Bring back paper ballots

They cannot be hacked by the Russians.  And they can be recounted should there be some irregularities, or challenges.  And they don't suffer from hanging chads.  We could do it.  There is plenty of time to print ballots for the entire country before the election.  Up here there is never a lack of public spirited citizens to count ballots on election night. 
   And the various ways of cheating on paper ballots have been around for centuries and are well known.  Precautions against ballot box stuffing and other chicanery can be taken. 
   Them voting machines, which are small computers run by software, and we all know how trustworthy software is, can be hacked to change the election result, and there is no way to tell.  No paper record, and nobody can decipher the software, so you can't prove a thing.   All it takes is one party fanatic with access to the machines, and he can do anything, and leave no traces.  And if the election committee is stupid enough to connect their election machines to the public internet, all bets are off. Anything can happen. 

Epipens are only $20 in Europe

And we could have them over here for that price if we passed a federal law allowing duty free import of medicines from any reasonable first world country.  Like Canada, the EU, Japan, a few other places.  First world countries all have regulations on the sale of medicine.  If they rule a medicine OK for sale to their citizens then it's OK for Americans too.  FDA doesn't get to block imports.  If it's legal in the country of origin, the law shall make it legal here. 
   The reason Epipens are selling for $600 here is that FDA shut down all the competitors.  Nothing fancy in Epipen, its just adrenalin in an easy to use hypodermic needle.  No patents, no nothing, but FDA kindly drove all the competitors off the market.  Nice work for Mylan.    

Battles that Changed History

An oldie but a goodie.  First published in 1956 when I was in middle school.  I  saw it in a Harvard Square bookstore, and thought it was so cool.  I begged and pleaded with the parents and somehow I received a copy for birthday  and read it cover to cover.  Pratt starts off with Alexander the Great,  moves up thru Pyrrus of  Epirus (from whom we get Pyrric victory), the siege of Vienna, the revolt of the Netherlands, and ending with the carrier battles of Midway.  Although it concentrates on the military history of Western Civilization, the book is a good introduction to Western European history. 
   The writer, Fletcher Pratt is a helova good writer.  He made his living dong decent science fiction, good stuff that sold, and he knows the periods of which he writes well, gives all sorts of interesting details.  Pratt is a good fun read, and in this book the reader gets at  good abet sketchy  history of the Western world  going back 2500 years.  If you have a middle school child or grandchild, this book would be a class A gift. 

What small children ought to know

And it's your responsibility to tell 'em about it.

1.  Beware of going into the street.  The cars will run right over you.  Stay on the sidewalk.  If a toy or a ball rolls into the street, don't go after it.  Find a grownup to retrieve it.

2.  Beware of going out on the ice.  If the ice breaks, you are dumped into freezing water over your head.  Your chances of pulling yourself out are poor, especially after the water soaks into your winter coat and snowpants making them very heavy.  My mother required us kids to wack a hole in the ice with a pickax to see if it was four inches thick.  Any less than four inches and we couldn't go skating on it. 

3.  Stay away from the stove.  I still remember my mother touching a paper towel to a dark electric stove burner and watching it burst into flame.    

4.  Beware of electric sockets, light sockets and lamp cords.  If  the insulation is old or bad, they can kill.

5.  Beware of power mowers.  They can fling rocks and stuff with the speed and force of bullets. Stay away.

6.  Beware of wild animals and strange dogs.  Don't try to pet them, they may take it the wrong way, and bite you. 

7.  Beware of cars with engines running.  They may be parked at curbside, standing in driveways, or parking lots.  If the engine is running (smoke from tailpipe, and/or lights on) the car is getting ready to move.  Stay well clear, since you are short and the driver may not be able to see you. 

8.  Dress for winter when going out in winter.  Coat, boots, mittens and hat.  Maybe snow pants too.  Even if going by car.   One dark Friday night the car engine lost power going up Franconia Notch with all three kids in the back seat.  We might have had to walk out, four miles or more.  Fortunately I was able to fix the problem by flashlight and we drove on.  But we also had the needed winter gear to walk it should it have been necessary.

Sunday afternoon on NBC TV is all about blacks and Hispanics

And, of course, how neither blacks nor Hispanics will vote for The Donald.  Groovy, NBC getting in some licks for Hillary. 
   But, not a word about a much larger and much more important voter block, women.  Hispanics are like 10% of the electorate, blacks are like 15%.  Women are 50%, which is a whole lot more.  Anyhow in a long period of talk, not a word about women, lots of words about blacks and Hispanics.  I wonder why?  Can it be that the newsies, or women, or both, find the traditional women's issue, abortion and birth control, to be repellent this year?  And they don't know of any other issues?  Or perhaps good old lefty NBC thinks it's better for Hillary to divvy up the voters into small special interest groups rather than one very big group? 
   It was the women's vote that sank Romney four years ago.  Women favored Obama over Romney by 10%.  That's Obama's winning margin right there.  And I never did hear any discussion of why women liked Obama better than Romney.  Was it because Obama is good looking, slender, and sexy?  Whereas Romney just looks like a happily married husband?  Could it be women liked Obamacare?  Or Obamanomics even though both policies threw a lotta people out of work?   Was it being Mormon?  Something else?  None of the pollsters did any polling on this, or at least they never published.  

World War II, nearly everybody lost

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France were invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940.  Yugoslavia and Greece got the same a year or two later.  Poland, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were invaded and occupied by the Soviets.  Germany and Italy  were heavily bombed and then invaded and occupied by the Anglo Americans.  A few countries managed to stay neutral, but darn few. 
   We, America, won without taking too much damage.  The British won but suffered a lot more.  The Russians won at a terrible cost. 
   So on balance we have three winners, and a whole lotta losers.  Right after the war, 1946, the survivors (losers all), determined never to do a World War again, set out to build a United States of Europe to prevent another catastrophe. It started small, just six members.  It went thru a bunch of name changes, but it kept growing, and now everyone is in it, except the Russians.  They set up a Common Market, the Euro, and a government of sorts in Brussels.  Up until this summer it looked like a winner, despite some boondoggles like Greece. 
   This summer the Brits pulled out.  That's a setback for the United Europe idea.  Britain is the second biggest economy in the EU, right after Germany, they are very good diplomats, and they have the enormously strong American connection, far stronger than anyone else in the world.  Britain will be missed. 
   It will take some years for Brexit to sort out.  If no other country follows the Brits, then it's a minor setback.  If some minor players bail out that's a bad thing.  If a biggie, France say, bails out, that's a very bad thing.  
   Time will tell.

  

Lotta work needed on F35

The F35 is a flying computer.  Software does everything.  And the software is far from ready.  Plus some other problems.  The Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation set forth the "challenges"  (bureaucrat speak for bugs or problems) still to be overcome.  
   First off is the 25mm Gatling cannon won't fire. This used to be a pure software problem and cannon firing software was promised sometime in the future.  Which is a minor scandal.  A gun ought to fire every time the trigger is pulled.  All the software can do is correct the aim, but pilots can get plenty of hits without fancy software driven lead computing gunsights.  But somehow they decided to route the trigger signal thru the computers rather then straight to the gun.  Good design that.  Now they discover that a little door that opens when the gun fires creates enough drag to throw the aim off.  On the old F105, which I worked on for a year in combat, the muzzle of the 20mm Vulcan cannon stuck right out in the airstream, fired every time the trigger was pressed, and no silly little doors to get in the way.  KISS (keep it simple stupid).
   Second the project is running into difficulties getting the system to fire the AIM9L Sidewinder air to air missile and drop the laser guided Small Diameter Bomb.  Sidewinder, an infrared heat seeker,  has been around since the 1950's, and is still very effective, and cheap.  SDB is newer, but it's been around for a while, it's a 250 pound smart bomb that you can put in a guy's bedroom window without leveling the entire apartment building.  Neither require much electronic assistance by the launching aircraft.  Did the F35 people bother to read the Technical Orders on either weapon? 
   Then there is the computer crash problem.  In July the system crashed hard (blue screen of death hard) every five hours on average.  With the last software update, that was improved to 9 hours between crashes.  My Windows XP system does better than that.  Here we are at Top Gun, closing on the enemy, when the system crashes. Instead of pulling some G's and nailing the enemy, we are pushing reset buttons trying to bring the computer back up. 
   And lastly the $400,000 a copy night vision helmet still doesn't work. 
   There is a bunch of other gripes about non essential systems, sensor fusion, date link, and some other stuff that doesn't belong on a fighter plane. 
   The test and evaluation people don't think the F35 program office has the funds to fix all this stuff. 

Real Jobs

I was listening to NPR on the way home yesterday.  They were doing a nice long piece on a dozen Maryland high school students who graduated high school back in 2012, and have mostly graduated college and found jobs.  There was a teacher, an HR worker, an actor, couple of grad students, and I forget the rest. 
   None of them had taken a real job in industry, you know where they produce wealth.  I'm glad to know that beaten up as the American economy is, it is still productive enough to carry all those fresh young faces doing nothing very important. 

Immigration (to the US)

We need it.  To maintain the population, each woman in the US needs to bear 2.1 children during her lifetime.  We aren't making that right now, it's like 1.9 or 2.0.  And it would not be that high without immigrant women who bear more children than the native born do. 
   We need immigrants who are loyal to the United States.  Not loyal to ISIS or Islam, of communism, or the old country, but loyal to the United States.  Other the years we have done well in this respect,  I have a number of immigrant friends who are intensely loyal to this country. 
   After loyalty, we need people who will become gainfully employed, stay out of trouble with the law, raise decent children, pay taxes, and contribute to the community.  People like this strengthen the country, make the economy grow, and are good to have around. 
   We have 11 million immigrants in the country who haven't done the right paperwork to be here.  Far as I am concerned,  if they have been doing the right thing, (employed, clean criminal record, married, children) I say let em stay.  Deporting them all would be brutal, and the TV coverage would look like the SS shipping Jews to Auschwitz.  Let's not do that.  
   And, if we are gonna let them stay in the country, we need to grant them citizenship.  All men are created equal is the core principle of the United States.  That means everyone gets to vote.  It's a violation of our principles to have two classes of people, real citizens and green carders. 
   I know, it lets the people who are here already get to the head of the line.  Too bad.  They showed courage in coming here, and have demonstrated that they are good citizens, why not let them go ahead?  Plus the "line" is pretty much closed, it can take 20 years wait for a green card. 
   The newsies are having a lot of fun zapping the Donald on immigration issues.  But immigration isn't all that important to the voters this year, not compared to the economy, jobs, Islamic terrorism and even Zika.  The newsies like the issue cause it is simple enough for even their limited understanding, unlike say  the economy which is complicated.

The Donald does the right thing

He accepted the invitation from an important neighbor country.  He flew down to Mexico.  He had a talk with the Mexican president.  I dare say the Mexicans have a few things they want from us, and The Donald has a few things he wants from Mexico.  Since The Donald isn't president (yet) he is in no position to grant the Mexicans anything,  and the Mexicans certainly cannot make any concessions to a man who may never be president.  So they had a meeting. They issued bland but friendly communiques afterward.  And that is exactly what they should have done.  Even if they didn't achieve anything of real substance, just issuing a friendly press release and a friendly communique is a good thing.  Don't knock it. 
   Hillary was on TV knocking it shortly afterward.  

Asteroid Mission to Launch next week

A US built asteroid inspection vehicle named OSIRIS-REX is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral atop a Unitied Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.  OSIRIS-REX will attempt a sample return to Earth.  It has a robot arm to scoop up surface material into a return vehicle.  It also carries every other imaginable scientific instrument, a laser altimeter, and IR thermometer, and IR spectrometer, three cameras, and Xray imaging and spectrometer gear.   It's a long duration mission, lasting until 2023. 
   The samples returned will be analyzed for spores and any kind of biological precursor chemicals.  There is an old old theory (Arrhenius) that life on earth originated from spores coming from outer space.  Scientists will be looking, intensely, for such spores in the returned samples.   

Peeling the Apple with a dull knife

Apple set up an operation in Ireland.  Probably because Ireland's corporate tax is only 12%.  All of a sudden the EU, in Brussels, says that Apple ought to be paying $14 billion more in taxes.  Both Apple and Ireland are appealing.
   Couple of things I don't understand here.  I thought the internal affairs of EU countries. especially tax law, was under the control of those EU countries, not under the control of Brussels.  Nor did I think that Brussels has the authority to levy EU wide taxes.  If this is the case, how does the EU get to demand an extra $14 billion from an American company operating in Ireland? 
   Then there was a chucklehead sounding off on Fox News.  He said that Apple should never set up operations in Ireland, Apple should do all it's business back here in the USA, to avoid exporting American jobs.  Sorry there my chucklehead, Apple management is required by law to maximize Apple's earnings for its shareholders.  Anyone can see that doing business in Ireland with a 12% tax creates more earnings than dong business in the US with a 35% tax. Apple was doing its duty in maximizing its earnings.  Maybe the US should think about lowering its tax rate to keep business in the country. 

It's a free country

That football player doesn't have to stand for the national anthem.  Freedom of speech and all that. 
   On the other hand, I don't have to like it.  It's disrespect for the flag, and to the Republic for which it stands.  I plan to avoid watching his team play, and I'll call him a scumbag.  My free speech rights. 

Things I would like to hear Trump say.

1.  Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley.  It's a huge law on corporate governance.  Requires corporations to furnish thousands of pounds of paperwork to the feds.  It is so onerous that it decourages creation of new companies, startups.
2.  Allow health insurance companies to sell policies in every state of the union.  WithOUT having to do another thousand pounds of paper work for each of the 50 state governments.  I can get a cheaper policy if I can choose from many companies instead of being limited to one. 
3.  Allow duty free import of any medicine from all reasonable first world countries.  Starting with Canada and the countries of the EU and Japan.  If the health authority of a first world country has approved the medicine for its own citizens then it is OK for American citizens too.  FDA will scream and shout, but they don't vote.  Many medicines are available overseas or in Canada for half the price changed in the US.
4.  Stop the war on coal.  It throws miners out of work and raises the price of electricity for all.
5.  Lease federal land for oil exploration.  Obama has totally shut off  oil exploration on federal land at the behest of the greenies. 
6.  Approve the Keystone XL pipeline project.  We need the oil.  Pipelines spill less than oil tanker trains.
7.  Repeal the "Corporate Average Fuel Economy" (CAFE) rules.  Consumers will apply plenty of pressure for better fuel economy on Detroit.  We don't need  complicated and expensive federal regulation that establishes impossible-to-meet goals.
8.  Repeal the alcohol mandate on gasoline.  It takes nearly as much energy to make the alcohol as we get back when we burn it.  The corn farmers will  cry loudly but there aren't all that many farmers any more.
9.  Close down the federal department of education.  Let private lenders furnish student loans.  State and local governments run  and pay for all the schools anyway.  We don't need to pay for a bunch of federal bureaucrats to look over their shoulders and get in the way.

There is probably more, but this will do for a start. 

The Double NIckel Rides Again

Back after the 1973 oil shock, a cry went up that we could save fuel and cut accidents with a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour.  And so it was.  Congress passed it, the president signed it, and every speed limit sign the length and breadth of America was replaced with new ones reading 55 MPH.
    And everyone hated it.  No one drove any slower, and traffic cops had a field day.  Since everyone was driving well over the limit, they could ticket everyone on the road.
    It took a while, years actually, but the double nickel speed limit was finally repealed.  In a matter of a few days all the speed limit signs were changed back to 65 and 70.
    Yesterday the bureaucrats decided to try again.  They limited their efforts to trucks and buses to avoid political backlash from everybody in the country.  Rather than a speed limit, they want to install speed governors on all big trucks and buses.  The bureaucrats claim it will save fuel and reduce accidents.
  Yeah right.  The professional drivers of heavy trucks and buses are the safest on the road.  They signal, they yield the right of way, they stay in lane, they don't tailgate.  The accident rate for heavy commercial vehicles is far lower than for private automobiles.  And who can make a better tradeoff between fuel economy and getting the cargo delivered on time, trucking companies or federal bureaucrats?
   Question.  How much money did the makers of governors contribute to the Clinton Slush Fund? 

Is This For Real???

Shrink claims 60% of college students are crazy.   
   This shrink has a pretty low standard, he clearly thinks everyone needs a head shrinker. 

Record sales don't count anymore

Records (and CD's) aren't selling much anymore.  So they are now counting the number of Internet downlords.

Corn is as high as an elephant's eye....

Drove down to Nashua (NH) Monday afternoon.  A good deal of backroad driving mixed with a bit of I91.  On the back roads, stands of fresh green corn, 6 or 7 feet tall, looking very good indeed.  Caught my eye they did.  These corn patches looked as good as ones I saw in Nebraska many years ago. 
  So this morning National Progressive Radio was wailing about the drought up here, claiming that all crops in NH and MA had been ruined, how farmers were switching to "sustainable" crops, and in general lamenting the ruination of New England farming.  They didn't come right out and blame it on global warming, but they wanted to. 
   How come the corn crops looked so good when all else is going to rack and ruin?  NPR never bothered to furnish us listeners with numbers, like average rainfall (inches) and this summer's rainfall (inches).  Numbers repel newsies. 

What I might say to kids going off to school

My three children all made in thru college in one piece, so I don't have to make these points to them anymore.  But I thought I might share some of them with my blogoverse.

1.  Don't get falling down drunk at parties.  You go to parties to meet people, to chat, maybe dance, to show yourself off, to have a good time.  None of this works if you pass out on the floor, drunk.  Plus it makes a negative impression upon everyone there.  Plus girls are likely to get raped after they get drunk.  If you just have to drink til you are wasted, do it on dorm, with some trusty friends around.

2.  Know that everything you post on line, email, facebook, twitter, blogs, what ever, never goes away.  And everybody can read it, friends, enemies, future employers,  the FBI should you go for a security clearance, robo callers, everybody.  So don't post things that might be embarrassing after you graduate.  No racy pictures, no ethnic jokes,  stories of sexual encounters, nothing that you wouldn't feel good about showing to your parents, and posting on the down town bulletin board.

3.  Do your homework, do it the afternoon or evening it is assigned.  Start with the first day of class.  Classwork is mostly a discussion of how to solve the homework problems.  If you haven't at least tried the homework, the entire class discussion won't mean diddly to you.

4.  Think hard about how you will make your living after graduation.  Pick a major that makes you more employable in your chosen field.  There is little to zero demand for art history majors, sociology majors, gender studies majors, anthropology majors, or ethnic studies majors.  And a bunch of other majors.  Talk your major over with someone you trust.  DO NOT trust a college advisor, they know little, and try to steer you into their favorite major.  

5. Go out for a sport, everyone needs the exercise.

6.  Guys need to be super careful in relationships with girls.  The girl can turn on you, accuse you of rape, haul you in front of a campus kangaroo court, and get you expelled, with a rape charge on your record.  The careful guy gets to know the chick before having sex with her.

Good luck.

MacBeth the 2015 version with Michael Fassbender

It turned up on Netflix and I rented it this weekend.  They obvious spent a lot of money on it, but the curse of the sound man ruined it for me.  I simply could not understand the dialog.  The actors mumbled or whispered, the mikes were poorly placed and the soundman mixed the score and the sound effects over the dialog.  It was so bad I gave up and turned the DVD player off before it finished.  
   Hollywood is hurting if they cannot even do Shakespeare. 

Nightmare on Main St.

Title of an Economist editorial.  The Economist thinks America has too much home owner ship, and that the $26 trillion dollars of US mortgages outstanding are at risk of default.  $26 trillion in losses will shake the soundest bank.  They admit that real estate prices have perked up.  Used to be 25% of mortgages were underwater and now that is down to 10%. 
    The real problem in the US mortgage market is all the special favors the real estate industry (realtors, home builders, municipal boosters, appliance makers) are getting from long suffering taxpayers.  It's pressure from this widespread special interest that caused Uncle to create Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to run the secondary mortgage market.  And FHA to guarantee home mortgages.  And the mortgage interest deduction on federal income tax.  And federal flood insurance.  And a bunch of other expensive things. 
   A good mortgage is a very sound investment.  Good means a borrower who earns enough income to carry the mortgage payments and a property with a market value greater than the amount of the mortgage.  Preferably a borrower who is married, which gives him that much more incentive to avoid foreclosure.  It's hard to explain to the spouse why the family is out in the street.
   A bad mortgage is a default waiting the happen.  The borrower doesn't earn enough to make the payments, he isn't married, he is a house flipper.  The value of the property is way less than the mortgage. It's a sucker's mortgage with an escalator clause that jacks up the payments after a few months.
   Only the officer who originates the loan can tell good from bad.  He needs to interview the borrower, he needs to contact the borrower's employer to verify income, he needs to inspect the property to ascertain it's market value.  He has to know the real estate market in his area to form a valid estimate of value.  He has to be local to do all this.  The officer will be deligent in his duties, if and only if, he has some skin in the game, like his bank is going to hold this mortgage to maturity.  If the bank plans to dump the mortgage on the secondary mortgage market (Fannie Mae), then the officer doesn't care.  In fact, he wants to process as many mortgages as he can to rake in the fees he gets from doing a mortgage.  Dump it on Fannie before it defaults and all is well. 
  A broker on Wall St, or a banker in Germany have no idea how credit worthy any borrower is or what the value of a single family home in Kansas might be.   So the secondary mortgage buyers don't really know what they are buying.  Which caused Great Depression 2.0 in 2007.  The sucker investors wised up to the crud they were being asked to finance and refused to buy any more of it.
   The real answer to the problem is to shut down the secondary mortgage market.  We could do this with a simple law that declares a mortgage non transferable.  The borrower is only obligated to make payments to the guy who originated his mortgage.  He can stop payments, and keep his house, if the mortgage is sold to anyone.        

Small Town Democracy at work

It all started with metal roofs and solar collectors.  They have been getting more and more popular up here in Franconia.  The fire department calls them dangerous.  Both are so slippery, especially when wet, that firemen cannot walk on them with out slipping and falling to the ground.  So the fire department has wanted to buy a ladder truck to furnish a solid footing when firemen need to go up on slippery roofs to fight the fire.
   And so, a deal turned up.  A nice big used ladder truck, in good shape, even painted yellow, Franconia's departmental color, for only $70K.  New ones go for ten times that.  The fire department wants to buy it.
   Buying takes money.  Franconia has some trust funds, in which the town salts money away over the years to replace various pieces of equipment, police cars, firetrucks and the like when they finally wear out.  We have  fund to buy a tanker truck for the fire department with $140K in it and a newly established fund to buy a ladder truck with only $37K in it.   The fire department wanted to take some money out of the tanker truck fund to buy this marvelous ladder truck.  Their thinking was a fire truck is a fire truck and it's OK to spend fire truck money on fire trucks.  I tend to agree, but that's not the way it works.
   We summoned a special town meeting for August to vote on the matter.  It was a lovely evening, warm and clear of sky.  Turnout was light, maybe 60 people out of a town with 900 registered voters.  All the old Franconia people turned up. All the fire department turned up.  Everybody knew everybody.  Lots of questions were asked, most of them about process and procedure, rather than do we really need another  fire truck.  And a vote was taken, written ballots just to be sure, and the ladder truck buy passed 43 to 14.  And a good time way had by all. 

Bill O'Reilly on Gitmo

Last night, on his TV show, O'Reilly said he was in favor of closing Gitmo because, he said, the prisoners at Gitmo had not received trials. 
   Sorry about that Bill.  Those prisoners are in Gitmo because they were bearing arms against US forces.  They were captured on a foreign battlefield.  We are holding them in Gitmo to prevent them from continuing to fight against us.  They are prisoners of war, not convicted criminals.  No American court, court-martial, or special commission is going to convict them of crimes when all they did was fight against us.  Back right after 9/11 we took prisoners alive.  They are clearly enemy, clearly hostile, and  unless we snuff 'em, we gotta put 'em somewhere.  They are not criminals, they are enemy soldiers  (enemy combatants the politically correct jargon used today).
   The only reason we don't call them prisoners of war, is that the Geneva Conventions give prisoners of war a fair number of protections that we don't want to grant these guys.  Geneva Conventions prohibit grilling POW's for intelligence.  We grilled everyone sent to Gitmo until they were medium rare. 
   Obama (and O'Reilly) want to close Gitmo for who knows what reason[s].  The result is we don't take prisoners much anymore.  We kill them with Predator drone strikes, or we shoot 'em right in the lips, like we did to Osama Bin Laden. 
   Which was a mistake.  Bin Laden knew a lotta things that we need to know, and a nice long interrogation session at Gitmo would have given us a lot of good intel. Plus we could have run off a nice show trial.  Bin Laden in an orange jumpsuit and shiny handcuffs, a long parade of tearful victims testifying against him, would go a long way to convincing the world that Bin Laden really was a nogoodnick rather than a martyr.  .

New missiles for USAF

The Air Force has released two Requests for Proposals (RFP) at the end of last month.  One is for a new ICBM to replace the aging Minuteman III missiles and the other for a new Long Range Stand Off  Cruise Missile.  Timing is a little odd, for two massively expensive programs just before election day.  Clearly the incoming administration will have it's own ideas. 
   They used to assign snappy names to missile programs.  Atlas, Titan, Thor, Skybolt, and the like.  Now they just go with acronyms.  The ICBM is dubbed "Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Ballistic Missile" or GBSD for short.  The cruise missile is called "Long-Range Standoff Missile"  (LRSO). 
   GBSD is long term and slow going.  USAF budgets $3 billion  over the next five years for studies.  First production missiles are not expected until 2028.  That's a long long time away, many profitable years of contractor paperwork.  Production of 642 missiles will cost $62 billion spread over thirty years.  That's $1 billion per missile in round numbers.  Pricey, very pricey.  It wouldn't cost so much if it didn't take so long.  I remember the original Minuteman program put 1054 missiles into silos inside of five years from start of contract.  And built the necessary 1054 silos at the same time. 
   The LRSO is really a penetration aid missile.  Bombers (B52, B1,B2, B21) carry them to soften up air defenses.  The missiles can reach out 1000 miles ahead of the bomber and vaporize enemy radar sites, fighter bases and SAM sites.  With enough missiles, and good intel about where to shoot them, the bombers are pretty much unstoppable, at least in an all out war where nukes are used.  The program schedule is just as slow as GBSD.  They budget $2.2 billion and 4 1/2 years  for studies.  Then another $10 billion to actually build the missiles. 

"Boy" and "Girl" outlawed by Charlotte NC school board

The TV snippet didn't mention what word[s] were supposed to replace "boy" and "girl" which have been words in English since the time of William the Conqueror.  "Kid" perhaps?
  Ya gotta wonder what this school board was thinking when they made this really amazing ruling.
  Was it the unisex "There is no difference between male and female" people?  Who hope to make boys and girls the same in all respects, opportunity, dress, life roles, what ever? 
  Was it the Transies who want to teach children that they can change themselves from boy to girl or girl to boy if they so desire?
   Was it a desire to defuse or sidestep the boys and girls room issue?
   Was it the LGBT crowd who must be thinking it will ease the social pressure on gay and lesbian students?

   And, how is this amazing ruling going to interfere with the push to start sex education at ever younger ages?

   And what will the signs on boys and girls room doors read?  

Healthcare reform to cut the federal budget

W all know that the federal budget is in trouble.  Has been since Obama became president.  Obama has managed to spend $1 trillion more each year than the IRS collects in taxes.  He sells bonds (T-bills) to the public to keep the Treasury checks from bouncing. 
  There are only two fixes for the problem, raise taxes (the favorite Democratic  plan) or reduce spending (the Republicans like this but never carry thru).  Right now, the second biggest outlay is healthcare, Medicaid and Medicare.  These are "entitlement" programs, they don't have to be approved or funded by act of Congress, they just are.   Eligible patients submit their medical bills, and Uncle pays them.  So the program costs cannot be controlled by law.  Right now, health care payments are the second biggest part of the US federal budget, 27% of total spending.  There are other big things (defense, Social Security, highways, and a bunch of others) but let's just look at one big enchilada for this essay. 
  Everyone agrees that health care costs in the US are twice the costs in any other country.  And for spending twice as much as any other country, US healthcare isn't all that good.  We are down around number 10, not number 1. 
  If we could just lower healthcare costs of  by half, like every other country in the world manages to do, we would chop Federal healthcare spending in half.  That would knock healthcare down to 13% of the federal budget, down from 27%.  That is serious money. 
   Neither The Donald nor Hillary are talking about this at all.  They should be.

Persid Meteor Shower

The Internet said it was peak last night.  So I got up at midnight and went out to see.  And I did see three good bright meteors in about 20 minutes.  To get a good view I went up to the Peabody Slopes parking lot.  The sky was lighter than optimum, the moon hadn't quite set yet although it was below the tree line.  All I had to do was look straight up, and there they were.  The flash was too quick to photograph, at least not with my humble point-n-shoot.  If I do this again, remember to bring a flashlight and a folding chair. 

Estate Tax, small business killer.

Small businesses employ a lotta people, and a few of 'em grow up to be the next Apple Computer.  We need more of them, and we ought to pass laws to make things easier for them.  Eliminating the estate tax would help a lot.
   Typical small businesses, a gas station, a retail store, a motel, a general contractor,  a farm, a medical practice, or a restaurant.  Typically a sole proprietor  deal.  Sooner or later (death comes to everyone) and the sole proprietor dies.  His estate is the small business.  He may have a few bucks in a checking account, but over his lifetime he put everything into the business.  And now that he died, Uncle Sam wants 50% of the value of the business for estate taxes, in cash, right now. 
   Few small businesses have that kind of money.  Not now, not ever.   So the business is closed, sold off, the employees laid off.  The owner cannot will the business to an heir, he has to give half of it to Uncle Sam.  And paying half the value of the business kills it. 
  Me, I think business owners ought to be able to pass the business down to heirs, tax free. 
  The estate tax was invented to confiscate the fortunes of  people like the Rockefellers and  the Gates.  It does skin some of them, but they hire clever well paid lawyers who construct tax shelters for them.  The estate tax really does hammer small businesses, so hard that many of them die. 
  We ought to repeal the estate tax, all the way. 

Delta computer crash. Again

This morning's Wall St Journal had a few words from Delta's chairman.  He says an equipment failure on Delta's site both knocked out the system AND started a small fire.  A fire?  Where are the Halon fire extinguishers that any decent computer room has???   We actually had them go off once at my old place.  It was a false alarm, and it's a good thing that Halon just puts out fires and doesn't wreck electrical equipment like water will do.  But the question for Delta is, why didn't your Halon extinguishers work? 

Delta admits it was their own equipment that failed.

The local power company, Georgia Power, said that their power had stayed on all night.  Delta admitted that a "power control module" (which might be anything)  failed early Monday morning and crashed their computer system, shutting down Delta flights world wide.  And apparently rebooting the world wide systems isn't working so well.  Delta is announcing further flight delays and cancellations for tomorrow.
   Delta clearly needs to decentralize their computer systems, preferably down to the local airport level, so that a failure only knocks out ONE airport, not the entire world.  The only thing that has to be centralized is the airline's seat reservation system.  Agents sell seats all over the world.  Before an agent can sell a seat, he has to know that the seat in question is available, not already sold to someone else.  So all the seat sales go to the central computer system, which keeps track of which seats on which flights are available and which are sold.  This function has to be centralized.  But a lot of other  stuff, like running the airport kiosks ought to be local.
   Good luck Delta IT dept.  You gotta lotta work to do, and a lotta flak to catch. 

Words of the Weasel Part 38

Optics.  The politicos are now saying "The optics are bad".  Us real native born English speakers still say " It doesn't look good." 

No backup generator for Delta?

Delta's main computer system went down early this morning, and Delta announced that it was canceling flights world wide until they bring the computers back up.  Delta claims a power failure at their main computer site caused the outage.  And stranded passengers all around the world.
Question for you Delta.  Where was the back up generator at your site?  In the Air Force we had diesel backup generators for crucial stuff, the tower, the radar approach control, the runway lights, the instrument landing system, the electronic navigation aids.  Where was Delta's backup power for this absolutely crucial computer system? 

Ethnic voters, Black, Hispanic, Muslim.

Endless talk on TV about how Hillary and The Donald are doing with this or that ethnic group, who's ahead, who's behind, where they stand relative to previous races.  Endless yak.
None of the TV newsies are talking about the largest ethnic group in the country, women.  Fifty percent of voters are women.  Romney lost the woman's vote to Obama by 10%.  That was the election right there. Hillary and The Donald's race will be decided by women's votes.  But the TV newsies, not even the Wall St Journal ever talks about it.
  We know that The Donald has his problems with women's support.  So does Hillary.  A lotta women think she should have divorced Bill over the Monica affair.   How many of each sort of women voters do we have?  Would those women admit their real feelings to a robo calling pollster? 

How much should a nuke plant cost?

The new British government announced that it will be reviewing (read delaying) a decision to build a nuclear power plant financed by the Chinese to be located at Hinkley Point, England.  The strangest part of the brief article in the Wall St Journal was the price.  The plant is estimated to cost $23 billion to build.  Wow.  The going price for brand new nuclear plant is "only" $5 or $6 billion dollars for a 1 Gigawatt plant.   $23 billion sounds like a rip off to me. 
   Another odd detail about this deal, the Brits promised to pay double the going electric rate for juice from this Chinese financed plant.  Does this sound like crony capitalism? 
   You have to wonder why the Chinese are dickering to spend (invest?) so much money in the utility electric power business, which is not noted for high returns.  And to spend all that money in England, where the power helps the British economy rather than the Chinese economy. 
  Anyhow I can see why the new British government is "reviewing" this high price project. 

Get the US economy growing again

Gross National Product (GNP) is a count (or perhaps estimate) of the  value of all the goods and services produced in one year.  At least that's what they called it when I took economics in college.  Now that PC has slipped in thru out the land, "national" has become a bad word. So all the PC MSM call it Gross Domestic Product (GDP)  now a days.
    Ever since WWII the US GNP has increased by about 3% a year.  This means that the number of jobs increases at 3% a year,  which is enough to offer jobs to each year's crop of high school and college grads, as well as jobs to a lot of immigrants. 
   But, since Obama took office in 2008, the US economy has only grown at 1% a year.  Which is why young people are having a tough time finding jobs, and all that anti immigrant talk.  What can we do to get economic growth back on track?
1.  Repeal Obamacare.  Obamacare lays heavy costs upon business.  Businesses larger than 50 employees get hit harder.  So a lot of businesses have decided not to grow beyond 50 employees.  All businesses get levied for a lot of costs and the levy is on a per employee basis.  So businesses have stopped hiring, except when it is absolutely necessary. 
2.  Reform the income tax.  The current tax code is just a vast fabric of loopholes.  If you hire clever and expensive tax lawyers, they can find ( or create) loopholes for your company.  Loopholes create a lot of pure tax dodge companies, like "hedge funds".  Hedge funds enjoy a giant loophole called "carried interest".  I'm convinced that many hedge funds are in business solely to take advantage of "carried interest", not because they are serving any real need.
3.  Get the cost of health care down.  The US pays 19% of GNP for health care.  That is twice the amount paid by any other country  in the world.   And US health, while good, is not the best, there are a dozen countries with better health than the US and they are doing it on half the money.  If they can do it, so can we.  Right now all US goods cost 19% more than they ought to, just to pay the worker's healthcare.
To do this, we ought to make health insurance good anywhere in the US.  Any licensed health insurer ought to be free to offer policies in all 50 states.  Right now, an insurer has to be licensed in the state in which it is selling the policies.  Needless to say, the necessary licenses require the  insurer to do a ton of paperwork and in a lot of cases, they decide it's just too much trouble.  Which is why we only have two companies selling health insurance up here.  And we ought to allow duty free import of any drugs from any reasonable first world country, places like Canada, England, Germany and others.  If the authorities of a reasonable first world country allow the sale of the drug in their country, it is plenty safe enough for Americans.
4.  Straighten out the patent office.  Right now, if a company introduces a new product, it gets sued by a patent troll.  We ought to outlaw patents on "business methods" and software, and common standards like the ASCII code, the QWERTY typewriter layout, TCPIP, and the like.
5.  Get Uncle out of the home mortgage business.  Close down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which triggered off Great Depression 2.0 and then went broke, costing the taxpayers billions.  Home mortgages are the safest and most profitable investments out there, and private businesses can raise all the mortgage money needed.
   That's enough to get started on.  

President Trump vs President Hillary

If elected,
President Hillary will raise our taxes.   She said that on live  TV to huge applause yesterday,
She will try to take our guns away,
She will pack the Supreme Court (and the lower federal courts) with lefties, who will persist and continue to do harm for decades.
She will do more payoffs to foreign scumbags, and she will take up her disasterous foreign policy where she left off when she turned the secretary of state office over to John "Swiftboat" Kerry.

President Trump might do some real and badly needed income tax reform. 
He won't press for more gun "control" aka taking our guns away.
He will appoint decent law abiding judges to the Supreme Court.  He has published a long list of names. 
We aren't too sure of his foreign policy, he hasn't said much, but it cannot be worse than Hillary's.  I know he could have gotten four hostages back for less than $100 mil a head. 

Large unmarked bills. Small unmarked cargo plane.

Totally disgraceful.  And Hillary set it up.

Two Party system

This morning NPR was touting third party candidates for President.  Couple of guys whose names are new to me, couple of parties, Libertarian, Green.  Then they segued into a  pro third party pitch, and denounced various state laws making it hard for poor old third parties to get on the ballot.  Sounded dreadful.
   In real life, the two party system is a good thing that makes legislation possible.  In a two party system, if you have the votes, you can pass your legislation.  Once we let more parties into the game it becomes difficult to impossible to get anything done.  On any political issue there are always six of seven different courses of action.  If you have six or seven parties, each one of them will pick one of the possible courses of action, but none of the parties will have the votes to push it thru.  France, going all the way back to the Third Republic, worked like this.   The French had half a dozen parties, all going there own way, and they could never get anything done.  This pattern of French politics persists to this day.  It brought France invasion and defeat in 1940, Diem Bien Foo, the Algerian civil war, and overall weakness and confusion for nearly a century. 
   In a two party system, the six or seven courses of action get whittled down to two, one for each party, by internal party negotiations and log rolling.  Then the party with the votes gets it's program passed.  With only two partie, one of 'em will have the votes to pass its legislation.  If, like today, the country is evenly split on a lot of issues, nothing happens, neither party has the votes.   When the country is evenly split, it's probably best not to do anything. 
   And, consider this.  The last third party candidate to win the presidency was Abraham Lincoln and that was a long time ago.  To my way of thinking, casting your vote for a third party candidate is same as throwing it away, or not voting at all. 

We need some Cruel and Unusual Punishments

For robo callers who ring my phone and don't answer when I pick up.

Military in Politics???

I am hearing some chat on TV about how retired military officers should not engage in politics.  I beg to differ.  Once retired, a military officer is just an American citizen, with all the rights and privileges thereto, such as shooting his mouth off in public, or even at the Democratic convention.
  Active duty military is another kettle of fish.  On active duty an officer commands the armed forces of the United States, under the direction of the commander in chief (the president).  On active duty, criticizing the political leadership is criticizing your military superior, a big no-no, and a court martial offense in the US armed forces.
   But after retirement, a military officers is just another civilian, and if he wants to politick, that is his right and privilege.    General Washington,  General Jackson, General Grant, and General Eisenhower all made first class presidents.   In fact I'd be happy to trade our current crop of presidential candidates for any one of them.  Too bad they are all dead. 

Zitka in Florida

According to the TV newsies, a very small area in Florida, maybe a square mile, north of Miami is the cause.
   You would think a few hundred gallons of DDT, or whatever less effective insecticide the greenies allow us to use would solve the problem in a day or two.    TV newsies aren't saying anything about spraying the skeeters.  Maybe they haven't thought of it, maybe spome greenie regulation prevents it, who knows.  But a one square mile pest hole is treatable.   Best to treat is now, before it spreads.

Touristing to Portsmouth NH

Haven't been to Portsmouth in fifteen years or more.  And then only to Strawberrie Banke, a historical village setting.  I needed to buy a few new clothes,  the khaki's and sports shirts bought at Good Will Industries years ago are wearing out, and Good Will Industries has downgraded itself below my fairly low standards.  Portsmouth has down some good work on reviving the down town into a tourist trap.  Lotta nice side walk eateries. They had plenty of tourists hiking around the down town.  Parking is tight on a Saturday, I finally had to use my credit card to pay off a parking meter at $1.75 an hour.  Google maps showed nearly a dozen men's clothing stores all on a three block run of Congress St.  It must have been a bad year for men's clothing.  Only two of the stores that showed on Google maps were still there.  One was a unisex place (not my style ) and the other was a women's clothing place, (also not my style). 
   Infrastructure was good.  I drove down on secondary roads, and they were all in good shape, fresh black asphalt, easy curves, generous sight lines, broad shoulders.   Makes me think the infrastructure catastrophe is limited to New York State.  Real states like NH are keeping their roads in good shape. 
   And I'm glad I retired in upstate NH where the traffic is light.  Traffic around Manchester was thick.  There was some kinda hangup in Concord that had southbound traffic on 193 backded up to Boscawen by 2 PM.  Which is early for people to start for home after a weekend in upstate NH.  That one made in onto the air on WBZ. 

Wanna bet hacked DNC computers were running Windows?

Windows, Bill Gate's gift to civilization, is like Swiss cheese.  It's got so many holes that high school kids can hack into it.  Far as I am concerned, running Windows is hanging a hack me sign on your fanny. 
   If you care about security, don't run Windows.  Run Linux or Unix or Macintosh.  They are all a hundred times more secure than any flavor of Windows. 

Debating WWII grand strategy

Nice thick new book, 2016, entitled Commander in Chief, FDR's battle with Churchill.  Good photo of FDR on the dust jacket.   To read the book, you would think Roosevelt and Churchill spent the entire war squabbling over strategy.  
    From the get go, the Americans realized that the only way to defeat Germany was to land a huge army, on European soil, as close to Germany as possible, defeat the large and effective German army, drive for Berlin, and hang Hitler.   This kind of American thinking goes back to US Grant and the Civil War. Grant understood that the North had vastly greater reserves of manpower (and everything else that counted) than the South.  Once installed as commander in chief, Grant ordered the Army of the Potomac to march on Richmond, the southern capital.  Robert E. Lee put up a stout defense.   But after each bloody battle, Grant ordered his men forward and called up reinforcements.  Grant knew he could absorb horrendous casualties and still beat Lee and win the war.  It wasn't elegant, but it did work. 
   So the American thinking ran toward, "if you run into an obstacle, get a bigger hammer."  And starting a few days after Pearl Harbor, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff  became set upon the notion of a second front.  They even talked about launching the second front in 1942.  And in 1943.  They were dead set against peripheral operations that drained men and material away from the main objective. Things finally came together in 1944 at D-day.  In short it took two and a half years of preparation to build up the enormous force that triumphed in Normandy. 
   The British, who had suffered thru four years of trench warfare on the Western front, suffered the Germans to drive them into the sea at Dunkirk, and watched the Germans massacre the experimental raid on Dieppe, were not as sanguine as the Americans.  Churchill himself had commanded a regiment on the Western front, he knew how bad that sort of fighting could be.  Churchill was an imaginative guy, and he did a lot of thinking about ways to fight the Germans short of frontal attack across the Channel.  He came up with a bunch of them.  North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Greece were all Churchill ideas.  I daresay there were others that didn't make the history books. 
   In 1942, it was clear to Churchill, and he made it clear to Roosevelt who was inclined to listen to Churchill, that the Allies needed to do something against the Germans that year.  It would have been politically impossible to spend the next two and a half years building up to D-day and not fighting the Germans anywhere.  And, the newly raised American divisions were green as grass, they needed some actual combat experience to become effective against the Germans.  Churchill proposed the Americans land an army in North Africa that year, drive east toward Montgomery's 8th Army, and crush the Axis forces between them.  In this case, Roosevelt had to go against the strong opposition of General Marshall, Admiral King and the US joint chiefs.  He did it, issued them a direct order, something Roosevelt seldom did.  And it worked.  The Germans were cornered in Tunisia, forced to surrender, and the Allies took as many prisoners of war as the Russians took at Stalingrad some weeks before. 
   This smashing success made the British even more reluctant to bet everything on D-day.  For the rest of the war,  conference after conference was held, with the British pushing for more peripheral operations and the Americans pressing for "do D-day now".   The Americans finally got their way, and D-day happened on the 6th of June 1944.  And it worked. 
   Nigel Hamilton goes over all of this in exhaustive detail.  He paints it as a struggle between Roosevelt and Churchill, and makes it sound so bitter that you wonder how the Alliance stayed together.  And he makes it sound like a whole new interpretation of history, which it isn't.  The debates between the British and the Americans are well documented and part of the generally accepted and understood history of WWII.

The Russians are going, the Russians are going.

The yuge burst of Russian page views has died down.  I am back to my usual 70 odd pageviews a day, with the bulk of them from the US.  Dunno what happened, but it was a wild ride while it lasted.

Trans Pacific Partnership

Both candidates have done a bit of badmouthing of this deal.  This sounds strange coming from The Donald.  Republicans are traditionally in favor of free trade.  But, since the details of TPP have never appeared in the public press, it's impossible to form an real opinion about it.  If it lowers other country's tariffs against American products, it's a good thing.  America's tariffs are already pretty low, which accounts for all the Chinese product in Wal Mart, and all those Japanese and Korean cars on American roads.  With the exception of sugar, I doubt that American tariffs can be reduced much, I mean you can't go below zero can you?
   The scary part is what we don't know.  Rumor says the TPP covers a lot more than tariffs.  Perhaps  equal pay for all countries, or a world wide minimum wage.  Patent and copyright protection for 75 years.  Fixed exchange rates.  World wide safety standards, world wide green house gas regulations, universal freight rates, gun control, universal labor laws. 
   Since the text is secret, it could be anything.  I assume the Obama administration is keeping it secret to damp down opposition.  Or, perhaps the newsies are so ignorant of nearly everything, that they don't want to publish it. 
   Could be anything.  But discussion of TPP would be more meaningful if we knew what was in it.

Russians hacked the DNC?

I'm hearing on NPR, Fox, and the 'Net a theory that the Russians hacked the DNC emails and released them on Wikileaks to help The Donald.
Why in the world would they do that?
    Hillary is a known quantity.  She is not very smart, she can be bought, she won't make waves.  She has had four years as Secretary of State to demonstrate her incompetence in foreign affairs.  If I was Putin, that's exactly the kind of person I would like as president of the only surviving superpower. 
   Trump on the other hand, might do anything.  America is an exceptional country, and with imaginative leadership it can do almost anything.  Under mediocre leadership (Hillary) nothing much will happen.  But under charismatic leadership America won WWII, developed nuclear weapons, traveled to the Moon, eliminated polio, and gave its people the best standard of living in the world.  Under Trump, America could be an irresistible adversary to Russian expansion worldwide.  Why risk that?  Far better to have a mediocrity who will let things slide as they have been doing.   
   So I don't believe the Russians wanted to help Trump.

You would think they would know that Email is public

Debby Wasserman Schultz and most of the top brass at DNC are dumb enough to put things in email that they would never want to become public.  They are too ignorant to know that email ain't private, ain't secure, any thing you put in email can turn up on Wikileaks, or the front page of the newspapers.  This has been clear since Ollie North tried to erase his incriminating emails on the Iran Contra affair back in the Reagan administration.  In Ollie's case, he deleted his emails all right, but efficient IT people at the While House had backed them up on mag tape, and produced them at the Congressional hearings.  Bye bye Ollie. 
   I knew this soon as we got email at work, 30 odd years ago.   Use email for stuff everyone wants to see, such as how to fix a circuit board, how to design with our company's parts, how good our product is.  Don't email gripes, bugs, opinions of customers, anything uncomplimentary to anyone. 
   Talk face to face, out of doors or in a secure location, or use a payphone, or a cell phone from a moving car, when you are talking about bad or sensitive stuff.  Never by email.  Cause email ain't secure.
   Debbie and company should have known this.  She is stepping down, which will help the Democratic party.  The Democrats will do better when they don't have a chuckle head running it. 

Fixing my laptop after installing Win 10

This wasn't so hard.  Run the built in BIOS diagnostic.  And now the Start Menu (pure software) works, and the power button (Hardware but with a lotta software messing it up) works.  a
   Some website explained the way to get into the BIOS diagnostics was to hold down the ESC key while you hit the power on button.  And this appears to work even while the power on button isn't working.  According to a website, the BIOS diagnostics have been standard in HP laptops since 2009. Which means a lot of 'em have it.  On my HP laptop, a 2014  model, the BIOS diagnostics do start up, but they don't give you any messages on the screen except for one, They ask if you want to skip the disk test. 
   And the diagnostics reset a bunch of internal variables, which revived both the power on button and the start menu.  This shows a crappy design on the power button.  Any decent power button ought to assert the reset line to the processor and the entire motherboard.  When reset is released, all micro processors jump to the starting address, (top of memory on some, bottom of memory on others) and start executing code.  The purpose of reset on micro processors is to regain control and start running the program from the top, no matter how messed up the software is.  That ain't happening on HP laptops, some kinda hardware and software kluge is breaking control of the reset line, and the machine fails to start when the button is pressed.  Running the BIOS diagnostics fixes the software part of this kluge.
   Good work HP engineers.   I wonder what else you have screwed up.

Win 10, no Start menu, Power on button broke

So after running a bit after my upgrade to Win 10 I find.
1.  The advertised "start menu" , a replacement for the trusty "start menu" in Win XP, is nowhere to be found.  Some web searching tells me that this is a common problem.  A bunch of fixes were offered,  I  have tried a few of them with no luck.  Without the new and improved start menu, the only way to reach the "settings" app is thru Cortana.
2.  From the settings app I tried out Windows update.  It trundled away downoloading a patch for office and then failed.
3.  The power on button doesn't work,  Press it to start Windows and nothing happens, I get a blank screen.   Work around,  power off the laptop.  Unplug the charger and remove the battery.  Count to ten. Replace the battery and the laptop powers up and runs windows.
4.  Task Manager shows something called "OneDrive" is soaking up 300 Meg of Ram.   Apparently OneDrive gives access to "the cloud" for file storage, after you spend money.  Since I have 600Gig left on the hard drive, and I don't trust "the cloud"  I'm thinking of removing One Drive.