Federal deficit

Just finished watching a union economist on TV spreading dis information about deficit spending. Just to set the record straight, here is what deficit spending really does. To keep the US government checks from bouncing, the treasury sells bonds to Wall St. The buyers give Uncle dollar bills, cash, and Uncle gives the investor a treasury bill, a piece of paper promising to pay back the money in the future. To the buyer, the T-bill he receives is nearly as good as cash. He can keep it, sell it, use it to back loans. Samuelson, (my college economics text) called T-bills "near money". You can use a T-bill for nearly all the things you use money for, and so the buyer of the T-bill feels as wealthy holding the T-bill as he did when holding cash. In short, selling T-bills is just about the same as printing new dollar bills.
We don't like to print too many dollar bills because that causes inflation. For the same reason, we should not be printing so many T-bills, it causes inflation for the same reasons as printing too many dollar bills does.

The joy of driving to Brooklyn

School is starting. Youngest son is ready for his senior year. He had the car packed and ready a day in advance. Trip down was a white knuckle affair. Youngest son speeds, tailgates, and changes lanes so roughly as to set heavily loaded Subaru into scary fishtails. We were ahead of schedule until we hit the bridges of Long Island. The are working on both Throgs Neck and Whitestone bridge at the same time, so no matter which way you go you get stuck in traffic. Then Long Island is the usually traffic snarl, it took an hour to get from the bridges to Brooklyn. The State of New York is competing for the "World's worst traffic signage" award and looks like a sure winner. Sign reads "Eastern Long Island Midtown Tunnel". So which one is it? One is east the other is west, which way does this off ramp go? And they don't bother to post the toll on the bridges, you have to ask the toll taker how much, and then fumble for it. Best part of the trip, we found a parking space right in front of the apartment.
The "micro mile post" madness is taking hold in MA. They have shiny new expensive little signs calling out each 0.1 mile of progress, just like we did on I93. The sign making companies love it, but it doesn't do a thing for us motorists.

Is net neutrality ruining my broadband?

Dunno about the rest of you, but broadband service on Time Warner Cable is going down hill for me. Used to be you clicked on a bookmark and bingo, the site opened in Firefox. Now, as often as not, the website fails to open and you draw an error page indicating the site is unavailable. Pain in the ***.
Deteriorating service is either failing equipment or network overload. The TV signal comes thru just fine. The broadband goes over the same wires and amplifiers as the TV signal, so if the TV is clean, the network is OK too. So the trouble as gotta be network overload.
The traditional way of dealing with overloaded networks is to let the important traffic go thru now and send the less important traffic later. In my view, and the view of the ISP's, important traffic is traffic that a live human user is waiting on, and less important traffic is stuff that computer programs are buffering out to disk. Music and video downloads are the classic less important traffic.
But, the purveyors of music and video downloads screamed like wounded panthers and started up the "Net Neutrality" jihad. As of right now, the ISP's are under siege by the jihad and probably are letting the downloads block more important traffic.

Katrina, 5th anniversery thereof

Every one (NPR, NBC, WSJ, Fox, you name it) is doing a Katrina story. I watched Brad Pitt showing off new green houses with solar panels in the Lower Ninth Ward. We had pundits complaining of the slowest of the disaster response, community development corporations showing off new construction, finger pointing, and endless talk.
But no talk about the root cause. The root cause wasn't racism, classism, illegal immigration or dreadful public schools. The root cause was the floodwalls broke under the weight of 18 feet of water and let the Gulf flow into the city. Most of New Orleans is below sea level, and once the floodwalls failed the town filled up with water.
Before New Orleans can do much rebuilding, the floodwalls and levees must be fixed. No bank is going to grant a mortgage and no insurance company will offer homeowners insurance to a site that is below sea level, unless there is a strong public commitment by Army Corps of Engineers to defend the site against the next flood. Banks are not keen on mortgages when the collateral for the loan is liable to be destroyed in the next spate of bad weather. Insurance companies are equally reluctant to insure places that are going to generate humongous losses. Banks won't grant mortgages unless the place is insured. Few private citizens can afford to rebuild without a mortgage and insurance. Until the Corps of Engineers makes clear which neighborhoods will get levees and floodwalls, and which ones won't, little private redevelopment is going to occur.
In five years following the disaster the Corps has said nothing.

No wonder health care costs are high

Opened all my junk mail this morning. It burns better if you open it before pitching in the fireplace. One piece was pushing hearing aids. It was in-the-ear and had some decent features like background noise cancellation, and feedback squeal reduction. They wanted $1095 for it. They bragged that this was a bargain, comparable units from the competition were going for $2400, they said.
I used to design stuff like this for my day job. I know I could achieve this performance with $100 worth of parts. Using the industry rule of thumb of "four times parts" I could assemble and test and ship something like this for $400 and make money.
I think patients are getting over charged by better than 100% here.
Maybe I should come out of retirement and get into the business.

Thirty percent of BP personnel take the Fifth

Today's Wall St Journal lists ten BP and Transocean executives and workers involved in the Gulf well blowout. At hearings into the disaster, three of them have refused to testify, claiming fifth amendment protections against self incrimination.
It is generally agreed that the well blowout was caused by BP executives Donald Vidrene and Robert Kaluza who decided to ignore instrument indications of a gas leak in the well. Vidrine and Kaluza are two of the three BP men who took the fifth.
Equally as interesting, the Journal cites an internal BP investigation report as their source. Could it be that disgruntled BP employees leaked the report to the Journal?
Also interesting, all the men seemed to have lawyers.

Slushbox

It's been common knowledge for years that automatic transmissions cost you about 5% on gas mileage compared to a stick shift. T'other day I was reading an internet rant that claimed the "modern" slushbox was in fact just as efficient as manual shift. I beg to differ.
Car transmissions have a simple problem to deal with. When stopped at a light, the wheels must not turn and the engine must turn. Automatic transmissions use a fluid coupling between engine and gears to solve this problem. The engine turns a paddle wheel gizmo in a can of hydraulic fluid and a similar gizmo on the gear shaft gets swirled around and around by the fluid. When stopped at a light, the brakes hold the car stopped, and the fluid just gets churned up. Trouble is, when the car is moving, the fluid coupling or "torque converter" is still there, and there is some slip between the engine in the gears. About 5%, which accounts for the 5% loss of gas mileage.
Some advanced automatic transmissions a have an additional lockup clutch which grabs the two paddlewheel gizmos together when the car is moving and prevents any slippage. Transmissions with a lockup clutch are pretty good, but not all cars have them. For instance Cadillac has a lockup clutch and enjoys significantly better gas mileage than the big Ford/Mercury/Lincoln sedans which don't.
So, when asked what you have done for the environment lately, you can respond by asking them if they drive a stick shift. And when buying a new car, you can mystify the salesman by asking if the car has a transmission lockup clutch. The device will save you 5% on gas mileage over the life of the car, so it's worth a few bucks extra to get one.
Other benefits of the stick shift. It serves as an effective anti theft device. Most kids cannot drive stick any more, so your car is less likely to be stolen if it has a manual trannie. When climbing a snow slick hill in winter you don't have to worry about the trannie deciding to downshift at the wrong time and making the wheels loose traction.