Boomer Greed

 6/7/26 Fortune article title:

‘The golden years are not golden’: Boomers are hoarding most of America’s wealth and power because they’re terrified of outliving their money

The arrogance of that title really steams me even the article quotes a number of Boomers refuting that title in part.

1. "Hoarding": like we are never going to spend it. For the most part, Boomers are not overwhelmingly rich. There are homeless Boomers and many barely making their rent or mortgage payments.  I am not one of them, but I know such. 

2. Power: does he mean we elected Trump? Or that we reliably show up to vote? Zoomers can fix this easily enough.

3 Where is our "hoarded wealth" going after we die? We are not taking it with us. We are going to leave it to our GenX children who Zoomers will again claim are hoarding. Much of my wealth is already spent on meals out and services overwhelmingly provided by younger people. 

4. Houses? Yes we bought houses for $106,000 in the 1980s on wages commensurate with those prices ($45,000 was my salary at the time). We paid interest rates that seem horrifying today. I refinanced a mortgage at 10.5% in 1989. We had a 18.5% car loan. (We had pretty good credit at the time.) Life was not easy back then.

5. We had limited capabilities because of technology. A few years ago, my son asked, "Hiw did you buy houses before the Internet." Slowly and carefully  .

BZoomers need to stop whining or Boomers might buy billion dollar yachts and sink them at sea to deny that wealth to the Zoomers.

More Weirdness From the Combined Minds of My Wife and Me

Canis Ex Machina

It had been 40,000 years since the Great Collapse when our expedition reached HD56689 B. We knew that before the GC our ancestors had seeded B with our distant cousins. Would they still be recognizably human in culture. Other planets we had explored were still physically human with slight variations in size and color (two-meter adults on Rigel F with coal-black skin, one meter adults with interesting and sometimes beautiful primary color skin spotting on HD44449 C). These were startling, but we grew to see them as just interesting variants on the basic human pattern.

What we found too disheartening was civilizational drift. Some had gone cannibal; the sociologists recorded what they found. After losing a few sociologists to the pot, we decided this was a civilization best studied from drones and moved on. Others completely lost technological knowledge; they had reverted to hunter-gatherer societies with no apparent forward progress in 40,000 years to the state from which they had regressed.

HD56689 B was unique. We could see evidence of an advanced civilization: large cities; some strangely narrow, unpaved roads; what seemed to be something like very large bird roosts made of concrete. The population was clearly shrinking. We contacted the small remaining leadership. After a bit of struggle getting the AI Translators working with what seemed (t us) a very primitive language, we pieced together what happened.

Their ancestors separated from the mainstream of human technology by the GC had started insanely breeding the Earth-origin mammals to do the important jobs of machines. The swifferhound had a large fine haired tail. It was very small, about 500 grams. It would climb shelves and use its tail for dusting.

They bred the vacuum shepherd to inhale dirt and dust into outsized lungs, then exhale the contents outside. They had fairly short lifespans because of high lung cancer rates.

They bred a transport elephant with a very broad flat back on which enormous loads could be strapped to the mid-abdominal tusks. (Our biologists suspected some now lost to them gene editing played a part in that one.)

They bred bats to 40 meters long with commensurate wingspans that carried humans on transcontinental journeys from batplane roost to batplane roost. They consumed vast quantities of insects and birds on the way. This limited them to travel on the only settled continent and outlying islands.

Tractordogs operated the only agricultural machinery they had still produced. Combines were operated by their canine pilots through the fields.

It was both unsettling and impressive to see our mighty species operating almost without technology. So why was the civilization dying. Some centuries before, at what they now called Peak Animal Helper, an interspecies virus spread rapidly through all the mammals killing most of them in one generation. While survivors carried a gene for immunity, the generations of careful breeding made the survivors weak and less effective at their functions. As an example, chauffeur dogs sometimes intentionally crashed ground vehicles so that they could devour the occupants.

We tried to explain the concept of machines as less vulnerable helpers and dogs as companions, but I fear the concepts would not stick and future explorers would find empty cities here.

This whole concept was dreamed up by my wife as ww were returning from a star party in Payette. There has to be a better title for this. Maske suggestions! 

Support for Gay Marriage Falling. Why?

Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay journalist has an answer that makes a lot of sense. 6/5/26 Daily Dish:

The New York State legislature recently tackled the vital, pressing issue of whether the terms “mother” and “father” are cruel and oppressive. They concluded that these terms are indeed transphobic and need to be replaced in law by “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” “Paternity” is also bigoted and axed. Among the Democrats, the vote was, natch, a few shy of unanimous. And let’s not kid ourselves: Hochul’s signature is inevitable. On all questions gay and trans, the Dems are now entirely controlled by trans and “queer” extremists....

I suspect the queers are so insulated they don’t even realize that this is what they have been effectively saying to Joe Public for a decade now. Remember when they told you that gay and lesbian people were just like everyone else, and just wanted to be left alone? Scrap that. We’re actually queers who believe marriage is a “fundamentally violent institution” and that the sex binary is a white supremacist fiction. Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate your kids in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and insist that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

Yes. When LGBs pleaded for rhe right to be left alone, there was little argument.  Active and aggressive prosecution of LGB activities in private was out of fashion. Police had more important problems to pursue. When "the love whose name we dare not speak" refused to shut up, it was hard to ignore. 

The genital mutilation of children made a lot of people upset. That LGBs who wanted to be left alone were now automatically assumed to be tied to the T and Q did not help. LGB sex seems positively tame compared to cutting off genitals and breasts.

Star Party in Payette

I hate doing star parties in summer. If it's really not dark until about 10:00. People with much better eyesight could see Venus well enough to aim at it 20-30 minutes before me. Venus is at the gibbous phase right now. Not very interesting. 

Jupiter was more interesting.  Even my Televue-85 was showing multiple cloud bands at 108x. As much as I am frustrated by the inability to control the mount for goto and even somple centering, it tracked very reliably.  Jupiter stayed center of eyepiece even at 108x as long as 30 minutes.  By comparison, Dobsonian owners and one gal with an alt-az mounted Newtonian were busy moving and adjusting every couple minutes.

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The Televue-85 is a very small aperture refractor of exceptional quality. It does not have the resolution of the 8" telescopes but it is dramatically inferior, either. When it was showing two bands, an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain was also showing two bands. The light disadvantage, which is the square of aperture, is not as severe as you might expect because your eye does a pretty good job of compensating for brightness difference. 

The Televue-85 is not the best choice for planetary observing although it id gorgeous on the Moon. It is better suited to deep sky astronomy because its short focal length allows a very wide field of view, well suited to the Pleiades or globular clusters such as M13. My 50mn eyepiece provides a 3 5 degree field.

The great advantage is portability.  It weighs about ten pounds and on the mount it weighs about 20 pounds.  At one point I realized that I might be able get the Sun so I could pick it up and carry it to a better location. 

We had a decent crowd of people out there.

Things That Drive Me Crazy

I ordered a roof rack system from Amazon thst clamps onto the Hyundai's roof bars intended for that purpose.  The left and right attachment mechanisms of course have locks to prevent theft.  The key fits three of the four locks. It will not even insert into the fourth. The logical step would be replace one appropriately keyed, or even all four. No. All Amazon can do is send me a new unit.  Keep the bad one. I may try and figure out to repair that bad lock.

It is hard to believe this is cost effective.

Explore Scientific iEXOS 100-2 Mount

This afternoon, I took it out and looked at the Sun. I must have gotten pretty well polar aligned because it was trqcking very well. Obviously, two star alignment was impossible, but i was able to use LURD (left, up, right, down) buttons to center the Sun in the eyepiece. 

This evening, LURD was completely useless. It is random how ExploreStars app works.

The Declining Importance of the Strsight of Hormuz

No, not a MAGA talking point. 6/4/26 New York Times:

But with every passing day, the world is learning to live without the Gulf’s seaborne exports.

1Just as the Covid-19 pandemic and President Trump’s tariffs forced a significant rewiring of global supply chains, the Strait’s closure has prompted a similar adjustment. You might be part of it. When gas prices rise rapidly, people start to limit their driving. Walmart just reported that customers are now buying less than 10 gallons of gas at a time on average at its filling stations.

The United States, Brazil, Canada, Kazakhstan and Venezuela are already increasing their oil production. Large releases of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are also helping to cover shortfalls. Like a stream that finds its way around a fallen log, markets locate new supplies when the old ones are suddenly cut off.

At some point, the Iranian crazies will get poor enough for their religious objections to evaporate. By then, Iran will be a less important source of oil. And on the bright side, reduced consumption of oil will make the world a better place for Greenies.