conspiracy – Weary Wretch

The Boston Tea/Alcohol Party

November, 2017

Some will say that I might be just a little prejudiced on this issue, but I think the government is a little on the wrong side here. I’m not saying that I’m an anti-oil company, big government liberal or anything. You be the judge.

I noticed a sign at a gas station on the way to work tonight. Unleaded gasoline was $2.29 per gallon and E-85 was $1.99 per gallon. Of course, we’ve all been through the analysis that the only reason for ethanol to be cheaper than gasoline is government subsidies.

But that’s not the issue.

The quantitative analysis.

E-85 is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. The ethanol is distilled from grain products grown right here in the good ‘ol US of A. So, people who purchase the ethanol pay 30 cents for the gasoline in the mixture and $1.69 for the ethanol. So, if the gallon was pure ethanol, they would be paying $2.34 for a gallon.

Do you see where I’m going with this, yet? No?

Well, let’s look at the cheapest liquor in the US. For Example, McCormick Vodka. At about $36 per gallon, it is 80 proof, or 40% ethanol. It is made from distilled grains grown right here in the good ‘ol US of A, mind you. So, still speaking of the cheap stuff, one pays $90 for one gallon of pure ethanol. I’ll leave it up to the reader to work out the price of higher quality Oban scotch, for instance.

The qualitative analysis.

Our government is subsidizing an industry that takes domestically produced grain and makes fuel so that a small minority of consumers can feel good while a sister industry uses the same grains in the same process to make the same product that a majority of consumers use to feel good.

But for a hugely different price.

This, in my humble opinion, deserves the same actions as the Boston Tea Party.

From your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave. For those interested, it’s all algebra.

The Needy Daughter

I was listening to a report about the Hillary e-mail fiasco the other day. They said that Hillary had provided 30,000 e-mails to the FBI resulting from their subpoena but she reported that 33,000 had been lost or deleted.

Hillary was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. She explained that the lost or deleted e-mails were just personal e-mails about Chelsea’s [then] pending wedding. Chelsea was married on 7/31/2010.

So here we go.

Let’s say that Chelsea and Hillary were e-mailing heavily for the year before the wedding and about 6 months after. That is about 25 months or 43 e-mails a day. Almost 2 per hour, 24 hours a day for over 2 years.

Every day.

Not considering that there must have been a few days in there that either Chelsea or Hillary might have been preoccupied with other things. Being Secretary of State and all.

But this is a very conservative estimate because the Clinton’s were heavy Blackberry users and most of their back-n-forths would have been by voice, voice messages, texts, etc. And some, probably quite a few, days they would have been in each other’s company. If one could conceive that Hillary and Chelsea might e-mail each other while in the same room, maybe that’s a mute point.

Social recluse that I am I just can’t be held as an example, but I get maybe 43 e-mails a year. And have trouble keeping up with that many.

What the multi-tasker Hillary must be.

Running a household of one (Chelsea is off with hubby-to-be and Bill’s off being Bill), e-mailing her daughter (and I presume others) about her upcoming wedding, and running the foreign affairs of one of the largest, most complex countries in the world. And running her own home server to boot.

Your skeptical grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy

https://www.state.gov/secretary/115194.htm

Aluminum Foil and RFIDs

7/2017

RFID, radio frequency identification (or maybe, radio frequency idiot), chips are here and more will come. You think cell phones, wifi, and computers are easy to hack? This makes that kind of hacking seem like child’s play.

If you’ve seen one of the modern movies, like a James Bond flick, where they put this little capsule under his skin, that is a RFID. They aren’t all that large. Or maybe you’ve seen retailers brush your intended purchase across a scanner before you leave a store so that the alarms don’t go off? Some companies put one in the hand of it’s employees so they can automatically log in/out, charge food at the commissary or track their movements.

The RF part means that the chip puts out a radio signal when stimulated by a scanner. It broadcasts whatever information is on the chip.

A simple radio scanner can read and reproduce said information. The scanner can be as small as a cigarette lighter with a remote antenna that is as inconspicuous as a small coil of wire. A small computer (like a raspberry Pi, the size of a pack of gum) can overwrite the information on the chip to what the hacker wants.

RFID chips are everywhere – companies and labs use them as access keys, Prius owners use them to start their cars, and retail giants like Wal-Mart have deployed them as inventory tracking devices. Drug manufacturers like Pfizer rely on chips to track pharmaceuticals. The tags are also about to get a lot more personal: Next-gen US passports and credit cards will contain RFIDs, and the medical industry is exploring the use of implantable chips to manage patients. According to the RFID market analysis firm IDTechEx, the push for digital inventory tracking and personal ID systems will expand the current annual market for RFIDs from $2.7 billion to as much as $26 billion by 2016.”(1)

That was the news 11 years ago.

From your Grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave, wrapping my credit cards in aluminum foil as I lament my Maui experiences.

Weary.

1. The RFID Hacking Underground, Annlee Newitz, 05.01.06, https://www.wired.com/2006/05/rfid-2/

12/19/2020, Edit; The following links are YouTube videos on how easy it is to defeat RFIDs in your credit cards and key fobs. The Lock Picking Lawyer has a video showing that the shielding sleeves are easily defeated.

How to Bypass RFID Badge Readers (w/ Deviant Ollam and Babak Javadi). The Modern Rogue. January 29, 2020. Retrieved 12/17/2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccm1caB6bao
How Hackers Steal Card Info, Just by Standing Nearby. The modern Rogue. March 27, 2020. Retrieved 12/17/2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt2Gn2CoJ74

TSA and the Terrorist

7/2017

I’ll bet you probably could have guessed what the US Transportation Security Administration was intended to do without my giving you this link. (1) And if you are too lazy to read it yourself, I’ll summarize the salient points here.

Mission
Protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.
Vision
Provide the most effective transportation security in the most efficient way as a high performing counter-terrorism organization.
Core Values
Integrity. Innovation. Team spirit.

But read it anyway, it is illuminating. Especially in light (no pun intended) of this report about an 82-year-old woman who got arrested in the Wichita airport for assaulting a TSA officer. (2)

All of this 120 lbs and 5’5″ of lean, mean, fighting machine with 82 years of combat experience was viewed as a threat to the transportation security of the largest superpower in the existence of the world using only her closed fist. See, watching those Bruce Lee films of the 1970s paid off (eg. Fists of Fury 2, 1976).

So, with respect to the Mission, they were able to ensure freedom of movement for the poor lady from the airport to the Sedgwick County jail. The Vision, maybe they succeeded in striking fear in the hearts of terrorists around the world since this made international media and now terrorists will think twice before coming to America. Ya think? And, the Core Values were upheld in that it did take more than one TSA officer to apprehend the 82-year-old woman.

And you wonder why I don’t like to fly.

Respectfully submitted by your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

The Devil You Don’t Know

7/2017

Disclaimer: This is NOT a political comment but an example of poor financial planning and a lesson learned in life.

OK now. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I owned a 1972 Cheby Nova (spelling intentionally incorrect) with a V-8 engine. My wife would run along beside it with a gas can to make sure we didn’t run out of gas between home and the store 2 blocks away. Well maybe not really, but you get the idea.

A young (to the US) upstart Japanese car company (Subaru), Jimmy (then President), and a lot of the national media strongly urged everyone to ditch their gas guzzlers for a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle. Kinda sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “You will save money,” they said.

Young and stupid was I, I traded in the perfectly functional but less than efficient Nova.

The new Subaru did indeed get better fuel mileage. When it ran. Unfortunately, it was one of the first vehicles (at least for Subaru) to have computer control of the engine. It didn’t work too well. In addition, the little 4 cylinder engine didn’t have enough oomph to make the hills of Kansas without downshifting, if there was more than one adult in the vehicle. The car was in the shop almost every week for months. Subaru finally threw in the towel and said, “We don’t know what is wrong and you are on your own. Sue us if you want.” This was before the current impotent Lemon Laws,

I ended up trading the Subaru, on which I still owed a significant amount of the original financed note, for a new Jeep Wagoneer. Loved that Wagoneer, but wish, even now, that I had the Nova and all the money wasted in finance charges, maintenance, lost equity and rental expenses for substitute vehicles. If I had, instead of following this woe-some path, invested in say Walmart, lookout Donald. I’d of been firing people on TV instead of him.

Me thinks what I am saying is consider carefully, the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know.

Your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave, who didn’t fall for it the second time around.

Weary.