NHPR and the Infrastructure

There was a somewhat confused young lady on NHPR this morning emoting over the terrible state of American "infrastructure". She never defined this somewhat nebulous term, but from context I believe she was talking about roads, railroads, and airways. She was convinced that the "infrastructure" was in terrible shape and needed massive amounts of work. Well paid work naturally.
Do I believe this? I drove to DC in May and Brooklyn in August. The interstates were all open, smoothly paved, and except where construction was occurring, in great shape.
Then she moved on to rail. The country desperately needs "high speed rail", and trains are so green because they are electrically powered. Two whoppers for the price of one. We already have high speed rail running from Boston to Washington. That's the only US route where high speed rail is competitive with flying. The East coast cities are close together and the train can match airline time. Most other US city pairs are so far apart that everybody flies. The second whopper concerns the electric power bit. Actually, nearly all trains are pulled by diesel locomotives. Only on the most heavily traveled routes does it pay to install the costly overhead wire needed for electric locomotives.
For closers, she must have been exposed to the sales pitch from the "NextGen" air traffic control system vendors. She claimed that "Nextgen" would save much jet fuel from better routing of airliners.
Not so. Nextgen would enrich a number of equipment suppliers but would have little effect on air traffic. Nextgen would replace the current ground radar system with GPS. Aircraft would all carry GPS equipment and the onboard GPS would radio the plane's position to air traffic control. GPS is accurate to tens of feet where as ground radar is only accurate to a couple of miles. However the couple of mile accuracy of radar is plenty good enough to avoid mid air collisions. The greater accuracy of GPS doesn't really do anything that needs doing. It takes the same amount of fuel to cover the distance no matter how accurately air traffic control knows the position of the plane in the air.

Chevrolet Caprice returns from the dead

Looks like Chevy wants to reclaim its share of the taxi/cop car market from Ford Crown Victoria. They may not be quite ready for prime time, but Chevy has a web site up to sell Caprices to cops.

Sic Transit Morning Gloria

Way back in spring, I fell for the flower seed display down at Mac's. I have a porch supported by a couple of rusty pipe columns. I bought a pack of morning glory seeds, thinking the climbing plant would cover up the rust. I planted them, watered them and nothing happened all summer. Not a morning glory to be seen.
Finally, yesterday, a pair of perfect morning glory blossoms appeared. Better late than never. This morning I took the camera down to photograph them. Arrg. They weren't blooming anymore. The two blossoms were all shriveled up and looked totally spent. Either morning glory only blooms for 24 hours, or the overnight chill (it got down to 40, but no frost) did them in.
Take home. Don't plant morning glory in Mittersill.

Earmarks

Basically I'm agin 'em. The word is used for two somewhat different political maneuvers. Type A earmarks are special goodies written into (or slipped into) appropriations bills at the behest of your friendly local pol. The pols think bringing home the bacon makes their constituents love them and vote for their reelection. Most pols partake of type A earmarks with the exception of crusty conservatives like John McCain.
Type B earmarks dedicate the revenue from a tax to a specific purpose. For instance gasoline tax revenue is earmarked for highway construction. The supporters of NH gambling were going to earmark the revenue from the gambling tax to the department of health & human services. The revenue from RGGI energy taxes was earmarked for energy conservation projects. The green community was outraged when the legislature diverted RGGI money to the general fund.
I believe that the legislature ought to have the freedom to spend the state's limited revenues on the most urgent requirements. The earmarked revenue gets spent on the earmarked program regardless of need.
Of course, very occasionally, a good Type A earmark comes along. Good ole Judd Gregg slipped thru an earmark that brought some federal dollars to rebuild the Litteton Opera House. The restored Opera House is a beautiful building standing upon a commanding site and Littleton just wouldn't be the same without it. So let us enjoy our good earmark while making a New Year's resolution to sin no more.

Harrisburg, PA goes broke

The city of Harrisburg failed to make a $3.29 million bond payment yesterday according to the Wall St Journal. The straw that broke the camel's back is apparently a municipal incinerator. Built in the 1970's and "retrofitted to meet code" in the uh-oh's the incinerator carries $288 million in debt. The city of Harrisburg's population is only 47,000, so each man woman and child is responsible for $6127.66 worth of incinerator debt.
They will never pay that off, so they might as well declare bankruptcy and teach investors not to fund unaffordable projects.
Let's hope our NH state and town legislators are wise enough to avoid buying white elephants like this one.

We are getting testy

Today's mail brought TWO 8 by 10 inch postcards. One from Bill Binnie saying bad things about Kelley Ayotte and one from Kelly Ayotte saying bad things about Bill Binnie. Primary is almost here. Gotta get the slams in before the polls close...

Programming the car

New (new to me anyway) Mercury came with a couple of built in annoyances. An aggressive seat belt warning buzzer, and the automatic door locker. Although I do wear seat belts on the road, it's nice to be able to just move the car into the garage or over to the next driveway without listening to the buzzer nagging at me.
I googled for "Mercury seat belt buzzer" and sure enough, an answer came up. There is a disable procedure, it's printed in the owner's manual. The owner's manual is only 200 pages or so thick, and I need Google assistance to find anything in it. Wait til I need to lookup proper tire pressure...
Any how, the seat belt buzzer defeat only requires you to buckle and unbuckle the seat belt 9 times inside of 30 seconds. And the nasty noise goes away.
After this bit of wisdom from the owner's manual, I decided to press my luck and see what it said about disabling the auto door locker. Yes, it can be done. Press the power door unlock button three times in a row with the ignition on, and three more with the ignition off and it's gone.
Just a little programming and I have a nice polite car that doesn't bug me any more.