You know how it is, someone keeps moving the goalposts on you, you keep saying no mate, that is not how this works, they eventually do things your way, but with ill grace, then they go a bridge too far, asking for something that sounds fishy and could get you in legal trouble, you decline and tell me not to bother asking you for anything else, next thing you know, the relevant authorities pay a visit and have a little chat with you.
pure coinkydink of course, but my money is on the asshole for whom I wouldn’t do what sounded like a fiddle for, decided to rat me out for being a fiddler, even though I ain’t.
pure coinkydink the cunt is an arab too… or not so much…
But it underlines something I have been touching on the past few posts, the crazy bastards aren’t the dangerous ones, the stupid bastards and the nasty bastards are the dangerous ones.
No real skin off my nose, fuckin’ arabs get added to the list of people I won’t do business with any more, same attitude as with the wimminz and muzzies, y’all won’t fix the problem within your own ranks, preferring solidarity, so fuck y’all.
When I deal with small businesses run by white men (no wimminz on board) I often get paid within 5 minutes of issuing an invoice, and there is no penny pinching bullshit, here’s your money, cheers mate…
At 5 years old you can be a prejudiced little shit, at 50 something years old you are going to tend to have opinions based on years of experience and hard knocks… (apologies if there are any reading this) but I have never met a Barry who wasn’t an asshole, matin matt jim john joe and so on usually as good as gold, and it was a similar story with da wimminz, if the name ended in an ee sound, stacey, lucy, janey, jackie etc, they were fucking nuts and a pain in the ass.
Of course these things may not be universal, but they may still be true for an individual, your mate who hates blue cars may attract only bad blue cars, so it’s all he knows, you having reliable blue cars doesn’t make his experience any less valid.
Then there is stuff like the challenger shuttle, the engineers said don’t fly it at those temps, so everyone else starts looking for other answers that will allow them to fly it, and then it blows up, and everyone else tries to pretend the engineers never said do not fly it, and even when it comes out, who gets jail time?
But, we are increasingly moving into a world where CEO’s kill people and fuck all happens, and the man on the street makes a typo when buying a parking ticket (the car reg system is only there to stop you handing the ticket to someone else… bastards) and a whole series of dominoes falls and next thing you know the poor bastard is out a month’s wages, because as far as he was concerned he parked and paid for it, so he wasn’t looking for any problems…
I’ll freely admit that I am no longer up to speed with UK tax and company regulations, I used to be, but they keep passing new laws, so I lost interest, fuck it, I’ll pay an accountant, and if that doesn’t work, fuck it, I’ll declare bankruptcy and start over, I still own all my shit…. I can always go back to being a sole trader and fuck the state and the system, that’s what happens when you make playing within the system too onerous… just look at catalunya… and brexit, and the rest of it.
It’s not so much that people wanted sovereignty as a nation, it’s that they wanted ***out*** of the fucking marriage to the EU, and as all us blokes know, there comes a point when “it’s gonna cost you every penny you have” seems like a good deal.. I’ll buy that for a dollar.
Stupidity and cupidity often means that when “the state” becomes involved in something where the individual didn’t defraud anyone, didn’t con anyone, didn’t steal from anyone, didn’t deprive anyone of anything, such as the aforementioned car parking ticket typo, neverthless he can find himself being treated like a fucking criminal, and end up one or two or three months wages out of pocket, and a couple of days off work sitting talking to assholes, who will undoubtedly chastise him for “not taking this matter seriously enough”
Because invariably these roles are always filled by stupid and unimaginative people, the “clever” ones are only clever in the way that a baseball fan can tell you exactly how many whatevers Babe Ruth made in a given season, and they are the best of the bunch so gawd help you if the fucking minions get their claws in you…
I know of many small time builders and sparky’s and auto mechanics and the like who have a history of being “in trouble” with the tax man or the HMRC or some bastard in government, none of them are driving around in new merc’s or taking 6 week holidays twice a year to Bali, they’re all scratching a living so none of them are “defrauding the state” on any meaningful level, the fact is if you sicced a pet accountant on any of them they could probably claim more than enough to offset their dues, but the stupid and the cupid that work for the state only give a fuck about the dues, and by golly, if you don’t have good enough books, they will just make up a number, same as the council parking twats who will make up a number for the “revenue” that they “lost” because some poor bastard types AKB612E and not AKE612B as his vehicle registration, but still paid for the fucking ticket.
And then they will add the “fees” of the “costs” they incurred, viewing cctv to get the correct registration and matching that to the DVLA then pressing one button on a computer to get it so send out a penalty notice (probably to the wrong address…)
I don’t necessarily like or enjoy talking about da wimminz, or da society, or da breivik, or da vegas shooter, I do it because I have to get it out.
I’d *like* to be given a TV channel job and be told to make a series of 12 programmes, each 60 minutes long, each on a subject of my choosing, I’d start with electricity generation and distribution and consumption, synchronisation, power factors, etc… your lives literally depend on this shit people, wake up and learn something about it.
Viewing figures would probably be in the low thousands…lol
So this one is a subject that I like, lasers.
I’m not an expert, I just own some and run them and make some sort of living from doing so, and it’s all my own hands on so I’m not some removed management type.
This first image plots various substances and their reflectivity vs wavelength.
The red arrow is the 1 micron wavelength of most fibre lasers, and the blue arrow is the 10 micron wavelength of CO2, and you can see right away for most of these materials 1 micron is too long, too much reflectivity, you’re going to be much better off with a 355 nanometre UV laser.. more detail in this second image.
You can see here that at 1 micron Aluminium is only about 92/93% reflective,
so you can work with that with a 1 micron fibre, but Gold Silver and Copper are still pretty much perfect mirrors at 1 micron.
Of course it matters what we are talking about, and these graphs all talk about pure materials, and that means you’ll probably only ever find pure gold and copper and silver in things like electronics, so forget ideas about etching copper pcb tracks with a 1 micron beam, you want a 355 nano UV beam for that.
It also means the chances are that the impure alloyed versions of copper and silver and gold that most people will hand you *will* mark with a 1 micron fibre.
You still want to be *careful* with this shit and make sure your work is off axis so nothing gets reflected back up into the beam source, but the fact is you probably can mark most gold jewellery, most silver cutlery, most copper plumbing fittings, because none of those things are pure.
Of course you are now presented with a whole new set of challenges, communicating some of this to potential customers in a useful way.
“Yeah man we can probably engrave your gold jewellery, because it probably ain’t pure gold, if it was pure gold we couldn’t”
“What, you’re saying this fucking expensive piece of bling ain’t pure?? fuck you… whaddaya you know about it anyway, you probably don’t even know what you’re talking about and you can’t afford nice bling shit like this anyway… fucking loser…”
ummmmm, no, ummm.. ah well…
Though I say so myself I have a very clear and very informative business website, complete with FAQ pages and a blog, and I explain quite clearly such things as a laser being a beam, not a tool, (as in physical tool like an end mill) so you’re never going to get precision Z axis machining out of it for example, and it is going to react to different materials differently, different parts of the same piece differently, and different batches of the same thing differently.
I will still get at least one potential customer per week talking to me about printing, they want Fred’s name engraved in black on a piece of wood or leather etc, and I have to point them at one of the aforementioned web pages explaining it is not ink, it is a beam of thermal energy, and many things determine the colour of the final work, and almost none of them are under my control.
Others will ask for things that they think look nice, not things that they should be asking for, I want a sign like this one, dude, that sign was made in two separate processes, 1/ it was engraved and 2/ the engraved areas were filled with paint, we only do laser engraving and cutting, you can paint fill it yourself…. OK, how about annealing.
If I listened to customers, with every other job I’d be adding a complete new process to the repertoire, and within six months 5% of what I would be doing is laser engraving and cutting, and if I was going down that road I’d be farming out my laser engraving and cutting requirements to someone else.
Just this morning I have been cutting shapes with the fibre galvo from household kitchen foil that is 0.03 mm thick, the problem isn’t cutting these small shapes, well it is, the outgassing from the cut blows shit around, the problem is picking them up without damaging them… the hexagon on the right (image should be a link to full size png) is 5 mm across, you can see the edges of the letters are distorted with the outgassing of the aluminium being vapourised by the beam energy, so clearly there is a lot of playing to be done there to get that right, but as a proof of concept, it works… BTW later on in this test I engraved / ablated an area to the right of this without going through, just some local thermal distortion.
That will be next the request if this was a client job and not a home experiment / learn / study job, can you engrave it without thermal distortion please….. yeah well, maybe I can minimise it buddy, but it is basically a beam of heat, sooooo…………
Of course down at the atomic levels where we can be (with this particular beam source and this particular f-theta lens and so on) putting 12.5 kilowatts of coherent 1 micron radiation down per square millimetre of work you’re not just melting or vapourising, you will also be making charged particles, so you have a whole new set of factors to content with…
With the same beam source and a different f-theta lens I could go down up a peak 87.5 kilowatts per mm square.
When you consider noon day sun in the tropics high up in the atmosphere on a clear day solar radiation is giving you about a kilowatt per square meter, we are talking around 90,000,000 the energy density.
I can cut 0.5 mm 305 stainless quite cleanly, if you can live with the thermal discolouration, just by making repeated passes each one about a micron deeper than the last, so suddenly we are looking at the ability to texture the surface of metals and make hydrophobic finishes.
You can see this sort of thing just by going to youtube and searching for “fiber galvo laser” and you’ll find a ton of videos, most of them made by the chinese, most of them showing an open machine in class 4 mode with a bunch of people stood around it with no eye protection of any kind, trusting to luck that there won’t be a stray beam reflection…..
At 10 microns the CO2 laser will cut acrylic, and cut clear acrylic and leave a polished edge, at 1 micron the fibre source won’t touch acrylic, or many of the organic materials such as wood or leather that the 10 micron CO2 thrives on, just one logarithmic step in wavelength makes all the difference and to the human eye it is all invisible infra red anyway.
At 1 micron the fibre source will directly mark / anneal / engrave most metals that the 10 micron CO2 will just bounce off.
Change the PRR frequency of the beam to higher levels and instead of engraving / ablating / cutting the metal, you end up cleaning it of rust and other dirt and imperfections, interestingly the metal part itself is warmer to the hand , less off the applied energy is burned off as ablated material, so more of it is absorbed into the body of the metal.
Again it’s not perfect, you don’t get a clean polished / brushed / fly cut surface finish, you can see imperfections where the rust / mill scale / etc was, but it feels smooth and clean and certainly all the rust and dirt has gone, or in the case of alloy all the oxides have gone.
Ten years ago all this shit would have been so far out of the reach of the single small businessman that it may as well have been science fiction, now it’s available for the price of a new taxi.
But, it is all still firmly in the realms of a primitive technology, it’s not mature or polished, there is a lot to learn and master, and most of all a lot to just accept, because you can’t do fuck all about it.
One of these things is the perennial I/O issue between the machinery and the PC, in the home the now ubiquitous Canon print driver engine takes care of everything, in your phone the Broadcom chipset takes care of everything wireless, when it comes to industrial equipment, especially newer stuff, not so much.
Plotters are now fairly mature, so steppers and controller are all fairly mature technologies, and frankly they are precise enough and fast enough for >98% of plotter laser applications, you can make it work.
When it comes to galvos not so much, of course they are newer to the scene, require much faster response times and much more precise levels of control, you’re looking at full excursion in one axis of the order of 0.03 seconds, and you are looking at a resolution of the order of 200,000 points along that excursion, so you’re knocking on 7 million separate instructions per second.. my current Mach3 install for the cnc mill and separate linear motion table for the fibre tops out at 100 kHz.
So you’re probably going to face a choice of scaps controller software / drivers / mainboard or an ezcad controller software / drivers / mainboard, or you bought some proprietary in house wank.
Scaps drivers won’t talk to an ezcad controller and vice versa, so you start comparing the two, and you see it ain’t that simple, it’s apples and oranges, and in an ideal world what you want is a hybrid of the two.
Then of course you’ll get all the marketing wank, people will tell you that you must have MOPA to get colours, I didn’t buy a MOPA because I didn’t see the need IMHO that particular roundabout and swing, but as you can see from the image on the right, I can produce colours just fine.
The problem comes when you start to talk about “colour” the same way we talked about pure gold and copper and silver above, they aren’t real pigments, just annealed discolourations, so reproduction and uniformity are a thing you’ll struggle with, and trust me, you will fucking struggle, because the moment you mention it some cunt will want pantone colours putting on some metal.
It is all slightly reminiscent of todays story in the register about Uk Home Secretary Amber Rudd being annoyed at techies who sneer at people like her because she doesn’t understand encryption, but still things she can legislate it, she has never heard of King Canute.
Nor will most of your (potential) customers, but that’s OK, *I* have the lasers, *you* want stuff lasered, guess whose rules we will be playing by?
A freedom that I only have because I saved up and bought my shit for cash, it’s mine, it can sit there all day doing nothing but cutting out tinfoil hexagons and it will still be mine, nobody can repo it.
But as a tool and as a toy it is a great thing, I strongly suspect that a year from now I will still be learning, because that’s the kind of guy I am, I did not buy it hoping to get contracts to engrave 10,000 promotional pens at a time and nothing else, I bought it to play with and experiment with, and sure, I’ll rent out machine time on it to anyone who asks.
This shit keeps me alive, keeps my brain working, keeps me interested and alert, I am fucking six years old and I have never grown up, and I have no intention of starting any time soon.
And this is the stuff I really like talking about.
I believe the last count is 58 dead and 500 injured, x 365 that’s 21,170 and 182,500.
According to wikifukia there were 35,092 vehicle fatalities in 2015, and at an average of 2 injured for each killed that means 70,000 injuries.
So basically a las vegas shooter every day would just about keep up with the automobile, puts things into perspective, but still, there is some shit I do not get.
Why go to all that prep work, and there was a lot of prep work to fire off that many rounds, get a hotel room on the right side of the building to hit the concert, etc etc etc, and not used silenced weapons and subsonic rounds?
Sure you’ll lose some accuracy, but you are literally shooting fish in a barrel, not aiming and individual targets, so who cares?
This kind of follows on from the previous post, because everyone just assumes that anyone who is nuts is also stupid and incapable of creating or following a plan, or if they do, the plan will be fatally warped.
Nothing of course could be further from the truth, crazy people are at least as able as anyone else to craft a plan carefully and follow it faithfully and adapt to changes.
My psycho skank ho ex might be called a crazy bitch by many, but she wasn’t, she was just plain nasty, if she had been crazy she might have come up with a better plan to ruin my life… you know, there is a world of difference between wondering what you will be accused of tomorrow, and wondering if you will wake up dead or with appendages cut off.
In my life I have met a couple of real crazy fucks, and in both cases there were circumstances where just for a few minutes the mask came off, and you realise you are talking to one crazy fucker, and it is an uneasy feeling, because at no point is there even a whiff that you are talking to one stupid fucker, you know you are talking to one crazy fucker who can plan and execute and adapt.
The female NASA astronaut a few years ago who set herself up wearing adult diapers so she could stalk someone and not miss a moment to seize the moment is a classic example of this.
Many years ago I was on a rooftop at night overlooking a western metropolis (I’ve told this anecdote before, and the equipment dates it now) and the guy next to me hand me a long rifle with a starlight scope and paraphones, he’d grinned as he’d pulled the mag and cleared the action before handing it to me, because he knew how magnetic that trigger was.. years later in video games I’m still the guy sniping super mutants and rust devils, preferably at night, preferably at extreme range…
The problem with me isn’t the execution of the assassination or armoured van robbery or anything else, it’s the detection and conviction, I just do not get how people can think it is all going to be OK to go out and rob an armoured car or a bank, when the chances of getting away with it are close to zero… did you leave your brain on the nightstand when you got up that morning?
So really the only way to rob a bank and get away with it is to do it in such a way that nobody ever knows it is you, which means you do not rob a bank, you rob the guy who robbed the bank, or you crash a couple of boeings into the bank and then blame it on Iran or someone else, or better still short the stock on insider knowledge of a chapter 11….
… I met a guy years ago who hired me to do some engineering consultancy for him, towards the end of the gig I found out he was investigating a company that folded… paperwise everything checked out, it was a straight up bankruptcy and nobody behaved “improperly”, but he was convinced something stank, so he hired an engineer to work through it, and it turned out there was a way to “disappear” a few million dollars worth of stock, only you could never prove it *after* the event… basically it revolved around item X, which was worth a lot of money per unit in its usual form, but which was just so much industrial waste in its other state, so after the event there is no way to tell if the valuable stuff was swapped out for crap before the company folded, or if the company folding caused a series of events that turned the valuable stuff into crap, because the stuff itself was fungible, so after the event (lacking any other evidence) there was no way to tell if a few million dollars worth of product had disappeared, there was no way to tell if a crime has been committed.
You can contrast this sort of thing with the sysadmin who gets fired, then goes home and logs into the corporate mainframe with a backdoor and wipes everything, this is like ex revenge, the idea is the other fucker *knows* it was you who fucked them over.
I mentioned Breivik in the previous post, contrast him with the Vegas guy who died at the scene, neither one had a plan to “get away with it”… the bank robber analogy is someone who breaks into the bank and leaves the cash and safe deposit boxes alone, but burns all the mainframe data storage and backups.
Breivik planned to avoid “suicide by cop”, the vegas shooter didn’t, this is one essential difference, and the manifesto of breivik ties in with this, you don’t write a 1,500 page manifesto if you are planning a suicide by cop.
Another reason that we can assume that Breivik is the genuine article is there was no Jack Ruby waiting for him to be arrested.
The problem is that all of the above, and others besides, well, we are human, and we want to understand why (well, we do in the touchy feely 20/21st centuries anyway) and the problem with this is like Jack explaining why he is still with Diane, his explanation is perfectly understandable, but you do not get it, yeah, I hear all that man, but I still don’t get why you hooked up with her in the first place, much less stuck with it all these years.
So we want to know motives, was they guy bullied at school, did he have a small penis, was he a blockbuster card holder, did he drink bud lite, and you can ask and know all these things about Jack, and still be no wiser about why he is with Diane.
Ultimately you’ll come down to what I felt stood in the secret family courts, you are listening to this person being described, and you just can’t relate to it, that person ain’t you.
The big difference between the two scenarios is the secret family courts and the police and everyone else, even if they do have a vested financial interest in investigating an alleged fire 6 feet under a lake, it’s a slow process that takes days and weeks and months, whereas with the shooter or the bank robber or mad bomber, it’s a catharsis that rarely runs for more than 30 minutes from when they committed themselves to that course of action.
Sure, the planning stage may have taken days or weeks or months, but you could say the same thing about buying a new car or getting married, you can always walk away from it 10 minutes beforehand.
People will often talk about “having no options” and this is of course very rarely even close to the truth, the truth is they have no other options that they like, and they can’t see that changing.
I’m just a poor broke victim of society, that’s never going to change, may as well rob a bank.
So the issue isn’t whether the vegas shooter lost his shit because the new star trek / blade runner / NFL bended knee reboot sucked, so knowing those things about him will not help you.
The issue is they thought they had no better options, and weren’t likely to get any soon either.
Breivik for all we know may have preferred the path he took, to a future where he saw himself bored lonely and single at 50 watching reboots of the time tunnel on cable.
And “my available options” are one of the cards most human beings play closest of all to their chests.
Again, Breivik carefully planned everything, including his targets, whereas the vegas shooter, well, it was probably a case of any crowded target rich area will do.
Which puts it in the same space as getting a stone chip on your windscreen, it’s a random event, so you don’t go to schools, or cinemas, or shopping malls, or military bases, or country music concerts, or ride buses or trains, and before you know it you are like one of those hermits avoiding all EM radiation because they are convinced it is harmful to their health… and then they die of something trivially preventable because they are off grid and can’t call anyone for help.
The vegas guy could just as easily have cooked up some toxic compound and flown it into the concert in a drone, if the idea was to kill people and evade detection and conviction for a small while, that’s what he would have done.. but no, he planned his own time and place of death.
His goal then was not to kill 58 and injure 500, any more than it was to make the hotel 100 bucks richer by renting the room, they were just details… albeit if he was angry he may have wanted to share the pain…
I don’t actually think the guy was a state stooge or a false flag, though there may well have been one played out around him without his knowledge after the event.
I think it was a “fuck this shit” moment by one person who didn’t see any better options on the table.
The problem that we as a society face is you can’t stop people from deciding to say fuck it and go out in a blaze of hubris, and you can’t do much about the fact that the more technological we get, the more collateral damage we can do….. banning guns in the USA will not counter this, guns are banned here in the Uk so the freaks just go out and hire a truck, it’s still a technological force multiplier.
You can ban trucks and the freaks can target the water supply, there is always more technology that can be used as a force multipler, and so the cure will always be worse than the disease.
Now, finally, we come to the real point of this piece…
the vegas mass killing is being billed as the “biggest / worst mass muder in US history” and that may be true, but it is only partly true, because the truth is the addendum “…so far…” because the more technological change there is the greater the force multiplers available, and the greater the multiple possible for each one.
Anyone with military experience will know that munitions have weight, so one guy killing 50 and injuring 500 with stuff he toted himself is getting up there towards the upper limits of what can be done with a gun by one guy.
And at that point I’d seriously consider not ever banning guns, because they are unlikely to ever eclipse what the automobile does in a year, even if more and more people every year decide they have no better options than to go postal.
more people in the UK die from shit like swine flu, hernias and skin disease in any one year than terrorists have ever killed, or mass killers have ever killed, hell, 96 died cycling…
We just as a species are more suceptible to 50 being iced in one go, that we are to 50 being iced one per day, so whether it be a burning building or a plane crash or a sinking ship or a mass killing, it makes the news.
And that’s the other side of the technological coin, 100 years ago you could ice 50 people in one country and the chances are someone in another country would never even hear about it, nowadays technology means it doesn’t matter where it happens, we hear about it while it is still ongoing, so we hear about a lot more.
I was half a world away from the twin towers on 9/11, but I still watched it in time to see the second tower hit, and all these years later, I’m still none the wiser as to what went down, or how steel frame buildings, one of them not even touched by a plane, fell at free fall speed very shortly thereafter.
So every act becomes circus, becomes theater, and it is old news as soon as the next act comes along, and come along it will.
Even as I type this there are thousands of people around the world who don’t see any better options, and plenty more coming in future, and sure as god made little green apples, some of those will do a mass killing.
We can either simply accept this, like we accept auto fatalities, or we can accept that the more technology advances, the more force multipliers will come in to play, or we can accept that nature will find a way to limit DNA becoming a monoculture.
Or we can go the other route, and we can seek to understand motives, we can seek to ban such technologies that are used as force multipliers, or we can seek to wrap everyone in cotton wool.
Imagine a DJI Agras carrying 9500 grammes of thermite and an arduino, just land it on a gas pipeline or a power transformer or a fuel bund or pretty much anything else of your choice, trigger the thermite and watch all the evidence go up in smoke, or 9 kilos of gasoline, or 9 kilos of gallium, or 9 kilos of toxins, fly that shit anywhere you like POV style and the fact is it is cheaper than many firearms by the time you spec them up and add all the accessories.
You don’t have to imagine it, allegedly the russians blew up a huge ukraine arms dump with a drone and one thermite grenade.
So 89% of catalans voted for independence, one the one hand, it won’t matter, any more than the astonishing million plus person protest in london against the proposed war when tony bliar was in power mattered.
One the other hand, it is yet another brick in the wall and answer to the question of what would happen if they had a vote / war / whatever and nobody turned up, and another brick in the wall and answer to the question of whether power and law comes from the will of the people, or is imposed on the will of the people.
If I killed someone last night, we all know it would be a very stupid thing to take to fuckbook today and post some snide remark about it today as a status update, because that comment can and will be used to convict me of murder.
Inside the box with Schroedinger’s cat lies AfOR’s conscience, so you have no way of knowing if I did not steal from you because I thought it morally wrong, or because I thought it never worth the risk of detection and conviction, and to most sane people there is no need to open the box, your valuables are safe from me.
But increasingly we are moving to an age (again, we have been here before) where the very question of your future liberty will depend on the contents of that box, and the people who will decide will not be like you and me.
History is replete with examples of people who did nothing but write some words expressing their disquiet or displeasure at how society was going, and next thing you know they are imprisoned or dead.
It matters, to those in power, what is in the box.
The moral based reason is a problem, so is the decision based reason, but it is easier to manage, all you have to do is make sure the decision never changes, and the easy way to do that is make sure I never ever ever ever ever think it is worth it to make that decision or choice.
It’s not so much harder to protect against a shift in the moral choice, it just requires different tools, propaganda.. not violence
What we saw in spain is what we see everywhere every single day here in the west, we see both a campaign of propaganda and a campaign of violence against those who fail to co-operate and comply.
Far from our media “reporting on it” as it were, they are just showing us enough to make it a lesson, watch this, study, learn, comply… or else…
This is why I have always had such a problem with the whole evil man abuses young girl and uses threats and power differential to get his evil way with the poor hapless victim thing.
I’m not say that that is, or is not, what is going on in such a dynamic, all I am saying is that as an example of coercion, it’s chump change with what goes on all day every day all around us, so it’s a bit rich to lay so heavily on the coercion angle with the poor powerless helpless victim.
If sending snapchat messages to a bunch of vigilantes pretending to be a 12 year old girl who wants to meet me for sex, or posting updated on fuckbook about my latest shipment of drugs and 9 mm, is likely to end up with me in the limelight for 20 minutes and jail for a few years…..
…. posting intellectually framed arguments highlighting the sheer iniquity and hypocrisy of the system we have is likely to end up with me being “processed”.
“Processed” was a thing we knew about as far back in my own personal memory as 1980 here in the UK, it was simple, you were arrested for a crime, and then in court concerns were made public about your mental state or drug usage prior to your appearance in court, so you’d be sent off to a more suitable place where they could assess you.
So this guy, and yes, I fucking knew him, knew his middle name, knew his brother and sister, knew his parents, knew where he lived, hell, I bought a motorcycle from him one time, so this guy, who only ever smoked a little lebanese mixed in with his tobacco, get’s picked up… there is a not relevant back story here about *why* he was picked up, suffice it to say “shame if something bad happened to your other two kids, or your wife, or you” wasn’t a million miles away, afterwards the whole family was wracked with guilt and could no longer bear the sight of the guy/son/brother in question
So next thing you know this guy is in a “hospital” where they “asses” him by giving him different drugs every day, and different doses, and a bit of good old electrotherapy thrown in (sorry, did you think clockwork orange was entirely fictitious?) and six weeks later this shambling wreck leaves the “hospital” and the next three years that I knew him he basically self medicated with lebanese all day every day to keep the tremors and anger buried, in six weeks he went from being a natural engineer who could and did tinker with everything into a shambling shell of a man who if you asked him the time (or anything else) while he was getting on the bus to pay his fare, he’d get off again and wait for the next bus, because you just overloaded his mind.
It’s so much easier for the state today, there are hordes of shambling broken people on the payroll, want six people to come out of the woodwork and make claims that you sodomised them when they were ten years old, no problem, just do this thing and you can continue to get your fix and your rent… does anyone even remember the strange death of Dr Kelly, the intellectual and scientist who said that all of tony bliar’s claims for war in the middle east were lies, and he could prove it… just need you three guys to do this thing, and you can continue to get your fix and your rent.
And as always, there is always the stick and the carrot of exotic forbidden fruit, just look at Julian Assange, he lives a life of a hermit, but he gets to fuck a baywatch babe now and again, it’s never all bad, not when it is fake, when it is real it’s all bad, Breivik doesn’t get visits from baywatch babes, not because there aren’t willing participants, but because he isn’t on the fucking payroll dude.
“You become a zombie where the highlight of your day is purchasing a 1000 Euro garment or a 100 Euro sushi meal, or getting a blowjob from someone you met outside the toilet at a club that Saturday. On your way home you see a girl getting gang-raped by 4 Somalis. You don’t offer it much thought as the slag probably had it coming anyway.”
The catalan fiasco is set to breed more Breiviks, not less, because most of the players are *exactly* what breivik describes as category A and category B traitors.
At this point IT DOES NOT MATTER if you agree with breivik or think he was an insane piece of shit, the relevant points are that he creates a set of labels, and proceeds to categorise people and put them in those boxes, and that in and of itself is not a game that stops being played when he gets life in solitary, anyone can play that game that far, and if you do, lots of what breivik ranted about becomes prescient.
Eerily, even AFTER all his crimes, assuming his manifesto is true, breivik would make a better neighbour for many of us than many of the neighbours we do have, he would certainly have no interest in telling me that I should shut the fuck up, when I tell you, entirely truthfully, that my own mother has been on the council house waiting list for 26 years, and they do not even bother talking to her, as a native old white woman she fell off a list that is dominated by skanky single moms pumping out a succession of womb turds and fucking refugees that do not want to become english, it’s Ok, she has been privately renting for 26 years and every single year when the landlord visits he calls the property “impeccable” and her a “dream tenant”…
I’d have less qualms about a released breivik being her neighbour or yodel delivery driver or her window cleaner or gardener than some of the types that *are* about.
Because all of this brings us to an interesting dilemma.
The stuff breivik writes, it is clear, concise and logical, and in any event, it is just words on paper.
breivik the man may be a complete fucking loon, and it is only his insanity that allows him to make a connection between clear concise and logical arguments, and the going out and slaughtering a bunch of privileged kids of powerful people…
…or…
well, there is the question…
Because fundamentally the question that we are going to have to address here is this, is Breivik insane because he put his thoughts to deeds?
Is the definition of insanity to take up arms against a corrupt state, for there is no doubt that his state is as corrupt as the rest here in the west, so is the question of his sanity hinging on dealing out to members of the apparatchiks, category a traitors as he calls them, the sort of impersonal cold violence and callous disregard for individual rights and freedoms, that these states use against their peoples?
So if breivik is insane, how is the state sane?
When US National Guard killed civilians at Kent State, did the US Government end up in the dock charged with multiple counts of murder?
Is that an insane question to ask?
Is it sane to say that *clearly* a government or a state or a corporation cannot be put in the dock and subject to the same sort of treatment as a breivik or mcvee or carlos or baader or anyone else?
And this sort of simple logic is what makes this whole piece “dangerous” and “seditious”, because it asks everyone to make a reasoned analysis, and as we have said before, a reasoned analysis is the absolute worst fucking thing possible to a power that depends on the stuff in green bold text above.
They DO NOT WANT a world in which everyone opens their own Schroedinger’s box of moral compasses and examines the contents for themselves, they want a world where that box is forever sealed, and only they are the arbiters of what it contains, or does not contain.
Yes young man, you were born with a penis, and that box is filled to 5,000 psi with urges to rape and kill and steal, do not open it, do not look at it, do not even think about it.
Trust us, we are the state, and we are here to help you.
We’ll see how well that goes down in catalunya over the next months.
Stands to logical reason, sooner or later, the bough is going to break, somewhere…. like Yellowstone, predicting it is an exercise in futility, being aware of the possible ramifications, is an exercise in survival.
But then, I always liked actually using my fucking brain, who cares if it is intellectual onanism, at least I am fucking using it and keeping it fit and healthy.
Having lived in Spain in the early post Franco years, and by lived I mean permanent resident status and Tarjeta de Residencia and work permit (Parte de Alta) etc before they joined the EU, and by Spain I mean catalunya / Baleares, I can tell you that a good way to start a fight back then was to say something about Franco, you were just as likely to be talking to someone who loved him as someone who hated him, if the person was the small minority who was ambivalent, they probably weren’t there when Franco was.
Catalunya back then was the richest region in Spain, and Calvia council back then was the richest council region in catalunya.
Yes I remember miki moto on catalan telly..lol
But, back then the EU was a brave new world not yet visited, menu del dia was 450 pesetas, a packet of ducados 55 pesetas, a beer 70 pesetas, and a real posh penthouse flat overlooking the marivent palace was 4 million pesetas, back around then there were around 200-225 pesetas to the old libra esterlina so the posh flat was a shade under 18 grand sterling.
Dayworkers were pulling in 500 pesetas an hour.
So life was good, life was fucking good, and I warned everyone who would listen that joining the EU and getting EU IVA (value added tax) on everything was going to fucking kill spain, not immediately maybe, but sooner or later.
Now, frighteningly, over 30 years have passed since those days, and spain has turned into a turd by and large, and none of the people there are unaware of it.
Spain pretty much wasn’t racist, the true spaniard had blonde or red hair and blue eyes, the swarthy look was a result of the moorish invasions and inbreeding, but add a few hundred years and they were all spanish, and you were more than welcome to come and work and pay taxes and obey the same laws as everyone else and be just another spaniard.
But just because they weren’t racist, doesn’t mean they weren’t aware of race, in catalunya speaking castellano makes you a second class citizen to the catalan speaker, only by a fraction, but the fraction was there.. knew an english girl who grew up there from a toddler, spoke catalan like a native, got to the front of every queue in every business on the industrial estates, but it was done with smiles, as it was when the iberia pilots spoke catalan to the control tower to get bumped ahead in the holding pattern.
But, when you fucked up, it wouldn’t be forgotten or forgiven in a few weeks, or a year, or ten, or thirty, once your card was marked, it was marked for life.
Which brings us to the present day shenanigans.
It is a question that I cannot answer as to whether a referendum in catalunya for independence from spain at large would be a legally binding document, I can’t answer it because I do not know the law intimately, and hey, we voted for brexit, and it is as distant as ever…
It is a question that I can answer, what happens when you start sending in the guardia civil to prevent people from even HOLDING such an election, or having a voting app on google play, or saying anything in support of it in public office, or possessing anything such as pens and paper and boxes, that could be used to hold a ballot.
And the answer is YOU WILL NOT then have what we had in the early 80’s, which went as far as “that franco loving / hating bastard over there” but it was all still pretty cordial and polite.
What you will have is lines drawn in the sand, before they are drawn in blood and fire, you’re pro catalunya or anti catalunya, there is no more “spaniard”, it’s a basque ETA redux, but this time the secessionist group is the wealthiest one, by far, in the room.
When *we* had a world war, spain had a civil war, and coincidentally 99.999% of everyone who even remembers that first hand is now dead, so 99.999% do NOT remember it first hand, so they have no fear of re-creating it.
Now we have raghead immigrant muslims and so on in the mix, a short car drive away from mainland europe, so it won’t just be idealistic white men from europe who go to spain to choose sides in the civil war, it will be every fucker, so the moment it starts those who started it will no longer be the only players on the field.
And if 100,000 militant raghead muslims cross from mainland europe to participate, then it is going to get real bloody real fast, because down at street level the spanish people are very pragmatic.
The other thing people forget is that “the spanish” isn’t just the spanish, back in the 80’s there were a shit load of Argentinians who got out and emigrated to spain, and those folks ain’t dead yet…
The other thing people forget is the spanish foreign legion, everyone has heard of the french foreign legion, but the spanish version was much rawer and more vicious.. in the early 80’s the spanish still had national service, and it applied to everyone, even folks like me who wanted to be resident and work there, two years on fuck all money, and I mean fuck all money, it was harsh and it was rough and it was brutal, and most of those folks ain’t dead yet either.
In another 20 years of peace and indolence and QE maybe Madrid would have got away with a stunt like the one they are pulling now, a stunt largely unreported in the mass media outside spain, but not now, not while there are still plenty of people still alive with first hand memories of Franco and national service and spain before she was in the EU and all fucked up.
Especially as globally there are enough shit stirrers out there to make sure there a few false flag events to stir the pot even more.
I still to this day fold my money longwise before handing it to someone…
My heart goes with catalunya on this one, madrid can go fuck itself…. madrid is no longer spain, it’s brussels on the river manzanares…
It was barely 09:30 when I had started this, and already I have had two spamming cunt phone calls trying to sell me shit, one was office water fountains and one was fucking packaging, basically I am seeing it everywhere, a quiet desperation to make sales, any sales, anywhere, at any cost, even the “it ***must*** be fucking less than zero” sales impact of outsourced cold calling.
Last night at 7pm I realised I was completely out of rechargeable small batteries, so I nipped down to the local maplin and bought two packs of ten 1900 mAh AA and one pack of ten 750 mAh AAA, Eneloop brand, 1.2 VDC NiMh, basically seventy fucking quid, OK it’s still going to work out cheaper than buying alkalines, but it’s twice the price per battery of buying a quality panasonic 3.7 VDC 18650 LiOn direct from china at 3,500+ mAh.
OK form factor and voltage are a thing here, the video light has 160 LED’d and takes 6 x AA in series for 9 volts, technically 6 x 1.2 = 7.2 volts, so two 18650’s in series would give me 7.4 volts so it would work the rest of the circuit.
Battery mAh capacity only adds up when you wire them in parallel, in series you get nothing, so 6 x 1900 mAh AA in series is still 1900 mAh, but two 18650 in series would give me 3,000 – 3,500 mAh so a significant increase.
So it is all down to physical form factor, and like many things in this world you discount that at your peril, because “no brainer” + “we already have the moulds and patterns” + “everyone knows what at AA is” + “you can put any type of AA battery in an AA battery space and it will work” means that my 15 quid 160 LED video light was 15 quid, and not 50 quid.
If you have a standard audio jack plug and socket in say 3.5 mm, if you’re an engineer you’re going to choose that the male part is exposed to all the crap and dirt and moisture, because it is easier to clean off than the recess that is the female part, but somewhere in there is the historical fact that the “device” was always the part with the female connector, and the “peripheral” was always the thing with the male connector, so we have headphone and usb jacks in mobiles as places for dirt to get in, and places that are thicker than the male counterpart that gets inserted.
Money also plays a part, do you go for cheapo machine screw in plug or more expensive but physically larger pukka XLR4? Speaking personally I always go for something big and butch and unlikely to wobble or break, but it adds up, you can get a male and female 4 pin machinery plug for 3 quid, but a male and female XLR4 will likely set you back 10 quid, that’s a big difference, gets bigger when you are doing 4 axes of a cnc build, gets bigger when you are hoping to sell one a week, 50 x 4 x 7 = £1,400 quid a year just on plugs, and since you didn’t cheap out on that part, all other parts that got cheaped out on will be more obvious.
I’ve got a lovely little worm gear driven 4th axis for the new machine, only problem is, the worm has backlash, so you have to put a null part in the design to compensate for that, Ok they are working on a newer version of the rotary to fix this and I’ll get a free one as soon as they are done, in the meantime a simple 2:1 reduction belt driven link between the stepper and the chuck would have eliminated the backlash… the issue here was the original design must rotate the axis of rotation of the chuck so you can set the chuck at any angle you like, so they went for a worm driven rotary table design as that made that easier, the belt coupled stepper is much harder to do that with.
None of this shit occurs to you until the first time you pick up a thing, Ok I’m an engineer so I *know* there are going to be consequences to me buying a 15 quid 160 LED video light, but often times you have to have the thing in your hand to appreciate them.
I have a ton of other stuff that takes AA and AAA cells, so in actual fact the 75 quid for a bunch of nimh’s isn’t so bad a deal, they’ll pay for themselves in a year and everything after that is a saving, but there are two factors to that happening.
1/ the batteries have to be good enough quality to last long enough and keep enough capacity to make those savings
2/ you have to spend a *lot* more capital up front to make ongoing savings down the line.
Suddenly we are into the realms of investment, and investment only happens if you understand the principle properly, most don’t, they are after immediate gains, and of you have the surplus capital to throw at it.
The asshole cold calling me this morning to sell me office water cooler and packaging clearly don’t grep any of this stuff, they are all smash and grab today and fuck tomorrow.
I’m widely mocked for having a six month supply of coffee and bog roll in, I was in the cash and carry yesterday for brown sugar and the coffee was cheap, 9.99 for a kilo of douwe egberts arabica pure beans, so two of them, and 11.99 for a 750g tin of DE instant, I wasn’t short or out of either beans or instant, but when something is cheap….. I’ll go back next week and the coffee will be 14.99 and 16.99 respectively, and I won’t buy it, not because I do not need it, because I did not need it yesterday, but I still bought it.
It (investment) reminds me of a conversation I had last week, with the father of a daughter, it was pretty uncomfortable for him, as I have always maintained that the reason disappointment and disgust sets in when princess daughter turns into miss cum bucket is you wanted it yourself and spent all that time and effort making it what you would have wanted, only for it to be thrown away.
it’s uncomfortable for him because he is one of those that find it hard to accept that one individual can simultaneously think about a thing, yet also would never do that thing in a million years, well, if we were talking about handling money and not stealing it, or handling ferraris and not stealing them, he’d be right on board, but like most in the west as soon as it comes to sex that makes you a sick fucking paedo.
I can go to the cinema and pay money in public to sit there and watch acts of murder, acts of violence, armed robbery, mutilation, no fucking problem… rape scenes, dodgy as fuck, naked kids, off to the prison with you, you dirty fucking paedo.
I’m sorry, (no, I’m not) but I want to buy a car from a man who built it the way he would want it for himself, and I want a woman raised by a man who raised her how he would want her for herself, and I want a male employee raised by a man to how he would want for himself too, so it ain’t all sex.
But to get back to the slut daddy the point I was trying to make to him was the fact that maybe, just fucking maybe now, as in food for thought, the fact that he was programmed to NOT see his daughter as something to be raised to that he himself would want her for a wife, is the reason he has in reality raised a daughter who is a cum bucket at 13, so maybe it is time to stop beating himself up for raising a slut, call her a slut, kick her out, and end it with the guilt a shit.
You know, know when to call it quits on that expenditure that is NOT an investment but which has been marketed as one.
Is this guy’s slut daughter suitable for me to fuck at 13?
This is a serious question, you are SUPPOSED to shy away from it, because it gives you answers and renders every other argument pointless, it ends the discussion… and we can’t have that, can we???
The brutal truth is if you are a slut at 13 then sex is the ONLY thing you have to offer me, BUT, because you are 13 it is poisoned fruit and I cannot touch it, even before we come to any questions about could I find it attractive, we already shut down the whole discussion, the only “advantage” to me is massively outweighed by the obvious “disadvantage” to me.
As in it doesn’t really matter what my reasons are for not robbing a cash in transit van filling hole in the wall machines, all that matters is that I’d never do it, whether my REASONS are that I believe it is wrong, or that intellectually I can see that the insurmountable problem is not the theft, but the detection, or any mix of the two, all that shit resides away inside my head, the only tactile thing that anyone else on the planet can touch is the fact I ain’t never done it.
And that at the core is all investment, it doesn’t matter what goes on inside someone’s head, all that matters is the tactile thing that anyone else on the planet can touch.
Anyone can touch my six month supply of coffee and bog roll, they may not agree that it is a wise investment, but they can touch it, and by touch I do not just mean physically touch, they can use it at will.
Back to the slut daughter, anyone but daddy can touch and use at will, he is the only one who cannot / will not, so by definition it is not an investment for him.
If she is a cum bucket at 13 then by definition it is not an investment for anyone using her to empty their balls, and because she has already been used for that, then by definition it is not an investment for anyone else, because that is the other side of the investment coin, if it is a thing that gets socialised that anyone can and does use, then the utility to any single individual is zero.
A public toilet is a public toilet, I clean my toilet and if it develops a fault I will go out and put a new cistern valve in, I put my own wooden seat on it, it is *my* toilet, so it has utility to me alone so it is my investment in my future.
It’s a circuitous and devious route via slutty 13 year olds and nimh batteries and cold callers, but it is a necessary one if we are going to investigate such things as what is an investment and what factors (such as physical form factors of batteries) have a significant effect on outcomes , but at the end of it, we come to some cold hard truths.
The water cooler company has staff and owners and investors, al of whom are invested in it to some degree or another, they, like the father of the teeny slut, have skin in the game.
The question then becomes, are they ever going to show a return on that?
Are office water cooler companies going to be a thing in 40 years? How about 30? How about 20? How about 10? How about 5? How about 1?
Or are they fungible like 13 year old sluts, there will always be 13 year old sluts, but in 10 years time they won’t be 13 year old sluts, they’ll be 23 years old skanks with 10 years on the cock carousel, and they will hate the 13 year old sluts that are 3 years old today. So it doesn’t matter if any one water cooler company goes down the drain, there are plenty more where that came from.
Or are you going to say ok it’s fungible, so it’s worthless, and the 3 year old who has slut-dom 10 years in their future is as bad a bet as the 23 year old who has been doing it for 10 years already, and as bad a bet as the 13 year old, who at least it can be said is relatively fresh if you are a very young (eg under 16 yourself) man willing to take the chance.
You can point at my mate’s 13 year old slut in her hot pants and bare midriff and crop top and say “slut”, and you can point at anyone doing cold calling and say “fuckedcompanydotcom” and people will tell you that it is unfair and prejudiced and not always true by any means.
But what are the consequences personally for you if you are indeed wrong when you point and name names?
Let’s assume you ARE wrong, what is the opportunity cost to you lost by being wrong?
It’s zero… even assuming you are fucking wrong.
If you’re not wrong, then assuming anything else can really hurt you.
Sluts and cold callers are people who believed that the only way to play the game was live today fuck tomorrow and if you ain’t a player you ain’t nuthin’, realists are people who would say you know what, that 15 quid 160 LED light you bought on amazon, make it take 4 x 18650 for 6500 mAh capacity and sell it for 20 quid and it would be a killer, but that isn’t on offer, so can I afford a bunch of nimh AA’s and still come ahead? because if I can’t I’ll do without.
Fact is sat here in my front room now I can see from where I sit (counts) 6 devices other than the just purchased light that takes AA batteries, and that is just what I can see from being sat here in one room…. and I have had nimh rechargeables in the past, so it’s no great leap for me, and fact is I had the 74 quid for those batteries and the two XLR4 plugs I wanted, so for *me* it worked as an investment.
But that’s not a call that you can even begin to make until you have gone to great lengths to assure yourself that you are only looking at shit that you have verified yourself is stuff that can be seen and touched, and then you start working with that with other known factors, do you actually have the spare cash? Do you actually have the time for the investment to pay off? Do you actually have a need or desire for the payoff, when it eventually comes around?
Compared to raising a daughter, or running a business that uses cold calling, buying pricey nimh batteries is a piece of piss.
So maybe that too is a moral, stick to the simple shit when it comes to investment.
The first part of this story is anecdotal and observational, it is what it is and nobody physically present would argue with the facts.
I lived on one side of a town, across the road was a corner shop, across the road and down a bit was a corner shop and news agents, opposite from that was the local chip shop, and a little further down from the news agents was the local pub, and opposite that was the local branch line railway station.
The fish and chip shop did some of the best cod and chips I have ever eaten, there was a guy and a woman out back and mainly up front was a fat girl called sarah, who was as efficient as a demon motherfucker at the whole taking orders / keeping track of orders and customers / making up orders thing.
It won awards every fucking year.
I used to go there on average once a week.
One day a few years later sarah was no longer up front serving, typically it took a minimum of two other people to do what fat sarah used to do, and being brutally honest two weren’t usually as good as she was on her own.. sometimes there were three serving.
There came a period where you weren’t sure who would be serving you, and quite often they were out of their depth.
I’d moved away across town by then so my visits became infrequent.
But staff churn was a thing, and then one day it dawned on me that the old guy out back was no longer there, there was just the woman.
Over the past three years I went more and more infrequently, we’re talking maybe once every six months, prices were going up, quality was going down, staff were fucking useless, to the point where nine months ago I said that’s it, no more.
Tonight I was returning from a long drive, I was tired, it was raining, I had a fair bit on my mind (I’d been filling a grave earlier) and muddy shoes and trousers, and I was passing that old chip shop, and I really fancied some fish and chips, so I went in.
Well, £8 fucking 25p for a large cod and chips and a tin of coke, well, ok, what the fuck, I’m here now, fuck it, there are two new servers up front, both gormless, and then the woman comes from out back, sends one of the staff across to the pub for change, and starts serving, and being as rude as fuck to people, like she was doing them a fucking favour serving them… it wasn’t even directed at me but I was thinking about saying fuck this shit give me my money back, next thing I know she is serving my order, I’m tired and hungry and she isn’t actually rude to me, just not pleasant, so fuck it I take it and go.
Now starts the commentary.
I used to eat everything but the paper, I left all the bottom batter, it wa inedible and hard, the fish was chewy and had lost its flavour, it wasn’t flaky and delicious and hot, it had obviously been sat in the hot shelf for an hour, and I ate about a third of the chips, they were also not fresh and basically fucking rubbish, in short it was one of the worst fish and chip meals I have had, ever… plus it was eight fucking pounds twenty five fucking pence.
The shop is the same, the equipment is the same, cod is still cod, spuds are still chips, the only constant is the woman, the only change is sarah and then the old guy went, and then staff started changing every time you went in.
For all I know sarah could have won the lottery and gone to australia, and the old guy could have died, I have no idea, I have no idea if the woman is suffering at the hands of fate and that has made her the way she is now, but my money is the woman is the problem, and always was, and now it’s a dog and pony show with a different dog every week, and so everything is down to the pony who is in charge.
I know I said before to myself don’t go back, but that was when it was just a case of the fish and chips were good, just not as good as they used to be, but had gotten bloody expensive….now, you couldn’t fucking pay me to go back, so farewell, adieu and good riddance P**** fish and chips.
Now the actual reasons why this chippie went to shit are somewhat unknown, I know what it looks like, but I do not have facts and forensic evidence at my disposal, just observation, so I could be wrong.
I do not think I am, I think what probably happened was one day the woman pissed sarah off enough she quit, then eventually the old guy said fuck it too, or who knows they could have been married and she divorced his ass and kicked him out, I dunno, I was just a customer, but when both sarah and the old man were gone, it just started to swirl around the pan on the way out, and I fully expect to see it closed or under new ownership within the year if todays “meal” is anything to go by.
For those who may think this is just old AfOR knocking da wimminz again, think again, sarah was the front man for the whole operation, a fat very plain girl, but incredibly good at her job, and very pleasant and jolly to deal with, and a fucking credit and gold standard to anyone as an employee and customer facing person etc etc.
Hell for a year there there were two muslim sisters who served who were head and shoulders above anyone else apart from sarah.
The old guy I never knew, some of the older local boys used to shout to him now and again…
Notably it used to be queued out the door with older customers and families buying up 6 portions of everything for an evening meal, lately it’s more and more younger people buying 1 portion or 2, and I think a lot of them are like me now, passing trade.
So to me observing all the facts and history, my conclusion is this woman was always the fucking squeaky wheel, it was just hidden in the past by the competence and ability of everyone else, and now her own shit is shining though, she can’t keep staff, she can’t keep customers, and she can’t keep only fresh made literally just out of the fryer fish and chips for sale, and there is a vicious circle going on with all that and her attitude.
Which all makes a nice counterpoint to me standing in the drizzle a couple of hours before that 100 miles away shovelling sodden clay into a grave.
Sadly, and disappointingly for my readers, you vicious bastards, “the deceased” had 4 legs, was going on 11 years old, and had cancer, so the owner did the right thing in ending the suffering, but the wrong thing in paying a fucking vet seventy five fucking quid to do it, for a shot of pentobarbital…
Now as you all know I pride myself on being a callous bastard, and in this case in particular this creature was not what I would call a dog in the first place, it was more of a rat, but it was a living creature for all that, so while it was not to my taste, I bore it no ill will
To be clear there are exceptions, I actively dislike cats, I do not see the point in them, but even there I would not be one to torture them to death or make them suffer, but they do make a good case for the .22 long rifle round IMHO.
But callous bastard aside, if you have 2 kids and 2 dogs and they are all around 10 years old then you’re talking about 4 family members, and I’m a little torn on the choice of which ones you would rather have die on you, and I do not feel any disdain or smirk when I hear of some guy (for it is usually guys) who lose the dog they have had since a puppy and get all broken up… I still very fondly remember my last dog but one, he was born 37 years ago now, and my last dog (stolen by the ex and then I have no clue what became of him, I believe he was sold on) was born 17 years ago, so I’m not quite as callous as I make out, even if I cannot clearly remember the actual loss of our first dog, who was poisoned by the chinese when I was 4 (the chinese don’t really like dogs, and tin thieves really don’t like dogs that bark) I do sort of vaguely remember this big camel coated beast that never seemed to be too busy to play with me.
So tonight I witness the owner, who is barely keeping things together, and it’s drizzling and slippery wet clay and all, so I say you go in, I’ll fill the hole in, and yes, I’ll do a little headstone for them, and some time later I wash my shoes off as best I can and go in for a coffee prior to leaving, and what do I see?
I see some kids who have basically only ever known this dog, the eldest would have been two when the dog came into the house as a puppy, the youngest came into a house where there was already a puppy, and none of them give a flying fuck, either about the lost “family member”, or the obviously broken up parental unit, one is off playing some shit on the playstation, one is talking to her little bitch mates on facetime, and one is stuffing her face with crisps and shit playing on a phone, me me me me me me me me me, not a single fucking bone of shred of empathy or compassion in any of them.
They are all modern little 21 century robots devoid of empathy and emotion and integrity, and as such at a stroke they went from being “my mate’s kids” who I’d look out for a do things for and generally act like an uncle to, to being how I see them now, fucking worthless meat puppets… I’m going to, in shades of avoiding the aforementioned chip shop, going to have to make a point of only ever visiting that mate when the worthless little cunts are at school.
It’s 4 o’clock in the morning, and the whole experience troubled me enough I woke up after 4 hours sleep and have no desire to go back to sleep.
Now, for all I care the male children can turn into junkie thieves and the female children can turn into pre teen whores and skanks, and frankly they all deserve every last bit of shit coming their way, why should anyone else treat them with dignity or respect of empathy, ever.
Sure it’s easy to sit there and say getting on for 60 years of memories and rose tinted glasses and all that shit, your memory ain’t that good, and it is easy to sit there are say hey, cut the kids some slack, they may be hurting internally and just don’t know how to show it.
But I was there, and I cannot conceive of any other child in my experience not being absolutely heartbroken when a family pet they have literally known all their life dies, hell I remember kids who mourned the loss of hamsters and goldfish and shit, and none of those hold a fucking candle to a dog.
The bond between human and dog is special, and when I see what I saw today, which is some kids who are more interested in facetiming their fucking skanky friends and playing the games console while “uncle buck” is outside in the drizzle burying the family dog and the parental unit is sat in the kitchen trying to hold it together, then at a stroke those kids are no longer human to me.
Fuck em.
I’d put em down myself but their parent is my mate, so I had to draw the line at telling them their kids are worthless little fucks, so mourn that dog real good and remember them real well, because it was the only one of the bunch worth a damn… and never forget this day or their attitude.
Typically in fiction, and it doesn’t matter much what genre nowadays, there is some sort of vehicle that makes the whole story possible, whether that vehicle is magic or interstellar travel or vampirism/immortality or whatever, it’s core to the whole thing, and if you ridicule the notion of magic for example someone will ask you what the fuck did you expect, when you picked up a book called the wizard and the unicorn, so why did you pick up the book???
Well, I suppose I was just seeing what it was like…
But in fact this notion of a vehicle of some sort upon which everything rests is not confined to fiction books…
“You can always trust a policeman” was one such vehicle when I was a young boy.. to be fair, it was a far more substantial and roadworthy vehicle back then, but today, well, it’s over there between the wizard and unicorn book, and the vampire and mermaid book, right where it belongs.
And like those genres of fiction, once the vehicle is broken to you, the whole genre is unreadable, and becomes something utterly different to what it might have been before… eg a bunch of tripe for escapist losers who have had a frontal lobotomy.
If any one asked me today my advice would be “Never trust a policeman”, sure, there may be some good ones out there, but there are shelves and shelves of tripe that even a putative good one would have to inhabit, so that begs the question, why would an idealist or someone of firm principles *stay* in the force, even if they joined in a moment of weakness?
The world of finance has its own vehicle, currently it’s mainly a Keynesian jalopy, but the same things holds true, once you lose patience with the vehicle, you lose patience with everyone who doesn’t.
Here then, is a dose of economic and financial and business reality.
Yesterday, Monday the 18th September, I took delivery of my new fibre galvo laser, which I ordered and paid cash for 6 weeks ago, and in between it was being built.
Hilariously today I realised that the 18th of September three years ago was the day I went and collected my first CO2 plotter, which is just about to get a new set of optics and PSU and tube, not bad for three years of use with zero downtime.
So anyway, on the business side of things I have been telling people for a few weeks about the new machine, and the business website has a mention, but it was all a bit vague, it will be here when it is here stuff, because there is nothing worse than breaking promises.
So friday last I get an enquiry, so monday I pop over and pick up a sample, so this morning I run the sample through the new machine, so this afternoon I drop it off, and they like it, a lot, and the price, and everything else.
I do not have a degree in economics or management or any of that stuff, but I have more than a passing familiarity with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Keynesian economics and so on, and NONE OF IT even remotely addresses the paragraph above.
The paragraph above stands alone and separate from the entirely of business and management and economic theory (managers and economists will all lie and say it does not, then fail to show you how such a process is actually described in detail in their theories) and yet it is both a true and valid example of a business and economic event, one that *many* small businesses can relate to.
So where does it leave us?
Well business and economics just got put on the shelf alongside honest cops and wizards and mermaids and unicorns.
I got no time for it, and I got no time for people who do got time for it.
And as you go through life, you find more and more vehicles, the justice system, the democratic system, the monetary system, and on and on and on, and they all have the same shady wonky old jalopies as the economic system.
This then is the real problem with “big data” and mining said data, 5 thousand, 10 thousand, 50 thousand anecdotes like mine above all go into the big data pile, and then you come along and mine it… and… you don’t get the answers you were looking for.
So, either the data is wrong or the mining algorithm is wrong, there simply are not any other possibilities, because only a virgin can ride a unicorn after all…
Only an unbeliever can say listen, 99% of the data is dreck, but there are some pearls amongst the swine shit, so there is no point looking for a ham sandwich with mustard… and in shades of a chatbot that turns into a white power misogynist nazi racist, all by itself, they are having the same problems with elemental AI or smart systems, it all starts out great but you either get a system that sits there fingering its own asshole, or you get a system that starts calling people dindu niggerz, and there is fuck all in between.
None of this AI shit is doing what it is “supposed” to do, which is mining through tonnes of pig shit and coming up with ham sandwiches with mustard… it doesn’t make sense, because lots of people eat fucking ham sandwiches with mustard, so they must be out there somewhere.
Nor can I tell *you* how to do this shit, I can tell you how I arrived at this place and time, but boy let me tell you there was never a master plan, I’m no more suprised that I am here than someone who has walked 5,000 miles, one step at a time, because all those steps followed on from the previous one, and the future is unknown territory, but looking back ain’t…
But what I can tell *you* is that one approach that works when it comes to taking that one step at a time, is making sure that there are plenty of shelves full of dreck that you ignore as avidly as you ignore everyone who reads it and believes it.
The road less travelled.
I’ve talked before about the dangers of wimminz with big hoopy earrings, asymmetrical hair styles, red / pink / multicoloured hair, skanky tats (there is no other kind) and so on, and there are parallels to that.
Do you really want to use some of your limited time on this planet listening to someone who owns an apple device, or the latest and greatest note8, or who drives an EV, or any other of a screed of other things? It is a valid question.
YouTube suffers the same fate, it’s a monoculture on any and every subject you care to name, and even if that wasn’t bad enough, 99% of it is flat out wrong… I’ll give you a real world example.
Guy asked me for some advice yesterday, he is looking to build and get into his own little CNC milling centre, desktop / hobby style.
Back when I was in IT I’d tell people they had everything bass ackward, 1 buy the software you need, 2 buy the operating system to run the software, 3 buy the hardware to run 1 & 2, and you’ll be a happy camper.
Told this guy the same thing, FIRST buy your cutting tools, your ball and end mills, from there you will know chip load, from there you will know material removal rates vs rpm, from there you will be able to specify your spindle and the loads on it, and from there you can specify your gantry and steppers / servos whatever, and from there your control systems.
There is no method more wrong than going out and buying the first thing that sounds good, you’ll end up with something that isn’t rigid enough to be any use, or isn’t accurate enough to be any use, or isn’t powerful enough to be any use, or doesn’t do the material you want to do… gua-ron-fucking-teed… but be my guest, go out and piss your money away.
Then maybe you can make a shill review video saying how fucking good your piece of junk is, without ever actually showing a video of it doing what you claim it can do, in detail.
AvE had a nice video recently about a kickstarter laser engraver, gordon gecko arduino style galvo and software to make up for the lack of an f-theta lens (any beam steered by a galvo, as opposed to a plotter mechanism, has to deal with a varying distance between the laser source and the work, simple pythagoras, and the *only* way to maintain focus is a very very expensive f-theta lens… ) you can’t fucking focus a diode in software, unless its kickstarter.
What was *terribly* depressing for me was all the comments from so called laser experts who allegedly use lasers in anger every day.
Not one cunt said hang on just a fucking minute, 800 mW in an exposed beam is a Class IV laser device, and there isn’t a Class V, so it’s at the most dangerous level already, because anything that can literally blind you for life before your blink reflex can kick in in 0.025 seconds is Class IV… so EVERY cunt within 100 yards or so should be wearing suitable protective goggles (pets and livestock too)
Not cheap, that is what I was told by someone who had just spent £250 on fancy designer spectacles from Specsavers, so they bought some goggles for 35 bucks on ebay…
MINE have a fucking certificate of conformance, his do not, so they aren’t the same thing, and, more vehicles ahoy, you have to wonder at the fucking mentality, 250 quid on designer frames, 150 quid for pukka protection is too much, so 35 bucks later you can end up blind for life… or worse still, blinding some other cunt.
NOBODY in ANY youtube video of a fibre galvo or arduino cnc laser engraver is wearing suitable protective gear.
I can tell you right away that as little as 20 watts of focused fibre laser power hitting metal creates a point of intense light that rivals and electric arc in intensity.
I was a marine engineer in a previous life so I ***KNOW*** what heavy IR and UV radiation from an arc feels like on my skin, I can tell you for a fact that 20 watts of focused fibre laser on metal makes a very easily noticeable similar effect on the skin of my hands etc, and even behind expensive certified correct wavelength OD 8 (0.000001% transmittance) I still avoid exposure, look away, use my hand to shield, don’t have reflective shit around, and only relax when the fucking solid covers are down.
I always had the same attitude to guns, every fucking gun is loaded, and never ever ever put your finger anywhere near the trigger unless you intend to shoot … something our UK armed po-po could do with learning…
Playing the stock market is the same, sure, it’s not a bullet that can kill you in an instant, or a beam of radiation that can blind you in an instant, but it can wipe you out and put you on the street or in debt for life in an instant.
It’s just another vehicle.
I have just been informed by a mate that his barely teen daughter is turning into a crazy slut before his eyes, it’s already game over, she is already unfuckable even years before she is theoretically fuckable, another vehicle consigned to the scrapheap, along with the wizards and vampires and honest po-po and economists and managers and data miners and a hell of a lot else…
So I’m sat here playing with a new high tech toy, in this case a fibre galvo laser, and I’m surrounded by people who tell me I must be so excited, all the months of planning, all the research, all the money.
Do they think I just bought my first Harley after years of riding Honda Cubs or something.
Like all high tech engineering kit, it’s not just download a picture from the internet and hit “print” and send it to the colour laser printer in the corner, you’re given a great deal of control over all kinds of settings such as beam speed, focal point, beam power, beam frequency, what patterns you use for hatching, what angles they are at, how often to repeat a pass, and that means to get any kind of useful results you have to know and juggle all those things, and it goes out the window when the material changes, and you start again.
I don’t have an issue with this because I expect it, I have an issue when people who see me for the first time on my new harley and call me a fucking poser, because they don’t see the decades or riding around on a Honda Cub saving up 5 quid a week for the Harley, to give an analogy, they have no concept of what went in before.
They have no concept of the relief I feel that I got it all sorted and got it all done and got it all here and own it all 100% outright before any financial shenanigans in the world at large moved the goalposts on me.
I’m reminded of the scenario where the layman reads a contract, shrugs, and says that all seems fine to me, but his lawyer friend screams in amazement, how the fuck could you think this is fine, you could drive a truck through this clause, and look at this clause, it’s crazy, only a fool would consider signing this.
The lawyer then has contempt for the layman, because he can’t understand how the layman can not see this shit, despite the fact that this shit was created by lawyers.
It’s the same shit in the world at large, the western world is run by lawyers and bankers and politicians, an inbred bunch at best, whereas modern china is run by engineers and scientists, and nobody running the west has any idea what they means… at best they think they can continue their tricks, and by golly, sooner or later those damn chinese are going to have to lawyer up and level the playing field.
Meanwhile the chinese are holding a length of engineered 1.5″ aluminium bar in their hands, looking at the lawyers with pens in theirs, and saying bring it on bitch.
The pen depends on so much other infrastructure to have any significance at all, and it is parasitic on all of them, and once you start taking any of them away, the pen is just a pen.
I’n the finest traditions of Karl Marx, I literally own my own means of production, so I do not really care what the pens in the cities say about business leasing and business loan accounts and so on, it doesn’t affect me.
it’s like being back in the day with firearms or internal combustion vehicles when they first came out, if you wanted one, all you had to do was save up to buy one, and then master it.. there was no concept of being licenced to own one or use it or anything else.
I’m sure it will change eventually, these things usually do, but that change is 10 or 20 years away and people like me will be grandfathered in, because people like me will already have been doing it for 20 years…
The only reason it has not happened yet is because a few years ago you’d have spent US$250,000 to even approach a machine that can do what mine can do today, so it didn’t matter, because the only people who *could* buy such shit were rogue eccentric millionaires and large corporations, and the rules have always been different for them.
Now it’s coming down, and like 3d printing, the day will come when 3d printing sintered metal parts is something you can do in your garage or the spare room at home, and the difference between you and the big boys will be production speed and the elegance of the software.
When you can 3d print in metal an entire copyrighted engine or weapon or mechanism part by part, then you’ll get the licencing and legislation and control, for now it’s pre free for all, because for now that shit is still just over the horizon… for now…
One of the problems I have with the vast majority of sci-fi is there is fuck all even remotely related to science in it, and I do not *just* mean spacecraft performing aerodynamic maneouvers in a vacuum, that is the fucking least of it.
Sure, there is much we do not know, and can barely dream about, but one thing is absolutely guaranteed to be a fucking fact, any race capable of interstellar travel will have an energy budget that dwarfs every nation on the planet in 2017 put together, just as the USA in the 60’s with the Apollo programme, the energy expenditure to go to the moon and back was more than most (as in the majority) other nations on the planet at that time could do.
Having arrived at the alien planet, all sorts of shit then goes wrong, and suddenly the arriving spacemen have craft and equipment relegated to the status of an RV and maybe an APC or two, that’s it.
The civilisation level power generation and technology just disappeared up the writers ass so they could tell a story.
I’m kind of OK with that, but the story itself and the writing has to be fucking excellent, and it rarely is…. yes it’s an interstellar civ but planetside there are food riots, it’s a basic foxes and rabbits life simulation but you make the rabbits breed like rabbits, and immortal… so it ain’t a foxes and rabbits simulation any more, no matter how often you claim it is so.
The energy budgets required for interstellar travel mean that interstellar trade is a non starter, it does not matter what it costs in energy and time to make it locally, it is going to be cheaper and faster than any possible interstellar option, unless you again have some magical solar system with no elements anywhere with an atomic mass greater that 8, and why would you go there, when spectral lines in stars will tell you if there is anything heavier than iron to be had.
Data is a different matter, it may be the case that interstellar sneakernet has more bandwidth than interstellar laser comms, but again said data isn’t going to be the latest replicator designs for the latest flying car.
land anything 1000 tons or more on the victim planet complete with an intact fusion power plant, an intact set of data plans, and even a couple of basic replicator / assemblers, and a handful or work robots, and you have the basis for a colony, and there will be fuck all the local inhabitants can do about it.
because another staple of modern sci fi is the space marines, well, half of them are fucking dykes, but they all suffer some sort of ammo shortage or ballistic penetration shortage, so that the erstwhile alien rabbits can overcome them by sheer weight of numbers.
Fusion power + masers will kill anything biological in line of sight, and shift to RF and it works in ground penetration too, because all life is chemical and the most energetic chemical reactions possible don’t stand a chance when pitted against a fusion pile in a battle of wills.
Yes, it is entirely possible that some small proportion of the crew that lands will come unstuck and get injured or killed by something, but the majority that remain will just sterilise everything for 100 km around.
Which brings us to the next staple, the unexpected flood / volcano / storm / etc.
So these guys complete an interstellar voyage, go into orbit around the target planet, take a day or three to produce satellite maps accurate to a few CM and ground radar and IR and everything else, and suddenly they get surprised by some topological mystery, don’t fucking think so..
The laws of physics in the alien solar system are going to be exactly the same as the laws of physics in their home solar system, and they are arriving with civilisation level energy budgets and tech.
The only time it gets interesting is when one interstellar race arrives in a solar system already inhabited by another alien race, now you have two lots of people each of whom has an energy budget and capability to drop rocks on the planet until it turns into a snowball.
And since they are both interstellar races there is no element that can only be gotten on the planet, so they do not need it for anything except a colony, they do not need it to survive.
So now you have the possibility of interstellar war, but again, it won’t be like anything in any of the books, it will be slow and protracted and at best a an expanding stern chase outwards through star systems, like bacteria growing outwards in a ring in a petri dish.
Nor do I go for the SF that has humans millions of years into the future that are unaltered from humans today, I reckon 10,000 years is enough to produce enough changes that todays humans will be seen as cavemen, and as sexually attractive to boot.
nor do I go for the SF that has robot overlords trying to wipe out their progenitors, rogue AI and mechs wiping the galaxy of nasty biologicals, it doesn’t make any kind of logical sense.
it doesn’t make any sense because it defies fundamental principles like physical laws and entropy, either these are universal and reign supreme or they do not, and they do, which means that at least here on earth, because that is all we can observe, all life is based on DNA and therefore all life must play within the rules and sandbox that DNA imposes, ergo DNA is king, not homo sapiens.
Even a homo sapien that can manipulate DNA still cannot change the fundamental workings of DNA, so you probably could breed a human being with the eyes of an eagle and the blood of a crocodile, but they might well end up dying of cancer by the age of 10, or be unable to eat grain, or be unable to tolerate sub zero climates, because DNA still makes the rules.
It’s exactly the same as engineers being unable to make a copper rocket nozzle, it doesn’t matter how good you are at engineering, you can’t change the fundamental principles, and doped silicon wafers are NOT an example of an exception, they are an example of proof, but we are still limited to the basic building block set of elements.
Ah yes, impervium armour for our spaceships and space marines, don’t fucking think so.
Sure, there are advances to me made, and many of them, so maybe when we can engineer materials at the nano scale so you can actually wrap a polymer inside a carbon nanotube of significant physical length you get amazing new shit, but chances are a splash of flourine and it will still disintegrate…
In the year 3576 on planet zork, acetylene (H – 1 bond – C – 3 bonds – C – 1 bond – H) will still burn energetically when the energy in those 3 carbon-carbon bonds are released in the presence of oxygen.
Ain’t gonna change.
Nano goop has the same fucking problems, where does the fucking energy come from, and where does it go… even if you can nano assemble and dissemble and repair shit, you are either going to do it so slowly in makes a 2017 3d printer look fucking fast, or it is going to look like a nuclear pile and you’ll get a suntan 10 feet away, you sure as shit won’t be injecting it into a space marine to heal them, or to create a cup of earl grey.
the star trek replicator ALONE renders every single other thing about the enterprise pointless, for it to work as advertised and not either take 10,000 years to make one cup of tea, or turn into a 20 giagton explosion, you need absolute real time mass <> energy conversion, and if you have that you make room temperature gigawatt fusion look like a warm patch of piss on the ground.
just replicate and lob a kilo of neutronium at 10 km/sec at anything you want to utterly destroy, and make sure you are a *long* way away from the target, far from being space marine starship armour, it would make, quite literally, the most powerful nuclear explosion possible, anywhere in the universe.
You could sit in the oort cloud and literally destroy a star and therefore an entire solar system… just start pumping neutronium nuggets inwards, it’s only a matter of time.
