The Bern says Wall St is all fraud

He was saying that on one of the Sunday pundit shows.  He is half right.  Half of Wall St activity is raising money for economic growth, the other half,  futures and derivatives and mortgage backed securities and short term security lending, is pure gambling.  When the bets go bad, it crashes the world economy, like back in 2007.
   Economic growth means building factories, airliners, pipelines, office buildings, residential housing, and new product development.  All of these activities require financing, you have to pay the workers and the suppliers, but the project doesn't bring in any money until it's finished.  So the project borrows the money to get up and running, and pays it back out of earnings from the finished project.  No money for investment, no economic growth. 
  The working part of Wall St raises the money and lends it out to worthwhile projects.  The tricky part of  finance is deciding which projects will succeed and pay off their loans, and which ones are flaky and will go bust, taking all the money down the drain with them. 
  The gambling part of Wall St does deals that lack any clear economic purpose, and are usually short term.  Real economic growth requires long term patient money, you cannot build anything worthwhile over night, worthwhile projects take months and usually years to pay off.  There are Wall Street operations that do overnight loans of both money and securities.  I submit that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished overnight, and that kind of short term lending is really gambling. 
   We need to identify gambling, and drive it off of Wall St, probably by taxing it heavily. 

The Questions Sucked

It went on for three whole hours. "So and so said this about you, Take 60 seconds and trash him back." was the question, asked over and over again.  Boring.   There were a few amusing moments such as young Florida tourist bumps up against Tony Soprano from New Jersey.  Bush got in a solid hit on The Donald about eminent domain. 
   Questions that did not get asked but should have.  How far will you go to wipe out ISIS?  How large are the American armed forces today and how large would you make them?  What will you do to get GNP growth back up to 3.5% from this quarter's 0.7%.  What kind of fortifications will you build along the Mexican border and how much would it cost?  What is "net neutrality" and where do you stand on the issue? Will you reform patent and copyright law?  And if so, how?  What deductions and exemptions will you remove from the personal income tax?  Mortgage interest?  EITC?  Charitable givings?  Marriage and children exemptions?  What will you do to take Wall St out of the casino and back to financing economic growth? 
   Any how, that is the last presidential debate I am going to watch.  And I still have not decided who I will vote for the coming Tuesday.

Democrats stand for Free Stuff, Republicans stand for good jobs

The Bern is offering the most free stuff.  He wants free healthcare, free college, and doubtless other stuff as well.  Hillary is behind The Bern, but she wants free contraception.
   No amount of free stuff  beats a decent job.  If you have a decent job you don't need free stuff, you can buy what you need with real money.  And your company pays for good healthcare, far better than Obamacare.  Republicans want economic growth which we have to have to offer jobs.  The working age population grows every year, unless the economy grows to match it, people are out of work.  Democrats have managed to bring US economic growth down to less than 1%, which is pitiful.  Economic growth ought to be 3 or 4 percent.
   One reason for pitiful economic growth is all the  lefty greenies out there who raise a stink every time anyone suggests building anything.  Northern Pass, and Keystone XL both come to mind.  I heard some Democrat on TV calling for closing all federal lands to oil exploration just the other day.

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

After a whole lot of "winter storm warning" and other theatrics from TV weathermen, we got an inch. It's still cold and the mountain is making snow. 

Our Heroin Problem

By all accounts we have a problem.  Deaths from overdoses are way up.  And so, our gallant legislature passed three bills to address the problem.  One will set up "drug courts", type and jurisdiction un specified.  You would think any real judge sitting in a real court, could recognize druggies and when appropriate, sentence them to rehab.  I don't see why we need to establish a special set of courts to do this. 
   Of course, we don't have much, if any rehab in NH, so the real judges sentence druggies to jail rather than letting them run around loose.  And our gallant legislature doesn't seem to be doing anything about the lack of drug rehab.
   Then they passed some more funding for law enforcement and called it anti drug legislation.   I can't remember what the third one was, but it didn't sound like it would do diddly about hard drugs.
   I believe that with enough of the right sort of drug rehab, we can get a lot of druggies off the stuff.  I'm not a real expert, so I might not have this right, but there ought to be some numbers (number of druggies entered into rehab, number druggies later rearrested for possession). I would expect some treatment programs work better than others.  We should copy the more successful programs.
   We also need to get the word out to our young folk.  We need to make sure they know that heroin and the other hard drugs will ruin their reputations, get them fired from their jobs, get them divorced, get them jailed, and kill them.  Schools, churches, and all social organizations should feel a responsibility for getting the word out.  Things like Facebook should at least prevent the sale of drugs on their sites, and blackball users who advocate drug use. 

Icebreakers $1 billion each?

Op ed in the WSJ this morning, a couple of retired general officers explaining the need for more US icebreakers.  Makes sense, especially if we are gonna have off shore oil exploration in the Arctic.  If they have an emergency on an Arctic oil platform, icebreakers can get up there for a rescue. 
   The OpEd claims that new icebreakers will cost $1 billion  apiece.  That sounds too high by  a lot.  An icebreaker is just a merchant steamer with a very strong hull, a specially shaped bow, and extra powerful engines.  You'd think you could buy one for 10-20% over the price of a standard merchant steamer.  Unless Pentagon weinies gold plate the specifications.  Which they have a lot of practice doing.  I think you can buy a supertanker for $200 million, you ought to be able to get an icebreaker for about that kind of money.
   Then the Op-ed veers off into the merits of leasing icebreakers instead of buying them out right.  This does not compute.  The only reason for leasing anything is you don't have the up front cash to buy it outright.  Uncle Sam has all the upfront cash in the world, and he can print more if he runs short.  The lessor has to make all his expenses plus some profit, His expenses include interest on the money he has to borrow to buy or build the ship.  A lease deal will cost the taxpayers more than an outright buy.  Especially as icebreakers are very specialized and I don't think there are any for sale, you need an icebreaker, you have to build it special. 

The year of A size post cards

We get a blizzard of ads in the mail these days.  New this year is the A sized post card.  Used to be a post card was 3 by 5 and got a cheaper postage than regular letters.  Now they are 8.5 by 11 (full typing paper size) and made of fine heavy paper.  And I get a lot of 'em.  I was able to light the fire on nothing but the A size post cards that came in over the last couple of days. 
   A size?  Engineering or draftsman jargon for a drawing the size of a piece of typing paper.  We had B size, C size, D size and more.