialist” but it’s pronounced “Confidence Huckster-Scammer”
It’s just another buzzword at this point, like “diversity” or “equity”. It just means “goodthink”.
https://youtu.be/GKqhHhLNA7o
We had a little scare at my hospital. Wasn’t my case, but they put this lady to sleep and then when the nurse went to place the urinary catheter, found she had a penis. The whole case came to a screeching halt because they thought they put the wrong person to sleep for surgery or switched the charts. Eventually they figured out the person was transsexual and proceeded with the case, so no harm no foul. Still delays in the OR are expensive.
why would they operate after euthenizing the patient… oh, you meant just anesthetizing.
I see the dog avatar and forget you’re talking about people.
Mob doctors are often vets by day.
That sounds right. I’m sure they’re more prepared to treat gunshot wounds and the like after having served during wartime.
AlexinCT was at your hospital?
I’m not at liberty to say…stoopid HIPPA.
blink once for “yes”
That’s exactly what I have been manning the ramparts against at my hospital. OK, we have to have separate fields for “gender” and “sex” in our EMR? Fine. Do it. Is there a problem with asking people what gender they are, and what biological sex they are? Sure, we could get a complaint and a civil rights investigation. Not your worry; I’ll handle it. What I don’t want to handle is, say, a wrongful death case because we have a dead baby because we were nancing around a fundamental question: are you biologically male or female?
If feeling that you’re a man or a woman makes it so then just feel that you don’t need medical treatment. Otherwise, acknowledge that in a competition between wishes, dreams, feelings, and physical reality, the latter wins every single time.
I don’t see a civil rights violation. We ask all kinds of invasive questions because we need to know. I’m not asking about your cocaine habit because I’m nosy, I’m evaluating if you have catecholamine depletion or possible heart valve damage.
I don’t see a civil rights violation.
If making someone uncomfortable with their races/sex/religion/etc. is a violation of civil rights, asking a trannie what their biological sex is would qualify. My defense will be that we have an overriding need to know the biological facts.
This story just gave me what I need to pound this point home internally, and to defend the civil rights complaint.
I just logged into my patient portal, and it asked me to confirm my sex, my gender, my pronouns, and my preferred way of being addressed. Seemed like a reasonable thing for a medical establishment to keep track of.
It’s a good thing men are forced to pay for insurance for pregnancy.
I’d assume that accommodation of this sort, as nice as it may be in a social context, will necessarily run afoul of, say, the Hippocratic Oath. Personally, if you make choices like this and insist that other people abide by them, that’s on you. Men don’t have babies. Welcome to the team.
You are assuming that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath seriously.
” I have pounded my shoe on the table insisting that we correctly identify the biology of our patients”
Frightening that a lawyer has to say this and not a doctor. Gives you an idea of the intellect of the average doctor.
“But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.
Because it was a scientifically incorrect classification.
Do we have a consensus on this?
One more curious thing about this story.
The patient “identified as a man”, yet got pregnant without knowing it. That can only happen after PIV sex with a man. Which seems like an odd thing for somebody who identifies as a man to do.
Your frame of mind is not the frame of mind of a women who was taking hormones to be more like a man then stopped taking those hormones.
Obviously, he identified as a gay man.
RC, once she was off of the rails it doesn’t matter if she was off an inch or a mile. She is in downtown crazy town. Don’t try to figure it out.
a stray mortar shell
“24 December 1944” is an important date in my family’s cemetery.
Every Americsns as well
Nice toys, Tulpa!
Sorry to hear about your house, Yusef. I’m glad you have a hobby to destress.
Same here.
Very cool, Yusef.
Hope you get your living situation straight. That would drive me insane.
I’m already insane, at least there’s that
I’m jealous of your patience and ability.
The games I play are 28mm (1/64th scale) and the painting/modeling aspect drives me insane. I hate doing it, and am no damned good at it no matter how much I force myself to practice. I can’t even paint serviceable undead infantry, and dry-brushing skeletons with a quick ink wash afterwards is supposed to be the easiest thing in the world.
I finally broke down and have been paying a professional to do it. She gives me a price break if I let her take them on the road for competition sometimes; the Space Marines she did for me won 2nd place at a tournament in Oklahoma last year.
Real Space Marines, Ultima Heretics, Or a different game all together?
Personal chapter but patterned off of Imperial Fists. I’ll do a quick article on it sometime. I’m making the army Imperial Chinese-themed, including the heraldry and everything.
But were the modesl real Space Marines, or the new Girlyman-Approved Space Marines?
GamerGate II, Space Marine Boogaloo?
“Girlyman” is the slang we use to refer to the character Roboute Guilliman because he’s a hated Marty Stu in the game we play.
Oh I haven’t touched that new stuff yet. Rowboat Girlyman can suck an egg.
When I get my workshop, I’ll do some big terrains, more your size
Agreed, anytime I’m dealing with something small I feel like I’m about to hug the rabbit to death. That and focusing on stuff right in front of me makes me nauseous and light headed.
Lighted magnifying glass on an arm, light is the key
/old blind guy
I think these guys missed something.
In March 2007, Spain introduced a national policy granting most new fathers two weeks of fully paid paternity leave. . . Economists studying the effects of the original 2007 policy examined what happened to families that had children just before and just after the program began, and found differences in the outcomes.
Can we really call them economists if they missed what was going on then?
Look, Don, you can’t expect people to believe that concerns about financial stability factor into the decision about having children.
What did they miss?
2008
Meaning the economic downturn caused people to forego adding more mouths-to-feed to their families?
No, that couldn’t possibly be it.
Does it take into account that usually people don’t just continuously reproduce and they have a set family size in mind, thus they may not want to produce another spawn after having one?
SAT to use ‘adversity score’ for students applying to college
I’m sure this won’t have any unintended consequences.
The SAT has now completed its transition from “Mostly Useless in assessing aptitude” to “Utterly Useless in assessing aptitude”
I have a Dream . . . . . . . .
He was probably just some dead old white guy, what does he know.
The day I took the ACT our house was flooding. I got no sleep the night before as we were trying to move as much stuff as we could. So I was exhausted and worried about my family while taking the test.
Somehow, I don’t think actual adversity is what they mean.
I worked a late shift the night before I took my ACTs, you know to make money to help my parents cover bills, and fell asleep during the test.
… This might be a bad time to bring up my own experience with the ACT.
Bussed tables, washed dishes, and mopped the restaurant until midnight, drove to the next county to take the test, and only made a 27 on the verbal, bringing my overall down to the 94th percentile. What might have been had I not been raised speaking ScotsIrish gibberish instead of English.
I got to English 101 before I realized I wrote like a hillbilly.
Yes because a black man who can’t add is much more ready for college than a white man who can’t add.
This is hilariously awful. They really are building their own coffins aren’t they?
Social Justice : Minority Achievement :: Margaret Sanger : Healthy Babies
No fair. Margaret Sanger was white.
“The purpose is to get to race without using race,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Mr. Carnevale formerly worked for the College Board and oversaw the Strivers program.
And Exhibit A for the plaintiff’s civil rights lawsuit just wrote itself.
At least they are tacitly admitting they were pathological liars when they claimed they wanted a race-blind society
So how long until the ACT and SAT get banned for disparate impact?
As long as lending institutions can use this score there shouldn’t be a problem…
OT: Other country bumpkins: I gots me a skunk problem. What’s the best course of action? (Reminder, I don’t use firearms)
Flamethrower
Step 1: Start using firearms.
And we’re done here.
My experience in shooting skunks is mixed. Sometimes they do the smell thing, most times (but not every time) they don’t. Its a pretty small sample, though. Unless the skunk in question is exhibiting unusual behavior (IOW, might have rabies), I would go with poison.
Find it’s den. At night when it is out of it’s den, close it up so that it can not get back in.
Poison.
Rodenator Pro
I want one of those so bad. I’m considering buying one and renting it out after I am done with it. The pocket gophers are getting a little out of control in my township.
You have gophers in your pockets?
Being pocket-sized they need human body heat to regulate their own temperature. It does annoy the owners of the pockets to find them there.
Everyone has their kink man.
*nods solemnly*
/Richard Gere
Well, he’s not happy to see you….
It sounds like you have a problem with a lack of snakes.
Yes,the only snake species we have up here is garter snake. Badgers are basically the only predator pocket gophers have here. And many people around here apparently don’t understand what badgers eat and will shoot them because they dig up big mounds of dirt. SMDH
I trapped 2 yesterday, they are no longer with us….I’m a skilled pocket gopher trapper, I rarely miss catching one the day after I set the trap. Live trap skunks, get a friend to shoot them. Wood chucks seem to be the smartest but still catchable. Raccoons are easy, too.
Think of the other vermin you’d have if the skunks weren’t there.
Pray for screech owls.
Stop painting a white stripe on the back of your black female cat.
We’ve had middling success with mothballs. Had a mama skunk under our shed. It took 3 boxes of mothballs before she decided the smell was bad. The mothball smell was bad for us as well.
OT: Hard hitting reporting from the BBC:
Right, Fuck off beeb!
When things aren’t actually OK?
I often use the OK gesture sarcastically. Hmm, quite the paradox…
Riiiiiight,
/ makes ok gesture
Stop the world, I want to get off.
Just came across an old Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln by Icebox:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJOvQYu6K7k
I was in San Marcos Sunday night but didn’t think to wonder how things worked out with the Jeep kid’s roach-fest.
OT: Need some car advice from the knowledgeable Glib community. A few months ago we bought a 2017 Ford F-150. Mrs. TOK loves it. However, about a month ago it gave us an oil pressure warning, so we took it to the dealer. Turns out there was an internal oil leak, and they planned on replacing the heads. (All covered under warranty). However, the parts are on back order and won’t be in until June. Now they called and said they’d like to just replace the entire engine with a factory rebuilt one. (Again, all under warranty because this was a manufacture defect). We have one friend telling us that we don’t want an engine that doesn’t match the truck, so we should try to get them to buy the truck back. I’m not into cars enough to make this decision right now. Any advice?
Stop painting a white stripe on the back of your black female cat.
That’s all I got today.
That’s funny, I have a black male cat. But he hasn’t told me what he identifies as.
LOL!
Kevin, yeah in resale a mismatched engine could knock off the value a bit, but if you plan on driving it to death it won’t make one lick of difference. Only thing is ‘factory rebuilt’ might also have more wear than what have in there now, depending on how used that engine was before the rebuild.
Not sure I’d really give a shit, as long as they provide a substantial warranty. How long were you planning to keep it?
And as the driver of a 2018, I am curious what motor you have. If the parts are backordered, your isn’t an isolated incident.
Part of the reason we bought it is because we heard they last a long time. We like to hold on to our vehicles as long as possible after they are paid off. That’s why we don’t lease.
Not sure what kind of motor it is. And good point about the back order.
Then I personally wouldn’t care. What’s the current mileage?
Not sure! Not too high.
What are your plans for the truck? If you plan to run it for the long term it’s not a big issue. If it’s got some miles on it in some ways you will be getting a fresher vehicle.
If you plan on selling it or trading it in the next few years in it WILL reduce the value of the vehicle.
What ever you do, you would be well served by checking out the lemon laws in your state. I’m 100% sure the dealer knows them front to back and will consider them when making you offers.
Great point, thanks.
I could see there being some suspicion raised when / if reselling of the mismatch.
If its the same model engine or is used in F-150s with the same transmission etc. you have now, I don’t see a problem. Confirm that it will covered under warranty as if it were new.
What Sensei said, also. I don’t buy cars planning to turn them in a few years, so I didn’t think of that.
try to get them to buy the truck back I wouldn’t waste time on things that aren’t going to happen.
an engine that doesn’t match the truck That’s not going to matter until your truck is collectable in, say, 2045. In our times, the nature and extent of your truck’s maintenance is going to be an electronic record that pretty much everyone knows, even if it were just the heads, so the how and the why of the engine swap isn’t some shady or shade-tree affair.
FWIW, I suspect people worry too much about these things. Even if you make a $1,000 error today, after 200k miles it’s only a cent every four furlongs; most people make much worst mistakes by financing cars or buying more car than they can afford to depreciate. Try not to sweat this and let Ford fix it since they’re happy to do so: enjoy the new mill.
Tundra has the blown V6 . . . whatcha got?
https://parts.ford.com/content/dam/ford-parts/wcdocs/WarrantyDocuments/GasEnginesandTransmissionsLimitedWarrantyStatement.pdf
Looks like a 3 year/unlimited mileage warranty on the rebuilt unit.
Call Ford’s customer service line 1–800-232-5952. I’d try to push for a new motor instead of a rebuilt one for a one-ish year old truck, unless it already has a bunch of miles on it. Or trade across for a comparable truck.
I love your work, Yusef! You make me feel like a lazy shit, though.
I haven’t had my fly tying stuff out forever. I blame my near vision, but it’s sheer laziness!
I can barely tie a fly onto my line. I can’t imagine actually making flies.
I was fishing with a retired surgeon (pushing 80) last week. He used to tie his own flies, and I watched him put flies on his line without hardly looking at what he was doing.
Hell of a life story. Grew up in way backwoods Louisiana (as in, no phone and an outhouse). Worked his way through college and medical school, became a widely recognized orthopedic surgeon. An adrenaline junkie in his younger days – used to go spearfishing around oil rigs and flew his own bush plane on hunting trips in Alaska.
^This.
Emily Ratajkowski posts her very deep thoughts on abortion…..along with a mostly nude photo of herself
I actually did read her comments. I think there’s some discussion merited by her statement that the Alabama law will “perpetuate the industrial prison complex by preventing women of low economic opportunity the right not to reproduce”. First of all, there’s no way to avoid reproduction without abortion? Second of all, I am tickled by the fact that she almost certainly is too stupid to realize that she is actually stating that poor kids are inherently more prone to criminality. Randolph Duke would be proud.
Yeah, that’s a puzzler. Is she going full Sanger, and saying we need to keep the lumpenproletariat from reproducing by any means necessary? Is she saying to poor women with kids are more likely to be criminals?
Wasn’t that essentially the take in the book Freakonomics? Sorry to butt in. I just thought from what I’ve read on the issue that there does at least seem to be a correlation.
Yes, Leavitt made that argument in Freakonomics, but there were some major holes in in that Steven Pinker discussed in his own book. For example, for the theory to make any sense, birth rates for poor unwed teenagers should have declined post-Roe. In fact, the opposite occurred – rates increased in the years following 1973.
One thing that Pinker didn’t mention but that always bugged me about the theory: if legalized abortion caused crime rates to drop, then crime rates prior to 1973 should have been uniformly higher. That’s not close to being the case, though, as violent crime rates in the 1940s and 50s, when people were poorer and black Americans were undeniably worse-off than they were in the decades to come, were much lower than in the 1960s and 70s.
I thought the current thinking was that the downturn in violent crime was tied to the banning of leaded gasoline. We should be able to test that in a couple years by checking back in Flint.
Did either bring up the draft in the crimes rate discussions? Hard to commit a crime in the US when you’re in a foxhole in Asia.
Fuck, I totally misread that.
If I remember correctly I think he explained that by saying that the children born just before Roe vs Wade was the last generation of ‘unwanted’ children who didn’t reach early adulthood until the early to mid nineties, which were in fact pretty damn violent. I don’t know. I’m not nearly informed enough to have a hard position on the subject. I’ll have to check out Pinker. Thanks.
“in the 1940s and 50s, when people were poorer and black Americans were undeniably worse-off ”
This is the part I am questioning. Especially the last part – black Americans were certainly worse-off after the Great Society programs started in the 60’s and 70’s.
Were blacks worse off after the Great Society, or did their rate of economic improvement slow or flatten out?
Pretty sure it’s the latter, and the rate of unwed mothers skyrocketed after government employees went door to door and told these women they could get more money if they were single.
40s and 50s were early in the urbanization of the black population of the US as they were drawn by factory jobs into the cities. The communities and families were of an intact, traditional structure well into that time frame. The broken, urbanized environment that produced a larger criminal element came later.
The other point I’ll make is that government crime stats have always been 100% bullshit.
Here – I found a section from Pinker online. It’s long but worth reading:
Ah, interesting stuff. Like I said above, I’ll check it out. Thanks again.
“Only in the late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties, should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In fact, the opposite happened.”
Again, crime stats are bullshit. But even if you disagree with me, the War On Drugs ramped up after Roe v Wade and it made violent crime a very different animal from the 60’s and 70’s. If Roe v Wade were the only variable, then there would be some plausibility in drawing correlations before and after.
The elites, right and left, have always wanted to keep the lumpenproletariat from reproducing.
Eugenics today! Eugenics tomorrow! Eugenics forever!
“…preventing women of low economic opportunity the right not to reproduce”.
Bullshit. The pill can be had for pocket change. This has nothing to do with access. The problem is irresponsible behavior.
OT: She seems nice.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/harrowing-video-woman-25-shoving-15959834
I’m hoping someone on the street ran to his help, because the people on the bus didn’t do a damn thing.
she was cussing at other passengers and he told her to be more polite, then he turned his back to her. i’ve had several negative interactions with crazy people on public transportation. this is what i’ve learned: 1. don’t interact with crazy people, 2. DO NOT INTERACT WITH CRAZY PEOPLE, 3. do i have to say it again?
there is absolutely nothing good to come from crazy people on public transport. nothing.
How do you defend yourself? Thick, urine-proof briefcase?
Lysol is their repellent.
I still have a Zero Halliburton aluminum briefcase that would ruin someones day.
I hardly use it anymore though. Kind of sad that it just sits there collecting dust.
That’s why we don’t lease.
Unless used for a short-term business need, leasing is a clear financial loser over owning. We don’t agree on everything, but I will note that Dave Ramsey calls it a “fleece.”
The games that are played to get people to make decisions based on cash-flow instead of on wealth preservation/creation astound me. Pay cash on the barrel head for everything and you will make much better decisions. Even 0% loans are a mistake.
I’m glad you started out with the seed cash to be able to do that.
I needed to get to work, and they cancelled one of the busses, so it was either get a car or say goodbye to my income.
UCS, your decision was still based more on wealth creation/preservation than cashflow games.
I needed to get to work
Sounds like a short-term business need, to me.
When I didn’t have the assets to pay for cars outright, I would hem and haw over leasing v buying on credit. I bought on credit, because I always intended to own the car for longer than the lease term.
Could be, indeed. Notice I don’t insist that people avoid mortgages: you’ve got to live somewhere and borrowing on a home might be a good play.
With cars as with houses, though, I think people borrow to buy too much. There is something about the anguish of counting out money on a barrel head that leads to better decisions, though: it stings in a way that some vague future string of payments can’t. Debt is the opiate of the masses.
Debt is the opiate of the masses.
Iron Law worth, Don.
I have resisted even pretty obvious arbitrage with mortgages and refinancing – taking money out of the house to invest. With mortgage rates so low, its a pretty solid play on paper. Assuming, of course, that things go well. What people miss is that debt doesn’t just leverage reward, it leverages risk. If things go south in the market, there goes your arbitrage. If things go south with your job, there goes your house (potentially).
In hindsight, I could have made some good money using this play. Instead, I will pay off my house in 3 years. Is that rather substantial pile of capital “dead” because its locked up in a non-producing asset? Yup. And I don’t care.
absolutely correct
The 0% loan game doesn’t address risk, a key factor in your note above. How many guys sign for more car than they need and then lose their job? That payment is still due on something that is more expensive than was needed, so how does the 0% make any difference?
I wrote that check last week, and I don’t even have a job; but cash is king; cash is freedom! Which, by the way, is never anything to let your boss or co-workers know: they resent the hell out of someone who isn’t at their mercy. I saw a dear friend last night who was my boss last year, and he’s turned in his rental for a new one! He’s going the wrong way, and I ache for him.
“I will pay off my house in 3 years. Is that rather substantial pile of capital “dead” because its locked up in a non-producing asset? Yup. And I don’t care.”
You will never regret it. In three years that annual housing expense will go into your retirement funds. Four years after that you will start thinking “Why do I need this job anymore?”
Actually, with any luck your house is appreciating at least by the amount of inflation and you are not paying any income tax on that gain, at least not at the present plus you are living rent free.
As IF and others have said when the house is paid for you’ll have more incentive to plan for retirement.
I once heard an old Greek adage: Don’t borrow money for anything that doesn’t make you money.
If you have to borrow, borrow for a $4k car, not a $24k car.
(Says the person with two 0% car loans right now, acknowledging they were bad decisions, but not as bad a decision as leasing)
$4k
That’s only 200 yards!
Fuck Obama and C4C. I bought a 7 year old car with 55k miles in 2008 for $2400. It lasted until I sold it to the next door neighbor’s sister in 2015 for $800. Another $100 in vacuum lines, and it was still running fine when we moved away in 2017.
You can’t find deals like that (even inflation adjusted) these days.
seed cash
My dad didn’t finish high school. I paid for my first car mowing lawns and drove it 100,000. Last week I wrote a check for the nicest thing on the Toyota lot; I got there by repeatedly making good decisions.
And that is my hope for everyone: good decisions.
I like to remind people that they are choosing to put their sales tax on 15% interest.
Don speaks the truth.
When we bought the dearly departed AMG, it was a lease turnback. What we saved over new was in excess of what the guy leasing it paid. Weirdly, I learned almost nobody buys new AMGs. They are nearly all leased, and the lease turnbacks are nearly all in excellent shape. You can get some excellent deals. On the downside, you now own a very nice car with rather pricey maintenance needs.
STEVE SMITH SAY WHY BUY HIKERS WHEN YOU CAN LEASE
NOT LEASING. MORE LIKE SQUATTING.
OT
Need some advice from fellow computer nerds. I’m burnt out in my current career field so I’m taking it upon myself to to learn code. No I’m not a journalist for the HuffPo. I currently know SQL and that’s about it. Unless you count Qbasic from back in the day. What should I go after next? I’ve been told Python, R, and JavaScript are where I should focus. But in what order?
Python to start. Javascript is really quirky. Python is vaguely similar to C, which will help if you eventually want to learn C#, C++ or any of the other C derived languages.
Navajo.
Depends on what you want to code and what sort of industry you want to be in.
My $.02 (worth more than you paid!): Learn the .NET platform, preferably in C# in addition to JavaScript (and learn JS through one of the popular frameworks – Angular, React, etc.) Unless you want to get into statistics/bioinformatics, in which case R and Python are better choices. There’s a *ton* of existing code in C#/.NET (and the knowledge mostly carries over to the places that did VB.NET). Lots and lots of web stuff out there, even when the “core” is .NET or something else, so JS isn’t going away any time soon, and lotta job postings looking for Angular/React experience.
Can’t go wrong with .NET and C#. You can even use it on macOS and Linux now. Primary use cases seem to be enterprisey stuff (my bread and butter). Combined with SQL knowledge, even better.
I don’t do front-end web stuff so I can’t say much there but yeah JS seems to be a must. Looking at it makes my head hurt, though.
I do almost no front end now but the guys I work with that do all insist that jQuery libraries are all they should be using and getting away from writing their own JS.
Dotnet core is the only reason I will touch C#. I’m not a big fan, but some people (read employers) are.
Another nice thing about C# is that that the syntax is so similar to Java.
https://www.introprogramming.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Books/CSharpEn/Fundamentals-of-Computer-Programming-with-CSharp-Nakov-eBook-v2013.pdf
Download Visual Studio, learn some basic C# and MVC. You’re familiar with SQL so you may want to start with database first for an MVC app.
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/4b0136/database-first-approach-in-mvc-5-working-with-database/
Personally trying to learn coding starting with learning C# was not good. There was to much left unexplained. As someone who didn’t do computer science in school python was great because I got to ignore a lot of the boilerplate stuff that I would get hung up on in C#.
But if you already know SQL it might not be a bad start.
Any books or tutorials you recommend for Python? Our company is starting to use it some. I’d be looking at using more for automating tasks.
O’Reilly’s “Python Programming” is pretty good. Of course there are all the codecademy courses. I never feel good recommending books or tutorials cause I don’t know how others learn.
Thanks!
L
L++ or GTFO
L#
O
E
Python is fantastic, stay away from R. Even if you are interested in data analysis Python is just better. I leaned to program with R but now use python for work.
All I know about R is that it is used in statistics/bioinformatics (some of our research people apparently use it in their analyses). Sounds like leon knows best on this one!
I’m definitely biased. If the people you work with used R then it might be useful. The thing is that it was written by statisticians. This means it’s very useful for statistics but stuffers from some quirks that can make it frustrating to work with.
Depends on what you want to do. If you are going to move from SQL DBA to big data, Python and R are great choices. If you expect to be a utility guy, I’ll echo the C# and JS with React or Angular. Really, though. Learning any language that is more functionally oriented than SQL will transfer. Once you know the code flows, moving between languages is like using Google Translate. Are there tricks to C++ or Python that will make it more performant than if I think through how I would write a C# version of a program? Absolutely? But unless you’re writing embedded systems that are going to be in place for 20 years on hardware that was spec 5 years ago, it won’t matter.
Do you like SQL? Oracle DBA’s make big money and are always in high demand.
Do you really want to code? Or would doing something in the cloud be cool with you. Get an AWS certification of some sort and you will probably be able to get a job. Lots of people are trying to move to AWS and none of them really knows what they are doing, so opportunities galore.
As far as coding languages go, it really depends on what you want to do. Node JS is a good one to know. (You can use it to write Lambda functions in AWS).
Great work, Yusuf. I admire you taking on that small a scale.
FWIW, I recently repainted a porch ornament and needed some black paint for detailing. I found my old Testors Military Flats paints from college (or maybe before) and they were still good and not dried up. Wow.
Also, the texturing looks good. I’m always afraid to do water or ice because it never looks good. Yours is perfect.
thanks Tonio
There’s a helicopter service between Manhattan and the JFK airport. I even thought about trying it. Yesterday one of their helicopters crashed into the Hudson River.
It lost the tail rotor connection (or something failed).. then the pilot started the autorotation, popped the emergency floats and splashed.. yes, you will walk/swim away from those. In a helicopter if you have a flight control or major engine issue, you are going to be doing an emergency landing somewhere directly below you..
What I have heard is that the approach to the E34th street heliport is so closed in that you have to go in with your finger on the float release button, because if there is an issue in the last couple of seconds you won’t have time to react. The approaches to Wall St and W30th are not as touchy.
I prefer Q’s float bags, but those are lifesavers.
With as much advice as we request from each other(myself included, just did it last night) I think it would a gas if the staff did a ZARDOZ gives Glibs advice article. ZARDOZ bookmarking a few advice posts here through the week then answering them in the most snarky, brutal way possible. Just a thought.
Very cool Yusef! Seems like a very Zen passion you have there. So are we talking hot/crazy or just crazy?
This look cool!