Wordle 1819 Hint

 Hint: Brief work stoppage.

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First Letter: B

Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but when I think of Norton Motorcycles, I think of the older, legendary bikes like the Commando 850 (this one's a 1973, quite possibly the model my brother rode, while keeping it a secret from everyone in the family that he even owned a motorcycle -- photo by Piero at Dutch Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license):

I suspect most people think of that kind of bike when they hear "Norton." And there seems to be a big market for "retro" type motorcycles -- it's Royal Enfield's bread and butter.

So seeing their new models is kind of depressing. Randomly picked, but it could be any of them,  here's the Atlas (I couldn't find a "free to use" image).

It looks like every other consumer slop motorcycle of the current period, all kinds of fairings and touchscreens and science-fictiony sharp edges. And that seems to be true of all their current models.

Not that I'm the "new Norton motorcycle" target market. If I buy a motorcycle that's expensive new, I'll be buying it used ... and I doubt I'll ever find a used Norton in my price range, and I wouldn't even bother contacting someone selling one of these particular models used.

If I wanted a motorcycle that looked like the Atlas, I'd save myself a whole bunch of money and go with a cheaper Chinese brand. The idea of Norton in the public consciousness is "1970s or earlier outlaw," not "bit mobile assassing part in some cheesy 2025 action movie."

Maybe -- maybe -- a more comfortable suspension than in the old days, and alloy wheels instead of spoked, but otherwise the platform I'd want to see -- and think most potential Norton customers want to see -- is something visually comparable to the old Commandos. Just sayin'.

This is What True "Trump Derangement Syndrome" Looks Like

Any threat against the president is taken very seriously by the Department

That's an Interior Department spokesperson referring to some stains on some grass marking out the numbers "86" and "47."

If you think "8647" is "a threat against the president," that thing you're doing that you think is thinking isn't. The whole idea isn't just stupid, it's batshit delirious hallucinatory babble.

When, As Occasionally Happens, a Republican Gets Things Even Partly Right ...

... you can expect it to be held against him (or her, but in this case him), and against the GOP in general:

The reason we’re in trouble is because over seventy-four percent of federal spending is on autopilot -- mandatory spending, that is your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security -- they have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year.

That's Mike Johnson (R-LA), Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

He seems to be high-balling mandatory spending somewhat -- the percentage I came up with is about 60%. It may be that he's including interest on the loans he and his fellow politicians have taken out (the "national debt"), which comes to about 13%.

But it's a fair point, and Johnson is right:

If the US government ever wants to stop running operating deficits every year (adding to that debt, and to those interest payments), either those programs have to take in more money (via tax revenues), or those programs have to spend less (through cuts).

Unfortunately, you're not allowed to say that if you want your party's candidates to do well in elections, because the many of the beneficiaries of those entitlements happen to also be among the most wealthy and politically powerful demographic -- "senior citizens."

Suggesting any reduction in Total Boomer Luxury Communism is political suicide, and likely will be until the the system delivering those bennies (effectively the US government itself) actually, unavoidably, inevitably, and totally collapses.

If you don't believe me, look up the name "Dan Rostenkowski." As chair of the US House Ways and Means Committee, he proposed adding "catastrophic health coverage" to Medicare. The idea being that if something really bad happened to you, Medicare would kick in more to keep hospital bills from bankrupting you. It was very popular, and it passed.

Then Medicare beneficiaries discovered the catch: They had to pay a little more -- $4 a month in 1989, rising to $10.20 per month in 1990, after which it would be indexed to inflation -- for that extra coverage. Here's well that was received:

"Cat health" was repealed the following year, reminding politicians that you do not expect senior citizens to pay for anything, ever, nor do you even hint that Uncle Sugar might knock a car or two off the end of the gravy train.

Johnson was right, and brave to be right, but that statement will almost certainly show up in Democratic campaign advertising between now and November, and Republican candidates will find themselves pointedly asked whether they agree with it at town halls and such.

All that said, one of the first things that could be done to bring government spending into line with tax revenues is to make deep cuts to the (entirely "discretionary") "defense" budget, which is probably at least ten times the size needed for actual "national defense." But that's got its own set of electrified rails.

Wordle 1818 Hint

Hint: Pop Quiz -- what's a one-word way of saying "impatient and irritable?"

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First Letter: T

Wordle 1817 Hint

Hint: Straighten up and take a side!

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First Letter: A

I'm Still Getting Most of My Daily 11,000 Steps In ...

... by mowing.

After deducting the house, outbuildings, hedges, trees, and the side yard area that I'm in the process of "re-wilding" from our 1.7-acre lot, I've got about an acre to mow.

I could use a riding mower -- the one the previous owner abandoned isn't running and it doesn't seem to just be the battery, I suspect squirrels ate some of the wiring, but I've got another available for the asking -- but so far I've been using a push mower, and I'm able to keep up with it, even now that we're getting some rain.

About an hour a day seems to get me to more than 7,000 steps, so a pleasant, fairly short evening walk and the walking I do in the natural course of the day gets me past the 11,000 mark.

I'm also considering doing more Friday hiking in the area's many state and national park areas, but not this week (Tamara will be traveling for a few days for work).

I have pretty much stopped carrying 25 pounds of weight in a pack while walking, mostly because I was using barbell weight plates in a backpack and they shift around a lot and aren't comfortable. I'll stick to using the pack to carry gear when I'm camping, which I'm also planning to do some of. I may buy one of those "weight vests," the 30-pound version, for the walking.

I'm also considering a new mower. The current one is only a couple of years old, but it's a corded electric, and dragging around 200+ feet of extension cord is a bother. I haven't decided whether to go with a gas mower or a battery-powered electric unit.

As I've detailed in more than one column, I have no love for the custom/tradition of trying to replicate the English aristocracy's "lawn" fetish, and may start replacing grass with something more low-maintenance at some point ("perennial peanut" looks good and requires mowing about once per season).

On the other hand, it strikes me that one section of the front lot would serve well as a croquet course or lawn tennis court, which I guess is aristocracy-like. Or maybe a baseball diamond. Get it set up with a nice backstop, then bring my projector out and screen Field of Dreams when friends come over to toss the ball around.

I'm also planning to plant palm trees. We've only got one, and we don't really have that one -- it's down in the jungle out front that's technically a county road easement if they ever decide to replace the cow path with pavement or whatever. I rescued a seedling from another right-of-way yesterday, potted it, and am hoping it will do well enough to go in the ground. I'll be looking for others.

Anyway, I'm at only 10,731 steps for the day, so I think I'll go check the mail or something now.

Wordle 1816 Hint

Hint: When your ship comes in, here's where you'll board it.

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First Letter: W

Tea Bleg

Aside from the occasional iced tea in summer, I've never been a big tea drinker.

Some time back, I stopped at a Starbucks to try the new rage, matcha (I got an iced matcha latte, and it was ... okay), but for the most part I've just been a coffee guy.

I've decided to try mixing my morning routine up a little, though. Tea it is, at least until I tire of it.

I have some Taylors of Harrogate English Breakfast Tea in the shopping cart for our next grocery delivery, and did a little research as to how to brew and drink tea like an Englishman (if I'm going to drink their tea, it makes sense to try it their way),

Any other tea types I should consider? Anyone know what the most "coffee-like" tea is? I'm not switching to tea because I don't like coffee anymore, just because I thought it was time to try something at least a little different.

Wordle 1815 Hint

Hint: This thing of certain Sicilians.

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First Letter: M

Wordle 1814 Hint

Hint: Some people have a green one; others should avoid gardening.

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First Letter: T

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #22

"Die before you die." (Sufism, Hadith Qudsi)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Ascribing the aphorism specifically to Sufism rather than to Islam generally seems erroneous to me, but I can see why it's more associated with Sufism than with other Islamic schools.

Why it's somewhat erroneous: The Hadith Qudsi are a separate category of Hadith. Briefly:

• The Quran is considered by Muslims to be a direct revelation from God, delivered via Muhammad.
• The Hadith, generally, are a collection of sayings attributed to Muhammad or to his inner circle (the "companions").
• The Hadith Qudsi are in between. They're sayings that purport to be, like the Quran, attributable directly to God, albeit via Muhammad. So they're more like the Quran than the other Hadith.

Why it's more associated with Sufism specifically:

Its implications associate easily with eastern religious teachings (Buddhism and Hinduism), and Sufism is highly informed by those eastern teachings, which tend toward killing the ego ("the false self") and replacing it with something "higher."

There is, in fact, a Christian analog: Baptism. Not the post-Paul "sprinkling" stuff, the dunking like John the Baptist gave Jesus. That's described as a second birth of sorts ... when you go under the water, your old self dies, and when you come back up it's a new self joined to the deity.

I've always found the whole idea embodied here interesting, but I'm not sure I buy into it very well. I'm at least somewhat skeptical that there is or can be anything else than the ego to "self." But I can't say for sure whether that's a matter of good reasoning skills on my part, or just a matter of my disinclination to let go of said self.

I Don't Miss Living in a Big City, But I Do Enjoy Visiting

Kind of a one-day "vacation" -- Tamara had a conference to attend in Clearwater, Florida yesterday, and I tagged along to do other things. We drove down Thursday evening, then in the morning checked out of our hotel. She went to her conference, I grabbed an Uber on into Tampa.

My Uber driver was an Iranian and very much interested in talking, so I got an -- not "the," "an" -- Iranian perspective on the current situation with all that. He was actually visiting Iran during the last round of anti-regime protests before the US attacked.

Summary: He believes the higher estimates of people murdered by the regime forces. He said that the last part of his visit was mostly consumed by helping friends and acquaintances to the hospital after they were injured in the protests. He doesn't like the war, but he does hate the regime -- he regards the Revolutionary Guards as murderous thugs and the theocratic politicians as corrupt oligarchs (and wonders why his country calls itself a "republic" when it has a "supreme leader"). He doesn't particularly like "Crown Prince" Reza Pahlavi himself, but found that the guy is more popular there right now than he would have expected.

Very nice guy, and a live-action reminder that just because someone is "from" Place X it does not mean that that person's ideas and observations will conform to whatever we think we "know" about Place X and the people who live there.

Once in town, I met an online acquaintance whom I know from another job and attended the Friday sermon and afternoon prayer at his mosque with him. While I've known Muslims, have been "around" Muslim communities, etc., that's the first time I've been invited into a Muslim house of worship. Quite interesting.

One thing I found particularly interesting was that the sermon, apart from the scripture being the Quran and many references being to Muhammad and his companions, etc., it could just as easily have been preached from a Protestant pulpit. To inadequately summarize, it was about  "thinking with one's heart," treating people well, and leaving harsh judgments of one's opponents to a higher power.

Another thing I found interesting was the obvious size of the Muslim community in the Tampa area. This is not the only mosque in the area, but its campus (including an associated K-12 school) was easily as large as what I'd expect to be a Catholic equivalent in, say, Boston.

At a rough guess, there were at least 200 men (quantity of women unknown -- there were a lot, but when they were together for prayer they were not visible from the male area) attending prayers on a Friday afternoon (for religious purposes, think of Friday as the equivlant of Christian Sunday).

After the service, my host and a friend of his took me out for an incredible Mediterranean meal (hummus, tabouleh and a giant "meat grill" with vegetables and rice all baked into a light crust).

Then the three of us drank and talked at a local Yemeni coffeehouse. There are several in the area, and apparently they do well for several reasons. One is that Starbucks seems to have got itself sideways with the "pro-Palestinian" movement. Another is that Yemen is smack-dab in the middle of the area where coffee first became a thing and they do it incredibly well. I had Mufawar, a fine-grind coffee spiced with cardamom, because it's served with cream. The basic "Yemeni coffee," the barista told me, doesn't work with cream because the particular spice blend tends to curdle it.

A fine time, a very generous and engaging host, and then I met with Tamara after her conference ended and we drove back home.

The part about not missing living in a major urban metro is, as you might guess, the traffic. Over many years in St. Louis, we got used to racing all over various bumper-to-bumper road networks, but when you don't do it every day anymore, you understand how nerve-wracking that really is. Purely from a driving standpoint, we were glad to get back to "country highways" with reasonable numbers of fast-moving vehicles.

Wordle 1813 Hint

Hint: What a shapechanger does.

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First Letter: M

Wordle 1812 Hint

Hint: Gallantly or high-mindedly.

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First Letter: N

Wordle 1811 Hint

Hint: Today's Wordle is to metal as crossbreed is to dog.

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First Letter: A

Wordle 1810 Hint

Hint: In the Old West, gunslingers supposedly memorialized kill counts by putting these on their pistols.

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First Letter: N

Wordle 1809 Hint

Hint: What you find when you get to the bottom of an issue or subject.

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First Letter: B

Max Borders is Always Interesting ...

... but I've found last Thursday's Underthrow Podcast especially interesting over multiple listens.

You're welcome.

The Horns of a Strange Dilemma by Max Borders

Underthrow Podcast: Many-Worlds Hypothesis vs. Simulation Theory

Read on Substack

Wordle 1808 Hint

Hint: The official state dish of Texas (smart move, since they can't compete with Memphis on barbecue).

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First Letter: C

Thanks For Asking! -- 06/01/26

Monthly AMA thread time! Ask me anything in comments and I'll answer in, or linked to from, comments (applies to regular people -- pseudonymous trolls/bots are required to ask interesting questions to get answers).

Wordle 1807 Hint

Hint: The most famous is probably Chopin's "Tristese."

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First Letter: E

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #21

"Speak only that which is true, pleasant, and beneficial." (Hinduism, Mahabharata 5:167)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Hard disagree.

The "true" and "beneficial" elements are redundant -- you're always better off saying, and knowing, the truth.

But that's not always pleasant, and sometimes the truth is more important than making yourself, or others, feel good.

Wordle 1806 Hint

Hint: Prompted response when informed that you're on Candid Camera.

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First Letter: S

A Partial Victory!

Per the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

After public outrage, California lawmakers are moving closer to exempting open source operating systems from the sweeping age-bracketing regime mandated by last year’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043). ... EFF understands this amendment to exempt open-source operating systems from the requirement to collect and transmit users’ age-bracket data. That is a definite win for open source developers.

Whether that means that systemd's developers will undo their insertion of a "birthdate" field remains to be seen. If so, Linux Mint will go back on my list of "Linux distros to consider if I ever decide I'm tired of MX Linux." If not, no biggie.

Small potatoes, I guess. Even if the California legislature hadn't exempted open source OSes from their idiot bill, Linux users would have been able to tell the California legislature to kiss our asses right in the crack. But it's always nice to make the sociopaths back down.

Wordle 1805 Hint

Hint: The sound the trolley made (and Judy sang) three times.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1804 Hint

Hint: Golfer's repair/replace duty.

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First Letter: D

Wordle 1803 Hint

Hint: To solve today's Wordle, cram those blanks completely full of letters.

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First Letter: S

Wordle 1802 Hint

Hint: One variety is just the right size for a romantically involved couple; the larger version might make one think of an Iowa city.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1801 Hint

Hint: Today's Wordle is here to stay ... but only for a little while.

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First Letter: V

Wordle 1800 Hint

Hint: Pair with a nephew to complete the set.

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First Letter: N

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #20

"The world is a mirror; see yourself in all beings." (Hinduism, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 6:11)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Probably good advice.

Are humans unique among species? Yes, in particular ways.

There are even reasonably strong arguments for uniquely human-based sets of ethics (e.g. a moral distinction between, say, humans and cattle as to which one it's OK for humans to eat).

On the other hand, all life is constructed from the same building blocks and its various forms are more similar to each other than they are to non-life.

And within some unspecified range, humans are very similar to other animals in many ways, as anyone who's ever watched animals at play likely intuits. There are probably lessons to learn in both the similarities and the differences. Which brings me to one of my favorite bits from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

[O]n the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Wordle 1799 Hint

Hint: One type makes a good pot roast; another is used to hold a drill bit.

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First Letter: C

I Knew This Would Happen

I hoped it wouldn't. I tried to convince myself it wouldn't. But in my heart I knew it would.

Earlier this month, my household switched from Starlink satellite Internet to Cox fiber Internet.  Personally, I didn't want to, but the rest of the family did, and it is cheaper, with a five-year price guarantee.

At the previous house, we had Cox -- not fiber, just standard cable -- and it came with frequent outages. Sometimes four minutes, sometimes four hours, sometimes longer, but I don't think we ever went more than a few days without one of at least noticeable length, at least over the last five years (it wasn't as frequent before that). Sometimes easily explained (bad storm, "hey, a truck just smacked a utility pole down the street, etc.), sometimes seemingly just because.

With Starlink, I noticed a grand total of one outage of more than a couple of seconds, lasting maybe a minute and a half, in six months (not counting times when the house power blinked or blacked out and the router had to reset).

Why that one noticeable outage? Who knows? Maybe a deer was wandering around the yard and decided to stand in front of the dish or something. According to the very nice stats report in the Starlink app, it did occasionally go down, for a second or two, but not for long enough to notice. It would temporarily go down for a couple of minutes when the router software updated, which it did automatically in the middle of the night (the user can choose the time) and I think it did that once (I only knew about it from the app report).

So yesterday I heard the old familiar refrain from the previous house: "DAD!!! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!!"

Why yes, it was.

Called Cox's automated line, chose technical support. "We see that there's an outage in your neighborhood. Technicians are at work fixing the problem and we expect service to be restored by [six hours from then]."

It was only an hour or so -- Cox usually seems to highball their time estimates -- but I'm just going to guess this will be a frequent thing. I had hoped that everything being buried fiber, for several miles from the outer wall of our house to wherever it surfaces, would minimize the outages. Not as much wire that's subject to storm winds or drunk drivers. But it does come up to the surface somewhere, and there are servers, etc. to go down somewhere, and of course even the underground stuff can experience technical issues.

But you'd think that decades-old ISPs could have their technical problems more in hand than a seven-year-old service that literally has to send its signals to space and back.

I'm already missing Starlink. And yes, I did yell a little bit at certain people about why the hell they wanted so very badly to trade reliable Internet service for unreliable Internet service.

Wordle 1798 Hint

Hint: When you talk your way through the day's Wordle.

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First Letter: V

A Linux Distribution You May Have Never Heard Of

You may not have ever heard of Azure Linux. It's not exactly a secret, and some of its code has apparently worked its way into other, major Linux distributions that you have heard of.

The reason you've probably never heard of it is that it's not designed to be used by individuals as a desktop operating system. The company that makes it prefers that you use a different desktop OS. That company is Microsoft and that other OS is Windoze.

Microsoft created, and uses, Azure Linux to run Azure, its family of more than 200 cloud-based products and services.

Apparently Microsoft doesn't trust Windoze with the important stuff -- it's just something to be sold to the yokels who don't matter except as revenue sources. For the things they need done well and reliably, they use Linux.

Wordle 1797 Hint

 Hint: When it comes to today's Wordle, I concur.

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First Letter: A

Semi-Annual Inclement Motorcycle Environment Time

If you don't live in the Gulf coast area, you may not be familiar with Plecia nearctica, usually called the "love bug."

No machine-readable author provided. Wikifrosch~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

One conspiracy theory has it that the bug was genetically engineered at the University of Florida, right here in Gainesville, as a mosquito countermeasure, but in fact it's been around for some time -- originating in Central America and observed in Louisiana more than a century ago before eventually making its way to Florida.

Anyway, twice a year the love bug emerges from larval form, takes flight, mates (continuously, for days, while flying), and dies. I don't know how many millions or billions there in an overall swarm, but in each individual "flight" there can be hundreds of thousands.

The semi-annual swarms annoy automobile drivers. A moving car's windshield can get completely covered, with dead love bugs and become largely opaque in minutes. They can gum up the cooling fins on radiators, vents and intakes, and their pH levels can be acidic enough to damage paint if not quickly washed off.

They can do all those things to motorcycles, motorcycle helmet visors, etc., too. Last year, I was out and about when I ran into the first signs of the swarm. By the time I got home, I had to completely wipe down and clean my helmet and wash my bike, too.

I know car drivers who avoid driving unless absolutely necessary during the swarms, and that's also my policy for riding a motorcycle.

The current swarm has been ongoing for several days, so I'm hoping today is the last of it (I seem to be seeing fewer bugs in the area, after sweeping thousands of bug corpses off my porch yesterday because I thought it was over then).

Wordle 1796 Hint

 Hint: A ruin (often of a ship), or the event that created its condition.

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First Letter: W

Pleased to Report ...

 ... that my app gripe from last week has resolved itself.

Or, rather, someone, but not me, resolved it.

InoReader (not an affiliate link) is no longer freezing up. Maybe there was a problem with the app itself and they fixed it, or maybe there was a problem in MX Linux that got fixed on an update, or maybe there was a problem in Microsoft Edge that got fixed in an update (I never spent enough time in other OSes or browsers to troubleshoot where the problem was).

So now InoReader is back to being, so far as I can tell, flawless and the absolute best RSS reader solution available anywhere.

Wordle 1795 Hint

 Hint: First name (with, for example, Springfield, Hill, or Rhodes).

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First Letter: D

The Ultimate One-Paragraph Case for Free Trade ...

... comes in fictional form, and from a "moderate left-wing" TV show, The West Wing. I've always loved the scene, and was glad to see Jake Scott do the work of pulling the monologue text at the Foundation for Economic Education. Here it is:

You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That’s ’cause I’m a speechwriter and I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with “lowers” and “raises” there? It’s called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and now you end with the one that’s not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that’s it. Free trade stops wars! And we figure out a way to fix the rest!

Mic drop, if that had been a thing back then. Whoever wrote that particular bit should have followed up with a book -- How to Make an Irrefutable, But Not Boring, Argument in 110 Words.

Wordle 1794 Hint

Hint: When you'd really rather not.

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First Letter: L

Wordle 1793 Hint

Hint: An internal organizational rule.

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First Letter: B

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #19

"The best revenge is not to be like your enemy." (Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6:6)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Good advice, and also in a way yet another rephrasing of the golden rule: If you object to Characteristic X of your enemy's behavior, then Characteristic X is no more moral when you display it than when he or she displays it. It's not a good feeling to find yourself in the situation described by Pogo ("we have met the enemy and he is us").

Wordle 1792 Hint

Hint: The first one enjoys a competitive advantage.

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First Letter: M

Wordle 1791 Hint

Hint: Statement of faith or belief, e.g. Nicene and Athanasian.

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First Letter: C

Interesting Response to the Linux "Age Verification" Nonsense

It's called Ageless Linux. Brief description:

Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don't know how old you are. We don't want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won't.

It's just Debian (a major Linux distribution upon which a lot of other major Linux distribution is based), plus a script that "will analyze your system, show you exactly what it plans to do, then modify /etc/os-release and associated system identification files, neutralize the systemd userdb birthDate field, install our AB 1043 noncompliance documentation, and deploy a stub age verification API that returns no data."

Do I expect California authoritahs to fall into the Streisand Effect trap of trying to arrest even one person who produces or distributes Ageless Linux? I'd like to say no, but never under-estimate the stupidity of gummint types.

I don't really see any potential for involvement myself, but if I ever happen to be going to California, I guess I might buy a box of cheap USB drives, set them up with Ageless Linux, make room for them in my luggage, and throw them over an elementary school playground fence or something. That might actually be a little more risky than sending the non-export version of PGP to a friend in Russia, as I did back when they thought they could forbid that, too.

Wordle 1790 Hint

Hint: To become atremble, possibly from uncertainty.

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First Letter: W

Wordle 1789 Hint

Hint: Versus the current fashion, today's Wordle is frumpish.

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First Letter: D

Some Thoughts on Meeting Inflation

I don't like meetings very much. I know they are sometimes necessary, and sometimes necessarily long, and I'll do them if I have to, but I mostly try to avoid them. If I need to communicate with others, I prefer to do it by email. That means that not everyone involved has to be paying full attention for a pre-reserved bloc of time, as long as the communications of all involved parties are timely to the matter being addressed. I'm not in the 911 dispatching business or anything like that. Most matters I deal with can be handled over the course of days, or at least hours, not minutes or seconds.

By "meetings," I don't just mean physical get-togethers around a table or in a convention hall. I include their "virtual" equivalents done with video conferencing, phone conferencing, and group messaging. And over time, I think I detect two distinct "meeting inflation" effects from the latter.

While I do very few "meetings" myself, I have family members who seem to spend a lot of time on them for both work and community (e.g. non-profit board) stuff, and they seem to spend a lot more time on them now than they did in 2006 or 2016.

The first "meeting inflation" effect is in the number of meetings. I've seen family members' work "meetings" go from "quick huddle at the beginning of the day, with maybe one a week or one a month for any given big project" to "half the day, every day is spent on four different Zoom meetings, and most of the other half is spent preparing for them."

The second "meeting inflation" effect is in the length of meetings, particularly the community types. They seem to have gone from "this is the agenda, with time assigned to each item, let's get through it" to "count on several 15-minute stream-of-consciousness rambles that seemingly have little or nothing to do with why we're meeting."

I'm a big fan of "work from home"/"telecommute" for people whose jobs can be done that way. It saves commute time. It saves gasoline costs. It means the workplace doesn't have to be a four-story building with 100 offices that must be cooled, heated, and lit 24/7.

Obviously the ability to "meet virtually" makes all that more doable. But if it also encourages dramatically increasing the time spent on, and in, those "meetings," it reduces the benefit.

Wordle 1788 Hint

Hint: Three kinds: Atomic, cuckoo, and grandfather.

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First Letter: C

The Latest App Gripe

I use InoReader (not an affiliate link) every day, all day long. I've used it for years. I've maintained a paid premium account for years. It's well worth the money for someone who needs to see the newest content from a large list of sites on a recurring basis. And while I periodically test other RSS reader apps, it remains my favorite by far.

BUT!

As the app evolves with new features (most of which I don't use, but can see why they'd offer), they also keep screwing with the layout of the user interface. This morning, all of a sudden, a button ("Mark all as read") that I use many times a day, every day, has suddenly been moved halfway across the screen from where my muscle memory "knows" it is.

This kind of thing is not unique to InoReader, it just happens to be the latest instance of an annoying phenomenon that I seem to run into every week or two.

User interface changes in apps that have been out of beta and in regular production for years should be few, far between, and arguably necessary to correct a problem. 

Adding a new feature? Great -- put the button or form field for that feature somewhere new, too. Long-time users shouldn't have to re-train their minds and muscles on the old features just because the app's dev team needs to report "incremental improvements" to justify their jobs.

On a positive note, a problem I started having with InoReader right about the time I switched from Linux Mint to MX Linux has disappeared -- the site seemed to intermittently freeze then unfreeze, and now it doesn't. Maybe that's a side effect of the same update I'm griping about.

Wordle 1787 Hint

Hint: Very recently (as in "wed").

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First Letter: N

Wordle 1786 Hint

Hint: Inuit outerwear.

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First Letter: P

Not My Use Case, But Still Pretty Cool

Royal Enfield is rolling out its first electric motorcycle, a take on the WWII military "Flying Flea" model. Its first market will be India at about $3,000 US; it looks like a winner for the US market if they can keep the retail price here in the $5k range.

While I'm not opposed to the idea of an electric motorcycle, this one's not for me, for two reasons: Range and speed.

Royal Enfield claims a range of about 100 miles, a top speed of about 70 miles per hour, and a full charging time of two hours.

Anyone who's ever used an electric vehicle knows better than to trust the maker's range claims. To the extent that they're true at all, they're true for 1) new batteries in 2) ideal situations when 3) the bike is ridden in specific ways. Once you're out in the real world, doing real world stuff, cut them by 25-50%. I suppose Royal Enfield might be the exception, but I won't believe it until and unless I see lots of rider reports on the subject.

As for charging, it's AC only -- the DC fast charging like you can use with modern electric cars isn't a feature. Which means that every x miles, you'd be plugged in for a considerable amount of time ... and that x miles is probably around the same mileage as my small-tank internal combustion bikes, which I can fill up with gas in a couple of minutes.

Since x is, at most, 100 miles, the Flying Flea is effectively good for local riding, or commutes of up to 50 miles if you have a couple of hours to charge it at the far end. Long rides would mean a two-hour break after each hour to hour-and-a-half of riding, even assuming you could count on finding a place to charge at each such interval.

In order for me to switch to electric, I'd have to see:

• A real-world range of at least 200 miles;
• A top speed that's well into usual interstate highway territory (80 mph bare minimum, but a burst of 100 mph is desirable for quick movement in emergency situations); and
• Fast DC charging.
• A price point similar to this bike.
• A lot more "public charging" infrastructure so that I wouldn't get stranded in East Asshole, Arkansas while on a cross-country trip.

I don't see that all of that happening in the very near term. The speed probably isn't an engineering problem (a little more motor goes a long way), but longer range requires more battery and apparently the internal infrastructure for fast DC charging is heavy, high-volume, and produces lots of heat, none of which are good things where motorcycles are concerned. Getting there, and getting the costs of being there down, will take time.

But for the right kinds of rider -- someone who lives/works in or near a city and doesn't have to haul a lot of stuff (or additional people, although I understand the Flying Flea does come with an attachable/removable pillion seat for one passenger) around -- it might be very nice. Ride it to work, ride it around town, plug it in at home each night. Probably very low-maintenance. The noise won't annoy your neighbors. Finding parking will be easier than with an SUV. Between gas, maintenance, insurance, etc. cost savings, it might be a financially attractive option.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #18

"Wherever you go, go with all your heart." (Confucianism, Analects 19:6)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

I'm probably as prone as anyone to forget this recommendation  -- which, in different formulations, seems fairly ubiquitous across human populations (my favorite variation is probably "anything worth doing is worth overdoing").

It seems sound to me. The ultimate human scarcity factor is time. Why waste that resource on stuff that's you only consider important enough to you to do half-heartedly?

Wordle 1785 Hint

Hint: A glossy fabric weave.

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First Letter: S

Interesting (Literally)

While thinking about the news that yet another Trump tariff scam got noticed by a court as illegal yesterday, it occurred to me to ask whether the regime has to pay interest on illegally collected tariffs. The answer is: Yes.

My first reaction was that the rate -- 4.5% on amounts owed over $10,000, 6% on the amount up to $10k -- is far too low. To the extent that interest charges are an incentive to not pull this kind of shit, the higher the better. Perhaps the average credit card interest rate (a little over 20% APR), or even "payday loan" rates (which can approach 400%).

But then I thought a little more about it:

• Tariffs, as taxes on the import of goods, are initially paid by the importer, but mostly passed on to the final retail customer.
• Refunds of illegal tariffs are paid to those importers because it would be impractical (in many cases impossible) to track down everyone who paid an extra $5 on a $50 retail purchase.
• So the importers are getting their money back after having recouped much of that money from their downstream customers.
• And they're getting it back from those customers via taxation and government borrowing.

So any interest charges would simply be additional costs to those retail customers, not to the government, because the government doesn't really have any money it hasn't stolen in the first place.

It makes more sense for the interest burden on illegally collected tariff refunds to be imposed directly on the person or persons who ordered their collection in the first place. In this case that would be Trump, but if Congress passed an unconstitutional tariff and the president signed the bill, that would split the burden between the members of Congress who voted for it, the president, and maybe one more person (the vice-president, if he or she cast a vote in favor of the bill in the Senate). Garnish their wages and auction off their assets if necessary to collect restitution.

Wordle 1784 Hint

Hint: Today's Wordle is as shady as it gets.

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First Letter: U

Wordle 1783 Hint

Hint: When you move, or move something or someone else, just a little bit.

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First Letter: B

Two Hypotheses on Sudden Delivery Problems

My household has has had a "Walmart Plus" membership for a couple of years now. Since we do probably 2/3 of our grocery shopping at Walmart, the "free delivery on orders over $35" seems well worth the annual membership fee, even setting aside the included streaming media platform subscription (you can choose between Paramount Plus and Peacock). It saves us both extra trips into town and the time we'd spend in the store.

It usually works out just fine. Occasionally an order will be missing an item (and Walmart cheerfully refunds out money). Also occasionally we'll get stuff we didn't order because the driver got mixed up. That's even better because Walmart won't take the stuff back, they just tell you to keep it, and it's usually stuff we do use.

But the last few days have been interesting. We placed an order for delivery Sunday evening, and it didn't arrive. "Delayed due to driver availability issues." Reschedule or cancel.

We rescheduled for Monday evening. Same outcome.

This time we canceled, waited a few hours, and did the same order (plus more stuff we had put on our grocery lists in the meantime) from scratch. I decided to set the delivery time frame to daytime and see if it would actually happen, otherwise we could make a physical evening trip to the store.

It arrived.

Nothing like this has ever happened before with Walmart Plus, for us or for anyone we know who's mentioned using the service. Off the cuff I suspect we've ordered for delivery close to 100 times, with only one "delay" ever and that by only a couple of hours because a driver's vehicle broke down.

What's up with that?

Well, Walmart uses a mix of employee and contractor drivers, and evening delivery seems to lean hard on the contractor end. Considering that, I have two hypotheses:

1. It's college graduation time in Gainesville, Florida. In fact, University of Florida graduation was last weekend. If a lot of the evening contract drivers are students doing it part-time, there may have been a sudden exodus of graduates (and non-graduates going home for summer) that Walmart couldn't replace in a timely manner. 
2. Gas prices are up by 50% since Trump shit the bed in the Middle East. Which means the contractors aren't making as much money unless they're either getting bonuses to help cover the higher price of filling their tanks or are able to increase the number of deliveries they make per trip. Late evening delivery is probably less popular than other time frames, meaning less ability to stack a larger number of orders into one trip.

Any other ideas?

Wordle 1782 Hint

Hint: When you point out a resemblance.

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First Letter: L

Non Sequitur, Vote By Mail Edition

Los Angeles Times letter to the editor headline (paywalled, so I can only go with that headline claim, not any other facts of the writer's situation:

I’m in my 90s and I’ve given up driving. Voting by mail is my only option

Yep, only option.

Except for Uber.

Or a taxi, if those still exist in the writer's area.

Or asking a friend or relative for a ride to the polling place.

Or calling up the local party organization or political campaign of your choice, if they haven't already called you (in urban areas, election day is usually characterized by multiple phone calls offering voters transportation to the polls).

If you're 95 years old, there's a very good chance you live in some kind of "retirement community," ranging from "people have their own houses/apartments but there's infrastructure to support their needs" to full-on "nursing home." Many, maybe most, of those places provide transportion on both an individual basis ("I need to go to the doctor for my appointment") and group basis ("the van leaves for the mall at noon and returns at 3pm") as part of the package.

So it's highly unlikely that this writer's only option is to vote by mail. It's the most convenient. It's the least expensive. It's arguably more secure. But it's not the only option.

Interesting Easement Situation

As I mentioned recently, our household decided to switch from Starlink to Cox fiber Internet. I was happy with Starlink, but the gamers in the house wanted higher speeds and lower latency.

On the initial installation attempt, the contractor said we were just too far from the main node to connect, so we thought it was over. No biggie. But then another contractor came back and said "no, it's fine." He ran the fiber from the node to our house and told us they'd be back to bury it later.

Yesterday, there was a knock on the door that I missed, so I hopped on my motorcycle to go see if they were working on it down at the main road. They were, kind of ...

The gentleman who lives at the corner was telling them they couldn't bury the fiber because the path was on his property.

They kept trying to explain that they were burying it right at the edge of the road, well within the utilities easement.

He insisted that there WAS no easement, that in fact the road ran through his property but belonged to him, and that he just allowed the 10 or so households down it to use it out of the goodness of his heart, but that they couldn't bury the fiber there.

It's a road with a county name and a county street sign, and I showed one of the guys the county works the survey posts where the path for eventual paving are placed (the road as surveyed does not QUITE follow the path cars have actually been traveling, presumably for at least 20 years, but we had our property surveyed last fall and I found the posts in some trees just outside our survey flag).

Which was great, the guy told me, but even if there WAS no actual pre-described "utility easement," there would be an "easement by implication" (due to the long use of the roadway without objection from the property owner) and/or "easement by necessity" (without that road, all those properties would otherwise be "land-locked").

So they ended up running the fiber. Which, presumably, the other guy will never have any reason to notice, since it's buried right along the edge of, and in, the cow path the county says is a "road." So now the kids have their fast Internet (since I use wifi, and it maxes out below the speeds of either Starlink or fiber, the only change I'm seeing is the name of the network I connect to).

Anyway, I can't really blame the guy for objecting if that roadway WAS actually within the survey lines of the lot he bought years ago. But it did seem like a mountain and molehill situation. It's not like they were using a backhoe to trench up the path to his driveway and keep him  from getting in and out for hours. They had a little tracked thing that looks like one of those bomb disposal robots you see on TV shows, and the only evidence it left behind was a thin line in the dirt. Probably blocked his driveway for about 30 seconds.

Wordle 1781 Hint

Hint: It holds the door shut.

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First Letter: L

Wordle 1780 Hint

Hint: What you are when you wake up in the morning.

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First Letter: R

Hypothesis: If I Don't Have Time, Just Add Weight

Around the beginning of March, I decided to re-commit to walking 10,000 steps a day.

Around the beginning of April, I jumped that up to 11,000 steps a day.

Good results so far. Slightly lower blood sugar and my weight is down by several pounds.

But for the beginning of May, I reconsidered the "add an extra thousand steps a day" formula.

Steps are time, and I already commit around an hour a day specifically to walking (above and beyond the steps I take in the normal course of getting things done). Usually in two 30-minute dedicated outings.

Unless I considerably pick up my pace, which is already fairly brisk, there's a limit to how many steps I can take in x minutes. Once I get below 200 pounds for the first time in 25 years or so, I may try to work some running into my daily step count, but between bad knees and an old lower back injury, I have to get the weight off first for it to be doable.

If I could figure out a way to get work done while walking, heck, I'd walk all day. It's been a few years since I did more than 15 miles or so at a stretch, but I'm sure I still could. I found out in the Marine Corps that I'm a genetic freak in that respect. If I'm in anything approaching good shape I can start walking and not stop until told to, with as much weight as I can carry hanging off me. But absent some kind of cool augmented reality glasses with a bespoke work setup built into them, when I'm walking, all I can really do is, um, walk.

So instead of taking more steps per day, I'm sticking to 11,000 steps ... while carrying  barbell plates in a backpack on those dedicated walks.

Just got back from the first, one-hour, 2.x-mile test walk with 22 pounds (four 2.5kg plates) in the pack. Not only am I none the worse for wear, but the weight tends to correct my posture such that my back is hurting less than usual (good) and my quads are complaining some (good).

Wordle 1779 Hint

Hint: Edemic in appearance.

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First Letter: P

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #17

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." (Taoism, Tao Te Ching 64)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

A well-known one, and an obviously true one. You can't finish anything without starting it. You can think, dream, plan, but until you actually do the things, starting with the first thing, the things won't get done. I can't think of anything more to say about that, or imagine anything that anything else needs to be said.

Wordle 1778 Hint

Hint: When you go somewhere and take something with you.

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First Letter: B 

I Expect Some Kind of Combat in the Persian Gulf Today

I could be wrong, of course, but here's why I expect it:

• While the war was wholly, completely, and unquestionably illegal from the start absent a congressional declaration of war, there's a fiction under the "War Powers Resolution" through which a president gets a 60-day free pass to do whatever he wants.
• That 60-day period ends today.
• The administration is claiming that the 60-day clock stopped with the declaration of a ceasefire.
• It's in the Iranian regime's interest to establish that no, the clock hasn't stopped because combat operations are ongoing, and the best way to do that is to do something requiring a US military response.