Sunday, October 30, 2016

Hillary's America - A Review of the Film

Hillary's America is a well-done documentary by Dinesh D'Souza about the Democrat Party and about Hillary and Bill Clinton. It is an eye-opening description of the Democrats' dark history involving slavery, the Indian's Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws, the KKK (founded by a Democrat) and much more. If you want to see why she is called Crooked Hillary, you will find out here. The documentary also shines a light on Republican efforts against all of these negative Democrat policies. The movie also delineates all the reasons that installing Hillary and Bill in the White House again will be bad for America and good for them.

Watch the documentary at iTunes, Google Play or Amazon before voting November 8 if you can. It is worth it just for the emotional renditions of "God Bless America" and "The Star Spangled Banner" at the end.

See the trailer...

Thursday, October 27, 2016

You Should Be Wearing Orange

low visibility on busy highway
Here is an equation for you: Rain + low light = Poor visibility.

It seems like a lot of drivers don't know their basic math.

If you drive in the rain when it's dark with your headlights off then you are either lacking brain functionality or you are malicious verging on evil. You are an accident waiting to happen and the sad thing is that someone innocent is going to be involved in the accident with you.

I am not saying that 50 percent of drivers drive without their headlights when they should use them and I am not saying that 10 percent of people do this, but if it is 1 percent or less doesn't make it any less heinous or dangerous.

Get a conscience and turn on your headlights. It's against the law to drive in the dark without headlights on and in many states it's against the law to drive without headlights in the rain. These laws are there for a reason and if you have a driver's license you should know the law. It's a matter of safety and thinking about your fellow travelers on the road. It's also a matter of how drivers with mild visual impairments may not be able to see you or young/newbie drivers who may not know to look for dark vehicles.

I don't know if police are concerned with giving tickets for this infraction, but since it is such a dangerous offense I hope that they do, and I hope the ticket is expensive and comes with 4 points (and a dope slap).

Friday, October 21, 2016

Vote to Make America Great Again

The U.S. election is just days away and there are very few people who won't be happy to see the whole spectacle put behind us. The presidential race has sucked up the news cycle like a Dyson in a sawdust factory.

The last eight years are another spectacle that many will be glad to put behind us starting with a disrespectful, haughty, petulant, campaigner-in-chief/golfer-in-chief who took more vacation and played more golf than any servant of the people should, except that he was not a servant but really more like a lord. He was the first president of half of the people of the country, continuously expressing disdain for Republicans and conservatives. Race relations didn't improve under Obama in his eight years - they got worse. I don't want to go through the laundry list of his ill-conceived policies but in relation to this election we are going to just get more of them with Hillary Clinton. The reason not to elect Hillary isn't the 33,000 emails she deleted, or the thousands (including secret) that she let fall into foreign hands. It also isn't the fact that she lied about Benghazi to the American public and didn't protect her embassy staff. It also isn't her failed foreign policy where much of the world is now at odds with us and where ISIS was allowed to grow and prosper. And it isn't her gathering of money from overseas power brokers for the Clinton Foundation.

The reason not to elect Hillary Clinton as president of the United States is that she will continue Barack Obama's fundamental transformation of the U.S. and on some issues shifting into high gear while doing it.

She will continue to weaken our economy and our safety by drastically increasing the flow of illegal aliens into the country, legalizing all those who reside here and came here illegally, and by increasing the numbers of refugees from the middle east who will harbor among them hundreds of terrorists. She has promised to raise taxes which will harm the economy. She will continue to make poor deals with other governments and lead from behind. Terrorism will not decline because it won't be met with a firm response.

A Hillary Clinton presidency will be four more years of the messy Obama world we live in now and even worse. We are really on the wrong track and your vote will make a difference in the most important election in the country's history.

Vote for Donald Trump for president of the United States and we will have a stronger economy, reduced debt, a safer country, a safer world, more friends and better partnerships in the world. Vote for the outsider - not the Washington insider.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

On Bitcoin Mining 5

It turned out that we would not be in my sister-in-law's house as long as previously thought. They were returning home and we needed to move out to a townhouse that we owned by January. This meant that I would not be able to bring the BFL Monarchs with us. For one thing they were too loud for a townhouse environment and too hot. They were also not very efficient in terms of electricity consumption. They are rated by BFL for 0.65 to 0.85 watts/GH but I measured them as using close to 1 watt per Giga hash including the power supply and the necessary laptop.

antminer U3 bitcoin miner
Bitmain Antminer U3 version 2
Looking for quiet, townhouse friendly miners, in October I bought two Bitmain Antminer U3 miners. This ASIC miner is very similar to the Rockminer R-box 1 (37GH/s) miners. The U3 however runs at 55 to 62 GH/s. Like the older Rockminer, the U3 is basically silent and put out little heat while using about 50 watts of power (plus wattage of attached computer). The problem is that every day or so these miners would become "zombies" meaning that they would stop working. This requires a hard reboot of the device (unplugging and re-plugging) and restarting the mining software. It's a hassle and not on a schedule of any kind so you don't know when you'll have to do it. So as quiet as this was, the fact that it had a problem like this and that I felt the hashrate was too low I kept looking for a better solution.


black arrow prospero bitcoin miner
The better solution in my situation was the Black Arrow Prospero X-1 (X-1.5). The X-1 hashes at 100 GH/s or better and the X-1.5 hashes at 140 to 190 GH/s. This miner is unique among ASIC miners - for one thing it has a large fan which dissipates the generated heat very quietly and effectively. For another thing it has an Android-based touch screen for interfacing with the miner. The miner is also WIFI capable which means that you can place it anywhere in the house and it doesn't need an ethernet cable or a computer attached to it to run the mining software. It is truly a stand-alone device. Perfect! As it got closer to moving day (again!) I sold the two Monarchs which turned out to be pretty solid hashers - if a bit inefficient - and bought two Black Arrow Prospero X-1.5s. I also sold one Antminer U3 and kept one in the box as a backup. I ran the two Prosperos near the dining room in the townhouse for most of the winter and spring of 2016 and appreciated their silence and their heat generation. 

The nice thing about mining for Bitcoin at home is that for part of the year the heat that Bitcoin miners generate can (and is) used to heat your living space. One hundred percent of the heat generated will go into the air in your home. For instance, if my two Prosperos raised the temperature of the downstairs portion of my townhouse by two degrees Fahrenheit, then that is two degrees that didn't have to be heated by the furnace (electric blower and gas fueled) thus saving that much electricity and gas from being used to heat our home. This means that the efficiency of the miner doesn't matter very much in the winter or on cold days in the spring and fall because you are basically running a heater that is mining Bitcoin. It's another story when the hot weather comes but the efficiency of Bitcoin miners is going to be better than rated over the course of a year if they are used in environments where their heat is used. (Now if they could make Bitcoin miners that generated cold air we'd be all set for the summer!)

I'll cover my experience with Bitmain's Antminer S7 in the next On Bitcoin Mining.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

On Bitcoin Mining 4

To continue the story from On Bitcoin Mining 3, in early 2015 I had a stack of 6 Rockminer R-Box 2 110 GH/s Bitcoin miners in my living room (which my wife didn't complain about as long as I kept them quiet) and while the heat they generated was appreciated in the winter and reduced the gas bill somewhat, it was now late spring and some of the days were mighty hot which in turn made the living room too hot. So, it was either turn off the miners (which I did do on many days) or relocate them. I decided to try the attic and add an external fan.

The attic had a pull-down stairway which made access to it easy. As you may know, attics get hot on warm days and this one could reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) or more. For this to work safely I had to set things up right. I placed the miners in stacks of 2 on non-flammable porcelain tiles, placed the power supply also on a porcelain tile, aimed them all towards the center of the attic where their heat would rise to the roof vents and aimed a fast blowing fan at the back of them. I also replaced the quiet fans I had earlier installed with the original more-noisy-but-more-effective-at-cooling-fans back on the miners. Then I monitored the temperature of the attic and monitored the temperature of the miners. On cooler days and at night the miners ran from 50 degrees Celsius to 65 degrees. On hot days the miners would run in the 70s. If they approached 80 degrees (which they did on really hot days) I would shut the miners down. This setup allowed me to mine in the summer and the noise and heat were out of sight. The down-time was minimal.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the laptop PC which I had to have attached to these six Rockminers. This laptop had to be in the attic too since the miners are attached to it via USB cords and the software on the PC runs the miners. After some research into the operating temperature of laptop lithium batteries I opted to remove the battery from the laptop and allow it to run only on AC power. It certainly wouldn't be good to have a rechargeable lithium battery exploding in the attic. 

Of course, this is not an optimal setup and if you are careless maybe even dangerous. Miners can fail if they run too hot too long. But these miners did not fail, and did not run slower. I kept them under 80 degrees and they only had to last until August like this as we were moving into my sister-in-law's house to take care of it while their family had "moved" out of the country for what was supposed to be a couple of years.

This meant I would have a basement in which to place my miners and in a solar-powered house. Nice. Hello, almost-free electricity.

Butterfly Labs Monarch bitcoin miner
BFL Monarch 650 GH/s Bitcoin Miner
At the same time I had noticed that the prices had come down on the water-cooled Butterfly Labs Monarch 650 to 700 GH/s bitcoin miners. If I got just one of these it would replace the six I had and give me the same hashing power. I bought one of them off of eBay and plugged it in. I had trouble getting it to hash at the rated speed. I was only getting about 500 GH, not the 650 advertised. It turned out that I had to use a special version of the Bitcoin mining software BFGminer. Anyway I spent dozens of hours trying to work out the problem. Butterfly Labs' own software EasyMiner never worked for me. Finally I got everything ironed out and the thing was running at 650 GH/s. I decided to get another one of these (actually a 700 GH Monarch) and sell the 6 Rockminer R-box 2s. 

Due to the fact that the Monarch's are liquid-cooled, the two fans on the miner are not as loud as fans on many other miners (like the Antminers). They are also potent heaters and the basement was soon very warm. This wasn't an issue though because it was a basement and not a living space.

This is the 1300 GH/s setup I had in the late summer of 2015 and going into the fall. But, as ever in the world of Bitcoin mining, things never seem to stay the same for very long. More to come....

(Some Black Arrow Prospero Bitcoin miners for sale here)

Monday, June 27, 2016

On Bitcoin Mining 3

bitcoin mining difficulty chart showing rising difficulty
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Level Rising
Bitcoin mining is a nasty game. It involves heat. It involves dust. It involves sometimes VERY-difficult-to-figure-out mining software. It's a game that continuously gets harder to play for increasingly less reward. Every few weeks, the difficulty for solving a block changes - usually it gets harder, sometimes it gets easier before making an even bigger jump in difficulty. This increase in the difficulty of solving a block has the effect of pushing the little guys of the Bitcoin mining game out. It also has the effect of making little guys into big guys as they (stubbornly?) commit more resources to the project. 

So, in general, it constantly gets more difficult to solve a block (solving a block is what generates Bitcoins). This means that if you keep the same equipment that operates at the same electrical efficiency that it will take you 3 weeks to earn the same BTC that previously took you say 2 weeks before. So if Bitcoin mining is more than just a hobby, you need to upgrade your equipment every now and then. If you want to keep earning Bitcoin you must increase your hash rate. Now, because I live in a townhouse/condo, noise is an issue for me. I don't have too many empty unused areas where I can put a Bitcoin miner and not have to hear its constant droning. As such, I can't go "all in" getting the best Bitcoin miners out there because those top of the line ASICs are noisy and heat producing and not at all "home friendly". 

rockminer r-box bitcoin miner
Rockminer R-Box 32-37 GH ASIC miner
With noise in mind, my next miner, while still having the 2 BFL 60's was to get the Rockminer R-Box 32-37 GH ASIC miner. I loved this miner! Two or three houseflies would be louder than this miner. It was (and is) quiet and small and put out a tiny amount of heat compared to the BFL 60's. The wattage was also fairly low being between 40 and 50 watts, I think. I soon sold both of the Butterfly Labs 60's (at a loss) and bought another Rockminer. This is a great entry-level miner and at the moment they are dirt cheap on e-Bay.

Unfortunately, with these two Rockminers my total Giga hashes were now lower than before and my rate of earning Bitcoin pretty much halved - that and the difficulty is always increasing. Having these two quiet miners was Heaven compared to those loud and hot BFLs so you would think I would have doubled down on just these great little miners. Maybe I should have, but that isn't what happened. 

rockminer new r-box bitcoin miner
In my dealing with the Rockminer company I became aware that they had another miner that produced 110 GH/s at better efficiency. The New R-Box 2.0 miner is 3 times faster than the "old" R-Box, at a more cost-effective price (ie., the watts used per GH is better). More GH and more Bitcoin with less heat and less electric use per work done made buying these units a done deal for me. Add to that a few people online said they were quiet too. I ordered one to try it out.

It was not very quiet. Quieter than a lot of miners, yes, but noisy enough for a condo. Following my earlier experience with the two BFL Singles, I decided to swap out the two original internal cooling fans for two quieter fans. The fans were indeed quieter but also a little slower which meant that the unit ran a little hotter than when I got it but well within the safe operating temperature range (maybe 10 degrees C warmer). Now I had a 110 GH miner which ran pretty quietly and with just moderate heat output into the room. That heat output was appreciated anyway since it was winter and the heat added to the warmth of the house. Win-win.

So with my new favorite miner installed I moved to sell (reluctantly, but I had to get the funds for the new miners) my first BFL 10 GH miner and the two slower Rockminer 32 GH miners and replace them with however many of these Rockminer R-Box 2's as I could afford. Over the next couple of months I built up to six of them.

I set up two stacks of three each on top of our unused gas fireplace in the living room and they warmed up the place for the rest of the winter as well as providing about 650 GH/s. The electrical usage of this setup, including power supply and a small laptop running 24/7 computer was probably 800 watts or so. 

All was well until spring and the warmer temperatures outside became more frequent. Find out what happened then in the next installment of On Bitcoin Mining...

(Some Black Arrow Prospero Bitcoin miners for sale here)

Monday, June 20, 2016

On Bitcoin Mining 2

My first Bitcoin mining computer when I heard about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining in 2014 was my PC and that is probably the case for many people when they hear about Bitcoin mining. But even in 2014 a personal computer was woefully inadequate as a Bitcoin miner and even expensive and powerful PC graphics cards were on the way out due to the rise of specialized Bitcoin mining computers known as ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). These special mining computers could do so much more work and much faster than graphics cards or CPUs. But using my PC was just a way to see how the process worked. So I got an account at a mining pool called Bitminter and tried out their Bitcoin mining software and saw how hashing for Bitcoins worked, even at the very slow rate my computer graphics card offered. I was hooked.

Butterfly Labs Jalapeno  bitcoin minerMy first credible Bitcoin miner was the Butterfly Labs BFL 10 GH/s ASIC miner. (GH/s is Giga hash per second or billions of hashes per second. Hashes are calculations.) It actually averaged about 11 GH/s. At the time it was $350. This was a very good entry-level USB miner and worked well with Bitminter's mining App. It does get a bit hot for its size and it is a little bit loud too but not too bad. Butterfly Labs is still selling these apparently and they can also be found on eBay for very little money. These are very good miners for hobbyists who want to see how Bitcoin mining works but there isn't much chance of making any profit. It's still a fun, low impact way to get into mining (meaning low impact on your electricity bill and not technically challenging). I actually wish I still had that first Bitcoin miner rather than selling it to reinvest in other equipment.

Butterfly Labs bitcoin minerAfter using this for a couple weeks by itself, I decided I wanted to increase my hashing power. Because I was happy with the USB connectivity and the compatibility with Bitminter's App, I decided on getting a couple slightly used Butterfly Labs BFL Single SC 60 GH/s ASIC miners off of eBay. This increased my hashing power to about 120 GH/s. This increased hashing power increased the amount of Bitcoin I received. The only problem was that these miners were as loud as jet engines when they arrived. Loud and hot! There was not much chance my wife would put up with their noise in our condo for very long. I read some posts on forums online about how to deal with the noise and the heat that they produce and it was suggested to take the casing off the miners and let them work "naked". They were a little less loud like this because the inlet and outlet grills created much of the noise, but the cheap fans were also equally responsible for extra decibels. So I searched for quieter fans and found some. I swapped out the old fans with the new quieter ones and though the units ran a little hotter because the fans were slower, they were still within the safe operating temperature range of the miners. 

Summer was coming and the miners which added warmth to the house in the cool spring were adding a lot of unwanted heat as the hot days multiplied. I needed a way to get rid of the heat. What I did was to make a contraption using heating and cooling hose and other ducting accessories from Home Depot to vent the heat from the miners directly out a nearby window. Problem solved. I wish I had a picture of the setup for you but I didn't think I'd be posting about the subject in the future and didn't take any pictures of it.

Of course, I wasn't happy to stay static in terms of hashing power or equipment. I talk about my next miners in the next installment of On Bitcoin Mining.

(Some Black Arrow Prospero Bitcoin miners for sale here)

Friday, June 17, 2016

On Bitcoin Mining 1

bitcoin logo
We haven't discussed Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining on this blog before and I have decided to spend a few posts discussing the digital currency. Hopefully you'll find it informative.

If you don't know too much about Bitcoin, there are three ways to look at it.
  1. It's digital money. If you want to buy something or send someone some money (worldwide!) without paying the high fees of PayPal, Western Union, and banks, then Bitcoin is a great way to do it. Transferring money with Bitcoin is very easy (once you have some) and there are no limits and only very TINY fees. Buying things with Bitcoin is also super easy (once you have some). Some places you can spend Bitcoin: Bitcoin Shop, Newegg.com, Overstock.com, TigerDirect.com, purse.io, spendbitcoins.com, Expedia.com, CheapAir.com.
  2. You can buy Bitcoin as an investment. If you're interested in Bitcoin as an investment, its price today (6/17/2016) is 753 dollars per 1 Bitcoin (BTC). Just a few weeks ago it was $400 or so. It has been rising steadily recently and one can only guess as to why, but one reason may be that the reward for solving a block in the blockchain will soon be halved from 25 Bitcoins to 12 Bitcoins. (The blockchain is the record of the transaction.) If you do want to buy Bitcoins it is getting easier than ever. You can buy fractions of a bitcoin as well, if you don't have $753 for a full Bitcoin. These are some places to buy Bitcoin
bitcoin price chart 2016

3.  You can mine for Bitcoins and use those mined Bitcoins to spend or send or use them as investment capital. To mine for Bitcoins you need to buy a special computer that's made especially to mine for Bitcoin. Bitcoin mining is one of those areas in life where you have to spend money to make money. You really need to go "all in" if you want to profit from mining Bitcoin. The biggest miners spend tens of thousands of dollars. Don't expect to make a profit if you spend $20 or $100. You can certainly enjoy Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this low investment but if you want to profit from Bitcoin mining you need to shell out at least hundreds of dollars and have a relatively low electricity cost. I will go more deeply into Bitcoin mining in subsequent posts.
In the following posts, I am not going to go into the history of Bitcoin or its creator or any other material that some other websites do a fine job covering (but I will try to point you to where the info lives). In these posts, I'm just going to discuss Bitcoin from my point of view, which is mainly the mining of Bitcoin for investment point of view. I hope you find it interesting!

(Some Black Arrow Prospero Bitcoin miners for sale here)

Friday, May 13, 2016

Letter to Amazon.com

Letter to Amazon.com,

I have been an Amazon customer since the beginning of the Internet I think. Today I have seen some news that disturbs me greatly.

If CEO of Amazon.com and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decides to pursue this idea of hurting Donald Trump's campaign for president (and/or drop his products) I will divest myself of my monetary relationship with Amazon. I will drop my Prime membership, buy from other online stores instead, delete Amazon Video from my Roku, sell my Kindle and get a Nook, delist my books from KDP and Createspace and any other dealings I have as well.

Keep your politics out of business or lose customers!

Monday, May 9, 2016

15 Reasons Why I Am #NeverHillary

Never Hillary

Hillary and Russian Foreign Minister
The following are some of the reasons that I would never vote for Hillary Clinton for President of the United States (in no particular order).

She supports raising taxes on the wealthy.

She supports amnesty for all illegal aliens.

Condones the breaking of federal law in her support for illegal aliens.

Supports extending Obamacare to illegal aliens.

She wants to build on the Obamacare fiasco.

She supports abortion.

Hillary supports paid family leave which raises taxes to pay for employees extended time off.

She wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $12.00 per hour and supports communities raising it higher than that. This is something that should be left to market forces and not imposed on businesses since it has the effect of creating layoffs for thousands of people and making products more expensive.

She supports the climate change hoax and taxing oil companies to pay for green energy schemes.

She supports increased gun control. 

Hillary supports free college, which is financially unrealistic and ruinous in a country with debts and deficits like the U.S. In my opinion, college should not be free but something that has value to the student, something that needs to be worked for and cherished. Look at the free public education system and how that has failed. Do we want college to go that way too?

Hillary Clinton kept a computer server on her own property which received and sent classified e-mails and which put United States classified information at risk. This server was very likely hacked. General David Petreus was convicted for a much weaker offense. Her aides deleted 32,000 emails from the server dated during the same time period, that she regarded as personal and private before turning over the server to the government. This alone is obstruction of justice.

Hillary participated in a lie/cover-up of the Benghazi terror attack which killed four Americans including an ambassador who repeatedly asked for her help. She knew it was a terror attack (it was on the anniversary of 9/11) but lied and said to the American people that it was retaliation for a You-Tube video. As Secretary of State there was at least incompetence involved and perhaps malfeasance. 


Clinton pursued a disastrous strategy to topple Kaddafi in Libya by supporting rebels with weapons and American and NATO military power which has destabilized the country and the region. Statements like the following alone should disqualify her:
"We are currently doing everything we can to bomb, strafe and use missiles to carry the rebels into power in Libya. We want them to win. We just don’t know who they are.” Hillary Rodham Clinton

She voted for a military solution to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and later changed her mind.



And for those of you saying that they will vote for her because she is a woman and that we are ready for a woman for president, please remember that qualifications and integrity are what should suit a person for president, not the gender of the candidate. Besides, we have had other women run for higher office who had more integrity than Mrs. Clinton (Michelle Bachmann, Carly Fiorina, even Sarah Palin).

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

The Demonization Machine

Conservative talk radio and Republican PACs have sabotaged the last two U.S. presidential elections and as a result gave us a President Barack Obama in both of them - the most liberal, divisive and constitutionally destructive president in U.S. history. A number of these radio shows continually bashed McCain and Romney during those two primaries and damaged their reputations so much that they could not recover for the general election, and many talk show hosts are again in the process of sabotaging the 2016 election. The PACs (political action committees) are just as bad and if they had held their fire and their tens of millions of dollars during the primaries of the 2008 and 2012 elections we may never have had Obamacare, and Libya, and ISIS, just to name a few. As for radio, I am speaking particularly of Glenn Beck and Mark Levin who are doing the kneecapping and who have very large audiences, but it is certainly not limited to just them.

What the intraparty destruction of other candidates does is make some Republicans and Independents so hate or fear the other candidate that once their guy or gal loses and it comes down to the general election, they just can't see themselves voting for the Republican candidate because they have been painted as so flawed and so evil that they don't vote or vote for a third-party candidate in protest. What we then end up with is a liberal Democrat president in the last two presidential elections. That alone should have been enough to motivate Republicans and conservative independents to vote for the Republican nominee, but as I say, the Republican nominee was seen as damaged goods by such a wide majority of Republican voters (due to the Demonization Machine) that they didn't feel like they wanted to have to vote for the lesser of two evils yet again and so didn't. The result of this is Obamacare, a lower standard of living, a lawless president with a weak foreign policy, etc, etc.

Of course the candidates in this 2016 election year are no better. It is ugly the tactics they use to destroy the other guy. Citizenship has been brought up, accusations of lies and financial mismanagement, character assassination, mocking.

What happens after all of this is that the supporters of each candidate get on Twitter and Facebook and double down on the trash talk. Twitter is the place where ridiculous claims about the candidates go to fester and metastasize into viral slander and unsupported lies.

So whether it is Donald Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio who ends up as the Republican nominee for President, the dirty fight leading up to the nomination is already souring voters in regards to the other candidates. Beck says he won't vote for Trump if he is nominated. What if a couple million of his listeners follow suit? Levin is clearly pro-Cruz and quite anti-Rubio and anti-everyone else. If the nominee is someone other than Ted Cruz will his support for that nominee be like it was when the fight had settled on a Romney nomination after months of kneecapping? Tepid at best? Will his listeners again not bother to vote because they have been schooled in all that is wrong with the nominee?

An Obama presidency would never have occurred if Republicans and independents had held their noses and voted for the "lesser of two evils" because the U.S. certainly has had the GREATER of two evils for the last seven years. The lesson to be learned is first, that there is no perfect candidate. The second lesson is that talk radio hosts (and PACs) have a huge impact on their listeners and ought to consider their culpability when it comes to that influence. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh seem to have had the right tone in 2016. Though one knows who they might favor to be the nominee they don't bring the weight of their influence like a hammer onto the candidates, saving the brunt of their attacks for the Democrat challengers.

Unfortunately, the same thing seems to be happening this time around, but we may just be lucky that the present Democrat candidates will cause the same sort of voter apathy in 2016 which will help the Republican candidate win in November. But if a Republican wins in November it won't be because the Demonization Machine isn't well-oiled, because indeed it is operating as well as ever.