Lion ponderings

 There's definitely a senioritis when your day job is getting acquired & nothing you're doing for it has any relevance to what's required to get the next gig.  Everything you do for your day job is taking a step away from what you have to do to pay the rent next year.

 Rossguy is another tragic tale of someone who avoided running his entire life over fear of getting osteoarthritis only to get it in the end.  He no longer uses even an elliptical.   Then of course, there's his narrative about people refusing to work because of runaway inflation & how runaway inflation is caused  by people refusing to work.  It's quite the opposite of 1979 when we had stagflation.  Stagflation is believed to start with the oil embargo & end with houses being taken out of the measurements.  A self feeding cycle is a new paradigm. Rossguy also famously proclaims his support for gold diggers.  The trick is his point of view is always from someone worth 7 figures, who can afford most anyone he wants.  The usual complaint is from men who want gold diggers but who don't have the means.

  Somewhat melted but still intact on day 2.

  New record cold. Lowest snow level in years

Another ultrarunner movie with a twist.  His wife has a hard life manually cleaning mud from his socks.  That's a definite case for wearing sandals. Was actually intrigued by the way he paved his own trail in a plot of undeveloped land.  The thought has occurred of paving a trail when rural living becomes necessary.  All the land is private property.  There's supposedly an easement for a trail.  It would definitely be a dramatic change from running short distances every day to maybe running really far once a week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqGEhv0QM6k Road Guy Bob visits the HFAC.  The day that vijeo was uploaded, the lion kingdom dreamed they changed their mind & decided to preserve the HFAC.   The lion kingdom might have been there during the tail end of the golden age.  They started locking up the good pianos in the spring of 1997.  The summer of 1997 was when they took away the good pianos for good.  1995 was firm...

 https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/venice-canal-drought-italy-climate-scli-intl/index.html Intriguing story about Venice drying up after centuries of flooding being the concern.  

 https://www.youtube.com/@stash_tv/videos The ocean of unknown documentaries & B movies getting no views shows how strictly the gootube has concentrated all views to the same thing.   The Sailor is the most viewed one & is pretty good.  At age 80 he outlived his savings & said he never expected to live so long.  He died 3 years after the movie was made.   He was well connected for a penniless old man.  Women would have nothing to do with someone like that in US but being known as a sailor does have some prestige.  

 So Comca$t finally suspended the lion kingdom internet connection for 8 hours due to pirated movies, claiming to escalate to a 12 hour shutdown next time & eventually account termination.  For 20 years no-one did anything.  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/comcast-verizon-att-sued-for-failing-to-stop-movie-piracy-1235221696/ Comca$t got sued back in September for not taking any action & that seemed to light a fire under their asses.  Currently, they claim to terminate accounts based on a certain number of offences per month.  There are few search results for anyone getting a similar suspension or termination.  There are some reddit comments from guys who got suspended for 24 hours or 1 hour by other ISPs.   The suspension might have been for seeding rather than downloading.  The seeding library had grown over 15 years but lions rarely downloaded.  To detect illegal seeding, all one needs to do is connect ...

  Formerly $5 now $15.  It's not the food.  Your money lost all its value.  

  https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-tinder-stereotypes-17769862.php The lion kingdom never got 1 like on that program. Would agree that a dating profile had to be in your face & over the top to get any attention, but https://finance.yahoo.com/news/survey-shows-1-3-americans-161500220.html 29k sounds like the polite answer in the midwest under 30. It's more like 300k in Calif* over 50. Lions make 0 & either put it all in a tax deferred retirement account or are unemployed. If you're a lion, you either don't exist or are slowing way way down at dating time.

 https://nypost.com/2023/01/26/single-women-are-shopping-for-husband-material-at-home-depot/ Women at the local homeless despot are all married, wealthy home owers.  It is mostly men in there, though.  Lions last went there for desiccant.   Probably best.  All business & politics that sort of thing.  Wouldn't interest you, as they say.  Mom was definitely in the thriller/mystery category.  The last audiobook lions finished was the haunting. Surprising to find erotica on the female preferences.  For most men, the last woman they saw reading was their mother.   Japanese Canadian hottie trophy wife.   https://www.instagram.com/nicole_coenen/

 The lion kingdom pondered the arrival of unlimited energy either from fusion or solar.  Fusion comes & goes.  Now it's enjoying another happy time.  Previously, it was rebuked because of the neutron contamination, the scarcity of heavy water, the cost of transmission from a giant reactor.  Maybe in 1000 years, energy generation will be compact & efficient enough to be unlimited if not portable.   The mane impact lions believe could be unlimited fresh water from reverse osmosis.  All the reservoirs not providing flood control near the coasts could disappear.  

 Portrait of a permanent stonk market collapse: the Nikkei 225 It hit 39,000 back in 1989.  By 2002, it was back at 7000, an 81% loss.  Even 40 years later, it has never regained its value.  Lions remember it being in the 20,000 range, thinking it was all due to the exchange rate, yet here we are with only a distant memory of when the dow 30 was last under 20,000.  Despite exchange rate differences, it too peaked in the high 30's. The nikkei is considered the most volatile of all indexes.  Its rise since 2010 is from the central bank officially buying stonks.  The lion kingdom has observed the dow 30 correlating exactly with the fed balance sheet, but the official buying of stonks by the fed has never been officially disclosed. The fed says its balance sheet reduction will end in the next 2 years, probably around a 7 handle.  That would correlate with a 28 handle on your dow meter.  The lion kingdom thinks they would be lucky to get it below ...

  Another reminder of the lion question of what it would be like to stand still in the sky just as if the sky was the ground, watching animals scurry around far below while being surrounded by the same infinite emptiness & clouds that have existed since the planet was formed.  A balloon might do the job, but it has to move with the wind.  A long cable under a helicopter could be the closest thing. Generation Z does hot air balloon stunts, fully parachuted & it has to be a team of course. Hydrogen balloons are intriguing because they're much smaller & don't have any flame noise, but they still have to follow the wind.

The lion kingdom rapidly approaches its next acquisition & layoff, probably before June.  It looks like another unknown struggling startup buying an unknown struggling startup.  4 years is a long stint for a lion.  The longest was 7 years & might have been too long.  Pretty sure the stonk options don't vest until 5 years so that's going to be a loss if the lion kingdom can't stay alive for another year.  The last acquisition was in Jan 2010 & the lion got axed in May 2010 after 3 years.  It might be a standard practice to vest everyone at the time of acquisition & pay out all the stonk options in cash.  We weren't allowed to keep our shares & weren't awarded any new options.  They earned dividends over the next few years which only came to some $5000 before they were dissolved.  If we were allowed to keep our shares, the last parent company was $7 in mid 2009, briefly touched $14 in 2013 after they won an emmy in 2012 ...

  Full motion video of a solar eclipse is hard to do on Earth, let alone Mars.  The lion kingdom just took bracketed exposures & made a timelapse which was barely useful.  You can see the sunspots, but of course not the corona since it wasn't completely covered.  It's another day of making power meters for lions while the final frontier is explored elsewhere.

  While lions have memories of watching Shawshank Redemption in 1990, it actually came out in 1994 & lions only saw it in college replaying over & over on the campus cable network in 1999.  There was no prison movie in 1990.  It was 1 of a growing number of memories of events that never happened. There weren't any Morgan Freeman cop movies in 1990 either.  Mississippi burning was the only big cop movie we watched in those days.   It was actually shot in a real prison.  The ohio state reformatory was built in 1886 & manely torn down after the movie was made.  Despite living near Alcatraz, the lion kingdom has never visited Alcatraz & probably never will.  Alcatraz was built in 1934 & never had an imposing 19th century castle appearance.  A 19th century prison has an extra terror to it.  The hardest time was served in 15th century prisons. San Quentin was built in 1852.  It didn't look very intimidating. but i...

  While disappointing that the modern industry emphasizes contrived programming problems instead of creating solutions like we did 20 years ago, it's still impressive what kinds of ASCII graphics demos have been created. These use extremely simple insights into the way trig functions work & show the kind of optimization necessary to make good C64 demos.  It's not all raster interrupt handlers & racing the beam.

 https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/millionaire-renter-households-triple-in-numbers/ This story from 2020 refers to annual income rather than net worth.  Most lion neighbors have over $1 million in net worth which doesn't even cover a down payment anymore.   Funny that the brief drop in rents in 2020 doesn't even show up as a blip anymore.   A Schwab study from 2017 showed what lions always knew. https://www.aboutschwab.com/schwab-modern-wealth-index A big factor might be millennials never experiencing a long term decline like previous generations did.  The decline from 1999-2010 has never been repeated.  Lions also noted a cooling in party atmosphere.  They're a more focused generation.  The party atmosphere peaked with the hippies & has been heading down ever since.

  Spy balloon shot down with a good old AIM-9X fired from an F-22.  The F-22 was at 58,000 ft.  The balloon was at 60-65,000 ft, slightly below the F-22's ceiling.  The interesting part was how it hit between the payload & the balloon, in order to keep the payload intact.  It didn't hit the balloon for some reason.  It landed in 47 feet of water, but probably got smashed into little bits.  We'll never see it up close.  There must have been high res photos of it when it was flying. Bald eagle approved.

  Rule #1: Don't compare yourself to your classmates.  Rule #2: compare yourself to your classmates.   What a difference not having any student loans made.  In 2004, the lion kingdom was buried in debt & didn't have any good job opportunities.  Even a condo was out of reach.  The $2 million club today is the classmates who had scholarships & got good jobs.  The $2 million houses are all bought with cash & have never gone down in price.  They are the collateral for the national debt.

 The big thing these days is investing in a house with a domestic partner.  Millennials do it less than 1 year into their relationships.  The few generation Xers still online tell of continuing to partly own a house with their ex husbands that each of them takes turns living in, like a timeshare.  Each of them spends most of their time in rentals.  The big implication of this is they're using 3x more housing than they would if the marriage worked. The other thing pushing up housing demand is most families being very large combinations of 2 marriages.  The kids from 2 families often live under 1 roof so they need a lot more space. Investing in a house with a domestic partner sounds a lot like financial desperation.  1st marriage went away because it became a financial risk.  Now domestic partners are becoming financial risks.

 container_of is a horror story of what can happen when you try to get away from using pointers to the point of creating something far more confusing than pointers.  In the old days, a function would typically take a pointer to a structure & a pointer to the parent of the structure.  It would save stack space & run faster to only pass 1 argument to the function, then reverse engineer the parent from knowledge of the type of the function argument. The 1st goog result is https://radek.io/2012/11/10/magical-container_of-macro/ undoubtedly by someone who has retired by now.  The prototype for future lion reference is: container_of(ptr, type, member) ptr is the function argument. type is the type of the parent structure. member is the name of the ptr as it appears in the parent structure. The example usage begins with our function prototype: void vos_linux_timer_callback (struct timer_list *t) { Then to get the parent structure of *t. vos_timer_plat...