I was shopping at Walmart in Bernalillo today and noticed all the fancy pricing tags on the shelves. I was wondering if this was to rapidly change prices, but the price was printed in ink, next to a QR code.

I decided to try a QR code and it brought up the Walmart app and the exact product I had scanned. Ok.  Kinda cool.  But then I saw you could also search for items and find out what aisle they were on.  And if that wasn’t enough you could bring up a map of the store that would show exactly where on the aisle the item was.

Even so, with 200,000 items on shelves at my local Walmart Superstore I still sometimes couldn’t find what I was looking for.  When we couldn’t find gluten free baking flour, I went to the app and to the map.  I found myself gazing at all sorts of baking flour.  I was definitely in the right place, but still didn’t see what I was looking for.

Then I noticed a button in the app to blink a light on this product.  I pressed it and a little blue LED in the price tag on the shelf started blinking!  There was my gluten free baking powder (right in front of my face).

There also seems to be some sort of AI helper called Sparkey that I haven’t tried yet.  I imagine I should be able to make a shopping list, have it sorted by aisle and lead me right to each item by blinking its light.

Trump has played the press, at least the US press, from the very beginning.  And he is still doing it.  I gave up on the US press a long time ago and get my news from mostly overseas outlets (BBC, France24, El Pais and Al Jazeera).  Here is the article every news outlet should have written, but didn’t.  You will also note that until the day after the election all the media outlets had this election as “tight” or “close”.  It wasn’t.  Ever.

What’s missing from every story about Tuesday’s anti-Trump rout

The well water where we live here in New Mexico has lots of dissolved silica.  It looks more or less like calcium scale, but pretty much bonds permanently to glass.  At first I thought it was just calcium and tried all sorts of products to clean it off.  But nothing worked.  So our drinking glasses, shower door, toilets and even exterior windows are getting damaged.  Not much hope until this recent paper.

What really surprised me was this line from the paper, which is aimed at industrial silica removal:

“About half of all fresh water withdrawn daily in the US, ∼500 billion gal/day, is used by thermoelectric power generation plants”

Removal of dissolved silica from industrial waters using inorganic ion exchangers

An election story lost in the Blue Tsunami news, but maybe just as important.  Basically no more corporate money in elections in deep Red Montana.  It passed by a 2:1 margin.  Hawaii has also done something similar.  I suppose we will see what the Supreme Court has to say about this one.  From Truth Out.

Montana Overwhelmingly Votes to Ban Corporate Cash From Political Campaigns

The polls were wrong, often by double digits.  Voting sites were also way off.  The news media was caught completely by surprise.  Lots of people I know saw the pushback and the enthusiasm, but wondered how deep it went. Now we know.  Also lots of dogs didn’t bark.  No shenanigans (or very few) at the polls.  Concessions came early and quietly from even entrenched Republicans.  And if people spending the money had seen this coming it could (should) have been a bigger bloodbath.  Florida, Mississippi and other states could have easily joined the Blue Tsunami, as it’s being called.  I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it.  The American People surprise me again, this time in a good way.   I’ll let Heather Cox-Richardson do the analysis.

November 4, 2026

Lots of “firsts” in the elections last night.  I was going to list them here but I would be copying the whole article.  There was some conventional thinking that Democrats should stick to running “old white men” after Kamala Harris’s loss.  Seems that wasn’t at all necessary.  From Al Jazeera.

Firsts for women and minorities in US midterm elections

The AI future is gonna be weird.  From IBM Think newsletter.

Why every AI writes the same story about a lighthouse keeper named Elias Thorne

From WaPo.  Link below from a PDF available on-line.

I went to Mexico to test-drive the electric cars
Americans can’t buy; here’s what I saw

A local story, in the UK press.  We call them The Greggs.  Ads on TV all day and night.  We need to tax these folks if they want to be involved in politics.

New Mexico megachurch endorses Republican candidates, testing federal ban

Today I saw that Gillette razors had plummeted in popularity.  It seems this was all connected to an on-line ad around 2019 leading to a boycott.  I never heard of the ad, never saw it, never heard of the boycott.  I dumped Gillette because their products SUCK.

Let me repeat that.  Their Products were EXPENSIVE and TERRIBLE.

Since 1980 or so, when I started buying my own razors I couldn’t believe how terrible an experience shaving was.  Blades (from Gillette) lasted a few shaves.  Sometimes they came out of the box dull enough to be useless.  And they weren’t cheap.  They were usually locked up at the drug store and had to be retrieved by the store clerks.

Over the years I tried some tempered blades (standard Gillette blades soaked in liquid nitrogen).  They were better, but even more expensive.  Bought a few sharpening gadgets.  Some improvement but not much.

This is going to sound like a promotion but I have no connection to Harrys except as a customer.  My wife bought me some Harrys.  They work great and last forever.  Like months. It’s almost surreal compared to the old Gillettes. I often wondered if it was just me because I never heard a mention about this, either the crappieness of the old Gillette blades or the better quality of Harrys.

I feel I spent decades ripped off by what was more or less a big American monopoly.  Good riddance to Gillette.

Gillette faces backlash and boycott over ‘#MeToo advert’