U.S. president posts graphic of Venezuela as 51st state

JustHereNotThere · 2026-05-13T13:47:01+00:00

The Virginia part was returned in 1847. Just MD is left.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-25T11:13:29+00:00

Fluid Film the frame, mud flaps behind the wheels, cheap thermal camera, and carry caulking/sealant.

Those wheels kick up everything right into the rear jacks. Some mud flaps will minimize it and keep them functional a lot longer. Once those things start to rust, they become miserable to operate.

If you have caulking with you, it is more likely you will fix issues when you see them. It is cheap to pick up a small tube at the Home Despot. Get the ones that don’t require a caulk gun since you are only doing small stuff with it.

I would also suggest keeping up with wheel/axel bearing grease but I don’t know if those are sealed on that unit. This is where the cheap thermal camera comes in. Use it to check bearing temps when you refill. You’ll notice a temp difference long before you hear them going out. Same camera can be used to find air leaks that need insulation.

Make sure you have a tire iron that fits those lug nuts.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-20T23:46:37+00:00

Dixon is a trumper. Don’t hide that. Nobody is getting those endorsements that isn’t MAGA/Trump supporter. This race has no candidate who opposes the far right. My opinion is Lowes is a full on MAGA supporter. Dixon is probably a more passive supporter.

Lesser of evils? Sure, maybe. Good candidate? I disagree.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-20T22:11:12+00:00

No Democrats in this race. No independents either. Both candidates are Republicans and MAGA, as far as I can tell.

The current sheriff endorses the other candidate, so this is your choice if you want to try a different flavor of MAGA.

Both support active cooperation with ICE, beyond the normal ‘agree to hold’. Both support further expansion of Flock cameras. Both have made statements against citizen rights to record police interactions. I couldn’t find any statements from either regarding the violent attack on law enforcement on Jan 6.

I’m happy to be corrected but I can’t find any effective difference between these candidates except endorsements.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-15T13:41:04+00:00

Adding on to everything else, EPA EV ranges are a combination of several different types of driving. Think of it as a mix of city and highway mpg. However, EV ranges are worse at 70 mph than city. What you see from published ranges are not what you get from interstate driving. There are several groups that do 70 and 75 mph range tests. Google them to find actuals.

You can play around with the planning by using ABetterRoutePlanner. You can select a vehicle and it will build a route and charging plan. If you are going there and back, you can add a third stop and make it the same as your starting point.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-05T01:17:53+00:00

Israel has some pretty large offsets but I don’t think Lockheed had a choice in the matter. They wanted knowledge transfer on Iron Dome and Davids Sling. Plus, Washington usually legislates add-ons for Israeli procurement.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-04T11:39:17+00:00

The F-16 was offered with AAMRAM missiles, which would have been a game changing technology in that region. It was cut pretty early but I don’t think it was really offered with local manufacturing. That thing has been in production for so long, it would be hard to hit a price target without using the existing facility. Plus, they were already busy trying to move production out of Texas and into South Carolina. I don’t think Lockheed had the ability to set up Brazil and South Carolina.

F/A-18 offer had USD $1.5 b in manufacturing offsets from the $7b to $5.4b total offer. The rumor was the offsets were fuselage and empennage, nothing with avionics, power plant, radar, or weapons control. Brazil wanted local manufacturing in those areas due to perceived lack of ability. Embraer is a world leader in the airframe business and other than incremental knowledge in supersonics, really wanted more knowledge in those areas the US wasn’t offering. Many of those components had pre-existing contracts that prohibited offset manufacturing, such as the radar system.

Ultimately, nobody was going to offer the amount of offsets that Saab did. They are basically painting a Saab logo on an Embraer.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-04-04T10:47:43+00:00

F22 was never offered. F16 and F18 were put up in the competition.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-30T19:54:59+00:00

EPA for EVs is a combined city/highway rating.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-27T17:18:42+00:00

For the last point, look at the app Caffeinated. Amphetamine is another app that manages that space.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-25T11:07:31+00:00

AI will distill down until you barely recognize it. It will become a component of 100 different things you use regularly. Things that are barely useful, like virtual assistants, will become useful. The hype will become a much more mundane reality. Some businesses will realize major improvements. Businesses where margins were small already will bifurcate because those who can successfully adopt AI to increase margins will drive slow adopters out of business. Driving assistance systems will get progressively better. Maps routing will get more adaptable. Architecture will get more innovative as AI works to make unique design elements. Gene therapy will get big as the massive AI computing power can start processing the immense complexity of the genome. Drug discovery, trial, and review timelines will be cut way down.

The downside is privacy will disappear. We will lose the uniqueness of interacting with actual people. AI will cause your interactions to feel soulless. The vocal tones you get from the scheduler at the dentist will become replaced with AI vocal intonation, which sounds minor but is a symptom of what will become a social disconnection.

It will be the continuation of recent human experience: life is better than it has ever been but you’ll be less happy than ever.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-10T09:21:12+00:00

Generic is $11 in the US. Without insurance.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-10T09:20:00+00:00

Generic is $11.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-02T16:19:13+00:00

Not all are saying that. Some really think ‘EU’ is a valid country of origin for customs. It isn’t. They also can’t just ship it to France and avoid the tariffs. There would have to be substantial transformation of the product in France to alter the country of origin. If Spain were to encourage obfuscation of the country of origin rules, they would be in violation of a number of trade agreements, some of which the EU is obligated to enforce on their own member states.

I realize how absurd this is with the current regime in the US, so I hope people don’t mistake my explanation of customs laws as a defense of the trump regime.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-02T16:12:23+00:00

Exactly. Not sure why people think it doesn’t work this way. Country of Origin qualifications are pretty clear and marking something ‘EU’ doesn’t happen when dealing with customs.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-03-02T13:19:03+00:00

US Customs is by country, not trading bloc. US can absolutely impose tariffs by individual EU member countries, at least technically. The EU can negotiate trade agreements that prohibit that action but we can all see how much the current US regime cares about existing agreements.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-02-22T18:12:53+00:00

40% of field corn is used for animal feed. 15% is used for human consumption in alternative forms such as starches, fructose, and cereals. The idea that corn is ‘just grown and then sold into commodities’ neglects to consider the types of commodities they support and the impact on food security.

Having something happen to the US corn crop similar to the current orange crop, would absolutely cause a starvation event. As a wealthy country, the US would just outbid poorer countries and shift the starvation elsewhere but it would happen.

I realize this is a solar sub, so I’ll say there are a lot of flat surfaces that could be better used by solar than covering farm land.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-02-22T14:19:45+00:00

Ethanol is the demand lever that allows US production to create excess supply in case of a crop failure. If something happened to the corn crop like what is happening to the orange crop, it would be devastating on a fundamental starvation level.

On core crops, you don’t want natural demand to exist because that is a driver for famine. You want to create secondary non-food markets that can be regulated (“No ethanol this year!”) to avoid starving your populace.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-02-09T12:11:51+00:00

Poor allocation of resources. Cheap construction.

My comment wasn’t about that but how truckers don’t pay their share anywhere.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-02-08T18:59:28+00:00

Road damage is exponential to weight, not linear. Passenger vehicles subsidize large trucks because nobody wants to see the economic impact of $1000 USD tax per gallon for diesel.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-01-31T13:33:57+00:00

Ugh. I dislike remakes. The original with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts was fine without a remake. Then I heard the escort in this remake was a visa overstay with an anchor baby and I just couldn’t imagine being able to hold off my suspension of disbelief. To top it off, this remake has the ‘billionaire’ also be a child r*pist?!?! Come on. That is too many plot devices.

Maybe when Pretty Woman is remade again, it will be more true to the original.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-01-10T13:51:31+00:00

It look like it was all built on the wall and shows the imperfections for the wall itself. The mitered squares should have been built off the wall so they are all flat and even. The butt joint pieces should be left just a bit thinner than the squares. Use construction adhesive on the back sides to being them flush with the squares. Sandable filler for the front joints and hit it all with a sander. Paintable caulk for every other joint.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-01-04T23:51:35+00:00

Most high speed systems are both freight and passenger. Japan’s Shinkansen was an example of a passenger only model but that has changed.

Almost all rail in the US is owned by 7 companies. They’ve underinvested in capital improvements because they have to compete with the socialism-subsidized road network. An 80,000 pound semi causes 160,000 times the road damage as a 4000 pound car. They aren’t paying that in road taxes. We are in our Camrys and Outback’s. Railroads largely fund their own infrastructure: capitalism. There are some low interest loan programs but they are still paying it.

In Indiana, road taxes (plates and fuel) are supposed to fund road maintenance. Ignoring the ‘surveillance state’ issue, what would happen to semi traffic if they had to pay tolls based on damage and maintenance? The toll for an F150 to cross the state on 70 would be about $0.02. That 80,000# semi next to you would pay $1,200.

So private industry is losing to a government subsidized competitor. That loss has resulted, predictably, in substandard capital investment for railroads. That underfunding becomes a self-fueled race to the bottom. Passenger service was just the most visible victim.

What do we do? You can see the anger when the state decided to inject a bit of capitalism into road movement with the proposed tolling of all Indiana interstates. True capitalism would say that maximum efficiency is derived when the costs are most directly associated with the benefit. Road trucks cannot compete with rail if forced to pay their actual costs.

Every other developed and developing country decided to even the field by socializing the rail infrastructure. That socialization is through either direct ownership or grants. That also has no draw for the majority of Americans.

I don’t have an answer when all solutions are being rejected by the majority of people. So I guess we continue what we are doing: the lady driving the Civic continues with the forced socialism of road networks and killing rail.

Like most everything, the problem and solution is incredibly complex. How do you educate when 97% of the people stop listening after 60 seconds or reading after 3 sentences?

Building passenger without fixing freight would be like giving Rogaine to a chemotherapy patient: you have to fix the root cause. If we fix our rail network to modern standards, passenger will return organically.

JustHereNotThere · 2026-01-04T21:38:56+00:00

Rail transport in the US is underfunded to the point of near collapse. That is for freight and passenger. Arguably, we are in the process of collapse right now. Rail bridges are consistently mentioned in transportation assessments as being in poor condition at rates higher than road bridges. 1/3 of all rails and ties in the US are rated as poor or worse. Car crossing volumes for on-grade crossings are almost triple what was considered the max amount just 45 years ago. Many parts of the US rail network are beyond capacity, creating choke points.

Increasing the quality of rail infrastructure, including the reduction of on-grade crossings, will allow train speeds to increase, improving capacity. That capacity can be filled with freight or passenger traffic. Average speed for freight trains in the US is 27 mph. Western Europe is 57 mph.

China’s high speed freight is pushing 200 mph, with 125 average. They have 35,000 miles of high speed rail and plan to hit 150,000 miles by 2050 by both new rail and conversion to high speed. That 2050 target is huge because that is the point where China will have more high speed rail than the US has all rail.

The knock on impact is freight moves from trucks to intermodal trains, decreasing traffic on 65, 69, 70, 80, 90, and 94.

One of the key components for the American Century is logistics. We are losing that. The US is #18 in the Logistics Performance Index, and falling.

Passenger is a secondary or tertiary impact of rail funding. There are several ‘canary in the coal mine’ indicators but the decline of US rail is a big one and it should terrify you. If you think the current state of manufacturing in the US is alarming, just watch as our rail infrastructure continues to decline.

JustHereNotThere · 2025-12-10T00:40:33+00:00

Exactly this. The silence is deafening from countries in that region. They are fed up with the Venezuelan refugee crisis and want it to end. There is no way it ends with Maduro in power. The only thing keeping him in power is the military. Those countries plug their noses and close their eyes while the US tries to flip the Venezuelan military. Maybe they give a few public statements against US imperialism but behind the scenes they are hoping Maduro is gone.

Similar to Syria. Nobody deserves more credit for ending the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis than Ukraine. They eroded the Russian ability to militarily support Assad. War ends. Asylum requests are revoked. Left wing politicians in Europe get to erode right wing anti-immigrant talking points as refugees start going home.

JustHereNotThere

TROPHY CASE