"Limited oversight, no competition, and state corruption aren’t a recipe for broadband success."
A $5.7 billion appropriation, while bigger then the USDA and EPA staff appropriations, really is small turkey in the grand scheme of things. Heck, that’s like building two Empire State Plazas at $2.3 billion a piece. Congress allocated $98.5 billion for the Iraq War in 2007, a similarly dubious initiative pushed by President George Bush. in other words, you could with inflation build 20 walls for a year, for the price of one year of the Iraq War.
I am about as skeptical of Trump’s wall as the Bush’s Iraq War. I doubt it will work. Most of the country where they propose to build the wall is pretty remote and formidable to anybody would would try to cross, and people have saws, cutting torches, and can tear down walls. But presidents and politicians more generally have their own stupid predilections, and sometimes it’s better to appease rather then fight.
Like most ambitious projects, we all know most of the wall will never be built, due to a lack of funding and willpower on the behalf of congress. It’s quite possible that it will be decided in years to come that the wall was a stupid waste of time and materials, but being that it’s a steel wall it’s likely to have a lot of valuable scrap metal, that can be melted down for future uses — which will be all the more important to have in reserve as natural resources get used up.
Good evening! Five weeks to Valentines Day ❤️. Nothing out there tonight to warm your heart. It’s as frigid at the heart of the grinch. Still clauwdy with snow showers and 25 degrees in Delmar. ❄ Breezy, ️20 mph breeze from the west-northwest 🌬 .The current wind chill is 11. There is a dusting of snow on the ground. ☃ Kind of another cold evening, and it’s only going to get colder as we head into the weekend. But at least I left the heat turned up a bit at home, so it shouldn’t find it so hard to climb out of the cold. But if necessary, I’ll turn that expensive electric heat on for a few minutes. I am trying to save money wherever I can towards my future and owning land, but I can probably afford a few pennies here and there so I’m not shivering while I’m home.
Things should start to thaw out at Tuesday around noontime. 🌡️ Do you think it will warm up before the federal government reopens? At least the Energy Department is funded so I’ll have things to graph from the Energy Information Agency. Not so much from the Census bureau but at least they weren’t such pissy pants like in 2013 when they took down the website and I camped out in the National Forest.🏕 I guess I can download data or camp in the wilderness without the help of the gubernatorial. Haha. This post is becoming political, kind of like how Facebook thinks I should follow Walton Manure Management.
Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌃, with a low of 12 degrees at 5am. Two degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -2 at 6am; Northwest wind 14 to 17 mph. In 2018, we had mostly clear in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 37 degrees. The record low of -25 occurred back in 1968. Definitely warmer then those days when Judy In Disguise (With Glasses) with playing on the radio every five minutes.👓
Tonight will have a Waxing Crescent Moon 🌒 with 30% illuminated with the moon setting at 9:09 pm. The moon will rise at 10:36 am. The First Quarter Moon is on Sunday night with partly cloudy skies. The Wolf Moon 🌝 is on Sunday, January 20th. The sun will rise at 7:24 am with the first light at 6:52 am, which is 17 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 Tonight will have 14 hours and 41 minutes of darkness, a decrease of one minute and 25 seconds over last night.
Tomorrow will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 18 degrees at 2pm. 12 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -1 at 10am; Northwest wind around 15 mph. Yuck, that’s winter. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies . The high last year was 51 degrees. Not all winters are that unpleasant. The record high of 57 was set in 1975. 8.0 inches of snow fell back in 1922.❄
So I got the SSD Drive but it turns out what I thought was a M.2 SATA slot in my laptop for plugging it into turned out to be the DVD drive’s connector. I was confused because the manual talks about the M.2 SATA connector but it’s only included on select models with the SSD included from the factory. So I ended up ordering a M.2 to SATA-III adapter, and will have to pull out the existing hard drive. 💾 Ducks as that wasn’t the plan but it should work.
I was doing some more research and I found I could order a DVD-drive sized enclosure for the existing hard-drive and replace the DVD drive with the second hard drive, bringing me up to the full 2 GB of space which I was expecting to have when I plugged it in last night. 📀 It’s just one screw to swap the DVD drive on my laptop, not that I’ve used it in a long time.
I was bummed out about it but then I thought about silly that is, especially because I think it was good to go with the M2 form factor with a adapter to be future compatible. 🗜 Mechanical drives are disappearing from computers and so are their drive bays.
I ended up sending $138 on the 1 GB SSD drive with tax which is a good price but it took six weeks to get it. 💰I debated the wisdom of spending the money but it will make my laptop much faster and extend its life. I have lots of memory and a fair amount of disk space but speed of the hard drive has always been sluggish with my laptop even with the lightweight XFCE window manager. I know every buck that I spend on toys is essentially stealing from my future, buying land and an off grid home out of New York but sometimes updating technology helps and I’m running low on disk space.
In the process of searching for the non existent m2 slot I discovered I could easily replace the broken headphone jack by replacing the small ioboard it’s mounted on for about $20 on Ebay, less if I buy used. 🔊 I want to confirm it’s actually that easy to remove but if that proves to be true, I’m going to fix it as I get tired of hauling around the USB external sound card – one of which broke and whose audio quality isn’t as good as the internal audio.
Cool this weekend with temperatures running 7 degrees below normal but otherwise sunny. 😀 Saturday, mostly sunny, with a high near 24. Northwest wind around 7 mph. Sunday, mostly sunny, with a high near 23. Typical average high for the weekend is 30 degrees. It’s going to be nice enough I’m going to try to get out both days, but I think I will have to plan on being well bundled up as most of the weekend will be in the teens or low twenties, with a breeze.
In four weeks on February 7 the sun will be setting at 5:17 pm,🌄 which is 35 minutes and 13 seconds later then tonight. In 2018 on that day, we had snow and temperatures between 27 and 13 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 33 and 16 degrees. The record high of 48 degrees was set back in 2005.
Looking ahead, Valentines Day ❤️ is in 5 weeks, Daylight Savings Time 🌆 is in 2 months, Spring 🌷 is in 10 weeks, Average High is 50 🌸 is in 11 weeks, Average High is 60 🌼 is in 14 weeks, Average High is 70 🐮 is in 18 weeks, Independence Day 🇺🇸 is in 25 weeks and August 🌻 is in 29 weeks.
Lancaster County, PA's famous "Goat Path".
"However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture."