coltswalker

Daylight Savings Time first appeared in the United States in 1918 as a WWI energy measure. It was very unpopular. Farmers especially disliked it. Congress killed it in 1919. Then WWII came along and Socialist FDR made it mandatory again, year-round this time. When the war ended, every state and city just picked their own dates. The lack of uniformity was a disaster for the nation. Congress finally stepped in with the Uniform Time Act of 1966 to standardize things. The 1973 oil crisis brought a brief year-round experiment that everyone hated, so it was scrapped. In 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act, a massive energy bill that buried a DST extension in it. The start date moved up three weeks to the second Sunday in March, and the end date slipped one week to the first Sunday in November. That's four extra weeks of DST. A DOE study came out in 2008 and found the whole thing saved about 0.02% of total US energy consumption. Basically nothing. The current schedule, starting second Sunday in March and ending first Sunday in November, has been in place since 2007.

Poland coup d'état update: Polish President Karol Nawrocki, an ally of the previous government, cut short a state visit to Senegal and returned to Warsaw. He publicly accused Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government of staging a forced takeover of a constitutional body and breaching public order. Riot police were deployed to the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw as protesters gathered to demand the reinstatement of the suspended court president. This escalation stems from a long running dispute over judicial appointments that has effectively paralyzed the court, with both the current government and the nationalist president refusing to recognize each other's judicial nominees. straitstimes.com/world/europ…

xAI knows how to upset paid subscribers. Customers are furious over xAI's recent changes to Grok's weekly usage limits. The shift from daily message counts to a shared weekly usage pool has generated significant frustration. Paid SuperGrok and X Premium subscribers have reported that their weekly quotas feel disproportionately low or have been quietly slashed. Some long-term subscribers have publicly stated they are considering canceling their plans because the decreasing limits make the subscription feel unsustainable. The weekly usage pool is depleted abnormally fast. For example, there are documented cases on the Cursor community forum of Grok Bot burning through a user's entire weekly allowance in minutes due to automated multi-bot review loops. There is an apparent long-term policy shift to eliminate free access and extract more revenue from paid tiers. There is active and vocal customer pushback regarding the weekly usage limits, with users frequently expressing dissatisfaction over reduced access, unexpected quota depletion, and the perceived value of their subscriptions. forum.cursor.com/t/grok-bot-… linkedin.com/posts/ctech-by-…

There is a coup d'état taking place in Poland right now. Poland is in the middle of a severe constitutional crisis that erupted over the Tribunal's composition. The new government had Parliament elect 8 replacement judges this year. President Nawrocki refused to swear in 5 of them, and Tribunal President Święczkowski refused to let any of the new judges sit on cases. And we thought Poland had their act together! thegatewaypundit.com/2026/10…

WatchFire is now LIVE! Friday Night. Join us! rumble.com/v7hmcnc-once-more…?

Alaska U.S. Senate race BACKGROUND: Well, it looks like Alaska Dems have come up with a rather creative way to play dirty and cheat themselves into winning a Senate race, and it involves finding somebody with the exact same name as the Republican they’re trying to defeat. revolver.news/2026/10/watch-… Dems operatives actually went looking for somebody named “Dan Sullivan” to run against the actual Senator Dan Sullivan, hoping that confused voters might accidentally cast their ballots for the wrong guy.

Alaska’s U.S. Senate race is under federal and state investigation over a voter confusion scheme. Two candidates named Daniel Sullivan are on the ballot: Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan and a challenger, Dan J. Sullivan. Although plenty of evidence shows they are behind it, the Peltola campaign and national Democrats have denied any connection. New development today: Daniel J. Sullivan, the independent candidate running for Senate in Alaska whose name is almost identical to the Republican senator running for reelection, left his hometown of Petersburg earlier this week, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News. Is he in hiding? He was recruited by operatives linked to Democrat Mary Peltola's campaign. Sullivan's current whereabouts after leaving his hometown are not clear. cbsnews.com/news/daniel-j-su…

While Breitbart pretends to fight Google by advertising and promoting Google, South Korea takes REAL measures to fight Google. South Korea just fined Alphabet’s Google (along with Apple) $47.6 million for market dominance app store manipulation that forces smaller developers onto unfair payment systems. oann.com/tech/south-korea-fi…

From the Final Frontier Dept,: Patrick Stewart and Walter Koenig, two iconic figures of the Star Trek franchise, died just three days apart this October, marking a devastating week for fans and the cast. thedigitalbits.com/columns/b…

WatchFire Podcast host BRANDON GRESHAM's article: "The 250 Year Argument" now live on substack frames the modern political climate around the 18th century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Brandon talks about how modern socialist movements are reviving the mindset of Thomas Paine. Brandon wars of dangerous implications. It is true that collective ownership does not eliminate power structures. Municipally owned grocery stores and public control of artificial intelligence companies are stupid attempts to redirect complex institutions without understanding the practical knowledge required to sustain them. This is always the issue with communists. Brandon concludes that preserving liberty demands that citizens cultivate integrity, accept personal accountability, and actively teach the next generation the value of their inherited freedom. brandongresham.substack.com/…

An ever degrading quality of ARRL publication can be demonstrated by this most recent example, "Will RADE Be the Next SSB?" Read the article here: arrl.org/news/will-rade-be-t… FreeDV RADE is a niche complement, not a replacement for SSB. The flaw in the article's claim is that it confuses technical capability with practical adoption. SSB didn’t supplant AM merely because it occupied half the bandwidth. It won because, once crystal filters and phasing technologies matured, SSB became simple, cheap, and robust to implement. It adhered to the amateur radio ethos of "any radio, any operator, just works." RADE inverts this paradigm entirely. By relying on a neural auto encoder, it shifts the burden from RF simplicity to computational complexity. RADE is not just a "mode," it's actually a compute heavy system. The machine learning codec requires a lot of CPU power. Operators can't simply turn it on in just any transceiver. It requires computer processing, either via an external setup or someday built into the radio itself. This creates a real multi-level barrier that the transition from AM to SSB never faced. Consider that analog SSB degrades gracefully. With less propagation from fades or more QRM, the noisier signal may still allow a skilled operator to copy a callsign or piece of traffic through the noise. Neural-codec-based digital modes like RADE suffer from the "cliff effect." While it is impressive that RADE can operate at SNRs as low as -2 dB under controlled conditions, once the signal drops below its decoding threshold, it doesn't get "noisy," it just hard-fails. The actual result of that fail is either silence or complete garbage. In marginal HF conditions, that lack of graceful degradation is a major operational liability. The ARRL article reads more like a press release rather than a critical analysis. The work by FreeDV and the funding from ARDC are impressive accomplishments for open source digital voice. On the other hand hyping it as the end of SSB ignores the sociological and practical realities of the hobby. RADE will absolutely find a devoted niche. It will be invaluable for specific use cases, but it will not dethrone SSB as the universal, "lowest common denominator" voice mode of HF. @arrl

Ilhan Omar’s “first” husband, Ahmed Hirsi, said Omar had married her brother so he could obtain a green card. 3 Marriage Timeline: Official Marriage 1: Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (Omar’s alleged brother) Married from 2009 to 2017. They were separated when he left the States around 2011. Official Marriage 2: Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi They had an Islamic marriage in 2002, separated in 2007, reconciled after husband number one (her alleged brother) left in 2011, legally married in 2018, and divorced in 2019. Official Marriage 3: Tim Mynett Married as of 2020. breitbart.com/politics/2026/…

C4 Corvette Designer Jerry Palmer has passed away. Details are limited on his death but confirmed on the National Corvette Museum which shows October 1942 to October 2026. The announcement I seen from Facebook matches. The news has recently been shared across the Corvette community. Tributes and announcements from automotive groups and family members (including a mention from his son, Brad) have been circulating on Facebook over the last few days, expressing sadness over the loss of the legendary designer. Palmer was a pivotal figure at General Motors from 1966 until 2002 as the executive director of design for GM. He is best known for leading the design of the fourth-generation (C4) Corvette, the third-generation Camaro, and the striking 1977 Chevrolet Aerovette concept. He was inducted into the Corvette Hall of Fame in 2000. I personally have both a C4 Corvette and a 3rd Gen Camaro in my classic car collection. As of today Wikipedia has been update to reflect his passing.