i need some more concrete. so i need to wait. i'd might as well get a pile of it for cheap. there's some other places in the house i might use some. 

so i spent the last few dollars on some overpriced fortified nutritional yeast, just to see if it would ship. it's a strictly us brand.

it's enough for a few weeks to start to stop me from crashing. i'm eating less generally in diet mode. but i need a clear solution.

it's a little more b6, a little more b12, a little less b9 and about the same amount of b1, b2, b3. i like the formula for the other product better, as i like the high amounts of folate and my b12 was testing great.

i may have another option. i need to look into some things.

Javani said Iran had never initiated a war and that its actions to date had been defensive, but, "from now on, every action we take, although it has a defensive nature, must take on an offensive form."

this was predictable and the obvious result of not carrying through with regime change. if you shoot somebody in the face and they live, they're going to shoot you back at the first chance they get. if you don't want them to retaliate, you need to kill them. this should be obvious to anybody with any working brain cells, but trump's clearly demonstrated himself as a low intelligence retard that can't process simple conflicts. he just expects people will obey when he yells.

we have 2.5 more years worth of trump. i don't think we can wait that long to remove the government in iran without a catastrophe happening in the region.

yeah, it makes more sense for me to use the ~$25 left in the account until thursday morning when the cdb comes in ($204) on a new dustbuster and wait to get the tools required to try to fix the other vacuums later.

but i want to wait for amazon to charge me for the shop vac first.

i'm not quite sure why they haven't, yet.

i'll need to do some shopping, but you can buy margarine in the us (apparently marketed somewhat hilariously as 'plant butter') with vitamin e.

i used to get margarine with 50% of the vitamin e requirements. vitamin e is somewhat elusive in a low fat, low protein diet, so that as very helpful. adding vitamin e to margarine seems to have been completely banned in canada. now, the olive oil margarine is rapidly disappearing altogether, and being replaced with palm oil, which is horribly unhealthy.

there's just been this movement towards making things less healthy across the board in canada, and i don't get it, but shopping in the us might solve it.

i want my diet to be

- low fat

- low protein

- high vitamin

that's increasingly hard to do in canada, because they keeping stripping out the vitamins, forcing you to eat too much protein to meet the rdis, which is going to make you fat.

it's not just the nutritional yeast that recently had it's fortifications cut. other foods i've seen lose fortification in canada are:

- cereal

- yogurt: cuts in b12, d

- soy milk: cuts in d, b12, a

- margarine: cuts in d, e, a

i have recently had deficiencies in b12 and d. i wasn't getting too much; i wasn't getting enough.

canadians do not face a concern about overfortification. canadians have serious vitamin deficiencies and severe obesity concerns. this policy of cutting fortifications is seriously wrong, as it's going to generate further vitamin deficiencies and increase obesity levels.

so, i may want to consider buying more food in the united states more generally to evade the health canada restrictions and get higher fortification levels, given that it's free to bike across the bridge. i have a small list of staples that i may rather buy in detroit. american processed food is increasingly healthier than canadian processed food, due to these stupid laws restricting fortification levels that don't exist in the us.

i'm going to give them a few more days to respond.

apparently, the correct ac adapter for this device is 25.9V output. i have 5, 6, 9, 12 volts. nothing at 26 v.

i'm going to let it sit in the 12 volt adapter i picked off the bat (for a no longer in use cable modem) for like a week and see if it clicks. it's actually telling me it's charged. these batteries get stuck when you don't use them, so letting it sit in the charger might wake it up.

but i think the adapters are not powerful enough and i need a stronger adapter. i'll have to decide if i want to pay $30-$50 for an adapter for this. it will be low priority. it's a nice looking device with advanced features and poor reviews, so i dunno. there are a lot of dumb people out there that throw out things that work because they're dirty, etc. that's not a lot for a vacuum if i think it will work.

replacing the fuse on the shop vac is going to require a soldering job, which is easy enough, but it means it won't get done until after the repair shop is set up. i'm going to need to get something else second hand for the initial project and let it break, then fix this one later.

so, i'm going to clean up in here this morning and then get out to vacuum in the garage early, after i've done a good clean up in here. the floors in the main apartment will then need to wait a few days for the shop vac to get in before they can get vacuumed again. 

i ended up sleeping a lot this weekend, and i think i did get drugged with something, but it's the same tiredness i remember feeling after passing out at the bar a few years ago. i haven't been drinking or smoking anything at all for months. i think i got drugged with a date rape drug a few years ago and they might have got me again this weekend.

there's no sign of entry into the unit and no obvious way in. i note the windows are wide open. it's 4:29 and i can hear them hacking and wheezing, but i can't smell it.

i plugged the vacuum battery in on saturday afternoon and intentionally slept for a few hours with the intent to wake up and charge it. it showed the charged symbol when i plugged it in but i let it sit. when i woke up, i made a large plate of pasta with a box of kd (200 g; i would normally boil 110 g. oops. so it was bigger than normal.) and ate through most of it but passed out after and then slept almost right through until 21:00. when i did wake up, i made some coffee and am more alert.

the battery did not charge, or there's an issue with it. it revs up and falls from charged to uncharged in a few seconds. but then when i plug it in it says it's charged. i'm trying with a different adapter and getting the same results.

let me try to understand this better.

but i lost the day due to this.

my new shop vac is shipping for the 18th. so i might just get the dustbuster in there in the morning and get the carpet down. i want to understand what the battery is doing and then order a new fuse, before the sun comes up. 

let's look at the tariff issue empirically, not theoretically or ideologically.

the theory - it is old tory, mercantilist - says you use tariffs to protect domestic industry. it's an old theory, 19th century, and broadly abandoned. that's the best academic analysis we have for this confusing policy, so the analysts continually go back to it. trump must be pushing tariffs to create jobs. right?

but is this an empirical analysis?

there are a small number of the tariffs where the intent appears to be to protect domestic industrial production for national interest reasons - chips, vaccines, drones. i have little criticism of these tariffs. i don't think tariffs are bad. i'm a socialist; i think tariffs are hard. trump is proving ricardo right. tariffs on chip or vaccines are a correct application of mercantilist tariff theory.

the reality is, however, that most of the time when trump talks about tariffs, he doesn't say anything about protecting industry. rather, trump tends to focus on tariffs being a large government revenue stream and frequently argues they are making the country richer. in fact, the theory trump is following doesn't seem to be old tory at all, but a kind of trickle down reaganomics and focused on implementing a tax shift from income taxes on the rich to consumption taxes on the general population. trump has repeatedly explicitly stated that the tariffs are intended to mitigate upcoming slashes to income taxes at the highest brackets. further, all evidence suggests trump actually believes canadians end up paying the tariffs. an empirical analysis is that canada is going to build the tax cut wall, and canada is going to pay for it, however ridiculously wrong that is.

it follows that the purpose of these tariffs is not to try to kill industry in canada or shift jobs south, but to generate tax cuts for himself. this is not really an attack on canada, then; canada is just being chosen as the hapless sock puppet that takes the hit on a policy intended to raise government revenue through a taxation stream on americans. if it does create job losses in canada, that's collateral, and doesn't matter.

canada has been making the mistake from the start of taking this seriously and trying to undo these policies by taking the arguments on directly. but the arguments are disingenuous, and it's just an excuse for trump to raise taxes. canada has to shift it's approach to fundamentally understanding this: what trump wants is the revenue stream. what trump wants is the tax shift. it's not about industry, not about jobs. 

that is the reason there's nothing canada can do to stop this; what trump wants is the revenue, and this is just the damaging way he does that. it's all theatre to enforce the tax hike and subsequent tax shift.

that's what trump has said and which the analysts aren't grasping. do the numbers add up? of course not, but that doesn't matter when it's trump. it's just the excuse he needs to cut income taxes.

canada's better tactic is to try to shift targets. the target was supposed to be mexico, not canada. how did canada get shifted to the scapegoat role? by fighting back, which drew attention to us as the insolent ones. the mexicans shut their mouths. we retaliated.

there's no deal coming because there's no deal to make. trump wants his tax hike, and canada cannot agree to the terms. nafta necessarily dies, as it cannot coexist with large tariffs.

in the end, we got outsmarted by the mexicans.