A Lot Can Change Between 9:00 and 9:01

I am parodying a San Francisco Examiner slogan from the 1980s.  On news.google.com the NBC News headline announced "Judge Orders Detained Columbia Student... Released."

Click on the link and it becomes: "Judge permits Trump administration to deport Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil"

At Least He Was Not Traumatized

4/10/25 Gothamist:

"A man found dead on the R train early Wednesday morning was robbed by a female passenger — and later sexually violated and robbed again by a male passenger, police said."

I keep hoping to see the stats on how frequently this happens. 

Kangaroo Market Continues

Bounce, bounce,  bounce!  It would be interesting to know how many of yesterday's sellers are today's buyers.   If they are the same,  we are seeing day traders not expressions of mistrust. 

If this is unclear to you, let me explain.  In the 1990s, I worked for a company called DSC, which bought a startup for which I worked called Optilink.  I started plotting the market motions of our stock.  Along with a generally rising price which made our Employee Stock Purchase Plan a major source of wealth, there a short-term oscillation that a friend described as a drunken sine wave.  At the time, there many programmed trades.  A while would buy 100,000 shares at say, $30/share and sell it the following day for $32/share.  $200,000 gain more than covered the transaction costs. 

I started doing the same.  Of course, 100,000 shares was out of my range, but even 1000 shares was.  The transaction costs and a 40% marginal income rate meant that it was profitable but not enough to justify the risks involved.   When our stock crossed above $45/share, I stopped. 

This was not insider trading.  I had no special knowledge of what our company as a whole was doing.  This was strictly being a minnow following the whales.  (Bad metaphor; suggest better?)

Panic in the Ivory Tower

Idaho S1198 is a DEI ban bill primarily aimed an discrimination in training, employment, promotion, and classroom indoctrination.  It has a list of naughty words and phrases which will be familiar to you:

What is causing the panic?  Classes in some departments use some of these phrases and concepts as a fundamental part of the curriculum.  While some are, or should be, offensive to thinkers of any discipline ("white fragility," "internalized racism) others have some merit as concepts such as intersectionality: individuals are more than just one group identity.  Ms. A is not just black or female: she has multiple characteristics.  You know things that all together make her her an individual.  (Now that is a scary thought in some fields: individuals, not member of a group.  This might require some explication in a classroom.)  This discussion of intersectionality from Vox makes the point that conservative opposition to it is not based on the validity of the original theory but its use:

"In my conversations with right-wing critics of intersectionality, I’ve found that what upsets them isn’t the theory itself. Indeed, they largely agree that it accurately describes the way people from different backgrounds encounter the world. The lived experiences — and experiences of discrimination — of a black woman will be different from those of a white woman, or a black man, for example. They object to its implications, uses, and, most importantly, its consequences, what some conservatives view as the upending of racial and cultural hierarchies to create a new one."

This is always a problem.  Abstract theories (such as the Marxian emphasis on economics as a driver of history) may be fine in themselves if tempered with other possible causes.  How those abstract theories are implemented can means millions worked and frozen to death.  It is hard to ignore how that theory is implemented when writing laws.

But the bill specifically exempts from these provisions: an "academic course offered for credit and not otherwise subject to subsection (2)(f). [which requires students to enroll in DEI-related courses].  It is not clear to me that that instruction in academic courses is impacted by this language.  It is a complex and at times unclear bill (Idaho legislators are not prone to clear language).

I am going to write Gov. Otter and suggest a signing statement such as presidents have used for some decades to express an understanding that this law does not apply to classes in which discussions of diversity are incidental to the primary focus of the class.

Dying With COVID Not of COVID

7/17/23 New York Times:

"Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

"The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions."

This was a complaint made by medical examiners in some places, that people who died in motorcycle crashes were listed as COVID dead because they were positive for the virus.

HD 12K Channel on YouTube

Fortunately my TV only goes to 4K or I would end up in the Maldives and never get back out.

There Was Probably a More Efficient Way to Do This

But convergent sequence of a hexagon shrinking by mill radius until hexagon height less than mill radius seems to do the job.

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -lt 8 ]];
   then echo "$0 xstart ystart zstart zstep zend xyfeed zfeed height millradius"
   exit 2;
fi
cat prolog.nc >hexagon.nc
xstart=$1
ystart=$2
zstart=$3
zstep=$4
zend=$5
xyfeed=$6
zfeed=$7
height=$8
millradius=$9
xend=`echo "$xstart+$height" | bc -l`
while [ "$(bc <<< "$height > $millradius")" == 1 ];
do
    xstart=`echo "$xstart+$millradius/2.0" | bc -l`
    height=`echo "$height-$millradius/2.0" | bc -l`
        if [ "$(bc <<< "$height > $millradius")" == 1 ];
    then
    mkhexagon $xstart $ystart $zstart $zstep $zend $xyfeed $zfeed $height $millradius
    fi
done
cat epilog.nc >>hexagon.nc

And there is an increasingly excited sound it makes as the cuts get shorter and shorter.  Writing scripts instead of C always sounds faster than it is.  Bash scripts are never as simple as they should be and are far harder to debug than a C program where you have tools like gdb.

I may need to cut slightly larger to get the hex nuts to slide in more easily. 

DOGE Surveys Unemployment Insurance Claims

They found tens of thousands of people over 115, people between 1 and 5, and people not yet born received benefits.

Now, some this might be mistyped dates, not fraud,  but why does the system not bounce these and ask for corrections?

5/22/20 WAMU reported that Washington State experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in unemployment insurance fraud during the COVID disaster.

Do you see why protesters hate Musk?

Some Carry-On Mistakes Almost Make Sense

Like a Swiss Army knife.   I lost one thst I thought was okay in a carry-on.  But a flash-bang grenade?  4/9/25 WTAE:

"PITTSBURGH —

A federal grand jury indicted a man who officials said was found with a flashbang grenade in his luggage as he passed through the security checkpoint at Pittsburgh International Airport last year."

Watch Inflation Become A Good Thing

4/10/25 CBS News:

"The Consumer Price Index in March rose 2.4% on an annual basis, showing progress in the Federal Reserve's battle to bring down inflation to a 2% rate. 

"By the numbers

"The CPI was forecast to rise 2.6% last month, according to economists polled by financial data firm FactSet. The CPI, a basket of goods and services typically bought by consumers, tracks the change in those prices over time. 

"March's report comes after inflation rose 2.8% on an annual basis in February. 

"On a monthly basis, prices actually fell 0.1% in March, the first monthly drop in nearly five years."

Later in the article is a discussion of the prospect of inflation as higher tariffs raise prices.  

"Because tariffs are paid by U.S. importers like Walmart when they accept shipments of foreign goods, they typically pass off all or some of the tariff cost onto consumers through higher prices."

Why "all or some"?  If other suppliers, such as in the U.S. or other nations subject to lower tariffs, manage to come up with competitive prices, retailers may not be able to pass the suddenly dramatically higher prices of Chinese goods.  

Rgular readers will recall my pleasure when I replaced a broken PRC drill press vise with a far better made Taiwanese one for roughly twice the price.

If doubling the price of poorly made PRC drill press vises makes them price competitive with far better made Taiwanese products (and who knows, maybe American products) there may be little or no price pressure on consumers.   There might just be a pile of PRC drill press vises remaindered at a price that makes W-M and Harbor Freight rethink China as a source. 

Today's Bash Question

This should not be this hard. I want to do a while loop on the condition "$xstart  < $xend"

while [ "$xstart < $xend" ]

do

...

done

I know that to do a float compare, I need something like 

echo "$xstart > $xend" | bc -l 

returning a boolean.

Found it:

    while [ "$(bc <<< "$xstart < $xend")" == 1 ];

Kangaroo Market

DJIA up 6.5%.  NASDAQ up 7.5%.  S&P up 7.71%.  I suspect it was not equity markets that caused Trump to pause tariff war, but 10-year Treasury yields now up to 4.396%.  This was not the goal.

UPDATE: The rally survived noon.  NASDAQ gained 12%.  DJIA gained 7.8%.  S&P 500 gained 9.5%.  I hope reassuring the PANICans was not the primary push for the sudden delay in higher tariffs. 

70 Nations and Counting

The White House reports 70 nation's requesting tariff negotiations.  (I am not sure if they are counting the EU as one, but my guess is thst they are counting each member as one.)

Unsurprisingly,  after last week's Wall Street bloodbath, yesterday was not a disaster and today is looking quite good.  The Dow 30 and S&P 500 up about 3%.  I suspect when this all sorts out. I will be a $100K wealthier than the start.  My mutual funds likely bought on the fall.

I confess thst I find Trump’s way of doing things quite unnerving.  He relies on brinkmanship for trade negotiations.  If thst word is unfamiliar to you:

"Brinkmanship is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. The maneuver of pushing a situation with the opponent to the brink succeeds by forcing the opponent to back down and make concessions rather than risk engaging in a conflict that would no longer be beneficial to either side,"

If that sounds like JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it should.  We went nose to nose with the Soviet Union and Kruschev blinked.  This was a scary time.  We reached DEFCON 2.  I doubt Ukraine will be like that,  but Taiwan may well reach that point.

UPDATE: As my wife observed, this is a message to Iran.  "I am prepared to destroy the world economy and our own for American jobs.  What will I do to get you to abandon nuclear weapons?"

UPDATE 2: The market recovery did not last although it is not falling dramatically.

UPDATE 3: Trump announces direct negotiations with Iran.

Faster Than the CT5

Yesterday,  my son-in-law's brother let me drive his slightly pre-owned Rivian R1S.  It is an all-electric three row AWD SUV.  Their website says 0-60 in 2.6 seconds and I completely believe it.  It is up pretty high so it probably does not outcorner the CT5 but it is still pretty impressive.   (Because electrics have a huge battery load low to the ground, their center of gravity is quite low, allowing for better cornering than you would expect from a 7000 pound SUV.)

It is luxurious and priced accordingly.   "Starting at $75,900."  I suspect the monster I drove was well above that.  I do not regret buying the CT5. I just hope the day is reached when chargers are so widespread and fast that buying something like this makes sense.

Bash Script for Machining Hexagons

 I rewrote this to be clearer.

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -lt 8 ]];
   then echo "$0 xstart ystart zstart zstep zend xyfeed zfeed height millradius"
   exit 2;
fi
cat prolog.nc >hexagon.nc
xstart=$1
ystart=$2
zstart=$3
zstep=$4
zend=$5
xyfeed=$6
zfeed=$7
height=$8
millradius=$9
halfheight=`echo "$height/2" | bc -l`
x1=`echo "$xstart+$millradius" | bc -l`
y1=`echo "$ystart+$millradius" |bc -l`
sqrt3div2=`echo "($height * .866)/2" | bc -l`
x2=$x1
y2=`echo "$ystart+$height-$millradius" | bc -l`
x3=`echo "$x2+(.5*$height)-$millradius" | bc -l`
y3=`echo "$y2+$sqrt3div2-$millradius" | bc -l`
x4=`echo "$x2+$height-$millradius" | bc -l`
y4=`echo "$y2-$millradius" | bc -l`
x5=$x4
y5=$y1
x6=$x3
y6=`echo "$y1-$sqrt3div2+$millradius" | bc -l`
cat prolog.nc >hexagon.nc
echo "g1 z1 f25" >>hexagon.nc
echo "g1 z.1 f25" >>hexagon.nc
for z in $(seq $zstart $zstep $zend)
do
    echo "(point 1)" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 x$x1 y$y1 f$xyfeed" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 z$z f$zfeed" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "(point 2)" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 x$x2 y$y2 f$xyfeed" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "(point 3)" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 x$x3 y$y3 f$xyfeed" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "(point 4)" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 x$x4 y$y4 f$xyfeed" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "(point 5)" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 x$x5 y$y5 f$xyfeed" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "(point 6)" >>hexagon.nc
    echo "g1 x$x6 y$y6 f$xyfeed" >>hexagon.nc
done
echo "g1 z1 f25" >>hexagon.nc
cat epilog.nc >>hexagon.nc

It only cuts the outline right now.  I need a hole for hex nuts to slide into, not an outline.  The next step is to write a wrapper that cuts the outline, then a series of progressively smaller hexagons inside it.  You may recall the Larry Niven story "Converging Series" with Satan continuously forced to reappear inside a pentagram drawn on his abdomen.  That is the idea, except I am not trying to avoid loss of my soul.

I Keep Saying That I Will Stop Talking About the CT5's Features. .

But I keep getting pleasant surprises. 

I was backing up in a parking lot and a pedestrian stepped suddenly into the proximity range.  The Automatic Emergency Rear Braking System stopped my car quite abruptly.   Unlike the Adaptive Cruise Control which subtly at first reduces speed, then subtly applies brakes,  this was immediate and unmistakable.  No wonder the insurance on this is so amazingly low.

The 410 page owner's manual arrived.   This should be standard,  not the silly quick start guide (which I know is all most buyers will read).  My wife opened the envelope and said,  "War and Peace for your Cadillac."

Yes, there are gobs of unobvious features.  Passive locking.  Leave the car with your remote and at one meter it automatically locks the car. 

Double click unlock button on fob, hold it three seconds and all the windows roll down. Reverse lock button twice plus three seconds rolls everything up.  (The manual makes no mention of the sunroof.  I guess I will try that later.)  UPDATE: no.  Disappointed.   The Jaguar did the sunroof as well.

.

Go to the trunk with fob within a meter and it illuminates the ground with the Cadillac logo.  Move your foot under the light and the trunk opens itself. 

Under Power Windows: "The windows may be temporarily disabled if they are used repeatedly within a short time."  This is I believe the "Bratty kids left in the car" feature.

Brutal Tariff Policies Cause Change

4/7/25 Politico.eu:

"BRUSSELS — The EU has offered the United States a “zero-for-zero” tariff scheme, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Monday, seeking to avoid a tit-for-tat trade war."

How Did I Miss This?

3/12/25 New York Times:

"Inflation eased more than expected in February, a welcome sign for the Federal Reserve as it grapples with the prospect of higher prices and slower growth as a result of President Trump’s trade war.

"The Consumer Price Index was up 2.8 percent from a year earlier, after rising another 0.2 percent on a monthly basis. That was a step down from January’s surprisingly large 0.5 percent increase and came in below economists’ expectation."

Tariffs on Penguins

4/3/25 NPR discusses how Trump's tariff schedule includes many places with whom we have no trade,  often because they are only inhabited by penguins. 

This is unsurprising.   The tariffs are calculated by a formula based on balance of payments.   Spreadsheet.   Copy and paste country code list.  Lookup balance of payments data with LOOKUP function.  Add a formula to column C to calculate tariff.  No balance of payments imbalance?  Automatic 10%.

He is not angry at penguins. 

Making Slow Motion Control Brackets From Carbon Fiber Composite

This has turned out to be more difficult than I thought, at least using the dimensions I used for Delrin.  The strategy I used for Delrin needed two Delrin sheets 3/8" thick, one of which is tapped.  The CFC strategy requires through holes with hex nuts on the far side.  This extends the vertical part until it runs into the motor mount.  I cannot reduce the thickness of the vertical part much because I need to make tapped holes about .16" ID in the other dimension. 

Another strategy is to use 1/4" thick CFC with hex nuts epoxyed into hex holes.  (I still need to make an example to veridy that i can do this.  Thanks to all who helped me with the math to write a program that cuts hexagons.) This reduces interference with the motor mount.  A 1/4" thick CFC sheet weighs slightly less than Delrin (1.6 g/cc vs. 1.4 g/cc).  It is also cheaper than 3/8" thick CFC.

This strategy also removes one interface block that requires machining to dimension and through holes.

I started out planning to make this thing almost entirely of 3/8" thick CFC sheet.  This stuff is so stiff and the loads are so low that I can use 1/8" sheet for many parts.  This reduces cost and weight.  Some parts still need to be 1/2" thick to hold the hex nuts for blind hole threading.

It Was Not All Biden's Fault

4/5/25 Associated Press:

"SAN DIEGO (AP) — Two U.S. border inspectors in Southern California have been charged with taking thousands of dollars in bribes to allow people to enter the country through the nation’s busiest port of entry without showing documents, prosecutors said."

One is facing money laundrying charges as well.  They were caught when smugglers ratted them out.

This Was So Absurd That I Looked Up the Law

California has passed a law that has different fines for speeding depending on your income level. 4/4/25 FrontPage says it is racial in purpose.  Why? Are rich people more of a hazard than poor people? The text of the law tells you why income is the defining rule for different fines:

(d) However, traditional enforcement methods have had a well-documented disparate impact on communities of color, and implicit or explicit racial bias in police traffic stops puts drivers of color at risk.

Yes, because they cannot say, "Blacks and Hispanics should have lesser fines than white people," they are using income as a proxy for race.  If 1948 Alabama had assessed higher fines on sharecroppers for late library book returns, there was no way this would have been tolerated by the federal courts.  

There are days that I think occupation and military government is the only solution to the ferocious racism of California government.

If speeding is a safety hazard, California is going to increase traffic accident death rates for blacks and Hispanics, as well as the people who are their neighbors-- who are disproportionately black and Hispanic.

This is astonishingly close to the Alabama Constitution (1901) provision that disqualified voters based on convictions for "moral turpitude" which disproportionately disqualified blacks.  One difference: the Alabama Constitutional Convention had the good sense not to say why.  It did not survive Hunter v. Underwood (1985).

Interesting Speculation on Trump's Tariff Strategy

I saw an interesting speculation as to what Trump's seemingly ferocious tariff strategy really seeks.  Imminent recession reduces demand, causing current stock market fall.  Falling stock market drives up bond prices which are a safe haven when the stock market is weak.  Rising prices drive down interest rates.   Falling interest rates goose the economy. 

We apparently have $9 trillion in Treasury bonds coming due for redemption, which means we need to sell another $9 trillion in Treasury bonds to cover that.  If we refinance that debt at 4%, we will pay $360 billion a year in interest.   If he can get 10 year Treasury yield down to 3.5%, we pay $315 billion a year in interest.   $45 billion a year less is a big win for reducing future debt.

Look carefully at those numbers and ask yourself,  "How did we get into this mess?  How extreme do the solutions need to be?"

Here is a history of Treasury bonds. Worrisome, when you see how we went from 7 year bonds to 30 year bonds, and surprisingly recently. 

Here is a 53 year history of 10-year Treasury bond yields.   The low point was when COVID hit in 2020.  I see no way to get there below 2%.  Notice the dramatic drop in yields during the recession at the start of the Reagan presidency.  (The gray stripes are recessions.)

More Backup Drives

 Because Windows 11 cannot automatically backup from any drive but C, I have two 1TB USB drivers that backup every night at 2:00 using XCOPY commands.  Because I am considering changing my 1 TB SSD from drive C to drive D, and the 2 TB SSD from drive D to drive C, I wanted a way to do a full system backup.  I bought a 4 TB external hard drive, which does a system backup with surprising speed.

Is DOJ's Review of Second Amendment Impact on Laws Resl?

You probably know thst one of Trump's Executive Orders directed the Department of Justice to review laws and regulations and if they contradict the Second Amendment.   Some think this is just a sop to gun owners.  A friend is part of the task force working with an Assistant Attorney General on fixing these problems. 

Criminal Prosecution Referrals by DOGE

 

They are finding SS numbers used by non-citizens to get benefits and to vote.  They are making criminal referrals.

TikTok Door Kick Challenge

 I saw a notice from Meridian PD but this seems to be widespread.

Kicking in a door will get you killed.  That the kids have no violent intent does not matter.  Most states presume that forced entry creates a presumption that the intruder intends great bodily harm.  This justifies use of deadly force.  If you know a teen who watches TikTok, inform them of this.

Non Sequitur. What Am I Missing?

Article about a zoning decision involving lithium batteries to be used as a backstop for loss of Green energy after sunset:

"In 2008, a Boise State professor died and numerous homes in the area were destroyed after a fire ripped through the neighborhood. The fire was later said to be caused by an Idaho Power equipment failure, high winds, and a tree that hit a power line."

When I die, I hope it causes neighborhood's to burn?

Top Secret!

Val Kilmer passed.  His debut film, Top Secret! remains a reminder of what a skilled comic actor he was, and what skilled filmmakers Abraham's, Zucker, ans Abraham's were.  The opening sequence with the song Skeet Surfin' is so utterly unexpected.

After watching it again,  I realized that if you are under 50, many of the cultural references and movies may be incomprehensible gags: The Blue Lagoon, exploding Pintos, Casablanca, all World War Ii movies, the East German Women's Olympic Team (which were fiercely hormonal abused men, or severely roided up women).

If Monty Python Added This Scene to a Movie...

From a discussion of thr Battle of Lepanto (1571):

"Even after the battle had clearly turned against the Turks, groups of Janissaries still kept fighting with all they had. It is said that at some point the Janissaries ran out of weapons and started throwing oranges and lemons at their Christian adversaries, leading to awkward scenes of laughter among the general misery of battle."

Cutting Big Pieces

The Sherline vertical mill is so tiny that people with big boy mills sometimes call it a jeweler's mill.  The Y-axis has about four inches of travel.  Trying to cut stock approaching that dimension in Y is often a struggle because the mill vise will contact the column at the far end of travel.  The trick is also to get the cut line far enough off the position of the column that the mill vise goes to either side of the column.  

In addition, the mill vise back jaw is so deep that the quill needs to be quite some distance from the column.  The Sherline allows you to stack spacer blocks between quill and column to solve this.  It is not an elegant solution and I suspect Sherline would cringe at seeing this.