i suppose I don’t enjoy these as much as I used to, but still funny. From Texas Monthly.

The 2026 Bum Steer Awards

Mentioned back in August that the tariffs / trade wars were hitting US spirits manufacturing (Canadian Whiskey). Today the BBC reports that Jim Beam distillery is pausing production for as much as a year. Jim Beam is owned by Japanese company Suntori, but employs 1000 in Kentucky.

Bourbon maker Jim Beam halts production at main distillery for a year

An interesting take on the current AI boom (yes, there have been others) from the London Review of Books. I consider Nvidia perhaps the last tech company. By that I mean they sell technology. All of the recent crop of “tech companies” really aren’t. Companies like Facebook and Google sell advertising. They are media companies more like magazines, newspapers or television. The second part of the article goes on to Sam Altman and OpenAI. I consider him a pure film flam man. I’ll leave it at that. Spoiler: the title of the article refers to Altman.

King of Cannibal Island

As ICE descends on my old hometown of New Orleans I got to wondering about the numbers. The math seems pretty simple. ICE aims at 3,000 arrests per month. There are 21,000 ICE agents. Math is easy, it’s 1/7 arrests per month per agent, or on arrest every seven months per agent. Less than two a year per agent.. Really? Somebody check my math. This can’t be right.

Update:  thanks to my friend Paul for correcting my numbers.  It’s a goal of 3000 arrests per day, not per month.  This is 1/7 of an arrest per agent per day, not per month.  Or one per week per agent.  Better, but still a very low number IMO.

My old neighborhood in Minneapolis. This is outrageous.

U.S. citizen offered to show I.D. but was arrested by immigration officers in Cedar-Riverside

Got my solar working with full monitoring. We have 7.5 kW but our power bills are much lower here in New Mexico compared to Texas. The house is smaller and probably better insulated and the weather is milder. The real killer in Texas was air conditioning in the summer.

In our old house I had removed the flow constrictors from most of the showers and the sink in the kitchen. Probably illegal in some places, but surely not in Texas. At the new house here in New Mexico the shower needed a little extra oomph. Rather than be a scofflaw and modify the existing shower head (there may be laws here) I just bought a nice old fashioned Speakman 2.5 GPM shower head. Weighs a ton, unlike the little plastic toy I was replacing. Made all the difference. I’m not even sure I use more water since I’m in and out of the shower in no time now.

It seems the bathtub also had a flow reducer. Not certain what the thinking is here. Maybe just hoping you will give up and take a bath with and inch or two of (now cold) water instead of waiting for the tub to fill. I removed the reducer and the results were spectacular. Except the water was now grey and the bottom of the tub filled with grit.

I suppose my water line needed flushing even though this is a somewhat new house. My water heater stopped making that death rattle noise though. Surely a good thing. But our recirculation pump was making very bad noises. I got the name of a plumber from a neighbor.

After a few bathtubs full. The water is clean again. I suppose I flushed the water line for the whole neighborhood. The pump noise also settled down. All is well. I’m done with plumbing for a while.

The current administration has published its National Security Strategy. It’s a retreat from the world stage, basically America’s Brexit.

TL;DR: the US is no longer interested in Asia or Europe (and presumably Africa too). The US will concentrate on the Western Hemisphere. The Atlantic Magazine has a slightly different take.

Trump’s Security Strategy Is Incoherent Babble

As China moves forward with EVs, the rest of the world finds themselves in battle for second place with legacy ICE cars. Good luck with this Detroit (and Stuttgart and Wolfsburg).

China floods the world with gasoline cars it can’t sell at home

Was thinking about the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project of the 1980s. It was a very large project aimed at producing an AI Supercomputer. It is all but forgotten today. It did shake up the US computer industry, which feared the Japanese would do to the computer market what they had done to the automobile market in the 1970s (produce a better, cheaper product). MCC in Austin was formed as a direct reaction to the Japanese FGSC.