Lion ponderings

 The very very very last 8 minute mile before the big day was really solid, except for the usual sciatica.  The big unknown is maximum speed while managing sciatica.  Managing it with an eccentric stride has been able to keep a sub 9 minute pace of some sort.  It needs to be way below 9 minutes to hit all the water stops. Helas, whatever the time is, finishing will be equally momentous. The weather continued trending wetter & colder.  It's going to be 2 days of aimless walking without the truck.  That's when the tours are going to happen.  The truck is only going to be useful on race day & night for some walks. The Thu night forecast was drier & colder & justified bringing the truck.  It's important to cover the camera in a ziplock bag as soon as it rains.  Any water is going to corrode the flat flex connectors right away.  There will be tools for accessing & drying the inside.  There were never any tests of the ...

Another year & the pendulum swung yet again to no longer owning any property to build a man cave on.  After the inflation of 2022, fixed costs rather than principal became the new limiting factors in owning anything.  Inflation had finally caught up with homeowners.   Reviewing current prices in greater Gainesville, prime walkable locations, Subject to change with 1 time never again inflation events, but $150/sq ft including the land can't be beat by any off grid man cave at $200/sq ft not including land.  The property tax at 2% is still horrendous.  It's not even beating rent anymore, let alone senior discounts. A man cave music room with Steinway could still happen, but it would have to contribute a seriously high value to justify itself.  Lions would have a hard time draining their brokerage account on such an economic disadvantage.  It would have to be top 1% net worth suitable for burning.  It seems the off grid guys are either all...

   Next in the wind down to the starting line came the mane chopping.  Lions did it without a mirror.  It was quite uneven & shorter than desired.  It'll last 3 years.  It seems the rubber band used to mark the upper bound shifted up as the mane was being cut & pulled tight.  The tracker_trt program must be used as a rear mirror, but getting the phone in position is quite difficult.  It almost requires a head mounted display.  The cheap VR goggles need to strap around the mane but might work for a long mane. The godox doesn't wake up without the full ID signal, so it had to be constantly power cycled.  Usage in a model session would require the wireless system or adjusting the timeout.  A smaller flash might be the only way.  Recovering the 580EX II would require a donor flash. An xmas without mane. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After 15 years, fina...

 Lions have pondered if the tube algorithm is even encouraging finance tubers to make relevant content for their own audience.  The audience is all top 10% males, yet tubers keep covering benefits for the bottom 50% like roth IRAs.  It's only attracting braggers because it makes the top 10% males feel good to see how bad everyone else has it. The advice for the bottom 50% is pretty worthless advice for the gootube audience though. No-one watching finance tube should prioritize a roth over a 401k.  They're all going to be in much lower tax brackets after retirement & they all have enough money to not need crazy high distributions. What if someone really did rebuild the drive-in in set in Monument Valley & showed a movie just to re-enact the back story of that part of Back to the Future, a period in 1955 with such a fever for westerns that they would paint a western in the theater. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

 Lions would be more excited if a name from 20 years ago posted again than by any of the current generation's recycling of the minimum material to get the most revenue.   Of course, a lot of the past internet is now only on apps.  Setjetters is something that would have been a website 25 years ago.  Now it's only a paid app which requires degraded location accuracy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So the amerikan people keep voting for a bigger government & the bigger government spends half the year shut down instead. Lions have been pondering what to do since the marathon is happening but all the museums are closed.  A big chunk of events are now gone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The lion kingdom portfolio was pretty abysmal since April.  The index funds went up 10% but most of the stonk was in BRK-B which crashed 10%.  The c...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ON9BNL3E4I The 2022 fed survey of consumer finances continues to fund gootuber mortgages, but lions have now graduated into the 50-54 group since then.  The top 10% in this group averaged $600k in home equity, based on the numbers.  That left $2M for expenses.  There was a big jump between 49 & 50.  The mane reason might have been inheritances & life expectancy of the parents running out in that time frame.   Lions believe the top 10% of the entire population no longer has enough money to retire, as of 2023.  The top 10% of the 50-54 group seems to be the minimum to retire now.  Of course, the survey only counts households.   Generation X can't buy 1st houses anymore.  There's not enough time to double their cash.  Generation Z will have no problem adjusting to the new prices. Home owners are going to shift younger because of the monetary reset & it's a reminder that t...

If you're renting to work in a job center, you're losing ground beyond a certain age. You're betting against "1 time price increases" in housing costs, wiping out decades of paychecks. Now another incentive is gone: the 401k catch up contribution. 401k catch up contributions were a big motivation for working after 50 & now they're gone. Finally, you're paying social security which is going away in 8 years. They are not going to bail it out when the smallest generation, generation X, is 62. They might bail it out for baby boomers & millennials. Generation X doesn't have any voting power.     There's literally going to be a 25% reduction for just those born after 1967.  Then 15 years later, there's going to be a new benefit for those born after 1980 because those are the generations with the votes. Roths pay off during periods of very high returns like 2010-2024 when most of the capital is coming from investments. ...

Apartment topology The latest apartment network ended up being sin: direct torrent VPN to 5Ghz Comca$t xena: router from wired network to 5Ghz Comca$t piano: 2.4Ghz router from desks & phone to wired network 5Ghz for the phone is still a dream, since it would eliminate ADB file transfers.  While Linux technically supports concurrent AP & STA, it's not practical.  The fundamental limit is the AP can't exist if the STA isn't joined. They have to 1st get connected on the STA, then run iwlist wlan0 channel to sniff out the channel, then start the access point with the hostapd.conf file edited to contain the same channel.  The problem is Comca$t can still go down & rejoin on different channels, breaking the access point. Unfortunately, virtual wlan0 devices behave badly when the 2 frequencies don't match.  The Comca$t outages would almost require the router to reboot. A hostapd wrapper would have to continuously monitor the station frequency & drop...

In today's discovery  const  char text[] = "asfakshfsd"; return text; text is not guaranteed to exist after the return. static const  char text[] = "asfakshfsd";  You have to declare it static even if it's const.  The problem seems to be masked by declaring the string  char *text = "asfakshfsd";  In that case, g++ statically allocated it.  A lot of students use char text[] because it's less intimidating than pointers.  XMLTag::encode_char somehow worked for 20 years before the compiler needed to overwrite the stack.  It was probably std::string.append_text requiring more memory than the old strcat.  Even mighty const inside a function is in volatile memory, probably because it's in a cache for speed. Here we have the 4 filebox instances in Cinelerra: index file location, render, load, save.  Render & all browse buttons use the browse button routine in file mode.  Index file uses the browse button in directory mode....