Money quote: “As an ideological matter, every time a Democrat claims that keeping more of your own money is tantamount to stealing – which is all the time – voters should remember this is fundamentally a debate between people who believe the state should have first dibs on your property and those who don’t. The only way to frame the bill as a tax hike is by using the 2025 expiration of individual rate cuts. And the only way they won’t be extended is if Democrats decide to raise taxes again. These are debates Republicans should embrace.”

They told me if I voted for Trump, fascism would descend on the country…and they were right!

Scale said 252 this morning. I’m officially a third of the way to my goal.

Having a beer after scouting for the first LVHHH (vlv!) trail of 2018. The band’s playing Black Horse and the Cherry Tree. (In the glass (not shown): Bad Beat Gutshot.)

Too bad we don’t get snow here…this looks like fun.

More electronics assembly work…shot this through the magnifier.

More food for thought:

A wee bit of copy-and-paste to consider:

All right. Well, let me ask a question:Obama-era net neutrality rules are basically two years old. The internet came into existence from literally nothing and blossomed into what it was with anything you wanted. You can find anything you wanted, and you could buy different speeds. You could buy different packages. You could buy whatever you could afford, you could buy whatever you wanted, and look at what happened to the internet. It grew and grew and grew, and these people in Washington are sitting there seething that they don’t have any control over it.

They are seething at this massive thing which is getting everybody involved. There was more free speech on the internet when it first started and for the next 15 years than there’s ever been anywhere. There was more access to information the first 15 years of the internet when it was unregulated than anything ever in human history. New companies were born, large and small. Some succeeded; some failed. But it was a… Look at what happened to the tech industry with a free and open internet for the first 15 years before Obama and his crowd figures out, “You know, we don’t have any control over this! We want to get our mitts in it.”

Think back 10, 15 years. How bad was the internet? Look at all that was there, and it was free. You want the New York Times? It was free. You want anything; it was free, because they didn’t know how to monetize it at first. Then they started doing paywalls, but that had nothing to do with internet regulation. That had to do with profit. So if you wanted to read the New York Times on the internet and you didn’t have a subscription, lo and behold, you had to pay for it. Why would that be? Well, it costs them to produce it, or anything else.

My point is for the first 15 years of the internet, you could do anything you wanted on it. You could access anything you wanted on it. It was wide open. It grew and it created multibillionaires left and right. There was nothing wrong with it except the left didn’t have their hands on it.

So we ordered some switches at work recently…these were the power cords included. WTF? Good thing we have lots of extras on hand.

(Might be able to use one of these as part of a plug adapter for next year’s trip to Fiji…just replace the IEC plug with a NEMA jack and we’re all set.)