Tricks
No treats for me today.
I’m back on my laptop because the big box died this morning. I suspect it is the power supply because of the way it happened and a change in fan noise over the last couple of days, more precisely a fan becoming audible, where silence once reigned.
Then there was the Not-Halloween, Definitely-Not-Samhain, Fall Harvest Festival at the fundie recording studio and school, occasionally acting like a place of worship, down the block. They fill their parking lot up with activities and people feel free to park on other people’s lawns, because it is a ‘church event’.
The nastiest trick is the one that Congress is playing on the economy by reducing the food stamp funding by $5 billion. That money is pure ‘demand’, it was going to get spent on food because that’s all it can be used for, and a major chunk of it is spent at MalWart.
Together with the uncertainty because of the possibility of another shutdown in December, retailers can just write off Christmas, people are going to hoard whatever they have. We are looking at another recession, while the Fed is inflating a stock market bubble with its monetary policy.
4 comments
Chrysler is running incentives on 2014 cars. In October. When demand usually exceeds supply for 2014 cars. The local Toyota dealer has 50 Prius (Prii?) on his lot. The best selling car in California. Not moving at all. The automakers had a good year last year as people who’d been putting off buying a car finally replaced their old junkers. But the shutdown, and now the stupid cuts in demand drivers, have ended that. Nothing’s moving. Nothing.
Damn, down here you have had to wait for a Prius to be delivered after you paid for it, and now they are sitting on lots. I guess I usually think in terms of the small retailers, the predominant local private businesses. Things were already slowing because of the end of ‘The Season’, but most of the tourist-related workers shift to retail for the Christmas season, and then hope for their tax refunds to carry them until seasonal hiring starts. This is looking like a repeat of the oil spill for locals.
Things are just going to suck for the foreseeable future because the people in charge are morons who have no idea how the economy actually works.
That’s a bummer m8. Similar to what happened to me about a year ago. I had to get a new PSU and replace the GFX card.
You can get a couple top 80+ Platinum certified 550W PSU’s there for $100 (Newegg).
Antec EarthWatts Platinum Series EA-550
FSP Group AURUM 92+ Series PT-550M
The FSP has modular cabling, the Antec doesn’t.
It isn’t the fact that they are Platinum certified that matters. Tests on both show that they are extremely good for the price, especially regarding regulation, stability & ripple (noise). Both also have good protection for most things that will kill a PSU (poor AC line quality being one of the main ones). I have the 650W Antec EA-650, and it’s been rock solid, even surviving a couple bad thunder storms (which is what killed my previous PSU). And as a bonus, you get to save a little money on your annual power bill, and they generate little heat.
Antec has: Over Current Protection (OCP), Over Voltage Protection (OVP), Under Voltage Protection (UVP), Short Circuit Protection (SCP), Over Power Protection (OPP), Surge and Inrush Protection (SIP), No Load Operation (NLO), and Brown-Out Protection (BOP.
Just my 2c. Good luck.
I just paid my annual *life* dues by doing penance taking a group of 7-9 yo girls trick-or-treating! It was the atypical nightmare-whilst-awake experience! Appropriate for Halloween I guess. *shrug*
I bought the Antec after my only remaining local source of computer parts showed that it only stocked two levels of parts – the top end for gamers and junk for the masses. As I wasn’t interested in a 1Kw supply and light show, I was pushed back to the ‘Net. I really try to buy from local retailers, but they don’t make it easy.
Oh, come on, they may not have been as much fun as the pre-schoolers, but it could have been 12-year-olds 😉