Fox News agitating for better air traffic control system

Must be the Fox TV people are getting irritated by delays, canceled flights, lost luggage, cattle car seating and taking off of shoes. They had a guy on Fox News this morning ranting that all could be fixed by some miraculous but unnamed technological improvement that the FAA was supposed to do but had not.
Not true. The congestion, delays, and cancellations are caused by too many aircraft trying the operate out of too few airports. The only fix is to bring more airports into service. Right now the bulk of commercial traffic goes thru 35 hub airports which is too many airplanes. An airport can only safely operate about one flight per minute, and no amount of technology can do much about it. It is very dangerous to allow the following flight to touch down before the proceeding flight has cleared the runway. Likewise it is dangerous to allow the following flight to release brakes before the proceeding flight is airborne.
The solution is to bring more airports into service. In New England airports in Providence Rhode Island and Manchester New Hampshire take a good deal of traffic that used to go to Boston. Which is one reason Boston is not on the FAA's list of overloaded airports.

Fusion Power in our time?

Dr. Robert Bussard gave a talk to Google people here. He told of an 11 year R&D program to achieve fusion thru a "compress to a point" process. Six electromagnetic coils are arranged in a cube. Their magnetic fields squeeze electrons into a trap in the center of the magnetic coils. A good big clot of trapped electrons creates a strong electric field that sucks in positive ions (hydrogen, deuterium, tritium, lithium or boron). Once in, the positive ions are trapped by the negative charge, and zip around at high speed until they go head on with one another and fuse.
Bussard's EMC2 corporation built a series of small (under a foot) models, ran them and took data. His last and best machine dubbed WB6, operated in a pulsed mode to keep the heat down, achieved a record setting level of fusion as measured by neutron detectors.
Bussard is convinced that break even fusion can be obtained by scaling the WB6 machine up to 5 or 6 feet (from the 1 foot prototype). He says a $200 million dollar budget over 5 years would lead to a 100 Megawatt fusion reactor.
Bussard is a serious scientist, well known and respected in the science and engineering community. $200 million isn't much money. You can only buy two jet liners for that price. It's peanuts compared to the spending in the ITER tokamak project. Maybe some fairy god senator could slip a $200 million earmark for Bussard into the federal budget.

The McLaugflin Group

This is the PBS news commentary show where everyone shouts at everyone else. They were hashing over the Hillary surprise from New Hampshire. McLaughlin was pushing the idea that voters were looking for experience. The other talking heads weren't buying. Neither was I.
I, and a lot of voters, are looking for someone with good judgment. Someone who will make the right call in an emergency. Someone who we can like, because it is impossible to trust someone we dislike. We figure any competent adult, who has achieved high office, has all the experience necessary. Plus as president he/she has every expert in the world offering advice. Hillary isn't going to achieve the nomination 'cause we think she has experience, she has to make us voters like her. The competition, Obama, is very likable, Hillary has to match that.

16% of GNP spent on health care (W

One dollar in six goes for pills and plasters and doctor's bills. Our international competitors Japan, Germany, France, the rest of the EU, spend half that. And, after paying twice as much as anyone else, we don't get anything for it. Objective measures of health, life expectancy and infant mortality are no better in the US than in Europe.
So, the price of every American product is jacked up 16% to feed the medics. Our competitor's prices only bear an 8% load. Can a US firm compete with an 8% cost disadvantage? Can our salesmen close the sale when our products are more expensive? Probably not. Why does the US run such a humungous trade deficit every year? Over priced products are one good reason.
Back in 1980 health care costs were only 8% of GNP. In the 28 years since, US health care costs have doubled. Is the quality of 2008 health care any better than 1980 health care. Life expectancy and infant mortality say no; they have not improved. We are just spending an awful sum of money and getting nothing back for it.
The economic drain of health care costs is too great to bear now. The democrats want to offer free health care to everyone in the country. That will push the percentage of GNP even higher, and really wreck the American economy. If something is free, more people will use it.
Let's cut the outrageous costs of health care. If the price were reasonable, ordinary people could afford to pay their doctors.

Sen. Judd Greg brings home the pork for Littleton

The Littleton Courier reports that Sen. Greg announced that the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes $492,200 for renovation of the Littleton Opera house. There is bad pork and then there is good pork. The Opera house is a glorious three story Victorian clapboard structure, on a commanding site overlooking the Amnoosuc River. It was the town police station, meeting house, and museum up until a busy body structural engineer declared the structure unsafe for human habitation a couple of years ago. The building is dear to the hearts of all of Littleton. The total bill for renovation is a couple of million, much of it raised by the town of Littleton. The $492,200 kicked in by the feds helps, but the town is on the hook for a lot of money too. It isn't a pure gift, it's matching funds.
I am not sure if residents of other states would see the matter just this way...
It does give everyone up here a good warm feeling about Sen. Greg...

How to Unbreak the banks (WSJ)

"The business model for big US banks is broken. Let us count the ways.
One: Banks no longer scrutinize a would-be borrower to decide whether he is good for the money. Instead they "originate and distribute" loans. "

Cheers. This is only the second WSJ writer to understand the sub prime mortgage scam. John Snow was the first a couple of months ago. The rest of the gallons of ink spilled on the subject have been bafflegab. The maker (originator) of the loan must lending his own money, and know that if the borrower defaults, he get hurt (or at least his bank gets hurt). If the originator can sell the loan and dump all the risk on the buyer, he will loan money like a drunken sailor. If the bank needs more money to do mortgages, let it attract more deposits.

Frank Luntz blames the voters

Frank Luntz, pollster and focus groupie extradinaire, was on Fox this morning. This is the guy, back before NH primary poll closed, who did the video of a room full of voters. He opens by asking everyone who hasn't made up their minds to raise their hands. Every hand goes up. Then Frank gives his pitch. At the end he asks how many will vote for Romney. Every hand goes up. Message: Everyone really wants to vote Romney. Just let me give 'm my patented Romney pitch. Why do I have trouble believing this?
Anyhow, back to Fox this morning. The Fox guys ask Luntz why the NH polls predicted an Obama win. Luntz says a couple of really astounding things. "Oh the tremendous turnout threw our models off". Translation, the pollsters fudge the raw poll data based on past history. I didn't know that. I thought that "40% favor so-and-so" meant the 400 people out of the 1000 polled said they mean to vote for so-and-so. Apparently the pollsters "correct" the counts before releasing them to the press.
Second, Luntz said "Oh its a racial thing, 20% of whites are secret racists and say they will vote for Obama to conceal their racism, not because plan to vote for Obama." I don't believe this either. Obama is charismatic speaker, good looking young guy, a real politician who has achieved high office and is very attractive to every one. Even us old McCain republicans think Obama is one hellova candidate. I dislike having a slippery pollster like Luntz, call us Yankees racists. I think Luntz is excusing his polling failures by blaming the voters.