Still making my way through old family photos left to me by my father. He was a photographer, so there is lots to wade through. He also wasn’t very well organized, which in some ways actually simplifies the job. I’m almost done with all the old family 8mm movies. I have had several hours of film professionally scanned. I also have an older model Wolverine 35mm film scanner which works well for slides and negatives. For photos I have a flatbed scanner / printer, but the idea of running literally thousands of prints through that system was a non-starter. I had taken to using my phone camera on an inverted tripod and just uploading the files, uncropped.

Recently my wife happened across the new Google Document Scanner app for our Android phones called Stack. A nice little app that includes OCR. I started using it before realizing it only saves PDF. I looked around again and found the new Google PhotoScan app. I have to say, I’m sold.

The PhotoScan app is made to use as a handheld photo scanner that takes multiple photos and stitches, crops and adjusts automatically. I didn’t need or want this sort of function. Luckily you can turn it all off and just do straight JPEG capture with automatic cropping. You need to be a little careful to get the cropping to work. The border has to be somewhat narrow with nothing else visible. I used a large white board as a background. Then all the photos get automatically uploaded to Google Photos without taking up any space on your phone. Just what I was looking for. Did over 1,500 photos over two days. Could have done more, but much of that time was spent learning about getting cropping to work the way I wanted.

I was wondering about the history of slavery in the British Empire, since this seems to be the root of American slavery. Britain declared slavery illegal in 1773, just three years before the American colonies started their rebellion. Somehow I was never taught about this in school. The story is more complicated, with a history going back centuries. A good, short read in wiki on the subject.

Slavery in Britain

Everyone seems to be worried about inflation all of a sudden. I’m skeptical. First I don’t really think 5% or 6% inflation is even a problem. Well, not for most Americans anyway. Inflation is bad for people with cash and actually good for people with debt. If you have a debt, including a mortgage, then inflation is your friend.

The job market is also suddenly hot. Many people near retirement seem to be retiring early, and sadly about a million Americans have died from COVID-19. Add in the folks who have been disabled by long COVID and there is certainly a hole in the labor market. I have even been able to personally witness some hiring managers and H.R. people flailing in this new environment. Workers are picking their jobs, instead of companies getting to pick their workers. It almost makes me want to go out and apply for jobs, just to torment those who used to torment me.

Of course this sort of thing is “bad for business” (in other words “good for workers”). An old Class Warrior like Alan Greenspan would have shut this all down by now, jacked up interest rates, and had Americans begging for a job, like in the good old days. We will see how long the assault of the Inflationistas can hold out. A good read from an otherwise neutral party, which I confess, I am not.

Everyone is worried about inflation, except the bond market

I am surprised by the lack of, well, celebration, on the passage of the new US infrastructure bill. It seems to be a pretty good thing all around and seems long overdue. Perhaps it has been discussed too much and we are just all tired of hearing about it.

I like to check the international news when big stories like this happen, just to see an outside perspective. I used to mostly turn to the BBC but something has happened over there since Brexit. I did find this concise, readable story in the Hindustan Times (India). Might be my new source for these sort of outside perspectives.

Biden celebrates $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signing

I have always wondered what the people who attacked the US Capitol on Jan 6 were thinking. I never could get a grip on what they thought their end game was. In a confession from one of the rioters we see what compelled these people to act. They thought they were starting an actual Civil War, and one (I have to assume) they intended to “win”. Just because it is delusional doesn’t make it any less dangerous. From the confession of Daniel Rodriguez, via MSNBC. At least he seems to have figured out what was really going on. Just a naked grab for power.

“we thought we were going to hit it like a civil war. There was going to be a big battle. I thought that there was going to be fighting, for some reason, in different cities, and I thought that the main fight, the main battle was going to be in D.C. because Trump called everyone there.

“We felt that they stole this country, its gone, its wiped out, Americas over, its destroyed now. We thought we were being used as part of a plan to save the country, save America, save the Constitution and the election.

“Are we all that stupid that we thought we were going to do this and save the country and it was all going to be fine after? We really thought that. Thats so stupid, huh? Its very stupid and ignorant. I see that it`s a big joke than we thought we were going to save this country.

Tadashii!! I repeated to the taxi driver, perhaps a bit too urgently. He turned around and gave me a quick look. He was wearing a white hat and gloves like all of the other Japanese taxi drivers, a uniform that always reminded me of an old fashioned milkman. Tadashii! He was about to pass the driveway for our apartment. I had given him the address from town, but the apartment complex was a bit of a large and spread out. I thought about just telling him to stop, but we had been grocery shopping and I wasnt keen on hauling all of our bags across the long parking lot in the Japanese summer heat.

Were only in Japan for the summer. I had some what impulsively accepted a three month appointment at a small research university in rural Japan. Having my wife and two young children along made the trip enjoyable, but also multiplied the opportunities for various miscommunications. Shopping on weekends was always exciting, sometimes in unexpected ways. I even learned many years later that I had been rudely insulting the young women at the bus station, incorrectly using the word “busu“, which means loosely “old hag” instead of “basu“, the actual word for bus when asking for directions.

For a minute “tadashii” didn’t seem quite right. I had tried to study a bit of Japanese before our trip but I didn’t get very far. But a three (or is it four?) syllable word for “right” seemed wrong. We were using a little device called a Lingo, which resembled a very tiny laptop. It could do translations into several languages and was an almost magical technology at the time. I later learned, or thought I had learned, that my Lingo had given me the translation for “right” as in “human rights”. No telling what the taxi driver thought I was telling him. Perhaps he thought I was complaining that my rights were somehow being violated. Much later I learned tadashii was the translation for right as in “correct”. I suppose the driver was very confused by my mixed message, telling him he was going the “correct” way while also urgently signaling him to turn right. Such confusion marked our days in Japan. For the record, the “right” I was looking for is migi. I will probably never forget that word.

I told the driver to stop, perhaps successfully finding the word for “stop” in the Lingo. We were far up the parking lot at that point but unloaded our groceries on the sidewalk, paid the taxi driver, and walked toward our apartment.

Tesla has sold about 2 million cars, give or take. One of the founders, a fellow named Elon Musk now has a net worth of around $200 Billion (with a “B”), mostly from Tesla stock. My calculations say this comes out to a cool $100,000 per car. Gotta love American capitalism.

Get ready for a bad winter. It is already starting in Germany and Russia. Austria has a new lockdown — of the unvaccinated. I’m guessing the number of “Vaccine Skeptics” will decrease, one way or another.

Across the Globe, Rates of Vaccine Skepticism Have Stalled

A good, no, great read about the US shipping crisis. This was supposedly written by a 20 year old truck driver. It reminds me of the Texas Power Crisis, in that the problems are easy to see and easy to fix, but established actors will actually profit from the failures caused by their own lack of investment. So there is no real hope without some sort of intervention, probably by the federal government. Will that happen? I’m not optimistic. Get ready to pay more, perhaps a lot more, for less. Seems to be the new American way.

Update: the article is by a 20 year trucking veteran, not a 20 year old. Thought he sounded very well informed for a 20 year old.

I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End