I’ve been busy inside The Gulch repacking items from big boxes and containers into smaller ones that fit through the attic door in one part of The Gulch and the hatchway/stairway in another part of The Gulch. The bigger boxes were too heavy for one person to safely handle, and the bigger containers were too big to fit through the attic entrances, or too unwieldly or too heavy for one person to handle, or both. Much of what made it into the attics came from the storage unit I emptied out at the end of March. (I still have one box sitting in the garage at the ex’s house that I will be taking care of during this coming week.)
I did make quite a bit of progress but I am nowhere near done. I still have to go though the garage to winnow out stiff we no longer use. Some of that is cookware which hasn’t been used in years and will make its way to our dump’s “Goody Shack”. From what I’ve been told, stuff like that won’t be sitting there long as it seems to be one of the more popular types of items people are looking for. Some of the rest of the stuff we no longer need will either be recycled or dumped as trash. I am trying to make room in the garage so I can rearrange things which include moving some shelves to make room so I can park the trusty RAM 1500 in the garage. I can’t do that at the moment because about a foot-and-a-half of the rear of the pickup sticks out which means I can’t close the garage door.
I am now a couple of steps closer to getting the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout back into the water. The first step was paying the winterization and storage fees and the second step was scheduling a pickup date when BeezleBub and I will tow the boat to his place so we can perform final prep which includes any cleanup required, installation of a new fire extinguisher, and loading all of the boating gear – mooring lines, anchors, PFDs, cushions, and other items - back into the boat. Once that’s done all I will need to do is put on the new registration stickers on the bow and it will be ready to launch. What day that will be is something BeezleBub and I will need to discuss.
==++++++==
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about dumping Windows, here’s a video that covers Germany’s decision to ban Windows 11 because of the privacy issues that Microsoft ignores.
==++++++==
Since I mentioned recycling above, I figured it might be worthwhile to link this post at Instapundit which in turn links to another blog posts that gets into the economics of recycling.
It looks into whether recycling is worth it. I can certainly see where recycling some materials like metals – iron, steel, copper, aluminum, etc. - makes perfect sense. But what about plastics? Are all of them worth recycling or only certain ones? What about glass? Paper? Cardboard?
My little town used to do single-stream recycling, meaning that for the most part everything went into a single dumpster. The only thing we required going into a separate dumpster was cardboard because it otherwise took up a lot of space in the dumpster and partially full dumpsters would be hauled away, but we still had to pay the cost of a full dumpster being picked up. Even so, single-stream recycling cost our town far more than anything we might receive for our recyclables.
Once our town changed over to separate-stream recycling, meaning certain plastics went into one place, paper into another, paper into another, cardboard into yet another one, and glass into another. (We don’t except all plastics.) Aluminum beverage cans went into yet another place, but other aluminum cans – cat food cans, for example – and tin cans went into another. Steel and iron went into other very large dumpsters. We also started accepting Styrofoam as we could process it on-site which greatly reduced its volume.
Our town went from losing money, meaning our tax dollars were paying the cost for recycling, to making money which means our recycling system was paying for itself as we received full value for our recyclables and we didn’t have to pay to have them hauled away.
Other towns will charge their residents to dump their trash and recyclables, usually requiring their cars or trucks to be weighed coming in and going out. This determines how much they pay as the fees are based upon the weight of the materials deposited. Cities, big and small, likely do curbside pickup of recyclables. That is usually paid for either through taxes or through the purchase and use of the properly colored bags.
There is no perfect system that covers all recyclables and does so profitably. Some recyclables have no market or must be paid for separately only to be landfilled because of that lack of a market.
==++++++=
Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me in the least.
France: New Real Estate Browser Extension Provides Immigration, Insecurity, and Islamization Data Directly to Property Listings
A French website and real estate browser extension for Chrome is promoting an unusual data offering, which includes information on immigration levels, insecurity, and Islamization rates — all factors that real estate buyers may want to take into consideration before they make an investment.I have a feeling this will spread well beyond France. I expect we’ll see something like this in the UK and Germany next and for the same reason.
The OVMF assigns various scores “automatically in real estate ad photos,” according to the company behind the extension, which is free and collects no data from its users, according to the website.
The OVMF also promises to highlight certain facilities in the area or neighborhood, which some real estate buyers may want to be aware of, such as asylum accommodations, troubled QPV districts, and the number of mosques in an area.
The OVMF site appears to have an enormous amount of data, such as the number of migrants in accommodation facilities, the number of different religious groups, and immigration levels for each neighborhood.
==++++++==
From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this:
Neighborhood Watch Signs Taken Down For Being Expressions Of Exclusion
Yes. You read that right. I even checked it three times just to make sure I hadn’t misread it or that it was some kind of typo.
Neighborhood watch programs help prevent crime. But preventing crime is racist.Excuse me? Preventing crime is RACIST?? What kind of woke B.S. is this?
Consequently, as the New York Post reports,Yeah. Right.
A woke Michigan city shelled out a staggering $18,000 to rip down hundreds of neighborhood watch signs after lawmakers branded them racist.Neighborhood watch signs are “expressions of exclusion,” according to Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor.
I wonder if there’s something in the water causing this mass delusion? What’s the cure for this kind of asinine reasoning?
Maybe we have to nuke it from orbit just to make sure…
==++++++==
And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the rain is playing hide-and-seek, spring cleaning is continuing apace, and where Monday is coming around to screw up the weekend…again.