There's one born every minute

Verizon has found another one. They are trying to sell phone lines in 14 states to Frontier Communications. Frontier is OK with paying $8.6 billion for 4.6 million land lines ($1797 per line). It would take 10 years for my phone bill to pay off $1797. According to the Wall St Journal, the deal is opposed only by the Communications Workers of America and only in the state of West Virginia.
Frontier ought to know that if these land lines were worth anything, Verizon wouldn't be selling them.
Verizon's telephone line spin off in Hawaii caused the Hawaiian buyer to go bankrupt in 2008. Verizon's sell off of rural New England telephone lines to Fairpoint Communications caused Fairpoint to go bankrupt in 2009. Verizon spun off Yellow Pages and they went bankrupt too.
Verizon sees it's future in cell phones and internet. It's dumping the rural phone business. The suckers who buy rural phone lines are doomed. Verizon wasn't making money on rural phone service with all the poles and wires paid for, long ago. The suckers think they can make money on the same business when saddled with a heavy debt they used to buy the business from Verizon. Ain't gonna happen.
In the Fairpoint catastrophe, the stockholders and banks got wiped out, the workers are facing layoffs, and service has deteriorated so badly that everyone is switching to a cell phone.
Wanna bet the same thing happens to Frontier? Dunno why the Frontier suits are falling for this scam, but they are. And the Public Utility Commissions in 14 states are not saying "boo".

Ron Hunt died last Sunday

Ron Hunt was a long time Franconia resident. Cancer finally got him last weekend. Ron was a member of the Franconia Fire Dept, a selectman, ran the auto salvage yard, and just about everyone in town knew him or knew who he was. He got a decent sendoff, 300 people attended services, held out of doors in the center of town. This in a town of only 900 registered voters. Fireman in full dress uniform, the Franconia antique engine, Ron's pulling tractor, and a great big tent. A dozen of Ron's friends and relatives spoke movingly.
A pillar of the community and we will miss him.

What happened to Protestants on the Supreme Court?

News reports tell me that retiring Supreme Court justice Stevens is the last Protestant on the high court. Everyone left is Catholic or Jewish. This ought to say something about the miserable state of the Protestant church in America. Jews and Catholics have a solid tradition of absolute right and wrong that goes back to the time of Jesus and before. Modern Protestants have bought into a relative morality that can permit a lot of dreadful things. Seems like when selecting honorable men to serve on the high court the body politic looks for men who believe in absolute right and wrong, rather than a slippery relative right and wrong.

Who wants a nuclear free world?

Not me. Nuclear weapons have kept the peace since 1945. There has been some bloodletting but never World War III. Even the Soviets were unwilling to come close to using nukes. Witness the Cuban missile crisis where the Soviets backed down rather than risk pushing the United States too hard. What's not to like?
Obama is talking up a nuclear free world. Dunno why, unless he really fails to understand world history since 1945. This deal he is pushing with the Soviets has some positive angles, both sides can reduce their arsenals and still retain enough power to turn the world into a parking lot. But promising not to use nukes defeats the primary reason for having them.
We have nukes for deterrence, in simple words to scare the bejesus out of our enemies. Promising not to use them, or not to build new models reduces the scare. Why do that? Better to have our enemies fear us than to have them love us.

The Curse of Home ownership

Good old NHPR was on this morning, like every morning. The terrible burden of home ownership was the topic. The new roof required shortly after the closing, the hot water heater that failed, Dad coming home and picking up his tool box to work on the house instead of playing with the children.
Man, I don't know how I survived 40 years of home ownership. I did a roof, all it takes is a little money. I changed out four hot water heaters over the years. Got so good I could get to Sears, get the heater home on top of the car, installed, water back on, and still get to work by 11 AM. Done my share of home remodeling projects, two kitchens, two bathrooms, wall paper, book cases, porch railings, dishwasher replacements, disposal replacements and paint. The children loved every one of these and begged to stay up late and help Dad. Home projects were always cooler than yard work.
Could I be listening to "can't change a lightbulb" journalists whining on the air?

UNH joins the global warming bandwagon

NHPR did a global warming piece this morning. They interviewed a young associate professor from UNH. During a lengthy talk this professor managed to completely avoid the use of numbers. Things are bad and getting badder he said but never a number to say how bad. Then he proclamed that this winter's DC snowstorms were actually caused by global warming. Global warming puts more moisture in the air so we get more precip.
He's wrong on that, the DC snowstorms were perfectly ordinary snowstorms that happened to track a little bit more southerly than usual. Had they gone thru New York state and New England they would have been un remarkable. The distance from the usual storm track and DC is only about 100 miles.
UNH will probably give this guy tenure next week...

Financial regulation, need therefore Part II

The usual suspects, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, are talking up financial reform, now that Obamacare has been rammed thru.
Not that we don't need something to prevent Wall St from driving the economy over a cliff again.
Too bad the Dodd and Frank bill is welfare for Wall St. The bill contains an elaborate and expensive plan for taxpayers to bail out Wall St the next time they wreck the economy. And as a sweetener for taxpayers, there will be a new "consumer protection agency" to limit some of the customer fleecing going on. With lots of well paying jobs for bureaucrats.
We really need rules to prevent the gambling and speculation that put us into Great Depression 2.0. The purpose of Wall St is to finance economic growth, new factories, new products, construction, inventory, and sales. It is not doing credit default swaps, reselling mortgages, or executing stock trades in milliseconds. We need regulations to crack down on the gambling and speculation that crashed the economy, not plans to bail out the gamblers.