I borrowed this chart from the Oil Drum blog. Despite a century of oil production, the US is still in the big leagues, number three producer after Saudi Arabia and Russia. That's nearly enough to supply our own needs. If we got back into deep water drilling, did some more fracking, and drilled in ANWR, we could be number 1, and self sufficient. Why is the Obama administration dead set against it?

Can the Feds cut the deficit?

The Republican house has made a start. They whittled $100 billion (or $61 billion prorated) off "non defense discretionary spending". Which ain't much compared to $1.4 trillion of new red ink this year. But it's a start. If the Feds don't have the gumption to pass these token cuts, we are doomed. They will never have the stones to attack the big entitlement programs.
Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security eat up the bulk of the federal budget. Cutting those is going to hurt, 'cause a lotta people take advantage of them, and they will all complain mightily when their benefits are reduced. Some the the sting could be eased by measures that reduce the overall cost of health care. Allowing interstate sale of health insurance, allowing import of drugs from abroad, banning consumer advertisements of prescription drugs, and clamping down on medical malpractice suits would help a great deal.
Then we could eliminate the federal farm subsidies, the federal ethanol subsidy, federal education spending, and federal highway spending.
It's gonna hurt, but there is no alternative. We won't be able to sell US bonds at any price if the federal debt goes much higher.

Is Spring a Myth?

Terrible blizzard yesterday. Wind howled around the house all day, snow every where. Got cold last night and its still below freezing up here. Today the town road grader made four passes up and down my street trying to push back the snow banks. Fortunately my mailbox survived this operation. I got drifts 8 feet high in places. More snow is forecast. And this is March?

GIMP, the poor man's photoshop

It's a great program, it's free, runs under Windows, and it's fans claim it can do everything Adobe Photoshop can do.
Trouble is, no manual. No overview. The program has a zillion options, and it's very difficult to figure out what they do. The on-line help is full of "alpha channels" and "layers" and other strange words all of which lack a definition in ordinary English.
With all the fancy options, GIMP cannot, or I cannot figure out how to make GIMP, do a cut and paste. My needs were very simple, I wanted to print out a stone wall texture that I could use to cover up the wood basement of a HO railroad building to make the wood look like a cut stone basement. I had a snippet of stone wall and all I wanted to do was copy and paste the snippet to fill up a 8.5 * 11 piece of paper.
I finally had to use plain old Microsoft "Paint" to do the copy and paste. Fancy GIMP just would not do it.

Sea Turtle mythology (navigation)

An article in "Wired" claims that sea turtles navigate by sensing the earth's magnetic field (quite possible) and can sense longitude magnetically (not likely at all). The author is clearly unfamiliar with magnetic compasses, magnetic variation, and magnetic dip, all subjects well known to seamen for hundreds of years. Nor has he read the classic investigation of homeing pigeon navigation done many years ago.
Finding longitude at sea has been intensively studied for centuries. The only way to do it magnetically is to measure magnetic variation. The magnetic poles are not exactly at the geographic poles which means magnetic north varies from true north. Variation ranges from zero to maybe 20 degrees, depending upon where you are. Variation is measured by comparing magnetic north (compass reading) with true north. For human navigators true north is found by observing Polaris, the north star, or by use of a gyro compass (invented around the time of WWI). It is doubtful that sea turtles can use either method.
The earth's magnetic field lines run horizontally at the equator and run nearly vertically right at the magnetic poles. The angle of the magnetic field with respect to the ground is known as magnetic dip, and can be measured with a simple apparatus, essentially a magnetic compass mounted on its side. Human navigators do not use magnetic dip to find latitude because measuring the height of the sun at noon gives a much more accurate latitude indication than magnetic dip does. But the magnetic dip method could be used by sea turtles.
I doubt that sea turtles are better animal navigators than homing pigeons are. Homing pigeons are so good at finding their way back to their homes that they were used to transmit messages up until the invention of portable two way radios in WWII. Pigeons navigate partly by observing the sun and partly by sensing the earth's magnetic field. On overcast days pigeons depend upon magnetic navigation. Attaching small permanent magnets to the pigeon's feet will disable their magnetic sensing. Pigeons released with magnets on overcast days always get lost.
I suspect the real truth of the sea turtle story is that the turtles can sense the earth's magnetic field and can navigate about as well as homing pigeons, using the same techniques. I do not think the turtles, or the homing pigeons can sense longitude.

Boeing wins the tanker contract

I've posted on this before. The Air Force announced Boeing gets the tanker contract ($30 billion) and Airbus, aka EADS, looses. Let's see if the contract award survives a challenge, last time Boeing challenged an EADS win and their challenge was upheld in the courts. Barring a successful challenge by EADS, Boeing has a nice fat contract that will give them business for the next decade. We are talking 180 big 767 airliners with the seats removed and fuel tanks in stalled. That's a big and lucrative job.

Obama and Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)

On a slow news day Obama knows how to get our attention. He declared a recent act of Congress, the Defense of Marriage Act, unconstitutional. He distracts the newsie's attention from his weirdo responses to Egypt and Libya by bringing up a hot button topic, (a wedge issue) that his left wing base will love, and perhaps the independents will not be offended by.
As a matter of process, Obama is way out in left field by declaring an act of Congress to be un constitutional all. The standard procedure is to propose new legislation to Congress, rather than declaring existing legislation unconstitutional.
As a practical matter, Obama will solidify his left liberal base, attract a lot of press coverage, and outrage the Republicans. Where the vast mass of independents really stands is unknown, clearly Obama thinks this will rally them to his banner. I hope he is wrong but you never know, Obama was clever enough to get elected president, so you cannot write him off as a dunderhead.

The American Revolution

It's a DVD I borrowed from the Franconia town library. It's good. It's a four DVD set of lectures on the revolution by Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College. I've watched the first two DVD's, some 12 lectures. Professor Guelzo clearly knows his subject backwards and forwards. He speaks at length without notes. The format is the classic college course lecture, Professor Guelzo stands at a podium and delivers a lecture. There are some audio visual aids, maps, portraits of revolutionary war participants, the sort of thing a professor might use in a real college.
This guy is good. I watched all 12 lectures in the first set of DVD's and stayed wide awake. He presents the generally accepted history of the revolution, in plain and clear speech, no jargon. No conspiracy theories, no politically correct deviations, professor Guelzo tells the story straight, with lots of detail.
If you have a child looking for a college, consider Gettysburg College. If they have one guy this good on the faculty, they probably have more.

What's Boeing to do?

Boeing's best selling product is the plain vanilla 737 single aisle jet liner. It's a good plane, it's been in production for a long time, it has orders that will take years to fill.
But, arch rival Airbus has announced a "New Engine Option" (NEO) for it's bread and butter airliner, the A320, direct competitor with Boeing's 737. Airbus will put Pratt & Whitney's new geared turbofan engine on the A320. Airbus publicity claims a 5% fuel savings. It is already beginning to gather orders, dispite the fact that it won't be delivered for years.
Question for Boeing. Should Boeing start design on a 737 replacement? Downside is enormous costs, embarrassing delays, an engineering department still tied up in knots with the long delayed 787 program. Plus the Boeing engineers can't come up with a plane that would be much better than the existing 737. Plus, as soon as a 737 replacement is announced, customers will delay orders, waiting for the new model to become available.
Driving Boeing toward a new design is the fear that the new Airbus plane will be decisively superior to the long-in-the-tooth 737 and capture the market. The 737 is the market, or at least the largest part of the market. Boeing sells ten 737's for every other model they sell.
As of now, Boeing hasn't said what they plan to do.

Language Drift

I've noticed a change in the meaning of "pistol". Used to be, pistol meant the same as handgun, and came in two flavors, revolvers and automatic pistols. Recent usage in the trade seems to use "pistol" to mean "automatic pistol" and not revolver. Handgun is now the generic word that includes revolvers and automatic pistols.
This change has filtered thru to the dictionary. A great big 1967 dictionary defines pistol to be the same as handgun, a firearm designed to be fired with one hand. A newer 1997 dictionary drops the "fired with one hand" bit and defines pistol as a handgun with a single chamber, which rules out revolvers.
Part of the change comes from Charles Weaver, who taught us all the two hand hold for combat shooting. Weaver had something. I was taught to shoot single handed. Only after I switched over to Weaver's two hand grip did I win an Air Force sharpshooter ribbon. And if you watch TV, the cops now always grab their guns with two hands, which kinda makes the "designed to be fired with one hand" definition passe.

Bahrain, a strategic American ally?

I've heard both left wing (NPR) and right wing (Fox) newsies call it that. "A strategic naval base", "important ally", and some other vague phrases. This talk has sprung up in the past few days after anti government protests started happening in Bahrain. The US Navy does have arrangements with Bahrain for docking ships in the harbor.
Bahrain may be a nice place, but it's too small and too far up the Persian Gulf to be a "crucial ally" or "strategic partner". Bahrain is a smallish island (290 square miles) a few miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia. That makes it only a few minutes flying time from Iran, not a clever place to keep expensive Navy warships. A Pearl Harbor style air strike from Iran could be launching Exocet missiles before even the fastest computers could respond. The Persian Gulf is a bottle, with a very narrow neck at the Straits of Hormuz. Iranian artillery and missiles can shoot clear across the straits, giving the Iranians the option of becoming very unpleasant should the mood strike them. The Gulf is not the place to station ships for operations against Somalia or pirates.
Bahrain is a fairly prosperous place. They have a population of only 738,000, some oil, same industry built with oil revenues, a lot of tourists and a GNP of $7.8 billion. That comes out to $10,000 a head, not too shabby, even by US standards.
It is a nice enough place to attract Michael Jackson as a permanent resident.
Nice place and all, it's not a crucial interest to the United States, not like Eygpt or Israel is. Too bad the newsies don't understand that.
And, it's a good bet that the political unrest will settle out with a reasonably pro-American regime in charge. The Bahrain tourist trade is too important to drive off the well paying American tourists.

Robin Hood with Russell Crowe & Cate Blanchette

Some how I missed this one when it was in theaters. The DVD turned up in the Franconia library, so I borrowed it. After watching it I'm glad I didn't pay to see it in the theater. The movie is devoid of plot. There's a lot of riding and fighting, and shouting matches, but the movie never gets anywhere. This is a Robin Hood movie, and we expect to see Robin accomplish something, you know, raise King Richard's ransom, marry Maid Marion, outwit the Sheriff of Nottingham, steal from the rich and give to the poor, that sort of stuff. In this movie, Robin doesn't do squat, in the course of nearly three hours of film.
You know the plot is in trouble right from reel 1. Robin starts off as an archer in King Richard's army besieging a minor castle in Aquitaine. A castle defender gets lucky with a crossbow and puts a bolt thru Richard, who dies shortly afterward. Right there the movie is in trouble, in Robin Hood movies King Richard is supposed to return from crusade in the nick of time to save the day. That's not gonna happen here.
After Richard's death, Robin somehow gets the job of bringing Richard's gold crown back to England. Lot of riding, lots of fighting, and Robin finally gets to hand the crown to Queen Eleanor at the Tower of London. It's just like dropping your shirts off at the laundry, Robin hands the crown over and then rides out the main gate. Into another 90 minutes of movie. He meets Maid Marion, but the relationship is too complicated to describe here. There is a scene of a French invasion of England. It looks like D-Day, with medieval LST's, complete with square drop ramp bows being rowed to the beach. What happens to the French invaders is never made clear. At the close of the movie Robin turns to Marion and says "I love you Marion." Then they roll the credits.
I guess the last Hollywood script writer died before this flick was filmed.

The Right to Repair

Pushed by EPA, new car's computers are wired into every part of the car. When you take the car in for an inspection sticker, they don't measure the emissions anymore, they plug into the car's on board computers and ask the car if it's burning clean. If the microprocessor thinks the car is clean you get a sticker. If the microprocessor thinks the car smokes to much, no sticker.
When your car's microprocessor give you thumbs down, fixing it can be tough. The mechanic asks the microprocessor what's wrong. The microprocessor replies with a bunch of code numbers. You have to have a code book to figure out what's what.
The car companies only make the full code book available to their dealers. Independent mechanics are left looking at a bunch of numbers. Nothing they can do without the code book, which the car companies won't give them. Gotta take it to the dealer. As a car owner, you know that taking the car into the dealer is gonna cost you heavily.
The independent mechanics are supporting a "Right To Repair" law that would force the car companies to publish the full code book. Car companies and their dealers (dealers can be a potent political force) are dead set against it.
Me, I take my car to a good independent mechanic, and he takes good care of it. I think he, and all the other independent mechanics should have access to all the codes. My car will run better after Bob Warden fixes it than it will after any dealer mechanic works on it. And for less money.

Republican Dark Horse

The Pemi Baker Republican committee invited Herman Cain to speak at the annual Lincoln Reagan dinner last night. Good move. Mr. Cain is one helova good public speaker. He brought the house down , repeatedly. There was a standing ovation at the close of his remarks. He's the best and most moving speaker I have heard since Martin Luther King. Fifty years ago I attended a King rally and came away deeply impressed. Mr. Cain is the first speaker I've listened to since then who makes the same sort of impression. He connected with the rural, white, middle class audience in an obscure small town way up in the north woods.
Mr. Cain has an impressive resume, mathematician working for the Navy Dept, serious executive experience with the likes of Burger King, hosted his own talk radio show. He has zero political experience, this is his first run for public office of any sort. His trip up here is clearly an advance mission for a NH primary campaign. I wish him well.
And, you ought to go hear this man speak.

It takes forever.

The new F35 fighter has been nine years in development. Aviation Week estimates that they have 6 more years of testing to go. So far 600 test flights have been accomplished. Over the next 6 years 7800 more test flights will be flown. That's a helova lotta test flights. My old Air Force fighter squadron (20 aircraft) only flew 3000 sorties a year.
A lot of this test flying is for the airplane's software. F35 has 8 million lines of code integrated and flying, and another 4 million lines to go. Software is released in blocks. Block 0.35 is flying and only provides basic "aviate and navigate" functions. Block 1 (which requires a hardware upgrade) does "sensor fusion" what ever that might be. Block 2 integrates weapons and datalinks, Block 3 is the final release. Sounds like we don't have a real fighter until block 2. Not much use to a fighter that can't launch weapons.

You have to wonder how much of this software is really necessary. For instance the Air Force was happy with the quality of the synthetic aperture radar maps returned from test flights. Mapping is not a core mission of fighters, we have recon aircraft and satellites to do that. Expensive fighters ought to be used go gain air superiority (shoot down enemy fighters).
By the time all the testing is finished and the F35 can go into mass production and squadron service the damn thing will be obsolete.

Obama ought to shut up about Egypt

Obama has gone of TV damn near every day talking about Egypt. He ought to stop. All he does is anger the Egyptians, undermine a loyal American ally, encourage Islamist crazies, and make him self, and the United States, look clueless.
Speaking of clueless, take Director of National Intelligence Clapper. He said on TV that the Muslim brotherhood is secular, and eschews violence. Right. Tell that to Anwar Sadat, gunned down by the Muslim Brotherhood while reviewing a parade. Tell me about the secular nature of Muslim Brotherhood offshoots Hamas and Al Quada. Clapper needs to be fired, quickly.
And just as I write this, Obama is back on TV, talking about Egypt, trying to tell the Egyptians to be good and democratic and other fatherly things that must be infuriating to Egyptians. The US is not Egypt's father.

Town Budget, Franconia

Getting ready for town meeting next month, the Franconia selectmen released the town budget for next year. The meeting was attended by town employees and a handful of citizens. Essentially, the plan is to spend pretty much what was spent last year, give or take a some chicken feed amounts. Line item budget totals $1.36 million. With capital improvement projects, the library and the transfer station added in, the town budget gets up to $1.99 million.

Out of this budget, the big items are:
Police $283,221
Highway & Streets $364,894
Recreation Programs $105,211
Transfer Station $252,696

Items that will draw or should draw comments at next month's town meeting are:
New police cruiser $27,200. A Crown Vic to replace one that is only three years old with only 80,000 miles on it.
Transfer Station $252,696. This seems like a lot of money for a fairly simple operation that is only open half the time. Some justification of costs would be nice.
Dispatch Lines $28,883 I believe this is 911 emergency call support. It seems awfully expensive for just an answering service.
Town vehicles $112,350 There are Capital Reserve Funds for 15 town vehicles, which soaks up quite a bit of money.

Strong temperature inversion

The weather folk had predicted bitter sub zero cold over night. Early this morning my kitchen thermometer read a chilly PLUS 11 degrees. Car started trouble free, and his thermometer dropped from the toasty PLUS 29 degrees in the garage to PLUS 11 degrees as I pulled onto Rt 18 (Three Mile Hill Road). I cruised down hill into Franconia some 1000 feet below my place at Mittersill. At the bottom of the hill in Franconia it was MINUS 5 degrees. We had a 16 degree temperature inversion in merely 4 miles. That's strong.
NOAA keeps temperature records over the whole world gong back to the 1600's when the thermometer was invented. By the 1980's they had some 14,000 stations reporting. Then in 1990 occurred the great purge, some 7000 stations were dropped. I have to wonder what dropping all those stations did to the world average temp, when we have a 16 degree temperature difference over a distance of only 4 miles.

What's worse a virus, or the anti virus?

Dunno. It's been a long long time since I had a virus. But I had antivirus just yesterday. It started out virtuously enough. I decided to do a virus check on the laptop. It's been a long time, so each of my antivirus programs updated itself, and its database over the internet. After each update, a lengthy scan. Two hours in one case. I ran my favorite three, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and AVG. All are freebies available for down loading. No virii were detected by any of the three.
Next morning, I booted up to check email and do some websurfing. Boot was ultra sluggish, and loading Thunderbird took so long I though the machine had crashed. Hitting Ctl-Alt-Del brought up the Windows task manager, which revealed that a "process" named AAWsomething-or-other was hogging as much as 100% of my CPU time. Some hackers had "improved" Ad-Aware to always load a real time scanner at boot time. This baby is supposed to check traffic one the internet and alarm when it sees a virus slipping into your machine. That's nice and all, but it slows the machine down too damn much. So, uninstall AdAware.
Next day, machine is still running slow. Task Manager shows a bunch of "processes" named AVGsomething-or-other are active. Must be real time scanners installed by AVG. So, uninstall AVG.
Today, boot up, and draw a couple of scary error messages at boot time. One message said "Cannot find a file with a name that starts with AVG". So much for a clean uninstall. Then it started Firefox to run a survey from AVG asking why I had uninstalled AVG.
So, now I am running almost barefoot. I still have firewall up (ZoneAlarm) but no realtime scanners and no disc scanners. I don't do file sharing, I don't insert strange media (flash drives, floppy disks or CD's), the router has been doing a good job as firewall, and I have autorun turned off. The desktop has run bare foot and virus free for more than a year. Lets see if laptop is as lucky.

Egypt Part 3

Listening to NHPR this morning and I heard this from "an administration spokesman".
"Our objective in Egypt is to secure free and fair elections."
Oh really? That statement is guaranteed to raise hackles across Egypt. All Egyptians hear that as "The United States wants to impose a government upon Egypt." Not diplomatic, to say the least.
The United States should be saying "We respect the right of the Egyptian people to choose their own form of government". That is the only proper thing for a democracy to say about foreign governments.
Now, you know and I know that the United States really wants a stable, decent, secular government in Egypt, one that will maintain the peace treaty with Israel, co-operate with the US, and improve the lot of the mass of Egyptian people. It would be nice if elections caused this to come about, but we cannot be fussy. Last time we did "free and fair elections" over there we got Hamas (offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) in charge of the Gaza Strip. We certainly don't want Egypt taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood is the outfit that killed Anwar Sadat 30 years ago. Today the Brotherhood is the only political organization in Egypt, if elections were held today, they would win. In fact if elections are held in September, the Brotherhood may well win.
If the Egyptian power structure (mostly the Egyptian Army) can cut a deal and make it stick without too much breaking of heads, we are happy. We care about results more than we care about process.
Let's hope the Obama administration understands this.

County medical insurance

Back to the county commissioners meeting. The HR guy said that the county's medical plan was up for renewal. And the insurance company was talking premium hikes. I asked the HR guy how many bidders he had. "Just one" he replied. "It's a sole source procurement. One company didn't even submit a bid when we asked." Which means we taxpayers are about to get robbed again. The way you keep costs down is you have multiple bidders and go with the low cost bid. When there is only one bidder, hold onto your wallet.
This is something Concord could fix. We could pass a NH law allowing health insurance companies with a valid license from any state in the union to sell insurance in NH. That would give us more bidders. The few New Hampshire insurance companies would bitch and moan, but Grafton County could get a better deal.

Right to Work

The state legislature held public hearings on a New Hampshire Right to Work law yesterday. A LOT of people attended, so many the hearing was held in the legislature's hall, the biggest room in the state house.
The Union people were out in force. Even without the buttons, you can kinda tell who the union people are. Beer bellies are the giveaway.
Testimony was intense. The union people see right to work as destruction of their unions and get very passionate about it.
Over the course of the hearings a figure of 7 to 10 percent union membership in the state was offered and everyone seemed to accept it.
Industry likes right-to-work states. In New Hampshire, we need more industry. Our young people are leaving the state to find work. We have a terrible unemployment problem. We have a tax revenue shortfall. More industry would solve all these problems. Becoming a right-to-work state will bring more industry into New Hampshire.
Right to work will bring industry to offer good factory jobs. The benefit of more jobs in the state far outweighs a small inconvenience to the small portion of New Hampshire citizen who are union members.

The $1 million water tank.

The other juicy tidbit from the country commissioners meeting is the water tank. Back in 2009 the county let a $1 million contract to install a big water tank to insure plenty of water at the county complex in case of fire. Said tank was built and plumbed in. After which, one (or more?) tests of water quality at the complex failed. In short, good drinkable water from the Woodsville system, after passing thru the county's $1 million tank was no longer drinkable, or at least not all the time.
Fingers have been pointed in lots of directions. However the county has no plans at present to sue the contractor until he fixes it. We have a county attorney on staff, and even a county court in which to try them. You'd think they would want to work at their trade.
I fear the fix will be at county taxpayers expense.

Grafton County Commissioners, weekly meeting

The rabble rousing started on Sunday, at the Grafton County Republican committee meeting. Newly elected county commissioner Omer Ahern invited a bunch of us to attend the commissioner's weekly meeting. "Just to see what's going on" Omer said.
So I drove over. Meeting started at 9AM. Various department heads reported results, issues, and actions taken to the commissioners. With one exception the department heads all mumbled and faced away from the audience, making it quite difficult to hear them. They also spoke in bureaucrat code words making it even harder to follow the drift. Occasionally a commissioner would rephrase what was said for the benefit of the audience.
The county attorney reported on a project to acquire new case management software. The county already has such a system, but the state of NH was offering $35K of free money to buy a new and web based one. This would allow county attorneys to do PowerPoint presentations in court. Cool. There was no discussion of security of the web based system, such as what would keep hackers from posting every county case file on WikiLeaks.
Note to Concord. I think we might have found somewhere to cut $35K from the state budget. In fact make that $350K (10 counties times $35K).

To fund or not to fund, Public Broadcasting

In principle, a government run broadcaster gives the government in power a mouthpiece to win votes and influence citizens. It has for sure given the liberal greenie leftie segment of the population a place to push liberal greenie leftie ideas. As a conservative this is slightly offensive to me. But, offensive or not, I listen to public broadcasting quite a bit. In fact a lot. The liberal greenie leftie slant is much less offensive than the non-stop barrage of ads on commercial broadcasting outlets.
Public Broadcasting's lineup of shows, Nova, Sesame St, The Newshour, Masterpiece Theater, All Things Considered, is strong enough to stand on their own two feet, to go out and get sponsors just like real TV shows do. On the other hand, having Big Bird brought to you by the number 9 is amusing. Having Big Bird brought to your kids by Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, PopTarts, and Ronald McDonald is distastful.
So, continue to fund PBS, to bring me and mine some decent programming. Keep the pressure up to make it non-partisan, but don't have a conniption when the liberal greenie leftie viewpoint comes thru.

WashPo reviews the Chevy Volt

Click here to read all about it. The writer is one of those hopeless klutzes who has difficulty changing light bulbs. He knows squat about cars, and spends several paragraphs telling us so. Just what we all wanted to learn. For reading the entire article we learn zip about the Volt. We do learn quite a bit about this guy's feelings about the car (he likes it), the evils of electric power generation, and assorted fluff, but zilch about the car. He doesn't even tell us how many doors it has.

Egypt. Part 2

Some TV newsies have been calling for the US to support the Egyptian rebels. Others have been calling for support of Mubarak, likening Mubarak to the Shah of Iran. The shah was overthrown after Carter withdrew American support, and Iran was taken over by Islamic fundamentalists led by the Ayatollah Khomeni. Iran was converted from a US ally to a relentless adversary in a matter of days. They are still an adversary.
In actual fact, we cannot support the Egyptian rebels, yet. The world is full of shaky regimes, all of which fear an American attempt at regime change will be effective. The US cannot be perceived as a superpower willing to foment revolution in countries that displease it, not if we want to do any sort of business, diplomatic, commercial, cultural, or whatever. Which means we cannot jettison the Mubarak regime just yet.
Plus, we aren't sure we like the Egyptian opposition all that much. CIA has done its usual sloppy job, and we have no idea who, if anyone, is behind today's Egyptian uprising. We ought to fear that the real leaders might be the Muslim Brotherhood. They are an old and powerful Islamic movement that goes back to the 1920's. They got started as anti colonialists. Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak considered them dangerous radicals, outlawed the party, and slung every party member they could catch into jail. Despite this pressure, the Brotherhood was able to assassinate Anwar Sadat and give birth to Al Quada.
At this moment it looks like Mubarak might be able to survive, but he is in his eighties, in poor health, and he isn't going to last much longer. If a halfway decent Egyptian leader were to surface in today's confusion, we could do worse. Unfortunately, we have no good intelligence from Egypt and we cannot tell real leaders from useless windbags. So we have to wait upon events.

Egypt

The TV newsies have been yakking all day about the uproar in Egypt. What none of them seem to understand is
1. We don't know who is going to come out on top. Might be Mubarak, might be someone else. We won't know until one side wins.
2. We want to be friends with the winners. Which means we don't want to piss the winners off by supporting the losers. And we don't know who is going to win.
3. Given 1 and 2, the correct action for the US is to stand on the side lines until we know who is running the place and then, only then, reassure the government of Egypt, be it new or old, of continued US support.

Whither TV?

TV is facing the Internet challenge. Ever since the switch to digital broadcast wiped out many folks TV reception, viewers have been turning to the Internet to watch programs. For instance at my place we used to get 8 over-the-air channels. After the switchover to digital broadcasting we only get one. Lotta people who don't have or cannot afford cable don't get to see much TV anymore. At my daughter's place in DC they don't have TV anymore. They have three reasonable modern but non functional TV sets piled up in the dining room to form a modern object d'art.
Enter the Internet. Hulu.com has been offering streaming TV right to your computer. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp, and Disney and offers TV programs. Hulu is free (right now anyway) but the owners are conflicted over the Hulu business model. In plain English, they cannot figure out how to make money giving stuff away free. Competitor Netflix charges $8 a month for roughly the same thing.
One unsolved problem, at least in my house, is how to get the Internet TV signal onto the living room TV. The main (desktop) computer is some distance from the TV and running a video cable across two rooms under the rugs is un inviting. I could put a wireless card into backup (laptop) computer) and set the laptop down close to the TV. My newer TV accepts VGA (computer monitor) video. Many (but not all)laptops will output regular composite video (standard analog TV signal like a VCR outputs) if your TV is a little older.
Another unsolved problem is internet bandwidth. There isn't that much of it. If you think the Internet is slow now, wait til everyone is watching TV over the 'net. The "net neutrality" scuffle is an attempt by Hulu and Netflix to force the ISP's not to put their streaming TV on the back burner. The ISP's, given a choice between delaying a website from painting, a matter of a few dozen packets, and delaying some of the 4 million packets for a movie, are going to paint the web site first and do the movie later.
Internet TV may force the ISP's to change their billing practices. Right now broadband is billed at one flat monthly rate. The ISP's find that a small percentage of their customers are hogging most of the bandwidth. To make the bandwidth hogs pay their fair share, the ISP's may have to bill by the byte. The more you download the higher your bill. Hulu and Netflix are against that idea.

HoHum State of the Union

Words roll off Obama's tongue so smoothly but they don't mean anything. With the US about to go as broke as Greece, Obama didn't talk about cutting spending on anything. He wanted more spending on high speed rail and education. Oh sorry, it's investment now, sounds so much better than spending.
Arrgh.

How cold did you get?

Well, both Franconia and Littleton were 25 below zero yesterday morning about 8:30. Didn't warm up much all day.

New Hampshire's deficit is as bad as California's

New Hampshire is looking at a $900 million deficit this year. State spending will exceed tax revenue by that much. California is looking at a $28 billion deficit. Who is deeper in the hole?
New Hampshire's population is 1.3 million people, California's is 37 million.
Divide New Hampshire's deficit by the population to yield deficit per citizen.
$900 million/1.3 million = $692 deficit per citizen.
Divide California's deficit by the population to yield deficit per citizen
$28 billion/37 million = $756 deficit per citizen

In short, we in frugal New Hampshire are nearly as broke as free spending California.

NH Republican Annual Meeting

It was cold yesterday morning, about 4 above zero. Trusty car started right up and by 7:30 we were heading downstate to Derry at a sedate 75 mph. Google maps brought me right to the front gate of Pinkerton Academy, whereat the meeting was supposed to be held. Not a sign of a meeting. 30 or 40 other cars showed up at the same place, and everyone looked around and shrugged their shoulders. Some casting about found the event, it was in a theater up the road, only the theater building was signed as the school gym.
Meeting opened at 10 AM. Lots of pep rally type speeches, reports from various committees, and back patting talk soaked up the morning. Business really got started after lunch with the election of party officers for the next two years.
Fun started there. Outgoing party chairman, John Sununu, retired NH governor hauled out of retirement in 2008, had done a smashingly successful job, leading the state GOP to major victory. Supermajorities in the house, the senate, and all five executive councilors. Victory doesn't get much better than this.
The party establishment nominated Juliana Bergeron to replace Sununu for the next two years. The Tea Party backed Jack Kimball, would had run for governor in 2010. Juliana stood for a quiet bureaucratic party leadership that wouldn't rock any boats. Jack stood for an activist leadership pushing for real change. Both sides campaigned hard before the meeting. I got emails and snail mails by the bushel, plus phone calls from both sides. Juliana called herself, in person, not a robo-call. Two old friends, whose judgment I respect, called me on behalf of Jack Kimball.
On the way in, partisans for both sides were handing out buttons. I got a two inch round button that read simply "Jack". The razzle dazzle ran down and just about 3 PM we had the vote for new chairman. After a lengthy delay to count the paper ballots, outgoing chairman Sununu announced the results. 223 for Jack, 199 for Juliana. The house erupted into cheers. Shortly the Kimball folks started a chant going "Jack! Jack! Jack..."
At that, I figured my civic duty was done. I found the car and started the two hour drive back to Franconia.

Going up against the Federal budget

There has been a lot of talk about hiking the federal debt limit, something that will become pressing this spring when federal borrowing bumps up against the limit. If the Republican house wants to use this crisis constructively, they could say "After we pass this year's appropriation bills, so we know how much deeper in the hole we are going to go, THEN we can talk about OKing more borrowing."
The Democrats adjourned last year's Congress without passing ANY appropriation bills. The whole federal government is running of a "continuing resolution", which runs out about the same time as the debt limit will be reached.
In short, use the debt limit as a lever to lower overall federal spending.

How farsighted are suits? Part 2

On the radio this morning, Travelocity and Orbitz no longer display American Airlines flights. That will increase American's market share. At least that's what the suits running American think. Good luck to them.
If I worked at American I would be getting my resume in order.

Dr. Strangelove rides again, on NHPR no less

NHPR this morning had an anti fluoridation speaker on. He explained how fluoride in your drinking water led to all sorts of horrible health problems. He did admit that fluoride was good for your teeth, and he allowed that fluoride toothpaste was OK, but putting fluoride in the drinking water is dangerous and unAmerican.
Last time I heard such a strong anti fluoridation rant was from General Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove. Anti fluoridation had mostly died out by the 1980's. I wonder why NHPR decided to revive this mostly dead issue in 2011?

So what if they don't hike the federal debt limit?

The TV pundits get very dramatic and call it "shutting down the government" and "defaulting on our debts". Would it really be that bad?
Hard to tell. According to the usual sources Uncle Sam is borrowing 40 % of federal outlays. If we hit the debt limit, that borrowing will have to stop. That cuts Uncle's cash flow down by 40%, and he would have to reduce the check writing by 40% to avoid bouncing checks.
That's pretty drastic. But 60% of government activity could proceed as usual.
So what government activities would be in the unlucky 40%? Government suppliers and contractors should fear for their lives, they won't get paid on time, and perhaps never. Payments for projects like fighter planes would be put on hold and the contractors told to just freeze the program where ever it is. "Non essential" government workers would be furloughed. Say the departments of education, energy, agriculture, health and human services and transportation. Maybe even the obnoxious TSA.
Farm subsidies, highway subsidies, unspent porkulus money would all be frozen.
That all probably ain't enough. The next cut would be medical. Medicare and Medicaid payments would be "delayed". This would cause a firestorm among the patients and the medical business but it probably isn't as bad as the firestorm that would occur if social security checks stopped flowing.
All this turmoil will create irresistible political pressure to do something, anything. The path of least resistance would be to cave in and raise the debt limit and let the spending go on as before.
I notice the new Republican leadership in the House has wisely kept their heads down on this explosive issue.

WSJ writer is no engineer

The story headline was OK, "Toyota tries to break reliance on China." with a sub headline "Company seeks to develop electric motor without costly, tightly controlled rare earth metals." So far so good.
Then we get to some statements indicating this writer is fundamentally ignorant of things electrical. "All electric motors rely on magnets to make them work". Not true. Most electric motors, including the ones found around the house, don't use magnets at all.
Then we have "induction motors found in such devices as kitchen mixers". Not true, kitchen mixers use universal (AC-DC) motors. Induction motors are used to power fans and vacuum cleaners, not kitchen mixers.
In actually fact, very satisfactory electric motors, which used no magnets, were developed to power trolley cars better than 100 years ago. Such motors could power electric or hybrid cars.
Another type of motor, the AC induction motor, is nearly as old and, with clever solid state controllers would work fine. The clever solid state controllers would take DC from the batteries and turn it into AC for the motors. The clever controller would vary the frequency of the AC power to control the speed of the AC motor. Large railroad locomotives use this scheme today. The new AC locomotives are somewhat more powerful than the traditional DC locomotives that make up most of the world wide locomotive fleet. They are also more costly which accounts for the survival of the older DC locomotive design.
In short the writer thinks Toyota is working on a break thru technology. I think Toyota is doing a routine research and development project, drawing upon well known technology, to design a motor which will be optimum for their electric and hybrid cars.

Web site clock running slow?

Last couple of my posts are time stamped 28 minutes EARLIER than the time on my wrist watch (or the Windows time display on my desktop). I guess the clock used by blogspot is running about a half hour slow.

GSI Java Press

Been getting tired of the taste of instant coffee. Real coffee, made in a French press, is good enough for me to drink it black. The instant stuff needs milk and sugar to kill the bitter taste.
So I bought a miniature french press from Lahout's Littleton sporting goods shop. It works. It's light, all plastic with some kind of clever heat insulating fabric cover which keeps the coffee hot and your hands cool. The coffee tastes OK, but not quite as good as the coffee from my big glass french press. Viewed as camping equipment, it's light enough and it nests together into a cylinder about the size of a small coffee can, a little big for backpacking, but not beyond the pale. Viewed as kitchen ware, it's OK. The rubberized grippy bottom tends to stick to my formica counter tops, leaving black marks when peeled loose. The fabric covers absorb water making washing up awkward. But it doesn't overfill the sink the way my big glass one does.
So I use it, most days. It isn't bad, but there oughta be something even better out there, somewhere.

How farsighted are suits?

American Airlines has been making the newspapers about conflict with the computer ticket sellers, and back of the cheerful internet faces of Orbitz and Travelocity, the massive Sabre reservations system. American wants passengers to buy tickets off American's website so that American doesn't have to pay the Interneters their commission. Passengers want to buy tickets off the independent websites so as to see which airline offers lowest cost tickets, so American's scheme seems sorta counterproductive, but heh, what can you expect from suits?
The real internet player is Sabre. They own and run the heavy duty computer systems that keep track of every airline seat on the planet. Orbitz and Travelocity get their seat information and make their reservations thru Sabre. Sabre charges 3% to 5% commission for the service. In retaliation for American's attacks on their commissions, Sabre has reprogrammed their computers to display American's flights last, behind every other airline's flights.
The joke is, American used to own Sabre. Way back in the 1960's, American wanted computer assistance to sell tickets. They built Sabre to keep track of every seat on every American flight. ASR-33 teletypes at travel agents allowed inquiry (what seats are available) and sales (soon as a seat is sold it is no longer available), all in real time. This was heavy lifting for 1960's computers, like the IBM 360, linked together with 300 baud telephone modems. Somehow the computer programmers managed to do it, and the computer trade press would carry stories about how clever the Sabre programmers were and how powerful the Sabre hardware was. Everyone in the computer business back then had heard of Sabre, one of the wonders of the mainframe computer world.
Sabre was a great success for American, so good that other airlines began to pay American for the privilege of listing their flights too.
Then in 2000, the suits at American sold off Sabre, set it up as an independent company. I suppose American got some cash out of the deal. But they lost control of the backbone of their ticket sales.
And now in 2011, American is complaining about the commissions they have to pay the independent Sabre. Somehow I don't think the cash American raised for selling Sabre, matches the commissions they have been paying Sabre for the last ten years.
Most suit's idea of long range planning is 48 hours into the future.

Tax Reform, Federal Income Tax that is

Interesting article here. Author says the current tax code is so unloved that it might be politically possible to toss the whole damn thing and start over.
Good idea. Here are a few thoughts of mine on how to do it.
1. KISS. Keep it simple stupid. Every word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph of the tax code makes it harder for us average Joe's to do our taxes. And offers more welfare to lawyers. Entire US tax code should be no longer than the US Constitution.

2. No exemptions, deductions, credits, for anything. Tax is a straight percentage of your income. That ought to get rid of 10,000 pages of tax code. Scratch exemptions/deductions for children, mortgage interest, marriage, oil depletion, and God knows what else.

3. Income is income. Doesn't matter if it comes as wages on a W2 or from selling stock, it's income and pays taxes at the same rate. That will clear out another 10,000 pages of the tax code and put an end to fruitless squabbling about ordinary income versus capital gains.

4. Everyone, no matter how poor, pays something. The tax rate for the really poor can be really small, but they must contribute something so they understand the government bennies they enjoy have to be paid for by someone. No free riders.

That's for the personal income tax. Corporate income tax is another bucket of worms, too complex to deal with here.

People killing people

The horrible incident in Arizona has provoked a lot of distasteful bloviating on TV and on the Internet. Left wingers blame the crime on "hate speech" by right wingers. Right wingers blame "hate speech" from left wingers. Gun control advocates blame inadequate gun control laws. All these ideas are phony.
What really happened is a mentally unstable individual (aka homicidal maniac) acted out his insanity. It's like the school shooter cases, only this shooter fixated upon a Congressman rather than upon his schoolmates.
This guy Loughner should have been confined to an insane asylum years ago. That didn't happen because most states don't have insane asylums anymore, and the American belief in individual freedom prevents us from confining people against their will.
Plus, laws tough enough to put the Loughner's of the world in custody would also put a huge number of teenagers who dress funny, say dumb things in public, and act out in custody with them.
Sorting out the truly dangerous nut cases from the run of the mill teenage rebel would require wisdom far beyond mine.
Everything has a cost. American belief in individual liberty allows young homicidal maniacs to kill large numbers of innocent people. Deplorable as this is, I am not ready to curtail individual liberty enough to put potential shooters in the booby hatch. Yet.
It is too bad that the chattering classes use this terrible case to grind their axes and fail to recognize the real problem.

Tucson Arizona shooting

My sincere condolences to the families of the slain, and my prayers for speedy recovery of the wounded.

When is a public company not a public company?

Under SEC rules any company with more than 500 shareholders is a public company and is required to furnish quarterly reports of gains and losses, liabilities, debts, sales, and so forth. That's for openers, in fact the SEC requires public companies to jump thru a large number of expensive hoops.
Facebook is a private company with less than 500 shareholders. They want to remain a private company. They also want to raise capital by selling stock. According to the Wall St Journal, one of the 500 Facebook shareholders is brokerage house Goldman Sachs. Goldman, having a lot of cash, bought a lot of Facebook shares. Goldman has now created a "special investment vehicle" backed by the Facebook shares, and is selling "special investment vehicle" shares to eager investors. Goldman salespersons say that owning shares in the "special investment vehicle" is as good as owning real Facebook shares.
In short, Facebook and Goldman Sachs have discovered a way for a private company to sell stock and avoid SEC reporting requirements (and doubtless much burdensome SEC regulation as well).
I'm of mixed minds about this scheme. The SEC, created after the 1929 crash, is supposed to prevent 1929 from happening again. I think most people will agree that the SEC has failed to do so. So, perhaps much burdensome SEC regulation should be abolished.
On the other hand, investors really need to know if a company is making or losing money, which is the purpose of the quarterly reports. Companies would not disclose such information unless required to do so by law. It isn't fair to let one company avoid reporting when it's competitors are required to report.

Whoppers heard on NHPR

I'm in the car, and the radio is on, NHPR with the Diane Rahms show. She has a couple of public sector union people on, who are trying to explain that public service unions are all that bad. One union guy says "the two major economic problems facing the country are the federal debt and the very low wages paid to workers.
Wow. a union guy and he doesn't mention 10% unemployment? He thinks a pay hike for his members is more important that keeping them employed? Scratch him.
Then the other union guy says "unions promote economic growth and right to work states have less economic growth than good old closed shop union states."
Wow squared. The 2010 census shows that the right to work states have gained population at the expense of closed shop states. All the states that lost US representative this census were closed shop states and the states that gained representative were all right to work states.

Bills in the NH legislative hopper.

There is a good one in there. HB1485 will allow construction of new houses withOUT fire suppression sprinkler systems.
Some back ground. Firemen and fire departments nation wide have been pushing for years to make home sprinkler systems mandatory in new construction. They have managed to get the national fire and building code to require home sprinklers. They are now pushing to make the newly stiffened national code binding upon New Hampshire.
Home sprinklers are expensive, $5000 to $7000 when installed during construction. If the firemen get their way, all new homes in New Hampshire will cost $5000 to $7000 more. For all that money, the home buyer gets those tasteful chrome sprinkler heads sticking out of his new living room ceiling. Good homey atmosphere, just like at the office.
The fire insurance companies are neutral on the issue. They figure extra claims from accidental sprinkler activations will cost them as much as the sprinklers save them by putting out fires.
Me, I've lived all my life in wood houses without sprinklers. I've never experienced a house fire. I have experienced an accidental sprinkler activation at work. Damn things came on in the middle of the day and filled the company computer room with water. That was costly.
We ought to pass HB1485. We shouldn't raise the cost of all new homes to mitigate a not very likely danger. Compared to the number of fatalities in auto accidents, few people perish in house fires.
It used to be a free country. Which means freedom to install, or not install a home sprinkler system.

Things I learn from NHPR

Salvia, a readily availible and legal herb, gives a rocketship high and out of this world hallucinations. The on-the-air piece raved on and on about the quality of the high, the clarity of the hallucinations. Miley Cyrus uses it the radio went on to say.
Damn, this is the first I ever heard of the stuff. Must be getting old.
The NHPR piece was allegedly about new wonder drugs that might be developed from salvia, but it really was a three minute advertisement for the joys of smoking the stuff.
Should NHPR be hyping a new "substance"? There might have been some teenagers out there who haven't heard of salvia.

Sunday TV Pundit Whoppers

Discussion of last weekend's snow storm, and its political repercussions. Lots of pix of snowy car clogged streets. NO discussion of the NY sanitation worker's job action, a slowdown on snow removal. That story has been all over the blogs and Fox, but NBC didn't mention it once. Could it be the sanitation workers threatened retailiation if the story was aired?
Then I heard NH state rep Terrie Norelli (sp?) claim that last year's state budget was only $60 million in the red. In actual fact, the deficit was far worse, and the Feds gave NH $400 million of Porkulus money to fill the gap.

So how to end Great Depression 2.0? Pt 5

Stop wasting money on windmills, solar cells, ethanol, and battery powered cars. Jobs are occupations that produce something of economic value, that can be sold, to pay the wages. The green's pet "alternate energy" projects just consume money, they don't make any. Heavy taxpayer subsidies are used to entice people into buying "alternate energy", gasohol, and battery cars. These projects do not create wealth, they consume it. The money would be better spent on real economic development.