A Jaguar SUV??

Jaguar??  SUV's?   The XK120s XK150s and XKEs are rolling over in their graves.  But I saw a TV ad selling a Jaguar SUV.  Who wants a Jaguar SUV?  Should I want an SUV I want a real SUV with a nameplate like GMC, Ford, Chevy, not Jaguar (or Cadillac or Lincoln).  Jaguar means sports cars and luxury hotrod sedans.  I owned a Jaguar 3.2 liter sedan once.  Nice car, black, chrome wire wheels, leather seats, walnut dash, OHV straight 6 with an oil leak that would not quit. 4 speed with overdrive.  Troubles it had, power brake booster quit, a wheel came off, the hood latch failed on the road letting the hood blow clean off, heater and defroster worthless in a Minnesota winter, wire wheels were not strong enough, corner the car hard and you could hear those little ping noises as spokes broke under strain.  
   So Jaguar stands for elegance, sportness, and flakiness.  None of which I want in an SUV.  SUV's want to be rugged and reliable. 
   Good luck Jaguar, or Tata who bought Jaguar off the Brits, selling SUVs under the Jag name. 

A Federal Department of Cyber Security?

Op Ed in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal calls for creation of one.  The writers want to consolidate some 11 existing cyber security agencies into one new cabinet level department.  Like we did creating the Homeland Security Dept some 15 years ago.  Sounds cool. I wonder what such a new bureaucracy would do, other than draw their pay.  The writers by the way, both work for Sullivan and Cromwell, a law firm doing cyber security work.  They probably figure that a big cyber security department could write bigger contracts that 11 smaller ones. 
  There are probably 300 million computers in the country, pretty much all of 'em running Windows, the world's most vulnerable operating system.  Some fraction of these (1/10th? 1/4?, maybe even 1/2?) have critical data, voter registration, credit card data, phone bills, driver registrations, title deeds, stock ownership, bank accounts, and more.  Destruction or even just tampering with any of this stuff would cause all sorts of havoc.  Not to forget national security stuff , codes, ciphers, location and numbers of nuclear weapons, plans for warplanes, operational orders, size and strength of the armed forces, war plans, effectiveness of weapons, and more.   And finally there is control of things like the electric power grid, nuclear power plants, the phone network, the Internet, even city traffic lights.  Putting out the lights, even just fouling up the NYC traffic lights would be very very expensive. 
  Keeping all this stuff secure is low level work, the system administrator of each of how many million computers, has to insist on strong user passwords, disabling passwords of employees leaving the outfit, weekly backup, keeping each machine up-to-date on Microsoft patches, keeping critical machines in locked rooms, insisting on periodic password changes, searching for and eradicating malware, insisting that only one firewall machine be on the public internet all the rest go thru the firewall machine to get to the net.  It's the unsung efforts of a vast number of low level workers that keeps us as secure as we are.  I don't see how a high level  cyber security department would help out here. 
   Users, commercial, military, and state, ought to come together and pressure Microsoft to close the many gaping holes in Windows security.  Microsoft ought to disable autorun (we spread Stuxnet on the Iranians via autorun).  Microsoft ought to remove the Basic language interpreters inside Word, Excel, and probably other stuff.  The Basic capability is never used by real users, and allows damaging malware to be hidden inside harmless looking documents, sent as e-mail attachments to infect victim computers.  And there are dozens of other Windows loopholes that anyone versed in Windows internals can tell you about.  Concerted pressure from all users might shape the Microsofties up.  
   As for the controlling of things, electric power generators, transfomers, trains, rolling mills, air traffic, etc. One simple rule will do a lot of good.  Never pass control or monitoring signals over the public internet or the public telephone network.  Run your own dedicated line, preferable fiber optic, preferably on your own poles.   Make it so hackers would have to climb a pole and tap a line to gain control.  Fiber optic is much harder to tap than traditional copper pairs. 
   We have a huge army of under employed lawyers in this country.  Tell the affected companies that we will sic those lawyers on them should they equipment fail because some hacker gained control over the internet. Keep it off the internet and we will be much safer. 

$9000 per kid, per year, State Aid to education.

That's what NHPR said this morning.  That's just state aid, the town puts in more.  That's a lot of dough.  Say 20 kids to a classroom.  Call it $180,000 total.  You can hire a decent teacher for $45,000, and buy her/his healthcare for $14,000.   What's the excess $121,000 going for?  Building maintenance?  More non teaching administrators? Pay offs?  
   NHPR did mention that NH spends more on education than most states.  And I have noticed that most towns have really nice, quite new, school buildings.  Far nicer than the tony private prep school I attended. 

ObamaCare, RyanCare, McConnellCare

First we have Obamacare, which is the law of the land, and will remain so unless Republicans get their act together.  Obamacare has doubled and tripled people's health insurance premiums, saddled them with $6000 co pays or deductibles,  cut workers hours from 40 down to 30 a week, and determined that small businesses stay small to avoid the killer costs that come when the 50th employee is employed.  Obamacare offers government handouts to some people sometimes.  How much and who is eligible is up to federal bureaucrats, who have 10,000 pages of Obamacare law in which to find words to justify what they want to do.  Which means the bureaucrats can do what ever they want to do.  And Obamacare tries to tax the healthcare industry to pay for healthcare; which doesn't work.  And the health insurance companies, after loosing barrels of money on Obamacare policies, are refusing to write new ones.
   Then we have a House bill to change some things.  It passed the House, just barely. Just what it does is unknown to me, although it is hard to imagine it being worse than Obamacare. 
   And the Senate is working on its own version of reform.  We don't know much about it, and Senate Leader McConnell has not been able to get the Republicans on board with it.  At a guess the Senate bill will be similar to the House bill, but since we don't know much about the House bill, that doesn't tell us voters much.  
   We voters elected Trump and the Republicans to fix Obamacare.  We don't understand just how that might happen, but we know we want the ridiculous co-pays to go away, and the premiums come back down to where they were before Obamacare.  And we want to have at least two health insurance companies competing for our business.  And we want to be able to buy "hospitalization only" insurance because it used to only cost $3000 a year whereas Obamacare's cover- everything policies cost four times as much.  A lot of people who are in good health, and have a little money in the checking account, like the idea of insurance only for the big expensive stuff, and pay the ordinary stuff out of pocket. 
   If the Republicans cannot get their act together, we voters will throw the bums out in 2018 and elect Democrats.  If the Republicans (the stupid party) does not understand that, good riddance. 

Swaps Rules to Get Revamp

Headline of a piece in today's Wall St Journal.  The global swaps market is $486 TRILLION.  Yikes.  I consider "swaps" to be a form of Wall St gambling.  Wall St is supposed to raise money to grow the economy, build factories, finance new construction, buy inventory, stuff that employs people and creates salable product.  Even the Journal was unable to describe how a "swap" works. 
   Much of the piece was about the Consumer Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)  whining about the sales data  being furnished to them by privately owned swaps data repositories.  As you might have guessed, each repository furnishes data in a different format.  CFTC hasn't bothered to write data swabber programs to put all the data into a common format for CFTC's programs.  Tough cookies CTFC.  Get your act together and fix the problem, don't waste everyone's time whining about it. 
   Apparently after Great Depression 2.0 Congress set up the reporting requirements "to help unwind failing market participants that posed a risk to the entire system"  By which they mean the taxpayer will bail out the swaps sellers next time the market goes south.  Why in God's name do we want to give a US government guarantee to Wall St gambling debts?  Let 'em go broke. 
   Our government at work.

The Economist writing about "The German Problem"

Sub title: "Why Germany's current account surplus is bad for the world economy".   The Economist goes on to write "At bottom, a trade surplus is an excess of national saving over domestic investment".   That's a crock.  Trade surpluses happen when you manage to sell abroad more stuff than you buy from abroad.  Having an array of good products at the right prices, helps with the sales end.  Having a good domestic supply of quality product helps keep imports down.  Germany has a lot of world class products, look at Mercedes, Porsche, VW, Lowenbrau, Airbus, and many others.  Who wants to buy an import when the domestic product is as good as you can get any where? 
   If the world wants to cut down on Germany's trade surplus, the world will have to offer products as good as or better than German products, at a competitive price. 
   Writing like this makes me wonder where the Economist's writers went to school.  If their economic writers are so deluded (in a magazine named the Economist!)  do their other writers know anything at all? 

You talk to everybody when you are running for President

Everybody.  They might vote for you, they might contribute money (in return for favors after the election), they might have intelligence (dirt) you can use, they might put in a good word for you, they might be planning a stab in the back.  You never know, so you talk to everybody you have time for.  You want to increase your candidate's name recognition, talking about him with everybody will increase it. 
   Given all that, I fail to see any interest in today's msm flap about Trump campaign workers, (Donald Trump Jr and Jared Kushner) talking with a low name recognition Russian lawyer.  So what? Everybody in the world wants something from the US, everybody in the world starts by talking to the presidential campaign people.  So what else is new?