U2 vs Global Hawk. U2 is winning the funding

The U2 recon manned recon aircraft has been flying for a long time.  It became famous in the the 1950's when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, flying a secret photo recon mission, violating Russian airspace big time.  U2 is still flying.  It's main claim to fame is fantastic altitude capability, 70,000 feet or better.  Few fighters can reach that high.
   A new fangled competitor is a drone, Northrup Grumman's Global Hawk, a big drone with a bulbous nose.  For a while the high tech drone looked to replace the vintage U2 for photo recon.  But this fiscal year the Pentagon changed it's mind, it wants to dump Global Hawk and keep flying the U2.
   One argument is Global Hawk now has a lower cost per flying hour. Used to be, both U2 and Global Hawk cost about $33,000 per hour to fly.  Last year, Global Hawk claimed to have reduced its cost per flyng hour to $25,000.  This is attributed to an INCREASE in Global Hawk flying hours.
   This makes me think the computation of cost per flying hour is too crude to be much use.  It doesn't get cheaper when you fly more.  What's gotta be happening is they divided FIXED costs by flying hours.  In this case, yeah cost per flying hour goes down.  They largest fixed cost is the money spent to buy the drone in the first place.  They probably  just assume a 20 year service life, and tack on a fixed cost per year of 5% of the acquisition cost (depreciation) .  That's crude.
   The drones have a fatigue life, the number of flying hours before stress and vibration cause dangerous cracking of the structure.  The proper  depreciation should be the acquisition cost pro rated by the percent of airframe hours used up.  Fly more and your depreciation goes up.   
   One thing about Global Hawk, it ain't all that reliable.  Last year 55% of Global Hawk missions were canceled.  Whereas only 4% of U2 missions were scrubbed.

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

It was 8 below this morning.  Not a flake of snow.  The snow all fell in Boston.

Electro Magnetic Pulse EMP

EMP, something discovered in the late 1950s.   Consider a nuclear bomb.  Several tons of uranium or plutonium and casework  and whatever.  Detonate it.  The furious energy of the atomic detonation blows all the electrons off the atoms comprising the bomb, and immediate surroundings.  Turns them into charged ions, and blows them away at supersonic speed.  This is a massive moving electric charge, which creates a massive magnetic field that spreads out from the detonation site at the speed of light.  Such a field will induce massive electric currents into any conductor that it encounters.  Other doomsayers worry that solar flares or "coronal mass ejections" can do the same thing.  They point to the 1850's Carrington event, a solar flare so strong that telegraph wires sizzled and crackled with sparks in telegraph offices, scaring the bejezus out of telegraph operators.
   The fear is, that such currents will melt wires, arc over insulators, trip circuit breakers, melt transformers and destroy alternators.  Wreaking the electric power grid, the internet, the wired phone system, the cell phone system, stereos, TVs, Ipads, everything electric or electronic and hurl our civilization back into  a dark age, lit only by fire.
   Not to worry.  The millions of miles of wire hanging from poles, all across the continent, get struck by lightning, every minute of every day.  A single lightning strike stresses electrical systems to the limit.  Lightning will arc over any insulator, and fry anything.  Half a century ago, every summer lightning storm would knock out the electric power.  Well, over the half century since then, the power companies have hardened their systems.  My lights stay on, unless a windstorm drops a tree on the wires and breaks them.   Local damage, sure.  My mother's home took a lightning hit a few summers ago.  Blew out her satellite receiver, her DVD player, and few other things.  But the electric lights survived, along with the furnace, the hot water heater, and the electric stove.
   I don't believe any EMP event will ever be as bad as a  lightning strike.  We have hardened every thing against lightning strikes.  They are probably safe against EMP events, be they hostile nukes, or solar flares.

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

Nothing much.  We got three, maybe four inches over the past four days.  Last night got really cold.  It was 4 below this morning.  No snow, and the forecast is for no snow.  All the snow is gonna fall in Boston according to the TV weather guys.  It hasn't warmed up much, its only 4 about right now. 

Basel backs off

"Basel" is a international committee of bank regulators who meet in Basel Switzerland now and then.  Their mission is to regularize and harmonize banking regulations world wide, with the idea of prohibiting risky lending and speculation of the sort that caused Great Depression 2.0, and preventing countries from taking over international banking thru favorable national regulations.  Sort of spread the pain of regulations evenly round the world.
   Basel had wanted to enforce a rule requiring banks to have capital (money from investors) equal to 3% of the outstanding loans ("assets" in banker speak).  The idea being that  capital can be used to cover losses from loans gone bad (lender stops paying on the loan). 
   The banks screamed and writhed and threatened to hold their breath.  And Basel backed down.  They changed the rules in complex ways, some kinds of loans don't count, and some derivative deals can be counted as capital, and lo and behold, just about all the banks can meet the 3% standard without raising new capital.  Great joy in Euro Bankville. 
   The Economist article goes on to criticize the concept of a leverage ratio (capital to loans) as crude and inefficient.  They prefer a weighted scale where very safe loans ( US T-bills for example) need less capital than say Greek bonds.  Which sounds good, but who does the weighting?  Reputable US rating agencies like Standard and Poor gave AAA ratings to mortgage backed securities that became worthless.  
    The Economist likes a more liberal leverage policy.  There are two ways to meet a 3% capital to loans ratio.  Raise more capital (difficult and expensive) or make fewer loans.  The Economist doesn't like option #2, they think it inhibits economic growth. 
   In real life, at least on this side of the pond, the issue is not all that important.  If a big bank gets in trouble, the feds bail it out.  We have FDIC, Federal Reserve, and the US Treasury all of whom handed out truck loads of money back in 2007.  Bankers like this.  In the bad old days, when a bank failed, the depositors lost their savings, and the bankers had to skip town before the lynch mob got its hands on them. 
  

Brit Hume speaks favorably about NSA

He was on Fox News a few minutes ago.  Brit is a serious newsman and I have some respect for his opinions.  He said the "meta data" program (scarfing up the billing records of every phone call on the planet and keeping them for ever) is legal, and has been in place for a long time, and nobody has ever found any abuses.
   Maybe.  On the other hand I remember they drove Gen David Petraeus out of CIA by leaking some emails with a mistress.   If the head of CIA cannot keep snoopers out of his email, who can?  By all accounts, they hit Petraeus with email instead of phone calls, but that's a technicality.  Revealing phone calls to a mistress would be as damaging as emails.
   I think the potential for abuse of the "meta data" is so high, and it's contribution to catching terrorists is so low, that I would still cancel the program, before it eats someone. 
  

Words of the Weasel Part 38

"Why can't they get anything done?"   Common whine from the Internet.  "they" being Congress. 
Translation: "Why can't they pass my pet program?"  Answer: "Because you don't have the votes to pass it."