Military Budget, Military Procurement

We are beginning to hear calls for more spending one the military.  The "sequester" ,a deal Congress set by law a couple of years ago, put a solid lid on military spending, and that lid is beginning to hurt.  There are calls to scrap the "sequester" and give the armed forces a lot more taxpayer money.
   Much of the military budget goes into "procurement" the purchase of food, uniforms, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and new aircraft and armored fighting vehicles.  Procurment is run by thousands of rear echelon m__therf___kers (REMF for short) at the Pentagon, and the big depots.  They have created whole book selves of "procurement regulations"  which must be consulted and argued over before even a roll of toilet paper can be purchased.  Procurement regulations support and defend a number of scams against the taxpayer.
   For instance, the JEDEC semiconductor scam.  JEDEC semiconductors must be made on special production lines dedicated only to JEDEC work.  To make JEDEC semiconductors on the regular commerical production lines is forbidden.  Since the volume of JEDEC sales is low, the JEDEC lines only get fired up once a year or so, and are shut down as soon as the current order is filled.  Whereas the commercial lines run 24/7.  The people running the commercial lines get plenty of experience, and minor tuning of the process (time in this oven or that oven, concentration of dopant gases, cooling time, lotta stuff) makes the difference between a superior device (higher gain, lower noise, better voltage tolerance, buncha stuff) and junk.  In real life the JEDEC semiconductors, which cost ten times what good commercial devices cost, are inferior in every measurable respect, and a lot of 'em come in dead on arrival. 
   The taxpayers would be well served by scrapping the whole JEDEC scam and building everything with good commercial devices from American silicon foundries. 
   Then there is the urge to gold plate everything.  Can't just buy decent stuff off the shelf, everything has to be built special for the military.  The KC-46 tanker should have taken a commercial airliner, pulled out the seats, and installed fuel tanks.  Instead, the Air Force insisted that Boeing redo all the wiring on the airplane "to meet USAF specs",  Boeing talked the Air Force into replacing the entire cockpit with the fancier all digital and touch screen cockpit from the 787.  At government expense.  Add in a rediculous amount of test flying, and the program is late and way over budget.
   And everything takes too long.  Every year a project is in the R and D mode, it sucks up money.  In WWII we could design a new aircraft and get it into production inside of a year.  The current F-35 has been aborning, and sucking up money for twenty years and it still isn't combat ready. 
    Bottom line.  We need to straighten out procurement more than we need to pour mor money into it. 

My Colleges made the WSJ top 500

The Wall St Journal ran a section about colleges worth going to.  They had a list of the top 500 colleges in the country.  I was pleased to find that my two colleges were on it.  Along with the colleges my children attended, my nieces and nephews attended, and even the colleges my brothers and cousins attended.  Makes you feel good.  It's Lake Woebegone where every college is above average.  Rah for me. 

What loopholes did Trump use?

Hillary claimed that The Donald managed to pay zip for taxes a few years ago.  The Donald did not deny it, in fact he said "That's being smart".   Which it is.  As CEO of his company, it is Donald's duty to maximize returns to his stakeholders, not Uncle Sam. 
   The real question is, what gaping loopholes did a billionaire use to skate on paying taxes?  Certainly any moderator with an IQ above room temperature ought to ask that question next time.  Another good question, what reforms to the tax law will you make to prevent billionaires from skating on taxes?
    Although Hillary promised a tax hike, and The Donald promised a tax cut, both of them could have been more forthcoming about what they want to do.  Is Trump talking about just the corporate tax, or personal income tax as well?
   Hillary's promise of tax hikes indicate her overall cluelessness.  The economy is still in the hole dug back in 08.  GNP growth is a measly 1.7%.  Hiking taxes, taking money away from those who earn it, and giving it to bureaucrats, pushes the economy further underwater. 

Things said and not said last night.

Hillary got going big on solar panels last night.  She claimed that solar panels were going to pull the country out of Great Depression 2.0 
   She is too stupid to understand that solar panels are a total waste of money.  They don't give juice after the sun goes down.  I need my juice to stay on all night.  Without juice my furnace won't run, and my pipes freeze in the winter.  Electric stove doesn't work, electric hot water goes away.   I can fake it for lights with kerosene lamps, but I gotta have the furnace in the winter.  Winter lasts a long time up here.  Without electricity the house becomes uninhabitable. 
   Which means no matter how many solar panels we put in, the good old electric company, PSNH or Eversource, has to build real power plants, enough of them to carry the entire load.  The bulk of my outrageous electric bill goes to pay the mortgages on the various power plants that keep my juice on all night.  And no amount of solar panels saves me a nickel on plant construction.  And, some of it goes to pay money to solar panel buyers, "net metering" they call it.  The cost of fuel, coal, natural gas, uranium is small compared to the cost of building the plant in the first place.  The solar panel juice supplied during the day just costs me money, it doesn't furnish dependable overnight electricity.
   Any how, a President Hillary who believes that solar panels are a worthwhile expense, is too ignorant of the real world to lead the country out of Great Depression 2.0.
   Both Hillary and The Donald came out in favor of more cyber security.  Neither of them mentioned the root of all cyber hacking, namely Windows.  Windows is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  Middle school kids can hack Windows. 

So I survived the first presidential debate.

Nobody made a fatal gaffe.  Both of them did OK.  Hillary stood up straight, didn't cough, didn't suffer a medical emergency.  The Donald did OK, stayed on point, didn't get sidetracked, or start insulting other people.  Hillary told five or six real whoppers, and Trump let her get away with them.  The post debate spinners are hard at it as I write this.  Both of them used a lot of that vague feelgood meaningless language so popular with politicians. 
   I'll score this one as a draw. 

Flying on a wing and a tube

Going back nearly to the beginning of flight, airplanes have been a tubular fuselage help up by a center mounted wing.  Empennage at the tail kept the aircraft flying straight, the way the feathers on an arrow do.  After airliners were pressurized, the fuselage became truly round, to withstand the pressure.  And the long tubular fuselage offers a window at every seat.  The window view is cherished by passengers and the overall lightness in the cabin helps reassure claustrophobic passengers. 
   Aerodynamics whines that the big fuselage contributes no lift, just drag.  The ideal design would be a flying wing, like the B2 Spirit bomber, where all the metal of the airframe contributes lift.  And every few months Aviation Week will run a classy looking future airliner picture, either a pure flying wing, or a "blended wing body" a flying wing with a swelling in the middle to form the passenger compartment. 
    What they don't talk about is windows.  The passenger compartment has to be a tube shape to hold the pressure.  If you just pressurized the whole flying wing, or the blended wing body, it would go "pop".  In fact we had that happen on a long obsolete Air Force transport, the C-133.  So the zippy future airliners don't get windows, or window seats, because windows in the pressurized passenger compartment would just look out into the insides of the wing, full of girders and fuel tanks and wire bundles and "stuff".  No daylight, no view of the ground,  no relief for claustrophobes. 
   And, IMHO, that is why zippy flying wing airliners will remain on the pages of Aviation Week rather than on the flight line.  I don't think airlines will buy them. 

Mount Washington Cog Railway

Mt. Washington, at 6288 feet, is the highest mountain in the East.  Way back in 1869 an enterpreneur raised the money to run a steam railroad all the way to the summit.  A fairly impressive feat of engineering, especially for 1869.  It's still running today.  The grades are so steep that they ran a rack up between the rails, and the locomotives have a big cogwheel that mates with the rack and pushes the train up the hill. Which is why we call it The Cog today. 
   Up until 2000, the old time fleet of tiny steam engines did the work.  Then they started building smallish diesel locomotives to do most of the work.  They still run steam on the first train of the day, but every thing else is pulled by the 21st century putt-putts.  So we (me and youngest son) got up at 0'dark thirty this morning to catch the steam run.
  It's cool.  The cars are pure wood, in nice condition.  Takes an hour to climb to the summit.  Speed is walking pace.  Weather was good, sun, and some clouds scudding over the summit.  It was summer weather in the parking lot, but there was frost at the summit.  Great views would open up as a cloud blew by, and fade into whiteness as the next cloud blew in.
   A fun trip.  A bit pricey ($69 a ticket) but worth it, just once.