The lights are going out, all over New Hampshire

The greenies, working thru the public utility commission, have bulldozed the local power company into closing their three remaining coal fired power plants.  One of them, was forced to install a $450 million scrubber back in 2009.  Part of the deal is that the power company can bill rate payers for the $450 million outstanding debt.  For the next ten years.  On top of the "Stranded Cost Recovery" charge they put on the bill for the Seabrook nuclear plant.  
    The power company is hoping to replace the lost generation capacity with hydro power from Quebec, to come over the yet to be built Northern Pass power line.  Which the greenies are fighting to stop. 
   The greenies managed to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant last year. 
   I ought to go out and buy a Honda generator set to get thru this next winter. 

Juan Williams on Johnny Can't Read.

Juan had a handsome op ed in the Wall St Journal yesterday entitled "The Scandal of K-12 Education".  He cited some really awful statistics on the terrible performance of black and Hispanic kids in the public schools. Without getting into the numbers, they are really really bad.  And Juan cries out to do something about it.
    Thinking back on my experiences learning to read, I don't really remember the school doing all that much for me.  I can still remember the night it all came together and for the first time I could actually read a real book, not a picture book.  It was "The Land of Oz",  (L. Frank Baum).  Granted the schools did some ground work, we all learned the alphabet song, we learned phonics, and we started with "Fun with Dick and Jane" a worthy but boring beginning reader.
  But, I learned to read because I wanted to read.  Reading was fun, an enjoyable pastime, as good as watching TV, especially TV way back then.  There was so much good stuff to read.  The Saxonville library was open every day and it was on my way home from school.  I stopped in every day or so to get new books.  And they had a bunch of really cool ones.  There was a series, bound in orange, of biographies of famous Americans.  I read them all.  There was the "Landmark" series with books about the Battle of Britain, the Tokyo raiders, the Royal Navy in WWII, and other things to catch the interest of an grade school boy. And really good science fiction by Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov.  And the Tarzan books, the Tom Swift books (the old series), the Oz books, the John Carter books, Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott,.  And comics.  If there was ever something printed that just cried out to be read, it was a comic book.  Scrooge McDuck, Blackhawk, Tarzan, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Superman, and more.  Parents and teachers disapproved of comic books back then, but they were a tremendous incitement to learn to read, certainly more stimulating than playing computer games.  We would spend our own money to buy them.  Ten cents an issue, they are more like four dollars now.  Every kid had a stash and every kid read them.
   The other incentive to read was that my parents did it.  Dad read the paper every day and he read bed time stories to us every night.  If Dad did it, I wanted to learn it too, just to get with it.
   Bottom line, learning to read is a self motivated thing, schools can help, parents can help, but the kid has to want to do it himself. 

GKN Technology meets Brexit

GKN Technology is a British company that makes the wings for Airbus.   The UK government pulled out of the Airbus consortium some years ago, but GKN Technology retained their Airbus business somehow.  The Airbuses are assembled in Europe (Germany or France, cannot remember which). Which means those British built wings get shipped across the Channel.  When Britain does the paperwork to pull out of the EU, presumably those wings have to pay the EU tariff when they land on the continent. 
  And it's not like GKN Technology can find another customer for its wings.  Those wings are Airbus wings, and won't fit another airplane.  If Brexit means Airbus has to pay a serious tariff on the wings, they will surely investigate alternate suppliers located on the continent.  And with EU unemployment running at 10%, any EU supplier will have no trouble staffing up to handle the extra business.
   Be afraid, be very afraid. 
  

FBI lets Hillary off the hook.

The FBI director held a news conference, live on TV, just a few minutes ago.  Bottom line, the FBI doesn't think they have enough to prosecute with.  They read a ton of emails.  In fact you gotta wonder how Hillary had the time to crank out nearly 100K emails.  She was only secretary of state for four years, call it 1000 days, so that's 100 emails a DAY.  How did she manage to eat lunch and go the can, and do 100 emails a day??
   The FBI claimed to have really scrubbed Hillary's server, recovering a lot of email from caches and deleted-but-not-scrubbed disk space.  They also said that Hillary's lawyers had wiped a lot of email as "personal" and the lawyers did a better job than Hillary, they scrubbed the disk files (over wrote them with random ones and zeros) and deleted them (erased the file names from the disc directory).  Which makes the emails unrecoverable, like they had been shredded. 
  The FBI did a lot of talking about how classified and how many were classified.  Groovy but any secret service in the world would love to read the American secretary of state's email no matter what it's classification. 
  In short, the FBI trashed Hillary and her state department for sloppy handling of classified, but they don't think it was deliberate, and you gotta show intent to prosecute.  The FBI didn't find intent, and so Hillary gets off, not scot free, some of the mud sticks, but they ain't gonna prosecute, so she can go on running for president.  Another tight squeeze for a Clinton, like Whitewater, like Vince Foster, like Monica, like a bunch of other stuff. 

The Supremes pretend to practice law.

Actually they are mere indulging in their private political prejudices.  Law is a body of rules,  written down.  Moses showed the way.  Just ten commandments, chiseled into stone tablets by the hand of God.  And law is limited.  Ten was the starting number.  We have a lot more now.  but if it isn't written down, it isn't law.
   Judges are supposed to know the law, and apply it to the specific case before them.  And there is always room for interpretation.  Even "Thou shalt not kill" (from KJV) has been interpreted to read "Thou shalt not commit murder." a much narrower reading.  It's up to judges to look at the law, look at the facts of the case, and render a judgement, using pure reasoning. 
   When this is happening, a majority of judges (or for that matter a majority of reasonable men) will come to the same judgement in the same case.  That is, if they are looking at the law, and reasoning from the facts of the case.  If they are judging from personal prejudices, anything can happen.
   Since the unfortunate death of Justice Scalia, it has become clear that he eight survivors on the court are judging from personal prejudice rather than from the law.  Hence the number of four to four ties.  How the eight top lawyers in America can fail to come to a majority opinion is a scandal.  These clowns aren't practicing law, they are setting themselves up as kings. 

Franconia Old Home Day Parade.

So Franconia does it's parade on Saturday (2 July) partly 'cause we always do it that way, partly to avoid going head-to-head with the Woodsville parade and partly 'cause everybody has Saturday off.  We have a huge mob of parade marchers forming up, we have my Buick doing a little electioneering, we have a Junior ROTC color guard, and we have the Jeanne Forester people.
   By the way, the Blogger people have been messing with the photo uploader again.  At least it still uploads although I had to do it twice before it worked. 

DEC makes the market, adapts to a changing market, finally fails and dies

Digital Equipment Company moved into the big time when it invented the minicomputer, back in the early 1960's.  The legendary PDP 8 wasn't much of a computer, only 12 bits wide, the largest number it could handle was only 4096, not much.  And it could only address 4096b words of magnetic core memory, RAM had not been invented yet.  But it was a computer, it was small compared to the only other computers available that year, namely mainframes costing in the millions and filling an entire room. 
   The PDP8 only cost $8000 (1960 dollars) and was smart enough to do a fair number of things.  A whole bunch of  automatic test sets were built, with a PDP8 built in and running the show.  So many were sold that DEC became rich and famous.  All looked well until the micro processor came on the scene in the early 1970's.  One of my first projects coming out of engineering school was to design a microprocessor board to run a test set.  My board had plenty of punch and only cost $200, parts.  That pretty much killed the $8000 PDP8 for that role.
   DEC recovered, they juiced up their minicomputer and sold it for timesharing.  A PDP11-35 could support a couple of dozen timesharing terminals, enough to run a small company. The later PDP11-70 and the VAX were even stronger. And the timesharing rig, with disk drives and mag tapes might cost $100,000.  Still cheap compared to a mainframe.  This kept DEC going thru the 1980's. 
  Then the desktop computers appeared.  The IBM PCs, and the Compaqs.  These sold for $3000 or so, and were every bit as good as the the DEC minicomputers, and they were cheap enough for every engineer to have one for his very own. 
   And that was the end of DEC.  Compaq bought them up, and then HP bought Compaq, and now there is hardly a trace of DEC left.