Courts are OK with AT&T - Time Warner Merger

The courts may be OK with it but I am not.  Both companies are huge, revenues in tens and hundreds of billions a year.  Both are plenty large enough to prosper on their own.  Both are so big that they won't get any economies of scale by merging. 
   Both companies are in the same line of work, namely providing cable TV.  Merge them and they will find it easier to hike my cable fees.  Just by example Time Warner managed to chisel my cable bill up to $62 this month from $35 a few years ago.  They just hike my cable bill a few dollars here and a few dollars there.  And Time Warner (now calling itself "Spectrum") is the only game in town up here.  It's pay what ever they ask or do without broadband and Fox News Channel. 
   The Wall St Journal was all in favor of the merger.  They did a lot of fancy explaining that this was a vertical merger, and that both companies were really in different businesses.  This I do not believe.  They are both TV cable companies.
   If the anti trust people were doing their jobs, we would not need "too big to fail" protection in things like Dodd-Frank.  If it's too big to fail, then it ought to be broken up as a monopoly.  

They have given up advertising cars on TV

It's been years since I saw a TV ad for Chevrolet, or Ford, or even Prius.  I do see ads for Jaguar and Range Rover and Lexus, and the car dealers still run ads now and then, but the big three US makers have pretty much given up on TV ads.  For GM and Chrysler, this was forced on them when they declared bankruptcy during Great Depression 2.0.  They just didn't have the money.  Ford was better managed, and didn't have to declare bankruptcy, but money was tight at Ford too.
   Things are better in Detroit now a days, compared to say 2009, but the big three car companies still don't advertise on TV.  Could it be that they have decided that TV ads cost more than they are worth? 

Thoughts for new College Freshmen

College is expensive, thanks to plentiful government loan money.  You can go into hock for as much as $200,000 for four years of college.  That's new house money.  And you are stuck with it forever, bankruptcy won't get you  out of it.  To pay it off in 10 years, you have to come up with better than $20,000 a year, for ten years. 
    And all that money only pays off for you if you finish college and graduate.  If you give up or flunk out, you still owe all the money but  it won't get you a job.
    So, think real hard.  Do you have the stick-to-itness to get thru college and graduate?  Do you like academic work, writing papers, doing research,  listening to lectures, doing homework?  A lotta people do, and a lotta people don't.  Where do you stand?  Your odds of graduating are much better if you like academic work.  If you don't like academic work, you may not make it.  
   If you have some doubts about academic work, think about doing something besides going to school for a while.  Join the armed services, take a job, travel, do a winter ski bumming, hike the Appalachian trail, anything.  You been sitting in classrooms since kindergarten, and you may be just plain tired of school by now.  A year or two doing something else will do wonders for your attitude. 
   Do you like working with your hands more than you like paper pushing?   A lot of skilled trades jobs pay as well as the average white collar job, don't require college, get you out of doors, and can be very satisfying.  Think about getting into welding, electronics, heavy equipment operator, lineman, machinist, construction, truck driver, logger, fish and game warden, fireman, lots of other things. 
   When you start college, you really need to know what you want to do to make a living after graduation.  And pick your college major to make you employable in your chosen field.  This is a big decision, but you have to make it, by Christmas time freshman year at the latest.  Talk to friends, family, anyone you trust, do some reading about the field.  Then pick your major with an eye to making yourself employable.  Colleges offer all sorts of interesting majors, many of which are totally worthless when it comes to finding a job.  Gender studies, Ethnic Studies, anything with "Studies" in its name, sociology, anthropology, art history, under water basket weaving, all are worthless unless you are independently wealthy and don't need a job after you graduate. 
                                 

So how lucky were we in Singapore?

Hard to say.  The NORKs made vague promises to denuclearize.  No specifics, no deadlines.  We gave Kim a nice worldwide propaganda platform and promised not to run any more joint South Korean-US military exercises.  We only do that once a year, and we just finished up this year's joint exercise a few weeks ago, and the next one wasn't scheduled until next year.  If the NORKs prove uncooperative, we can easily reschedule a joint exercise for 2019.
   Denuclearization will take some time, months at least, even with the best of good will from the NORKs.  With just a tiny touch of bad will, it will take years.   With a large dose of bad will it will take forever.  The key issue is admission of American inspectors to North Korea, with no-knock authority,  ability to go anywhere, inspect anything, with no advance notice given.  The NORKs aren't gonna like that.  It will take time to get that going, months, or worse.  Until we get the NORK working bombs handed over to us, and our inspectors working in the North, we don't have much.  It will take a long time to make this happen.  Until it does, we cannot really say whether Trump's mission to Singapore was a success or not.  We have a bunch of Lefty-Democrats on TV right now claiming Singapore was a failure, but it is really too early to tell.  
   For good things to happen, Kim whats-his-face needs to feel secure.  If he and/or his regime loose power for any reason, he will loose his life, and he knows this.  So distasteful as it may be, we will have to prop up the NORK regime.  
  

I wish President Trump all the luck in the world for Singapore Mtg

It's gonna be tough.  Kim feels his nukes are his security blanket.  But it might work.  I hope it does.  Best of luck to our side. 

Game of Thrones, Season 7 is out on Netflix

So I added all the disks to my Netflix Queue.  Then I decided to refresh the series in my mind by watching season 6 over again.  I've just finished watching the first three episodes and they are bad.  Black out camera man gives us pure solid black scenes with maybe just a single faint white face showing out of blackness.  Rest of the actor, costumes, sets, completely invisible, lost in the darkness.  No character every addresses any other character by name, leaving us audience wondering who they all are.  They start to magic John Snow back to life in episode 1 and it isn't til episode 3 that they get the job done.  
   Let us hope season 7 is better.

D-Day. Sixth of June

It was really before my time.  I was only one year old back in June of 1944.   D-Day was the first time the Anglo American forces were strong enough to fight the main German army on the German's home turf.  Previous combat in North Africa and Italy were against small detachments like Rommel's Africa Corps, or bloody but small scale combat against limited German forces, fighting a defensive battle in very defensible Italian terrain. 
   Humongous forces were poured into D-Day.  The operation looked all kinds of dangerous.  Eisenhower, supreme commander, the man with the best view of the situation, found it so dicey that he prepared a press release, to be issued in case the landing was defeated.  Had he needed to use it, the setback  to Anglo American arms would have been staggering.  1942 and 1943, two whole years of war production and training, went into marshaling the D-Day forces.  Had the Germans won, much of this vast investment in infantry, tanks, artillery, warships, and warplanes would have been lost.  It would have taken at least another year, probably two, to build up to launching a second invasion.  Give Hitler another year or two and there is no telling what might have happened.  The Germans might have perfected nuclear weapons.  The V-weapon program would have had another year or two to rain destruction upon London.  Time to bring a radical new U-boat, the type 21, into operation.  Lots of things could have given Hitler victory.
   Anglo American victory was possible by defeating the U-boats in the Atlantic in 1943.  We could not have moved our troops, let alone the vast quantity of supplies needed to support our forces, and keep England fed and producing,  had the U-boats kept sinking ships at the rate they had in 1942.  Second, USAAF and the RAF had pretty much blown the Luftwaffe out of the air by 1944.  This guaranteed that the Germans couldn't sink the D-Day armada in mid channel, or render close air support to advancing Panzer divisions.  Finally, the Germans did not know where the Anglo American invasion would come.  The entire coast of France, including the Riviera, and the low countries, was possible.  The Germans had to spread their troops  up and down the European coastline, whereas the Anglo Americans could concentrate all their forces on the invasion beaches, giving a solid superiority in numbers at the crucial spot. 
   As it was, it was a tough fight.  A lot of bravery, and sacrifice carried the day, just barely.  And, once ashore, the Anglo American armies could beat the German army in a standup fight.