Taxes and Spending

The US of A is spending 40% more than it takes in by taxes. This cannot go on forever. Something has to be done. The Republicans want to cut spending, the Democrats want to raise taxes. The Republicans know that any tax hike will be used to postpone the day that spending gets cut. All of those on the public dole will rise in wrath to defend their share of the taxpayer spending. It takes the threat of bankruptcy to force recipients out of the public trough. Any tax hike will postpone bankruptcy and thus make spending cuts impossible. The Republicans are (finally) wise enough to refuse any kind of tax hike until we get some real spending reductions.

How to make 54 mpg Corp. Avg Fuel Economy?`

Simple. Build hybrid pickup trucks. Uncle Sam will give you a 20 mpg credit for each hybrid pickup truck you sell. So you build a hybrid pickup that gets 35 mpg. Add the 20 mpg credit and you have 55 mpg pickup trucks. Wow.

Uncle wants us driving hybrids rather than diesel.

Anyone know how long the batteries in Prius's last? And how much a new one costs?

19877 Sorties flown by NATO

According to the Wall St Journal, only 7505 of those sorties were offensive strikes on Libya. That's about one third. Presumably the bulk of the two thirds non-offensive sorties were tanker missions. Sorties are expensive, it takes just as much work, fuel, maintenance, and expensive aircraft to fly a tanker sortie as an offensive sortie.

It's 400 miles from Sicily to Benghazi in Libya which is a bit of a stretch for modern fighters. 400 miles one way, or 800 miles round trip. Back in the day the old F106 could fly from Duluth MI to Tyndall AFB in FL non stop, about 1600 miles. It could do the 800 mile round trip to Benghazi and have a decent loiter time over target without tanking. Apparently the current fighters (all one or two generations more advanced than the totally obsolete F106) don't have the range to cross the Mediterranean and return. You could save a lot of sorties if the fighters had the range to get to Libya and back without tanking.

They report hitting a lot of stuff including 555 tanks and armored vehicles. That's a lot. Erwin Rommel at his best, campaigning in the same area, never had 400 tanks to call his own. Either Qaddaffi has a huge tank fleet, or the pilots are making a lot of far fetched claims.

Anti Trust is the answer for Too Big To Fail

We passed the Sherman Anti Trust Act back in the 1890's. It was used to break up Standard Oil in the early 20th century, and last used to break up the telephone company in the 1960's. The Sherman act gives the US government the right to break up big companies that are deemed monoplistic, or just too damn big. It's still on the books and the US Justice Dept has a whole division of lawyers to enforce it. Too bad they haven't been earning their pay.
At the beginning of Great Depression 2.0 it was decided to drop Lehman Brothers on the floor as a warning to others. Not a bad idea, but the breakage scared everybody. Soon after, Sec of Treasury Paulson and Chairman of the Fed Bernanke, both thoroughly frightened, went to Congress and got the $800 billion TARP bill passed to shore up the rest of the Wall St to avoid more breakage. Then the perpetrators of Great Depression 2.0, Congress critters Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, got the 2000 page Dodd Frank bill passed to guarantee US taxpayer bailout of "too big to fail" financial institutions.
Where are the anti trust lawyers? Any firm "Too Big To Fail" is clearly big enough to break up under the Sherman Anti Trust act.
Plus, big firms lack competition to keep their pricing honest. We consumers get robbed anytime a company is so big it is the only game in town.

Indian Giver

Among the various European countries lining up to bail out Greece, we have Finland. The Finns promises to "loan" 700 and some change million Euros to Greece. But to make sure they get paid back, the Finns demanded "collateral". The Greeks agreed to deposit 500 million Euros in an escrow account in Finland. The the Greeks default, the Finns keep the 500 million Euros.
Big deal, to get a 700 million loan they put up 500 million, so that in effect the Finns are only loaning 200 million Euros. The rest of the Europeans are waits to see how this plays out.
I saw a European TV pundit on the internet explaining how a movement to "tighten European economic integration" was running into trouble. Under "tight" integration, the Germans would pick up the losses in Greece. The Greeks like the idea, and the Eurocrats love it. The German taxpayers are against it.

Hewlett Packard Stock drops 23%

Yesterday Hewlett Packard announce plans to get out of the computer business by spinning off or selling off the computer division. The suits complained that manufacturing computers was a low margin business and they wanted to move into software and services. No matter that they are the #1 computer maker since they bought up Compaq some years ago. Then they announced plans to buy a British software company for $10 billion.

Today HP stock dropped 23% as investors decided that the HP suits were out of their minds.
HP did something like this ten years ago. The company got started and had been a powerhouse in the electronic test equipment business. In 2000, HP spun off the test equipment group and "Agilent Technology" a new firm that has down fairly well.

Supercookies

Yesterday's Wall St Journal reported the existence of "super cookies", bits of malware planted on your computer and used to track your web surfing. This sounded pretty bad. I googled "supercookie" and lo and behold, an avalanche of information.
Apparently one type of cookie hides out in your "flash" plugin. Another type had something to do with Windows Media Player.
I found a website that claimed to switch off the Flash cookies and another that explained the Windows media player cookies were fixed in version 10 of Windows Media Player.
The other thing I did was weed out my ordinary browser cookies. Upon looking, I found that years of use had accumulated a vast number of cookies, kinda like barnacles. Cleaning them out sped up my web surfing noticeably.
You can wipe ALL cookies, the only penalty is you may have to log in to some of your favorite websites again. The websites that keep you logged in permanently do it with cookies, they make note of your log in inside the cookie.