Infrastructure should be a state and local business.

 Infrastructure is roads and bridges and dams and airports and flood control.  This stuff only helps the residents of the states in which it gets built.  I think such projects should be locally funded.  He who spends the money should raise the money.  This tends to keep the spending down.  If the feds just hand cash to the states, the states will make sure that they spend it all whether they need it or not.  Use it or loose it. 

   Congress is debating a one and a skosh TRILLION dollar infrastructure bill right now.  A good chunk of this is the federal highway trust fund, financed by the federal gasoline tax.  It was created back in the Eisenhower administration to build the interstate highway system.  They finished that job 40 years ago.  But they have kept right on spending year after year.  We could shut down the federal highway trust fund, and shut down the federal gasoline tax.  And tell the states that they can do any road building they deem necessary and they can raise the state gasoline tax to pay for it.  Want to bet that spending would go down now that the states would have to raise the money to pay for frills like the Boston big dig?

   I think the country would be well served to get the feds out of the infrastructure business.  The states will do a better job.

 

 

Compression Ratio. What is it? How high is enough?

   Gasoline engines (car engines) work by igniting a flammable fuel air (gasoline air) mixture when the piston is at top dead center. The heat of the burning fuel creates a high pressure in the cylinder and that pressure forces the piston down.  Heat energy (from the fuel burn) is converted into mechanical energy to turn the wheels of the car.  As long as the piston can travel down, heat energy gets converted into mechanical energy.  Unfortunately, in real practical engines, the piston reaches bottom dead center, after a travel in the order of four inches.  At bottom dead center the exhaust valve opens and the burning mixture, still very hot, is wasted to the atmosphere.  If we could build engines where the piston could keep going down, for maybe 10 feet, we could get a lot more work out of the fuel we burn.  Unfortunately such an engine would never fit under the hood, or even inside the length of a car. 

   It was found that the measure of engine efficiency is the ratio of the volume of the combustion chamber and top dead center, to the volume of the entire cylinder at bottom dead center.  You can raise the compression ratio by making the combustion chamber really really small, and living with the four something inch stroke of the typical engine. 

   In gasoline engines something else limits the possible compression ratios.  The piston compresses a flammable mixture of fuel and air. Compressing a gas (a fuel air mixture) heats it.  Sooner or later the mixture will spontaneously burst into flame.  The mixture burning on the compression stroke is called knocking in automotive circles.  Most of us have heard the noise, a kind of banging, when lugging up a hill, rpms too low, load too high.  Knocking is more easily heard on standard shift cars.  Slush box cars are programmed to down shift, get the rpms up, and avoid knocking.  The onset of knocking depends upon the grade of the gasoline.  80 octane regular gasoline is about as low as we go in the United States and will not allow a compression ratio higher than 8:1.  100 octane high test is quite knock resistant and can support a compression ratio as high as 13:1, beloved of car racers. 

 In recent years the advent of microprocessors in cars has allowed compression ratios as high as 10:1 to run on 80 octane regular gas.   The microprocessor detects the onset of knock and adjusts the ignition timing to control the knocking. 

   The greenies have been working hard to reduce car fuel efficiency.  They believe that car exhaust emissions of various nitrogen oxides are the cause of LA smog, and they have written regulations to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions.  Nitrogen oxides are formed whenever air is heated to extreme temperatures.  High compression ratios yield extreme temperatures as well as high fuel efficiencies.  To pass the greenies nitrogen oxide limits most car makers are reducing compression ratios and taking the hit to fuel economy. 

   In actual fact, nitrogen oxides all wash down in the rain, all nitrates are soluble.  And nitrogen oxides are good for plants; the botanists call the stuff fixed nitrogen.   When you buy fertilizer for your lawn you are buying nitrogen oxides. 

   LA smog happens when nitrogen oxides react with oily vapors from spilled fuel, loose gas caps, and worn engines that burn oil.  We could reduce smog by clamping down on oily vapor emissions and permit car engines to run high compression ratios to get good gas mileage. 

Leaf Season. Not quite peak yet, but getting there

 

Raising the Federal Debt Limit.

The Feds have two ways to pay for their many many expenditures.  One is taxes, the other is borrowing.  Right now taxes are high enough to pay for about 60 odd percent of the federal budget, and the other 40 percent comes from borrowing. 

The Feds borrow money by selling Treasury bonds (T-bills).  The bonds are a promise to repay the money borrowed within a fixed period, so many years.  The United States has an excellent credit rating.  We have never defaulted on our bonds, and the US dollars are good money all over the world, mostly because the Americans will sell nearly everything that exists for US dollars.  We have product on the shelf, ready to ship, or we will make it to order.  This is far better than the Russians ever did, all the Russians have to sell is crude oil, and most of their manufactured goods are so shoddy that nobody will touch them for any money.  We have stuff like jet airliners that you cannot get just anywhere.  We have top notch pop performers; we have best selling movies, best selling books, unbeatable tourist attractions, and stylish clothes, everything you can imagine. 

   My old economics text called T-bills “near money”.  They are almost as good as money, there is a 5 day a week, 8 hours a day market in which you can sell your T-bills for real cash.  An investor can buy T-bills and not feel he is any poorer, he thinks of T-bills as nearly as good as cash, and convertible to cash in a couple of business days.

   And so, to keep some limits on things, there is a federal law, the debt limit, that puts a hard limit on the amount of T-bills the federal government can sell.  Every so often as the feds borrow more and more, we raise the debt limit.  Such a time is upon us, the US treasury is saying they will hit the debt limit this month.  The Democrats don’t have the votes to pass a debt limit hike; they need some Republican votes to go along.  The Republicans, looking at the Democrats plans to pass $3.5 TRILLION (or maybe more, depends on how you count it) worth of pork and welfare, are saying “We won’t vote to hike the debt limit”. 

   The Democrats are crying that without a debt limit hike the US will default on its bonds.  This is malarkey.  Federal debt service (mostly paying off T-bills as they come due) is like 10 percent of the federal budget.  Taxes are enough the pay 60 percent of the federal budget, so paying the debt service is no real problem.  What will be a problem is deciding what to cut once the Treasury can no longer raise money by selling T-bills.  We are talking about 40 percent of the federal budget, a handsome chunk of change.  We can furlough most of the federal bureaucrats, stopping their pay.  We can stop paying for a lot of welfare and school lunches and other freebies.  We could stop federal highway subsidies, farm program price supports.  We will have to keep paying social security benefits because of the political outcry that would occur if social security went away.  We probably need to keep paying the armed forces, we may need them badly. 

Uninstalled AVG antivirus. Computer runs faster.

I was trouble shooting another problem.  An Internet posting suggested turning off antivirus might fix the problem.  Not knowing how to turn off AVG, I uninstalled it.  That did not fix my problem (cannot send email) but it did speed up my computer a lot.  Particularly noticeable was faster internet speeds with DISH.

The TV ads mostly sell health

 Just keeping score this evening I counted 13 ads for health stuff, pills, copperfit, lawyers to call to sue companies for health damaging stuff.  Health was the biggie.  They are selling health.  This probably has something to do with the US spending 19% of GNP on healthcare, twice what any other country in the world spends on healthcare.

There were 15 other ads for realtors, pans, mypillow, air freshener, Angi, vacation spots, watches, computer stuff, food, and foreign cars.  All of these other ads were onesies and twosies, nothing like the 13 ads for various health products. 

Justice Kavanaugh tests positive for Covid according to Legal Insurection

 And just how reliable is that test?  The justice has been vaccinated and is asymptomatic.  Sounds like a false positive due to poor quality control on the test.  In my book, you don't have covid until you show some symptoms.