This ‘n’ That, 7/12/19

I’ve been lagging behind ’round these parts as the summer grinds on…

Summer.

This has become the Summer of Repairs™ for me.

I mentioned before (oh, the pain!) of having to first redo all the water exit lines on the east side of my house, following which my central AC crapped out on me and I had to get a whole new unit, then we had to redo the guest bathroom where the original water exit line problem began because floor was drilled.

Welp, I forgot to mention another thing: Earlier in the summer my eldest daughter’s car was crapping out and we wound up trading that car in for another. Today, my younger daughter’s car is giving her trouble (though I think not nearly as bad as the elder’s much older vehicle) and we took it to the shop today to get it looked at. I suspect the problem it has is in the fuel line. We’ll see.

We also discovered, now that the rainy season has begun, a leak in a part of our roof which will have to be resolved… though I may be forced to wait for the rainy season to die out. Around these parts, roofers are in high demand during the rainy season and a repair job is looked upon as not worth pursuing when many people ask for their entire roof to be repaired.

Ugh.

The money flying out is… impressive. Acutally, depressive.

The only saving grace is that at this point we’re running out of things that can crap out and subsequently need repair! (I really hope I haven’t jinxed myself!)

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Found this video the other day of the Tesla semi on the road…

People noted that a driver could not be seen behind the wheel of the vehicle and, thus, the reason the clip is pointing out that it’s a “self-driving” Tesla on the street.

I have to say, I was skeptical this was the case. Even if Tesla was testing their self-driving feature, they’d be crazy to let a vehicle like this one out on the road without anyone behind the wheel.

Nonetheless, I cannot make out anyone in the cabin. When reading the comments on the YouTube site this is presented on, people state there is someone in the cabin and they have dark sunglasses on.

I still don’t see it, but I tend to believe this must be the case.

Again: Why risk your Semi (I believe Tesla only has two of them built to this point) on something without having at least one person behind the wheel just in case something goes wrong?

*****

Jeffrey Epstein.

Holy shit.

I mean, if all the allegations are proven true (and he was convicted and given what amounted to a slap on the wrist) what a freaking sleaze of a guy.

I despair at the political situation these days in the US. We have a “news” network that is nothing more than a brainwashing service intent on getting people to love conservatives/Republicans and hate them-there libral scum and, sadly, the service is effective.

If day after day after day, year after year after year you’re presenting a slanted persistent message, eventually people start to buy into it.

With Mr. Epstein, (you can read about him and how his alleged dirty deeds have now cost Jim Acosta his job in the Trump administration), Fox “news” was only too happy to point out the fact that Bill Clinton knew the man and had flown a few times on his private jet in the past.

Less inclined are they, though, to mention Trump’s relationships with him.

Google around. The stuff that’s written -and assuming there is truth to it- is absolutely disgusting.

If Bill Clinton is proven to have been involved in some of this level of sleaze, he deserves to be reviled.

I suppose that’s the difference between libral scum and the Fox “news” people: If illegal activities occurred, I’m more than happy to see those engaged in them get sent to jail.

Whoever they may be.

Tesla: Endgame Part Deux

A while back and in April I wrote about my thoughts on where Elon Musk wants to ultimately take Tesla and their electric vehicles (click here for the original post, Tesla: Endgame).

My feeling was that Mr. Musk is thinking farther ahead than most car makers in the sense that he feels we will eventually have self-driving vehicles and, because of that, we will have a version of the Uber/Lyft system where a company will have a fleet of self-driving vehicles roaming around a city (at first) and the company will make a lot more money on those vehicles while consumers will not need to actually buy cars. It will become more economical to order a self-driving vehicle, have it take you wherever you need to go, then when you’re done order another to take you back.

No more buying cars, no more insurance, no more monthly lease payments, and no more worrying about changing tires/servicing your vehicle.

A recent tweet over the weekend caused some consternation among folks when Mr. Musk was asked by “Disruption Research”:

Do consumers have limited time left to buy a Tesla car, since prices would have to go up severalfold to balance supply & demand once you solve FSD?

To which Mr. Musk replied curtly:

Yes

The consternation was due to the fact one could interpret Mr. Musk’s response to indicate Tesla might not sell cars at all once the self-driving thing was resolved. Mr. Musk, perhaps sensing a rising panic, offered the following elaboration:

To be clear, consumers will still be able to buy a Tesla, but the clearing price will rise significantly, as a fully autonomous car that can function as a robotaxi is several times more valuable than a non-autonomous car

In other words, once/if Tesla resolves self-driving and if you have a self-driving vehicle, you have a potential money maker, one that you could send out when not using it as a “robo-taxi” and make money off of it.

So Mr. Musk notes rather bluntly: Why sell a Model 3 for, say, $50,000 (or thereabouts) when you could make that much money on the vehicle -or more!- in a year by sending it out as a robo-taxi? If/when Tesla gets the self-driving realized, they aren’t going to be selling their vehicles at the current prices because they are now potential money makers.

And that dovetails nicely into what I wrote in my original Tesla: Endgame post.

Here’s the thing: Until full self-driving is realized, Tesla still has to sell vehicles and continue doing so to make money it needs to continue its research.

When I purchased my Tesla earlier this year, I invested in the “self-driving” feature. It was, I believe, something like $5000 or so and didn’t think about using the car as a “robo-taxi.” Frankly, I did so because I thought it would be fascinating to have a car that can drive itself.

Having said that, if there’s good money into making my car a “robo-taxi”, I might be tempted to let it be used as such!

Once again, this is something that depends entirely on when -and if– a fully functional self-driving feature becomes a reality.

Mr. Musk is optimistic it will happen, perhaps as soon as later this very year.

I don’t think it’ll happen that quickly, but in the next two or three years?

It’s certainly possible.

Too damn funny… July 4th, 2019 Edition

Last year there was this very funny (IMHO!) bit of news, now sadly forgotten, where right-wing “pundit” and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones stated liberals were going to use the 2018 Independence Day to launch a takeover/Civil War against the good ol’ conservatives. Much hilarity ensued as people wrote hilarious twitter comments about the so-called “second Civil War” (you can read about this here).

In what seems to be becoming an annual tradition …well, if twice in two years portends such things… there was something new which appeared this year which provoked some pretty funny comments.

I refer to Donald Trump’s Independence Day speech wherein he said the following…

Yep, you heard it right. When talking about the Revolutionary War, Donald Trump said:

Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do.

Oh boy.

I’ve made my feeling known before regarding Donald Trump: I have absolutely no love at all for him. Whether he stole the election with the help of Putin or not, in his time in office he has proved to be uniquely unqualified to be president. Further, he seems borderline illiterate and certainly uneducated. And that’s ignoring his obvious racism, sexism, and any other number of vindictive you want to give him.

Seeing this clip, he seems almost out of it. As if he’s under some kind of medication and having difficulties seeing/reading the teleprompter. Perhaps its because his reading skills aren’t great or perhaps the rain made it difficult for him to read the damn thing.

Regardless, I suspect he was adding in words here and there and the airport line, one would think, had to be an ad lib, right?

I mean, no one could have been stupid enough to write out that speech and actually put that line in there?!

Because if that line was in the actual written speech, then one can’t help but assume whoever put it there did so in the hopes he would read the line without thinking and make an ass out of himself as he’s done here.

And, continuing on that thought and continuing in the assumption that line was in the written speech, one has to wonder how much his own staff hates Mr. Trump and is willing to make him look absolutely ridiculous in a high profile speech!

Well, it didn’t take long for several smart asses to react to Mr. Trump’s latest verbal faux pas. Over on Huffington Post, Mary Papenfuss offers an article which examines how…

Trump Dive-Bombed in Tweets After Claiming Army Seized Revolutionary War Airports

There are some very funny tweets mentioned in the article above and I urge you to check them out. One of my favorites was this one by Jack W. Bower:

My Dearest Rose,

I’m afraid I must be the bearer of bad news. My flight has already been delayed a fortnight, and I fear it will be longer. The army has shut down the airport and the airplane will not be invented for 6 score and 7 years from now.#RevolutionaryWarAirportStories

Sad… and yet expected

Yesterday came news that the venerable Mad Magazine, the satirical/smart-assed magazine published since 1952, was for all intents and purposes being cancelled.

Sure, there are a few “ifs” and “buts” to this news, but essentially the Magazine will be producing more and more “best of” editions and stopping the original stuff.

You can read more about this in this article by James Whitbrook and presented over on i09.com:

Mad Magazine is basically dead

To me, and as I wrote on the header above, this is sad but expected news. It’s been many, many years since I’ve read Mad Magazine, and likely well over twenty plus years since I’ve held an original newstand issue release.

But there was a time, back in the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, when Mad Magazine was one of my favorite publications. I loved it so much that I even had a subscription to them and got issues over the mail. Not before and not since had I ever done that, and I still recall the first issue I received in the mail…

Image result for mad magazine king kong

From 1977 and not one of their “best” issues, nonetheless I loved the parody of King Kong (the first remake film, which featured a very young Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange).

I was fascinated with Mad and eager to pick up their earlier issues. Luckily, they would release “Best of” editions which often allowed me to get peeks at the long history of Mad Magazine parodies.

Many years later and at the dawn of the “digital” age, a beautiful CD Rom compilation was released which featured all the issues of the magazine up to that point. Even better, it included odds and ends found in the various “Best of” compilations, including songs and other silliness…

Image result for mad magazine cd rom

Loved it!

A few years after this release they released another up to the moment CD Rom set, but this one didn’t feature all those wonderful bonuses.

When I got the CD Rom edition, I tried to read some of the more recent magazines included in the set but found the humor… just wasn’t as good as before.

Worse, many of my favorite artists and writers were no longer there. Don Martin left the book amid a squabble over royalties with publisher William Gaines and eventually went to work for Cracked, did his own series, and passed away. Sadly, in reading the incidentals regarding Mr. Martin’s situation, I couldn’t help but feel that Mr. Gaines had taken advantage of not only him but many of the other artists he hired from the early EC days through Mad Magazine. Mr. Gaines made plenty of money reprinting older strips and, at least according to Mr. Martin, didn’t offer royalties to the talent who made the works.

Similarly, other artists and writers, such as Antonio Prohias, who created and wrote/drew Spy vs Spy, had also either left the book and/or passed away. What I saw with those later issues were works by people I neither knew nor found all that interesting.

Ah well.

Still, it’s incredibly sad to read that Mad may finally be shutting down. It had a good, long run, but today it competes with memes and comedians who are on TV nightly. The humor it brought forward is readily available in so many media and a magazine coming out bi-monthly simply didn’t have as much of a chance.

Good things, as they say, eventually come to their end, and so too it appears to have happened to Mad.

The dangers of buying digital things…

First, I have to be honest: I LOVE buying things “digitally”.

I LOVE not having the clutter of so many books and movies and the ease by which I can enjoy both through either my cellphone, tablet, or through my “smart” TV.

I LOVE IT!

…however…

Stories like these make me mighty uncomfortable. From Matt Novak and presented on gizmodo.com:

Ebooks purchased from Microsoft will be deleted this month because you don’t really own anything anymore

The title is self-explanatory: Microsoft sold eBooks starting in/around 2017. The service appears to have not done very well and the company decided they were going to stop selling books and, further, delete those that people bought.

Money will be returned by Microsoft to the people who bought these eBooks, just to be clear, and the service seems to have been a flop pretty much from the beginning so not that many people were affected.

However, this does present a sobering thought: What if this should happen with Apple or Amazon? How about VUDU? All my books/graphic novels -and I have a BUNCH of them- are on Amazon. Pretty much all my film purchases are currently being done through VUDU.

What if these services have a problem? What if suddenly all these many thousands of dollars I’ve spent will *poof!* be gone?

Again, I love the digital services. I love the fact that my home isn’t getting filled up with more books and movie boxes.

I love this!

But, seriously, there needs to be some kind of permanence created for these bought items yet I wonder if such a thing could be accomplished, other than downloading your stuff and saving it to increasingly full Hard Drives.

The firing of Michael de Adder…

Not familiar with the above name?

Mr. De Adder is a political cartoonist whose work appears in Canadian newspapers and who, last week, was let go (ie fired) from four newspapers that presented his work.

He suspects this may have been the result of the following piece:

As Mr. de Adder puts it:

…in the past 2 weeks I drew 3 Trump cartoons. 2 went viral and the third went supernova and a day later I was let go. And not only let go, the cartoons they already had in the can were not used. Overnight it was like I never worked for the paper. Make your own conclusions.

I must admit, when I saw this piece, it was like receiving a gut punch. This piece, if you’re not aware of it, shows the two South American refugees, a father and his months’ old daughter, who drowned trying to cross into the United States.

The actual photograph of these two is heartbreaking and, frankly, I feel uncomfortable presenting it here, just as I find the above cartoon also very uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing: Mr. De Adder did his job.

Tremendously well.

He presented a scathing indictment of Donald Trump and his priorities as well as his lack of empathy for migrants -and active attempts to make their already difficult situation even more difficult- as well as the end results of many that do try to make this trek.

Granted, migrant deaths have occurred throughout many administrations, not just this one, but the animus shown by Trump and company to these people is on a league of its own.

And the fact that Mr. de Adder was fired so soon after presentation of this piece shows the intersection between businesses and politics. It would seem the owners of the four Canadian papers have other business interests, and it doesn’t pay to have an employee piss off a potential partner, or impediment, to their business world.

You can take hits at politicians, but sometimes the hits may land a little too hard.