Advice for New HS graduates soon to be incoming college freshmen

You want to think about what you want to do after you graduate college.  I know that is four years in the future, which seems like forever.  But college goes by quick and you will be out in the job market before you know it. 
   College is expensive, you or your parents, are paying for it.  If you are borrowing the money to pay tuition, you have to pay it back after you graduate.  You gotta have a job to pay off your student loans.  Which means you need to pick your college major to make you employable.  For instance a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, and you will have a decent job no problem.  A bachelor of arts in gender studies, and you will be waiting tables for a long long time. 
  The best majors, looking toward making yourself employable, are the STEM majors, Science (physics, chemistry, biology) Technology (computer programming, premed), Engineering (electrical, mechanical, chemical, civil) and Mathematics (calculus, statistics, matrix algebra)  Engineering, in addition to being decently paid, is interesting and satisfying.  Engineering is a lot of new design work, and being the engineer who designs that new automobile, new handheld electronic best seller, new building, new aircraft, is very satisfying work.  Beats the bejesus out of selling used cars. 
   STEM fields often require math up thru integral calculus and differential equations.  In fact you may need that math under your belt in order to even understand the homework in your major.  You want to find out what the mathematics requirement are in your chosen field, and sign up for those math courses ASAP, freshman year.  Electrical engineering is probably the most math intensive.  A simple two component circuit (a resistor and a capacitor)  require a first order differential equation to analyze. Things like biology and computer programming are less demanding in the math dept.
   If you just cannot warm up to a STEM field, consider the liberal arts.  Traditionally there are seven liberal arts, English, History, Foreign Language, Music, Art, Philosophy, Theology.  English ought to teach you how to write.  Industry offers a lot of jobs to people who can write, specifications, instruction manuals, advertisements, articles about the product, endless written materials.  History will also teach you how to write, and offers a broader field, all of human history, every age, every culture, which makes picking a thesis easier.  English is limited to the works of a relatively small number of English authors.  Picking a thesis in English literature that hasn't been written about a thousand times already is hard.  Foreign languages are always useful to any company doing business overseas, which is most of them these days. 
   If you are a musician or an artist, Music or Art majors are rewarding.  If you are not a musician or an artist, they won't do you any good at all.  There are next to no jobs for music or art majors who are not themselves practicing  musicians or artists.
   Philosophy and Theology used to be big, back in medieval times, but they won't get you a job today.
   One other major, which isn't STEM or an Art; that is education.  If you want to teach in the public schools, you have to take the ed major.  The ed major will get you a job, no problem.  If you can stand the total boredom of the major, and you like teaching, go for it.  The ed departments pretend that education is something that can be taught and will make you a better teacher.  In actual fact, the ed major is endless chit chat about trivia.  It's easy enough to pass the major, but most students find it REALLY boring. The best teachers I ever encountered didn't even have college degrees, let alone an ed major.  They were good Air Force enlisted men pulled right off the flight line to teach in the base Field Training Detachment.  They knew their subjects (jet engines, aircraft instruments, radar, nav electronics, hydraulics, what ever) backwards and forwards.  And that's all you really need to be a good teacher.  If you want to teach in the private schools, then you can major in something useful, the private schools are less hung up about the ed major than the public schools. 
   Then there are the majors that aren't sciences but want to be sciences, (sociology,political science, anthropology, economics, ecology, psychology)  To be a real science you have to conduct experiments to validate your theories.  Conducting experiments in sociology or any of them is not possible or totally unethical. The courses usually boil down to political indoctrination.  And there are no jobs to be had with these majors.
   Then we come  underwater basket weaving majors.  These won't get you a job (other than waiting tables)
Black Studies, Gender Studies, Men's studies, Any kind of Studies, art appreciation, aroma therapy, and others.  Stay away. Total waste of four years and a lot of money.
  Final word.  Don't trust advice from guidance counselors, ESPECIALLY as to the requirements for your major.  You have to get in ALL the required courses in order to win a degree.  Find the college catalog, the current catalog, not one from last year.  All the major requirements are in the catalog.  Look them up, write them down (a spreadsheet is good) and sign up for them as early as possible.  Don't trust a guidance counselor to steer you into the right courses, they don't know, and don't really care, not the way you care.
   

Who gets blamed when Obamacare crashes and burns?

Fox News was discussing this on Sunday.  Obamacare is driving insurance companies out of the health care business.  Even with $2500 premium increases and $4000 copays,  insurance companies are still loosing wads of money on policies sold thru the Obamacare exchanges.  As a result,  the companies are pulling out of the Obamacare business, leaving vast tracts of America without ANY Obamacare health insurance.
   Who takes the blame was the subject of discussion on Fox.  In actual fact, the MSM will write long tear stained stories about how it's all the Republicans fault.  They will do their best to blame all bad things on the Trump administration. 
   The Republicans NEED to get a health care bill thru Congress and to the president's desk.  If they don't, then the coming Obamacare crash will sink the Republicans, come 2018 elections.  Rule in American politics, when bad things happen, the incumbent president, and his party, take the blame.  Especially when the MSM hates them.  Bad things are happening to Obamacare.  The Republicans must get their act together and pass something, now. 

Paper Ballots Antidote to hacking, Russian or other contenders

We have a leak, from Reality Winner, that the Russians hacked into a voting machine software company.  Apparently they didn't go further and hack the voting machines, but who knows what might be possible next year, or after the next release of Windows. 
   Vote on paper ballots.  Keep the ballots after election day in case you need to do a recount.  And we can do a recount by hand, even after all the fancy digital voting machine stuff dies. 
   Modern digital voting machines are merely desktop computers running a "I-pretend-to-be-a-ballot" program.  They mostly run Windows, world's most vulnerable operating system.  Hack into the software provider, which the Russians did, and modify the "I-pretend-to-be-a-ballot" program to elect who ever you like.  The software company distributes the hacked program to all it's customers, and presto, the Russians favorite candidate wins the election. 
   This cannot happen with paper ballots, marked with pen or # 2 pencil.  And paper ballots a gotta be cheaper for the towns and cities than fancy electronic voting machines. 

Saw Wonder Woman in the Jax Jr last night

Pretty good.  It's a comic book super hero (super heroine) movie.  I  haven't paid much attention to Wonder Woman since I stopped reading comic books around age 14 or so.  Gal Godot plays a great Wonder Woman.  She has the looks, she has the figure.  She gets a great part and a lot of good lines.  A lot of good costumes too.   The flick opens on the Amazon's magic island (I missed the name) inhabited by lots of really hot Amazon women, and ONE really cute Amazon child, Diana.  They don't talk about it, but I assume the lack of men on the island accounts for the very low birthrate.  We see Diana at age 8 and then at age 14 or so, (younger actors) and as grown up (Gal Godot)  The movie opens when handsome American pilot Steve Trevor  (Chris Pine) crashlands a WWI monoplane just offshore (would have been cooler if it were a biplane).   Diana rescues him from his sinking aircraft.  There is a cool fight when WWI German infantry land from boats to capture Steve Trevor.  The Amazons show up in surprising numbers and slay the Hun with swords, arrows and spears. 
    Shortly Steve and Diana set off for Europe to stop WWI.   They leave the magic island by sailboat.  Actually the prop guys should have done a little more work on that sailboat,  its sails never set well, and were always luffing and it's speed thru the water was much too high.   After reaching Europe we see a great set of period automobiles, all polished and shiny.  Period British trains.  Great period costumes.  The guys are all wearing hats (fedoras for civilians).  We see inside of Whitehall offices (lots of hardwood paneling and Army uniforms).   We go clothes shopping in London with Diana which has some very funny bits.  We see the inside of a British pub, full of ugly tough Brits who even manage to impress Diana with their toughness.   We meet war weary British politicians who are ready to sign a really wimpy armistice with the Germans.  And we heard what Diana thinks about wimping out.  
    They miss a few cool shots.  Although bayonets were standard issue in all armies back then, we never see soldiers (allied or enemy) with bayonets on their rifles.  We miss an opportunity to watch Diana with a sword duel with a bayonet wielding infantryman.   One of Steve's buddies carries a good sniper rifle with a big telescopic sight all thru the latter half of the movie.  We never see him draw a bead, center the crosshairs, and blow a bad guy away at 1000 yards. 
   This flick is over two hours, gets a little tedious toward the  end.  Really young kids won't have the patience to sit still thru out.  Other than that, it's fine for kids, everyone keeps their clothes on and doesn't sleep together on screen.  Lots of explosions, acrobatic fighting styles,  and exciting stuff, not much blood.

Islamic terrorist videos on Utube cause big advertisers to pull ads

Wall St Journal had this story today. I don't cruise Utube myself so I don't really know what gets posted there.  But the stuff must be pretty bad if advertisers are pulling their ads off Utube.  Was I Utube, I'd think real hard about throwing extremist video clips off the site, just to maintain good relations with my advertisers, who put up the money. 

Nextgen and Privatizing Air Traffic Control

Trump was pushing these two ideas on TV yesterday.  Right now air traffic control (ATC) has been run by the FAA and paid for thru appropriations of federal tax money.  Trump (and others) want to set up a private or semi private company to run ATC and be funded by levying  fees on the airlines who use ATC.  The airline industry is in favor, as is the ATC union.   The issue really comes down to funding.  Right now, every time Congress gets its panties in a twist, the FAA funding bill doesn't get passed, and when it finally does pass, it leaves out funding for capital improvements, new radars, new control towers, new computers, Next Gen and such.   With a private company funded from fees, the cash flow is steady and predictable, every one's paycheck comes thru on time, and  capital improvements can be made, especially long term multi year projects.   The down side is the private company can hire more people, buy more equipment and just raise the fees to pay for it all.   They have a monopoly, and they will exploit it to grow. 
    The capital improvement under consideration is "Next Gen" an expensive plan to force every airplane in the country (and out of the country) to buy an pricey GPS receiver/transponder.  This gadget uses the GPS part to find the plane's location, speed and course, and when interrogated by a ground transponder would transmit the plane's ID and location back to the ground to update the ATC displays in control towers.  Transponders start at a couple of K for a light plane model, and a lot more for an airliner grade model.  The advantage of Next Gen is greater accuracy, say 10 feet of so, as compared to  5 miles or so for today's ground radar.  Which is said to allow controllers to fly planes closer together, allowing more air traffic in the same amount of airspace. 
   Maybe.  But it relies on vulnerable technology.  The GPS signal from satellites is quite weak and could be jammed in wartime.  The NextGen GPS/transponder is complicated and should it fail the aircraft disappears off ATC display screens.  And there is plenty of airspace for flying from place to place.  The congestion occurs around airports.  We only have 50 odd airports in the whole country and each one can only handle one operation (takeoff or landing) a minute.  There is plenty of airspace inbetween airports for all the planes now flying and all the planes that will be flying in the future.
   We should not do Next Gen.  Too expensive, too vulnerable, and we don't get anything for spending all that money. 

Reality Winner??

Unlikely name.  NSA contractor arrested Saturday for leaking classified information.  She had a history of flakiness, including a posting about whiteness is racism, or some such malarkey.  She was an Air Force veteran.   The newsies haven't said what kind of discharge she had.
   Question:  How did somebody so flaky ever get a security clearance?  Did who ever granted her clearance talk to her former Air Force commander?  And how did she keep her clearance?
  Another Question:  Why was a contractor given access to this classified?  What was their need to know. 
   Seems to me, NSA has lost it's grip.  Back when I was a NSA contractor they gave us polygraph tests as part of gaining a clearance.   NSA was the only place I was ever at where they inspected your briefcase on the way in and out of secured areas.   Letting "Reality Winner" (is that really a name?)  in and giving her the run of the files makes me think NSA is getting sloppy.