Obama ought to shut up about Egypt

Obama has gone of TV damn near every day talking about Egypt. He ought to stop. All he does is anger the Egyptians, undermine a loyal American ally, encourage Islamist crazies, and make him self, and the United States, look clueless.
Speaking of clueless, take Director of National Intelligence Clapper. He said on TV that the Muslim brotherhood is secular, and eschews violence. Right. Tell that to Anwar Sadat, gunned down by the Muslim Brotherhood while reviewing a parade. Tell me about the secular nature of Muslim Brotherhood offshoots Hamas and Al Quada. Clapper needs to be fired, quickly.
And just as I write this, Obama is back on TV, talking about Egypt, trying to tell the Egyptians to be good and democratic and other fatherly things that must be infuriating to Egyptians. The US is not Egypt's father.

Town Budget, Franconia

Getting ready for town meeting next month, the Franconia selectmen released the town budget for next year. The meeting was attended by town employees and a handful of citizens. Essentially, the plan is to spend pretty much what was spent last year, give or take a some chicken feed amounts. Line item budget totals $1.36 million. With capital improvement projects, the library and the transfer station added in, the town budget gets up to $1.99 million.

Out of this budget, the big items are:
Police $283,221
Highway & Streets $364,894
Recreation Programs $105,211
Transfer Station $252,696

Items that will draw or should draw comments at next month's town meeting are:
New police cruiser $27,200. A Crown Vic to replace one that is only three years old with only 80,000 miles on it.
Transfer Station $252,696. This seems like a lot of money for a fairly simple operation that is only open half the time. Some justification of costs would be nice.
Dispatch Lines $28,883 I believe this is 911 emergency call support. It seems awfully expensive for just an answering service.
Town vehicles $112,350 There are Capital Reserve Funds for 15 town vehicles, which soaks up quite a bit of money.

Strong temperature inversion

The weather folk had predicted bitter sub zero cold over night. Early this morning my kitchen thermometer read a chilly PLUS 11 degrees. Car started trouble free, and his thermometer dropped from the toasty PLUS 29 degrees in the garage to PLUS 11 degrees as I pulled onto Rt 18 (Three Mile Hill Road). I cruised down hill into Franconia some 1000 feet below my place at Mittersill. At the bottom of the hill in Franconia it was MINUS 5 degrees. We had a 16 degree temperature inversion in merely 4 miles. That's strong.
NOAA keeps temperature records over the whole world gong back to the 1600's when the thermometer was invented. By the 1980's they had some 14,000 stations reporting. Then in 1990 occurred the great purge, some 7000 stations were dropped. I have to wonder what dropping all those stations did to the world average temp, when we have a 16 degree temperature difference over a distance of only 4 miles.

What's worse a virus, or the anti virus?

Dunno. It's been a long long time since I had a virus. But I had antivirus just yesterday. It started out virtuously enough. I decided to do a virus check on the laptop. It's been a long time, so each of my antivirus programs updated itself, and its database over the internet. After each update, a lengthy scan. Two hours in one case. I ran my favorite three, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and AVG. All are freebies available for down loading. No virii were detected by any of the three.
Next morning, I booted up to check email and do some websurfing. Boot was ultra sluggish, and loading Thunderbird took so long I though the machine had crashed. Hitting Ctl-Alt-Del brought up the Windows task manager, which revealed that a "process" named AAWsomething-or-other was hogging as much as 100% of my CPU time. Some hackers had "improved" Ad-Aware to always load a real time scanner at boot time. This baby is supposed to check traffic one the internet and alarm when it sees a virus slipping into your machine. That's nice and all, but it slows the machine down too damn much. So, uninstall AdAware.
Next day, machine is still running slow. Task Manager shows a bunch of "processes" named AVGsomething-or-other are active. Must be real time scanners installed by AVG. So, uninstall AVG.
Today, boot up, and draw a couple of scary error messages at boot time. One message said "Cannot find a file with a name that starts with AVG". So much for a clean uninstall. Then it started Firefox to run a survey from AVG asking why I had uninstalled AVG.
So, now I am running almost barefoot. I still have firewall up (ZoneAlarm) but no realtime scanners and no disc scanners. I don't do file sharing, I don't insert strange media (flash drives, floppy disks or CD's), the router has been doing a good job as firewall, and I have autorun turned off. The desktop has run bare foot and virus free for more than a year. Lets see if laptop is as lucky.

Egypt Part 3

Listening to NHPR this morning and I heard this from "an administration spokesman".
"Our objective in Egypt is to secure free and fair elections."
Oh really? That statement is guaranteed to raise hackles across Egypt. All Egyptians hear that as "The United States wants to impose a government upon Egypt." Not diplomatic, to say the least.
The United States should be saying "We respect the right of the Egyptian people to choose their own form of government". That is the only proper thing for a democracy to say about foreign governments.
Now, you know and I know that the United States really wants a stable, decent, secular government in Egypt, one that will maintain the peace treaty with Israel, co-operate with the US, and improve the lot of the mass of Egyptian people. It would be nice if elections caused this to come about, but we cannot be fussy. Last time we did "free and fair elections" over there we got Hamas (offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) in charge of the Gaza Strip. We certainly don't want Egypt taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood is the outfit that killed Anwar Sadat 30 years ago. Today the Brotherhood is the only political organization in Egypt, if elections were held today, they would win. In fact if elections are held in September, the Brotherhood may well win.
If the Egyptian power structure (mostly the Egyptian Army) can cut a deal and make it stick without too much breaking of heads, we are happy. We care about results more than we care about process.
Let's hope the Obama administration understands this.

County medical insurance

Back to the county commissioners meeting. The HR guy said that the county's medical plan was up for renewal. And the insurance company was talking premium hikes. I asked the HR guy how many bidders he had. "Just one" he replied. "It's a sole source procurement. One company didn't even submit a bid when we asked." Which means we taxpayers are about to get robbed again. The way you keep costs down is you have multiple bidders and go with the low cost bid. When there is only one bidder, hold onto your wallet.
This is something Concord could fix. We could pass a NH law allowing health insurance companies with a valid license from any state in the union to sell insurance in NH. That would give us more bidders. The few New Hampshire insurance companies would bitch and moan, but Grafton County could get a better deal.

Right to Work

The state legislature held public hearings on a New Hampshire Right to Work law yesterday. A LOT of people attended, so many the hearing was held in the legislature's hall, the biggest room in the state house.
The Union people were out in force. Even without the buttons, you can kinda tell who the union people are. Beer bellies are the giveaway.
Testimony was intense. The union people see right to work as destruction of their unions and get very passionate about it.
Over the course of the hearings a figure of 7 to 10 percent union membership in the state was offered and everyone seemed to accept it.
Industry likes right-to-work states. In New Hampshire, we need more industry. Our young people are leaving the state to find work. We have a terrible unemployment problem. We have a tax revenue shortfall. More industry would solve all these problems. Becoming a right-to-work state will bring more industry into New Hampshire.
Right to work will bring industry to offer good factory jobs. The benefit of more jobs in the state far outweighs a small inconvenience to the small portion of New Hampshire citizen who are union members.

The $1 million water tank.

The other juicy tidbit from the country commissioners meeting is the water tank. Back in 2009 the county let a $1 million contract to install a big water tank to insure plenty of water at the county complex in case of fire. Said tank was built and plumbed in. After which, one (or more?) tests of water quality at the complex failed. In short, good drinkable water from the Woodsville system, after passing thru the county's $1 million tank was no longer drinkable, or at least not all the time.
Fingers have been pointed in lots of directions. However the county has no plans at present to sue the contractor until he fixes it. We have a county attorney on staff, and even a county court in which to try them. You'd think they would want to work at their trade.
I fear the fix will be at county taxpayers expense.

Grafton County Commissioners, weekly meeting

The rabble rousing started on Sunday, at the Grafton County Republican committee meeting. Newly elected county commissioner Omer Ahern invited a bunch of us to attend the commissioner's weekly meeting. "Just to see what's going on" Omer said.
So I drove over. Meeting started at 9AM. Various department heads reported results, issues, and actions taken to the commissioners. With one exception the department heads all mumbled and faced away from the audience, making it quite difficult to hear them. They also spoke in bureaucrat code words making it even harder to follow the drift. Occasionally a commissioner would rephrase what was said for the benefit of the audience.
The county attorney reported on a project to acquire new case management software. The county already has such a system, but the state of NH was offering $35K of free money to buy a new and web based one. This would allow county attorneys to do PowerPoint presentations in court. Cool. There was no discussion of security of the web based system, such as what would keep hackers from posting every county case file on WikiLeaks.
Note to Concord. I think we might have found somewhere to cut $35K from the state budget. In fact make that $350K (10 counties times $35K).

To fund or not to fund, Public Broadcasting

In principle, a government run broadcaster gives the government in power a mouthpiece to win votes and influence citizens. It has for sure given the liberal greenie leftie segment of the population a place to push liberal greenie leftie ideas. As a conservative this is slightly offensive to me. But, offensive or not, I listen to public broadcasting quite a bit. In fact a lot. The liberal greenie leftie slant is much less offensive than the non-stop barrage of ads on commercial broadcasting outlets.
Public Broadcasting's lineup of shows, Nova, Sesame St, The Newshour, Masterpiece Theater, All Things Considered, is strong enough to stand on their own two feet, to go out and get sponsors just like real TV shows do. On the other hand, having Big Bird brought to you by the number 9 is amusing. Having Big Bird brought to your kids by Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, PopTarts, and Ronald McDonald is distastful.
So, continue to fund PBS, to bring me and mine some decent programming. Keep the pressure up to make it non-partisan, but don't have a conniption when the liberal greenie leftie viewpoint comes thru.

WashPo reviews the Chevy Volt

Click here to read all about it. The writer is one of those hopeless klutzes who has difficulty changing light bulbs. He knows squat about cars, and spends several paragraphs telling us so. Just what we all wanted to learn. For reading the entire article we learn zip about the Volt. We do learn quite a bit about this guy's feelings about the car (he likes it), the evils of electric power generation, and assorted fluff, but zilch about the car. He doesn't even tell us how many doors it has.

Egypt. Part 2

Some TV newsies have been calling for the US to support the Egyptian rebels. Others have been calling for support of Mubarak, likening Mubarak to the Shah of Iran. The shah was overthrown after Carter withdrew American support, and Iran was taken over by Islamic fundamentalists led by the Ayatollah Khomeni. Iran was converted from a US ally to a relentless adversary in a matter of days. They are still an adversary.
In actual fact, we cannot support the Egyptian rebels, yet. The world is full of shaky regimes, all of which fear an American attempt at regime change will be effective. The US cannot be perceived as a superpower willing to foment revolution in countries that displease it, not if we want to do any sort of business, diplomatic, commercial, cultural, or whatever. Which means we cannot jettison the Mubarak regime just yet.
Plus, we aren't sure we like the Egyptian opposition all that much. CIA has done its usual sloppy job, and we have no idea who, if anyone, is behind today's Egyptian uprising. We ought to fear that the real leaders might be the Muslim Brotherhood. They are an old and powerful Islamic movement that goes back to the 1920's. They got started as anti colonialists. Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak considered them dangerous radicals, outlawed the party, and slung every party member they could catch into jail. Despite this pressure, the Brotherhood was able to assassinate Anwar Sadat and give birth to Al Quada.
At this moment it looks like Mubarak might be able to survive, but he is in his eighties, in poor health, and he isn't going to last much longer. If a halfway decent Egyptian leader were to surface in today's confusion, we could do worse. Unfortunately, we have no good intelligence from Egypt and we cannot tell real leaders from useless windbags. So we have to wait upon events.

Egypt

The TV newsies have been yakking all day about the uproar in Egypt. What none of them seem to understand is
1. We don't know who is going to come out on top. Might be Mubarak, might be someone else. We won't know until one side wins.
2. We want to be friends with the winners. Which means we don't want to piss the winners off by supporting the losers. And we don't know who is going to win.
3. Given 1 and 2, the correct action for the US is to stand on the side lines until we know who is running the place and then, only then, reassure the government of Egypt, be it new or old, of continued US support.

Whither TV?

TV is facing the Internet challenge. Ever since the switch to digital broadcast wiped out many folks TV reception, viewers have been turning to the Internet to watch programs. For instance at my place we used to get 8 over-the-air channels. After the switchover to digital broadcasting we only get one. Lotta people who don't have or cannot afford cable don't get to see much TV anymore. At my daughter's place in DC they don't have TV anymore. They have three reasonable modern but non functional TV sets piled up in the dining room to form a modern object d'art.
Enter the Internet. Hulu.com has been offering streaming TV right to your computer. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp, and Disney and offers TV programs. Hulu is free (right now anyway) but the owners are conflicted over the Hulu business model. In plain English, they cannot figure out how to make money giving stuff away free. Competitor Netflix charges $8 a month for roughly the same thing.
One unsolved problem, at least in my house, is how to get the Internet TV signal onto the living room TV. The main (desktop) computer is some distance from the TV and running a video cable across two rooms under the rugs is un inviting. I could put a wireless card into backup (laptop) computer) and set the laptop down close to the TV. My newer TV accepts VGA (computer monitor) video. Many (but not all)laptops will output regular composite video (standard analog TV signal like a VCR outputs) if your TV is a little older.
Another unsolved problem is internet bandwidth. There isn't that much of it. If you think the Internet is slow now, wait til everyone is watching TV over the 'net. The "net neutrality" scuffle is an attempt by Hulu and Netflix to force the ISP's not to put their streaming TV on the back burner. The ISP's, given a choice between delaying a website from painting, a matter of a few dozen packets, and delaying some of the 4 million packets for a movie, are going to paint the web site first and do the movie later.
Internet TV may force the ISP's to change their billing practices. Right now broadband is billed at one flat monthly rate. The ISP's find that a small percentage of their customers are hogging most of the bandwidth. To make the bandwidth hogs pay their fair share, the ISP's may have to bill by the byte. The more you download the higher your bill. Hulu and Netflix are against that idea.

HoHum State of the Union

Words roll off Obama's tongue so smoothly but they don't mean anything. With the US about to go as broke as Greece, Obama didn't talk about cutting spending on anything. He wanted more spending on high speed rail and education. Oh sorry, it's investment now, sounds so much better than spending.
Arrgh.

How cold did you get?

Well, both Franconia and Littleton were 25 below zero yesterday morning about 8:30. Didn't warm up much all day.

New Hampshire's deficit is as bad as California's

New Hampshire is looking at a $900 million deficit this year. State spending will exceed tax revenue by that much. California is looking at a $28 billion deficit. Who is deeper in the hole?
New Hampshire's population is 1.3 million people, California's is 37 million.
Divide New Hampshire's deficit by the population to yield deficit per citizen.
$900 million/1.3 million = $692 deficit per citizen.
Divide California's deficit by the population to yield deficit per citizen
$28 billion/37 million = $756 deficit per citizen

In short, we in frugal New Hampshire are nearly as broke as free spending California.

NH Republican Annual Meeting

It was cold yesterday morning, about 4 above zero. Trusty car started right up and by 7:30 we were heading downstate to Derry at a sedate 75 mph. Google maps brought me right to the front gate of Pinkerton Academy, whereat the meeting was supposed to be held. Not a sign of a meeting. 30 or 40 other cars showed up at the same place, and everyone looked around and shrugged their shoulders. Some casting about found the event, it was in a theater up the road, only the theater building was signed as the school gym.
Meeting opened at 10 AM. Lots of pep rally type speeches, reports from various committees, and back patting talk soaked up the morning. Business really got started after lunch with the election of party officers for the next two years.
Fun started there. Outgoing party chairman, John Sununu, retired NH governor hauled out of retirement in 2008, had done a smashingly successful job, leading the state GOP to major victory. Supermajorities in the house, the senate, and all five executive councilors. Victory doesn't get much better than this.
The party establishment nominated Juliana Bergeron to replace Sununu for the next two years. The Tea Party backed Jack Kimball, would had run for governor in 2010. Juliana stood for a quiet bureaucratic party leadership that wouldn't rock any boats. Jack stood for an activist leadership pushing for real change. Both sides campaigned hard before the meeting. I got emails and snail mails by the bushel, plus phone calls from both sides. Juliana called herself, in person, not a robo-call. Two old friends, whose judgment I respect, called me on behalf of Jack Kimball.
On the way in, partisans for both sides were handing out buttons. I got a two inch round button that read simply "Jack". The razzle dazzle ran down and just about 3 PM we had the vote for new chairman. After a lengthy delay to count the paper ballots, outgoing chairman Sununu announced the results. 223 for Jack, 199 for Juliana. The house erupted into cheers. Shortly the Kimball folks started a chant going "Jack! Jack! Jack..."
At that, I figured my civic duty was done. I found the car and started the two hour drive back to Franconia.

Going up against the Federal budget

There has been a lot of talk about hiking the federal debt limit, something that will become pressing this spring when federal borrowing bumps up against the limit. If the Republican house wants to use this crisis constructively, they could say "After we pass this year's appropriation bills, so we know how much deeper in the hole we are going to go, THEN we can talk about OKing more borrowing."
The Democrats adjourned last year's Congress without passing ANY appropriation bills. The whole federal government is running of a "continuing resolution", which runs out about the same time as the debt limit will be reached.
In short, use the debt limit as a lever to lower overall federal spending.

How farsighted are suits? Part 2

On the radio this morning, Travelocity and Orbitz no longer display American Airlines flights. That will increase American's market share. At least that's what the suits running American think. Good luck to them.
If I worked at American I would be getting my resume in order.

Dr. Strangelove rides again, on NHPR no less

NHPR this morning had an anti fluoridation speaker on. He explained how fluoride in your drinking water led to all sorts of horrible health problems. He did admit that fluoride was good for your teeth, and he allowed that fluoride toothpaste was OK, but putting fluoride in the drinking water is dangerous and unAmerican.
Last time I heard such a strong anti fluoridation rant was from General Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove. Anti fluoridation had mostly died out by the 1980's. I wonder why NHPR decided to revive this mostly dead issue in 2011?

So what if they don't hike the federal debt limit?

The TV pundits get very dramatic and call it "shutting down the government" and "defaulting on our debts". Would it really be that bad?
Hard to tell. According to the usual sources Uncle Sam is borrowing 40 % of federal outlays. If we hit the debt limit, that borrowing will have to stop. That cuts Uncle's cash flow down by 40%, and he would have to reduce the check writing by 40% to avoid bouncing checks.
That's pretty drastic. But 60% of government activity could proceed as usual.
So what government activities would be in the unlucky 40%? Government suppliers and contractors should fear for their lives, they won't get paid on time, and perhaps never. Payments for projects like fighter planes would be put on hold and the contractors told to just freeze the program where ever it is. "Non essential" government workers would be furloughed. Say the departments of education, energy, agriculture, health and human services and transportation. Maybe even the obnoxious TSA.
Farm subsidies, highway subsidies, unspent porkulus money would all be frozen.
That all probably ain't enough. The next cut would be medical. Medicare and Medicaid payments would be "delayed". This would cause a firestorm among the patients and the medical business but it probably isn't as bad as the firestorm that would occur if social security checks stopped flowing.
All this turmoil will create irresistible political pressure to do something, anything. The path of least resistance would be to cave in and raise the debt limit and let the spending go on as before.
I notice the new Republican leadership in the House has wisely kept their heads down on this explosive issue.

WSJ writer is no engineer

The story headline was OK, "Toyota tries to break reliance on China." with a sub headline "Company seeks to develop electric motor without costly, tightly controlled rare earth metals." So far so good.
Then we get to some statements indicating this writer is fundamentally ignorant of things electrical. "All electric motors rely on magnets to make them work". Not true. Most electric motors, including the ones found around the house, don't use magnets at all.
Then we have "induction motors found in such devices as kitchen mixers". Not true, kitchen mixers use universal (AC-DC) motors. Induction motors are used to power fans and vacuum cleaners, not kitchen mixers.
In actually fact, very satisfactory electric motors, which used no magnets, were developed to power trolley cars better than 100 years ago. Such motors could power electric or hybrid cars.
Another type of motor, the AC induction motor, is nearly as old and, with clever solid state controllers would work fine. The clever solid state controllers would take DC from the batteries and turn it into AC for the motors. The clever controller would vary the frequency of the AC power to control the speed of the AC motor. Large railroad locomotives use this scheme today. The new AC locomotives are somewhat more powerful than the traditional DC locomotives that make up most of the world wide locomotive fleet. They are also more costly which accounts for the survival of the older DC locomotive design.
In short the writer thinks Toyota is working on a break thru technology. I think Toyota is doing a routine research and development project, drawing upon well known technology, to design a motor which will be optimum for their electric and hybrid cars.

Web site clock running slow?

Last couple of my posts are time stamped 28 minutes EARLIER than the time on my wrist watch (or the Windows time display on my desktop). I guess the clock used by blogspot is running about a half hour slow.

GSI Java Press

Been getting tired of the taste of instant coffee. Real coffee, made in a French press, is good enough for me to drink it black. The instant stuff needs milk and sugar to kill the bitter taste.
So I bought a miniature french press from Lahout's Littleton sporting goods shop. It works. It's light, all plastic with some kind of clever heat insulating fabric cover which keeps the coffee hot and your hands cool. The coffee tastes OK, but not quite as good as the coffee from my big glass french press. Viewed as camping equipment, it's light enough and it nests together into a cylinder about the size of a small coffee can, a little big for backpacking, but not beyond the pale. Viewed as kitchen ware, it's OK. The rubberized grippy bottom tends to stick to my formica counter tops, leaving black marks when peeled loose. The fabric covers absorb water making washing up awkward. But it doesn't overfill the sink the way my big glass one does.
So I use it, most days. It isn't bad, but there oughta be something even better out there, somewhere.

How farsighted are suits?

American Airlines has been making the newspapers about conflict with the computer ticket sellers, and back of the cheerful internet faces of Orbitz and Travelocity, the massive Sabre reservations system. American wants passengers to buy tickets off American's website so that American doesn't have to pay the Interneters their commission. Passengers want to buy tickets off the independent websites so as to see which airline offers lowest cost tickets, so American's scheme seems sorta counterproductive, but heh, what can you expect from suits?
The real internet player is Sabre. They own and run the heavy duty computer systems that keep track of every airline seat on the planet. Orbitz and Travelocity get their seat information and make their reservations thru Sabre. Sabre charges 3% to 5% commission for the service. In retaliation for American's attacks on their commissions, Sabre has reprogrammed their computers to display American's flights last, behind every other airline's flights.
The joke is, American used to own Sabre. Way back in the 1960's, American wanted computer assistance to sell tickets. They built Sabre to keep track of every seat on every American flight. ASR-33 teletypes at travel agents allowed inquiry (what seats are available) and sales (soon as a seat is sold it is no longer available), all in real time. This was heavy lifting for 1960's computers, like the IBM 360, linked together with 300 baud telephone modems. Somehow the computer programmers managed to do it, and the computer trade press would carry stories about how clever the Sabre programmers were and how powerful the Sabre hardware was. Everyone in the computer business back then had heard of Sabre, one of the wonders of the mainframe computer world.
Sabre was a great success for American, so good that other airlines began to pay American for the privilege of listing their flights too.
Then in 2000, the suits at American sold off Sabre, set it up as an independent company. I suppose American got some cash out of the deal. But they lost control of the backbone of their ticket sales.
And now in 2011, American is complaining about the commissions they have to pay the independent Sabre. Somehow I don't think the cash American raised for selling Sabre, matches the commissions they have been paying Sabre for the last ten years.
Most suit's idea of long range planning is 48 hours into the future.

Tax Reform, Federal Income Tax that is

Interesting article here. Author says the current tax code is so unloved that it might be politically possible to toss the whole damn thing and start over.
Good idea. Here are a few thoughts of mine on how to do it.
1. KISS. Keep it simple stupid. Every word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph of the tax code makes it harder for us average Joe's to do our taxes. And offers more welfare to lawyers. Entire US tax code should be no longer than the US Constitution.

2. No exemptions, deductions, credits, for anything. Tax is a straight percentage of your income. That ought to get rid of 10,000 pages of tax code. Scratch exemptions/deductions for children, mortgage interest, marriage, oil depletion, and God knows what else.

3. Income is income. Doesn't matter if it comes as wages on a W2 or from selling stock, it's income and pays taxes at the same rate. That will clear out another 10,000 pages of the tax code and put an end to fruitless squabbling about ordinary income versus capital gains.

4. Everyone, no matter how poor, pays something. The tax rate for the really poor can be really small, but they must contribute something so they understand the government bennies they enjoy have to be paid for by someone. No free riders.

That's for the personal income tax. Corporate income tax is another bucket of worms, too complex to deal with here.

People killing people

The horrible incident in Arizona has provoked a lot of distasteful bloviating on TV and on the Internet. Left wingers blame the crime on "hate speech" by right wingers. Right wingers blame "hate speech" from left wingers. Gun control advocates blame inadequate gun control laws. All these ideas are phony.
What really happened is a mentally unstable individual (aka homicidal maniac) acted out his insanity. It's like the school shooter cases, only this shooter fixated upon a Congressman rather than upon his schoolmates.
This guy Loughner should have been confined to an insane asylum years ago. That didn't happen because most states don't have insane asylums anymore, and the American belief in individual freedom prevents us from confining people against their will.
Plus, laws tough enough to put the Loughner's of the world in custody would also put a huge number of teenagers who dress funny, say dumb things in public, and act out in custody with them.
Sorting out the truly dangerous nut cases from the run of the mill teenage rebel would require wisdom far beyond mine.
Everything has a cost. American belief in individual liberty allows young homicidal maniacs to kill large numbers of innocent people. Deplorable as this is, I am not ready to curtail individual liberty enough to put potential shooters in the booby hatch. Yet.
It is too bad that the chattering classes use this terrible case to grind their axes and fail to recognize the real problem.

Tucson Arizona shooting

My sincere condolences to the families of the slain, and my prayers for speedy recovery of the wounded.

When is a public company not a public company?

Under SEC rules any company with more than 500 shareholders is a public company and is required to furnish quarterly reports of gains and losses, liabilities, debts, sales, and so forth. That's for openers, in fact the SEC requires public companies to jump thru a large number of expensive hoops.
Facebook is a private company with less than 500 shareholders. They want to remain a private company. They also want to raise capital by selling stock. According to the Wall St Journal, one of the 500 Facebook shareholders is brokerage house Goldman Sachs. Goldman, having a lot of cash, bought a lot of Facebook shares. Goldman has now created a "special investment vehicle" backed by the Facebook shares, and is selling "special investment vehicle" shares to eager investors. Goldman salespersons say that owning shares in the "special investment vehicle" is as good as owning real Facebook shares.
In short, Facebook and Goldman Sachs have discovered a way for a private company to sell stock and avoid SEC reporting requirements (and doubtless much burdensome SEC regulation as well).
I'm of mixed minds about this scheme. The SEC, created after the 1929 crash, is supposed to prevent 1929 from happening again. I think most people will agree that the SEC has failed to do so. So, perhaps much burdensome SEC regulation should be abolished.
On the other hand, investors really need to know if a company is making or losing money, which is the purpose of the quarterly reports. Companies would not disclose such information unless required to do so by law. It isn't fair to let one company avoid reporting when it's competitors are required to report.

Whoppers heard on NHPR

I'm in the car, and the radio is on, NHPR with the Diane Rahms show. She has a couple of public sector union people on, who are trying to explain that public service unions are all that bad. One union guy says "the two major economic problems facing the country are the federal debt and the very low wages paid to workers.
Wow. a union guy and he doesn't mention 10% unemployment? He thinks a pay hike for his members is more important that keeping them employed? Scratch him.
Then the other union guy says "unions promote economic growth and right to work states have less economic growth than good old closed shop union states."
Wow squared. The 2010 census shows that the right to work states have gained population at the expense of closed shop states. All the states that lost US representative this census were closed shop states and the states that gained representative were all right to work states.

Bills in the NH legislative hopper.

There is a good one in there. HB1485 will allow construction of new houses withOUT fire suppression sprinkler systems.
Some back ground. Firemen and fire departments nation wide have been pushing for years to make home sprinkler systems mandatory in new construction. They have managed to get the national fire and building code to require home sprinklers. They are now pushing to make the newly stiffened national code binding upon New Hampshire.
Home sprinklers are expensive, $5000 to $7000 when installed during construction. If the firemen get their way, all new homes in New Hampshire will cost $5000 to $7000 more. For all that money, the home buyer gets those tasteful chrome sprinkler heads sticking out of his new living room ceiling. Good homey atmosphere, just like at the office.
The fire insurance companies are neutral on the issue. They figure extra claims from accidental sprinkler activations will cost them as much as the sprinklers save them by putting out fires.
Me, I've lived all my life in wood houses without sprinklers. I've never experienced a house fire. I have experienced an accidental sprinkler activation at work. Damn things came on in the middle of the day and filled the company computer room with water. That was costly.
We ought to pass HB1485. We shouldn't raise the cost of all new homes to mitigate a not very likely danger. Compared to the number of fatalities in auto accidents, few people perish in house fires.
It used to be a free country. Which means freedom to install, or not install a home sprinkler system.

Things I learn from NHPR

Salvia, a readily availible and legal herb, gives a rocketship high and out of this world hallucinations. The on-the-air piece raved on and on about the quality of the high, the clarity of the hallucinations. Miley Cyrus uses it the radio went on to say.
Damn, this is the first I ever heard of the stuff. Must be getting old.
The NHPR piece was allegedly about new wonder drugs that might be developed from salvia, but it really was a three minute advertisement for the joys of smoking the stuff.
Should NHPR be hyping a new "substance"? There might have been some teenagers out there who haven't heard of salvia.

Sunday TV Pundit Whoppers

Discussion of last weekend's snow storm, and its political repercussions. Lots of pix of snowy car clogged streets. NO discussion of the NY sanitation worker's job action, a slowdown on snow removal. That story has been all over the blogs and Fox, but NBC didn't mention it once. Could it be the sanitation workers threatened retailiation if the story was aired?
Then I heard NH state rep Terrie Norelli (sp?) claim that last year's state budget was only $60 million in the red. In actual fact, the deficit was far worse, and the Feds gave NH $400 million of Porkulus money to fill the gap.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 5

Stop wasting money on windmills, solar cells, ethanol, and battery powered cars. Jobs are occupations that produce something of economic value, that can be sold, to pay the wages. The green's pet "alternate energy" projects just consume money, they don't make any. Heavy taxpayer subsidies are used to entice people into buying "alternate energy", gasohol, and battery cars. These projects do not create wealth, they consume it. The money would be better spent on real economic development.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 4

Spend less on health care. The United States spends 19% of GNP on health care. That's twice what every other country on the globe spends. We cannot afford to divert that much money from economic development. Every dollar spent on health care could have built new factories, new products, schools, roads, bridges, airports, and contributed to real economic growth.
Every US made product costs 19% more just to pay the worker's health care. Our international competitors pay half that.
Much of the health care money goes to trial lawyers, over priced drugs, expensive procedures of limited benefit, insurance company bean counters and other undesirables.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 3

Drill baby Drill. Economies run on energy. Right now the US sends better than $1 trillion dollars abroad for oil every year. Much of the money goes to countries that don't like us very much. For instance Saudi money pays for madrassahs in Pakistan that turn out Al Quada and Taliban fighters.
The Pacific coast has huge oil reserves that have been untouched since the Santa Barbara blowout in the 1960's. The Atlantic coast hasn't even been surveyed. There is a huge field in Alaska that got designated "Alaska National Wild Life Refuge" and closed to oil drilling. We have vast tar sand reserves in Colorado. We have gigantic newly discovered domestic natural gas fields.
Developing these reserves would put a lot of people back to work. The oceans of money we send overseas would be better spent employing our own citizens to develop our own resources.
Right now an aggressive US Green movement is doing all it can to block energy development of all kinds. They point to the BP spill and claim that possible environmental damage is too great a price to pay.
I beg to differ. We have 10% of the population out of work. That's 30 million people. Being out of work is really miserable for the workers, the spouses and the children. Getting laid off is about the worst thing that can happen to a worker.
I'm willing to accept a BP sized spill every ten years or so in order to put 30 million hard pressed citizens back to work.
The oil industry is going to be super careful after the BP spill. That spill cost BP everything the company will earn over the next ten years. We have a herd of tort lawyers currently harrassing doctors. They could be retrained to sue oil companies over every spilled bucket of fuel or lube. That will learn 'em.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 2

Gotta get the housing market running again. The banks, egged on by Fannie and Freddie, have completely screwed up the housing market to the point where no one is building new houses, no one can sell their old houses, no one can sell their new houses, and zillions of people (and their lenders) are taking a bath when they cannot pay their mortgages. Construction workers, and building tradesmen are out of work, building supply firms cannot sell their products, and appliance makers cannot sell appliances. This is a big slice of the economy, and it's flat on its back. Banks and the investors have lost so much money on home mortgages that they aren't lending to anyone.
The key to housing is credit. Nobody has enough cash to buy a house, they have to get a mortgage. The market is a disaster today because lenders gave credit to people who could not afford the house. These people are defaulting on mortgages they never should have signed. Each defaulted mortgage means another house put on the market at firesale prices, driving down the price of houses. For the average Joe, whose savings are mostly in his house, each price drop comes right out of his hide. Price drops in housing hurt more than a drop of the Dow Jones.
To tame this monster, we gotta have rules limiting mortgages to those who have the income to pay them off. To insure the rules are enforced, lenders who break the rules need to loose their money.
Right now, that doesn't happen. The mortgage market has Fannie and Freddie, who buy shaky mortgages from lenders. If the lender can sell the mortgage before the borrower stops paying on it, he is home free. And that is the major cause of Great Depression 2.0. We need to shut down Fannie and Freddie, cause they encourage disasterous loans, loans that hurt the borrower and hurt the housing market as a whole.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0?

We have a new republican house coming in a few days. We have a democratic party sufficiently scared by the 2010 election to listen to a little reason. We ought to be able to do something.
Firstly the economy is suffering from a want of demand. People just are not buying anything that they don't have to. Cars, appliances, new clothes, home repairs, lawncare, books, and a lotta other stuff doesn't have to be bought now, it can be postponed. And that's what everyone is doing, postponing the purchases of everything and anything they can. So the makers of everything and anything are cutting back production, laying people off, and sitting on their available cash, waiting for better times.
How to stimulate demand? Simple, introduce new products that people are willing to spend on. In the past, automobiles, radios, refrigerators, television, vacuum cleaners, stereos, chainsaws, power mowers, cell phones , and PC's were irresistible products that people bought, 'cause they needed them or 'cause they were cool. This has slowed in recent years. About the only guy still doing new products is Steve Jobs at Apple.
We need to get more new products going. First step would be to straighten out the Patent Office mess. Today's Patent Office grants patents on totally obvious stuff, grants patents on stuff that has been common knowledge for decades. Result, invent something that makes money and get sued. Doesn't matter much what it is, some patent troll will sue you. The Blackberry makers got ripped off for $600 million by a patent troll who had a couple of patents on totally obvious ideas.
Large companies have lawyers, and stock of their own patents, and defend them selves by countersuing. Small startups without deep pockets cannot afford these suits.
Net result, we have a patent system that discourages innovation and new product development. Not what we need to get out of Great Depression 2.0
A cleaned up patent office would go back to where it was in the 1970's. No patents on computer programs, business methods, and intangibles like file formats and communications protocols. A good patent office would put the entire backlog of patents onto a computer searchable data base on the internet for all to see. It would conduct a serious search for prior art before granting a patent, and it would solicit industry responses to all new patent claims. New patents should be only granted for things are are truly new, and advance the state of the art. Allowing patents on one click selection on a website (which is done today) merely give welfare to lawyers.

Snow Bonanza

Just went out and stuck a yardstick into the snow on the porch. 29 inches. Skiing at Cannon will be fantastic. Think about taking a day off from work and coming up skiing.
Its still falling. Weather guy thinks it might snow all day.

Words of the Weasel Pt 17

Bi-partisan (or Bipartisanship). Now that Republicans have gained control of the US house of representatives, the media has been overflowing with pitches in favor of "bipartisanship". Doesn't matter what the issue is, the right thing is the bipartisan thing.
Actually, coming from the mouths of politicians, "bipartisanship" means "vote my way".
This is not a good thing. Politicians should vote their district, or if the district doesn't care about the issue, vote in the best interests of the United States. They shouldn't vote for the other side just to be nice or bipartisan.
Laws should not be passed unless a solid majority of the voters favor them. If the country is evenly split on an issue, then we shouldn't legislate on that issue.
No politician should vote for something he or his district doesn't favor just to be "bipartisan".

Save your Dixie cups, the south will rise again

Actually, save your old Verizon phone books, 'cause the new Fairpoint phone books don't have a lot of stuff they oughta have. Like PSNH, the electric company, isn't in the Fairpoint book. When the lights go out, that's a number you need. And the Littleton Wal-Mart isn't in the Fairpoint book.
Of course Fairpoint is in, or going into bankruptcy, so they don't have money for little things like phone books.

Smart Phones fink on their owners

According to the Wall St Journal, some popular smart phone applications, (apps) transmit the owner's location, contact information, and website choices to advertising companies. In short, buying the app makes the owner vulnerable to tracking, stalking, spamming, identity theft and undercover photography.

Narnia, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Went to see it in Lincoln this afternoon. Things are a little slow today, and we had the entire theater to ourselves. The movie is OK, but not great, just barely drawing even with the first Narnia movie. The ship Dawn Treader is wonderful, looks totally real and has the neatest cabins and decks and lookout spots. The story is down to Edmund (Skandar Kaynes) and Lucy (Georgie Read). Peter and Susan are too grownup to return to Narnia this time. Acting is quite passable. Costumes are very good, especially Lucy's. If you are a Narnia fan, you need to see it. If not, it's a decent fantasy movie, as good as the last Harry Potter.

DADT vs Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)

The UCMJ was adopted in the early 1950's and it defines gay and lesbian as "sodomy" and a court martial offense. The UCMJ is the working criminal law for all the armed services. It's an act of congress, and the executive branch cannot change it. The Clinton era Don't Ask Don't Tell did NOT change the UCMJ. Clinton figured he didn't have the votes to do that.
Don't ask Don't Tell told commanders not to snoop and gay and lesbian troops to keep it quiet. But it was still "sodomy" and a court martial offence.
Amid all the hoopla surrounding this week end's revision, I still haven't heard if Congress actually revised the UCMJ this time, throwing out the articles on sodomy. Your news media at work...

Defeat of 2000 pages of Omnibus Spending

And a good thing too. It killed $8 billion or more of pork. Compared to the $1.3 trillion in the whole package, the pork isn't all that bad, but killing it is a good thing. We also killed funding for Obamacare, another good thing. The Senate ought to approve the House "continuing resolution" today. A continuing resolution is less damaging, it says in effect "You agencies can continue operating using last years budget." This means no spending increases, a good thing. The 2000 pages of "omnibus spending" undoubtedly had all sorts of spending increases buried deep inside.
Even better, some pet Congressional spending projects like the extra engine for the F35 jet fighter may die. Or at least give in incoming Republican Congress another chance to kill them.
The other good reason for killing the omnibus spending bill was nobody really knows what is hidden in the 2000 pages. I'm sure the staffers who wrote it tucked in all sorts of things that I might not approve of.
We should never allow omnibus spending bills. We should pass one appropriation bill for each agency (Defensive, Homeland Security, Agriculture, etc). Then resulting appropriation bills will be smaller, and people have a fighting chance of reading them, understanding them and critiquing them. There are plenty of people who know the ins and out of a single government agency. Nobody knows the ins and outs of the entire US government. When you take the appropriations for the whole government, mix them together at random, omit a table of contents, and make it 2000 pages long, nobody can figure out what it means. I think such bills should be voted down just cause they empower bureaucrats to do anything they want to.

Does the Iphone add to the trade deficit?

Apple's blockbuster Iphone is made in China. Last year Apple imported $1.9 billion worth of Iphones from China. Making the US-China trade deficit worse by $1.9 billion.
But, the Chinese merely assembly the I-phones. They have to import all the parts. Of the $178.96 wholesale cost of the Iphone, China only gets 3.5% or $6.50 a phone. 6% of the cost comes from US made parts, nearly twice the value add of China. The big hitters are Japan (34%) Germany (17%) and South Korea (13%)
But the Commerce Dept just credits the full price of the Iphones to China, since that's where they come from. Nobody has the time or expertise to do a manufacturing cost breakdown of every imported manufactured product.
From a standpoint of computing the US trade deficit it probably doesn't matter. Whether you charge the Iphones all to China, of split it up by national content, it's still an import. To us, it doesn't matter all that much who the trade deficit is with, it matters that we have such a deficit.
To the Chinese it matters a good deal. The Americans are pressuring China to revalue their currency upward to reduce their trade deficit. If the Iphone costs were partly laid upon Japan, Germany and South Korea, it would help the Chinese resist American pressure.
The most interesting thing is the narrow slice of value add given to China. For that little work, I'm surprised Apple makes them in China. Better to make them at home, under Apple Corp control. It's easier to keep the quality up in your own factory. And, you keep your technology to yourself, rather than sharing it with a potential competitor.

Republicans, the party of the working man

I did a lot of door to door campaigning as a Republican candidate this fall. It got so I could make a pretty good guess about the political sentiments just by looking at the house as I walked up to knock on the door.
Manicured green lawn, a BWM or Prius in the driveway, carefully maintained house, figure a Democrat. Shaggy lawn, with a few weeds and some kids toys, a pickup truck, some do-it-yourself home repairs in progress, figure a Republican.
I did better in Bethlehem, which has a lot of residents who work for a living, than I did in Franconia, which has a lot of wealthy retired folk.

Winter's back

I got 8 inches of new snow on the porch, and it's still floating down. It's 18 degrees F (seasonable) and the sun is trying to break thru the clouds.

Tom Clancy, Dead or Alive

Clancy's latest book is out, in hardback. As a long time Tom Clancy fan, I splurged on the $28.95 hardback. It isn't as good as the previous Clancy thrillers. It's set in the "future" after Clancy's last book "Tail of the Tiger". It has a dozen protagonists and villains and the narration jumps from one to another every couple of pages. There is a "co author" and the book reads like Clancy did the outline and the co author did all the writing. Sort of like the "Op Center" books.
Proof reading must have been done by Word for Windows. It allowed "site" to pass where "sight" should have been used, "Y-turn" for "U-turn", and other oddities.
Wait for the paperback, or wait for your library to get it.