Electric company watches for ‘too high’ electric use, indication marijuana is being grown inside, with grow lights. No, it’s just that (like my hubby), lights are left on all over the house (and I can only imagine how many lights there are in their house).
He leaves too many lights on. She wants to to tell him that but she also wants to rub it in and humiliate him. So she tells an exagerated story about how the electric company thought the house must be a grow house because of their excessive lighting bill.
I get the exaggerated “you leave the lights on” joke. But isn’t the guy a billionaire?
Mike — the amount of money a person has is rarely correlated to how much they worry about wasting money. Some people with almost nothing are extremely frugal; some are wasteful. Some people with a vast fortune are extremely frugal; some are wasteful. I don’t think there’s a correlation, either positive or negative.
I don’t know where she stands on issues, but wasting electricity is not just a budget item, it’s also an ecological problem.
The cops would notice the neighborhood and decide it’s not a grow house based on the property value. The bad guys rent houses where they can get them really, really cheaply, for the same reason any other business tries to cut down expenses.
On the other hand, the local alt-news weekly newspaper runs an annual story of the biggest water bills in the city. One property had run up almost a million dollars worth of water bill. (The properties on the list tend to be large estates with lots of landscaping to keep green, and businesses that use a lot of water doing whatever business they do. This one was a large estate with a huge broken water pipe that nobody noticed because nobody was resident, so it didn’t get fixed for over eight months.)
Right before the punch line, I almost flashed back to the Bush Jr. Administration.
I see what’s happening here, but I couldn’t reconcile that with the fact that he’s a billionaire, rides his own limo around town and probably flies a private jet –and Lucretia’s never been obsessed with the environment before.
Basically, I think the gag would have worked better in a different strip.
I’ve always thought cartoonists should have a sort of clearinghouse, or a freecycle,for gags they like but just won’t work well in their own strips. You know, give this one to Greg Evans to use in Luann: I can see Papa DeGroot telling Luann the police were here…
Andréa, interesting article. Wasn’t that the same argument they used yesterday (I think) about fuel-efficient cars?
The AlterNet article is interesting for another reason: my browsers don’t properly scroll down the page responsively, because the site is eating up 50% of my CPU power, presumably to display the ads appropriately. Is that just the price of seeing an environmentally pushy organization chide everyone for using electricity excessively?
Ads? I didn’t see no steenkin’ ads . . . use AdBlocker.
“my browsers don’t properly scroll down the page responsively, because the site is eating up 50% of my CPU power, presumably to display the ads appropriately.”
The past 30-40 years have seen incredible increases in computing power generally available. Today’s processors are more than 1000 times as fast as the processor in the original IBM PC… the clock speed is almost 1000 times faster, and the processor can now operate on 64 bits at a time instead of 16, and there 2, or 4, or sometimes even more cores at work in each PC. The original PC had no hard drive at all, the PC/XT came out a year and half later with a 10MB option (yes, 10 M. Today’s systems have 1 Terabyte or more, where a single Terabyte is a million Megabytes. (1000 M’s in a G, 1000 G’s in a T.). System memory? The original PC had 64K New PC’s have at least 4 G (1024 K’s in a M, 1024 M’s in a G.)
So, the hardware engineers keep coming up with systems that can operate faster and store more information This meant that programmers didn’t have to write efficient code that was optimized for speed or storage capacity, with the result that loading a browser and loading a web page or two can bring a modern computer to a crawl.
The “interesting” part isn’t that bloatware exists, it’s who is using it.
In high school I used to describe bathrooms where kids smoked by saying “You could cure meat in there!” I know it doesn’t work that way but colorful figures of speech never hurt.
James Pollack – interesting to read your post tonight (of all nights). I am hard to get to change. I use my old work laptop in my kitchen for going online at night. Drives husband crazy. This laptop runs Win XP and the newest copyright on an information sticker on it is dated 2004. It is a v e r y s l o w computer. But with the exception of Comics Kingdom, it is usable for me. My work laptop is about 2 years newer and also XP – although my desktop is Win 7.
Husband keeps trying to get me to get an updated laptop. I used his for something and I really don’t like Win 10. We did spend last week looking at laptops. (Well, we are always looking at laptops, but this was serious looking.) We had it down to 3 or 4 laptops – Acers and a Lenovo. (Dells,and HPs are way down on my list from prior purchases by both of us and his old job – Toshiba if it still makes computers is even lower as it put out computers that it knew had a screen problem. I would buy a Sony again – this one is Sony – but they no longer make laptops. We are also looking at the cheap end – $500 makes me upset. He went to look up the laptops for reviews – none of them exist, even at the websites of the stores selling them.
So he went back to his idea of putting Linux in this laptop as it is mostly used for going online and I agreed, as I figured I could use my other laptop for other things. He then found a Linux that could be plugged in on a USB stick drive. He has now spent 2 days setting up the Linux for me. We put in the drive tonight. It took forever to load. It stopped in the middle and did not finish starting. Back to XP. I can wait.
Windows XP was a fine operating system, but the big 3 browsers all no longer support it, which means soon enough XP will no longer be a useful platform for web browsing. Internet Explorer went a long time ago, but Firefox and Chrome are no longer putting out updates for XP, now, either.
James Pollock – I understand that it is no longer supported, but it mostly works fine. Robert has now put 5 different versions of Linux in the laptop trying to get one to work right. (Mostly my problem is with ComicsKIngdom and the one strip I read there.) This seems to have led to my having lost my saved passwords somehow (hence why I ended up posting as “Alcott” a couple of times tonight. It looks like I will pushed into a new laptop – which means most of my software work in it.
The only strip I regularly read on CK is Sally Forth. In general, that’s one of the least satisfied groups of commenters for a comic strip that I’ve seen.
@ Meryl A – Lack of support doesn’t mean that the operating system is unusable, but it does mean that any new security leaks will no longer be patched. Operating a Windows XP system with an Internet connection is just asking for trouble. There are plenty of well-known exploits that spammers and bot operators can use to gain access. It still have one computer with an ancient Windows system on it, but it is isolated, so that there is no way for an outsider to gain access.
P.S. That last sentence was supposed to start with “I”, not “it”.
Kilby – Thank you. Other than the comics I read online and my posts to my embroidery groups there is nothing else on this laptop which is why I am not that worried about it. Up until about a month ago my browser was still doing security updates for XP, although not other updates. The computer is connected when I am online (and yes, I know it can be hit then) and when I sign off, it is unplugged from everything and stored away.
My work laptop is not used online – I shut the connection off the minute I turn it on. I use it at the client I go to and there is no Internet available to me there and I use for the map program I have it in – which uses a dongle and not the Internet for directions.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Electric company watches for ‘too high’ electric use, indication marijuana is being grown inside, with grow lights. No, it’s just that (like my hubby), lights are left on all over the house (and I can only imagine how many lights there are in their house).
He leaves too many lights on. She wants to to tell him that but she also wants to rub it in and humiliate him. So she tells an exagerated story about how the electric company thought the house must be a grow house because of their excessive lighting bill.
. . . and this just was sent to me – life’s synchronicity . . . https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/led-lighting-has-become-global-threat-public-health?src=newsletter1094913
I get the exaggerated “you leave the lights on” joke. But isn’t the guy a billionaire?
Mike — the amount of money a person has is rarely correlated to how much they worry about wasting money. Some people with almost nothing are extremely frugal; some are wasteful. Some people with a vast fortune are extremely frugal; some are wasteful. I don’t think there’s a correlation, either positive or negative.
I don’t know where she stands on issues, but wasting electricity is not just a budget item, it’s also an ecological problem.
The cops would notice the neighborhood and decide it’s not a grow house based on the property value. The bad guys rent houses where they can get them really, really cheaply, for the same reason any other business tries to cut down expenses.
On the other hand, the local alt-news weekly newspaper runs an annual story of the biggest water bills in the city. One property had run up almost a million dollars worth of water bill. (The properties on the list tend to be large estates with lots of landscaping to keep green, and businesses that use a lot of water doing whatever business they do. This one was a large estate with a huge broken water pipe that nobody noticed because nobody was resident, so it didn’t get fixed for over eight months.)
Right before the punch line, I almost flashed back to the Bush Jr. Administration.
I see what’s happening here, but I couldn’t reconcile that with the fact that he’s a billionaire, rides his own limo around town and probably flies a private jet –and Lucretia’s never been obsessed with the environment before.
Basically, I think the gag would have worked better in a different strip.
I’ve always thought cartoonists should have a sort of clearinghouse, or a freecycle,for gags they like but just won’t work well in their own strips. You know, give this one to Greg Evans to use in Luann: I can see Papa DeGroot telling Luann the police were here…
Andréa, interesting article. Wasn’t that the same argument they used yesterday (I think) about fuel-efficient cars?
The AlterNet article is interesting for another reason: my browsers don’t properly scroll down the page responsively, because the site is eating up 50% of my CPU power, presumably to display the ads appropriately. Is that just the price of seeing an environmentally pushy organization chide everyone for using electricity excessively?
Ads? I didn’t see no steenkin’ ads . . . use AdBlocker.
“my browsers don’t properly scroll down the page responsively, because the site is eating up 50% of my CPU power, presumably to display the ads appropriately.”
The past 30-40 years have seen incredible increases in computing power generally available. Today’s processors are more than 1000 times as fast as the processor in the original IBM PC… the clock speed is almost 1000 times faster, and the processor can now operate on 64 bits at a time instead of 16, and there 2, or 4, or sometimes even more cores at work in each PC. The original PC had no hard drive at all, the PC/XT came out a year and half later with a 10MB option (yes, 10 M. Today’s systems have 1 Terabyte or more, where a single Terabyte is a million Megabytes. (1000 M’s in a G, 1000 G’s in a T.). System memory? The original PC had 64K New PC’s have at least 4 G (1024 K’s in a M, 1024 M’s in a G.)
So, the hardware engineers keep coming up with systems that can operate faster and store more information This meant that programmers didn’t have to write efficient code that was optimized for speed or storage capacity, with the result that loading a browser and loading a web page or two can bring a modern computer to a crawl.
The “interesting” part isn’t that bloatware exists, it’s who is using it.
In high school I used to describe bathrooms where kids smoked by saying “You could cure meat in there!” I know it doesn’t work that way but colorful figures of speech never hurt.
James Pollack – interesting to read your post tonight (of all nights). I am hard to get to change. I use my old work laptop in my kitchen for going online at night. Drives husband crazy. This laptop runs Win XP and the newest copyright on an information sticker on it is dated 2004. It is a v e r y s l o w computer. But with the exception of Comics Kingdom, it is usable for me. My work laptop is about 2 years newer and also XP – although my desktop is Win 7.
Husband keeps trying to get me to get an updated laptop. I used his for something and I really don’t like Win 10. We did spend last week looking at laptops. (Well, we are always looking at laptops, but this was serious looking.) We had it down to 3 or 4 laptops – Acers and a Lenovo. (Dells,and HPs are way down on my list from prior purchases by both of us and his old job – Toshiba if it still makes computers is even lower as it put out computers that it knew had a screen problem. I would buy a Sony again – this one is Sony – but they no longer make laptops. We are also looking at the cheap end – $500 makes me upset. He went to look up the laptops for reviews – none of them exist, even at the websites of the stores selling them.
So he went back to his idea of putting Linux in this laptop as it is mostly used for going online and I agreed, as I figured I could use my other laptop for other things. He then found a Linux that could be plugged in on a USB stick drive. He has now spent 2 days setting up the Linux for me. We put in the drive tonight. It took forever to load. It stopped in the middle and did not finish starting. Back to XP. I can wait.
Windows XP was a fine operating system, but the big 3 browsers all no longer support it, which means soon enough XP will no longer be a useful platform for web browsing. Internet Explorer went a long time ago, but Firefox and Chrome are no longer putting out updates for XP, now, either.
James Pollock – I understand that it is no longer supported, but it mostly works fine. Robert has now put 5 different versions of Linux in the laptop trying to get one to work right. (Mostly my problem is with ComicsKIngdom and the one strip I read there.) This seems to have led to my having lost my saved passwords somehow (hence why I ended up posting as “Alcott” a couple of times tonight. It looks like I will pushed into a new laptop – which means most of my software work in it.
The only strip I regularly read on CK is Sally Forth. In general, that’s one of the least satisfied groups of commenters for a comic strip that I’ve seen.
@ Meryl A – Lack of support doesn’t mean that the operating system is unusable, but it does mean that any new security leaks will no longer be patched. Operating a Windows XP system with an Internet connection is just asking for trouble. There are plenty of well-known exploits that spammers and bot operators can use to gain access. It still have one computer with an ancient Windows system on it, but it is isolated, so that there is no way for an outsider to gain access.
P.S. That last sentence was supposed to start with “I”, not “it”.
Kilby – Thank you. Other than the comics I read online and my posts to my embroidery groups there is nothing else on this laptop which is why I am not that worried about it. Up until about a month ago my browser was still doing security updates for XP, although not other updates. The computer is connected when I am online (and yes, I know it can be hit then) and when I sign off, it is unplugged from everything and stored away.
My work laptop is not used online – I shut the connection off the minute I turn it on. I use it at the client I go to and there is no Internet available to me there and I use for the map program I have it in – which uses a dongle and not the Internet for directions.