Never been one to let the carrier drop

Mom 80 – Happy Revolution Day

(With thanks to How Kuff for the concept of birthdays as revolution days)

God knows you weren’t the perfect parent
God knows I wasn’t the perfect child
You were a bit too bound by your tribe
I was maybe a bit too wild

But we’ve found our way through the years
And ended up as friends
You were there at the place where my road started
I’ll be there at the place yours ends

Happy revolution day
One more time around
Where the falling angel meets the rising ape
Standing on holy ground

You’ve been there through bad times and good
I’ll been there through dark and light
We’ve found many things to talk about
In this shadow play of wrong and right

You’ve made it through 80 journeys around the sun
With the laughter and the tears
And I feel certain that you find wisdom
In the exposure to the years

Happy revolution day
One more time around
I hope the laughter has outweighed the tears
I hope whatever you looked for you found

I wanted to write a little bit about what I’ve chosen to do for my solar battery bank because I think that the popular approach is less safe than what I’m doing.

Note that I am running a 12 volt system – but you could use this same approach for higher voltages. You would need to have breakers or fuses for midpack string equilization as well if you did. Feel free to ask me about this.

What I’ve done is first put a fuse on the positive terminal of every battery – this is a marine fuse, direct attaches to the battery post. Then I have 2 10 AWG wires going from each battery to ground, and 2 going to the battery breaker for that battery. Each battery has a 40 amp breaker.

The intention here is that if a battery were to get severely out of balance, it’s breaker would trip during charging because it would get a unreasonable amount of charge current. Every month or so I check to make sure I have no tripped breakers.

Beyond that, if a battery were to have a short circuit fault in it’s BMS, the fault current would be limited to what that battery could supply. I have seen many people advocating 4/0 or bus bars between batteries in 12 volt systems and I think this is potentially quite dangerous – especially in a large pack such as mine. (I have 12 280 AH batteries, for a total of 40kW of stored energy – if each battery contributed 250 amps of fault current, this would make for a eye popping 2500 amps.. I would be pulling bits of battery off the ceiling, not to mention that would be a very difficult arc to quench)

I would like to encourage DIY solar folks doing a battery bank to consider using my approach (many little wires, one breaker per battery) rather than the more popular (big bus bars between batteries) approach.

So, the US is currently involved in a war where, basically, we’re blowing up someone else because we cancelled a treaty we had made where they agreed not to develop a technology we already have. We cancelled the treaty. Then we got mad that they were developing the technology – which we already have – which we have already used – and bombed them. Then, we got mad and started a war with them. And started committing war crimes like threatening civilian topics.

I am ashamed to be a US citizen. We are thugs. We are a oil company with a army. We are on the side of wrong.

So, I’ve installed OpenClaw and tried to get it to do some basic things around here. So far, what the lesson for me has mostly been is how much smarter, more parallel, and more capable I am as compared with a ANN.

I also am convinced I could write a much better one.. so I’ve started sketching of design for PerlClaw. That may be my project for when I finish up KittenTrader, which is now paper trading and close to live trading.

I know in general being conservative means being unable to learn.

However, my hope is that as Donald Trump causes the next Great Depression, we will ALL learn that

1) Money in general is a bad idea
2) Conservative thoughts in general are a bad idea
3) the GOP’s “trickle down economics” don’t work
4) We should never again allow this particular type of non-fact-driven stupidity to drive our political decision making

No more religion
No more billionaires getting to be billionaires even though by becoming billionaires they have already proven they are morons.

(Look.. you’re reducing the amount of real tangible wealth EVERYONE INCLUDING YOU can have by deciding to use a trading token as a score counter)

So, most recently he has said ““Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have under invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under invested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change, and because it hasn’t changed, this is why President Trump’s policy in Greenland is what it is,””

But.. by any standard, being annexed by the USA would be a step *down*. They’d suddenly have

1) A healthcare system that is among the worst in the world AND robs the users blind
2) Very little social safety net

Trump, how about stopping being the worst human being in the world.. if indeed you aren’t actually Satan himself.. and try to improve the situation of Americans, who are in MUCH worse shape than Greenland. Among other things, your stupidity and incompetence is leading us into a great depression and you’ve also taken away our ability to walk without fear in our country. We never know when your brown shirt ICE thugs will smash our windows, beat us up, and demand our papers.

No one would want to live under your rule except your braindead, brainwashed GOP syncophants.

Sheer says – a little bit of explanation. I’m adding to my blog some of my most interesting conversations with ChatGPT as they happen

I asked (as a anonymous user): Based on everything you know, what is the highest priority thing to change about earth?
ChatGPT Responded:

If I had to name **one highest-priority thing**, based on the widest lens possible, it would be this:

**How humans make collective decisions across long time horizons.**

Not a single policy, technology, or moral failing—but the *decision-making system itself*.

### Why this matters most

Nearly every existential or global problem traces back to a mismatch between:

* **Short-term incentives** (profits, elections, status, comfort)
* **Long-term consequences** (climate stability, biodiversity, social trust, technological risk)

Examples:

* Climate change → we know what to do, but incentives reward delay.
* Ecosystem collapse → benefits are immediate, costs are deferred.
* Misinformation → attention beats truth in the short term.
* AI, biotech, nuclear risk → power advances faster than governance.
* Inequality → compounding systems outrun corrective mechanisms.

The issue isn’t ignorance or even malice—it’s that **our institutions evolved for a slower, smaller, less interconnected world**.

### What “changing this” actually means

Not one silver bullet, but a shift in how humanity:

* Values future generations (politically, economically, legally)
* Designs incentives (reward prevention, not just reaction)
* Coordinates globally (problems ignore borders; governance doesn’t)
* Measures success (beyond GDP, clicks, or quarterly growth)
* Builds wisdom alongside power

If decision systems improved, *many other problems become tractable*:

* Climate action becomes rational
* Technology becomes safer by default
* Cooperation outcompetes zero-sum behavior
* Trust becomes a strategic advantage

### A simpler way to say it

> **Earth’s biggest problem is that we are using Stone Age instincts, medieval institutions, and god-like technology at the same time.**

Fixing that alignment outranks any single environmental, political, or technological issue—because it determines whether we can solve the rest.

I just realized that ‘counterintelligence’ in the case of i.e. cointelpro is another word for lying.

Trump, of course, is the king of lying.. it’s probably the biggest part of how he’s destroying America.. I just realized how lying has been a GOP mainstay since the 50s..

So, the other day I had some extra time at John Wayne airport, which turns out to have a piano between terminals two and three which is public access. I started out just playing a few christmas carols, but then I started to get into it and played a short set including my modified version of Puff The Magic Dragon, Don’t Stop Believing, Southern Cross, Dust In The Wind, Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Joy To The World (3 dog night), Silent Night Blues (my reworking of Silent Night into 12 bar blues), Cats In The Cradle, and probably a few others I can’t remember. I got $25 set on the piano even though I hadn’t set out a hat. This is the most I have made from a solo live performance ever, and it did feel like another milestone in my quest for musical greatness. 😉

I also have ordered, and gotten the impressions for, a set of my own IEMs – I’ve tried using COTS IEMs but they always fall out of my ears. These will be the most expensive earphones I have ever owned, by far, but hopefully they will stay in my ears.

This is somewhat less of a celebration than most because it’s the first second hundred hour increment since my dad died, and he was a large part of my interest in music and desire to achieve some sort of facility with it. But, life goes on. I’m still trying for 2000..

Edit: Apparently the first was right after he died.. I just forgot about it somehow.