Delta admits it was their own equipment that failed.

The local power company, Georgia Power, said that their power had stayed on all night.  Delta admitted that a "power control module" (which might be anything)  failed early Monday morning and crashed their computer system, shutting down Delta flights world wide.  And apparently rebooting the world wide systems isn't working so well.  Delta is announcing further flight delays and cancellations for tomorrow.
   Delta clearly needs to decentralize their computer systems, preferably down to the local airport level, so that a failure only knocks out ONE airport, not the entire world.  The only thing that has to be centralized is the airline's seat reservation system.  Agents sell seats all over the world.  Before an agent can sell a seat, he has to know that the seat in question is available, not already sold to someone else.  So all the seat sales go to the central computer system, which keeps track of which seats on which flights are available and which are sold.  This function has to be centralized.  But a lot of other  stuff, like running the airport kiosks ought to be local.
   Good luck Delta IT dept.  You gotta lotta work to do, and a lotta flak to catch. 

Words of the Weasel Part 38

Optics.  The politicos are now saying "The optics are bad".  Us real native born English speakers still say " It doesn't look good." 

No backup generator for Delta?

Delta's main computer system went down early this morning, and Delta announced that it was canceling flights world wide until they bring the computers back up.  Delta claims a power failure at their main computer site caused the outage.  And stranded passengers all around the world.
Question for you Delta.  Where was the back up generator at your site?  In the Air Force we had diesel backup generators for crucial stuff, the tower, the radar approach control, the runway lights, the instrument landing system, the electronic navigation aids.  Where was Delta's backup power for this absolutely crucial computer system? 

Ethnic voters, Black, Hispanic, Muslim.

Endless talk on TV about how Hillary and The Donald are doing with this or that ethnic group, who's ahead, who's behind, where they stand relative to previous races.  Endless yak.
None of the TV newsies are talking about the largest ethnic group in the country, women.  Fifty percent of voters are women.  Romney lost the woman's vote to Obama by 10%.  That was the election right there. Hillary and The Donald's race will be decided by women's votes.  But the TV newsies, not even the Wall St Journal ever talks about it.
  We know that The Donald has his problems with women's support.  So does Hillary.  A lotta women think she should have divorced Bill over the Monica affair.   How many of each sort of women voters do we have?  Would those women admit their real feelings to a robo calling pollster? 

How much should a nuke plant cost?

The new British government announced that it will be reviewing (read delaying) a decision to build a nuclear power plant financed by the Chinese to be located at Hinkley Point, England.  The strangest part of the brief article in the Wall St Journal was the price.  The plant is estimated to cost $23 billion to build.  Wow.  The going price for brand new nuclear plant is "only" $5 or $6 billion dollars for a 1 Gigawatt plant.   $23 billion sounds like a rip off to me. 
   Another odd detail about this deal, the Brits promised to pay double the going electric rate for juice from this Chinese financed plant.  Does this sound like crony capitalism? 
   You have to wonder why the Chinese are dickering to spend (invest?) so much money in the utility electric power business, which is not noted for high returns.  And to spend all that money in England, where the power helps the British economy rather than the Chinese economy. 
  Anyhow I can see why the new British government is "reviewing" this high price project. 

Get the US economy growing again

Gross National Product (GNP) is a count (or perhaps estimate) of the  value of all the goods and services produced in one year.  At least that's what they called it when I took economics in college.  Now that PC has slipped in thru out the land, "national" has become a bad word. So all the PC MSM call it Gross Domestic Product (GDP)  now a days.
    Ever since WWII the US GNP has increased by about 3% a year.  This means that the number of jobs increases at 3% a year,  which is enough to offer jobs to each year's crop of high school and college grads, as well as jobs to a lot of immigrants. 
   But, since Obama took office in 2008, the US economy has only grown at 1% a year.  Which is why young people are having a tough time finding jobs, and all that anti immigrant talk.  What can we do to get economic growth back on track?
1.  Repeal Obamacare.  Obamacare lays heavy costs upon business.  Businesses larger than 50 employees get hit harder.  So a lot of businesses have decided not to grow beyond 50 employees.  All businesses get levied for a lot of costs and the levy is on a per employee basis.  So businesses have stopped hiring, except when it is absolutely necessary. 
2.  Reform the income tax.  The current tax code is just a vast fabric of loopholes.  If you hire clever and expensive tax lawyers, they can find ( or create) loopholes for your company.  Loopholes create a lot of pure tax dodge companies, like "hedge funds".  Hedge funds enjoy a giant loophole called "carried interest".  I'm convinced that many hedge funds are in business solely to take advantage of "carried interest", not because they are serving any real need.
3.  Get the cost of health care down.  The US pays 19% of GNP for health care.  That is twice the amount paid by any other country  in the world.   And US health, while good, is not the best, there are a dozen countries with better health than the US and they are doing it on half the money.  If they can do it, so can we.  Right now all US goods cost 19% more than they ought to, just to pay the worker's healthcare.
To do this, we ought to make health insurance good anywhere in the US.  Any licensed health insurer ought to be free to offer policies in all 50 states.  Right now, an insurer has to be licensed in the state in which it is selling the policies.  Needless to say, the necessary licenses require the  insurer to do a ton of paperwork and in a lot of cases, they decide it's just too much trouble.  Which is why we only have two companies selling health insurance up here.  And we ought to allow duty free import of any drugs from any reasonable first world country, places like Canada, England, Germany and others.  If the authorities of a reasonable first world country allow the sale of the drug in their country, it is plenty safe enough for Americans.
4.  Straighten out the patent office.  Right now, if a company introduces a new product, it gets sued by a patent troll.  We ought to outlaw patents on "business methods" and software, and common standards like the ASCII code, the QWERTY typewriter layout, TCPIP, and the like.
5.  Get Uncle out of the home mortgage business.  Close down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which triggered off Great Depression 2.0 and then went broke, costing the taxpayers billions.  Home mortgages are the safest and most profitable investments out there, and private businesses can raise all the mortgage money needed.
   That's enough to get started on.  

President Trump vs President Hillary

If elected,
President Hillary will raise our taxes.   She said that on live  TV to huge applause yesterday,
She will try to take our guns away,
She will pack the Supreme Court (and the lower federal courts) with lefties, who will persist and continue to do harm for decades.
She will do more payoffs to foreign scumbags, and she will take up her disasterous foreign policy where she left off when she turned the secretary of state office over to John "Swiftboat" Kerry.

President Trump might do some real and badly needed income tax reform. 
He won't press for more gun "control" aka taking our guns away.
He will appoint decent law abiding judges to the Supreme Court.  He has published a long list of names. 
We aren't too sure of his foreign policy, he hasn't said much, but it cannot be worse than Hillary's.  I know he could have gotten four hostages back for less than $100 mil a head.