Saving Money the Easy Way

I found a coffee cup at WalMart for $1 with a lid cover and spill flap and a rubber ring to use when the coffee cup is hot.  I was quite surprised to find anything in WalMart for a dollar anymore.  I have plenty of coffee cups, but they are all packed up because we are moving and the paper cup I was using finally started leaking.

Another store, below the quality of WalMart (if that can be) is BIG LOTS.  They buy non sale items in bulk or discontinued items in bulk and sell it rather cheap.  I know that there a lot of people who claim they would not be caught dead in places like WalMart and BIG LOTS, and those people are usually the snotty wealthy people.  

That is actually strange because while rich people are willing to spend money for quality, they also like to save money when they can, and claim that careful spending is one of the ways they became wealthy.  Who knows???

All I know is that I can paint the house with a $2 paint brush just as good as I can paint the house with a $10 paint brush...  And, I don't need an expensive shovel to dig a ditch...  if you follow my drift.

I remember years ago when my daughter worked for some retail outfit that accepted refunds, telling the story how customers would borrow stuff to use and then return it a few days later (with the receipt) saying they had changed their mind.  One of the most memorable stories was a family buying a set of dishes for 8 people, just before Thanksgiving, and returning them just after Thanksgiving (used but not washed), saying they had changed their minds.

I suppose if you want to save money, this is surely an easy way to do it.

KoolAid

 

Chinese Hackers Target USA

A state-sponsored Chinese hacking group has been spying on a wide ange of US critical infrastructure organizations and similar activities could be occurring globally, western intelligence agencies and Microsoft have warned.

“The United States and international cybersecurity authorities are issuing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to highlight a recently discovered cluster of activity of interest associated with a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actor, also known as Volt Typhoon,” said a statement released by authorities in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – countries that make up the Five Eyes intelligence network.


In a separate statement, Microsoft said Volt Typhoon had been active since mid-2021 and had targeted critical infrastructure in Guam, a crucial US military outpost in the Pacific Ocean. “Mitigating this attack could be challenging,” Microsoft said.   READ MORE...

Toilet Blues

 

Clogging

 

Hypersonic Generator

• Turning gas into plasma creates an intense electrical current for powering potent hypersonic weapons.
• Chinese researchers built a hypersonic generator that could power military lasers, rail guns, and microwave weapons.
• The relative compact nature of the hypersonic generator opens the scope of potential uses.

Chinese scientists say one formidable explosion inside a shock tunnel can turn hot gas into the most powerful hypersonic generator a military has ever seen—strong enough to charge military lasers, rails guns, microwave weapons, and more.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, a new peer-reviewed paper in the Chinese Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics explains how the hypersonic generator turns one detonation inside a shock tunnel into enough electrical current to power hypersonic weapons of the future.

The Chinese scientists were able to use a controlled detonation to turn hot gas into a plasma filled with racing ions, which converted to current. With shock waves accelerating the compressed argon gas to 14 times the speed of sound, the charged ion-filled plasma then passed through magnetohydrodynamics generators to produce electric current up to 212 kilowatts while using.26 gallons of gas. That’s enough power for a burst of energy unlike anything available now in a compact system.

“It has a large capacity and high efficiency," the scientists write, via the SCMP. “There is no need for intermediate energy storage components. The energy can be directly transferred to the load without a high-power switch. And the device can start up quickly.” The generator also has no rotating parts, increasing efficiency and ease of use.

With some of the largest weapons in development requiring a gigawatt of input power, the researchers say they can produce that with 177 cubic feet of hypersonic plasma (that’s smaller than most vans).   READ MORE...

Water Flow

 

The Witch Hunt

 It is rather interesting, at least to me, how the Democrats went after Trump for 4 years and then 2 years after he left office the Durham Report shows that the FBI and DOJ had NO EVIDENCE AT ALL...  not only that but the Mueller Report should have never taken place, nor should the House have initiated EMPEACHMENT proceedings...

It is also rather obvious that many people in the House LIED TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC about the evidence they claimed to have.  Not only was the American Public played for FOOLS but the mainstream MEDIA who wholeheartedly supported the Democrats are now seen as a bunch of amateurs...

The Democrats have never apologized for their arrogance!!!

NOW HERE'S THE ISSUE:   Can we ever trust the Democrats again?

But it is not just the Democrats but can we trust the FBI or the DOJ or the mainstream media again to report the truth or investigate/prosecute those that are really guilty?

Not to have that trust is a major concern to myself as well as HALF THE US POPULATION who are about to elect Donald Trump to become President again.

WHAT LIES WILL THEY THROW OUT NOW?

Refusing

 

HALO

On Monday, defense giants Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon were both awarded contracts totaling $116 million between them by the U.S. Navy to separately develop prototype ship-sinking hypersonic missiles designed to sink ships hundreds of miles away for a program known as HALO (Hypersonic Air-launched Offensive). The competing initial design proposals are due in late 2024.

This likely-to-be scramjet-powered weapon, also known as Objective Anti-Surface Warfare Increment 2 (OASuW) in Navy budget documents, would be carried by the service’s carrier-based FA-18E/F Super Hornet and F-35 Lightning jet fighters and perhaps future successors. It’s expected to fly farther and much faster than the current LRASM stealth cruise missile.

The focus on anti-ship capabilities reflects the focus on a potential conflict with China in the western Pacific Ocean. Notably, simulations of a battle over Taiwan suggest it would be decided in large part by the effectiveness of long-range anti-ship missiles.
The Navy’s Need for Speedy Missiles

Strictly speaking, a hypersonic missile could describe any weapon that exceeds five times the speed of sound—i.e. traversing a mile per second—but practically, the term applies to two modern concepts. The first is a missile that releases hypersonic gliders that skip just on top of the Earth’s atmosphere.  READ MORE...

Gene Krupa: Percussionist

 

What You Don't Understand

 

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Speed of LIfe

What I find interesting is that each day has the same number of hours and minutes as the day before and the day after, and yet, as one gets older, time seems to move by quicker and quicker...  but, that is impossible as it moves at the same speed that it has always moved.

Age 20 and younger, time seems to move by slowly especially if you are waiting for something like a birthday or if you are in a bad situation in the classroom and you just want the day to end.

Around ages 40-50, time seems to be just right  except for vacations.  Vacations at any age always seems to move slow, unless you are on a vacation you don't like.

Ages 60 and over, time seems to move by quicker and quicker each year.  For instance, my 60th birth seems like it happened only a few years ago.  I remember it well because that was when I was diagnosed with cancer.  But, my age is 75 and it just does not seem like 15 years has passed when it is more like 3-5.

At the speed at which time flies by now, I'll be 80 soon, then 90 and will seriously begin wondering how many more years do I have left.

So far, I have no looked back and REGRETTED ANYTHING that I did or did not do.  I don't regret my choices because at the time, I thought they were good ones or the only ones available.

What bothers me more than anything else is physically not being able to do what I use to do and having to ask someone else to do it for me.  I have never had to ask that before.

Political Cartoons

 

Western Civilization

One weekend, I found my younger son at the kitchen table, carefully writing out everything he knew about the Olympian gods for his school homework. His brow was furrowed, and he trained his eyes on the page with a level of concentration that I wish he would pay to his maths homework. So I asked him—casually, I thought—why he was so interested in the ancient Greeks. He beamed up at me with an angelic smile and answered, “Because that’s what you study, Mama.”

At this point, my heart nearly burst with parental pride. I am a Professor of Classical Archaeology and the ancient Greeks are, quite literally, my bread and butter. But my heart sank when my son added as an afterthought, “and because the Greeks gave us Western Civilization.” Buckle up, kid, I thought, you’re in for a lecture.

I wanted to tell him that the ancient Greeks did not give us Western Civilization. That there is no golden thread, unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO. That we in the modern West are not the heirs of a unique and elevated cultural tradition, stretching back through Atlantic modernity to Enlightenment and Renaissance Europe, and from there through the darkness of the medieval period and ultimately back to the glories of classical Greece and Rome.

For most of us, it seems normal—even natural—to think of Western history in these terms. Unthinkingly, we assume that the modern West is the custodian of a privileged inheritance, passed down through a kind of cultural genealogy that we usually refer to as “Western Civilization.”

It is a version of history that is all around us, set out in popular textbooks, encoded implicitly into children’s stories and Hollywood movies, and proclaimed loudly and sometimes even angrily by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum. But it is a version of history that is simply wrong.

Research points to a different version of Western history. I have myself spent two decades of my professional life uncovering how ancient Greeks and Romans were much more diverse than we might think. They were neither predominantly white nor predominantly European, and indeed did not conceive of racial and geographical categories in the same way that we now do. As a result, the monks of western Europe, laboriously copying Latin manuscripts in their dusty scriptoria, were not the only medieval heirs of classical antiquity.

So too were the merchants of fourteenth century Sudan, conducting their trade in Greek; and so too were the Buddhist sculptors of northern India and Pakistan, who drew on the artistic traditions of the Indo-Greek kingdoms.

But perhaps the greatest centre of medieval classical learning when it came to the sciences was in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, where classical scholarship was fused with new philosophical and scientific developments drawn from across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Put simply, the real history of the West is much richer and much more complex than the traditional grand narrative of Western Civilization acknowledges. It is not a golden thread but a golden tapestry—in which strands of diverse peoples, cultures, and ideas have been woven together over the centuries.

Our notion of Western Civilization is then demonstrably wrong, proven to be factually incorrect again and again by the mounting weight of historical and archaeological research. So where did the idea come from anyway? And why do we still cling to a version of Western history that we know to be untrue?  READ MORE...

Full Capacity

 

Beach Lightening

 

Selling Superintelligent Sunshine

The OpenAI CEO is on a world tour to talk up the benefits of AI and the need for regulation — but not too much. Some, though, think Altman’s vision is dangerous.

The queue to see OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speak at University College London on Wednesday stretched hundreds deep into the street. 

Those waiting gossiped in the sunshine about the company and their experience using ChatGPT, while a handful of protesters delivered a stark warning in front of the entrance doors: OpenAI and companies like it need to stop developing advanced AI systems before they have the chance to harm humanity.

“Look, maybe he’s selling a grift. I sure as hell hope he is,” one of the protestors, Gideon Futerman, a student at Oxford University studying solar geoengineering and existential risk, said of Altman. 

“But in that case, he’s hyping up systems with enough known harms. We probably should be putting a stop to them anyway. And if he’s right and he’s building systems which are generally intelligent, then the dangers are far, far, far bigger.”  READ MORE...

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