Trump tariff letters: A full list of countries and proposed rates so far : NPR
75 days from now is September 23rd is last day for wearing contact lens ð
Truth is I can’t wait until I don’t have to deal with those nasty pieces of plastic that I put in my eyes every day, sometimes to great irritation and struggle. I learned today in my 25 or 30 years of wearing contacts I have scratch in my right cornea from touching my eye on and off, though it’s far enough to the side that it won’t impact the procedure.
They want roughly $4.2k for a 10 minute procedure on the machine on afternoon of Friday September 26th. Nice work if you can get it I guess. Got to pay for the swanky office and the liability insurance. But it means never having to deal with contact lens or corrective lens again in my life, so it’s a good investment in my future. Contact lens get more and more expensive every year, more plastic and cardboard garbage, and the aluminum backs that have to be pulled off for recycling. And supposed yearly visits which I don’t do. With LASIK it’s just the free to me ordinary eye check up every two years with my vision insurance.
I could get in as soon as next week, but I am putting off get the surgery until summer is done. For one it gives me time to move money and maybe seek a higher credit card limit, as they don’t have a cash discount and I wouldn’t mind getting cashback on that. I also want to use up as many of my remaining contact lens I paid good money for before the celebratory bonfire. But mostly because for a month after LASIK surgery you aren’t allowed go swimming, which by September doesn’t matter. And it’s also a week of no bike riding.
How woke became my favorite adjective
“I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I’m glad that the Commies were thrown out
Of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
And I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
As long as they don’t move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
“The people of old mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can’t understand how their minds work
What’s the matter don’t they watch les crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, i’m a liberal”
– Phil Ochs, Love Me I’m a Liberal
Woke seems to be my new favorite term for anything that somebody dreamed up as a progressive vision as making life better for people, even though it’s just a thought and the actual action behind it is at best neutral, if not harmful the people it applies to. Woke is about meaningless policies, while well intentioned and sometimes quite expensive don’t actually help people.
Describing something woke doesn’t mean government shouldn’t be helping people, but it does mean that government should be making sure it’s actions actually help the people it intends to help. There should be more pragmatism and policies should come out of communities that it intends to help.
I can’t see clearly now ð
I rode my bike 10 miles to work after getting my eyes dilated at the eye doctor early this morning. I didn’t hit anything, though I might have caused some elderly men to duck off the bike path when I careening towards them as I barely saw them in blur and did not hit city parks truck parked in the shade on the bike trail.
I mean it had to be safer then driving, right?
Stress at work… What you need is BetterHelp! ðĪŠ
That’s what that podcast advertisers kept repeating to me on the Ezra Klein podcast as I listened to it after waking up in the heat around 4 am last night. How predictive of the day to come. The e-book I’m reading, the Sucessful Backyard Farmer is nearly as annoying, every other page the narrator says, “The Sucessful Backyard Farmer”. Good info but I now know the title of your book for the next thousand years just like the web ads for Chinese Jack-off battery boxes.
It was just one of those days, â° and I keep waking up at 3 AM. Things are so messed up in our country. I know I shouldn’t take politics perfectly or be a victim to the buffoons in government, but I don’t want to end up paying a lot more for everything, ðĩ having more industrial pollution ð and fewer public services. I like paying less in taxes so I can invest more in my future, but the latest tax plan doesn’t actually save me money. And things have just gotten so mean and nasty. Even city buses and city just seem dirtier and crazier then they once were. ðĪŠ
The Pine Bush meeting last night was good, ðē I participated via Zoom from the back part of the Town Park. I wanted to get to Five Rivers but I didn’t get there until fairly late because I was a bit late getting out of the office, the road was blocked by a train ð and then I was trying to find my insurance card. ðģ Never found it but I’ll order one when I get back in the office this afternoon and can scan or fax it to them. Not sure how much my insurance will cover for elective procedure, so that’s why I hadn’t bothered to get one. Need to run some more data analysis and do a write up for Save the Pine Bush’s comments on the Guilderland Compressive Plan.
Apparently I was pushing too hard for hybrid work from home at work ðĄ and I got told that they wouldn’t give me the network access staff needs to do it. Big bummer, I was looking forward to occasionally working from camp, though truth is that kind of sucks as you’re still working plus then your dealing with batteries, hotspot data, etc. ðĨïļ One of the staff people ordered a laptop, but then I was told we couldn’t get VPN access for them right away, and we need for work access. The whole situation sucks. It seems like lately I’ve been pushing for a lot of changes on various database and improvement on things that seem outdated and regularly get rebuffed. It just seems silly with the power of computers not to do things electronically and automated as much as possible. Scripting, even old fashioned bash scripts are so powerful. ðū Why do people insist on doing things manually? I know so many people either view me as the irreverent millennial youngen, or that egotistical R programmer which we all know isn’t a real programming language like C or Python, even if it’s awesome for manipulating moderate-sized datasets and cranking out nicely formatted Excel spreadsheets of data. ð§Ū
Landlord is reinstalling gutters and planning a new work program for my building this summer. ðĒ I’m like oh great. I really don’t want my rent to go up but I do concede things are pretty shabby both inside and out on my building, with it’s asbestos tile siding, lack of gutters and with my neighbor’s unit an outside light after they removed the old one. My neighbor who pays $400 more a month for his renovated unit, has very much been on the landlord about deficiencies. The only repair I asked for was replacing that nasty old refrigerator after it died. More pressures on the budget. Plus I know I’ll have to replace Big Red next year, and I see market growth slowing. And I’m dropping probably $5,000 or so on my eyes ð before the end of the year.
So my LASIK Consultation is in about an hour. ð I thought it was just going to be a quick in and out, you know, a quick DMV like checking your vision, do you have any questions, kid here’s your sales brochure, and call us back when you decide you’re ready for the big snip. But after talking to receptionist yesterday afternoon – between everything else hellish going on in the office – the dialog quickly went to we will need your vision insurance card ðģ , oh by the way, wear sunglasses and your probably don’t want to drive ð because we are dilating your pupils. Not a fifteen minutes appointment – actually more like 60-90 minutes! And when again do you want to schedule your big snip of your eyes? Next week? OMG! I just was planning to call to schedule a consultation sometime after vacation in August and not get the big snip until later in the year. I guess if it’s a sale, worth more then $100 it’s worthwhile to get the big snip even before I run low on contacts. Or maybe they’ll just say, sorry kid your eyes are bad, no LASIK for you, your sentenced to another 40 years of contacts and glasses. Plus every month I delay is one less left in my life, one less to enjoy the benefits of good vision without those stupid pieces of plastic in my eyes or glasses on my face.
I so hate wearing glasses. ð But alas that’s what I’m wearing today. The receptionist said no wearing contacts for at least 12 hours if not longer before the exam. Going to ride my bike over to the LASIK dealer ðē which isn’t going to be fun at rush hour with the round abouts and the road construction, ð ð ð ðē but I don’t feel safe driving after getting my eyes dilated. Then I’ll catch the bus downtown and ride over to the office. ðĒ I so wanted to work remote today, but that has pretty much been put out to pasture with what went down yesterday. ð I just pushed too hard, probably could have gotten away with it had I not been asking around to get staff access to the systems remotely. It’s frustrating to have my screwed myself that way. ðĪ
Saturday now looks wetter and wetter, â like so many Saturdays so I’m not sure if Schoharie is still on the agenda. ð I do want to get out to Mine Kill Pool at least once this summer and float in the Schoharie Creek by Towpath Mountain and get farm produce at Max Shauls ð― though I know it’s still too early for sweet corn. Maybe I’ll just end up going to Thacher Park. Then maybe next weekend I’ll do Schoharie as the following week is summer vacation ðïļ – I still need to take those days off but I want to keep an eye on the forecast and long range before I commit to a week of rain. ð§ïļ
Ending of the woke solar subsidies âïļ
Maybe it was time for the weaning ring and weening solar off of the big subsidies that seemed so necessary not that long ago but now seem less necessary as technology has matured and prices have come down. Children need training wheels to learn how to ride a bike. Calves need their mothers milk for the first few months of life before they can digest grain and hay. Assistance is sometimes essential at the start but becomes less important as time marches on.
The end of the solar tax credit will inevitably slow the roll out of solar power. But often those credits were abused by businesses and used to sell overpriced loans and poorly planned and implemented solar electric systems that have a much shorter lifespan than advertised. It’s not that technology is bad or that we should be moving away from solar – but instead ti should become mainstream without government subsidy. You build a house, it includes solar. You renovate a house, you add solar. Not because of government incentives but because it’s the right thing to do and will save you money in the long run.
Truth is solar needs to mature and not just be a subsidized and financialized government-endorsed scheme. Solar systems – even grid tied systems – should include storage and not rely on there always being excess demand in the grid that every non-solar homeowner is picking up. Net metering has in many cases become a scam – financial companies are using bill credits to subsidize abusive financial products. I’m glad the solar scam is coming to an end. Let’s force solar to transition into a solid technology that supports the grid and reduces carbon emissions and not a government endorsed way of scamming the financially unsophisticated.