Bye Bye Internet Exploder.

Apparently Microsoft is going to drop Internet Explorer.  The Wall St Journal; ran a long front page article lamenting this, flavored with a lot of IE users tears.  What they did not mention was the history.  Netscape Navigator was the first real web browser and Netscape was selling it for $30, It worked, and lots of people were sending in $30 to Netscape.  Micro$oft woke up to the power of browsers and wrote Internet Explorer to compete with Netscape Navigator.  Only Micro$oft included Internet Explorer as part of Windows, which made it free.  This torpedoed Netscape’s business plan of selling Navigator for $30.  They sued claiming unfair competition.  The Federal Trade Commission dismissed Netscape’s suit. 

   Which was the end of Netscape as a company.  Netscape Navigator was very good, and a bunch of computer savvy hackers maintained Navigator for many years.  Navigator is still out there, it calls itself Firefox now.  I still use it.  According to figures I see on my blog, Firefox is still number three in popularity amount browsers.  Micro$soft and Internal Explorer, and the follow on Edge are so far down they don’t even show.   

Crypto currency takes a dive. "Investors" take a bath.

 The old line financial instruments I understand are stocks, bonds, and bank deposits.  These either grant ownership in a valuable company (stocks) or are backed by promises to pay (bonds) from strong companies (Ford, Facebook, Apple, and many more) or strong governments (USA, Britain, Germany, Japan and others).Bonds issued by dead beats like Greece or Puerto Rico are often bought, but should not be since Greece has no way of paying them off.  Most banks understand this but there were a number of brain-dead European banks that bought Greek bonds because the Greeks offered juicy interest rates. 

   Lately we have crypto currencies like Bitcoin coming on the market.  These sold because they have been going up dramatically in value.  There is nothing behind crypto currencies except the desire to buy them from other investors.  When the other investors stop buying, the crypto currencies sink, badly.  Right now the Wall St Journal has been running stories every day or so about how badly the crypto currencies have tanked and how badly investors have been burned. 

   One of my rules is don’t invest in things that have no value of themselves.  Stocks and bonds can be sold in markets that are open 24/7 and cash can be in your checking account within a day or two.  You cannot do that with crypto currencies.

 

 

What ever happened to that Supreme Court Leaker?

 You would think that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is enough of a lawyer to interrogate the small number of people who had access to the leaked material and figure out who done it by now.  And fire him or her.  And publicise the name, making any future employment in the legal system very difficult. 

Supreme Court Security Force.

We ought to have one. It needs to report to the Supreme Justice only.  It shall protect the lives of the Justices and their families, and any other important Supreme Court personnel that the Chief Justice shall designate.  It shall preserve order around the Court and on any such real estate that the court may possess.  This force shall not involve itself in anyway with plaintiffs before the court.  Its job is strictly to protect Court personnel and property. It shall not arrest people for failing to show up for a court hearing or trial, that is the duty of the various executive law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.

   Size of force, office space, funding, and equipment shall be at the discretion of the Chief Justice.

Uvalde Cops.

I am seeing and hearing some bad things about the Uvalde cops performance at the Robb school massacre.  Apparently the cops stood around in the hall out side the classroom for an hour before the team from the Border  Patrol showed up and took care of business. 

  The commander of the Uvalde cops should had been in the school, on that floor and turned to his men and said "We are going in to stop that bastard right now.  Follow me."  His men would have followed immediately.  Looks like there was no leadership and so nothing happened.

Those Jan 6 hearings.

 I watched Fox News last night. They did not carry the Jan 6 hearings. Instead they spent the time trashing the hearings and the speakers there at. Some instant replay on ABC did not show much goodness coming out of the hearings.

Solar Panels just raise my electric bill.

 Home owners with solar panel roofs can sell the electricity back to the electric company, when the sun is shining of course.  Homeowners get paid the retail rate, 25 cents a kilowatt hour, for their meager contribution.  By rights they should only get paid the wholesale rate, 10 cents an kilowatt hour.  As it is, the power companies are required by law to pay a ridiculous rate for electricity that they don’t need.  The power companies are all paying staggeringly high mortgage bills on their real power plants.  They have to pay the mortgage whether the plants are running or not.  So the homeowner’s solar power does nothing for the power company, it just costs them money.  Which they have to recover from rate payers like me.

  Now the TV is telling me that Biden is lowering the tariff on solar panels to allow Chinese panels to be sold in the US.  We will be sending good US dollars to an unfriendly China to pay for solar panels that just raise my electric bill.  Lets go Brandon.