Comment Re:BBQ is for cows. (Score 1) 149
In insensitive clod Russia, Fourth of July Tofurkey eats you?
In insensitive clod Russia, Fourth of July Tofurkey eats you?
What has MIT got to do with this?
I spent some time, a lot of it, in the South and Midwest. Kansas and Illinois had some of the best BBQs but I have to give the Pulled Pork Award to either Georgia, Alabama, or Florida. I also lived in North Carolina. Somewhere between GA and NC the secret to BBQ has been lost. Somewhere it became something you could do in your oven or, almost worse in some ways, something you did on top of a disposable open-top grill. Also, it is done in a half hour... *sighs* Louisiana does a good BBQ but they seem inclined to put anything edible on the table. I love me a good BBQ.
Over a summer a few friends and I built two pits plus a shed to house the BBQ equipment and a second Kegerator. It gets pulled out every year on the last weekend of July (our balanced month of Summer's Maniac Middle). We put buried power down to it so the two puts have rotating variable spits. The standard fare is a large smoked turkey, a pig, and a half of a cow. I got a turkey fryer but I have only fried two of them so far, it was not as well liked as I was hoping. I am thinking of smoking a goose and frying another turkey this year. Then again, maybe getting a second (or even a third) smoker is a good idea and I can smoke a turkey and, if the second is large enough, I can smoke two birds and a couple of smaller birds as well. I am thinking a turkey, goose, and a couple of partridge would be nice. I found a recipe for 'honey brined smoked turkey' online and I would like to try it. It reads like it would be very tasty.
I do not drink anymore but I am not the jackass ex-drunk. I have a keg in the Kegerator on the deck, some in my fridge even, and will be picking up another few kegs for the festivities at the end of the month. I do not make beer or wine any more which is, honestly, no real loss as I have never made anything exceptional. Anyhow, I mentioned that so that I could also mention that we are thinking about making a fold-out "bar" to be manned from inside the shed itself. The shed was built with this future in mind so it was built with quite a bit of extra space.
What we are trying to figure out, some sketches have been done, is how to take the "bar" and fold it up for transportation to and from the house. I do not want to leave the alcohol down there as it would be tempting some folks. I generally trust all the people that come here and would know about the bar but I do not trust the people that they may tell about it. There is likely to be a decent investment in booze going on and, frankly, I also do not want to be encouraging anyone who may have control issues. The current, most universal, idea is to make a cover that has 8" deep foam attached to it and is cut to the reverse lines of the shelving. This can then just be put on the front, latched down, and carried back to the house. The expected total number of bottles varies between 25 and 40 count estimates so this would be easily carried by two people. I am, of course, open to suggestions but I am a bit late to the thread to expect much in the way of responses.
Anyhow, this year is the first year that it is going to be a multi-day event. I have encouraged people to come and stay the weekend. Normally a lot of them tent and the house that was here when I built my house is still completely functional so there is no problem there. I have already set up with a company to provide two additional outside toilets and rented sound equipment. We have done a live band before and then left the equipment up for open mic performances. It was not as good as we had hoped. So if anyone has any ideas, specifically about a collapsible bar or any geeky things (I am putting a wireless AP/repeater in when it arrives), then I am all ears/eyeballs.
Hell, it is from July 31st to August 2nd and anyone willing to go north and east of Rangeley is more than welcome. It would be kind of awesome to have a
We are just as bad as the Greeks.
Greece was borrowing money to pay back formerly borrowed money. The U.S. is still borrowing money to do things with it (hopefully productive things). I'm a fiscal conservative, but in the current extremely low interest rate environment, it actually makes sense to borrow a lot of money to get more (productive) things done than you could do without borrowing.
The only thing you have to watch out for is that you don't borrow so much that you find yourself unable to pay it back when interest rates climb. That's the situation Greece found themselves in - as they got deeper into debt, their credit rating declined and it became more expensive for them to borrow money, which resulted in them being unable to pay back what they owed.
Notably, austerity tends to shut down the economy, which will only lead to further financial insolvency.
The fundamental problem here is that Greek pay (in Euros) is disproportionately high compared to their productivity vs other Eurozone nations'. "Austerity" is simply reducing wages to bring that wages-to-productivity ratio back in line with the EU norm. The reforms the EU was asking for addressed the other half of this ratio - increasing average Greek productivity. The growing Greek debt is created by this imbalance - people were being paid more Euros than they were producing via their labor. Greece was covering up this imbalance by borrowing, which is totally the wrong reason to borrow money. You borrow it to purchase things which will help increase your productivity so that you will no longer be running a deficit. You don't borrow it to continue to operate in arrears.
By rejecting austerity and failing to implement reforms, you don't leave many choices. The simplest is to boot Greece off the Euro. Then they can do whatever the hell they want with their economy, pensions, and pay, and it will automatically balance itself out via the Drachma falling in value vs. the Euro. You can either take a 30% pay cut in Euros, or you can switch to the Drachma and the Drachma declines in value 30% vs. the Euro. The end result is the same - "austerity". (Ideally Greece would increase their average productivity by 30% - then wages wouldn't have to drop. But they seem hell bent on refusing to do anything the EU suggests that could improve productivity.)
"Drop the hammer on them."
That's the easy part. The hard part is dealing with what happens after the hammer has been dropped.
Someone once said that the definition of a bad policy is one that leads to a place where you have nothing but bad options. I believe everyone (not just the Greeks) thought back in 2000 it woudl be good policy to bring Greece into the Eurozone. But now we've now reached the point where otherwise rational people are talking about "dropping the hammer", as if having an incipient failed state in Europe is a small price to pay for 600 euro in your pocket. The frustration is understandable, but the the satisfaction of dropping the hammer on Greece would be short-lived -- possibly on the order of weeks depending on the scale of financial disruption.
The unhappy truth is that bad policy choices fifteen years ago means all the options available today lead to long-lived, complicated, and expensive consequences.
That was beautiful. I chuckled in the real world. Lessons learned and, really, no harm done. It was also well written. Even though I suspected the ending it was still enjoyable to read all the way through it. It read like an original BOFH type of story only you did not cause anyone any harm and, well, he would have been making fun of you.
I spent about 32,000 USD upgrading to CD-Rs in ca. 1995. The worst part is that only covered eight of the computers in the office. At the end of the year there was an offering from HP that was under 1,000 USD. By the following summer they were half that. At the end of that year they were half again. Then, not more than a year and a half after that I could find SCSI CD-Rs for near 125 USD. Blank CDs were something like eight bucks when you bought in bulk... My mistake was adopting the tech that early. We were using large data sets (for the time) and the idea was portability. It worked, it *sort of* paid for itself. It would have paid much nicer to wait. I can not say that it lost us money but I can say it sure as hell did not make us any.
I only know of two such instances where this happened or something similar happened. One was only about five years ago and the other was longer - it made the news. Assuming it was the latter then that grocery store chain either begins with an S or a K? I can not recall which one it is but I do recall hearing about a computer mishap that took out warehouse access for a major grocery chain. The more recent one was due to a malware infection that spread across their network (as I recall) and its primary goal had been collecting credit card data but it had spread much further. That one was covered in eWeek and noted, by me, simply due to its proximity to me.
Somewhere on this planet there needs to be a "Greybeard Bar & Grill." Unfortunately, that place would probably end up being somewhere in Silicon Valley.
I hope you capitalized on it by setting it alight and dancing naked around the blaze. It is the only correct thing to do at that point.
I was still pretty poor in the 80s. I owned, for a while, a Dodge Aries K... Yes, the K car. I am not proud. I will admit it. It actually held up okay but, damn, it was nutless and even though it ran it still had so many other things wrong with it that meant the actual fact of the car running was more a detriment than a success story. It was not old either though I was the second owner.
Is that $33k the MSRP price or the price AFTER financing? Also, sorry. I ordered a 640Li. I screwed up your averages. (I did want the i3 but it lacks enough range and the i8 is beautiful but impractical.)
If you can do a whole week's worth of driving on a single tank of gasoline then you can almost certainly do just fine with an EV unless, of course, you are doing all those miles in a single day which may be the case. I do not own an EV. I can not own one realistically. I would if I could. I can afford one. I can not afford the limited range due to my physical proximity to a real town - never mind a true urban center. (It is about 180 miles for me to get to Farmington, ME and back again. In the winter I need heat and in the summer I want AC. I will want other features as well which make an even 200 mile range EV unrealistic for me.)
You do not make the battery owned - make it leased.
IF I HAD A MINE SHAFT, I don't think I would just abandon it. There's got to be a better way. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.