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PlanktonPunkt Designs puzzles available in CreateJigsawPuzzles

link to order print on demand PlanktonPunkt Designs jigsaw puzzles (printed in China)

PlanktonPunkt Designs POD products in Printify

link to order PlanktonPunkt Designs print on demand wares from the source

PlanktonPunkt Designs POD products in Etsy

A link to order from a selection of PlanktonPunkt Designs print on demand wares from Etsy

Blog

  • PlanktonPunkt Designs

    I have been busy recently trying to get my jigsaw puzzle business going. First, browsing Print On Demand suppliers for dropshipping partners, I realized that I could sell my designs printed also in other items. Then, I realized that I might need a seller’s permit, especially if I also sell physical goods to local stores for resale.

    I got a seller’s permit for State of California but in the office I had a brain freeze and had to use a placeholder name for my print-on-demand business. I needed to later change that to PlanktonPunkt Designs. I also learned that I should get a city business license. The permitting office was next open on Monday morning.

    On Saturday, I took a long trip (for me) driving over 100 miles to each direction to a comic book garage sale to connect with comic book crowd and to ask advise in on-line sales. On my way back, I stopped into a comics & games shop to ask if they were interested in buying my jigsaw puzzles. In principle, yes, in practice, let’s wait until I get my business going.

    On Monday morning, I walked to a copy shop to print my applications for business license and fictional name registration, then to city permitting office, where I was told I would need to register my fictional business name before I could apply, but if I made it back before 2pm, I could submit my application in the same day.

    I walked back near my rental place, where I had parked my car and drove to county registrar where I could register my fictional business name. Otherwise good, except the office was next to county court house and registrar of voters and there was a special election going April 15th, so it took some searching to find a parking spot. The registration itself went smoothly, relatively short waits and minimally complex bureaucracy, only cost me 40 dollars.

    After finishing my business registration application while drinking Vietnamese coffee, I drove to city permitting offices again and this time, after some wait, I managed to submit my application (80 dollars) but was directed to zoning board. Nonplussed, I meandered upstairs and got to fill a zoning application. I think it was approved, but that took a 250 dollar fee, paid in the spot. After which my business application will travel through a few more desks (I don’t know how much those are going to cost and what more forms or other actions will be required.) Meanwhile, I will need to within next 45 days post four times at minimum 5 day intervals an announcement of PlanktonPunkt Designs (I’ll need to find details, exactly what) in some newspaper circulating in the county…

    While I waited to become commercial, I edited some of my older posts, mainly replacing a couple of jigsaw puzzles and other images that are OK in non-commercial blog sites but not in commercial environments with more acceptable content.

    About a week later, I went back to City Permitting Offices to ask about my business license. I was told it will still need to be seen by two more desks and it could take up to two weeks. I was horrified. I asked if it could be expedited. They promised nothing, since that is not a service the offices do. However, on Sunday when I unusually opened my email I discovered that my business license has been approved. Plot spoiler, I am still in process of testing my samples, not going to open a Print On Demand store by the Mother’s Day rush, though that was what I had originally aimed for.

    Getting licenses and ordering samples was more expensive than I thought, so I had to put some samples on hold until I got some money from my other business. Today, as I finally could afford this, I bought an upgrade from WordPress and a business email contact@planktonpunkt.com from Titan Mail.

    Now I’m busy doing designs and ordering samples (the supply chain is still undecided), but at least I have upgraded this blog site for monetization and got a domain name, planktonpunkt.com for development of actual ecommerce. I’ll keep you posted as I continue my business attempts.

    Once I get my print-on -demand shop(s) open, I’ll link to those. Other medium to intermediate projects I have planned include making little videos and / or podcasts to Instagram, YouTube and / or TikTok to advertise PlanktonPunkt Designs.

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  • Some News

    Nobody expects the Spanish interruption

    This week Iberian Peninsula had a massive power outage that darkened large parts of Spain and Portugal, affected Andorra, France and according to some, Netherlands and Belgium. I have not yet seen the proximal cause for the outage published, though speculations have run from Russian hackers to atmospheric phenomena. What is increasingly clear is that the Western European power grid has become extremely vulnerable to disturbances and even the slightest wobble can collapse the interconnect.

    European power grid is at 50 Hz and already 0.5 Hz out of sync causes massive troubles – the power grid can choose to shut down or experience massive damage when the system goes off even that slightly. In Spain, the power grid began to experience fluctuations blamed at some point on ‘induced atmospheric oscillations’ (a mistranslation?) or anomalous heating. However, the power grid had lost large fraction of its buffering capacity as the power production has moved from traditional big power stations with big turbines that maintain inertia against minor fluctuations to renewable energy which uses inverters. In other words, the power grid had become more fragile. Spain had just six days earlier boasted about having produced 100% of its daily energy by renewables. Spain is not alone with its fragile grid, the EU wide race to Net Zero has weakened grids over the Western continent. Individual countries have relied on power production of their neighbors to subsidize their climate programs, and when the neighboring countries transform from help to drain, whole Western Europe is in trouble,

    Snake

    Unrelated to European problems, Japanese Tokaido Shinkansen line had about an hour and half train stoppage due to a power outage caused by a snake that had slithered into power line. Or maybe the snake was a tool of a global conspiracy against power grids. The article did not know the fate of the snake.

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  • Interesting Things I Wanted to Post

    I don’t usually work on Sundays (the day of rest and so on), but the recent news about heightening tensions between two nuclear powers have been alarming. No, not the war in Europe, or the slow boiling in Middle East. I am talking about India and Pakistan. Here is what I get from the non-mainstream news/commentary streams I follow.

    Negligible Chance of Mushroom Clouds

    Apparently, there was a terrorist attack in Kashmir where 26 Indian tourists were killed. This region has been contested by Pakistan and India for decades and occasionally, a war has flared up. India blames the attack on Pakistan, which claims innocence. Regardless of truth, the relationship between the countries tensed up, as in India giving 48 hours for all Pakistanis to get out of the country, whereas Pakistan closed Indian borders and Pakistani airspace from Indian airlines, while revoking visas from Indians and telling the Indian government to reduce their embassy size to 30 people, no military attaches allowed. India informed that they will no longer recognize the Indus River Treaty, which allocates the rights over this common river between the two countries. This is very important, because Indus river waters about 80% of Pakistani farmland, and if India were to block the water, it would create a famine that would collapse Pakistan. Pakistan has informed that if India messes with Indus river, it will be an act of war. Presumably, India has already been accused of flooding some Pakistani villages along Indus tributary. The same podcast claimed that there has been clashes along the border, not just small arms fire but actual artillery shelling. This is before the formal declaration of war. The Indus river question is an existential threat to Pakistan, which is estimated to have at least 170 nuclear warheads and has a first strike policy. India is estimated to have over 160 nuclear warheads and if things escalate, we could see mushroom clouds, though this is still a very small possibility.

    Oddly enough, when president Trump was asked about this issue, he seems to hint that United States will stay out of this conflict. That would be a refreshing novelty, a war that USA is not starting or participating in.

    Earthquake (Space) Weather

    A Podcast that YouTube recommended to me says that the magnetic field of the Sun is weakening. Apparently, this may be somehow connected with the likelihood of big earthquakes. Sun’s magnetic field weakens and strengthens by 11-12 year sunspot cycles but the peak magnetic field has been weakening over the latest solar cycles (data starts in 1970s, so we don’t know how things were earlier). This presentation fits the hypothesis that solar weather including sunspot activity triggers earth quakes that has been making rounds around interwebs for some time, except that in this presentation it is the weakening solar magnetic field that creates sunspots and correlates with the frequency of big earthquakes.

    The earthquake – sunspot connection has been explained by the effects of space weather on telluric currents, i.e., the electric currents going through Earth, telluric currents being stronger along fault lines. Living within a walking distance from Hayward fault, I have been interested in earthquakes, waiting for the Big One.

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  • Estonia Has a Russian Problem

    No. I am not talking about their eastern neighbor, though the relationship between the two countries is currently even more strained than normal.

    I am talking about their Russian speaking stateless minority that is about 17% of their population (when Russian speaking citizens are included, the percentage climbs to 27.4%). I think that when Soviet Union collapsed and Estonia regained its independence, the native Estonians wanted to kick out the Russians and other Soviet nationals that had been imported or migrated into their country since the WWII, refusing to give citizenship to anyone who did not assimilate enough to pass the Estonian language test, but I thought that the sentiment had faded during the over three decades since, or at least something had been done to resolve the issue of large fraction of population being stateless. If I correctly remember, the newly re-emerged Russia had not wanted to take the Russians and other Russian speakers from Estonia, and I suspect many of the Russian speakers had been born in the country. Without Russian or Estonian passport, these people became stateless. To me, having about 17% of your population as a stateless minority, especially when preparing for war against their supposed native country seems very dangerous.

    An opinion poll comparing Estonian speaking, Russian speaking and bilingual households shows a clear rift in the opinions and attitudes of the ethnic groups. As far as I have seen, the Western media, of course, only publishes the Estonian speakers predominant opinion. The Russian speakers, anyways tend to follow their own media landscape. The pollsters comfort the readers (or themselves) telling that the Russian speakers are not a monolithic group and there is a diversity of opinions among them. This is true, but aside from the commonly differing prevalences of opinions between the linguistic groupings, the other two messages I got from reading this poll were 1) the difference in opinion about Ukrainian war between the region containing Tallinn (more pro-NATO and hawkish) and the rest of the country, and 2) the clear agreement between all groups that ethnic conflict within Estonia is possible, with Estonian speaking majority believing in it more .

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  • PSA

    While waiting to become commercial, I have edited some of my older posts, mainly removing a couple of jigsaw puzzles and other images that are OK in non-commercial blog sites but not in commercial environments with more acceptable content.

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  • Klaus Schwab Has Resigned

    Last weekend, it was announced that Klaus Schwab has resigned from his position as a chairman of WEF. He had been one for 55 years, and was one of the faces of the technocratic globalism that the transnational institutions and Western governments have been pushing on the populaces. You know, things like 15 minute cities, CO2 taxes, energiewende, digital IDs, central bank programmable digital currency, the Great Reset and modified RNA vaccines.

    Now it is said that he has resigned as a consequence of a whistle-blower that had implicated Klaus Schwab and his wife in fiscal (and possibly other types) of improprieties, with the WEF board having a sudden emergency meeting. Somehow I doubt this reason – whistle-blowers do not just conveniently appear after 55 years of people not noticing chairman’s practices. I suspect this has more to do with the disastrous effects of the current forced changes on economy and the cultural blowback against the zealous insistence on the Veblen ideologies of the elites enforced with a surveillance state. Since I have not detected WEF to show interest in actual well-being of the masses, rather than the insistence that masses must adapt to their betters’ vision of the Greater Good, I think Klaus Schwab’s ouster has more to do with the smarter members realizing that sawing the branch they are sitting on, i.e., destroying the countries they live in, is not a viable long-term strategy. Even bugout countries, like New Zealand, would sooner or later be destroyed by technocratic practices.

    In a WEF’s Davos meeting about a year ago, Blackrock’s Larry Fink who also sits in WEF’s Board of Trustees, surprised by praising xenophobic countries which had instead of immigration invested in AI and robotics. At that point I took it as a bad omen – what are they planning to do with the people replaced by AI and robotics? In retrospect, I think that was an outward sign that there will be changes within WEF.

    In summary, I think Klaus Schwab was forced out after his vision of New World Order had proven to be a failure.

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  • Happy Easter

    Eggs with their natural colors (102 pieces). Dyed eggs are a common part of Easter celebration.

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  • K2-18b

    Scientists in University of Cambridge have published their analysis of the data collected by James Webb telescope, presenting the results showing likely dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet K2-18b. This is thought to be a hycean world, which is supposed to have large liquid water ocean with hydrogen atmosphere but not all scientists agree even that. There were preliminary results suggesting DMS in the atmosphere published earlier, but this later analysis by the group presented more evidence claiming to have strengthened the earlier findings to 3 sigma levels.

    DMS on Earth is produced by microbes like phytoplankton, and the researchers consider it in the atmosphere of K2-18b as a potential sign of large amounts of life in the ocean of K2-18b. However, the possibility of some exotic chemistry occurring in extraterrestrial conditions (different gravity, temperature, availability of component chemicals, space chemistry, etc) has not been excluded and may explain the signal, in which case it would be abiogenic. Besides, collecting spectroscopy signals from faraway planets (in this case about 120 light years away) is difficult, and more data is needed to verify the DMS/DMDS signal instead of some other chemical with similar spectrum at 5 sigma certainty.

    In any case, an interesting possibility and worth noting, just in case.

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  • Tuna

    The Poplar Report alerted me to textured vegetable protein in canned tuna, so I decided to look at the current tuna stocks – are we that close to (commercial) extinction? Or is it just the current trend of substituting food ingredients to cheaper or maybe adding weird chemicals for profit?

    If I correctly remember, I had considered tuna overexploited since 1980s and had avoided eating it maybe since junior high school. Moreover, this century has had lurid food fakery scandals including the percentages of mislabeled fish sold in USA, often cheaper fish species being passed for more expensive ones.

    Tunas, both the canned variety and the sushi can contain mislabeled fish, with especially sushi being notorious for fakery (escolar, also sold as ‘white tuna’, can cause severe gastrointestinal distress), the more expensive varieties were more likely to be faked, risk of fakery presumed to grow with demand exceeding the supply, but sometimes also the cheaper species were mislabeled. (in Spain the likelihood the bluefin tuna you ordered in restaurant is something else is on average 73% with seasonal variation based on bluefin fishing season.)

    Now, checking at the state of the tuna stocks, I was surprised to read that conservation methods to protect commercial tuna stock had apparently worked and that depending on report 15 out of 23 stocks or 11 out of 23 stocks monitored were estimated to be fished at sustainable levels in 2024 reports (assuming I correctly understood their summary tables) with 88% of tuna coming from sustainably fished stocks (according to one of the reports). The contrast to 2007 doomsday news is promising, but when looking at the FAO report from 2007, I noticed that even then 13 – 14 out of 23 stocks were fully or moderately harvested, the status of the rest being unknown (3 stocks), overexploited (4 – 5 stocks) or depleted (2 stocks). Maybe the difference between today and then is in the levels of overexploitation reducing?

    Nevertheless, it is nice to read some good news, assuming the tuna statistics are real. However, considering the unreliable climate reporting, I cannot avoid creeping suspicion that the earlier tuna depletion may have been overrated or the current improvements overstated. And maybe I should go to supermarket myself to check if I can find TVP in tuna can, possibly to buy a can of Albacore labeled as sustainably caught.

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  • Crime in Oakland

    A local ABC7 news report from last year informed that the published 2023 Oakland PD clearance rates for violent crime (from assaults to murders) was 3% whereas for property crime the clearance rate (that is, police made an arrest) was 0.1%. For nearby big cities San Francisco and San Jose the respective numbers were 28% and 35% for violent crime and 5% and 7% for property crime. When the ABC7 reporter asked the Oakland PD about the numbers, they were blamed on human error, but they did not have correct numbers available at that time.

    While the statistics of San Jose and San Francisco seem pathetic to anyone living in these cities, the Oakland numbers are so close to zero, that if true, instead of a reporting error, the people there would live essentially without law enforcement, if not for the parking enforcement and municipal code inspectors.

    According to statistics, Oakland issued close to 269000 parking tickets in 2023. Moreover, a 102 year old man was ordered to clean graffiti from his fence or pay fines. He complained that he could have done it when he was younger but now that he is in wheelchair, the task falls to his 70 year old son. The utility box nearby, also covered with graffiti, I suppose, is apparently OK. However, from the original news: “The city inspector contacted KTVU and said that he would do an immediate inspection and, presumably, cancel the citation.”

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