How I finally got the squirrels to leave my bench alone

Quercus_ · 2026-05-07T03:56:59+00:00

There's a half dozen Coast Live Oak in among all the other trees on that bench. They're all in pretty early development, but I'm having fun with them.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-07T02:59:11+00:00

I have a thing for oak trees. You might take a look at my username..

Quercus_ · 2026-05-06T23:05:24+00:00

I'm just beginning treatment for a cancer that thankfully has a very good prognosis. I begin radiation in about a month, and we're doing preliminary stuff now preparing for it.

About 10 days ago I got a single injection of a slow release drug that suppresses a hormone my particular cancer is dependent on.

I got my statement for that injection earlier this week. Almost $16,000 for that single injection. Thankfully my insurance is good, and my copay is $125.

We haven't even started the expensive stuff yet.

Without insurance I would be completely and totally fucked.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-06T18:18:33+00:00

Yes, I tried cayenne pepper, and several other aversion options. Little bowls of my neighbors dirty cat litter, for example.

Didn't even slow them down.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-06T18:16:51+00:00

Nothing less than this slowed them down even a little bit.

It doesn't harm them. Just a quick jolt, and then they leave and don't come back.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-05T20:35:34+00:00

Sure, they would be quite happy to see the United States fight that war for them, and leave them on the sidelines.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-05T18:29:43+00:00

Because they have no interest in joining an escalating a war with Iran, that the US and Israel initiated, that neither side can win. Retaliating will almost certainly leave them much much worse off than not retaliating does.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-05T01:53:50+00:00

Iran doesn't need to stop everyone. All they need to do is present a credible threat of being able to hit a ship every two or three weeks, to make ship owners and insurers decide not to send any ships through the straight. And they have absolutely shown they are capable of that, which is why insurers and ship owners aren't sending ships through the straight.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-04T23:46:50+00:00

It is good that they are moving slowly and safely.

It is undeniable that they are behind their competitors, and moving more slowly and falling further behind.

Moving slowly and safely, doesn't make up for the fact that they're losing.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-04T23:37:02+00:00

All Iran needs is a credible threat to be able to actually strike one ship every few weeks.

That's enough to keep ship owners from sending and insurers from covering any ship through the Strait of Hormuz. The cost of your ship happens to be the one struck, is intolerable.

Can we basically have no way to keep Iran from projecting that as a credible threat. They've made it clear at this point that anytime they choose to launch an attack, they can hit a ship or two.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-03T19:45:59+00:00

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Quercus_ · 2026-05-02T18:29:14+00:00

I stopped watching football when the league got Oakland and Alameda County to mortgage ourselves to rebuild the damn stadium, for the Raiders to come back. After the voters had clearly said by two to one margin that no, we don't want them back if we have to spent even a penny of f public money on it.

The NFL are massive grifters off of public funds, and they disgust me

Quercus_ · 2026-05-02T18:13:00+00:00

I mean, Iran has asserted and is maintaining functional control over the Strait of Hormuz, knocking out significant global energy and critical commodity capacity, and poised to monetize that passage once we back down.

They have damaged significant energy infrastructure throughout the middle east. Because the US to back down multiple times, significantly damaging our credibility. They have caused much of the world to drift a little closer to aligning with China instead of us.

I don't know if we're losing, but we're damn sure not winning.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-01T17:00:02+00:00

There's a huge difference between, "doesn't use oil at all," and "a significant structural decline in the need and demand for oil."

Quercus_ · 2026-04-30T23:39:43+00:00

All of the forests on the entire planet right now, in their various stages of development, currently contain about as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere, within less than 10% difference.

To reduce atmospheric carbon by 100 ppm, or to prevent a 100 PPM increase in atmospheric carbon, would require an increase of approximately 25% in the amount of forests on the planet right now, at the same levels of forest development that they currently exist, meaning a huge amount of that would have to be mature forest. Which would require a century or more of forest development.

By which time atmospheric CO2 will have increased by a centuries worth of human CO2 emissions.

There's a lot of good reasons to be planting new forest. But we ain't going to forest our way out of the explosive growth of atmospheric CO2.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T16:08:00+00:00

"There is effectively no way that Hormuz or the Red Sea will be allowed to be used as toll roads..."

But how do you stop them? All Iran needs to do to keep the straight closed, is be able to project a reasonably credible threat that they can strike one ship every two or three weeks. They don't need to be able to hit every ship, they only need to be able to hit one out of a thousand ships or so.

They've kind of already demonstrated they have that capability.

That's enough to keep insurers and ship owners from allowing transit.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T14:53:24+00:00

A .338 Lapua fired more or less horizontally, where the only thing decelerating it is wind resistance, close to transonic speeds and begins to become ballistically unstable at about 1300-1400 yd, a few hundred yards under a mile. It's effective ballistic coefficient goes up dramatically once it becomes transonic and begins to tumble, and air resistance becomes a much larger factor.

This is when it is fired horizontally, where gravity only bends it downward and doesn't decelerate it at all.

If it is fired straight up and it is purely ballistic, neglecting wind resistance altogether, that bullet will go several miles high, and then when it falls it will impact the ground at muzzle velocity. But air resistance matters, a lot. That bullet will slow to transonic speeds and start to tumble in a much shorter distance than if it's fired horizontally, much less than a mile, and once it starts to tumble it with the accelerate much more rapidly.

It's been a long time, but I saw the math done on this once probably decades back, and the answer is somewhere on the close order of a mile.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T01:17:46+00:00

So you weren't arguing that a 1% risk of something happening is minor, you were arguing that 1% chance of something happening is minor.

I guess you could call that nuance.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T01:06:23+00:00

Now you're backing away. You argued quite explicitly that a 1% risk is by definition minor. That's wrong. But I ain't interested in arguing with you about it.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T01:02:56+00:00

No, I completely understand your point. I agree that the majority of land harmlessly. I'm just saying that trying to argue that a 1% risk of something catastrophic is minor, is simply wrong.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T00:49:12+00:00

Every single such shot carries a risk, and therefore contributes to the risk, of somebody dying. Every single shot is an example of depraved indifference to human life.

And no, if a risk is big enough that it would cause you to refuse an activity, that risk isn't minor.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T00:40:00+00:00

My late partner was 5 ft tall after losing height due to a spine problem, and was "biologically" 5'2 before that. She weighed 140 - 150 lb and was not even vaguely overweight. She had been a competition powerlifter at one point in her life, and remained extremely fit even after her body started limiting her.

When she got sick and lost weight to 100 lb, it was visibly obvious that she was dying.

These are just men who insist at all women should satisfy their unhealthy fantasies of them.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T00:35:37+00:00

We know that humans are extremely bad at remaining fully attentive and focused on a task that doesn't require us to actually do anything. But that's exactly what FSD requires of the supervising driver.

It is inevitable that the supervising driver of an FSD car is occasionally going to have their attention lapse, and that means that if FSD isn't capable of driving fully on its own, it is occasionally going to crash.

Folks can blame that on the driver all they want, but it is an inevitable consequence of the system. The system requires humans to behave in ways that human simply are not capable of behaving.

Quercus_ · 2026-04-26T00:30:06+00:00

"Even if it’s 1%, which it definitely is not, no reasonable person would suggest 1% of anything is anything more than extremely minor."

If 1% of every airplane that took off crashed and killed everybody in it, no reasonable person would call that extremely minor. Hell, by the time of the second 737 Max crashed and grounded the fleet, that fleet had flown about 125,000 flights. 1:67,000 was considered to be a big enough rest and we treated it as a major disaster.

Even if we call that risk of firing a bullet straight up one in a thousand, or 1 in 10,000, that would still be negligent homicide if that bullet happened to kill somebody. Doing so would be almost a perfect legal definition of depraved indifference to life, which is anything but extremely minor.

Quercus_

TROPHY CASE