Windows beat solar panels.

 

How to use solar energy for real.  Don’t mess with photo voltaic panels.  Go for plain old glass windows, facing south.  In my place, on a cold winter day, (10 F) I get so much solar gain thru my windows that my furnace doesn’t kick in all day.  Now the windows need to face south, where the sun is.  They ought to be thermo pane, two sheets of glass with ¼ inch airspace in-between the two sheets.  Just plain glass, one sheet, looses too much heat.  Saving my furnace from running half a day saves a LOT of expensive ($3.499 a gallon) furnace oil.  This is a far greater saving than solar photo voltaic panels offer.

  While we are at it, those big south facing windows need eaves, set so that the winter sun shines right in but the summer sun is blocked.   I am at 45 degrees north latitude (upstate New Hampshire).  The earth’s axial tilt is 22 degrees.  In summer, the axial tilt points toward the sun, giving us warm summer temperatures.  In the winter, the axial tilt points away from the sun, giving us snow.  In summer, the noon day sun is at 45 degrees (my latitude) plus 22 degrees (axial tilt) for a total of 67 degrees.  In winter, the noonday sun is 45 degrees less 22 degrees axial tilt for a total of 23 degrees.  You want eaves that give a 45 degree angle (shadow angle) to the bottom of the big south facing windows, this will let the winter sun shine in and block the summer sun.

   While we are talking about eaves, good deep ones will let the rain water run off your roof and fall upon the ground with out making the soil soggy around the foundations.  With good deep eaves you can skip gutters, downspouts, cleaning leaves out of the gutters, and ignoring all those ads for gutter screens. 

   Anyhow, good big south facing windows do more for your house  than solar photovoltaic panels.    

Stiffer Building Codes

 This morning's tornado hit has killed 70-80-100 we don't have a full count yet.  TV of the worst hit buildings show a lot of damage, some deaths, but the roofs look like they almost stayed on.  When things settle down, they might have the building code people look at the damage and make recommendations for stiffening the building codes for new construction to make the area a little more tornado proof.  More hurriquake nails?  more steel angles holding the roof on?  Something else?  Anything?

Let's hear it for companies.

 

Companies do a lot of good in America.  Many of us are employed by companies, paid by companies, given free health insurance by our companies, while the company is supplying product or services or entertainment to the most of us at attractive prices.  In America the streets are paved with gold the saying goes, and it is companies that do the paving.  Since the companies are owned, either by their stock holders or outright by their founders, or the children of the founders, the owners take home a generous, not to say outrageous, portion of the company’s earnings.  Far more than the average worker.

  Naturally, the various governments in America, federal, state, and local often do things helpful to companies on the theory that companies do a lot of good and need support.  Lefties hate companies and want to take every opportunity to tax them, regulate them, sue them, and make life difficult for them.  Only the fact that the company’s employees support their company and promise retribution at the polls (We will remember in November) keeps the lefties in check. 

   Lefties get their ideas from Karl Marx, who advocated getting rid of private property and having the government own “the means of production” and pay everyone a fair wage. By which Marx meant everyone got the same wage, from the new hires sweeping the floor, to the manager of the business.  And government got to install the managers, government bureaucrats to a man, who were not very good at running a business.  Dickering with suppliers for best price, hiring and firing, appointing people to important offices, setting prices, reviewing advertising, all those management things. 

   In America, we came up with a better way share out the profits of companies.  We invented labor unions.  The unions would negotiate for better wages and benefits, with the threat of a strike to back up their positions at the bargaining table.  Non union industries mostly pay union scale so that they can stay non union.  Management at every company I ever worked for would do almost anything to stay non union. 

Hold them accountable

 The TV people love to said it, "Hold so=and=so accountable".  Sounds really serious, particularly when talking about some no-good-nick who deserves to be boiled in oil.  In real life, we hold someone accountable by chewing him out and then letting him go.  Next time you hear someone use "hold accountable" know that they are lying to you.  The words I want to hear are "execution" and "long jail sentence".

What's a cubit?

What’s a cubic inch?  (What’s a cubit?).  It is a measure of the size of a piston engine.  Cubic inch displacement is the volume of a cylinder, measured from top dead center to bottom dead center (stroke). Another way of phasing it is displacement of a single cylinder is the cylinder’s stroke times the piston’s area.  And naturally for a multiple cylinder engine, which most of them are, the displacement of the entire engine is the displacement of one cylinder times the number of cylinders. 

   The larger the engine’s displacement, the more power it can produce.  Power comes from burning fuel.  The bigger the displacement the more fuel the engine can burn.  Rule of thumb used to be, that a well designed engine could produce one horsepower per cubic inch of displacement.  Now a days I see plenty of new cars with advertised horsepower considerable larger than one horsepower per cubic inch.  I am not sure I believe those numbers. 

   In recent times the car industry has begun to rate displacement in liters instead of cubic inches.  Handy conversion factor, there are 63 cubic inches to the liter.  A liter is a tad more than a quart.

   Car engines only have to produce full rated horsepower for short periods of time, say the time between when the traffic light goes green until the car reaches the speed limit (or perhaps a little bit more).  Then the throttle is eased back to probably a quarter or less of full rated power.  It doesn’t take much power to keep a car rolling at a steady speed.  If a car engine were operated at full rated power continuously it would break down after a few minutes.  Engines for aircraft and boats need to produce substantial power to keep the aircraft or boat moving.  Air or water drag is far greater than road drag in a car. 

Advice for Joe Biden

 Joe,  You don't ever tell the Russians, or any of our other enemies, that we are not planning military action.  You let them guess what we might do.  They might, or might not, fear US military action, but you want to leave 'em guessing.  We might just scare them off if we kept our mouth shut.  

Note:  If you want to get Putin's attention, transfer a US armored division into the Ukraine.  We do have an extra armored division don't we?

Capitalism vs Communism

 “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”  Winston Churchill said this. 

 

We used to call it communism, but the Russians blackened the name of communism so thoroughly that lefties now call themselves socialists instead of communists. What ever you call it, it goes back to Karl Marx, writing in the 1850s and 1860s, very early in the industrial revolution.  Things were rougher back in those early days. Marx observed that the capitalists, those who owned the businesses, took home a lot more money than the ordinary workers did.  Marx called this unjust (and a bunch of other things too) and proposed his solution.  Private ownership of nearly everything would be made illegal.  Government ownership of “the means of production” would pay everyone in the enterprise the same wages. 

    This sounded pretty good, and the Russians, the North Koreans, the Cubans, and the Columbians, and some others too, fell for it.  The results were not good.  “The means of production” were operated by government bureaucrats, who are never very good at anything, especially something difficult like management.  Lacking anyone to cut deals with suppliers, and truckers, hire and fire, and take risks, the businesses languished, lost money, did layoffs, or went out of business.  Government wages were skimpy at best.  Production fell off.  Plenty of misery was created.  “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”. 

    Capitalism has incentives.  The capitalists are strongly motivated to make the business a success, mostly because they wanted the money, and partly because they wanted the fame that came to successful capitalists. The more valuable workers get pay raises to keep them working for the business, as opposed to quitting and going to work for a competitor.   With everyone in the business motivated to make it a success, it will succeed.  That is why they say the streets in America are paved with gold.