Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 01NOV2025 – Goin’ South

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We moved from Burlington, VT, to Charleston, SC, 13 years ago, and never looked back. It took about six months to realize we were spending $1000 LESS per month . House payment (a real HOUSE, not a condo), gas, electricity (we bought an all-electric house and I feared the worst, and was VERY pleasantly surprised). I did a little research and found SC power is around 12.9 cents/kWh, while Vermont is 21.5 Mapped: The Average Cost of Electricity by U.S. State

Groceries, pet supplies, home repairs, etc. were all lower. the Charleston cultural life is as vivid and varied as Boston or NY. And perhaps more culturally balanced. Museums, sport arenas, the Galliard Playhouse, North Charleston Performing Arts Center, are always booked with everything from rock concerts to Broadway plays, The Sound of Music just opened for an 8-day run, and Jeff Dunham will be turning Walter and Achmed loose just before Thanksgiving. The SC Aquarium will be kicking off its annual Christmas program with light shows, music, and yours truly —among others —as SCUBA Santa!
And not a bottle of hot sauce in sight!
We’ve had snow twice since we moved down here, the first time literally a year to the day we moved in. We played it smart and stayed home until it melted off. The way you drive in snow in Carolina is YOU DON’T! We Damnyankees may know how, but the locals have not got a clue!

Overall, I will take Southern Living over Vermont. We don’t get Leaf Peeper Season here on the coast, but a short drive up towards Clemson gets you into some nice color. And I definitely do not miss having to dig my car out of a snowdrift at 5AM in double-digit-below-zero temperatures. I saw it as a sure sign of civilization when I drove past Lowes and Home Depot in November, and there was not a single snow-blower or even shovel on display!

Stay warm, my friend!

 

Tom’s World – 01NOV2025 – Something for the Soul

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There are a large number of performances of Pachelbel’s Canon by various musicians using various instruments but this one is the peak by my estimation. When I’m in a mood to just totally reject humanity due to the insanity, violence, cruelty, stupidity and seeming lack of any redeeming quality, something like this performance will recenter me.

 

 

The Sourest of Grapes

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Today I heard an hilarious argument as to why it is cheaper to live in New England than in the South.  The main points of the thesis are that the infrastructure and services available here more than make up for the exorbitant cost of living.  So, for instance, whereas the cost of owning a car in New England (insurance, mechanic’s charges, taxes) are much higher, because the roads are so much better your car will last much longer.  When I heard this, I was thinking about what road salt does to the frame of a car in New England every winter.  And then I thought about my recent drive on I-95 and the craters there that I drove over.

Next up was the world class medical care available in this region of the country and nowhere else.  Now, it is without a doubt true that some very fine doctors and hospitals exist in places like Boston.  But it is also true that there are plenty of really mediocre medical centers and even terrible ones up here.  And I have experienced both so I’m not sure I believe that this is a slam dunk.  I guess if your health is extremely poor this might carry some weight but I have heard of good hospitals sprinkled around the country and in addition if someone is in desperate need of specialized care like a knee replacement or something I’m guessing you could travel for the procedure.  So, let’s call this a 50/50.

But the final point was the best.  The overarching reason to live in New England is “the culture.”  That one I think made me snort out loud.  Apparently going into Boston or New York City to see “Hamilton” or some other masterpiece of middle-brow pomposity is supposed to make up for ridiculous real estate prices, outrageous utility and fuel bills, failing schools and colleges and an, in general, overregulated existence.  And once you add the prevalence of increasing violence and squalor in the urban centers to the equation what exactly is there to extol about this region of the country?

But the participants in this New England pep rally nodded their heads and agreed that no sane individual would even think of packing it in, selling off the family home and buying a bigger house for half the price in a place where you can walk around in February in a light jacket and snow is an oddity that you hear about in stories about Santa Claus.

Well, I guess heaven (or hell) is where you make it.  I will admit that we’ve had a beautiful fall with balmy weather extending almost all the way to Halloween.  But eventually you have to pay the piper and the wind has been blowing pretty hard and the leaves have been stripped from a lot of the trees (except the oaks).  So even these people making believe they live in a wonderland know the awful truth.  After Christmas is over, the really awful stuff will begin.  Even with the milder winters we’ve been having, there are four months of bleak, cold weather waiting for us; January, February, March and April.  That’s a bitter pill.

I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

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It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Dunwich.  Or to draw on our supernatural reputation that would be, “raining sekhmets and werewolves.”  I had a late workday today so I’m relatively out of material for my post but it occurred to me that where AI really shows its usefulness is in answering specific technical questions on computer languages and programming.

For instance, I haven’t been using Excel much at all lately but I needed to put together a multi-sheet Excel workbook.  I forgot some of the formulas I liked using to produce certain results and instead of searching around on YouTube for some Indian programmer to explain in extremely hard to understand English I asked Grok.  And it printed out precisely clear, concise and accurate information on exactly what I was looking for.  Well, in my book that’s a valuable tool.  I didn’t ask it to make my spreadsheet for me because that wouldn’t help me remember the formulas.  And if I made it write the spreadsheet it would definitely do it differently from how I would want it and then I’d need to tweak a bunch of stuff.  Grok is like a notebook of all the hints and shortcuts for all of the things I want to do.

And now I hear that Grok will be Wikipedia too.  Of course, it doesn’t literally have to be an enormous encyclopedia like Wikipedia.  It’s just this endless cloud full of every single document in the world and an LLM to organize it as needed for whatever question is asked.  From what I’ve already heard and seen it’s probably orders of magnitude better than the left-leaning bias built into Wikipedia.  So, goodbye Wikipedia!

I think this guy Elon Musk is going in the right direction.  Stop trying to gaslight us and tell us what’s good for us and instead provide valuable tools that make our lives easier and our decisions more informed by facts.  I’m sure that AI will cause incredible change and a good amount of disruption in our world.  But I’m also pretty sure that it will create enormous opportunities too.  With the right sort of political and social management AI can be an extremely valuable tool.  At least I find that to be the case.  After all, when high level programs came along that could simulate a physical system like a pipe network, it didn’t put chemical and mechanical engineers out of business.  It became a tool for making engineers more efficient.  It allowed them to crank out much more work and more accurately.  The same will happen for almost every application where having the accumulated knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips allows us to make better and faster decisions.

Of course, that is what is possible if those in charge use these tools for our advancement.  If instead they attempt to form monopolies where machines replace humans in some kind of replay of the 2000’s where corporate America tried to replace American industry with cheap Chinese labor then we’ll be forced to do what Dave Bowman did to HAL-9000 when he slipped his gears.  We’ll have to unplug him.