Although we have already had our first cool front to bring Autumn into Florida, summer isn’t ready to give up just yet. The humidity today is brutal. When you go outside and take a breath, the air seems to have a thick consistency:
Look at that dew point! Of course it’s cloudy, and the sweat runs off you with nowhere to go. Cooler weather is supposed to arrive this week, and I for one will be happy to see it return.
I’ve been asked why I don’t just use Cat6 cable in my network upgrade. Here is why:
Thirty years ago, I still had dialup Internet. My first internet was a 9.6 kbps connection around 1992 or so. I remember thinking how fast my 56 kbps connection was when I got that just a few years later. I’m sure you all remember it taking hours to download a single picture. Then Time Warner started offering their “Road Runner” high speed broadband service in 1999, boasting speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps. Now here we are, 26 years later, and I have available Internet speeds of up to 1.2 gbps, nearly 22 THOUSAND times faster than it was just 30 years ago. Now word comes that we are about to get fiber Internet within the next year, and they are offering speeds of up 8 Gbps.
When I was a kid, my Dad, who you may remember was an engineer for Hewlett Packard, told me that no one needed a hard drive larger than 10mb. Why, he told me, 10mb could hold the text of every book within the Library of Congress. The computer (the HP computer he brought home was an early DOS machine built into a suitcase) had all the storage anyone could need, he predicted.
He was wrong. A corollary to Moore’s law, Internet speeds have historically doubled about every 2 years or so. With that in mind, I set out to build a home network that would anticipate these advances. Sure, I have 1GB speed now, but in a year it will likely be 2 GB. Within a decade, I would be looking at 32 or even more Gbps.
The network traffic between devices in a home can be even higher than that. In 2015, 1 Gbps was the usual home switch speed. Today, 1 Gbps remains the mainstream baseline, with 2.5 Gbps becoming a common upgrade. Sure, my computer may only be capable of 1 gbps, but what happens when there are multiple computers, streaming televisions, and IoT devices? All that traffic adds up, and you can soon overload a network.
The maximum speed we will ever get out of Cat 6 is 10gb. A couple of years, and a home wired with CAT6 will be obsolete. I’m not getting any younger, and I wanted to have a system that wouldn’t require a ton of work when I eventually get too old to climb up in the attic.
So with that in mind, I designed my home network. There were some initial observations:
I noticed that I was paying for gigabit Internet, but speed testing showed I was only getting 300mbps or so, sometimes less. I plugged my computer directly into the modem, and was getting over 800 mbps. My network was the bottleneck. I was also having Internet connection issues. At first, I was just trying to clean up my WiFi, then I decided to redesign the entire network. I envisioned using CAT6 Ethernet cables to haul up to 2.5 gbps from clients to switches, and 10gbps connections from one switch to another, and to the server I was using. That would allow all of those 2.5 gbps connections to come together and not bottleneck at the switches.
So after over 7 months of work, this project is coming to a completion. The holdup has been the cost of buying the equipment. The server and its hard drives were the most expensive segment at a cost of about $3200, and the rest of the project cost about $4700, but that includes the Home assistant stuff and the cameras. All told, this project came in at just under $8,000 for everything.
I decided to use LC fiber optic cable, because those cables are capable of up to 40 gbps, even if the switches I have aren’t capable of that. Yet.
So my network looks like this:
There are a couple of single gigabit switches, but they supply a television or some Internet speakers, and those don’t need any more bandwidth than that. One of the switches is a 10gbps SFP switch, and the others are 2.5 gbps with 10gbps uplink connections. The only remaining choke point is my ISP, the 1 gigbit modem, and the gigabit router. Once fiber comes in, I can replace the router and connect to the fiber ONT, and I will have a fully capable 2.5gbps network that can easily be reconfigured to 10gbps. The wires will already be there if I want to transition even higher at some point.
When my kids were little, they wanted to eat chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for climbing onto the roof of the house and jumping off. My parents stopped me because they knew something that, as a child, I didn’t. I stopped my kids for the same reason. I could foresee the likely results of their actions, and used my own wisdom and experience to stop and discipline them. Had I simply said, “Don’t do that,” and walked away, I guarantee you my children would have eaten the cake anyhow. I would have jumped from the roof again as soon as my parents weren’t watching. Punishment is required to drive that point home.
It’s the same thing as a society. As adults, we have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves- children, for example. For that reason, we have laws preventing children from engaging in sexual intercourse with adults. The excuse pedophiles frequently give: “the child was a willing participant” is immaterial. There are consequences to the actions the child is engaging in, and they don’t yet have the maturity to fully understand those consequences, and therefore are incapable of making a fully informed decision of risk versus benefit.
Robert Heinlein stated this principle rather eloquently in his novel Starship Troopers:
duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail
How many times have we seen a story about a female (usually a teacher) who had sexual intercourse with a 15 or 16 year old boy, a child? If the teacher happens to be physically attractive, there is always some moron who will come around and say “There was no victim here. Had this woman wanted to sex me up, I would gladly have done so. Therefore, no harm, no foul. There was no victim here.”
However, let that exact situation occur and let the adult teacher be a fat, unattractive woman or a male PE teacher, and those cries disappear, replaced by calls to prosecute. Why? Those people are substituting their own desires to have sex with that teacher for adult responsibility and common sense.
Again, I will regale you with a story from my past. I was once part of a case where a woman was selling her children to adults for the purposes of sexual relations. So, are there victims here? Were the kids harmed? They split the money with their mother, so they probably wanted to, right? Of course not. That woman deserved to lose those kids, and the cops rightfully arrested that woman and her kids. Sometimes, parents don’t make wise decisions in raising their kids.
Our societal responsibility towards children is the reason why we don’t have children working in coal mines any longer. The child doesn’t know any better, so we as a society have put rules in place to protect them until they are old enough to assume that duty we all have as adults. If an adult wants to do any of the above: jump from the roof, have cake for dinner, work in a coal mine, or have sex with attractive teachers, they can do so, because they have the ability to understand the consequences of their choices and will have to live with the consequences.
So let’s apply that principle to the idea of children riding motorcycles. My post from the other day had me being told I sound like a “boomer.” First, I don’t see why so-called boomers and their ideas are automatically bad, except for the immature notion that because they are old, they are somehow out of touch. That is a poor argument and just makes you sound like a spoiled child who is never allowed to do anything because mom and dad just don’t understand that things are different nowadays, and your outdated ideas are stupid. That’s why you don’t believe in the Constitution because it was written by out of touch old men who owned slaves, and …
I was told how wrong I was because there was no victim to a child riding a motorcycle on a road. After all, he was just going down the street to fish. The story of “I ride my lawnmower 4 miles down the road all the time.” Does that mower go 50 miles per hour? Are you 11 years old, or are you an adult who is capable of deciding for yourself?
Then there are those who claim the kid was on the easement or the ditch next to the road. Here is a screengrab from the officer’s bodycam. Where is the ditch or easement?
All sorts of excuses. Let’s just stop enforcing any rules for children. After all, they can and should be permitted to have sex with adults if they want, have chocolate cake of they want, transition sexes if they want, well, you know, DO whatever they want. After all, children aren’t immature, they are just little adults.
Or you could just think to yourself what it would feel like to hold a dead child, or tell a parent that their child was killed when he got in an accident when he hit a car while riding that electric motorcycle at 50 mph.
Then we pass laws that say a child can’t ride vehicles that are designed for roadway use. In order to be considered off road only, it has to meet certain criteria. Some of those are the vehicle can’t be capable of speeds over 28 mph, and in the case of mopeds or electric bikes, they have to have pedals and a few other criteria:
In order for Cade’s vehicle to be considered legal for him to operate, Florida requires fully operable pedals, a motor of less than 750 watts, and compliance with one of the three e-bike classifications. The reported bike failed both the pedal and power requirements, so it did not receive the e-bike exemption from licensing and registration laws. §§316.003(23), 316.20655(2).
He was riding what the law considers to be a motorcycle on a public roadway. You might as well let him drive a Camaro. However, when that kid makes a driving error and smears himself all over the hood of someone’s F150, I imagine no one here will be saying, “Welp, shit happens. FAFO.”
The police, had they just “given him a warning” would have been wasting their breath. The kid would have rolled his eyes, waited until the cop was out of sight, and gone right back out on that motorcycle. Perhaps this was the case this time. Maybe a cop DID already warn him. Maybe not.
I will die on this hill: There are certain things that we cannot allow children to do. Driving on a motorcycle at 11 years old is one of them. I would even go a step further and say the parents should be arrested as well, for letting him buy and drive a motorcycle on a public roadway.
People on Social Media are up in arms because an 11 year old kid has been arrested and charged for riding an electric motorcycle (he called it an ‘electric bike’) to the pond down the street to go fishing.
Here is a link to the actual news story about the case. In the recording of that court appearance, Cade can be heard saying he knew his e-bike was actually a motorcycle. Police said the motorbike was capable of traveling 50 MPH and was powered by a 4,500-watt motor. It was likely this one.
After the hearing, Cade’s father, Chris Kirchner, commented on the court appearance.
“How ridiculous that he had to miss school for that,” Chris Kirchner said.
I have a different take from my own personal experience: Jacob was just 12 years old when he was struck by a car while riding his bike on a dark country road 30 years ago. When I found him unconscious and covered in his own blood on the side of the road, I ran my hands down his back to check for injuries and the fingers of my right hand sunk into his lower back. His entire back was ripped open by that hit and run driver. He died right there on the side of the road, not 40 feet from the bike he had been riding.
As a paramedic who has seen this play out time and time again, I think this child has no business riding a motorcycle on the road, whether it is 300 feet or 300 miles. The roads are a dangerous place, and an 11 year old child doesn’t belong there. Not only should he be charged for riding it, the parents should be charged for letting him buy and ride a motorcycle.
Those cops may very well have saved his life. I’ve seen comments where people say something like “Maybe he should get a Glock with a switch,” or “Why aren’t the cops out there catching REAL criminals?” Like it or not, this IS a real crime, and it’s one that is intended to save lives. According to the National Institutes of Health, auto accidents are the leading cause of death in children and adolescents.
Then the lilbertarians showed up.
everyone should be allowed to drive around with no tags dl or insurance. unless there’s a valid reason to stop them. I don’t view cars and motorcycles any differently than I view bicycles or horses, neither of which need those things (in most places).
Completely ignoring the fact that this is an 11 year old child.
The left is rediscovering the Tenth Amendment. Judge David Leibowitz in Miami tossed a case against a Jamaican national accused of voting in our elections for years with a fake birth certificate. He ruled that the 1996 law making noncitizen voting a federal crime is unconstitutional because only the states get to set voter qualifications.
These are Federal elections for President and Congress, and a Federal judge just said the Federal government can’t punish a foreigner for voting in them. Reports say about 45 more of these cases are pending around the country, and we’re 33 days from the midterms.
What does this mean? It means when the left says there is no evidence illegal immigrants are voting in our elections, they are lying.
There is no way we can vote our way out of this. First, even if we could, it wouldn’t be allowed. Second, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable in practice. One party openly claims to be socialist, while the other says they are different, but votes like the socialist party.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again- just because Democrats are your enemy doesn’t mean the Republicans are your friends.
Volunteer fire departments are the backbone of the US fire service. No one has more respect for the spirit of volunteer firefighters- I began my career as a volunteer before moving on to do the job part time, then finally transitioning to being a full time, career firefighter.
There are advantages to both systems. The volunteer system is perfect for rural areas where the department doesn’t see more than a few calls a month. It’s inexpensive in terms of dollars, and this makes it cost effective.
Out of 461 total registered fire departments in Florida, roughly 315 departments use volunteers in some capacity. That ranges from a few auxiliary firefighters who will ride a fire truck along with a full time crew, to the more than 200 departments heavily utilizing volunteers to sustain daily operations.
The disadvantages to the volunteer fire system are:
The traditional volunteer system has a fire station where the trucks and equipment are stored, and when a fire or other emergency is reported, volunteers respond to the scene while a few volunteers stopping by the station to bring the fire truck(s). Once call loads get to a certain point, and in my experience that’s about 1,200 call outs per year, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain this system. Some volunteer systems respond to EMS calls, and those departments are nearly always over that limit.
It’s at this point that volunteer stations begin having a crew stay at the station, just like a career department. The volunteer crews at the station carry the bulk of the runs, if not all of them.
Even then, there are only a few volunteer departments who manage to maintain a large call volume, and it’s getting more and more difficult to find volunteers nowadays. Especially with the modern trend of EMS and fire being combined, it’s even more difficult. It’s much easier to attract volunteers to fight fires (which volunteers and career firefighters both love to do) than it is to get volunteers to climb out of bed at 2am to wipe some old lady’s ass while picking her up off the bathroom floor. Most EMS calls are not life or death emergencies, and volunteers (neither do career, but you can make them) just don’t like getting out of bed for them.
For those reasons, the busier volunteer departments have to rely on paid EMS and fire crews for at least part of the day each day for the most part, because there simply aren’t enough volunteers to cover those stations at those call volumes.
Those 200 Florida departments who heavily use volunteers tend to be in rural areas where call loads are lower. In fact, all but 19 of those departments are north of Gainesville, with 15 of the 19 in the state’s peninsula being in Glades (pop 13,000 with 5 VFDs), Highlands (pop 100,000 with 6 VFDs), and Hendry (pop 40,000 with 4 VFDs) counties, all counties on the west bank of Lake Okechobee.
There are a large number of hybrid departments- where paid crews are augmented in some way with volunteers, but even that becomes difficult to maintain. One large fire department that is hybrid of which I am aware is Virginia Beach, VA, who staff the EMS side of the department with volunteer rescue personnel.
I was a volunteer for years: in Florida and Virginia Beach, where volunteers spent the night at the station assigned to a fire truck or Rescue Squad (volunteers no longer staff fire engines there), at several departments in Arkansas and in Florida where volunteers respond directly from home. Some of those departments had me getting paid to staff the station during the day while the volunteers were at work.
So what happens after you get hired? For the first several weeks, you attend a training program that is taught by some of the firefighters you will be working with. There are things and procedures specific to your individual department.
The SCBA your department uses, the medical protocols the department follows, personnel accountability, standard procedures for various functions like firefighting, extrication, operating our powered equipment, and more. After three weeks of training, you are assigned to the crew you will be working with. Most firefighters work 24 hour shifts, and each crew is called by its company number and crew letter: Station 1 A shift, or Ladder 72 C Shift.
Each piece of fire apparatus has what’s called “minimum staffing,” that is, the minimum number of firefighters that must be assigned to the vehicle at any one time. For example, at a station there might be a fire engine and a rescue unit, with 4 people assigned to the engine and 2 to the rescue for the day, but minimum staffing for them is 3 on the engine and 2 on the rescue. This means one of the personnel assigned to that crew can be off on vacation, sick leave, or temporary assignment at any one time. If the number falls below that, a spare firefighter can be “floated” to that crew for the day, or if none are available, someone from another shift is assigned overtime for the shift.
When you are new to the crew, you don’t count towards minimum staffing, you are supernumerary. You remain in that status until you are approved to count towards staffing. To do that, you must prove to the crew you can operate as a part of that crew and contribute to its mission. The officer in charge of that crew is the one who decides, but most officers make it a vote amongst the crew. Hey, if the new guy isn’t up to scratch, it’s their lives on the line, so it’s a fair way of doing it. The process usually takes 5-7 shifts, which is about 2 or 3 weeks. Until then, you concentrate on learning what you need to learn in order to be a help instead of a hindrance.
When you arrive at a station to be a new crewmember, you learn a few important things:
Those first shifts are spent memorizing everything about the truck you are assigned to- where every single piece of equipment is. How to operate every single piece of that equipment. Once your crewmembers are satisfied that you are knowledgeable enough to operate as part of the crew, your officer notifies the battalion chief that you now count for staffing. Now you are part of the crew. Time to prove to them that you deserve to stay there.
You spend the entire first year mastering the basics of being a firefighter. You are on probation for at least the first year. The leather front on your fire helmet is orange and says “Probationary” on it, and the reflective tape on your helmet is also orange. That way everyone on the emergency scene knows you are still learning the job, so they won’t expect more than you are capable of handling.
During that first year, you should spend every spare minute on shift studying something about the job.
Each 90 days, there is a course of instruction for you. There are things you must master during that 3 month period, and there is a written and practical test at the end of each period. The first one contains a map test, among other things. It has questions like:
You are driving south on First Avenue on the way to a call at 804 West Main Street. When you approach Main Street, do you take a left or a right?
If you happen to be a paramedic, you are also precepting at this time. You get paired with a senior paramedic whose job it is to teach you the protocols for medical emergencies. It’s up to that person to decide when you are ready to face the medical director’s exam. Fail it, and your precepting continues. That exam is where you sit in front of the department EMS chief and the medical director (who is a doctor) and they pepper you with questions on medical issues. Pass, and you can practice as a paramedic. Fail, and you have to remain precepting for a bit longer. If you can’t successfully complete that preceptorship in a reasonable amount of time, you are fired.
After you count for minimums, you will likely be on a rescue squad for at least the next month. Then you will rotate back and forth between that rescue and the engine.
Once you pass that first 90 day exam, you are now eligible to float to other stations, where you will be assigned to a rescue unit for the shift. Why a rescue? Because every rescue in the city is identical to every other, and has exactly the same job. No one has to worry that you don’t know what you are doing.
During that year, you have a lot to learn. You learn how to refill SCBA bottles, how to perform vehicle extrications, and how the department you now work for operates. Once that first year is done, you now know the absolute minimum you need to know in order to be successful. You can never know enough when you work in the fire department. There is always more to learn.
It all sounds difficult, but it really isn’t, as long as you are willing to work at it and aren’t a complete idiot. I was a preceptor and an officer, and in all the years I did it, I only saw a dozen or so who had their probation or preceptorship extended, and of those I only remember three who were let go. One of them (23 years old!) quit after his first shift because his mother said firefighting was too dangerous and wouldn’t let him do it. Imagine being a grown man, spending a year and $10,000 to become a firefighter, only to have your mother tell you you weren’t allowed to do the job.
So at the end of that first year, your officer and crew have decided you have learned all you need in order to be a permanent fixture. You are invited to a city commission meeting where you are sworn in, taking an oath that is remarkably like the one when joining the military. At the conclusion of that ceremony, you get your permanent leather front to your helmet, and a new set of yellow reflective tapes to replace the orange ones. You are now one of us and you get to uphold the traditions of the department while also ensuring those who come after you do the same.
Keep telling me how voting for Republicans will save us all.
Even the name of the Act is in Spanish with an English subtitle.
So the owner of the business has to provide the compressor, the electricity, the maintenance, insurance, and other necessary items at his own expense?
Pass a law against charging for air, and they will just remove the air station, ensuring that no one will have air available at all.
Oh, and saying “I’m pro-capitalism, but” right before making a statement like this is like saying “I’m a gun owner, but”