Re-Arranging deck chairs on the Titanic

In DC we have Congresscritters re arranging statues in town.   Eleanor Holmes Norton (the non voting DC representative in the House)  wants to move a statue of Frederick Douglass from it's current location (1 Judiciary  Square) to some place inside the Capitol. 
   Douglass is an inspiring American from the Civil War era, and fully deserves a statue.  I'm not knocking Douglass.  But I'd just as soon have his statue out in the open where I can see it, rather than stuck away inside the Capitol where I cannot.  They don't let citizens inside the Capitol building  anymore. 
  Plus, we have lots of serious issues that Congress is neglecting.  But they have time to re arrange the statues while headed full speed for that iceberg.

Revenge of the Nerds

Small Wall St stock brokerage Knight Capital  turned on their brand new computer trading program Wednesday.  Something went wrong and the computer managed to loose $440 million dollars by quitting time.  This nearly put Knight out of business.  They only had $365 million cash on hand.  According to the Wall St Journal, Knight did a lot of telephoning and a lot of hands and knees work and Goldman Sachs bailed them out.  Sort of.  As of Friday night Knight was still scrambling to borrow enough money to stay in business.
   Wow!  Pretty good work for a mere computer program.  And what are those programmers doing right now? They ought to be going underground and fleeing the country.  There has gotta be one humungous lawsuit coming out of this fiasco.
   It's not clear just what the program was doing.  The Journal describes the program as something cooked up by, or at least with the support of, the New York Stock Exchange.  It was supposed to allow trades to be executed with prices in fractions of a penny.   Just why anyone would want to do that is unclear.  A penny ain't worth much and a fraction of a penny is pretty close to worthless.  Unless you are trading millions of shares.
   The program probably was doing, and bungling, "high speed trading".  This exercise in capital allocation looks at stock prices and buys rising stocks and sells falling stocks.  It's fast enough to detect the instant a rising stock starts to fall and bang out sell orders faster than a plain old human broker.
 

Cyber Security thru lawyers

Bloomberg has a long article on a cyber security bill before Congress.  It appears the bill won't pass, or will be so watered down as to be useless.  On the other hand this bill proposed giving federal bureaucrats significant power over utility companies.  Power to decide how much security  must be paid for is the power to wreck a utility.  I don't believe federal bureaucrats are wise enough to be intrusted with that kind of power.
    Cyber attack means hostile hackers gain control of the computers that run our electric generators, our gas holders, our transformer banks, our transmission lines, and the rest of our physical plant and make them do bad things, such as another great blackout, fires and explosions. 
   Better would be to let the utility companies know that we have an army of hungry nasty tort lawyers just looking for work.  If the utilities let the lights go out, we start a class action suit for gross negligence and triple damages and legal fees and court costs.  And the scalps of the CEO and all the directors.
   Back this up with insurance companies.  All utilities carry insurance  to pay off that  army of tort lawyers.  Pretty soon the insurance company inspectors will be saying things like "If you don't fix this gaping loophole and that horrible weakness, we won't insure you."  
   The dickering over cyber security requirements between professionals, insurance men, utility engineers and lawyers will get more protection for less cost than empowering federal bureaucrats.  Federal bureaucrats are all liberal arts majors who have difficulty changing a light bulb and who work for politicians.  They certainly cannot improve reliability of  utility company operations, they are too ignorant and too politically motivated.
   

Wonderful new word

Ensuckification.   That's what Stephan Greene calls Facebook's new layout.  He's got a point.  And that's a great word, just looking for some more things to describe

Hang it out to dry

Here is The Plant, a birthday gift fresh from the nursery.  So far I have just watered it every day except on days when it rains a lot.  It takes a full pitcher of water (one quart) each time.  Which seems like a lot, but it all get soaked up somewhere and no water ever runs out the bottom of the pot.

Here it is 8 weeks later.  Not so lush but still alive.  It is currently attracting hummingbirds so it is in pretty good shape.  It had one bad night when high winds blew it off its nail and it feel on its head in the driveway some twenty feet below. 

NHPR can be really offensive

I'm listening to the Olympics on NHPR as I drive up to Whitefield.  An American girl has just won a gold medal.  But then NHPR has to tell me that she is black, (African-American is the word they used). Then they explain how being black makes her different and how she has all sorts of special responsibilities.  Then they  relate Facebook gossip criticizing her hairstyle.  Arrgh. 
   That girl is an American.  Winning an Olympic gold medal makes her the best in the world at what she does.   She had to work like a dog for years to get that good.  She makes me proud to be an American, and to know that our beloved country can produce citizens like her who are the best in the world.
   I'm offended to hear this American hero described by her skin color.  She's an American, plain and simple.

 

Linkage

Should taxes and spending be linked in Congress?   We hear endless talk about "offsets" and "pay as you go"  every time budgets and authorization bills come up.  Some favored constituencies get a tax dedicated to just one thing.  The gasoline tax is dedicated to (earmarked for) road building, so the road builders don't have to fight for funding every year. It's nice to be a road builder. 
   May it not be better to consider taxes and spending separately?  Taxes need to be low enough to keep the economy running and tamp down political unhappiness that leads to votings out, civil insurrection and other unpleasantness.  Most of the time this means that taxes cannot be raised much without serious consequences.  Certainly Obama's call for a tax hike on "millionaires and billionaires" isn't exciting the broader electorate.
   Expenditures rise to meet income  (Parkenson's law).  There is an infinite amount of worthy causes that can suck up all the money in the world.  But nobody is that rich.  Effective government spends money on the absolutely necessary things and stops after that.  Otherwise they go broke.  Witness Europe, Greece, Spain, Iceland, Ireland and the US.  
  So the common thing heard today "If we pass your appropriation, then you have to pass our tax hike to pay for it."  is just another way of saying "No".