General

Have you read the Constitution? Do you know what it says?

The fourth article reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of our youth to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

That isn’t what you read?

This is from an image in the Library of Congress. It is a reproduction of the original Bill of Rights, as proposed. Articles 3 through 12 became the first 10 amendments to our Constitution.

For many young people, it might as well be 一個受到良好管制嘅民兵，對自由國家嘅安全係必要嘅, 人民持有同攜帶武器嘅權利唔會受到侵犯。 It is just noise to me. I’m sure that somebody can translate it back to English, but it will lose something in the translation.

There are many people that can no longer read cursive. It is not taught in most schools. The purpose of cursive was to increase the speed that you could write. My son’s legal signature is block letters.

It falls in the same category as counting change. Try this experiment, buy something, then pay in cash, but hand them change to make it a nice return. If the bill is 7.12, hand them 12.12 and watch them try to refuse the extra $2.12.

If you force them, they will be surprised when the cash register tells them to return a $5.00 bill.

I talked about the educational industry replacing words. Pupils became students became learners.

Everybody gets a participation award.

Today, everything is digitized. Photos can be manipulated/faked. Videos can be made by AI from a prompt. People have lost the ability to think critically.

My wife has difficulty in assigning value to different sources. Add to that, her ability to pick up a scary phrase from the talking head and not know the context means that she has difficulty discerning what is likely true, and what is likely not.

Tina Fey said, “I can see Russia from my house.” and today, most people attribute it to Sarah Palin. And if you point out their air, they can tell you that they have heard and seen Sarah say it.

We are on the cusp of losing our history. Words change meaning to fit the wants of those defining it.

It is hateful to speak the truth. So don’t speak it. Nobody else is saying these things, you must be wrong.

Every one in the MSM is saying it, it must be true.

The Supreme Court said this about that. Oh, have you read the opinion? What, it wasn’t an opinion? What was it? Oh, it was an administrative stay.

Did you read the bill? No? Then you don’t know what it says or means.

And, as one lawyer put it, we don’t know what a law means until the courts tell us.

NAZI used to mean a particularly nasty form of socialism. Today it either means a particularly nasty form of socialism, or it means somebody the left doesn’t like.

I just want a win that lasts for more then 24 hours.

I am NOT a good source of information about the HPA. I’m not even sure the “A” stands for “Act”.

That said, repeating what I’ve read and heard from people I respect and follow:

The HPA removes suppressors from the NFA. This means they are no longer regulated under the NFA. No tax stamps, no registering them, no “extended” background check. No need for chief law enforcement permission. That is all gone.

The GCA would still consider them firearms and require a 4473 to purchase them.

This means purchasing a suppressor becomes just as easy as picking up another Glock or Sig.

State laws might (will) vary.

If the Senate were to pull the HPA or there are not enough votes, then the HPA can go away, but there is still an amendment to reduce the cost of registering from $200 to $0.

All the rest of the bullshit remains, but that $200 savings isn’t something to stick your nose up at.

I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I can start experimenting with cans. Of course, there is a boat load to learn about making a suppressor, I’m not sure how a booster works.

I admit that I have horrible organizational skills. I use different tools to account for that lack.

I love me some Kanban and it looks so pretty when I start. And then it gets left behind.

Git allows me to make cheap commits. It allows cheap branches.

The development model should be “Create Issue. Create a branch to match issue. Work the issue on the branch. Resolve issue on branch. Merge master to issue branch. Resolve conflicts. Merge the issue branch back to master and delete the issue branch.”

I have a branch which was “Add MD5 to images”. By the time I was ready to commit, I had almost 40 files that had been modified. I spent about an hour making commits. Moving to different branches to get the changes into the right branches.

Once that was done, my workflows kicked the commit because of issues. Four hours to create typing stubs and to lint the added code. Painful.

Why? Because I got the md5 done but was in the middle of using the new code, then a higher priority issue popped which got its branch but which …

About once every two weeks, I have to spend a day organizing to get things back to reasonable.

I love working at the Fort at No 4. The current director is wonderful. She is also in over her head and struggling to get everything done that needs to be done.

This leads to her moving from most important to next most important until there is no organization, no completion.

Yet, she keeps it all going. I don’t know how she does it.

Today we had a longish meeting to go over Use Cases for the new website.

For me, use cases are formalized brainstorming. Every use case is written as

“As {Actor} I {Want|Need} {something}”

The something needs to be well-defined, and it must be a single thing. You don’t write, As a web visitor, I want to be able to read the EULA and the Privacy Statement.

That is two different use cases.

As we were working our way though one section of use cases, she told me that the process of writing use cases for the website was helping her to organize her job as the director.

Which is an extra benefit.

I’m a bit tired right now. I stayed up way too late Tuesday Night, 0300 late. I’m in the making good progress, fighting my way through the tangled web of code.

Today will be an even better day.

Now all I need to do is find time to read some more court documents, without taking my blood pressure through the roof.

Update

The world is ending because the United States is imposing tariffs on other countries. This will cause the economy to crash.

Amazon was going to put up a “this product cost you $x in tariffs” to drive home just how evil tariffs are.

That is not what happens.

Let’s consider a tool I purchased recently. It cost me $45, it was made in China.

According to Amazon, since there is a 145% tariff on China, that means that $18.37 of that price is me paying a tariff.

This is garbage. Not true. There is no way to know what I am paying in tariffs because that is decided by the vendor.

To understand tariffs, we need to understand the difference between cost and price.

Let’s assume I’m buying lots of widgets from a vendor in Canada. According to the US government, there is a 145% tariff on those goods coming into the US.

Using the Amazon system, if we would see this particular item on Amazon for around $0.99 with $0.59 of that being “tariffs”.

This particular widget cost $0.58 cents. This is the amount the Chinese seller gets per unit. It costs $0.01 to get it shipped over to Canada.

This puts the total cost to the vendor at $0.59. This includes any tariffs imposed by Canada or export costs imposed by China.

The customer is buying these widgets from the vendor for $0.80/unit.

Using the Amazon model, this would mean that the tariffs would be $0.47/unit. If this were the case, the vendor would make negative $0.12 per unit. This is not viable. Something else must be happening.

There is something else happening. That is, that the vendor first sells the widget at cost to himself in the United States.

This means that he is paying a tariff on his cost of the item. Which is $0.58 with a tariff of $0.85. This makes the breakeven point on this product $1.44

The vendor and the customer have negotiated how much each will pay of the tariff. They agree to split the tariff 50/50.

This means that the breakeven point is now $1.02, meaning that the vendor loses $0.22/unit. The cost to the customer is now $0.80 + $0.43 = $1.23.

The customer will lose $0.24 per unit sold on Amazon instead of the $0.19 he was making before the tariffs.

The reality is that this widget is listed on Amazon. The price is $2.83/unit.

The Canadian vendor is not going to eat any of the tariff costs, that will be passed on to the customer.

The customer’s cost will go from $0.80 to $1.66.

Your price will go from $2.83 to what?

It will likely stay at $2.83. Why?

Because if they could sell the product at $3.83 they would already be selling it at $3.83. It is that simple.

Will it go up a little? Maybe. What if it went up enough to cover the entire cost of the tariffs? That would take it to $3.69/unit. That is still a much smaller percentage than what Amazon and the media would have you believe.

Which brings us to reality, once again. The price of this item will probably go to $3.33 per unit. A cost increase of $0.50/unit.

This is the complexity of tariffs, much of the pricing calculations are done well outside the view of the final user.

At every stage, the price of the good is set at the maximum that the market will tolerate. If that means that profits go down, profits will go down. If profits go down too much, then that seller will go out of business.

This has been a tradition at our house for the last 12+ years. I was roped into doing the Easter Egg Hunt for my kids.

Easter Sunday, my wife tells me she’s going to be gone with the kids to church for a period of time, I’m to make an Easter egg hunt for the kids before they get home.

I did. Then played dumb when they came in asking about the eggs they could see. I think that was the year of the jelly bean rabbet poop.

Things became more elaborate over time. Once I remember clearly was the Easter where there was still snow on the ground. I used a sliding pitch to place eggs in places with no footprints. That cemented the belief that it was the Easter Bunny and not dad hiding the eggs.

By the time they were teens, the hunt had become something more. The first big hunt was about 100 eggs in the forest behind the house. This is not a “search to find eggs”, this is a challenge to find the next egg.

Each egg is carefully placed to be visible from the last egg found. Lose the track, you’ve lost the remaining eggs. In general, the eggs were placed in easy to see locations, IFF you were standing where the last egg was found.

Last year, there was a swarm of 9 teenagers on the hunt. My son bought a handful of cheap orange cones, to be able to mark found eggs so they could go back.

This hunt was different, there were written clues with either compass direction, distance, or both. This meant that they might not be able to see the next egg from the current egg.

Of course, they beat that. They used swarm tactics. The 9 of them just moved out in all directions, searching for the next egg.

3 hours to plant the eggs, 1.5 hours for them to complete the search.

Tonight I’m sore. I walked about 3 miles placing eggs. Then another mile or two while helping them get back on track. It took them over four hours to finish the hunt. And that was with a rescue from dad.

It appears that they lost the track, they attempted a swarm, picked up a part of the tail of the track, cleared those eggs, recovered the forward track.

What this meant was that when they got near the end, there were no eggs in sight to follow because they had already picked up those eggs.

From the egg count, they missed around 8 of the 100+ that were placed. There were a total of 201 eggs in the hunt.

10 went to a littles hunt for the 4yo across the street. The next 100 to 150 were hidden in the forest.

To give some idea, we located three eggs from last year when placing eggs this year.

The kids had another failure, I had placed 10 eggs on the ground, carefully laid out in an arrow pointing in the direction they needed to go. They got to the “cluster of eggs” and just picked them up.

The arrow was there because the next egg was not visible from the location of the arrow. Plus, that direction had a heavy thicket full of fallen trees. They should have had somebody maintain that point and sent others around the obstacle until they were in the right location.

I had fun, I’m sore, my legs hurt. I’m already planning next year.

Oh, I received permission to place booby-traps next year. This will be fun.

I noticed that we don’t see Garcia’s face clearly.  All the images are from the side.

There are some perspective issues when they are shaking hands.

Finally, they went from, “No, you can’t see him.” With the Senator getting stopped by the military 2 miles from the prison, to sitting and having drinks in a nice location.

This looks faked to me.  If not the images themselves, then in the setup.

Just a short follow up. In one day the portfolio I am following recovered about 530%.

That is to say, the reported loss over the last 6 days has gone from 3.58% yesterday to 0.19% today.

Just stay the course and things will get better.

If you are invested in the market, don’t panic. As CBMTTek pointed out, February 2024 the S&P 500 was doing just fine, at the same level. The media wasn’t screaming about the economy tanking.

He’s correct. The amount of panic the media projects is tempered by which party is in control.

A 0.001% drop in the market when Trump does something is cause to panic, which causes the sheep to sell, causing the market to drop. A 1.000% drop in the market when a Dem is in office creates a cricket like ambiance. And saying anything makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Trump has put multiple tariffs into place. These tariffs cause changes in supply chains and in the costs to produce certain goods.

Every product produced requires raw goods, tooling, work space, and skills to create.

Consider a simple BLT. The raw goods are bacon, bacon, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bread, mayo. Having all of those raw goods does not a BLT make.

You have to have the correct tooling. The tooling here is a way of cooking the bacon, such as a grill top, cutting tomatoes, cutting bread, spreading the mayo.

Once the sandwich is produced, it has to be packaged for delivery. That requires still more raw goods.

When you sell that sandwich, you include the cost of the raw materials that go into it, you include the cost of the packaging, you include the cost of the tools, the building you used, and you include the cost of labor. You then need to include the cost the government imposes on you.

The cost of your raw goods includes the price you pay for the goods, the cost the government imposes on those goods, such as tariffs and VAT, and the cost of transporting the raw goods to your location.

Once you have all those costs, you add profit to come up with the price you will charge your customers.

Now, let’s change the product, instead of creating a sandwich, you are creating a gear. Your raw goods are iron and pattern making materials. You will use your tools to convert pattern making materials into patterns. You will then use those patterns to cast gear blanks. You will then turn those gear blanks into finished gears by applying different tools.

You have converted raw materials, with knowledge, skill and labor, into a finished product, a gear.

That gear is sold at a price which is profitable to you. That gear is likely a raw material for some other business.

Tariffs add to the cost of anything imported into a country that imposes imports. Imports are decided on the origin country or the country of manufacture.

Consider a car that is manufactured in Detroit. If that car includes raw materials that are imported from other countries, those materials that have tariffs applied will cost more.

There are no “complexities” to this. The “PANIC!” people want you to think there are, that’s not true. Every business keeps track of the cost of raw materials. If they don’t know the costs, they can’t set prices. It doesn’t matter if Ford, Canada produces the part or Ford, Flynt creates the part. There is a cost that is paid to have that part in the Ford, Detroit plant to put into a new car.

In a well-functioning business, they are always looking at the cost of raw materials. The cost of raw materials includes the cost of taxes (tariffs) and transportation.

It also includes the cost of bad materials. If you are paying a $1.00 for a widget and there is a 10% failure rate, that means you are paying $1.10 for each working part. If somebody else has the same widget with a cost (price + extra costs) of $1.05 and a failure rate of 0.1% that means they are only scrapping 1 in 1000 widgets.

In this case, it is actually cheaper to buy the “more expensive” widget.

Included in the cost calculations are longer-term issues. If the ball bearings you purchase are not properly heat treated, and you assemble them into a high-precision roller bearing which then fails in a million dollar engine, there is a heck of a lot more costs involved.

We know that people will change their purchasing habits when the cost of needed goods goes up. We saw this when Americans switched from steak to ground beef as their primary meat. Look at the CPI for food, you’ll see that in the past it had steak on it, today it has ground beef.

Because the cost of goods goes up, people will look for better prices. If that search leads to a local business, so much the better.

Unfortunately, local business might not be set up to cope with a large influx of new business. This leads to shortages.

In a market-driven economy, this leads to people consumers offering more or producers charging more. This is called a “signal”.

Because this signal exists, asking for more of that product, producers will attempt to create more product. This could be as simple as turning on an extra machine or as complex as standing up an entirely new production plant.

When this is going on, “the market” will respond. The market responds by buying or selling ownership in different companies. If a company that used to clear $2,000,000 per year is now projected to clear $4,000,000 per year is likely to attract buyers. A company that is seeing their income drop is likely to attract sellers.

This causes market fluctuations.

Over the course of yesterday, the portfolio that I follow was up as much as 1% yet closed down 0.82% Since Trump announced the tariffs, the portfolio has lost 3.53%

On $100,000 that’s a $3,530 loss.

And it is meaningless. That portfolio will go up again.

The people who are screaming the loudest are the people with millions in the stock market. If that are looking at a $10,000,000 portfolio, a 3.53% drop is $353,000 “loss”. That is more than a 1/4 million dollars in just a few days.

But it only becomes a loss if they sell now. If they hold on to those securities and the price recovers or goes up, then they will “make money”. But again, that is only true if they actually sell the security to realize the profits they made.

There is no reason to panic. The sky is not falling. If anything, this might be a good time to look at putting money into the market. The trick is to buy when near the bottom of the sell-off.

The only reason I know this, is I did some research this last week. I am NOT the person you want to take financial advise from.

There are five rifles on the wall. Four lever action and “Mrs. Pink”, an AR-15 platform with pink furniture. Don’t ask.

They are known as “Bear”, “Deer”, “Raccoon”, “Squirrel”, and “Mrs. Pink.”

Bear is a Henry Big Boy in 45-70. Deer is a Winchester model 94 in 30-30. Squirrel is a Henry Golden Boy in .22LR.

We do have bear around here, and I know that Bear has enough stopping power, with rapid follow-ups.

Deer has taken a couple of deer. She does a fine job with iron sights for me out to around 150 yards.

Squirrel isn’t used for squirrel hunting, but damn he’s fun to shoot.

That leave’s Raccoon. Raccoon is a Rossi R-95 in .357 Magnum. She eats .38 special just fine. She is a little loose where the stock attaches to the receiver, but she will put rounds on target out to 100 yards with no problem.

The lever action in .357 is a nice, mid-weight, rifle. I’ve used it for taken fat raccoon and opossums. One shot and they are down.

She is easy to reload for, and it is easy to police up all the brass. I cast hollow point bullets for her and have some commercial bullets for her as well.

All in all, she is a great rifle.

There is a matching wheel gun in .357 magnum. I don’t have enough time with that revolver. It is more than capable of putting rounds on target, I’m not. It doesn’t shoot like my Sig nor my 1911s.

Would I recommend an R-95 for a first-time gun buyer? No.

They don’t have a great reputation. The loading gate is nasty sharp, it needs a little care to get it to function easily. I found that finding ammo for it was a bit of a pain. With reloading, it is a joy.

Mrs. Pink as a red dot on her. She belongs to my wife. We run the manual of arms every so often, but I figure she has 30 rounds before she needs an assist to load the next magazine. But I know that those 30 rounds are going exactly where she wants them to go.

The iron sights on the four lever guns work fine for me today. I have another 30-30 that has a scope mounted on it. I need to spend a few dollars to replace the scope with something modern and then sight everything in.

All in all, those rifles make up the “go to” when needed now.

The other part of this are the LBV that are available for use. Each vest has 6 30 round mags of 5.56, at least 2 spare mags for the pistol that goes with the LBV, and a first aid kit.

Past Plans

When I was considering buying my first firearms, I was looking at “what happens if…” My thought process was based on the concept of availability of ammo after the fall.

That lead me to an AR-15 in 5.56, an AK type rifle in 7.62×39, a 9mm Glock, a bolt action in 7.62×51, a black powder revolver, and a black powder rifle.

The firearm I have the most fun with, to this day, are the AR’s. They are gentle on the shoulder, the ammo isn’t too expensive, they are easy to carry and are just plain fun.

Though I will note that they eat ammo rapidly. It isn’t an unusual range day when I won’t send 300+ rounds down range.

I still have .308 from the original ammo buy. I’ve augmented it with reloads, but I don’t feed much through that rifle.

Of course, once I started buying firearms, it hasn’t really stopped.

Regardless, as more than one person has said, when the SHTF, the best firearm is the one you have.