Lion ponderings

    Month 3 of tule fog. Lucky Ego Monger.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Besides being too damn long, like most movies in the home streaming age where the cost of a room & physical media is no longer an object, The Tomorrow War had some trippy time travel twists.   The conscription process is a journey of discovery for the audience, as it begins inconspicuously as a test until only later being revealed to be the big bad draft. Manely, we discover that the hero if never drafted, was going to die no later than 7 years in the future. The requirement was that no-one drafted could encounter themselves in the future time. Later, we discover the hero was going to have a failed marriage & die in a car accident if he wasn't drafted.  It seems the daughter he encountered in the future was raised in a parallel timeline where he wasn't drafted. Lions presumed i...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAJaoUrxVzQ A series of LTVA videos got lions pondering if large van cities are the only viable housing solution.  The mane features about quartzsite are a mobile commercial area which supplies all the needs of the mobile residential area & it being walkable.  The mane limitation is the 7 month time limit for residents.  That could be overcome if the van cities constantly move. Van cities are limited to BLM land & most of the BLM land is useless southwest desert land.  Everything else is a national park or agriculture.  Lions can only hope no use for the useless land is found, like solar farms or mining.  Water is 25 cents per gallon & showers have to be paid for.  The lion kingdom's water bill is now $60/month, manely for manual dish washing & showering.  They would most certainly need a dishwasher.  They're not saving anything on food.  Jeeper paid $15 for a small burger.  It's ...

  Onward & upward. 77% in 3 years but that's what it takes to subsidize 3 to 1 government debt to GDP.  The fed is going to keep it going as long as they have something to offset it with.    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  What lions planned to do after retiring has long been either what they did during summer vacations in the 80's or vacations from 1997-2000.  Lions have pondered what made 1997-2000 the happy time.  The prime factors were just developing software, but lions did that for their career & it was not as rewarding for a boss. Building useful audio video software, useful audio electronics, & having an erratic schedule to suit whatever the immediate need was were key factors. At a lower level, there has to always be a big thing lions are making.  It was solving what lions saw as the most valuable problems, making what lions saw as th...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hRBzBnzkX0     The lion kingdom set to the task of stabilizing the extremely shaky crew-11 re-entry footage.  It was not possible to stabilize with Lucas Kanade. After decades of manually motion tracking flying objects, the lion kingdom pondered yet another take in the motion/tracking/stabilization department.  Manely, a hack to just find the left most blob in the image which meets a minimum size & move its leftmost point to a fixed position.  If nothing qualifies, it copies the offset of the previous image. Another idea was to scan every column from the left, find all the pixels which exceed a certain threshold, track the center of the 1st hit when a column has enough qualifying pixels.  Lions believe this would have too many false positives from noise & a blob size which factored in horizontal information would be required.  It might  be simpler to use the column algorithm though. A variation w...

   Having exited the real estate market, lions feel sorry for anyone just embarking on a land purchase.  It's only worth it in certain cases.  It definitely needs to have a business case, either as a primary residence or a rental.  It can't be a passive investment like the movies.  The old man drove to Placerville every weekend in 1987, hoping to buy land.  We looked at a lot of cold, run down cabins.  Most everything in those days was built in the 1970's.  Rather than log cabins, they were manely plywood.  He didn't realize the amount of manetenance, property tax, road building a cabin would require, but assumed the appreciation would outweigh any costs.  He bought an SUV specifically to reach undeveloped land in that area.  That led to a spate of house hunting in 1988, which led to our move out of the greater bay area.  He finally bought & developed land in the late 90's.  He was still driving around looking for...

 Lions don't believe any more population growth on Earth is possible.  The only way to sustain all the entitlement programs is higher productivity from a smaller population. The problem is most of the births aren't very high achievers. Lions were never a good candidate for reproduction because of deformations caused by genetics & anxiety attacks.  Neither would any sperm bank accept their sperm.  Lions were excused from that standpoint, if not the fact that only 50% of men ever had relationships & the competition was extremely high net worth, polyamorous compared to somewhere like Wisconsin. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ski lift memories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFNOH6I4UmM   The chairs were all nailed into the rope by a horizontal wedge, 40 years ago. They ran as fast as possible & the empty chairs swung out as they rounded the wheel. The stations were dead...