Words of the Weasel Part 35

Describing a 1989 British Land Rover in a Wall St Journal article.  "We did hit some weather. There's a lot of water ingress with this truck, but that's part of its charisma." 
   Water ingress.  Yeah right.  Any real person would say "It leaks like a sieve."  Part of its charisma???  Detroit figured out how to make a waterproof car back in the 1930's.  I've owned and ridden in a lotta things over the years,  Fords, Chevys, Dodges, Caddy's , Mercuries,  They all had problems of one kind or another, but none of 'em leaked rainwater.  For that level of build quality, you gotta go to England. 
   He also admits the Land Rover was only doing 11 mpg and burning oil at the same time.  Another example of British engineering at it's best.  A plain old V8 Chevy pickup will give you 16 mpg. 

Magical thinking at the Wall St Journal

Granted, it was a letter the the editor,  not an editorial or op-ed piece, but they published it, which means they think it has value.  The subject was bank reserves, a traditional sticking point between regulators and bankers.  Reserves are cash, or  liquid assets owned by the bank, which they can use to keep going when their loans default. Regulators always want the bank to have more reserves, bankers always want less.  If a bank cannot pay out cash to depositors making a withdrawal, the bank is in serious trouble.  Word gets around, at the speed of light, and all the depositors hot foot it down to the bank to withdraw their funds while they still can.  This is a run on the bank, every one wants all their money, right now, and no bank can do that, they don't have reserves that big, and all the money the depositors entrusted to the bank have been loaned out.  Poof,  one vaporized bank, FDIC has to pay off the depositors. 
    The WSJ letter write proposed that banks  purchase "put options" on their own stock.  A put option is short selling, a bet that the stock price will fall before the short seller has to deliver the stock.  Anyhow, the writer feels that this dodge would create "regulatory capital" ( what ever that might be).  This is pur magical thinking.  When loans go bad, a bank needs cash, or really liquid investments, like US T-bills which can be turned into cash on short notice, to pay off depositors.  Banks cannot give "regulatory capital" to a depositor at the teller's window, they need cash. 

Baton Rouge is horrible, just like Dallas

My sincerest sympathies to the slain officers, to their families, and to the entire city.  Their loss is too great to describe in words. 
    This is the third attack on police officers within a year.  It's frightening.  It shows a breakdown in the social order in the country.  Laws are obeyed in America because the majority of the people think they ought to be obeyed.   If opposing (shooting) the police becomes the dominant thinking, we are in deep trouble.  It will get to the point that people are afraid to go to the store, for fear they will be robbed or killed, or both.   
   And I don't know how to fix it, other than getting rid of Obama who is egging it on.  And getting our schools to pull up their socks, and teach the need for civic participation in government, and less glorification of  violent troublemakers in history.  Like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Allende,  and others. 

Season Five, Game of Thrones

I'm a year behind.  I don't have HBO, and Netflix doesn't let the show out until a year has gone by.   So I watched the first two discs of season five this week.
  Metza Metza.   They suffered badly from the curse of the cameraman.  The cameraman is on a "turn the lights out" kick and the scenes are so dark you cannot even see the actors faces.  It's really dark.  I guess the cameraman thinks it's "arty" or something.  I think it sucks.  I think that turkey cannot read a light meter, and doesn't know how to set up the lights, you know a key light, a fill light, and avoid throwing double shadows.
   I am loosing track of the plot.  Arya is getting mixed up with a sorta religious group that lives in massive masonry buildings.  Arya wants them to train her to fight.  She certainly doesn't want to become a nun, that's not Arya.  Why she thinks she needs more combat training is beyond me.
   Anyhow, season five is not as good as previous seasons.  

PBVRC Spagetti Dinner

That's Pemi Baker Valley Republican Committee.  PBVRC throws these dinners once a month.  All you can eat.  And they have speakers.  Last night they had Kelly Ayotte, (Candidate for US Senate), and Chris Sununu, (Candidate for NH governor).  Word had been circulated, and everyone came.  The place, the Ashland VFW hall,  was packed.  Fortunately the air conditioning was working.  Both candidates spoke well, with conviction, and to the approval of the audience.  Audience was typical north country, I know many of them.  The older set, lotta gray hair, a few canes.  The few young folk were mostly campaign aides to the candidates.  All in all, a good evening for the candidates, they pretty much picked up every vote in the place.  And for us voters, the spaghetti was up to the usual standards, everyone had plenty to eat. 

How to get rid of ISIS/IS/ISIL, Al Quada, and the rest of 'em.

Might be a little costly.  No pol or presidential candidate is talking about it, but it is doable if we want to.
First, we invade the ISIS lands, occupy them. Set up a government of our liking.  Do land reform.  Hunt down and prosecute Islamic terrorists.  Put 'em on trial rather than just shooting 'em down.  Reform the education system.  Make sure they are teaching the three R's (reading, riting, rithmetic) and some useful arts, and not preaching hatred and jihad.  This whole program might take five years or more.
   Pass some laws over here making membership in ISIS and the like a crime, also criminalize travel to ISIS lands and service in their military, and giving them money.  Get US prosecutors out looking for examples and prosecuting them. 
   Keep on fracking.  It blunts the "oil weapon".  Keep the pressure on banks to deny them accounts, wire transfer services, money laundering, and anything else. 
   Make sure US TV coverage, especially news, in Arabic, gets into all ISIS lands.  We have internet and satellites to broadcast from.  Make some movies and TV shows that depict Islamic crazies as crazy and evil, and the true faith as virtuous.  We defeated communism with blue jeans, rock and roll,  and "1984", let's do the same to Islamic crazies.
   Blow the Islamic crazies off the internet.  Make their websites disappear, tap their email.  Cancel their Facebook pages and memberships.  Take down their snuff videos.  Put software to work looking for Islamic propaganda.  
    Find some reasonable Imams and give them some support, TV contracts, book deals, air time.  Use drones to take out the really crazy Imams. 

Google Maps, software is too daring, you gotta watch it

Used to be, when you asked Google maps for directions from here to there, the program was pretty conservative, it would route you over Interstates only, even if it took you a long way out of your way.  Well the software weenies got more daring, and they let the program route you down secondary and tertiary roads, looking for the shortest route.  In a way this was good, but the program would route you down impassible or non existent roads.  Last year it tried to run me over NH route 116 in mud season.  The program didn't know, or didn't care, that 116 has bottomless potholes from side to side in mud season.  I used my superior local knowledge to drive on US 302, which is an all weather road,  unlike 116. 
   Then yesterday it generated a routing thru Maine for me.  The Maine road the software picked, was just plain non existent.  Just plain no such road, nowhere, no how.  I did make it, but it took a lotta backtracking.
  My advice, look at the Google proposed route.  If the roads lack even a state route number, or the little towns along the route lack names, beware. 
   My other suggestion for the Google software weenies.  Fix up your map coloring.  Leave the background white, that saves me ink cartridges ($52 each) and improves the contrast with the roads.  Then paint the roads with a solid stripe of a single color.  Drop the white road with faint gray sidewalks look.  Use a consistent color code to distinguish between interstates, primary roads, secondary roads, tertiary roads, and dirt roads.  Your current color scheme is close to unreadable.  You ought fire what ever weenie thought it up.

The Nostalgia is Overwhelming.

Way back when, back when I was 11 years old, I got to go to summer camp.  It was a wonderful experience, so cool that I went back for two more summers.  There was tripping, the strange cult of King Kababa, riflery, woodshop, sailboats, rowboats, and canoes, campfire, general swim, the war game, good friends,  living in a tent, no electricity in the entire camp, really great counselors and trip leaders.  Absolutely awesome. 
   So yesterday, I fired up the Buick and drove over to the old camp, just to see if it was still there.  Well, Pine Island Camp is still there.  It's still way out in the Maine countryside, it hasn't been swallowed up by urban sprawl the way my old prep school was.  It's near Belgrade Maine, on an island (Pine Island) out in Great Pond.  And it still looks pretty much the same, even after a serious fire in the 1990's burned down the messhall and Honk Hall.  They rebuilt, and took some pains to keep it looking the same.  The camp director was Ben Swan, son of Eugene Swan who was director way back when.   It being mid week, half the kids were out of camp, tripping.  So I had lunch in the dining hall, swapped some war stories from the old days, didn't take many pictures, looked around, and wallowed in nostalgia.  If by some magic I could be 11 years old again, I'd go right back for the summer. 

A really different Republican National Convention??

A Federal judge in Virginia has just ruled that VA delegates are free to vote any way they want at the Republican convention.  He has dissolved the requirement under state law for delegates to vote the way the primary election turned out.
Wow.  If this decision stands, the convention will be strange, very strange.
   The convention delegates are all old Republican hands.  Everyone wants to go to the convention, it's a blast.  Hell, my mother got to be a delegate to the 1964 convention.  Needless to say, the plum of going to the convention is handed out as a perk to solid Republicans by various strange party systems, a different system for each state.  The lucky delegates were then informed that they had to vote this way or that way.  And all the delegates are old Republican people.  Some office holders, some party workers, some big donors, some activists, but all members of the Republican establishment.
   And the Republican establishment doesn't like The Donald.  If the delegates are told they can vote their consciences,  a lot of em will vote against Trump.  Nobody knows who they would vote for, but someone will turn up.
   The Republican National Committee doesn't like this idea at all.  They have rightly figured that the dyed in the wool Trump voters are absolutely necessary for winning.  Without the Trump voters, Hillary wins.  So opening the door to dumping Trump is opening the door to losing big.  Nobody is sure that Trump can win, but they know that without Trump they loose.  The RNC understands this.  Not sure if the Republican establishment understands it.
   The Wall Street Journal sees this as a big issue.  They ran an editorial about it today.  They were sorta whistling past the grave yard, opining that Trump would make it even if all the delegates are unbound.  Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it.  There is a lotta NeverTrump sentiment out there.  

US race relations not as bad as 1968

So says Obama on the tube this morning.  Of course, as soon as he said it,  I thought to myself, that actually things are as bad as 1968.
   Obama has made things worse.  Polls show things are a lot worse now than back in 2008 when Obama first took office.  Every time an ugly incident happens, Obama jumps right into it, and takes sides. Guess which side he takes. Every time.  After Obama jumps into it, the rest of the MSM get on the story and their reporting just pours gasoline on the fire. 

You gotta get your story out, right away.

After any of these terrible confrontations between citizens and authorities (cops), there are always TWO stories.  There is the victim's story, and there is the authorities story.  There will always be some differences, which can cast the entire incident in one light or another.  For example "Hands up don't shoot", which the Michael Brown supporters claim happened vs the cop's story that Michael Brown was trying to grab his gun when he was shot. 
  Moral of the story, the authorities must get their story out, right now.  Even better if they have video to back up their story.  They need to know that the other side will get their story out, and when there is only one story out there, that's what people believe.  So the authorities must get their side of the story out, right away.
  Lots of cops and prosecutors complain that releasing a story ahead of the trial does bad things for their case at trial.  Piffle.  The real trial, the one that counts, is the trial by public opinion.  If the public thinks the authorities behaved badly, it doesn't matter what a judge declares, usually years later.  The lawyers have so degraded the American justice system that it doesn't really matter any more.  Today's courts take years and years to come to a decision, and they usually let the perp off.  Better to win in the court of public opinion than wait for the wheels of justice to get turning. 
   Historical example.  Right after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Americans wrote up their story, emphasizing patriot heroism and really stunning Redcoat casualties.  The rebels got their story onto a fast Yankee schooner and it was in London within three weeks.  General Gage on the other hand, sent his dispatches back on a slow Royal Army merchantman which took three months to get to London.  Result, the American version of the battle, with it's story of Patriot bravery, went the length and breadth of England for two and a half months before the British side of the story got out.  Needless to say, the American version, so favorable to the Patriot cause, is the one every Englishman heard.

Dallas was horrible.

Five dead police officers, seven or eight more wounded. In a totally unprovoked ambush. My sincerest sympathy to the victims and their families.  According to the TV newsies, the shooter, a US Army veteran who served in Iraq,  had no indications of craziness before opening fire Thursday night.  That's scary.  It shows the bonds that hold our society together are failing. 
   The bonds go way back, to childhood.  Sunday school teaches the Ten Commandments, and "Thou shalt not kill." is easily understood even by five year olds.  Movies and TV shows depict police as good guys, and those that shoot at them as bad guys.  Nobody wants to think of himself as a bad guy.  Parents and teachers constantly keep on kids about fighting, with siblings and classmates.  This training was so effective that in WWII, General SLA Marshall noted that a large number of American soldiers were reluctant/unable to shoot the enemy.  Apparently this shooter was not so inhibited.  How many more like him have we raised up?
  

Congress grills FBI director Comey

They got on his case this morning around 11, and they are still whacking at him now at 2 PM.  Comey is standing up and hasn't really put his foot in his mouth, yet.  They are working on that as I write this.  The Democrats on the committee have been throwing themselves on the tracks in Comey' defense.  The main point of contention is the matter of guilty intent.  According to Comey, the ordinary law of the US requires guilty intent in order to prosecute.  Apparently a US law passed back in WWI times makes divulging  classified a crime no matter why the perps state of mind is.  Comey doesn't like that law and he claims that only once in the 99 years of the law's existence has anyone been prosecuted under it.  A lotta Congresscritters don't agree, they think leaking classified should be prosecuted no matter what.
   Nobody is talking about the basic insecurity of email, be it government or private or just plain old Gmail.  To my way of thinking, you should never put classified on email.  Back when I was in the service, and handled classified, email hadn't been invented, so the matter never came up.  But now, we should not allow classified to go by email.  Government email is same same, it's vulnerable.  Plus all the secretary of state's communication ought to treated as classified.  I sure don't want the Russians, the Chinese, or ISIS reading US cabinet officer's email.  I don't think cabinet officers should use email at all.  Nobody is talking about that at all.

The lights are going out, all over New Hampshire

The greenies, working thru the public utility commission, have bulldozed the local power company into closing their three remaining coal fired power plants.  One of them, was forced to install a $450 million scrubber back in 2009.  Part of the deal is that the power company can bill rate payers for the $450 million outstanding debt.  For the next ten years.  On top of the "Stranded Cost Recovery" charge they put on the bill for the Seabrook nuclear plant.  
    The power company is hoping to replace the lost generation capacity with hydro power from Quebec, to come over the yet to be built Northern Pass power line.  Which the greenies are fighting to stop. 
   The greenies managed to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant last year. 
   I ought to go out and buy a Honda generator set to get thru this next winter. 

Juan Williams on Johnny Can't Read.

Juan had a handsome op ed in the Wall St Journal yesterday entitled "The Scandal of K-12 Education".  He cited some really awful statistics on the terrible performance of black and Hispanic kids in the public schools. Without getting into the numbers, they are really really bad.  And Juan cries out to do something about it.
    Thinking back on my experiences learning to read, I don't really remember the school doing all that much for me.  I can still remember the night it all came together and for the first time I could actually read a real book, not a picture book.  It was "The Land of Oz",  (L. Frank Baum).  Granted the schools did some ground work, we all learned the alphabet song, we learned phonics, and we started with "Fun with Dick and Jane" a worthy but boring beginning reader.
  But, I learned to read because I wanted to read.  Reading was fun, an enjoyable pastime, as good as watching TV, especially TV way back then.  There was so much good stuff to read.  The Saxonville library was open every day and it was on my way home from school.  I stopped in every day or so to get new books.  And they had a bunch of really cool ones.  There was a series, bound in orange, of biographies of famous Americans.  I read them all.  There was the "Landmark" series with books about the Battle of Britain, the Tokyo raiders, the Royal Navy in WWII, and other things to catch the interest of an grade school boy. And really good science fiction by Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov.  And the Tarzan books, the Tom Swift books (the old series), the Oz books, the John Carter books, Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott,.  And comics.  If there was ever something printed that just cried out to be read, it was a comic book.  Scrooge McDuck, Blackhawk, Tarzan, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Superman, and more.  Parents and teachers disapproved of comic books back then, but they were a tremendous incitement to learn to read, certainly more stimulating than playing computer games.  We would spend our own money to buy them.  Ten cents an issue, they are more like four dollars now.  Every kid had a stash and every kid read them.
   The other incentive to read was that my parents did it.  Dad read the paper every day and he read bed time stories to us every night.  If Dad did it, I wanted to learn it too, just to get with it.
   Bottom line, learning to read is a self motivated thing, schools can help, parents can help, but the kid has to want to do it himself. 

GKN Technology meets Brexit

GKN Technology is a British company that makes the wings for Airbus.   The UK government pulled out of the Airbus consortium some years ago, but GKN Technology retained their Airbus business somehow.  The Airbuses are assembled in Europe (Germany or France, cannot remember which). Which means those British built wings get shipped across the Channel.  When Britain does the paperwork to pull out of the EU, presumably those wings have to pay the EU tariff when they land on the continent. 
  And it's not like GKN Technology can find another customer for its wings.  Those wings are Airbus wings, and won't fit another airplane.  If Brexit means Airbus has to pay a serious tariff on the wings, they will surely investigate alternate suppliers located on the continent.  And with EU unemployment running at 10%, any EU supplier will have no trouble staffing up to handle the extra business.
   Be afraid, be very afraid. 
  

FBI lets Hillary off the hook.

The FBI director held a news conference, live on TV, just a few minutes ago.  Bottom line, the FBI doesn't think they have enough to prosecute with.  They read a ton of emails.  In fact you gotta wonder how Hillary had the time to crank out nearly 100K emails.  She was only secretary of state for four years, call it 1000 days, so that's 100 emails a DAY.  How did she manage to eat lunch and go the can, and do 100 emails a day??
   The FBI claimed to have really scrubbed Hillary's server, recovering a lot of email from caches and deleted-but-not-scrubbed disk space.  They also said that Hillary's lawyers had wiped a lot of email as "personal" and the lawyers did a better job than Hillary, they scrubbed the disk files (over wrote them with random ones and zeros) and deleted them (erased the file names from the disc directory).  Which makes the emails unrecoverable, like they had been shredded. 
  The FBI did a lot of talking about how classified and how many were classified.  Groovy but any secret service in the world would love to read the American secretary of state's email no matter what it's classification. 
  In short, the FBI trashed Hillary and her state department for sloppy handling of classified, but they don't think it was deliberate, and you gotta show intent to prosecute.  The FBI didn't find intent, and so Hillary gets off, not scot free, some of the mud sticks, but they ain't gonna prosecute, so she can go on running for president.  Another tight squeeze for a Clinton, like Whitewater, like Vince Foster, like Monica, like a bunch of other stuff. 

The Supremes pretend to practice law.

Actually they are mere indulging in their private political prejudices.  Law is a body of rules,  written down.  Moses showed the way.  Just ten commandments, chiseled into stone tablets by the hand of God.  And law is limited.  Ten was the starting number.  We have a lot more now.  but if it isn't written down, it isn't law.
   Judges are supposed to know the law, and apply it to the specific case before them.  And there is always room for interpretation.  Even "Thou shalt not kill" (from KJV) has been interpreted to read "Thou shalt not commit murder." a much narrower reading.  It's up to judges to look at the law, look at the facts of the case, and render a judgement, using pure reasoning. 
   When this is happening, a majority of judges (or for that matter a majority of reasonable men) will come to the same judgement in the same case.  That is, if they are looking at the law, and reasoning from the facts of the case.  If they are judging from personal prejudices, anything can happen.
   Since the unfortunate death of Justice Scalia, it has become clear that he eight survivors on the court are judging from personal prejudice rather than from the law.  Hence the number of four to four ties.  How the eight top lawyers in America can fail to come to a majority opinion is a scandal.  These clowns aren't practicing law, they are setting themselves up as kings. 

Franconia Old Home Day Parade.

So Franconia does it's parade on Saturday (2 July) partly 'cause we always do it that way, partly to avoid going head-to-head with the Woodsville parade and partly 'cause everybody has Saturday off.  We have a huge mob of parade marchers forming up, we have my Buick doing a little electioneering, we have a Junior ROTC color guard, and we have the Jeanne Forester people.
   By the way, the Blogger people have been messing with the photo uploader again.  At least it still uploads although I had to do it twice before it worked. 

DEC makes the market, adapts to a changing market, finally fails and dies

Digital Equipment Company moved into the big time when it invented the minicomputer, back in the early 1960's.  The legendary PDP 8 wasn't much of a computer, only 12 bits wide, the largest number it could handle was only 4096, not much.  And it could only address 4096b words of magnetic core memory, RAM had not been invented yet.  But it was a computer, it was small compared to the only other computers available that year, namely mainframes costing in the millions and filling an entire room. 
   The PDP8 only cost $8000 (1960 dollars) and was smart enough to do a fair number of things.  A whole bunch of  automatic test sets were built, with a PDP8 built in and running the show.  So many were sold that DEC became rich and famous.  All looked well until the micro processor came on the scene in the early 1970's.  One of my first projects coming out of engineering school was to design a microprocessor board to run a test set.  My board had plenty of punch and only cost $200, parts.  That pretty much killed the $8000 PDP8 for that role.
   DEC recovered, they juiced up their minicomputer and sold it for timesharing.  A PDP11-35 could support a couple of dozen timesharing terminals, enough to run a small company. The later PDP11-70 and the VAX were even stronger. And the timesharing rig, with disk drives and mag tapes might cost $100,000.  Still cheap compared to a mainframe.  This kept DEC going thru the 1980's. 
  Then the desktop computers appeared.  The IBM PCs, and the Compaqs.  These sold for $3000 or so, and were every bit as good as the the DEC minicomputers, and they were cheap enough for every engineer to have one for his very own. 
   And that was the end of DEC.  Compaq bought them up, and then HP bought Compaq, and now there is hardly a trace of DEC left. 

Wall Street Futures Contracts

Gambling? Or shrewd investment?  The Wall St futures market is big enough for NPR to report on it.  Like Friday, when the Brexit vote was counted and announced, NPR said that Wall St futures had dropped a lot before the market opened.  At any rate, a good deal of money is invested in "futures".  Does this money do anything to encourage economic growth, employment, new product development, in short, good things for America as a whole, or just some profits to lucky gamblers?
   I have never dealt in futures, and a quick Google  didn't say just how stock market futures work.  Let's assume they work like commodity futures.  Two parties reach a deal, sign a contract, to deliver so much of something, or buy so much of something,  for such and such a price, on a date in the future.  If the market price of what-ever-it-is changes before the due date, one party makes money, and the other party does not.
   Does this kind of deal make sense for the larger economy?  Hard to tell.  Certainly the money spent on futures contracts does not go to a company in return for stock.  Companies print and sell their stock, for cash, to obtain money to run the company, grow the company, pay the workers, lots of things that create jobs.  And the stock market makes people willing to buy stock.  With an organized stock market, open for business five days a week, a stock holder knows he can sell his stock holdings when he needs some cash.  And the trade will go thru, and he gets a check, within a day or two.  This is a goodness, it gives companies a fine way to raise money.
   But I don't see how a stock futures contract does anything good for the economy.  It surely doesn't funnel money to companies.  I don't see it increasing market liquidity.  I think it's just plain gambling, of no benefit to anyone except lucky winners.
   I'm not an economist, I'm just a plain engineer.  I've never read anything about the economic effect of futures trading.  I wonder what the economics community thinks about them.  

NAFTA, pro and con

According to Wikipedia (a reasonably impartial source)  NAFTA dropped tariffs between the three countries to zip in nearly all cases by now.  It took President Bill Clinton's best efforts to get NAFTA ratified over the dead bodies of US unions. NAFTA did increase trade between Mexico, Canada and the US by a lot, perhaps 50% over the years since 1993 when NAFTA was ratified.    It also did contribute to US job losses of maybe 500,000 jobs.  These numbers can be controversial, but Wikipedia is the most balanced source I am aware of. 
   We had The Donald on TV yesterday trashing NAFTA up one side and down the other.  He promises to "renegotiate" the NAFTA treaty.  He claimed that NAFTA is a US job killer.  In this, he has, or ought to have, the warm support of US unions who have been anti NAFTA since the beginning. 
   We had the "three amigos) (Obama, Trudeau, and I can't remember the name of the Mexican president) on TV today.  All saying nice things about NAFTA, and the need to keep it going.   
   Nobody said anything about admitting the UK to NAFTA.