Major Irritant

What goes:  “Fuck. Double fuck.  Double-doublety-double fuck”?

That would be me.

When my Logitech mouse starts randomly double-clicking when I tap the key once.

Yesterday I tried to see whether it was a software or hardware issue, so I tried going to Logitech’s “Customer Support” site (okay, you can stop laughing now).

  1. Tried blowing compressed air under the key, as helpfully suggested by Rajib “Logan”  — didn’t help.
  2. “Enter the serial # of your mouse, then we’ll know exactly what it is”  — fucking hell, I could barely read the thing with a magnifying glass, and every time I turned it over to read it, the cursor wandered out of the chat panel, never to be seen again.  Eventually, after uttering Sentence #1 of this post a few times, I managed to get the thing entered.
  3. “Do you have another PC or laptop where you can test your mouse?” — good idea.  Then we can see if it’s a laptop software issue or a mouse issue.  Hopped over to New Wife’s PC in the next room.  Once I’d called her to get the login password — shuddup — I connected it up and… nope, still doing it, the little fucking fucking double-fucking piece of shit.  Go back to laptop.
  4. “Session has timed out.  Do you want to log in again?” — where’s the 1911?  Oh yeah, in pieces on the table waiting to be cleaned. So I log in once more.
  5. “We’re sorry, but your warranty expired on 02/22/21.  We cannot replace your mouse.”

So I shot bit the bullet — not literally, ammo is spendy — and ordered another one.  From Amazon.

“Your order may be delayed as the product is on back order.”

            

[several lines of cursing omitted]

Easier Option

Well, you could choose to go through all this hassle:

The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain

But like just about everywhere in the U.S. where new mines have been proposed, there is strong opposition here. Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.

“Our gold rush mentality regarding oil has fueled the climate crisis,” says State Rep. Margaret O’Neil, who presented a bill last session that would have halted lithium mining for five years while the state worked out rules (the legislation ultimately failed). “As we facilitate our transition away from fossil fuels, we must examine the risks of lithium mining and consider whether the benefits of mining here in Maine justify the harms.”

Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need.

Geologists say there’s also likely a lot more lithium in spodumene deposits across New England. Communities that haven’t had working mines in years may soon find themselves a key source for lithium and other minerals needed for car batteries, solar panels, and many of the objects people will need more of to transition themselves off polluting fossil fuels.

There are good reasons for U.S. communities to have healthy skepticism about mining projects; there is no shortage of examples of a company coming into a community, mining until doing so becomes too expensive, then leaving a polluted site for someone else to clean up. There are more than 50,000 abandoned mines in the western United States alone, 80% of which still need to be remediated.

But of course, there’s no story without there being rayyyycism, and the Injuns:

Environmental concerns aren’t the only problem with mining, Morrill says. The history of mining in the U.S. is linked to colonialism; Christopher Columbus was looking for gold when he stumbled across North America, and as Europeans expanded into the continent, they took land from Indigenous people to mine for gold, silver, and other metals.

Today, mining in the U.S. often encroaches on Indigenous land. Under mining laws in the U.S. that date to 1872, anyone can stake a claim on federal public lands and apply for permits to start mining if they find “valuable” mineral deposits there. Most lithium, cobalt, and nickel mines are within 35 miles of a Native American reservation, Morrill says, largely because in the aftermath of the 1849 gold rush, the U.S. military removed tribes to reservations not far from mineral deposits in the West. In one particularly controversial project, the mining company Rio Tinto wants to build a copper mine on Oak Flat, Ariz., a desert area adjacent to an Apache reservation that Indigenous groups have used for centuries to conduct cultural ceremonies.

…and on and on it goes.  (Read it all until you begin to glaze over;  we’ve had these arguments so often that everyone knows what’s going on.)

OR:

We could just continue to use oil to power our cars and trucks, figuring that the gross pollution difference between batteries and electric cars (production and consumption) and using internal combustion engines is pretty much a wash.

But then that wouldn’t be an insane choice made by gibbering eco-lunatics now, would it?

U-Turn

This is interesting:

Japan reverses nuclear energy phase-out policy amid global fuel shortages, climate change

…whereas in Germany, for example, where all nukes were put on the short-term shutdown list because of the Fukushima disaster on the other side of the world, they’re still going to resort to firewood and wind power over the winter (lol good luck with that).

And I always thought that the Germans were pragmatic — but that no longer seems to be the case.

Disconnected

I read this guy’s story with something akin to dread:

And that’s when I realized that little by little, my phone had gotten the best of me.

I’ve often prided myself on one of the few people not shackled to my phone, but after reading this guy’s story, I chided myself for my arrogance.

As much as I hate to admit it, my phone is now an integral part of my existence, as much as my glasses or my car.

We’ve been one-carring it since the beginning of the week — first, my car had to (finally) get completely fixed after my collision with the highway crocodile a few weeks ago, which meant that while New Wife was driving to and from work, I sat at home, isolated.  Then I had to get some errands done (Rx refills etc.) so I had to drive her to and from work for a day.  Then, just as we were going to pick up the Tiguan, I got this call:  “My check engine light just came on.”

So we picked up my car and dropped hers off, to get the oil changed as well as getting whatever the warning light entailed seen to.  All manageable (except the total repair cost for the two cars — I’m going to have to sell a gun or two, and I’m not kidding), but having one car was an inconvenience, really.

However:  had my phone disappeared on me during this time, that would have been simply catastrophic.  Calls to the auto repair shop, calls to New Wife to organize pickup times… the list of critical calls was far longer than I was comfortable with.  And don’t even ask me how I’d have got through to anyone without my phone’s contact list.

Like many people nowadays, we don’t have a landline phone in the apartment.  But I’m starting to rethink that — or else I’m going to get a no-contract burner phone for emergencies.

This modern life is bullshit, and it sucks green donkey dicks.

There They Go Again

Apple was never shy to overprice their under-performing computers, but this has to take the cake:

‘Apple Computer A’, the prototype for the tech giant’s first ever computer, is up for sale – and could sell for more than half a million dollars at auction.  Considered ‘lost’ until recently, the prototype was hand-soldered by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1976, the year the company was established.  The ‘rare’ and ‘historic’ item is essentially a circuit board covered in chips and wires, embossed with the words ‘Apple Computer A ©76’.

Steve Jobs would be proud.

Update / No Update

As I have no good or indeed any news about the Comments / No Comments debacle, here are a couple pics of women showing off their respective superstructures.

Amanda Holden:

Kelly Brook:

Someone named Toni Garrn (no, I don’t know, either):

And Lana del Ray:

I hope this makes up for the lack of Commentary…