Re: Trump raid

The rumor of the day is that there were nuclear codes or some such nonsense.

Except that the sole source for starting this rumor that everyone has been running with is Bezos Deep State propaganda organ the Washington Post..  aka the Washington Compost.

They launder their propaganda and repeat each other.  No lie, too big to spread.

When in fact we have zero proof other than rumor-mongering

Dark times

 This darkness is part of the mourning process and stages of grief. You need to recognize it for what it is and work your way thru it.  The sooner you overcome the grief process, the sooner you can recover.  

There is no shortcut around the stages of grief.  It is what it is.  It is in our nature.

Past project builds.

Some of my past 3D printer builds.  Big industrial sized machines.  Did not sell well though.
 

Below is the first CNC router I ever built.  Scraped together my last 200 bucks to finish a order that needed machining.  good design, not so good execution due to lack of funds.  It is a open source design, you can get the file on thingiverse.  

If I did this again, I would laser some steel plate.   Co2 laser plywood would be the cheapest, but that is 1/4 inch thickness. so I would need 3-4 pieces laminated together.  Probably with some cloth in between like micarta style.  Bigger stepper motors

Convoy pstaging yard in Ahmadi Kuwait.  Each truck you see is in a line of 15-20 trucks behind that.  This is only a portion of the trucking that the US Military used in Iraq during the war.  There was at least 3x this amount on the road at any one time.

Joke post, but not far from the truth.

Trip to downtown Manila

 I took a trip downtown Manila yesterday.  I needed to get pneumatic fittings and could not risk buying wrong stuff online and screwing around on that.  So instead of spending 25 bucks online and potentially getting wrong size fittings, I went to a physical store.

The trip cost about 90 dollars, as I had my employee drive, gas and lunch, plus buying Japan made parts, not China.  

Observations:

I have never seen downtown Manila in a cleaner state.  Certainly not due to Marcos, rather the former mayor who while he was a preening corrupt jerk, who loved his publicity; managed to get some semblance of organization to the public spaces.  It was not too terrible. Yes there were the pockets of squatter rot, but I can say it was better than Detroit, or Chicongo, or Baltimore, or even the Bronx.

Traffic was light for a business day, and the cops were no longer standing on the corners running their bribe scams.  They were simply directing traffic.  Amazing.

I got to the industrial supply shop, and there was no parking in Chinatown as expected.  So my guy circled the block until the purchase was done.  He made 3 trips.  

It was a good thing I did buy there because I found that my air valve was under sized and will restrict air flow to the pneumatic cylinder.  I need to find a much bigger unit as the inside of my valve was only 1/4 inch and I need a half inch valve.  Faster inject= less chance the plastic will freeze before the mold is full.

On the way back it was lunch time already.  I passed by one of the few Taco Bell restaurants in the country, so I had my first Taco Bell in several years.  

WOW, the prices there were expensive.  16 bucks for 3 people.  American prices.  We did not get much either.  Just enough for the hunger.  No more bean and cheese burrito, and everything was aimed to charge extra.  Service was terrible.  long line out the door.  3 registers, only one cashier who also was getting the orders from the kitchen.   Bathroom was in bad need of new fixtures and a remodel.  Clean but very worn.

No fire sauce, just  mild and it was more like the idea of hot sauce than any sort of flavor.  Chili, cumin, in water thickened with xanthan gum.

I do not think I will return to Taco Bell for a long time.  

Back to the shop, I got the pneumatic parts assembled, tested.  Awaiting some machined bits, and a final paint of the frame to test and put into production.  

I then turned attention to the new dual shaft shredder.  That on the other hand was a shit show.  My solid model file provided by Precious Plastic is totally different than the DXF files for the single shaft machine I make.  Which I suspected, but it was very far off.  The bearing bolt holes were so far off as to make the undertaking a bit useless.  I need to laser cut 2 new steel plates, and probably just start over with the DXF 2D files of my current single shaft machine.

I have some bigger projects to bid on soon that will require a more idiot resistant shredding machine than my granulator, and one that will work outdoors on the beach for beach cleanups.  

Next week, gonna check out a beach for a upcoming ocean plastic cleanup drive funded by a beverage company.  Have several of these upcoming, and I can get the plastic from the cleanups for free.  Already washed in the ocean.  With plastic scrap costing me almost 90 cents a kilo, anything free that is usable I will take.  Since that beverage company has funded roughly 75% of my income this last year indirectly, I might as well get in directly with some trash pickup, and get the publicity points too.

Anyways, the way I look at it, there is nothing wrong with advocating for litter collection.  It is when some of these groups go off the rails with the current WEF nonsense I have issue with.  

Especially here, the litter problem is mind boggling.  While on the boat I was counting a piece of plastic trash going by every 20 seconds on average in the open ocean.  In Manila bay it was a brown soup of sewage and plastic trash.  I seen sewage ponds cleaner than that port and smelled better.  

Compared to 5 years ago when I first started taking the boat, the plastic soup was only near the cities, now it has grown to the open ocean.  At my buddys beach resort on one of the farthest west Philippine islands, I collected bottles from China, Vietnam, Malayasia, and the Philippines.  Plus there were tons of discarded Chinese fishing nets.

re-work job is done

 We busted our ass for 3 days, me and 4 others to pressure wash off the old labels, and re-label the couple pallets of wine.  About 300 bottles are not sellable in the normal sense.  Dented lids, and under-fill.  

No tax stamp so they can not be sold.  Still drinkable.  However the stuff is Catholic communion wine and VERY sweet.  As in you need to dilute it with 50% water to be drinkable.    Maybe turn it into grape jelly and sell it?  It would make a nice grape jelly.

Everything else goes back to the distributor, new labels, bottles shiny clean and polished with a cloth.  

We all were absolutely exhausted at the end of this task.  

Wife showed up on day 3 to monkey-wrench things as per her custom.  It really pissed off the workers with the snarky side comments.  

Meanwhile no bugs in the house for now.  Citronella oil, neem oil, peppermint oil, and then a bottle of some sort of menthol with peppermint oil used to rub on sore shoulders diluted and sprayed.

My house smells like a massage spa.  

More of that stuff inbound ordered cause I expect this to be a long haul task to spray and clean.  200ml bottle of pure citronella oil, in transit.  

Meanwhile my pneumatic cylinders for the new injection molders arrived yesterday.  They were several weeks coming from China.  Very unusual the long transit time.  Today a trip downtown is required.  I need to get the fittings and hoses.  That part will require a test fit of the bits together.  Metric and imperial threads on all this stuff.  

Meanwhile the shop hums along making plastic lumber, and injection molding.  7 bucks of lumber every 15 min comes out of the machine.  Minus the overhead, labor, electricity, and plastic costs.  I started buying plastic by the ton last week.  My first one ton order in a single go.

re Trump raid.  Not much to add there.  Shit show.

CCP owned phone company doing illegal stuffs in Phils

 

33.5 million USD.

DITO is the CCP owned phone company that stuck the fortress outside my shop.  Is it any wonder they doing illegal stuffs?  Any excuse the CCP can make up to do bad stuff, they do.

Fighting the bugs and China invasion thoughts

 Well, first off, permethrin, is not working.  The bugs are immune to the stuff.  Likely because here in the Philippines pemethrin is the common bug spray but it is sold as a 0.015 concentration.  Small dose which the bugs are now immune to.

So I have brought out the big guns.  Citronella oil, neem oil mix and Diatomaceous earth and borax.  

The Citronella oil and Neem oil did the job on the live bugs for 2 days.  But then some eggs hatch and back to square one.  I have run out of citronella oil spray.  I got a liter of the diluted stuff which did 2 treatments with the neem oil.  The wood floors have never been more shiny.  

All the bedding gets washed daily with borax, so that is not a source of bugs.  

Unfortunately the wife has shown up back at the house.  So I am suspecting that she is moving the  bugs around the house.  I found a pillow from another room in my bed, and then more bugs last night.  I am unable to keep her out legally, so there she is.  There is no divorce law here.  

I have been trying to do a cordon and section attack in the house.  I suspect that my room was good but the spare bedroom has some bugs.  Unfortunately the wife moved her shit all around the house without a proper spray so there is that also.  

I also bought a commercial clothes steamer at Ace Hardware. (yes we have Ace here and all the major USA Hardware chains)  

So there are much less bugs than before, until I get a couple weeks without seeing one, I can not declare victory.  

Meanwhile in the shop.  Plastic molding orders up, machine orders are zip-zero-nada.  

I am taking side jobs to make ends meet.  Stuff outside my normal course of work.  

This week the side job is removing water damaged labels from a couple pallets of imported alcohol, and re-labeling them.  It is a combo of the distributor pulling a fast one by trying to stick the manufacturer with old stock, wrinkled labels from the EU factory, and some moisture damage cause the container sat on a ship for many months in Singapore due to the cargo delays.    

We pressure washed off the labels, and are reworking that by hand.  There is a good amount of damaged lids, and such from rough handling (likely from the distributor) that is now unsellable.  It has been a hard 2 day weekend processing that stuff.  Everyone was soaked from the pressure washer.

More parts arriving for the new injection molding machines.  With any luck I can get a test run by Friday.  That is if I keep on top of it.  I may have to make a trip downtown to get pneumatic fittings though which will waste the good part of a day.

Re:China  Well I can not predict the mond of the CCP.  China is really screwed with a major mortagage payment boycott by people who got hosed by scammy real estate deals in the ghost cities.  That is the sole reason for the ghost cities.  MASSIVE real estate scams backed by the CCP. 

The latest CCP display of force was kind of clownshoes when you think about it.  Tanks on the beaches and moving around ballistic missiles?  Those things can hit Alaska, so what purpose does it serve to move them 20 km closer to Taiwan?  What are the tanks supposed to do on the Chinese beach exactly?  

It is monsoon season.  Sept 25 I am hearing is the next day to look out for. Occult day.  No idea what is coming.  Taiwan, digital Yuan, something coming.  Nothing good.    Sept 25 is near the time for the monsoon to change and the good weather to start.

That said, Matt Bracken pointed out that taking Taiwan will be 100x more difficult that taking Okinawa.  More so because the US troops had 4 years of practice before taking on Okinawa, and the CCP has ZERO practice.  Also the CCP was unable to take the small islands next to its cost despite attempts for decades.  Now they want to take on a nut to crack.that is tougher.