The homelessness crisis.

You can see video from California towns mostly showing streets, parks, vacant land anywhere full of tents.  This seems to work out in California where the winters are not too bad.  It doesn’t work in New Hampshire where the winter temperature can drop down well below zero and stay there for a week.  Nobody can live in a tent, be it unheated or even heated in that kind of weather. 

The problem has a number of angles to it.

   There is not enough housing, and little new housing is being built, and the existing housing is too expensive for ordinary people to afford.  This unfortunate state of affairs is caused by snob zoning.  Many many towns don’t want more housing, the residents think the town is too big as is and they don’t want it to grow bigger.  So they zone for nothing but single family houses, on quarter acre lots.  They zone out apartment houses, trailer parks, and “tiny” houses.  The only fix I can think of are state laws restricting the powers of town zoning boards. 

   There are a lot of unemployed people.  When you are unemployed, you cannot afford any kind of housing.  One part of our unemployment problem comes for having a lot of citizens who lack any usable skills, who cannot get to work on time, and who cannot come in to work every day, or have criminal records, or are drug addicts.  In short they are not employable. This is the result of the failure of the public schools to teach any thing of value and who waste time on lefty things like Critical Race Theory.  We could try remedial operations like the CCC camps we used to run back in the Franklin Roosevelt years.  Such a camp would take in anyone, give them three square meals a day, give them 40 hours a week of work, and offer medical care for any problems the campers might have.  The work might be kinda low end like picking up trash along public roads, raking leaves, or shoveling snow.  It might be things like digging needed drainage, or clearing land for farming or building.On the other hand CCC campers mostly created the Cannon Mountain ski area back in the 1930s.

  And we need to reduce the number of drug addicts.  Right now a lot of doctors prescribe opioids to everyone who comes in their door.  Some states have opioids prescribed in 75% to 85% of   all office visits.  That is ridiculous.  I have lived a long life, I have gone to the doctor’s numerous times, and just once, after a tooth extraction, did the dentist proscribe Percoset for me.  And the patients find the opioids make them feel good.  When the prescription runs out they start to buy street drugs, which are a lot cheaper than prescription drugs.  We need to clap down on doctor’s proscribing practices.  We also need to spread the word that street drugs are souped up with fentanyl.  About 20% of street drugs have enough fentanyl in them to kill you.

Biden offers to spend $6 billion on nuclear power.

 Good idea.  I am surprised that he got the idea past his greenie backers/controllers. Greenies have been against nuclear power, fearing that nuclear reactors can turn into nuclear bombs and kill them all.

  Greenies also fear that CO2 in the atmosphere will cause global warming and fry us all.  This is not actually a problem; the atmosphere already contains a hundred times as much water vapor a CO2, as strong a greenhouse gas s CO2, so a puny 400 ppm of CO2 is not going to make much of a difference. 

   Good thing about nuclear power is it is there when we need it, after dark and on windless days.

 

 

 

You need votes in Congress to pass anything.

    Right now Congress is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.  US Senate is exactly evenly split, 50 Democrats 50 Republicans. US house is close; the democrats have only a 5 vote lead out of a chamber of 400 or so members.  Which means, on any controversial bill, neither side will have the votes to pass it. 

   The country is divided between makers, who have jobs and pay taxes, and takers who are unemployed and drawing welfare.  Half the population pays no federal income tax.  They don’t make much, or any, money, and generous allowances in the Federal income tax for children, home mortgages, and other stuff reduces their federal tax to zip.  This isn’t right; all citizens should pay something, just to teach them that taxes hurt and should not be raised.  The poor don’t need to pay much, but they ought to pay something, just to give them the idea that taxes are bad. 

   Right now the Democrats are better known as the party of more free stuff and more taxes to pay for all the free stuff.  The Republicans are the party of the makers, they want to support business, which employs most of them, pays most people’s medical insurance, and produces the river of goods and services that make America the richest country in the world. 

   We have an election coming up in six months.  We have seen how bad a Democrat administration can be.  Every real American ought to vote Republican in November.  Give the proper party a sizable majority in Congress so we can get something done.    

Avenger’s: Infinity War 2018

    Meh.  A 12 foot tall bad guy with purple skin and a lot of muscles, Thanos I believe he is called, spends the 2 and a half hour movie beating the tar out of  Ironman, Spider Man, Thor, Rocket Raccoon , Groot, and a bunch of other super heroes whose names I missed.  It took me three tries on my DVD player to get to the end of this movie before falling asleep.  Most of the cast names meant nothing to me except for Robert Downey Jr doing Ironman and Chris Hemsworth doing Thor. 

   Thanos is ridiculously tough.  The space going super heroes guide an asteroid, solid rock, a thousand feet across and a mile long onto Thanos’ head.  For a minute we think maybe they got him.  Nah, Thanos shakes off all the rock a minute later and continues beating the tar out of the super heroes.

   They do a bit about an army in Wakanda fighting off an army of bad guys.  In other movies Wakanda shows up as a black inhabited and operated country in deepest Africa, industrialized, and equipped with advanced stuff like anti gravity stretchers and advanced aircraft/spacecraft like they have in Star Wars.  In this movie the Wakanda army, numerous and mostly infantry, is carrying short spears.  The few Avengers helping them out are carrying nothing heavier than shoulder fired assault rifles, which make a feeble “pop pop” noise when fired.  And in fact, the bad guys keep right on coming after even a lot of pop pops.  You would think that real Avengers would be carrying something that fired 50 cal Browning Machine Gun (BMG) rounds with a blam blam loud enough to damage the speakers in my TV set.  No such luck.  

550 Foot pounds per second equals one horsepower.

   The unit goes back to James Watt, who needed to sell his steam engines.  Watt was trying to tell customers than just one of his steam engines could replace so many expensive and hungry horses at their mines or mills.  We can assume that Watt chose a small and weakly horse for the comparison to make his engines look their best. 

  Many many years later, Detroit used the idea, and the unit to advertise the power of car engines.  Everyone knew that more power gave a livelier car.  They started out measuring the power of an engine removed from the car and mounted on an engine dynamometer.  The engine was tested “bare”, no generator/alternator, no power steering pump, no air cleaner on the carburetor, no exhaust manifold or mufflers.  All of these things took engine power to run, said engine power subtracted from the power shown on the dyno. 

   About 1971 the big three in Detroit got together and agreed upon a new test procedure, engine was to be equipped with all power robbing accessories, an exhaust manifold, a muffler, air cleaner, the works.  The idea was to give car buyers a more accurate idea of how much usable power their new car might have.  The other effect was to reduce the advertised horsepower of all cars by about 15%.  Although car salesmen groused about the reduced horsepower claims, all makes suffered about the same amount, so things came out more of less even. 

   Things trundled along for many years.  Until in very recent years, some imported cars began advertising huge horsepower out of very tiny engines.  One of them was claiming 200 horsepower out of a 120 cubic inch engine.  For comparison a Chevy 283 cubic inch two barrel carburetor V8 only claimed 180 horsepower when it came out back in 1956.  And that was under the more generous rating system in use up until 1971.

   The long and the short of it is, I don’t believe the incredible horsepower claims from some tiny engines.  As a rule of thumb, an engine can produce about one horsepower per cubic inch of engine displacement.  So 180 horse power from a 283 cubic inch Chevy V8 is believable.  200 horsepower from a 120 cubic inch engine is not believable. 

Teacher Training

    There has been a lot of criticism of American Schools, K thru 12 and college.  Some things we ought to keep in mind.  The Catholics run very good parochial schools at very reasonable costs.  We sent our three children to parochial schools and the experience was good.  The public schools should take notes.

   I did Framingham public school up thru 9^th grade and then Westtown Friends School and then college and finally the Air Force.  I had pretty good teachers all the way.  There were a couple of duds, Miss Waters and Miss Coyne, but the rest were all fair to very good.  But the best teachers I had in all that time were in the Air Force.  USAF ran Field Training Detachments (FTD) to teach aircraft maintenance, airborne radar, jet engines, fire control, guided missiles, instruments, electrical systems, lots of good stuff.  The teachers of this stuff were really good.  They were just flight line mechanics, pulled right off the flight line and run thru a three week “How to teach FTD” course.  None of them had ever been to college.  But they were good.  They knew their stuff, backward and forward. Their classes were all teenage boys, who could be troublesome.  The FTD instructors never had any trouble with student discipline.  The students all knew they had to pass the FTD courses in order to get promoted from apprentices to journeymen, so an instructor’s invitation to a troublesome student to leave the class was effective.  

   My take away from the Air Force was two things.  The students had to know the material was essential, and the teacher had to know the material cold. 

   Which to my mind means prospective teachers ought to major in stuff they need to teach, like English, history, mathematics, foreign language, physics, chemistry, biology?  Not “education”.  My college roommate wanted to teach after graduation so he majored in “education”.  He told me it was the most worthless, boring major imaginable, and he only put up with it to get a job teaching in the public schools.  After watching the FTD instructors do a super job with just a three week “How to be an FTD instructor” course I can believe that. 

  American education would be better if we scrapped the “education” major entirely.  

Moskva, Russian Black Sea flagship sinks.

   Russians lost a nice big modern cruiser, Moskva, in the Black Sea.  The Ukrainians claim to have hit Moskva with two cruise missiles.  The Russians talk about an on board fire setting off some ship’s ammunition.  The Russians just don’t say how that fire got started, so it could have been Ukrainian missiles.  The ‘Merkins are saying they lack evidence that missiles were used.  Not very helpful to the cause of Ukraine.  We would have done better to say nothing. 

   Pictures of Moskva show a very handsome heavy cruiser; the sort of ship a Navy will build when they cannot afford air craft carriers and the air wing a carrier needs to be battle worthy rather than being just a target. Our latest carrier cost $10-12 billion, and the air wing maybe another $4-5 billion.  I notice that Moskva, in addition to a substantial missile armament also carried a nice big battery of guns.  Modern US Navy ships only carry a single little wimpy 3 inch gun. 

   Anyway you slice it, accident or Ukrainian missiles, the Russians have lost the flagship of their Black Sea fleet.  All the TV newsies agree that this has hurt the Russians.