North Carolina Bathroom Brouhaha

The Obama justice department and the state of North Carolina are now suing each other over the bathroom bill.  The Feds are threatening to cut off some serious federal money unless North Carolina knuckles under.
   Leaving the bathroom bill issue for a bit, let's ask why the Feds were giving a state that kind of money in the first place.  Education is a state and local responsibility, and should be paid for by state and local governments.  When the folks that spend the money have to raise the money, they are a bit more frugal in spending.  Where as free money handed out by the Feds gets spent as fast as possible.  There is always something to spend money on. 
  In short, why is my federal tax money being set to North Carolina?  It's a nice place and all, but I think it ought to be raising its money from its own citizens, not freeloading off of me, up here in New Hampshire.

Army to Shrink to 480,000 troops

  So how many are real combat soldiers, infantry, artillery, and armor, and how many are paper pushers and Rear Echelon Mother F----rs (REMF)   480,000 real combat troops is on the thin side, but possible. We only sent 140,000 troops to take out Saddam Hussein a few years ago.  But 480,000 who are mostly REMF's is scary.   
   In the real world, the troops are dispatched on one year overseas, unaccompanied, combat tours, and then they expect at least one year back home with their families.  When there ain't enough troops, the same guys get sent back on second and third and fourth combat tours with only a few weeks at home in between each combat tour.  This is pretty damn hard on the troops.  
    

Why we don't want a President Hillary

She would pack the Supreme court with lefties, who would rule against liberty and in favor of regulations, bureaucrats, against the second amendment, and uphold rights for tiny minorities at the expense of the general public  They would support all kinds of government snooping on citizens  These lefties  would stay on the bench for decades suppressing liberty and enhancing federal power. 
  She would veto repeal, or even any changes to, Obamacare. 
  She would bungle US foreign policy the way she has bungled Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Ukraine, North Korean, Iraq, and Iran.  She is possibly clumsy enough at foreign relations to get us into yet another war.
  She is a gun control freak and will attempt to take our guns away. 
  She will continue Obama's economy killing policies.

   The "Never Trump" people talking up Hillary as better than Trump need to think about these things.  

Selling the Nerd Mobile on TV

One of those  successful car commercials.  Opens with a sporty looking little red car zipping down an empty road. (When was the last time you got to drive on a road empty of cars?).  Camera zooms in on the driver's seat and we have the biggest nerd you ever saw driving the car.  That's gonna make me want to buy it.  Then we see a cop car, bubble gum machine flashing blue and red in the rearview mirror.   Commercial ends, mercifully, before we get to the cop writing the nerd a ticket.
   Do they really think this is gonna sell cars?

Computing Gross National Product (GNP) according to the Economist

Actually, in these PC days they call it Gross Domestic Product (GDP) .  National has become a dirty word in PC circles.  But it was GNP when I went to school and I am not PC.  The statistic began to be computed in the 1930's as a measure of an economy's war potential.  The Americans managed to shift a third of their massive GNP into war production by 1945, and that buried the enemy under an avalanche of ammunition, rations, tanks, jeeps, warplanes, army trucks, aircraft carriers, radar sets, and finally nuclear weapons.
   GNP is defined as the total output of goods and services, expressed in dollars, and figured on a yearly basis.  Goods is easy enough to understand, goods are packed in cartons, stacked on loading docks, shipped to customers.  Services used to be necessary things like transportation (rail, shipping, trucking) or utilities (electricity, water, sewage)  As time went on, service providers of lesser importance wanted the prestige of  being included in GNP figures.  In the UK they now include the services of "sex workers" and there is a push to include housekeeping and child care into GNP figures.
   The Economist did not explore a few issues in GNP computation.  Consider automobile production.  Clearly number of new cars produced times the average sales price of new cars goes into GNP.  But, consider this, Detroit doesn't make everything that goes into a new car.  They buy tires, batteries, spark plugs, wire, fasteners, glass, paint, sheet steel, lotta stuff from other companies.  Think about that spark plug company, Champion say.  They ship a lotta plugs to Detroit, which have an average sales price.  That goes into GNP as well as the new cars do.  In this case the plugs get counted twice, once as the leave the spark plug company, and a second time as they leave the auto plant, securely screwed into the engine of the new car.
   Then how do you handle big construction projects.  Say the World Trade Center.  That took years to build.  Did they estimate the amount done each year and add that into GNP?  Or do they wait until the building is finished and sold?  We are talking of a billion dollar project here.  Lumping years of work into the last year gives you a GNP bump in the year the job finishes.  And what does 9/11 do to GNP?  Do they even count that in GNP? 
   Anyhow the Economist devoted a full page to GNP calculation this week.

We is stuck with Trump.

Yesterday's solid Trump win in Indiana got Cruz, and now Kasich to both throw in the towel.  Barring an act of God, The Donald is the Republican nominee. 
   The Donald is not my favorite candidate, but, druther him than Hillary.  Gotta start thinking up things to say to get people to vote Republican. 

Book cooking for fun and profit.

Companies are required to publish periodically their profits or losses.  Computation of profit can be pretty slippery.  In principle, profit is gross sales less legitimate expenses.  Legitimate expenses can vary a lot.  When doing the books, any clever accountant can find various ways to make profit come out higher or lower.  When doing the books to show to the taxman, the accountants work real hard to make profit as low as possible, since the company is taxed on profit.  When doing the books to show Wall St investors and sell the company's stock, the same accountants work real hard to make the profit higher. 
  This is natural, not good, but natural. 
  But, in the United States, we allow companies to keep two sets of books, one to show the taxman, another to show to stock buyers.
   This should not be.  We should insist that companies keep one set of books, and the profit they brag about to investors is the profit upon which they pay taxes.  In fact, the IRS could do investors a favor by merely publishing all the company tax returns.  They are public companies after all, and so their tax returns are public information.