Chasing Down an Old Photo

When I looked at my computer this morning the background was the old photo below that my father took on a family trip in the summer of 1971. I decided to see if I could find where the photo was taken.

The Glorious Benefits of Tariffs

You may not realize it, but your household is “getting ripped off” by the rest of the US economy. That’s because you run a trade deficit with respect to everyone else. Unless you are an owner-farmer, or make your living as a self-employed crafter, you import more goods into your household than you export. You run a trade deficit. You likely work for a business of some sort and supply labor in exchange for wages. This means you run a service surplus. But the measure of being ripped off apparently depends on the value of tangible goods you purchase vs the value of those you sell. So you’re almost certainly being ripped off.

I’m willing to bet that the manufacturing base in your household is close to non-existent. You may cook meals, clean your home, and do some small DYI jobs, but these are services, not goods. You should have a vibrant manufacturing sector where you make your own soap, grow your own food, raise your own cows, pigs, and chickens for meat (if you eat meat). You should not buy a car or car parts, but make and build your own. Your house should be one you have built yourself and any additions as well. This is the definition of prosperity. This is the way your great, great grandparents lived with such high standards of living.

How can you achieve this lofty goal? By imposing tariffs on purchases of goods outside your household. How much does the local grocery store sell to you? How much do they buy from you? The larger that difference, the higher the tariff you should impose. For every dollar you spend on groceries, you should charge your household a minimum of 10 cents. And using the exemplary formula released by the White House, probably something closer to a dollar, or even more! Continue using your current budgeting, but for every purchase you or any family member makes, impose this tariff. Don’t worry, the grocery store pays for it.

This will incentivize your household to return to the good old days when households were great and almost all production of goods and services occurred there. Should these measures prove insufficient to raise your standard of living, look a bit further afield. Start with you local community. Tariff and other trade barriers could bring the benefits of protectionism to you and your neighbors. Do you make cars in your town? If not, you are all being ripped off. Impose a tax on all cars that are not built in your town. Ditto for all other manufactured goods. Then look further to your state. Do you produce your own oil, your own electricity, your own food? Or do you import these things from other states? Don’t let those devious out-of-staters keep ripping you off. A tariff on goods from another state may be unconstitutional, but it appears there are way around such a minor inconvenience.

You may be reluctant to begin this journey to prosperity because you are addicted to the vice of cheap goods from outside. In the pursuit of freedom, perhaps the government should begin imposing this household tariff regime on your household, your town, and your state.

Tariffs are truly the key to prosperity not only for nations, but for states, counties, towns, and households. Onward to economic greatness!

Below is a translation provided by ChatGPT of the above text into Elizabethan English for anyone struggling with modern English. ;-)

The Right Honourable Benefits of Tariffs
4th Day of April, Anno Domini 2025

Perchance thou know’st it not, yet thy household is most grievously “cozened” by the whole of the realm’s economy. Forsooth, thou dost run a trade deficit with all others. Unless thou art a husbandman of thine own lands, or makest thy livelihood as a free craftsman, thou dost import into thy household more goods than thou dost export. Yea, verily, thou dost run a trade deficit. It is like that thou servest a master, be it merchant or lord, and dost labour in exchange for wages, whereby thou dost hold a service surplus. Yet the measure of being thus beguiled is reckoned not by thy labours, but by the worth of the tangible wares thou dost purchase set against those thou dost sell. In sooth, thou art well nigh assuredly cozened!

I dare wager that the manufacture of goods in thy household is nigh unto naught. Perchance thou dost prepare repasts, cleanse thy dwelling, and make shift with small labours of thine own hand, yet these be but services and not goods. Shouldst thou not hold a most prosperous manufactory within thy house, where thou dost fashion thine own soap, till thy fields for sustenance, and raise kine, swine, and fowls for meat (if such be thy diet)? Shouldst thou not forsake the purchase of coaches and their parts, and instead hew and forge thine own? Should not thy house be built by thine own hand, and each stone and timber placed by thee alone? Lo, this is prosperity indeed! Thus lived thy great-grandsires, who, by their own industry, did attain a standard of living most high.

How mayst thou achieve this most noble end? By placing tariffs upon all goods brought into thy household from without. How much doth the grocer sell unto thee? And how much doth he buy from thee? The greater this unbalance, the weightier must be the tariff thou dost levy. For every shilling spent upon victuals, thou must demand, at the least, a tenth part in tariff. Nay, by the reckoning of His Majesty’s Council, it were better yet to demand a full shilling more, or even twain! Continue in thy current accounts, yet impose this levy upon each purchase made by thee or thy kin. And be not afeared, for the grocer himself shall bear the burden thereof!

Thus shalt thou be moved to return to those halcyon days of yore, when households were puissant and all the fruits of industry were wrought therein. Should these measures yet fail to lift thee unto prosperity, cast thy gaze further. Look first unto thy neighbours. Let tariffs and trade barriers bring forth the blessings of protection to thee and thine. Doth thy town forge carriages? If not, then thou and all thine are despoiled! Lay a levy upon all coaches not wrought in thy town. And so with all manner of goods and wares. Then look unto thy shire. Dost thou produce thine own oil, thine own candles, thine own sustenance? Or dost thou import these from other shires? Let not these cunning foreigners beyond thy borders make sport of thee! A tariff upon wares from another shire may be set at odds with the law, yet there be ways to circumvent such trifling hindrances.

Perchance thou art loath to embark upon this journey toward prosperity, for thou art ensnared in the vice of cheap goods from abroad. If so, then in the name of liberty, should not the Crown itself impose this noble household tariff upon thee, thy town, and thy shire?

Tariffs are, in sooth, the key to prosperity, not only for kingdoms, but for shires, boroughs, hamlets, and even the meanest of households. Forward unto economic majesty!

Pokarekare Ana

Pokarekare Ana is a Maori folk song written down during the early years of World War I by Maori soldiers longing for home. Again, I ran across this song while playing as the Maori in Sid Meier's Civilization VI. The song kept playing over and over in the background along with a haka, and eventually I looked it up to find out more about it.

Hard Times Come Again No More

I've been playing Sid Meier's Civilization VI and am enthralled by the music. My son, Evan, told me the music for the United States was particularly good, so I gave it a listen.  The song chosen is a composition from 1954 by the iconic American composer, Stephen Foster. Wikipedia says:

It was published in New York City by Firth, Pond & Co. in 1854 as Foster's Melodies No. 28. Well-known and popular in its day, both in the United States and Europe, the song asks the fortunate to consider the plight of the less fortunate and includes one of Foster's favorite images: "a pale drooping maiden".

The song became very popular during the Civil War and inspired one rather witty parody entitled, "Hard Tack Come Again No More," I'm putting a link to a recording of this at the end of the post.

Waltzing Matilda

Bear with me for a bit. I've been on a bit of a gaming binge lately, playing Sid Meier's Civilization VI. One of the nice features of that game is the background music that takes (usually) a folk melody from each of the civilizations in the particular game you're playing and which advances in complexity as your civilization grows. For Australia, that melody is Waltzing Matilda.

Midna Memorial

This sweet, gentle soul passed away on September 19th.  Grief makes it too hard to write, but here are some memories.

Our Cats

We are currently living with five felines that have domesticated us.  In addition, we are fostering three kittens until August 7th.  Since Yeongmi and I married we've had two other cats that are no longer with us.  We've also fostered eight cats (counting the kittens), all since we moved back to Utah in September of 2023.

Teddy, Moki, and Midna  2024

A Roman Denarius

I received a gift today from my son of a Roman Denarius coin. It is purported to be a silver coin issued in Rome between 211 and 238 BC.  The silver denarius was first issued in 211 BC as part of a coinage reform.  It contained approximately 4.5 grams of silver and was worth 10 asses, hence the name meaning "ten".

The inscriptions on the coin lead me to believe this coin is from a later date during the imperial era.

You Need to Know about the Hundredth Meridian

The Hundredth Meridian was identified by John Wesley Powell (a fascinating character in his own right) as a geographic tipping point separating the wet Eastern US from the dry West.  This has all sorts of implications for ecology and social structure.  Here is a fascinating YouTube video on the subject.

Basically, the dry West is due to the rain shadow from the Rocky Mountains (very broadly defined).  East of the 100th meridian, the land was wet and dominated by forests that were not dissimilar to those with which most European immigrants were familiar.  To the west of this line the land was dominated by grasslands and desert, to which the settlement patterns adopted in the East were not well suited.

"At the Hundredth Meridian" is also a great song by The Tragically Hip.

Domesticated Foxes

Apparently foxes were domesticated thousands of years ago. I guess it never stuck like it did with cats and dogs. Gizmodo has an article that a site in Spain had foxes buried with humans.

"Researchers from several institutes and universities analyzed bones collected at the burial site. They studied the isotopes found in the collagen preserved in the bones, which can provide insights into the diets of individuals. In human bones, we can learn about the diet of an adult in the last five to 10 years of life. In young adult dogs, the diet data spans from six months to three years."

During the 1950s in the USSR, there was a successful systematic attempt to domesticate the silver fox.  The researchers also successfully bred silver foxes for "violence"; a sort of anti-domestication.

The 점심 - Dim Sum Connection

The Korean word for lunch (점심) comes from the same Chinese characters as Dim Sum (點心 or 点心). In Cantonese it is pronounced dim sam, and in Mandarin it is pronounced dian xin. In Japanese they pronounce it as tenshin and it means "snack" . In Vietnamese it is diem tam and means "breakfast". Apparently the lunch meaning came through Eastern Chinese dialects, as in the Shanghai dialect ti xin, is often used for "lunch". In most dialects of Chinese it means "snack", "light refreshment" or "pastry". The word dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618 - 906 A.D.).

Artistic Styles in Craiyon / DALL-E mini

An old man holding a dachshund

George Washington

Gandalf

Big Bird

All of the images above were created by an AI known as Craiyon or DALL-E mini.  This is a simplified version of DALL-E, a neural net that converts text into images.

I am impressed with how the program manages to imitate various art styles, so I am going to show a series of generated images that use the same prompts as above, but also add an artist or artistic style.  Some of the images are quite impressive, while others are odd or silly.  Click on any of the images below to view a larger version.

I picked the subjects because "An old man holding a dachshund" is fairly specific, but open to a lot of artistic interpretation.  "George Washington" is a historical figure with a well-known image, so much less open to interpretation.  "Gandalf" is a fictional character, but the image from the movies played by Ian McKellen is, by far, the most widely known.  Finally, "Big Bird" just looked really awesome when painted by Caravaggio.

You Think You Have Translation Problems?

In his book, Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose notes the following translation sequence occurred when Lewis and Clark met the Wallawalla Indians in April 1806. Lewis speaks in English George Drouillard or Francis Labiche, French Canadian soldiers in the expedition, translate this into French. Toussaint Charbonneau, a 45-year-old French Canadian trapper who speaks no English, translates this into Hidatsa, a language he has picked up in the course of trading with the Indians. Sacagawea, Charbonneau’s fifteen-year-old Shoshone wife who had been captured by the Hidatsa four years earlier, translates this into Shoshone. A Shoshone woman held captive by the Wallawallas translates this into Wallawalla, a language related to Nez Perce. This was considered an improvement over the sign-language they had been using with the Indians further west.

Computer Case Mod for "Gondor"

 

I assembled my first custom-made desktop computer several years ago when I was still living in Utah. My youngest son, Alan, had actually put it together a year or two before that, but he was upgrading and I wanted something better than the MacBook BYU had issued me as a work computer.

A DALL-E Short Story

 

This story starts with the simple inquiry to DALL-E mini, shown above.

Imagining Feelings with DALL-E Mini

 

DALL-E mini is a app that converts text into images.  It's based on a larger neural net called (not surprisingly) DALL-E.  The main public usage of DALL-E mini seems to be the generating of silly memes like those linked in this article.

One really interesting use, however, is to see the kind of images it generates when you type in feelings and emotions that are rarely associated with a specific image.  The images above are from "existential angst."

Building Westmarch, my Home NAS

 

A couple of months ago my main desk top computer, which I built two years ago at the begining of the COVID pandemic quit working.  Diagnosing the problem took me down a real rabbit-hole of possible parts problems and I ended up with some extra working parts at the end of that journey.  (The problem turned out to be a bad HDD.)  As a result I decided to see if I could cobble together a working home NAS.

There's something about ...rungus!

 

Not long ago a comedian named Guy Kelly typed in the nonsense name, Crungus, into DALL-E mini and got the horrifying result above.  DALL-E mini is a app that converts text into images.  It's based on a larger neural net called (not surprisingly) DALL-E.

What is a Mergopus?

 

Is this a mergopus?

What exactly is a mergopus?  Try searching on your favorite internet search engine and you will find no information on the word.  This is because it is a nonsense word I made up a few days ago.

Family Cars

Looking through old slides and other photos, I saw several automobiles that I vividly remember from my childhood.  Also some others that just look really cool, but which predate my arrival on this planet.

Ford F-Series Pickup 1st Generation owned by Russell and LaVon Phillips