Single failure must not put every store down

Target has managed to hook every cash register in every store to somewhere central.  Somewhere center broke yesterday and the day before, locking up every single cash register all over the country, forcing customers to stand in line for hours, or, just leave their purchases and go home. 
  This should not happen.  A Target store is large enough to afford the computers to be stand alone.  Target didn't  bother to do this, and it will cost them.  Certainly I will think twice before doing business with Target, lest I get stuck in line for hours, or have my account information broadcast to every hacker in the world. 
   Target's disastrous cash register setup has to be the work of ignorant Target suits.  No competent engineer would design a system like that.  Engineers understand that things break every so often, and that to tie every cash register in the company into a central point is a company wide failure just waiting to happen. 
   For that matter, cash registers used to work just fine before computers were even invented.  And we managed to use credit cards for decades before the automatic approval systems we use today were installed.  Target would do well to revive these antique ways of doing business.

Han Solo. 2018.

   This is Han Solo’s origin story.  It came out in theaters last year and some how I missed it.  I am a long time Star Wars fan, I can remember catching the first Star Wars on opening night in Boston back in the 1970’s.  I have caught all the following Star Wars flicks in theaters, except this one some how. 

   First thing I noticed is the cameraman has a new shtick.  Instead of the blackout look, this guy has a new look.  The color is faded out to nearly black and white, contrast is way down, brightness is way down, and the studio air seems filled with smoke, blurring everything out.  Makes it hard to recognize the actors, they all look like fuzzy shadows floating thru the gloom.  Only in the last reel do we get some decent video.  To see what was happening I had to pull my chair up to within 4 feet of the TV screen. 

    Plot is indescribable.  IMDB took a whole page to summarize it.  WE meet a young Han Solo, played by an actor I never heard of before.  He did not look at all like Harrison Ford.  He carries a blaster in a low slung holster but somehow his blaster is not as neat as the one Harrison Ford used to carry. Han has a girl friend, and the relationship is intense enough that first thing they do upon meeting is an impressive kiss.  She is there for the whole movie but only in the last reel do we learn she is a traitor working for Darth Maul.  We have a repeat of the Moss Eisley bar scene, a train hijacking like the one in Firefly, the scene where Han wins the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian at cards and some others too.

    They do the really fat stereo bit so good that I could hear things coming from way off the screen.  Like when Beckett busts in on Han and girlfriend smooching in the clothes closet you can hear him coming from way off the screen. 

    All in all a meh movie. 

Senate Session June 13

Senate Session, 13 June.  We are getting to the bottom of the bill pile, finally.  For openers we sustained the Governor’s veto of SB 5.  All ten of us Republicans voted to sustain, which was just enough to do the job.  This bill would have increased Medicaid provider rates.  The governor’s stated reasons were that this bill was only good thru 1 July of this year, a date that is nearly upon us, and that this kind of funding ought to be part of the budget.  

   Then we did a lot of house keeping.   75 bills, previously passed by the Senate, had gone over to the house, and the house had made small changes in them.   Working off of 50 pages of spreadsheet we plowed thru all 75 of ‘em, approving the house changes by voice vote in nearly every case.  Six bills were controversial enough to get a roll call vote.  In each case the Democrats voted it thru, 14-10.  These were:  SB 99 and expansion of worker’s compensation to cover partial disability, SB 148 that allows union recruiters access to all new employees, SB 196 that allows non academic surveys on our school children, SB 168 that raises electric rates by requiring more renewable energy, SB2 which raided the business & economic affairs fund to more “workforce development”. And SB 263 which would allow disgruntled parents wide latitude to sue schools and school districts. 

   We were able to whisk thru all 75 bills by 12:30.  The house was still chewing over more bills, so we adjourned til 1:30 for lunch.  This was a picnic, hot dogs and potato salad out on the lawn.  Would have been more fun if it had not been raining hard.  My umbrella was in the trunk of my car, way off in the LOB garage.  I got fairly wet. 

   By 2 PM the house finished up, no more changes and so we adjourned for the week.  I drove home in the rain.  Sun did not show itself until I was going up into the Notch.        

WSJ says medical marijuana laws reduce opioid deaths

That's in today's Journal.  Funny, NH has medical marijuana and we have an opioid crisis of too many opioid overdose deaths.  What's different about NH?  Or is the Wall St Journal piece based on flawed research?  The Journal piece didn't give any numbers.  Is this a reverse New Hampshire advantage?

Pratt & Whitney to merge with Raytheon. WSJ

Front page of today's Wall St Journal.  They called it United Technologies and Raytheon to merge.  United Technologies is the holding company that holds Pratt and Whitney.  Pratt is one of the only three jet engine makers in the world.  The other two are GE and Rolls Royce.  That means they are making about a third of all the jet engines made in the whole world.  That's big. 
   Raytheon started up in the 1930's making vacuum tubes and cashed in on the invention of radar in WWII.  Raytheon had good connections with the MIT Radiation Laboratory where the American radar effort was centered.  A lot of Raytheon people were old MIT grads, they kept in touch, and when the Rad Lab needed something built, they had Raytheon do it.  By the time I went to work at Raytheon in the 1970's they were big.  They had the fantastic anti ballistic missile radar project which I got to work on.  They were doing SAM-D which became the Patriot anti aircraft and anti ballistic missile system in time for the Gulf War.  Raytheon was the go-to contractor for Navy ship borne radars and later the Aegis missile systems for Navy cruisers.
   Any how, the merger, if it goes thru, to be called Raytheon Technologies Corporation will be the second largest defense contractor, right behind Boeing, and be worth $100 billion. 
   This will reduce the number of defense contractors, reducing competition, which will raise the price of defense contracts to us taxpayers.  Was I Donald Trump (I'm not) I would have the anti trust department over at Justice object to this merger on the basis that it is anti competitive.  Anti trust hasn't done anything since they chickened out of supporting Netscape from predatory pricing by Microsoft back in the 1990s.  There has been some talk in recent days about breaking up the big tech companies, but I haven't since any real action on that front.  Fat as I can see, the DOJ antitrust people simply draw their pay and don't do anything.

Budget Day in Concord.

Senate Session, 6 June.  Budget day.  Plus 200 year anniversary of the Concord state house.  We had a small army of former Senators in the visitor’s gallery and the senate president introduced each one by name.  And a short joint session where nice things were said about New Hampshire history and the progress women have made in politics over the years.  No Fast Track calendar this week.  We ran thru the 8 bills on the regular calendar, mostly on roll calls, 14-10, all the Democrats voting for and all the Republicans voting against.  That got us up to lunch, sandwiches and cookies on the lawn outside.  After lunch we started on the budget and didn’t finish it until midnight.  The budget comes in two parts, part 1 (200 pages) and part 2 (180 pages).  Over than style changes it was/is not clear to me what the difference between them is.  Transparent they are not. Would you believe opaque?   No index or table of contents.  I never found any totals of spending or tax revenues for the whole state, or even of the various departments of state government.  I have been told that restoration of 100% stabilization grants is in there, somewhere, but I never found it.  The budget is started by the governor, who asks all his department heads how much money they need.  This list of goodies then goes to the house, which modifies it to suit them selves.  Then it comes to the senate and we make a lot of changes, or we try to. 

    We submitted 20 amendments.  The Democrats voted each one down, 14-10.  My amendments, one to fund renovation of the Hitchner building in Littleton to support White Mountain community college expansion there, and the other for expansion of the Coos County Family Health Services clinic in Berlin, both perished on party line roll call votes 14-10.  Anyhow, that makes this budget a Democrat budget.  Lots of new taxes.  Lots of expensive goodies like a 1.5% COLA for state retirees.   

   It was after 10 PM by the time our last amendment was voted down.  Then we got into a complex, and amazing bit of parliamentary quibbling than ran on till midnight.  We had originally voted to “divide” the budget into stuff we liked and stuff we didn’t like.  Senate president Donna Soucy had ruled the budget part 2 “divisible”.   In a voice vote the Democrats overruled the senate president (one of their own party!) and declared part 2 indivisible.  Very unusual to slap down your own senate president like that.   Which meant we could only vote the whole thing up or down, whereas we wanted to vote for the stuff we liked and against the stuff we didn’t like.  So we called a recess and waited for the Democrats desire to go home to override their desire to score an obscure political point.  It didn’t work, and at midnight we finally held a roll call vote to approve budget part 2.  All the Democrats voted for and all the Republicans voted against.  So the Democrat budget is off to the governor’s desk.  

Why Huawei should be no way

The US is campaigning to keep China's Huawei Technologies telecom equipment out of US and allied telephone systems.  We think Huawei is a security risk, that Huawei equipment contains secret back doors that allow Chinese intelligence services to intercept our voice and data traffic.  This risk sounds real to me. 
   One of Tom Clancy's techo thrillers has a CIA agent in Beijing securely emailing his intel reports back to Langley using a secret backdoor in US built telecom equipment installed in the Beijing phone system.  Clancy explains how the backdoor was slipped into the embedded computer code of the telecom switch by a few patriotic low level employees of AT&T and Microsoft at the request of CIA years before. Senior management knew nothing about it.  Although Clancy is writing fiction, that tale sounds completely plausible to me, an old embedded systems programmer.
   Huawei is a Chinese company and it is reasonable to believe that it is tied more closely to the Chinese government than US companies are, and that Huawei employees are as patriotic as US employees, perhaps even more so.
   We should work as hard as possible to keep suspect Huawei equipment out of our phone systems.  And out of our allies phone systems too.