Third Presidential Debate

So I jotted down some of the things they said while they were saying them to help me memory along.  Hillary was coming out strong against the "Gunshow Loophole".  Which sounds good, but there is no gun show loophole.  I bought a gun at a gun show some time ago, (Nice Marlin 30-30 lever action) and they did instant background checks on all of us purchasers. 
   The Donald said that his supreme court picks might well repeal Roe vs Wade.  I wouldn't have said that.  It offends about half the voters.  Roe vs Wade has been the law for nigh on 50 years now, and overturning it would cause as much commotion and bad feeling as imposing it did.  Then he got off on a riff condemning partial birth abortions. 
   They got onto building border walls.  Hillary suggested that we wait for improved technology.  Improved technology for walls?  They had wall technology down pretty good in Troy, and it hasn't changed much in the 3000 years since Achilles slew Hector.  If she is talking about electronic widgets, forget it.  We tried that in Viet Nam.  Didn't work.  Put your trust in a plain old chain link fence. 
   Hillary was selling the idea that Putin is trying to help Trump with his leaks to Wikileaks.  Why would Putin do that?  Hillary is a known quantity, she isn't very effective, she isn't very smart, she isn't very polite, her mandate from the voters will be weak.  As the dictator of a Russia competing with the USA, Putin would be much better off with Hillary.  As ex head of KGB Putin knows this.  It's been suggested that the reason they only leak Democratic dirty laundry is that the Replublicans have tighter security and the hackers were not able to break in.  If true, that's a good reason to vote Republican. 
   Hillary claimed that Obama cut the national debt.  That's a flat out lie, the national debt doubled under Obama. 
   Hillary derided all tax cuts as "tax cuts for the rich".  Well, since half the population pays NO federal income tax, tax cuts only benefit the taxpaying half of the population.  If paying income tax makes you rich, then I suppose so.  But cutting taxes is good.  It's good for the economy, it worked for both Kennedy and Reagan, its good for taxpayers.  And a mere 5% of the taxpayers pay most of the taxes. 
   The Donald failed to nail Hillary on what she has accomplished on all her years on the public teat.  The real answer is she accomplished nothing.  No bills, no laws, no treaties, no peace talks, nada. 
   And finally Hillary wants to forbid anyone on the no-fly list from buying guns.  The no-fly list is maintained by bureaucrats somewhere and is completely arbitrary.  Citizens get stuck on it and there is no way off.  I don't want to give faceless federal bureaucrats the power to take away citizen's second amendment rights on a whim.
  The Donald came on pretty strong.  He'd be better if he could stick to the subject, and not go rambling off about pet peeves that the voters either don't care about or don't like.  He did get in a fair number of solid slams on Hillary.  Hillary wasn't quite as good.  I'd give this one to The Donald, but just barely, a squeaker.

Leaf Peeping.

It was a lovely day, sun, warm, clear sky.  Leaves still bright.  I decided I had to get out and look.  So I drove over the Kancamagus to Conway, and back thru Crawford Notch.  Foliage was magnificent all the way.  Whole hillsides showing gold and red. Individual trees all bright red. I brought the camera, but I already have, and have posted, a bunch of pix of brightly color leaves, so I didn't take any more.  Plus a lot of really beautiful scenes don't photograph well, you have to be there and see them.
Good Trip.  At the right time of year. 

Selecting a "man-on-the-street" for inteview. NHPR style

NHPR newsie in Orlando Florida is interviewing a "representative" voter.  Didn't give his name.  It became clear listening to this guy that he is gay, and pretty much all his waking thoughts are about his gayness and how it effects his life, his relationship with his mother and family, and the world in general.  It's hard for me to take this guy as representative of the typical Orlando (or anywhere else) voter.  Real people have other concerns than their sexual identity in their lives,  stuff like jobs, sports, hobbies, cars, politics, computers, music and more.  All this guy could talk about was his sexual identity.
   Granted that being gay can bring unusual stresses.  But 95% of the population is straight, and has interests other than sex and sexual identity.
   I don't think this guy is representative of anybody except himself.  And the NHPR newsies were too dumb or too PC to figure that out.  Or they just wanted to put a gay guy on the air. 

Moderators, Presidential Debate type.

The last two presidential debates had dreadful moderators.  They asked dumb ass questions, they were profoundly ignorant of many simple matters, and they both tried hard to help Hillary and hinder Trump.   Chris Wallace ought to be better.  He is smart, knowledgeable and fair.
   Far as I am concerned,  Republican presidential candidates ought to be pickier about debate moderators.  They should veto any rabid democratic moderators like Candy Crowley along with other more ignorant newsies.  And since newsies are a fairly low grade lifeform, they ought to look for prominent Americans from other walks of life. 

Free College. We used to have it.

I got one back in the 1970's.  My Air Force hitch was up, after a tour in South East Asia, and I enrolled at the University of Delaware for a Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering degree.  I  had been stationed in Delaware long enough to qualify as a Delaware resident, entitled to resident's rates at the state university.  For residents tuition was super low, only a few hundred dollars a semester.  For a couple of semesters my text books cost more than my tuition.  My GI benefits covered tuition, books, and rent on my apartment.  Between that, and money I saved during my Air Force hitch, I graduated with no student loans to pay off and enough money left over to get married and take a honeymoon in England. 
   University of Delaware might not qualify as completely free in those days, but it was so cheap that anyone could afford it.   With Dupont and Hercules in the state, the engineering program at Delaware was good.  
   So when you hear Hillary campaigning for free college education, some one ought to ask her what happened to the ones we used to have. 

Words of the Weasel Part 48

"Bottle of flammable liquid"   That's what the cops called it on TV.   In real life, we call them Molotov cocktails.  

Words of the Weasel Part 47

Heard on TV this morning.  "I was self medicating myself with alcohol."   Sounds a helova lot better than "I drank like a fish."

Franconia Notch Fall Foliage

I took these pictures yesterday up in the Notch.

McDonalds is loosing it

I've been eating Big Macs and fries at McD's since forever.  Not so much lately.  Something has gone away, the Big Mac's are dry, cooked grey straight thru, the roll is soggy, and the fixings are tasteless.  The fries aren't as crisp as they used to be, and taste bland and mealy. 
   McD's used to be better.    Burger King is in the same hole.  Dunno what I am gonna do for lunch on the road.  Brown bag it I guess.

No-Fly zone in Syria?

Been some loose talk about taking the heat off Aleppo by declaring a no-fly zone over the city.  Keep Assad and the Russians from bombing the place.
   Not a bad idea, but you gotta ask one big question.  Are we willing to enforce such a no-fly zone?  Which means shooting down Russian aircraft.  The Turks did that a while ago and the Russians got awfully testy about it.  Do we have as much guts as the Turks? 
   If we aren't ready to enforce a no-fly zone, it's better not to declare one.  Something you learn from parenting.  Never make a threat that you are not prepared to carry out.   

The Donald has a lotta enemies to overcome

Enemy Number 1 is Democrats (natch).  Led by Hillary, they hope they can win in November.  Many of them detest Republicans on general principles, kinda like how cats feel about dogs.  It's not ideology or philosophy, it's just plain hatred.
Enemy Number 2 is the MSM.  Everybody in the MSM, reporters, editors, anchorpersons, janitors are  Democrats.  Only being in the MSM they have a really really loud megaphone to broadcast their propaganda.
Enemy Number 3 is the business establishment.  They have a cozy thing going with Hillary, they have contributed to the Clinton Foundation (paid their bribes).  They need favorable regulatory rulings, tax breaks, tariffs, and other crony capitalism things.  They are pretty sure that Hillary will do this stuff for them, as long as they keep paying her.  They have no idea what The Donald will do if elected.  That's scary.
Enemy Number 4 is the RINOs.  Once elected, the RINOs find they like the Democratic tax and spend policies, especially when it results in spending in their districts.  They don't care about tax hikes, they figure they can blame them on the Democrats.  The MSM won't call them on it, and the voters won't fact check them either.
Enemy Number 5 is all the women in the country.  The Donald is a boor, they know it, and that tape last Friday confirmed it.  Plus any woman has gotta like the idea of a female president.
Enemy Number 6 is academia.  Every college prof, every grade school teacher, and every administrator is a democrat.  They consider it their plain duty to brainwash their students, your children, with leftist drivel.  You wonder why the "millennials" are so pro Hillary and anti Trump?  They are coming off of 16 straight years of leftist indoctrination. 
  Good luck Donald.  You need all possible luck. 

Polls, more polls, and maybe some statistics

The TV is reporting that Clinton is up 9 % in the polls nationwide.  This comes after Debate #1, the Trump tape from 11 years ago, and Debate #2.  Bad news, if the polls are accurate. 
   My brother just got back from the great antique car show and auction in Hershey PA.  The show has been the second biggest thing in Hershey, after the chocolate company, for forty years or more.  He tells me the Trump signs were all over the place, not a Hillary sign to be seen.  Apparently car buffs are Trump fans.  Let's hope there are more of them.
   The pollsters got it wrong on Brexit.  They might get it wrong on the election.

How was 11 year old tape located in time?

I can see how TV networks would want to keep video of all the shows that they put on the air.  But the tape that did so much damage to The Donald was an out take, not broadcast video.  How come it was saved, and how did anyone find it 11 years later, just in time to do The Donald a lot of harm?  How much rummaging thru dusty boxes of video tape was required? And how much viewing of aged video was done, and by who? 
   There is a story here. Wanna bet the MSM won't touch it with a ten foot pole?  "All the news that fits, we print".

And I watched the 2nd Donald-Hillary debate

The Donald came on strong.  He answered some opening questions about THAT TAPE, pretty well.  He was able to move the discussion forward to some real issues, tax reform, Syria, repealing Obamacare, shutting down Obama's war on coal.  He also kept up a steady stream of zingers at Hillary. 
  Hillary was looking strong too, did not stumble or faint or show any kind medical problem.  She had a lotta zingers for The Donald. 
   Most of the questions sucked.  The moderators were a pair of newsies from ABC and CNN who tried to help Hillary and hinder The Donald as much as they could. 
   I think The Donald managed to erase some of the damage done by THAT TAPE. 

So I listened to the Trump audio tape.

Well, I've heard worse, actually a lot worse.  I was in the service once upon a time.  I played varsity sports in high school and heard a lot of crude remarks in the locker room.  But it's still kinda gross.  And the MSM are giving it all the air play in the world, hoping to sabotage Trump's campaign. 

The Odyssey of Humanity on Nova

Two hour show this Sunday.  Lots of  good video.  Lots of inane commentary.  Lots of astounding conclusions presented without any of the evidence to support them.  For instance, the voice over says that Neanderthal man lacked projectile weapons (bow and arrow, throwing spears) that Homo Sapiens possessed.  The voice over fails to mention any evidence for this bold claim.  Were there counts of flint arrowheads from Neanderthal sites and homo sapiens sites?  How does one tell the difference between a flint spearhead from a thrusting spearhead from a throwing spear?  It's an important issue.  Hunting with a bow and arrow is one helova lot more effective than hunting with just a flint knife or a thrusting spear, merely because the hunter doesn't have to stalk as closely and risk spooking the game.  With a bow and arrow the hunter only has to get within 50 yards of his prey.  Which is a lot easier than stalking to within touching distance ( zero feet). 
   Then the voice over goes into the old Bering Land Bridge theory, the idea that man crossed over from Asia to America when the oceans were low and the Bering Straits became dry land.  This is a land lubber's idea.  In real life Alaskan Eskimos used to cross the modern day Bering Straits in skin boats (Umiaks) until the Soviets made life impossible for them after WWII.  The umiaks were covered with walrus hide, a quarter of an inch thick, tough as fiberglass.  Eskimo umiaks are strong enough to take the thrust of a 40 horsepower outboard motor. 
   They did show a umiak on video, but the voice over clearly doesn't under stand the difference between rowing and paddling.   If your boat is strong enough to take the thrust of the oarlocks,  rowing will take you much further and faster than paddling.  Indian birch bark canoes were paddled because the birch bark isn't strong enough for oarlocks. 
   Then we see a truly impressive Pacific ocean catamaran.  Two masts, cabins, big crew, very impressive vessel.  It's a modern replica.  No discussion of ancient catamarans.  Do they have pictures? rock carvings? a salvaged wreck?  or what?  I'd love to believe that Polynesians reached Hawaii in such a craft, but I'd like a little evidence.  Plus no details of the impressive modern replica, like length, displacement, speed, how high she could point up into the wind, what each of the twin hulls was made of.  Or what the sails might have been made of.  The replica's sails looked like modern Dacron to me.
   Nova  had a lot of dramatic flashy video, made a nice TV show, but the voice over displayed so much ignorance as to discredit the whole thing. 

Peak of Leaf Season

This weekend is as good as it's gonna get up here in the Notch.   I was going to add a couple of photos but the software weenies at blogger seem to have broken the photo upload code, again.  Way to go software weenies.

Sorry about Gretchen Carlson, but Britt Hume is cool too.

Gretchen disappeared off Fox's 7 PM  news show.  I assume that she was caught up in the Fox News/Roger Ailes sexual harassment affair, although I don't know that for sure.  I watched Gretchen's show for a long time.  But, I gotta say that old pro Britt Hume does even better than Gretchen did.  Britt makes the same show (same time slot) even more interesting.   Way to go Britt.

International Tax Scams

Want to avoid US corporate income tax?  If you are a corporation, open a branch or a subsidiary in some really low tax country.  The Bahamas and some other Caribbean island-nations are notorious.  Apple chose Ireland, a reasonable EU country that let Apple pay 12% instead of the US 35%.  Apple got such a good deal that the EU got on Ireland's case and demanded Apple pay a whole bunch more.  If the EU finds it was a scandal, where was the American IRS?  Uncle Sam was loosing out bigtime on the Irish-Apple deal. More so than the EU was.
   Once an overseas subsidiary is established, it's easy for the company accountants to direct all sorts of earning to the subsidiary.  Just running the bills thru the subsidiary can be enough.  Even if the product is made in the US, shipped in the US, delivered in the US, but the bills go to the Bahamas, it's income in the Bahamas, not the US.  We could tighten this up with some rules in our tax code.  Call it inverse domestic content, if say 50% of the product's content is US content, then income from selling said product is US income.  And we could ban transfer of intellectual property, say the rights to Disney films like Peter Pan, out of the United States.  Between movies and music and computer programs, and books and suchlike, the US earns a lotta money, probably more than we do exporting automobiles and steel.
   We probably need a world wide tax agreement, setting corporate tax rates the same all over the world.  This would reduce the incentives for US companies, cursed with the highest tax rate in the world, to move abroad.  To make this work, we would have to bring our corporate tax rate down to match places like Germany, Japan, and England.  And once we have the first world on board, we pressure the tax havens like the Bahamas to shape up. We tell 'em if they want to do business in the first world, they gotta adopt first world corporate tax rates.  If they don't listen, we tighten the screws on 'em.
  Wanna bet nobody running for president ever talks about this?

Let's go with Pence for VP

I stayed up to watch the VP debate.   With both presidential candidates in, or near their seventies, and a world full of crazies, there is a distinct chance of the VP succeeding to the presidency.  So do either of these two guys, Republican Mike Pence, and Democrat Tim Kaine look like they could cut it as president?  Both of them are unknown to me.  Governors of states so far away from NH that I never heard a word about them before.  
   Of the two, Republican Mike Pence made a much better impression on me.  He seemed steadier, talked more of substance rather than just dishing up insults, which is all Democrat Tim Kaine did.  I feel the country would be in good hands with Mike Pence should something happen to Trump.  Not so much Tim Kaine,  Hillary won't be much good as president and Kaine will be worse. 
   Kaine spent the night repeating every distasteful thing Trump has ever said or whining about Trump's personal taxes.  Not very interesting, I have heard most of 'em, from Trump on live TV, or on instant replay with the morning TV pundits.   Pence talked about his successes as governor, they sounded pretty good, lowered taxes, lowered unemployment, created a $2 billion surplus in the state government.  Pence also talked about Republican plans to revive the national economy.\
   The moderator, a lady from somewhere in the MSM, I don't know her, used each question to pet the democrats and slam the republicans.  And the questions were light weight, just invitations for another flood of politician talk, feel good, commit to nothing speech or the kind that Obama is so good at. 

How should Boeing do its books?

What companies make, and report as income, depends on how they do their books.  For Boeing, the problem is accounting for the fantastic expenses of new product development.  Take the 787 program.  Originally planned to cost $5 billion to develop, it went ten times that, $50 billion in outgo (expenses) before a single 787 could be sold.  If Boeing had just reported the expenses in the year they were incurred, Boeing would have shown massive losses for five years in a row.  Which would have done awful things to its stock value, its credit, and its image. 
   Boeing used "program accounting" instead.  The horrible expenses of 787 development were held somewhere, off the books, until the 787 started to sell.  Now these massive expenses are divvied up on each 787 sale, after sales begin.  Which makes Boeing's books look a helova lot better during the development time.  The Wall St Journal didn't explain a few crucial details, like how long Boeing can take to write down the 787 expenses.  Clearly forecasting a production run of 50 years drops the expense per aircraft a lot compared to a production run of 10 years.  Boeing could argue that since the old 747 stayed in production for 50 years, the newer and more fuel efficient 787 might last as long.  And just where the expenses are recorded, (on the books, off the books, in the cloud, somewhere) is not mentioned.  The Journal does say that "program accounting" is legal.
   Spending $50 billion on new product development is clearly a good thing.  Without the 787 Airbus would take over the market.  We need a way for companies to make super expensive investments in plant, equipment, and new product development. 
   I'm not an accountant.  In my simplistic view of the world, you do the books every year.  You list expenses, and income, and report the profit or loss every year.  But looking at the Boeing case, maybe we need "program accounting". 

We ought to watch the VP debate tonight.

With both presidential candidates in their seventies or almost seventy, there is a distinct chance of a VP becoming president.  I know little to nothing about either of the VP candidates.  Watching 'em debate ought to tell me something. 

Cooler weather slows the flies.

Makes 'em easier to hand swat.  In the heat of summer I have to use bug bomb to kill 'em. 

Sucking up all the Oxygen

The New York Slimes claims to have three pages of a Donald Trump income tax return from twenty years ago.  They say that Trump took a loss of nearly $1 billion dollars that year.  Wow.  Not discussed, is how anyone, even The Donald, can stay in business after loosing a real $1 billion dollars in cash.  Clever tax men, and The Donald hires the cleverest, can gin up paper losses as required.  No discussion of this.
   And, why are we discussing twenty year old tax returns?  Especially twenty year old tax returns that passed IRS audit.  And the IRS is auditing this year's tax return, and they won't do The Donald any favors.  I'd sorta like to see The Donald's returns for 2015, but I can wait, the IRS can do The Donald more damage than the MSM can.  And the IRS would enjoy doing the damage. 
   The tax loss carry forward provision has been in the tax code for a long time.  I'm an amateur tax preparer (I do my own taxes) and I know about tax loss carry forward. When you loose money, you can deduct losses from previous years against this year's tax.  I've never lost enough money to take advantage of it.  And if you have $1 billion in allowed losses, you can carry it forward for quite a few years, especially if you haven't made much money in the succeeding years.
   Tax loss carry forward is a loophole that ought to be closed.  All it does is reward failure.
   I'm with Carly Fiorina.  Close every loophole, lower every rate. 

Discipline for Wall St

Want to shape up Wall St?  Put some risk in the game.  Right now, they can play risky games, and when they loose, the tax payers bail them out.  FDIC and all that.  Since the risky games are high yield (except for when they become high loss) they keep on playing them.  Step one,  make it perfectly clear to everyone, that the next Wall St operation to go broke will stay broke, no bailout, anyone who gave them loans will loose, and the broke outfit's executives will be prosecuted for fraud.
  Make a list of risky games, credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, commodities trading, and the like.  Either tax the bejesus out of them or make them illegal.
   Forbid banks playing the stock market.  Glass Steagall had it right.
   Discourage banks from lending to each other.  The purpose of a bank is to make loans for economic development.  Lending money to another bank doesn't develop the economy.  Loans should go to builders and businesses to build plant and equipment, buy inventory, or build houses.  If the loan doesn't create anything that you can see, touch, or pack in a truck, it  isn't developing the economy or creating jobs.  Which means the bank should not be doing it.  Discouragement can be taxes or worse.
   Forbid banks selling mortgages.   Mortgages are good investments, safe as houses they used to say.  The borrower is highly motivated to make the payments on time, if for no other reason than to avoid the things his wife will say when they get foreclosed on.  The collateral is fairly sound, and it's immobile, nobody can drive it out of state.  Make a mortgage and the bank has to keep it, until the borrower pays it off, like when he sells the house.  This way the banks won't make NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assets) mortgages and, won't do balloon notes.  And they won't crash the global economy with mortgage backed securities. 

Military Budget, Military Procurement

We are beginning to hear calls for more spending one the military.  The "sequester" ,a deal Congress set by law a couple of years ago, put a solid lid on military spending, and that lid is beginning to hurt.  There are calls to scrap the "sequester" and give the armed forces a lot more taxpayer money.
   Much of the military budget goes into "procurement" the purchase of food, uniforms, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and new aircraft and armored fighting vehicles.  Procurment is run by thousands of rear echelon m__therf___kers (REMF for short) at the Pentagon, and the big depots.  They have created whole book selves of "procurement regulations"  which must be consulted and argued over before even a roll of toilet paper can be purchased.  Procurement regulations support and defend a number of scams against the taxpayer.
   For instance, the JEDEC semiconductor scam.  JEDEC semiconductors must be made on special production lines dedicated only to JEDEC work.  To make JEDEC semiconductors on the regular commerical production lines is forbidden.  Since the volume of JEDEC sales is low, the JEDEC lines only get fired up once a year or so, and are shut down as soon as the current order is filled.  Whereas the commercial lines run 24/7.  The people running the commercial lines get plenty of experience, and minor tuning of the process (time in this oven or that oven, concentration of dopant gases, cooling time, lotta stuff) makes the difference between a superior device (higher gain, lower noise, better voltage tolerance, buncha stuff) and junk.  In real life the JEDEC semiconductors, which cost ten times what good commercial devices cost, are inferior in every measurable respect, and a lot of 'em come in dead on arrival. 
   The taxpayers would be well served by scrapping the whole JEDEC scam and building everything with good commercial devices from American silicon foundries. 
   Then there is the urge to gold plate everything.  Can't just buy decent stuff off the shelf, everything has to be built special for the military.  The KC-46 tanker should have taken a commercial airliner, pulled out the seats, and installed fuel tanks.  Instead, the Air Force insisted that Boeing redo all the wiring on the airplane "to meet USAF specs",  Boeing talked the Air Force into replacing the entire cockpit with the fancier all digital and touch screen cockpit from the 787.  At government expense.  Add in a rediculous amount of test flying, and the program is late and way over budget.
   And everything takes too long.  Every year a project is in the R and D mode, it sucks up money.  In WWII we could design a new aircraft and get it into production inside of a year.  The current F-35 has been aborning, and sucking up money for twenty years and it still isn't combat ready. 
    Bottom line.  We need to straighten out procurement more than we need to pour mor money into it. 

My Colleges made the WSJ top 500

The Wall St Journal ran a section about colleges worth going to.  They had a list of the top 500 colleges in the country.  I was pleased to find that my two colleges were on it.  Along with the colleges my children attended, my nieces and nephews attended, and even the colleges my brothers and cousins attended.  Makes you feel good.  It's Lake Woebegone where every college is above average.  Rah for me. 

What loopholes did Trump use?

Hillary claimed that The Donald managed to pay zip for taxes a few years ago.  The Donald did not deny it, in fact he said "That's being smart".   Which it is.  As CEO of his company, it is Donald's duty to maximize returns to his stakeholders, not Uncle Sam. 
   The real question is, what gaping loopholes did a billionaire use to skate on paying taxes?  Certainly any moderator with an IQ above room temperature ought to ask that question next time.  Another good question, what reforms to the tax law will you make to prevent billionaires from skating on taxes?
    Although Hillary promised a tax hike, and The Donald promised a tax cut, both of them could have been more forthcoming about what they want to do.  Is Trump talking about just the corporate tax, or personal income tax as well?
   Hillary's promise of tax hikes indicate her overall cluelessness.  The economy is still in the hole dug back in 08.  GNP growth is a measly 1.7%.  Hiking taxes, taking money away from those who earn it, and giving it to bureaucrats, pushes the economy further underwater. 

Things said and not said last night.

Hillary got going big on solar panels last night.  She claimed that solar panels were going to pull the country out of Great Depression 2.0 
   She is too stupid to understand that solar panels are a total waste of money.  They don't give juice after the sun goes down.  I need my juice to stay on all night.  Without juice my furnace won't run, and my pipes freeze in the winter.  Electric stove doesn't work, electric hot water goes away.   I can fake it for lights with kerosene lamps, but I gotta have the furnace in the winter.  Winter lasts a long time up here.  Without electricity the house becomes uninhabitable. 
   Which means no matter how many solar panels we put in, the good old electric company, PSNH or Eversource, has to build real power plants, enough of them to carry the entire load.  The bulk of my outrageous electric bill goes to pay the mortgages on the various power plants that keep my juice on all night.  And no amount of solar panels saves me a nickel on plant construction.  And, some of it goes to pay money to solar panel buyers, "net metering" they call it.  The cost of fuel, coal, natural gas, uranium is small compared to the cost of building the plant in the first place.  The solar panel juice supplied during the day just costs me money, it doesn't furnish dependable overnight electricity.
   Any how, a President Hillary who believes that solar panels are a worthwhile expense, is too ignorant of the real world to lead the country out of Great Depression 2.0.
   Both Hillary and The Donald came out in favor of more cyber security.  Neither of them mentioned the root of all cyber hacking, namely Windows.  Windows is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  Middle school kids can hack Windows. 

So I survived the first presidential debate.

Nobody made a fatal gaffe.  Both of them did OK.  Hillary stood up straight, didn't cough, didn't suffer a medical emergency.  The Donald did OK, stayed on point, didn't get sidetracked, or start insulting other people.  Hillary told five or six real whoppers, and Trump let her get away with them.  The post debate spinners are hard at it as I write this.  Both of them used a lot of that vague feelgood meaningless language so popular with politicians. 
   I'll score this one as a draw. 

Flying on a wing and a tube

Going back nearly to the beginning of flight, airplanes have been a tubular fuselage help up by a center mounted wing.  Empennage at the tail kept the aircraft flying straight, the way the feathers on an arrow do.  After airliners were pressurized, the fuselage became truly round, to withstand the pressure.  And the long tubular fuselage offers a window at every seat.  The window view is cherished by passengers and the overall lightness in the cabin helps reassure claustrophobic passengers. 
   Aerodynamics whines that the big fuselage contributes no lift, just drag.  The ideal design would be a flying wing, like the B2 Spirit bomber, where all the metal of the airframe contributes lift.  And every few months Aviation Week will run a classy looking future airliner picture, either a pure flying wing, or a "blended wing body" a flying wing with a swelling in the middle to form the passenger compartment. 
    What they don't talk about is windows.  The passenger compartment has to be a tube shape to hold the pressure.  If you just pressurized the whole flying wing, or the blended wing body, it would go "pop".  In fact we had that happen on a long obsolete Air Force transport, the C-133.  So the zippy future airliners don't get windows, or window seats, because windows in the pressurized passenger compartment would just look out into the insides of the wing, full of girders and fuel tanks and wire bundles and "stuff".  No daylight, no view of the ground,  no relief for claustrophobes. 
   And, IMHO, that is why zippy flying wing airliners will remain on the pages of Aviation Week rather than on the flight line.  I don't think airlines will buy them. 

Mount Washington Cog Railway

Mt. Washington, at 6288 feet, is the highest mountain in the East.  Way back in 1869 an enterpreneur raised the money to run a steam railroad all the way to the summit.  A fairly impressive feat of engineering, especially for 1869.  It's still running today.  The grades are so steep that they ran a rack up between the rails, and the locomotives have a big cogwheel that mates with the rack and pushes the train up the hill. Which is why we call it The Cog today. 
   Up until 2000, the old time fleet of tiny steam engines did the work.  Then they started building smallish diesel locomotives to do most of the work.  They still run steam on the first train of the day, but every thing else is pulled by the 21st century putt-putts.  So we (me and youngest son) got up at 0'dark thirty this morning to catch the steam run.
  It's cool.  The cars are pure wood, in nice condition.  Takes an hour to climb to the summit.  Speed is walking pace.  Weather was good, sun, and some clouds scudding over the summit.  It was summer weather in the parking lot, but there was frost at the summit.  Great views would open up as a cloud blew by, and fade into whiteness as the next cloud blew in.
   A fun trip.  A bit pricey ($69 a ticket) but worth it, just once.   

Win 10 Megapatch

Windows Update got to work on Win update 1607 this morning.  It took 6 hours to download the patch. That's as long as it took to download all of Win 10 a few months ago.  This patch must amount to changing all the code in Win 10.  After the download it spend another couple hours "installing" itself.  Massive.  Hope it works. 
  

Flushing Greece down the drain.

Way back when, Greece was a bumbling, but no more so than many places, small country.  It had allowed far too many people to hold government jobs, it promised fat pensions to all sorts of people, and it allowed massive tax evasion. 
  Each year the government found it was paying out far more than it was taking in with taxes.  And back in those carefree days before the Euro,  Greece made payroll by simply printing Drachmas as needed.  This caused the Drachma to sink on the foreign exchanges, but no body really cared much.
   Then Brussels invented the Euro.  International currency, run by the Germans, and solid as the US dollar.  Lots of prestige for countries allowed onto the Euro.  And, the Greeks wanted to go on the Euro for the coolness and the prestige of it.  They begged and pleaded and cooked their books to look more solvent than they really were.  And the Europeans let the Greeks into the  Euro, mostly 'cause they all felt sorry for the struggling Greeks and didn't want to slam the Euro door on them.  
   Well, now when the payments exceeded tax revenues, Greece could no longer print the necessary money.  Now they had to borrow the shortfall from banks.  And Europe was full of sucker banks, who would loan money to Greece, thinking that a Euro country was good for it, and even if they weren't, the IMF or the ECB, or someone would guarantee the loans.  Whereas any one of any sense would see that the Greeks were never gonna make enough money to pay the loans off.  Sucker banks have no sense. 
  Sure enough, a few years go by, and Greece cannot make payments on the loans.  And for no good reason the IMF bailed them out in 2010, and again in 2015.  Each bailout came with firm instructions to cut expenses  ("austerity").  Each time the Greeks failed to cut much.  And now the Greeks are broke, business is terrible, unemployment is way up, things are bad, and the Greeks are blaming it all on the lenders. 
   What should have happened, back in 2010, instead of a bailout, the Europeans should have just let Greece sink.  That would have caused Greece to default on her loans.  And after a default, even sucker banks are not going to make new loans.  The money would have gone away, and the Greek government would have had to lay off a lot of government workers, and start collecting its taxes.  And the Europeans would have saved them selves a lot of grief and ill will, not to say a lot of money. 

Words of the Weasel Part 45

Weasels say "faith based organizations"  just to avoid saying the word "church" 

Twitter bans Glenn Instapundit Reynolds

Wow.  Glenn, a law professor at University of Tennessee, and publisher of the popular blog Instapundit, had his Twitter account closed.  Reynolds is a helova nice guy, knows a lot of things, and writes interesting stuff that gets widely read.  His politics are middle of the road to conservative, but perfectly rational and well supported. 
   For Twitter to ban such a man speaks VERY poorly for Twitter.

The Donald's robo callers are working hard

They been calling me once, sometimes twice, a day for weeks now.  At least it shows the Donald cares about the upcountry.   Me, I 'm going to vote for Trump, so calling me doesn't help him much, but it doesn't hurt either.   I wonder what the robocaller costs compared to the TV advertising that Trump isn't doing much of.  Least ways I haven't seen much Trumpery on my TV. 
   These come on my land line.  Wonder how it works on the cell phone only millenials.  Like none of my three children have a land line.  

Federal deficit. The undertable tax

The federal deficit is easy to understand.  The feds have a lot of expenses, paying the bureaucrats, paying the troops, paying social security, paying medicare, paying for the armed forces, and on and on.  Last year outgo was like $15 trillion.  Income from taxes was a lot less.  Say $12 trillion.  To keep the checks from bouncing, Uncle Sam borrowed $3 trillion.   
   Actually, Uncle doesn't borrow the money, he prints it.  Works like this.  Uncle sells US Treasury bonds (soundest investment on the planet).  Bond buyers give Uncle money in exchange for bonds.  Thing is, T-bills are near as good as money.  Granted bonds aren't accepted down at Walmart, but, the bondholder can turn bonds into cash with a simple phone call to his broker.  There is a market, open every business day, and a sell (or buy) goes thru within hours.  So, a man with a big wad of T-bills in his safe deposit box feels as wealthy as a man with the same amount of cash.  My college economics course called bonds "near money".  And printing near money is really the same thing as printing cash (real money). 
   So,  what's wrong with printing money?  As more and more money is printed, the value of the money goes down.  US money today is only worth 10% of what it was worth when I was a kid.  Gasoline used to be 28 cents a gallon.  It's nearly ten times that today.  Comic books used to be 10 cents.  Last time I bought a child a comic book it set me back $4.  Ice cream cones used to be 5 cents.  More like $2.50 this summer. 
   What this means, is anything saved over my life time is only worth a tenth of what it ought to be. 
 That's the undertable tax.  It nails us all. 
    And neither The Donald nor Hillary are talking about cutting the deficit.  Hillary is talking about increasing it a lot.  Vote for Trump.  Don't get fleeced. 

Detroit should be selling cars, not computers

Wall St Journal had a long article on the miraculous electronical features coming in new cars.  New cars might allow you to lock or unlock them with your phone.  Or schedule outrageously expensive service visits to your dealer, wave-your-hands controls to replace touch screens, rear view TV, and automatic remote controlled valet parking controlled by your phone, automatic driver wake up systems, and over-the-air software patches. 
   I don't want my new car to have any of this stuff.  If the car will unlock for my cell phone, it will unlock for car thief cell phones.  I never take my car to the dealer for service, the cost is outrageous.  I want real physical controls, that I can feel in the dark, not touchy feely screens or wave your hand in the air and something happens controls.   Rear view mirrors work all the time, TV camera's fail, especially after a fender bender.  I wouldn't dare allow a microprocessor to park my car, one screwup and I have a repair bill and a lawsuit. 
   Electronics, be they  car borne, pocketable, smart phone, Ipad, smartwatch, or plain old laptop, are only useful after a lot of loading of contact info, phone books, music,  email, programs, photographs, software, and whatever.  Once I have spent the time to load all this stuff into the electronic gizmo, I want to take it with me, into the client's office, into my office, into my home, to the beach, anywhere.  And electronic gizmos go obsolete faster than cars do.  Might want to get the latest gizmo without buying an entire new car.  And,  I'm not going to spend the time to load up a built-into-the-car system that I cannot take with me.
   The carmakers ought to come up with an industry wide electronic interface that would give a third party (Apple say) electronic gizmo access to the car speakers, antennas, and DC power.  And a stowage spot, a shelf under the dash, or a slot in the front seat console, or maybe a holder on the ceiling, up front, over the rear view mirror. 
   Last time I was on the road with youngest son and his Ipad,  interface with the car speakers was flaky.  All we had was a RF modulator that put the Ipad audio into the FM band, where the car FM radio picked it up and played it.  Had to keep fiddling with the RF modulator as we drove.  Ipad volume control was opaque, and song selection was worse. 

The Push Polls are running for Maggie

I've gotten two telephone push polls pushing Maggie Hassen this weekend.  Both poller's command of English was so poor that I had great difficulty understanding them.  Lots of luck Maggie.  If this is the best you can do, Kelly will beat you like a drum.

Will the Hillary-Donald presidential debate be worth watching???

I mean they both have said a lotta mean things about each other, what's left to say?  Can either of them present a substantive idea that makes any real sense, as opposed to promising pie in the sky?  Will the moderator try to help Hillary and bash Trump?   Watching presidential debates is like watching a bull fight.  You watch on the off chance to see a matador get gored.  Not that you wish the competitors any harm, but if blood flows you don't want to miss it. 

John Kasich supports TPP

Kasich did an op ed in the Wall St Journal yesterday.  He came out four square in support of TPP, saying that it would increase exports, create jobs, and reduce consumer prices.  All good stuff.  That's stuff I would like to believe. 
   Trouble is, Kasich said nothing about that TPP is.  Does it reduce other country tariffs against US exports?  How much? When?  What else does it regulate? 
   I am OK with a TPP that brings other country tariffs down to US levels.  US tariffs (except for sugar) are really really low.  That's why you see so many Japanese and South Korean cars on the road, and why pretty much everything on sale at Walmart is made in China.  Fair trade means other countries lower their tariff barriers to match ours. 
   And I am OK with a TPP that tries to lower "non tariff barriers",  hard to meet safety regulations , pollution limits,  and the like.
   I am not OK with lowering US tariffs any further.  I am not OK with using TPP to impose international minimum wages,  worker safety, and worker benefit laws.  Or to impose controls on money exchange rates.
Or other things that have nothing to do with tariffs.
   So far Obama has kept the contents of TPP secret.  It could have anything in it.  I am not in favor of ratifying a secret treaty that might well hurt us. 

Brits approve Hinkley Point nuclear plant

Back in July the new British government of Theresa May ordered a "review" of the project.  Back then, the "review" was seen as an indefinite delay.  Well, will wonders never cease?  Today the Wall St Journal announces that the Brits have given the project a go ahead.  The work will be done by Electricite de France, with financing by China General Nuclear Power Corp.
   The Brits have imposed some restrictions on the builders selling out their shares in the plant without Her Majesty's government approval.
   The announced price of $23.8 billion is way high.  You can put up a 1 Gigawatt nuclear plant for $4 to $5 billion in this country.  

Air Force bites off more than it can chew.

Or fund.  The big three money suckers.  The F35 fighter.  Cost is outta sight.  The software isn't finished.  The gun doesn't fire, the engines cannot take more than 5.6 G.  The KC-46 tanker project.   The Air Force managed to gold plate a simple "put tanks inside a well proven airliner" project into an ongoing boondoggle that is running late and over budget.  The new B-21 strategic bomber, this is going to be a somewhat smaller, and hopefully cheaper, version of the B2 bomber.  It's just getting started, but the project did make it thru a bid challenge by the loser[s]  (Boeing and Lockheed).  Aviation Week did not offer much in the way of cost estimates on the big three.  I'd guess $1 trillion over the next 10 years. 

And, after the top three projects, we have a four projects  in to the Request for Proposal, going out for bids, study project phase.  We have a new jet trainer to replace the capable but ageing T-38 Talon. A new ICBM to replace the Minuteman III.  The Long Range Standoff Missile to arm the new B21, and re arm the B-52, B1, B2 fleet.  A new helicopter for VIP transport. 

And even further out, an A10 replacement.  Which is hard to think about.  The existing A-10 is good at what it does.  It's a ground attack fighter that can fly low enough and slow enough for the pilot to see and hit his ground target.  Once the airplane can do that, it isn't fast enough to dogfight with mach 2 jet fighters.  The answer to this short coming is to provide fighter cover for the A-10s as needed.  Bombers have needed fighter escort ever since WWII.  

   The Air Force isn't going to be able to round up the funding to do all of this stuff at once. 

Trump proposes 6 week paid family leave for new mothers.

 Not a bad idea.  Birth of a child is the most important event in a person's life.  New born infants require pretty much full time care.  Mothers, and fathers, feel an enormous compulsion to gave that care.  Any responsible employer ought to be willing to cough up six weeks wages to ease the stress on their valuable employees.   
   There were some other ideas from Trump, mostly making child care costs deductable.  You could do that, but simpler, just as effective, and requiring less paper work is to raise the exemption taxpayers already get for each dependent.   

Vetting or "extreme vetting" of refugees

"Vetting"  nice bureaucrat word, not defined in dictionaries.  The word appears in my Webster's but the definition concerns veterinary care for animals.  We think the bureaucrats mean checking a refugee's background with his home country authorities.  You ask questions like "is this person really a citizen of your country?" and "can we see his police records?" and "Was he gainfully employed before he left your country for America?" and "Did he have a driver's license?" and "What are the names of his wife and children?" and "How far did he go in schooling?"
   For real countries, for example England or Japan,  this works.  There are authorities over there, we know who they are, they have access to written records and they want to cooperate with the United States because of the 800 pound gorilla effect.  (What do you say to an 800 pound gorilla?  Ans: Sir!)  We can believe what the authorities of real countries tell us. 
   This doesn't work for Syria and similar places.  In Syria the authorities are either the Bashar Assad regime or the various rebel groups.  Depends on where you telephone.  We cannot believe anything that either group will tell us.  The records may well have been bombed or shelled or burned.
   So no matter what anyone says, admitting a refugee from places like Syria is a risk, they might be enemy agents looking to do us harm.  We cannot get trustworthy information from their home authorities, mostly because there aren't any left.  The best we can do is interview them, using sympathetic interviewers who speak their mother tongue, and know the area from which the refugee claims he is coming from.  I'd say a good interviewer could catch many, but not all, enemy agents pretending to be refugees.  
    The refugees have suffered terribly, you don't flee your homeland unless things get really bad.  I feel sorry for them and want to help them out.  Letting them into the United States is a great big help out.  And, we need young working age immigrants to keep our population growing.  
   And, I don't worry about enemy agents infiltrating as refugees.  Was I ISIS or the like, and I wanted to get an agent into the US,  I'd come up with papers and plane fare to Canada.  Then he could walk across the border just about anywhere.  More dependable than being a refugee who might or might not get admitted.  

Shannara Chronicles

This swords and sorcery fantasy TV show hit the airwaves (cable waves?) back last fall.  I caught a couple of episodes off the cable over the winter before they killed the show.  It made it onto Netflix recently and so I signed up for the total season (just 3 DVD's) to see what it looked like. 
   The name of the show comes from the Terry Brooks fantasy novels, the plot borrows heavily from Tolkien.  The unnamed world is threatened by an invasion of demons, ugly bad guys who look like Tolkien's orcs, but have magic powers too.  .  It stars three characters, Handsome Boyish Hero, Good Chick, and Bad Chick.  Good chick, is an Elvin (NOT Tolkien's spelling of the word) princess. who volunteers/is selected for a mission to save the world.  She starts off carrying a silver flower blossom (puts me in mind of the Ring of Power), with handsome boyish hero and Bad Chick for travel companions.   Destination of her mission is never made clear to me. Bad chick is daughter of a human bandit chieftain and starts out doing banditry.  As time goes on, she falls in love with handsome boyish hero, which does her good, and she stops doing bad, and starts doing good.  What makes the show hard to follow, is that Good Chick and Bad Chick look so much alike it's hard to keep them straight.  They are both brunettes, they wear their hair the same way, they both have very fair completions, they both have superb figures, they dress the same, they both do martial arts with the best of them, and they both are soon in love with Handsome Boyish Hero.  Somehow, after quite a few episodes,  they become friends with each other, rather than fighting it out for the attention of Handsome Boyish Hero.  The only things distinguishing one from the other is that Good Chick is taller than Bad Chick, but Bad Chick is cuter. 
   Anyhow, it was good enough for me to watch all three discs and stay awake til the end of each episode.  If you like fantasy this one is fairly OK. 

Summer home shop project

As always, you need more storage space in a shop.  So last month's project was a combined wall shelving and plane till project.  I5t's made from ordinary lumberyard white pine.  The finish is one coat of Minwax "puritan pine" to give it the light tan color, the natural pine is bright white which seems a little much for a shop.  Plus one coat of poly urethane varnish over the Minwax.  Hanging it on the wall was tricky.  This bit of wall has NO studs in it.  I know, I put the wall board up myself some years ago.  So it is now bolted and lag screwed to the joists.  I started out with three lag screws going straight up, but the last one broke off deep in the hole, so two lag screws will have to do.  Part of the project was to have a place to put my handplanes where they would be handy, and where they could show themselves off.  The shelves are still fairly empty but I don't expect that to last long.  The dadoes in the side are to accept a pair of chisel holders, which I haven't made yet. 

Price Inversions

Seen at my local grocery market, hot dogs $6 a pound,  Chicken $1.29 a pound.  Looks like good old beans and franks ain't cheap anymore. 

Norks finally get the bomb

Took 'em five test shots before it worked right.  The first four Nork tests had yields in the one kiloton area.  That's a fizzle in most people's books.  Where as the United States was able to produce TWO functional nuclear weapons in 1945 with only one test shot.   The Little Boy gun type uranium bomb was so well understood that it was sent into action without a test, and  produced a 20 kiloton yield that devastated Hiroshima.   Fat Man, the far more tricky implosion type plutonium bomb, was tested once in Nevada before being dropped on Nagasaki.  In action, it worked properly, with a 20 kiloton yield, and vaporized Nagasaki.
   Getting a fission bomb to explode is tricky.  You have to assemble a critical mass of fissionables, either by gun style assembly or implosion, and hold it together long enough (nanoseconds) for the neutrons to fission the fissionables.  If the energy released in the first few nanoseconds blows the bomb to bits,  you don't get a 20 kiloton yield, you get a fizzle.
    We let the Norks run off five nuclear tests, and finally they got it together, achieved city smashing yield, and we did nothing to stop them.