Youngest son took me car shopping today. In the space of an afternoon we visited all four car dealers in Littleton. Wow. Most of ;'em started at $10k for high mileage mini cars. We didn't find anything to fall in love with. The best of the batch was a Kia with 93K miles on the clock. It had a manual trans, which is a plus, but the road noise on the highway was a bit daunting.
Clearly more hunting is in order.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sunday, October 21, 2012
What should they talk about tomorrow night?
Tomorrow is the last Romney-Obama debate. It's supposed to be about "foreign policy". For a superpower with world wide interests, this is a fairly important subject. So what should they talk about? Here is my list.
1. Iranian nuclear program. How bad would a nuclear Iran be? What should we do to stop the Iranians from getting the bomb? We have managed to crash their centrifuge computers and their currency. Can we go farther and destabilize the mullahs, bringing on a third Iranian revolution? If worse comes to worse do we have the stones to do a regime change on them?
2. China and the South China Sea. China is claiming ownership of some worthless rocks in the South China Sea as a way of pushing out the Philippines, the Viet Namese, the Japanese and the Koreans from oil exploration in the region. Should we let the Chinese push our friends around? Should we tell China where to get off?
3. How much military strength do we need to maintain the Pax Americana? Let's talk real numbers here, numbers of Army and Marine divisions, Air Force squadrons, Navy ships.
4. Can we sign the outstanding free trade agreements which objections by US union have stalled?
5. How hard do we want to bash China on currency manipulation and trade? It wouldn't be hard to start a trade war here. Who would get hurt worse, us or them?
6. Do we just let the Arab Spring stew in its own juice, or do we try to restore some kind of order over there?
Wanna bet they waste the evening talking about Benghazi and who knew what and when did they know it?
1. Iranian nuclear program. How bad would a nuclear Iran be? What should we do to stop the Iranians from getting the bomb? We have managed to crash their centrifuge computers and their currency. Can we go farther and destabilize the mullahs, bringing on a third Iranian revolution? If worse comes to worse do we have the stones to do a regime change on them?
2. China and the South China Sea. China is claiming ownership of some worthless rocks in the South China Sea as a way of pushing out the Philippines, the Viet Namese, the Japanese and the Koreans from oil exploration in the region. Should we let the Chinese push our friends around? Should we tell China where to get off?
3. How much military strength do we need to maintain the Pax Americana? Let's talk real numbers here, numbers of Army and Marine divisions, Air Force squadrons, Navy ships.
4. Can we sign the outstanding free trade agreements which objections by US union have stalled?
5. How hard do we want to bash China on currency manipulation and trade? It wouldn't be hard to start a trade war here. Who would get hurt worse, us or them?
6. Do we just let the Arab Spring stew in its own juice, or do we try to restore some kind of order over there?
Wanna bet they waste the evening talking about Benghazi and who knew what and when did they know it?
Saturday, October 20, 2012
What to regulate?
In the news have been fatal cases of fungal meningitis traced to drugs mixed or packaged at a Framingham MA "compounding pharmacy". Nineteen people have died, more are ill. Predictably there have been calls for more "regulation" of "compounding pharmacies".
More regulation means more tests, more paperwork, more QC inspectors watching production, more worker training and a big dose of Mickey Mouse.
But, despite all the hooting and hollering, nobody has yet figured out what went wrong, and how. They had been making this stuff for some time and all of a sudden it goes bad. What really happened? Did they skip or botch some test for infectious matter? Fail to sterilize something? Buy some material from China? Leave out some important preservative? Change the formula somehow? Or what? I can imagine a lot of ways to let fungus infect your product.
Should some investigators figure out the problem and publish a paper explaining how to prevent this dreadful infection, I am 100% positive that every "compounding pharmacy" in the land would immediately make the needed changes to their production lines.
We don't need more "regulation". We need to find out how the fungus got into the product and how to stop it from happening again.
More regulation means more tests, more paperwork, more QC inspectors watching production, more worker training and a big dose of Mickey Mouse.
But, despite all the hooting and hollering, nobody has yet figured out what went wrong, and how. They had been making this stuff for some time and all of a sudden it goes bad. What really happened? Did they skip or botch some test for infectious matter? Fail to sterilize something? Buy some material from China? Leave out some important preservative? Change the formula somehow? Or what? I can imagine a lot of ways to let fungus infect your product.
Should some investigators figure out the problem and publish a paper explaining how to prevent this dreadful infection, I am 100% positive that every "compounding pharmacy" in the land would immediately make the needed changes to their production lines.
We don't need more "regulation". We need to find out how the fungus got into the product and how to stop it from happening again.
What to cut? Fannie and Freddy
Back during the New Deal, builders, real estate agents, bankers, insurance agents, and civic boosters of various stripes convinced the Roosevelt Administration that Great Depression 1.0 was caused because people weren't building enough new houses, and they were not building houses because there was a shortage of mortgage money. And the federal government, with the power to print as much money as desired, ought to print up a bunch and put it into mortgages.
And so it happened. Federal National Mortgage Something-or-Other, commonly known as Fannie Mae, was created. Being an agency of the US government, the best credit rating on the planet, they could sell bonds for nearly as good a rate as Federal Treasury Bills. They used this fountain of cheap money to purchase mortgages from savings and loans (remember them?) and ordinary banks. The sellers could then use the cash to write more mortgages.
And what did Fannie Mae do with all those mortgages? For many years they just cashed the mortgage checks and life went on. Something in the '90s they invented a financial weapon of mass destruction, the mortgage backed security. They proceeded to blow the global financial system to hell and back, and we are still living in the wreckage. Great Depression 2.0 was caused by Fannie Mae, more than anyone else.
The destruction included Fannie itself, as Great Depression 2.0 threw everyone out of work, they stopped making their mortgage payments, and that cut off Fannie's air supply. The US treasury had to step in and guarantee Fannie's obligations. This cost $140 billion of our tax money. As bad as AIG.
We ought to close down Fannie. It isn't needed, and it has the power to do humungous damage. It's still loosing money. The financial world will be a better, safer, and cheaper place after we drive a stake thru Fannie's heart. Revoke their charter, put 'em out of business.
Obama hasn't said one word about Fannie. But its a good bet that he would keep it going.
Romney hasn't said much about Fannie either. But I bet he would be OK with closing it down.
And so it happened. Federal National Mortgage Something-or-Other, commonly known as Fannie Mae, was created. Being an agency of the US government, the best credit rating on the planet, they could sell bonds for nearly as good a rate as Federal Treasury Bills. They used this fountain of cheap money to purchase mortgages from savings and loans (remember them?) and ordinary banks. The sellers could then use the cash to write more mortgages.
And what did Fannie Mae do with all those mortgages? For many years they just cashed the mortgage checks and life went on. Something in the '90s they invented a financial weapon of mass destruction, the mortgage backed security. They proceeded to blow the global financial system to hell and back, and we are still living in the wreckage. Great Depression 2.0 was caused by Fannie Mae, more than anyone else.
The destruction included Fannie itself, as Great Depression 2.0 threw everyone out of work, they stopped making their mortgage payments, and that cut off Fannie's air supply. The US treasury had to step in and guarantee Fannie's obligations. This cost $140 billion of our tax money. As bad as AIG.
We ought to close down Fannie. It isn't needed, and it has the power to do humungous damage. It's still loosing money. The financial world will be a better, safer, and cheaper place after we drive a stake thru Fannie's heart. Revoke their charter, put 'em out of business.
Obama hasn't said one word about Fannie. But its a good bet that he would keep it going.
Romney hasn't said much about Fannie either. But I bet he would be OK with closing it down.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Microsoft whines about America's Talent deficit
Today on the Wall St. Journal Op-Ed we have Brad Smith, executive VP and general counsel at Microsoft wailing about 6000 Microsoft job openings that they cannot fill. Of these, 3400 are for "engineers, software developers, and researchers". Brad Smith then goes on to cry about the US education system.
Tough cookies Microsoft. If you need software people, you can train them yourself. Run an ad. "Learn Programming. Good pay. No prior experience necessary." That will get you all the applicants anyone could ever need. Enroll the better half of them in a Microsoft run software training program. In three months I can teach any decent college graduate how to program anything. And so can Microsoft.
It is crazy for Microsoft to expect colleges to graduate students with five years experience in Windows internals, C sharp, Visual Basic.Net and Excel Macros.. The Microsoft HR droids want to hire people off the street with years of experience in very narrow specialties. Got news for you HR droids, the world doesn't work that way.
Tough cookies Microsoft. If you need software people, you can train them yourself. Run an ad. "Learn Programming. Good pay. No prior experience necessary." That will get you all the applicants anyone could ever need. Enroll the better half of them in a Microsoft run software training program. In three months I can teach any decent college graduate how to program anything. And so can Microsoft.
It is crazy for Microsoft to expect colleges to graduate students with five years experience in Windows internals, C sharp, Visual Basic.Net and Excel Macros.. The Microsoft HR droids want to hire people off the street with years of experience in very narrow specialties. Got news for you HR droids, the world doesn't work that way.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
So where was the air support in Benghazi?
After a month of chattering about the Libyan outrage, who knew what and when did they know it, who was responsible for lack or security men, we have NOT talked about real issues.
1. Why no air support?. The jets can move out at 600 mph. We could have had fighters over the besieged consulate within an hour.
2. Why no Marine reinforcements? The V22 Osprey VTOL transports are slower than jet fighters, only 300 mph or so. But they could have landed a company of Marines in the consulate courtyard within two hours.
These are more important questions than why US ambassadors were pushing the "Video drove them crazy" story on the Sunday pundit shows a week after the attack.
1. Why no air support?. The jets can move out at 600 mph. We could have had fighters over the besieged consulate within an hour.
2. Why no Marine reinforcements? The V22 Osprey VTOL transports are slower than jet fighters, only 300 mph or so. But they could have landed a company of Marines in the consulate courtyard within two hours.
These are more important questions than why US ambassadors were pushing the "Video drove them crazy" story on the Sunday pundit shows a week after the attack.
357 Magnum in an automatic pistol?
That's what we get from Coonan Inc according to my latest American Rifleman. It looks like a regulation .45 automatic but it takes 357 Magnum revolver cartridges. Interesting and all that, but why?
357, being a revolver cartridge, has a rim on the brass to seat on the back of the cylinder. Without the rim, the hammer strike would merely push the entire cartridge up the cylinder instead of igniting the primer. Revolver cartridges need that rim. There have been several attempts to make revolvers that could fire rimless .45 auto cartridges, using clever metal clips that grab the extractor groove in the rimless automatic round. They worked, mostly, but nobody was ever very fond of them. Convenienal wisdom is that revolvers need rimmed cartridges.
On the other side, rimmed cartridges don't stack neatly into a magazine the way rimless will. The rims have a tendency to catch each other and jam the gun. Instead of stacking up straight, they stack in a curve, calling for a curved magazine. Straight magazines, with a spring on the bottom are more likely to feed than curvy ones. The moment of truth for an automatic pistol is when the slide jerks open, the empty brass is tossed out, the springs ram the slide home, stripping a new round off the top of the magazine and jamming it into the chamber. As any automatic pistol owner can tell you, there are a thousand ways this can go wrong, jamming the gun. I certainly don't want to give Murphy's Law something extra to work with like a rimmed cartridge. I want rimless ammunition for my automatic pistol.
Plus, nobody has ever complained about the regulation .45 round lacking in power or accuracy. 357 is a fine round, but it doesn't hit any harder.
It's a nice looking gun, but I'd druther have a regulation .45 automatic.
357, being a revolver cartridge, has a rim on the brass to seat on the back of the cylinder. Without the rim, the hammer strike would merely push the entire cartridge up the cylinder instead of igniting the primer. Revolver cartridges need that rim. There have been several attempts to make revolvers that could fire rimless .45 auto cartridges, using clever metal clips that grab the extractor groove in the rimless automatic round. They worked, mostly, but nobody was ever very fond of them. Convenienal wisdom is that revolvers need rimmed cartridges.
On the other side, rimmed cartridges don't stack neatly into a magazine the way rimless will. The rims have a tendency to catch each other and jam the gun. Instead of stacking up straight, they stack in a curve, calling for a curved magazine. Straight magazines, with a spring on the bottom are more likely to feed than curvy ones. The moment of truth for an automatic pistol is when the slide jerks open, the empty brass is tossed out, the springs ram the slide home, stripping a new round off the top of the magazine and jamming it into the chamber. As any automatic pistol owner can tell you, there are a thousand ways this can go wrong, jamming the gun. I certainly don't want to give Murphy's Law something extra to work with like a rimmed cartridge. I want rimless ammunition for my automatic pistol.
Plus, nobody has ever complained about the regulation .45 round lacking in power or accuracy. 357 is a fine round, but it doesn't hit any harder.
It's a nice looking gun, but I'd druther have a regulation .45 automatic.
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