Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS)

The Wall St Journal floated a trial balloon today.  The plan would have Uncle Sam calculate a "fair" price for drugs, based on overseas drug prices, and then tell Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of 'em to only pay the drug companies the computed fair price.
   The price of American made drugs sold overseas is a lot lower, like half the price, of the same drug sold in the US.  This happens because  the US health agencies are forbidden to bargain over drug prices.  Overseas the health agencies do bargain over prices and generally get a price one half the US price, or better.  
   I have a better fix for the problem.  America passes a law permitting duty free drug imports from all reasonable first world countries (Canada, Britain, the EU, Japan, maybe a few more).  This is a free market fix, no bureau crats computing prices, Health agencies just go out for bids and buy from the lowest bidder.  No flimflam over "list" prices, discount prices, special prices, what ever.  Lowest bidder gets the sale. 
   This would have to be a federal government fix, the state of New Hampshire doesn't get to set US import duties. Peaking as a candidate for the NH legislature I won't have much to say about this issue, other than to root for it, should I be elected.

They caught them alive. They are both nutcases

And the evidence against them looks strong from here.  The Florida mail bomber left a fingerprint on one of the bombs which is pretty solid evidence against him.  The synagogue shooter was taken alive, gun in hand, at the scene of the crime. From what I see on TV (highly reliable source that) both criminals are nut cases, with social media postings and vehicle stickers to prove it.  Various TV newsies have blamed President Trump or Democrat politicians for inciting them to violence.  I don't buy that.  These two guys are nutcases.  We allow nutcases to run around loose until they kill someone.  We ought to change that policy.
  Let's hope our legal profession has the stones to convict and execute these two murderers, and do it within a year. 

Driving people out of restaurants is disgusting

And trying to kill them with pipe bombs in the mail is worse.  I hope law enforcement will catch the bombers and do it quickly. 

Canceling nuclear disarmament treaties

Trump and John Bolton are talking about doing it.  I don't remember just what the Intermediate Range Forces agreement called for.  There has been some vague talk on TV about restrictions on short range nuclear missiles.  Consider the fact that long range missiles can hit short range targets.  About all I can think of is that short range missiles are small enough to be road mobile, which makes it easier to disperse them and make it hard for counterforce strikes to take them out.
   There hasn't been much talk about disarmament treaties in many years, actually since the Soviet Union collapsed in way back in 1989.  And, what's in it for us?  Do we, owners of the largest air force in the world, really want or need yet another nuclear missile system?  Especially one that has to be based in the EU in order to hit the Russians?  Do we believe that the Russians really want to nuke the EU?  As opposed to taking it over piece by piece?
   And, just what have the dead broke Russians been doing that we think is against the treaty?
   In short, I don't understand why the Trump administration is threatening to pull out of an international treaty that has been around for like 30 years, and doesn't seem to be doing any harm.  Unless they think they can browbeat the Russians into signing a better (in our view) treaty, just to keep the disarmament thing running. 

Bye Bye local politics

Every day this election season I get mail from congressmen and governors from all the 50 states, you know the usual "dear voter please make a campaign contribution" sort of letter.  Also robo calls.  For me, I will support my local NH candidates, my state wide NH candidates, and presidential candidates.  I don't have either the money or the inclination to support candidates running for office in the Carolina's, California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Montana, or any other state.  But I still get the out of state letters.  Many of them franked (send for free by congressmen who enjoy free mailing privileges). 
   How do the rest of you feel?

The Saudi's are an important American ally

Saudi Arabia is Sunni, contains the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, has the respect of its Arab neighbors, has a working relationship (abet under the table) with Israel, and has both oil and oil money running out its ears.  All good Moslems are supposed to make a journey to Mecca (the Hadj) in Saudi at least once in a lifetime.  All in all, having the Saudi's on our side helps us dealing with all the other players in the middle east. 
   The disappearance, most likely murder, of Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, may well break up our good relations with Saudi.  The TV news is saying that Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents inside the Saudi consulate at Istanbul.  I'm never all the sure that the TV news has it right, but today it's all I have to go on.  If the TV newsies have it right, we have a problem.  Much as we might like to continue our good relationships with the Saudi's, it will become politically difficult-to-impossible to ignore the outrage among the American electorate and Congressmen.  This outrage will likely force us to take action against the Saudi's.  And things will go down hill from there. 
  I have to think that the Saudi's have really botched this one.  Offing a political enemy, on foreign soil, is so provocative as to make me wonder it the Saudi's have there heads screwed on right.

Inferno, World at War 1939-1945, Max Hastings 2011

A worm's eye view of WWII.  It's 700 pages.  It covers the European War and the far eastern war.  It dwells on killings, casualties, cruelties, concentration camps, civilian hardships, prisoners of war, Gestapo atrocities, anti semetism,  ship sinkings, the holocaust, and every other horrible event the occured in the period.  Little discussion of the causes of the war, the failing of the west to stand up to Hitler, the reasons for the astonishing German victories of 1940, the means the allies used to finally crush Hitler.  In short, a lot of colorful, if miserable, stories of little people getting stomped on, little discussion of how the war was fought and won, little discussion of the future effects of WWII.
   The author, Max Hastings, has written a fair number of other books on politics and military history.  Some of them are less down beat than this one.   

Annie the Kuster has a new TV ad

The ad claims that Annie passed a new law to reduce opioid smuggling into New Hampshire.  Since she is a US congressional rep presumably this was a federal law.  Strange, I don't remember ever hearing or reading about this before Annie started running this election commercial just the other day.  I wonder what the number of her bill was.  I wonder what her bill really says. 

New Hampshire Greenies release a new state energy plan

I heard about this on NHPR yesterday.  The greenie's plan calls for 100% renewable energy state wide by 2040.  Sounds great, but...  They did not describe just what they mean by "renewable".  At a guess they are talking about wind and solar.  Usually the greenies don't consider hydro to be renewable, even though it rains a lot and refills the reservoirs.
   They did not explain how we keep the lights on since solar doesn't produce any electricity after the sun goes down.  Even up here in the White Mountains, we have long calm spells of no wind.  How do the greenies plan to keep the lights on after dark on a calm night?  This is important.  My furnace doesn't work when the power goes out.  That means my pipes freeze in winter.  I am not the only electricity user who needs dependable 24/7 electricity. 

Some advice for Google Maps software weenies

1. Fix the bug that causes a blank sheet of expensive paper wasted before getting down to the business of printing the real map. 
2.  Remember that white is free, other colors consume expensive inkjet ink.  Make the background of the printed map white.  The road map people had this figured out long ago.  Don't make the roads white, they don't show up against the grey background.  Roads should be bright primary colors.  Color ought to indicate the quality of the  road, from interstate down to dirt. 
3.  Make the printed map fill the page.  Most of us have inkjet or laser printers that handle A size paper (8 1/2 by 11).  That gives you a target to shoot for. 
4.  Once you get it working, if you are smart enough to program it, don't change it.  Remember, in software there are NO HARMLESS CHANGES. 

Archiving all the TV newsbroadcasts

I listened to this piece on NPR yesterday.  There is an organization that has been archiving all TV news broadcasts going back to he 1960s.  Cool.  They went on to describe various obsolete technologies, used on the older archive, videotape, VHS, and how they had transcribed everything to DVD's.  And, they plan to move the entire archive to "the cloud" real soon now. 
  Me, I have serious doubts about the reliability of "the cloud", especially after natural disasters or war.  I'd feel better with racks of tapes or DVD's, and the machines to play them, in a nice deep underground site that I owned, outright.  A site on high ground and away from city centers. 
   For that matter, I have never read anything about the life of a home burned DVD.  Are they truly permanent? Or does the data fade away after ten years or so?  The old floppy disks would become unreadable after a few years in a desk drawer. 

Kavanaugh squeaks by the Senate. TV Newsies still talking about it

I was hoping, after the full Senate voted to approve Justice Kavanaugh yesterday that the newsies would move on.  Surely there are other things of interest  happening somewhere in the wider USA or the wider world.   The TV newsies are still talking about the Kavanaugh appointment.  Is that all they know about? 

It's all about compression ratio

Compression ratio is the number that sets fuel economy and power output for internal combustion engines.  More is better.   Inside the engine, the fuel air mixture lights off at top dead center.  The piston goes down, expanding the hot combustion gases, cooling them, and converting the heat energy from the burning fuel into mechanical work.  Ideally we would keep the piston moving down, expanding the cylinder volumn until the combustion gases had been cooled down to room temperature, extracting all possible mechanical work from the fuel burn. 
   In real engines, the piston cannot keep going down forever.  The piston gets to bottom dead center.  Which is about 4 inches in a typical car engine.  At which point the exhaust valve opens and the still blazing hot combustion gases go out the tailpipe.  At night, running a short straight exhaust pipe, no muffler, you can see the exhaust gas glowing blue-white.  That's a lot of heat energy that didn't get converted into useful work. 
   Compression ratio is the ratio of cylinder volume with the piston at top dead center (as small as it gets) to the cylinder volume with the piston at bottom dead center (as big as it gets).  The higher the compression ratio, the more of the heat energy of the fuel gets converted into mechanical work.  Gasoline engines in cars have compression ratios as low as 8:1, 10:1 in good engines like the Cadillac Northstar, and 13:1 in outright racing engines. 
   Why not use a higher compression ratio and get more efficiency?  In gasoline engines we put a combustable fuel air mixture into the cylinder at bottom dead center and compress it as the piston goes up to top dead center.  As the mixture is compressed, it gets hotter.  When it gets too hot,  it catches fire and burns before the piston is at top dead center, and tries to drive the engine backwards.  You can hear this happening, it is a pinging noise (knocking) from the engine.  Good fuel  (high octane rating fuel) will suppress knocking for a while, but there is a limit.  Call it 10:1 for a "street" engine. 
   And this is the benefit of the diesel engine.  Diesels have just pure air in the cylinder for the compression stroke.  Fuel is injected into the cylinder at top dead center. Diesels cannot knock.  Which means that diesels can run compression ratios as high as 20:1.  Which is why diesels have better gas mileage than gasoline engines.

US Senate votes to have a vote on Kavanaugh

Which is plain stalling, Senate style.  They should not be voting to take a vote.  That is a pure waste of time, and offers senators a way to vote both yes and no to confuse their constituents.  Senate ought to just have a vote on confirming Kavanaugh, and have it right now, not tomorrow. 

Representatives should represent their districts

The ancient Greeks invented democracy, some 2500 years ago.  They did direct democracy, all the citizens gathered in the Agora and voted on such issues as going to war over Corcyra (which kicked off the Peloponnesian War) or the disastrous expedition to conquer Syracuse on Sicily.   Direct democracy is great in principle, but it doesn't scale well (you cannot gather all the citizens of the Roman empire together in one place) and is liable to make poor (disastrous) decisions.
   The British invented representative democracy with the institution of Parliament.  Each member of Parliament represented all the British subjects of his district.  We Americans picked up the idea in colonial times.  All the thirteen colonies had representative legislatures by the time of the revolution.  So long as the representatives are honest, and truly represent their districts it is a fair system.  If the chosen representatives fail to vote in accordance with their district's wishes, it is a corrupt system.
   I am running for a seat in the New Hampshire senate.  Should I be elected, I will vote the way my district wants, and not the way I may want.  As a senator, my duty and my honor call for me to truly represent my district, rather than my personal desires.  

More features that Detroit should offer

My 2005 Buick has a feature.  After dark, it keeps the headlights on long enough for you to reach your front door.  At least that's what it is supposed to do.  In real life it either turns the headlights off before you even get out of the car, or it leaves them on too long, causing me to stand out in the rain, watching, to make sure the car does actually turn the headlights off before it runs down the battery.  They ought to reprogram the computer so that the headlight timeout does not start until the last car door is closed.  This way I could take the groceries out of the back seat and still have some light to climb the front steps and find my door key. 
  Second feature, a fold down back seat.  Folded down, you could fit long stuff like skis and two by fours in from the trunk lid and get them all the way inside the car, and close and latch the trunk lid. 

How the Brits won the Battle of Britain

The time is 1940, early in WWII.  The Germans have just crushed the French, now the Third Reich owns all of Western Europe, except Britain.  The Brits managed to get the bulk of their army back from Belgium at Dunkirk.  They evacuated better than 300,000 men.  But they had to abandon all the army's heavy stuff, tanks, artillery, trucks, ammunition, supplies, yuge  amounts of stuff.  When Operation Dynamo ended, the British army, although back in England, was in no condition to fight. 
   If Hitler had managed to get even a small army across the channel and onto English soil, he would have owned the place.  The Channel is only 20 some miles wide at Dover and Pas de Calais.  Trouble is, the Channel is deep enough to float real warships, and the Brits had plenty of them.  If the Germans had loaded the troops onto Rhine River barges and attempted a crossing, the British would have steamed up along side with destroyers, and a few rounds would put the river barge and all its troops on the bottom.  At this time the Germans had only a hand full warships, less than a tenth of what the Royal Navy had. 
   Air power, the Luftwaffe, could have countered the Royal Navy.  To do this, the Germans had to wipe out the RAF.  They could not  sink or drive off the Royal Navy when they had Spitfires on their tails.  And so, the Luftwaffe attacked all that late summer and early fall of 1940.  Both sides had good pilots and good planes, qualitywise it was a draw between them.  The Germans had somewhat more aircraft but not a decisive margin.
    Fighter units can only generate so many sorties a day.  For instance my fighter wing in the Viet Nam war could do about 110 sorties a day from an assigned strength of 90 F105 Thunderchief fighter bombers.  We would launch 60 aircraft on the morning strike which got off at first light.  They would return around 11 AM.  We had until 2 PM to turn as many birds as possible , finish fixing broken birds from yesterday, and put together the afternoon strike of 60 aircraft.  I dare say RAF fighter squadrons could do a little better, the sorties being shorted and the aircraft had less high tech stuff to break and demand fixing.  (No doppler, no toss bomb computer, no radar, no TACAN, no gyro compass)  But I am sure they had a fixed number of sorties they could generate in a day. 
   The battle winning weapon the Brits had was radar, and a command and control system (the sector centers they were called)  that guaranteed that nearly all RAF fighter sorties would engage the enemy.  No sorties wasted patrolling, looking for the enemy, few or no sorties wasted when the enemy was not found.  Each sortie flow under radar control would find the enemy and score some kills.  This gave the RAF the winning edge in the summer of 1940. 

Communism is Different from Socialism.

So said NHPR today.  A woman, (I think she was the moderator on the talk show) said repeatedly and with emphasis that Communism was not the same as Socialism.  Talking about classical socialism and communism, as was the breed up thru the 1950's, there was little difference.  Both parties read their Karl Marx and believed in government ownership of the means of production, so that government could set everyone's wages to the same low level. Eliminate "wage disparity" at a stroke.  And set up a command economy where the politbureau sets production targets for everything.  And collectivise farming.  The only different between Communists and Socialists was how the party would obtain the power to push thru their program.  Communists believed in seizing power thru revolution and force of arms.  Socialists advocated political action and the ballot box.  Once in power there wasn't much difference from the viewpoint of citizens, kulaks, business people, and nearly everybody else. 
   Today's "democratic socialism"  is probably a little different.  I doubt that many of them have read their Marx, know much about socialism's history, and their party platform is "more free stuff".  None of them talk about how all that free stuff will be paid for.  At least very few of them claim to be Communists, the decades long Cold War blackened the name of Communism too much for anyone to claim it today.
   Anyhow I am glad that tax payer funded NHPR feels there is a critical and important different between Communism and Socialism.

Can we trust the FBI anymore?

An organization run by James Coomey, with Peter Strvok, Lisa Page, Andy whats-his-face and who knows what other men of questionable judgement in charge.  An outfit that stonewalls the US Congress.  Can this outfit conduct a reasonable investigation of the hottest potato in DC, the Dr Basely Ford story?