CAFE Clash

Can you pass a law that will make cars get 50 mpg?  Well yes, but don't expect the cars to comply.  The only thing that will do 50 mpg is a motorcycle.  And, much as I like bikes, I owned one for years, I don't want to ride a bike to work in a New England snow storm.  Or bring the groceries home on one. Or take the kids to youth league soccer on one.  Or bring anything home from the lumber yard on a bike.  Once you get married, you need a vehicle big enough to hold you, the wife, the kids, the luggage, the picnic lunch, and the skis.  And a real vehicle like that is never gonna do 50 mpg.  You are doing well if you can get 25 out of it.
   The Greenies, and the lefties, are crying a lot of tears now that Trump's EPA is gonna dump the magical 50 mpg by 2025 rule.  It's magical because only magic will produce such a vehicle.  In fact, even the EPA understood that nobody could reach that mileage in the real world.  They offered incentives like giving all your cars a sizeable boost in mileage rating if they would run on alcohol.  It was such a juicy bennie, that was I running a car company I'd tell production to make 100% of my vehicles run on alcohol.   It isn't hard, all you have to do is select fuel system hoses and gaskets and such (elastomers) that can withstand alcohol.  And add some code to the engine microprocessor programming to richen up the mixture when running on alcohol since alcohol  doesn't provide nearly as much heat energy as gasoline does.  And presto, magic happens, the EPA says my vehicle fleet, my CAFE, gets a substantial boost. 
   In actual fact, the car companies have plenty of market incentive to build the best fuel economy they can.  It sells.  Good fuel economy is as important as styling to customers.  We ought to shut down the whole CAFE bureaucracy, lay off all the bureaucrats, save a little money, and get on with it. 

Does your Firefox have a memory leak?

Mine does.  I'm running V52.7.3  Firefox on Win XP.  Start up Firefox and check Task Manager, and Firefox will be using 168K of RAM.  Let it run for a while, visit some websites, do whatever, and notice that it starts running slower.  Takes longer to open a new site, to switch from tab to tab.  Check Task Manager and find Firefox is using 500K and more of RAM. 
   Something like Firefox which needs large and unpredictable amounts of RAM, is built to acquire the needed RAM from Windows, making system calls to get it.  And when finished, Firefox is supposed to return the borrowed RAM to Windows.  Common coding error, program forgets to return no longer needed RAM.  This is called a memory leak.  I think Firefox has one.  At least in the 32 bit XP version.  I have a newer computer running Win10 that doesn't seem to have the problem. 

We need the Line Item Veto

But we are unlikely to ever get it.  The line item veto would allow the president to go thru pork laden spending bills and veto individual items without killing the whole thing.  The "everything including the kitchen sink" policies of our Congress make the line item veto necessary.   Congress allows absolutely anything and everything to be included in any bill, whether it has any logical connection with the bill's purpose or not.  For instance they tried (and failed) to tack an immigration reform (DACA) onto the omnibus funding bill.  Since the omnibus funding bill was a "must pass" bill (the government shuts down if they don't pass it) evry Congresscritter made sure to add his pet piece of pork (federal spending in his district) to the bill.  Result, a lot of wasteful spending.  If the president could go thru the omnibus spending bill and veto the more offensive pieces of pork, we could reduce federal spending by a lot. 
   Line item veto is unlikely to ever happen.  Congresscritters love their pork.  The thought that a president could veto a bit of pork they had worked hard to get into the funding bill just frosts Congresscritters.  Since a line item veto requires at least an act of Congress, and perhaps a constitutional amendment, the Congresscritters can stop it by simply voting against it, should it ever come up for a vote.  And Congress has plenty of file 13's entomb unwanted legislation, killing it with out having to go on record by voting against it.

Would you tell the Census you are an illegal alien?

Probably not.  I'd figure the Border Patrol would be on my case if I told them I was an illegal.  And gave them my name and address on the Census form.   
   I figure the illegals will  either lie, claiming to be citizens, (exposing themselves to prosecution for lying to the Census Bureau), or just not return the Census forms at all, or leave the question blank (which is as good as confessing to being illegal).
   I certainly would not believe any statistics based upon responses to the citizenship question.  

Out in California they are gunning for a President McKinley statue

Damn.  McKinley has been dead for better than 100 years.  Some anarchist shot him in the back, shortly after he got elected president.  He didn't live long enough as president to do much that got into the history books.  But the California SJW's are agitating to pull his stature down.   They must be out of  things to do. 

Capitalism or Communism?

Winston Churchill once said "The vice of capitalism is that it stands for  unequal sharing of blessings; whereas the virtue of socialism is that it stands for the equal sharing of misery."   Socialism being a politer word for communism.  Why is this? 
    Communism was invented to "level the playing field" by taking everything and dividing it equally and sharing it equally among all the people.  The biggest down side of  Communism, why even the Russians gave it up in 1989, is it gives no incentive to anyone to work hard.  Why work hard when you get paid the same for slacking off?  Other downsides come when ordinary fallible people take up the divide and share business.  Being fallible, these people skim plenty off the top for themselves before  doing any sharing.  Since nobody works very hard, there isn't much to share in the first place. 
  Under capitalism, people are allowed to own stuff (land, houses, factories, everything) and to keep the proceeds.  By hard work, or genius, it is possible to become wealthy, powerful, and important.  This motivates a lot of people to work really hard, take risks, invent stuff.  The overall result is a never ending fountain of material wealth, food and drink, clothing, shelter, toys for children and grownups, all at decent prices, and vast quantities.  Aided by capitalism's law of supply and demand which efficiently matches production with demand.  The entrepreneurs who create all this goodness get to keep a goodly share of it, but there is enough that everybody gets some.  Compare the standard of living for ordinary people in communist places like Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, with the standard of living in the United States.  This is why the United States has an illegal alien problem whereas the Communist countries have long lists of people wanting to leave, and not permitted to.
    This is what the Cold War was about, the Russians wanted to convert the entire world to Communism and we wanted to keep the entire world capitalist.  We won, and the wonder of our victory is that we managed it without touching off the Last War with the Soviets.   

It's the Post Office's problem

President Trump was bashing Amazon the other day. Among other things, he said the US Post Office is losing $1.50 on every parcel Amazon sends by mail.  And it's all Amazon's fault.
I beg to disagree. 
   If the Post Office is losing money on Amazon's business, it's up to the Post Office to either improve efficiency, or raise prices.  It isn't Amazon's duty. 
   As a matter of fact, back in the 19th century, when Congress authorized the Post Office to offer Parcel Post,  the original legislation demanded the Post Office set rates high enough to cover costs.  Probably because Congress didn't want to subsidize the big mail order companies of the day, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck.   Sixty years later some business writer commented that the Post Office would never offer much competition to Fedex and UPS because of it's inefficiencies and high wages.