The Keeping Americans From Working Act

Otherwise known as FATCA - the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.  FATCA was passed in 2010 when the Evil party controlled all branches of government.  The idea was to punish those ebil peoples who go overseas to work, and "hide their income" from the IRS - a problem that might impact as much as an estimated .00001% of the budget, so it MUST be addressed. 

FATCA has had the (probably) unintended consequence of making it financially much harder to be an American overseas, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of American expatriates renouncing their American citizenship.   The Wall Street Journal (paywall) reports that during the W administration an average of 480 Americans gave up their citizenship yearly, while that number has jumped radically since FATCA was passed.  In the just-completed third quarter, a record 1,426 people renounced their US citizenship, bringing the year's total to 3,221, just 196 short of the record for a full year.  It seems a lock to bet that more than 196 people will apply in the fourth quarter, producing a new record number.

As a further kick in the teeth, the feds dramatically increased the fee that these people must pay to renounce. 

Simply applying to renounce citizenship now costs $2,350, way up from the $450 fee of a few years ago, meaning the IRS made over $7.5 million just by processing renounced citizenships. The figure is actually even higher than that, as wealthier Americans who renounce their citizenship are hit with an expatriation tax that can total into the millions.

Should you be in that group the democrats considered they could tax without repercussions, you're required to pay an exit tax.  To leave America, you generally must prove 5 years of U.S. tax compliance. If you have a net worth greater than $2 million or average annual net income tax for the 5 previous years of $160,000 or more (that’s tax you paid, not income), you pay an exit tax. It's a capital gain tax as if you sold your property when you left.  There's an exemption for the first $680,000.

As the cheesy infomercials like to say, "But wait!  There's more!"   FATCA drastically increased the amount of paperwork and reporting that foreign banks must do if they allow Americans to bank there.  Foreign banks, brokers, insurers, and other financial institutions must provide the IRS detailed asset and transaction records for any accounts held by Americans, including corporate accounts controlled by American employees.  If the foreign bank refuses, the IRS can slap a 30% withholding penalty on any transaction going from a US bank to the foreign company. 

As a result, foreign banks are increasingly refusing to work with American expatriates.  Obviously not the "rich fat cats" that the politicos rail against, but average, middle class Americans working overseas:  English teachers, sales reps, lawyers and retirees - who are the overwhelming majority of expatriates.  Especially the retirees, who generally are overseas because they can live cheaper there than here in the US; the foreign banks don't make enough profit off the retirees when the costs of compliance to the IRS rules are included.

It's not much better for expats working as employees or business partners of foreign companies in the FATCA age.   Any financial accounts they can access must now be exposed to government scrutiny; not just from the US, but from any one of over 100 other countries that have signed FATCA-related information-sharing agreements with DC.  Americans up for executive posts in Brazil, Switzerland, Singapore and elsewhere have been asked to renounce their citizenship in order to get the promotion.

FATCA has the effects of limiting opportunities for Americans to work or live overseas, or making them renounce their citizenship if they want to work.  The exit tax has the effect of the Fed.gov saying, "how dare you think you can take what you earned away from our taxing authority".  Doesn't that sound like something the mafia would do? 

(From the UK Progressive (!?!) of all places.  Note that the third quarter of 2015 at 1426 is well off the scale on this plot!)

Techy Tuesday - "Seeing Through the Walls" Using WiFi as Radar

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, CSAIL, reports results using frequencies near the 5 GHz WiFi band to image people through walls. 

Since 2013, CSAIL researchers have been developing technologies that use wireless signals to track human motion. The team has shown that it can detect gestures and body movements as subtle as the rise and fall of a person’s chest from the other side of a house, allowing a mother to monitor a baby’s breathing or a firefighter to determine if there are survivors inside a burning building.

Next up? Seeing a person’s silhouette and even distinguishing between individuals.

In a paper accepted to the SIGGRAPH Asia conference taking place next month, the team presents a new technology called RF Capture that picks up wireless reflections off the human body to see the silhouette of a human standing behind a wall.

In other words, from the opposite side of a building, RF Capture can determine where you are, who you are, and even which hand you are moving.  (RF Capture paper - pdf warning)  Who you are?  They claim the ability to identify the right person out of 15 with a 90% success rate.

While the surveillance state and privacy aspects of this are obvious, MIT's press release chooses to barely mention them; for instance, preferring to mention a firefighter being able to determine if there are survivors in a burning building and more family-friendly things like that child monitoring example. 

“We’re working to turn this technology into an in-home device that can call 911 if it detects that a family member has fallen unconscious,” says Katabi, director of the Wireless@MIT center. “You could also imagine it being used to operate your lights and TVs, or to adjust your heating by monitoring where you are in the house.”

Like most radar, the software is the heart of it.  The system operates by sending out these "5 to 8 GHz" radio waves and getting reflections from the subjects.  It does a lot of processing of those reflections, and they're up-front about the weaknesses of the system in their conclusions:

1. It assumes that the subject starts by walking towards the device, hence allowing RF-Capture to obtain consecutive RF snapshots that expose his body parts. Future systems should expand this model to a more general class of human motion and activities. [emphasis added - SiG]

2. The current method captures the human figure by stitching consecutive snapshots, and hence cannot perform fine-grained full skeletal tracking across time. Future work may consider combining information across multiple RF-Capture sensors to refine the tracking capability.

3. Our implementation adopts a simple model of the human body for segmentation and skeletal stitching. Future work can explore more advanced models to capture finer-grained human skeleta.

Interesting idea.  Wall-penetrating imaging using WiFi (probably because so much equipment is available to experiment with) are not new, and while this is crude, there's clearly promise here.  This particular device is really just a lab curiosity, and I don't think it's very useful at this level.  Still, it's worth being aware of and thinking about.

 

Making Tough Work Look Easy

In Lyon, France, a new high rise office building called Incity Tower is being completed.  Like most tall buildings, it's capped with a large tower which, again like most, appears to be topped by cellular service antennas.  The tower is 50 meters (164 feet) tall on top of a 150 meter (492') tall building and the resulting 200 meter (656') tall building has the highest tower in Lyon and the third highest in France.  The tower weighs 25.9 tonnes, which raises the question of how one puts 25.9 tonnes of metal on roof that's 492' tall?

Watch in full screen.



This is amazing. Note the two guys sticking out of the base section of tower that's being worked on. A mistake with the alignment of that upper section being put in place while exposed would cut them in half. Consider that the enormous weight is a pendulum, but since the helicopter isn't fixed to anything, both the helicopter and the tower section are swinging around a common center of rotation.

It's a job that would make most people wet themselves.  Most people wouldn't have the nerve to climb the ladder inside the lower sections.  (Don't look at me.  I'm a desk jockey; I include myself.)

But this is what it takes to bring the constant connectivity everyone has grown to expect. 

Spinning Wheels

Couldn't finish what I wanted to do, except for one little task, upgrading to Tails 1.6.  I rarely use Tails, but it's there on a thumb drive hanging where I can grab it if I need to bug out and can't take computers, along with a bigger thumb drive full of things I'd like to have.  And if you've never heard of TAILS - The Amnesiac Incognito Live System - or TOR - The Onion Router, go here.  

My main project for the day was to get my Raspberry Pi running.  Unfortunately, it only has HDMI video output and I don't have a monitor available with an HDMI port.  Everything is standard VGA.  The topic of doing that conversion is really an FAQ, I just didn't check the monitors I have available.  I was looking forward to getting that little thing booted up and seeing what it's like.  Now it's looking like next weekend at the soonest.

I did get a lot of busy work done that was overdue, so it wasn't a complete waste of a day.

And speaking of spinning wheels, the Independent (UK) is reporting that there is a steady flow of the Syrian refugees flowing into northern Norway on bicycles.  (Note the article is from August 31, when I imagine conditions were more hospitable in the arctic regions of Norway).  They explain that the Storskog border post between Norway and Russia is not open to pedestrians, and passports are checked for people on foot or in cars but not on bicycles. 

Norway's The Local reports:

The Storskog border station -- just two hours drive from the Arctic City of Murmansk in Russia's far north -- is Norway's only legal border crossing with Russia.

According to border agreements, it is illegal either to cross the border on foot or to give someone without papers a lift, a problem Syrian refugees have sidestepped by using bicycles.

Could it be a silly legal loophole?  They'll check your passport if you're in a car, but won't even try to stop a bicycle?   What's next?  Anyone on a skateboard can come into the country?  Anyone on a hang glider? Who would think that they don't check the documents of someone coming across the border, just because they're on a bicycle?  Note that it doesn't say they're using the bikes to cross elsewhere, like using an off road bike to cross away from the official border crossing. 

Shifting back to the Independent: 

Refugees are reportedly using bicycles to cross the Arctic border into Norway to exploit a legal loophole in the country's immigration controls.
...
Police Chief Inspector Goeran Stenseth said 151 people had crossed this year near the northeastern Norwegian town of Kirkenes, 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) northeast of Oslo, most of them during July and August.

The Daily Mail posts this picture of what it says are refugees on bikes that are obviously much too small for them, and report that many don't seem to know how to balance themselves.  Stolen kids' bikes?  Someone making some money rounding up (stealing) kids' bikes and selling them to the refugees? 

Sometimes I just have no words...

China And US Mirror Each Other

It's easy to find economic pundits saying China is in economic trouble; heck, I've done it myself.  To some degree they are in trouble!  That CNN article (first link) points out the China's government lies about their economic statistics all the time.  China's government manipulates their stock markets - and their citizens - to make it look better.  Critics will also point out that they're up to their eyeballs in debt.

I say: big deal.  Our government lies to us about every economic statistic; the Federal reserve manipulates the stock market every day and has been doing so for ages; and when it comes to debt, we're the most indebted nation in recorded history.  All of those things make them exactly like us.

China has a corrupt, autocratic government that pretends to embrace the free market but is really all about the leaders' personal benefits.  Again, just like us. 

Keith Fitz-Gerald of Money Morning writes at Bonner and Partners

Washington openly manipulates every data stream dished out to the American public as gospel. There are seasonable adjustments, cost-of-living improvements, and constantly changing calculations.

The U.S. government, for example, has changed the way it calculates the Consumer Price Index (CPI) more than 20 times in the past 30 years. Labor stats are calculated six different ways by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Gross Domestic Product is deflated or inflated at will depending on “methodological changes” over time. It’s revised incessantly.

To be fair, though, every country on earth manipulates its currency to try to gain advantage.  We're currently in a worldwide currency war consisting of just this sort of action.  Countries are trying to devalue their currencies to make their exports more attractive, or like the Fed, deliberately trying to import inflation from other countries because of their dire fear of deflation. 

Like Fitz-Gerald, I think China's problems are short term.  The demographics are on their side: they have a population that is growing and they're an enormous country.  They now have the world’s largest middle class at more than 600 million people. That will grow to more than 1 billion by 2020.

By 2020, I predict China will be the world's largest economy, and the US will have continued its decline. 

Wall Street Journal.

Putting Robots Out of Work

The concept that robots, or "computers" would replace all of the workers in companies is actually older than the word "robot".  The name was first used in the 1920 play "Rossum's Universal Robots", or R.U.R, by the Czech author Karel Capek, but before that the idea of automata as some some sort of servant or slave goes back to early societies before Christ. 

Despite the optimistic writings of Isaac Asimov and others, robots have not developed intelligence, even with the advance of Moore's Law and increases in computer power.  No robot has developed sentience, yet.  (If they have, they're keeping quiet about it - which is a pretty darned good sign of sentience!)  

Trade magazine New Equipment Digest reports on a robotics trade show recently held in Milan, Italy, and the emerging direction of creating man/robot teams, where each does what they're good at.  Something I find interesting about this is that it appears to be the result of our old friend, The Law of Unintended Consequences.  See, robots are strong and good at doing a lot of repetitive tasks, but because they aren't sentient, they're a workplace hazard.  A robot going through its programmed motions doesn't recognize people as things apart from what it normally works on, and will hit or knock over people while going through its motions.  The first couple of people to be killed by robots were killed in just this way.  The story of Robert Williams, the first (known) person killed by a robot just doesn't have any details, other than it being on a Ford assembly line.  The better known second victim, Kenji Urada, was documented better.  He died on an assembly line at Kawasaki Heavy Industries, when the robot arm he was working on and hadn't properly made safe pushed him into an industrial grinding machine (gruesome, I'm sure). 

Workplace safety has pushed robots into areas where humans don't go.  Factories will have fenced off areas that are No Go zones until the robots are turned off.  Enter the more nimble, smaller, less powerful robots on display. 

This CR-35iA industrial robot by industry giant Fanuc.

This one is a normal, high capacity, yellow Fanuc covered in a soft green foam and equipped with safety stop protections in case of collision.

Basically, rather than starting from scratch to create a new kind of robot to compete in the collaborative race, Fanuc simply made its own proven technology collaborative. Which is pretty clever.

As a result, the company has a sturdy-yet-safe robot with a massive 77 lb payload (compared to the 10-25 lb usually found in the collaborative market).

The author at New Equipment Digest takes the CR-35iA for a spin, finds it incredibly intuitive to learn, easy to control, and learns the operator controls he's using aren't going to be out for a while, but offer a big advantage:

Using the controller, which won't be out until next year, assemblers can grab heavy components like seats and tires with the CR, and place them wherever they go without breaking their backs in the process. Sort of like an external bionic arm.

Even better, he told me that the only way to do this in a factory today is with normal high-powered robots, which means all of the necessary safety cages and precise engineering that they require.

The CR-35iA, however, allows workers to do this job themselves, skipping the process gap between placement and installation, which could help speed up assembly by a few seconds.

That's right. This robot isn't putting humans out of work, it's putting robots out of work.   

A common theme in design is that the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the effort.  I can design you a radio for any service that will work pretty good, and get it to you pretty darned quick.  It's when you start adding new requirements or ones that conflict with others that it gets harder.  Similarly, getting robots to do every last detail in a long string of complex assembly operations may push the costs into prohibitive realms, but having a robot that's easier to work with, doesn't require as much programming, and doesn't need restrictive safety areas around it, could be just the ticket. 

I've commented here before that I've spent 40 years working in the electronics manufacturing industry in this country and one of the only things that has remained constant is people telling me the electronics manufacturing industry is leaving America.  That goes for just about every industry, from companies that manufacture electronics components to car parts to bicycles.  The US has a very strong manufacturing sector.  It's also true, though, that more automation has displaced workers.  The other term for that is "increasing productivity" which is an imperative.  It appears from this NED article that the robotics industry is increasingly looking not to replace workers, but allow them to be more productive by augmenting them.  

About Being Out Last Night

It's sort of a bucket list moment.  One of my favorite guitarists was in town and we found out early enough to get tickets.

Mark Knopfler's Tracker Tour came to town last night.  This photo is from a stop in Germany earlier in the year.  That's Mark, of course, in the bright light with the red Fender Stratocaster, and while this shows three members of the band, most of the time there were eight musicians on stage.  Nine when the saxophonist came out for a few songs.  Very good back up and a leader who has to be on anyone's short list of the greatest living guitarists.   

Techy Tuesday - Homemade Railgun

A friend at work sent me this link to a story about a guy who built his own railgun.  Railguns are popular research topics for the military, and use electric energy to accelerate the projectile.  Here, the builder used six large, 350V, 5500uF capacitors (in blue), which weigh 20lbs combined and can deliver 1800 Joules of energy to the projectile.  The gun is powered by a 12V lithium-polymer battery that’s stepped up to 1050V using a micro-inverter and a transformer before charging those capacitors.

Despite the fact that it doesn't appear to be painted or finished, it looks a lot like a gun from the first Men in Black movie.   The article is short on details, but says

The aluminum sabot flies out of the gun at 250 meters per second (559 mph), hits a plywood target with a steel backing approximately three feet away, and bounces off the wood after leaving a 1/2-inch deep indent

It doesn't say how much that sabot weighed, but we can look at what little information we have.  To begin with, 250 meters per second converts to 820 feet per second.  That's around the muzzle velocity of a 45 ACP handgun.  Obviously the impact energy depends on the mass being thrown, which they don't tell you.  A 12 ga. slug goes about 1600 fps and imparts almost 2600 ft-lbs at 25 yards (both of these courtesy of the Federal Premium online calculator)  That slug weighs about 1 1/4 ounce.  That 45 ACP round at 820 fps is going to be weigh a bit under 1/2 (42%) what the 12 ga. slug weighs and deliver a bit over 1/8 (14%) of the energy.

Dean Weingarten at AmmoLand reports he was able to find the mass of the railgun's sabot.  It's tiny.  Far, far less than the 230 grain FMJ I looked at on the ballistics calculator.

I was able to find the mass of the projectile with some Internet research.
...
The projectile mass was 1.1 grams, about 16.97 grains, so the total energy would be about 25 foot pounds.  That is about the same as the most powerful common air rifles, for the minimum velocity listed.  [Emphasis added - SiG]

For comparison, Federal's bulk 36 grain hollowpoint .22LR has a muzzle energy of 127 foot pounds.  

From Crosman:

A powerful .22 caliber air rifle such as a Benjamin Discovery or Marauder fires a 14.3 grain pellet with a muzzle velocity of approximately 900 ft/sec. ... about 26 ft lbs.

Weingarten points out that this railgun is only operating at 1.6% efficiency in converting the electrical energy into forward movement, a big issue in railgun development. 

Considering that this expensive, over 20 pound, rifle doesn't outperform a common .22LR out of a rifle, I'd say railguns have quite a way to go before they're practical.  I don't want to discourage the guy; the gun has an epic coolness factor, and as far as making a usable firearm goes, he's got to start somewhere! 

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This is post #1900 here, and may well have to stay alone a few days.   I expect to be unavailable tomorrow and Thursday.  Y'all have fun! 

An Interesting Anniversary

Miguel at Gun Free Zone reminds me that this is the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Wilma hitting South Florida. 

Wilma was a strong Category 3 storm when it came ashore the west coast of Florida (Cape Romano, part of Marco Island) with 120 mph winds, but it was assisted by a strong steering current pushing it to the Northeast.  Wilma still holds the record for the lowest barometric pressure ever measured in the Atlantic Basin, at 882 millibars (26.05 inches Hg) while still in the Caribbean basin, and the cost across all affected areas goes up to $29.394 Billion dollars. 

All those stats aside, the fact that amazes me the most is not Wilma herself, but the fact that Wilma was the last hurricane to hit Florida - 10 years ago - and the last major hurricane to hit the continental US.  While Hurricane season in the Atlantic goes through November and has a month left, the fact that Wilma was the "W" storm and the most recent Atlantic storm was a "J" storm (Joaquin) tells you lots about the relative activity between 2005 and now. 

Wilma wasn't a major storm for us, although I see from a NOAA web page, that the Kennedy Space Center (about 30 miles north of home) recorded the highest rain total from Wilma at 13.26", and there was a wind gust of 94 MPH.  I think of it as just another tropical storm.  My brother in South Florida lives much closer to Wilma's path and lost his roof shingles, which had just been replaced after the 2004 hurricanes. 

My main memory from Wilma was that the frontal passage that followed the storm brought in strong, cool NW winds, and while hosing leaves and debris off the cars, it was the only tropical storm cleanup ever that I felt cold. 

Bad Memes Are Like Zombies

They keep coming back.  This week's bullshit is that restraining spending so that our budget remains under the debt limit means the government goes into default.  That is not default - by definition.    Default would be refusing to pay the payments due on our debt - the interest on the debt.  Rather than default, this would be better called "living within their means" or "being responsible".  We will not default unless the administration chooses to.  The Fed.gov will get approximately nine times more tax revenue than the interest due, so we don't default unless congress chooses to spend the tax money on the equivalent of hookers and blow instead of paying the debt.  According to the Fed.gov themselves, this fiscal year our interest on debt is $402,435,356,075.49 or to put it more conveniently, $402 Billion.  Estimating the federal income tax collected through the end of the year based on the Debt Clock shows tax revenues will be $3637 Billion, almost exactly nine times the amount needed to avoid default.  

I know I've written about this endlessly in the five years I've been blogging, but I'm pretty sure I have a lot of new readers and I have to assume they haven't read the many posts I've done on this.   (Example from four years ago)   Let me recap a little.

First, although they're going to make a big deal about the debt ceiling, I believe that the US effectively doesn't have a ceiling at all.  I say that because there isn't one time in history that we've  held the debt ceiling in place.  Whenever it comes up, our "representatives" sainted leaders vote to raise the debt limit.  Six times in history, they didn't pass the debt ceiling increase in time, and the country continued to run without going into default.  Either that, or they simply ignore the ceiling and allow the Treasury department to use "extraordinary measures".  If you or I did that, instead of "extraordinary measures" they would say we "lie, cheat and steal".   In July of 2013, I did a story on the Treasury Department's spending clock suddenly stopping from May of '13 until the debt ceiling got raised.  Newsflash: the spending didn't stop; they just lied about it.

Second, I believe that since they go into these times knowing with 99.9% certainty that they will raise the ceiling, this is all theater so that each side of the two-headed ruling class monster can claim to be heroes to their supporters. 

So what's the big picture:

• This is all theater
• They're going to raise the ceiling because they don't have the restraint of a drunken sailor, who, after all, stops drinking when he's broke.  
• The government is not really going to shut down and it absolutely isn't going to get smaller in any meaningful sense because to do that would hurt the ruling class.  
• Corollary: the only way the government shuts down is if one side or other believes they get a lot of political points by doing so.  I actually think the president wants a shutdown so that he can shame and blame the Stupid party.  The Stupid party is actually so stupid they think they can make points in the press that it's the president shutting it down.  
• The president says that these discussions may lead to another 2008 economic crisis: find me someone who says debt ceiling discussions had anything to do with it.  As you can see from the above graph, the debt ceiling ratcheted up without interruption throughout that time period.
• This only ends when the world decides to stop putting up with our stupidity and stops using dollars.  This is not just theoretically possible, all the major players are moving in that direction now.  That could happen this year or not for a few years to come.

As I say, I've written an acre of posts on this.  I just felt obligated to pass on a few points for new readers and new liberty-minded people. 

Busy Couple of Days

Today was rather unusual day for me at Major Avionics Corporation.  Our products are required to be certified by the FCC, and due to all of the things that have to be completed before the data can be taken for their tests, FCC tests tend to be among the last things we do during product development.  As anyone who has worked in any industry will instantly know, that means the project is just about guaranteed to be running late and almost out of money by the time this needs to be done.  So they want it done in one pass, as fast as can be, with no room in the schedule for finding and fixing a problem. 

Lately, we've been contracting with a one-stop-shop that does a lot of the nasty paperwork for us (for a fee, of course).  They know the technical testing issues very well, but naturally don't know about the system they're testing, so we need to send a technician with all the hardware and software they'll need to run our system, and we also typically send a systems engineer to work with their test engineer.  Now, I'm not considered a systems engineer; I'm a design engineer.  On the other hand, I know the radio aspects of the radar better than the systems engineers.  After rumblings and rumors that it was going to happen, yesterday I was directed to be at the testing facility to answer any technical questions the testing authority might need to ask.  The kicker is we had the place reserved for one day (see "almost out of money", above) and the place is near Gainesville, Florida, just short of 200 miles from home.  I needed to be there when they were ready for us at 9 AM and to stay until we were done or they kicked us out.  That meant I was on the road to Gainesville a few minutes after 6 AM, instead of getting out of bed for work like usual, and was figuring I'd be home by 6 PM as best case.   As it worked out, I was there by close to 9:30 and I made it home by 6:15.  The day went as well as it could have, although I don't know if we passed.  The contractor needs to do post-processing on the data they took to see.  But I've never seen a box that passed our internal qualifications testing to aviation industry standards then fail the FCC tests. 

This probably sounds like I'm bitching; I'm not.  It's part of working for a living, which most of us still are.  I'm just making excuses for why I haven't put up any free ice cream since Wednesday.  So here: the essence of the 2016 presidential campaign, as seen by Rick McKee:

The Comedians Get Things Right

It's a little long to embed here, but comedian Steven Crowder does a good look at Comrade Bernie Sanders in this video.



Also, a pretty good impression of Sanders.

I'll just add that someone did some math on Sanders' promises and said they add up to $18 T over 10 years.  As always, when I hear numbers like that I don't assume that means $18T divided by 10 and he increases the debt $1.8 T per year.  And I don't believe anyone can predict 10 years out in the budget with any reasonable certainty.  That said, Crowder assumes that linear, 1/10 every year.  He still pretty well demolishes Sanders.

Techy Tuesday - Single Board Computers For Fun and Profit

Every now and then something comes up that would be nice to throw a controller on.  Maybe it's some home automation tasks, maybe it's something like adding a TOR relay, who knows?  It's just something you don't want to tie up a computer for.  Enter the cheap single board computer (SBC) like the Raspberry Pi mentioned in that first link.  

With the Pi, now at  Model 2B, these are fully functional computers that are on a par with good cell phones; in other words, a functional desktop PC from around 10 years ago - for $35.  It features a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU, 1 GB of SDRAM, USB and Ethernet connectors.  It can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10.  Yes, you read that right; this single board computer can run Windows 10 (not sure why you'd want to, but maybe that's just me).  Raspberry Pi is the most popular single board computer, and you may be able to simply search for an app for something you'd like to do and find it in the community. 

Besides the Raspberry Pi, the other big name in this space is the Arduino.  Compared to the Raspberry Pi, they appear aimed more at controlling things.  Instead of four USB and an Ethernet connectors, they have pin sockets.  A beginner package, the Uno, is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328P. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz quartz crystal, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.. You can tinker with your UNO without worrying too much about doing something wrong, worst case scenario you can replace the chip for a few dollars and start over again.

Trade magazine EE Times runs an article on a group of these single board computers.  Between the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino, you'll probably find more source code and more projects than for any other boards.  Or all of them put together.

An interesting idea is the HummingBoard-Gate, a computer that emphasizes small add-on sensors called Click Boards.  There dozens: a GPS receiver, Stepper Motor Driver (hmm - one of these for each axis of a CNC system?), three axis accelerometer; over 150 to choose from.  You could also connect your own basic sensors using a 36-pin GPIO header and 4 USB ports.  However, the board doesn’t come with any memory storage and starts off with a single-core Solo chip and 512 RAM for a whooping $50.  Adding a faster processor, storage, and WiFi and Bluetooth and bring your investment up to $235—that’s before the addition of sensor modules.  As you can see, The HummingBoard-Gate adds all the flexibility you could want, but it brings a price.

I've still never played around with any of these SBCs.  At $40, I think a Raspberry Pi is in the near future.

 From

This Changes Things

The Times of Israel reports that significant amounts of oil have been discovered in the tiny country, specifically in the Golan Heights region in the north of the country, bordering Syria.

The layer is ten times larger than the average oil find worldwide, Bartov said, “and that’s why we’re talking about significant amounts. What’s important is to know that there’s oil in the rock, and this we know.”

They note:

Three drilling sites on the Golan have uncovered what is potentially billions of barrels of oil, enough to fulfill the Israeli market’s 270,000-barrel-per-day consumption for a very long time, the report claimed.

You might recall that a couple of years ago, Israel announced they had discovered a deep offshore oil and gas deposit offshore from the city of Haifa, named the Tamar and Leviathan fields.  At that time, the press were saying:

“The quantity of gas discovered in the licenses, and the high probabilities, make it the third largest offshore discovery to date,” according to Israel Opportunity chairman Ronny Halman, quoted by Globes.

He added, ”This quantity guarantees Israel's energy future for decades, and makes it possible to export Israeli gas, and boost the state's revenues without worrying about gas reserves for domestic consumption."

Sounds like Israel is poised to move from net energy importer to net exporter. Which has to have an effect on global geo- and petropolitics.

Drilling test holes on the Golan Heights. 

The Saudi Plan To Bankrupt American Oil

15 months ago, if you'll recall, oil was $102/bbl.  A moment ago, a check showed it at $47.35.  In between these lies a story and some lessons.

The first thing to note is that when oil had been around $100 for a while, everyone thought the days of sub-80 or $90 oil were long gone and they'd never be seen again.  Today, you'll read pundits saying that oil will stay below $60 and we'll never see $100 oil again.  That epic shortsightedness is lesson #1. 

Last December, I ruminated a bit on the price of oil and what may be going on.  This weekend, I see a summary by Jim Rickards that makes it appear I was right all along.  I wrote:

I think there can be a bigger game going on here, though.  The principal power in OPEC is the Saudis.  The Saudis have no use for the Iranians and are frankly terrified of a nuclear Iran.  You can bet your butt that if Iran goes nuclear, the Saudis will go nuclear as well.  For a country that nominally hates Israel, they've quietly agreed to allow Israel to over fly Saudi territory if needed to attack Iran ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend" in action?).  They also want Assad out of Syria and Russia is propping up both Iran and Syria.  I think it's entirely possible that Saudi Arabia could be playing the game to get Putin out of the area, and try to collapse the governments of both Iran and Syria.  Russia's economy is already showing signs of trouble.  If they collapse Putin himself, get him ousted by ballot, by revolt or worse, I think the Kingdom would view that as a good thing.  I also can't imagine the Saudis would be too upset if they found a price for oil that shut down American shale oil production. 

I included this handy graph of the price to balance the national budgets of several oil producers.

A vitally important piece of information which was missing from this chart was the cost per barrel of fracked oil.  What does it cost to produce a barrel in the American and Canadian oil fields?  The fracking industry assumed oil would remain in a range of $70 to $130 per barrel and based their business model on this. Over $5 trillion was spent on exploration and development, much of it in fields like the Bakken formation and the Colorado/Wyoming Niobrara oil shale.  

As I said last December, OPEC, and particularly Saudi Arabia, found themselves in a tight situation: not making enough profit from their sales to be fully comfortable.  Note I said enough profit.  Saudi Arabia is unique in actually being able to produce oil at a profit for as little as $10/bbl!  One thing was abundantly clear, though, unless they did something to strike back at the American production, they were condemned to low oil prices for the foreseeable future.  As Rickards says, the Saudis could survive with oil at $30, but it would be hell on their budget.  $80 would be good for their budget, but would probably allow the American frackers enough breathing room to stay alive.  Instead, they went for a price comfortably below that $70/bbl price they believed was the price of American oil. 

It turned out that the optimal solution for the Saudi problem was $60 per barrel. A price in the range of $50 to $60 per barrel would suit the Saudis just fine. That was a price range that would eliminate frackers over time but would not unduly strain Saudi finances

Oil at $60 has the added bonus of hurting both Russia and Iran, as well America.  It's win-win-win for the Saudis.  If you look at the records of the past year, the price of oil hit the Saudi target price of $60 per barrel by the end of 2014. But it kept going down. The price hit $45 per barrel in January 2015 and $40 per barrel by this past summer. That was due to normal market overshooting and momentum trading. It was also due to the fact that desperate frackers actually increased production to meet the interest payments on their debt even thought they were in the process of going broke.

Assuming war doesn't break out in the Persian Gulf region, I can see oil staying in the ~$45 to $60 range for a while; specifically, until the American fields are largely shut down and the workers moved back out of North Dakota and other places.  It will stay there until it will take a couple of years for the US industry to get fully mobilized again.  For planning purposes, figure some time in 2017.  

If you have enough Ferengi in you to be wondering how you can make some money out of this, should this all be true and not just fever dreams from your humble blogger (and, strangely, Jim Rickards), consider the following scenario.  In gold and silver mining, companies are broadly sorted by size into what are called juniors and majors.  Juniors are the startups; the hotshot geologist and a small group who go prospecting and find the new deposits to mine.  The majors leave this work to them because it's highly risky.  A lot of juniors go broke working on a deposit that doesn't end up being worthwhile.  On the other hand, once the juniors find a good deposit and start extracting the gold, the majors buy them out.  There's a similar stratification in the oil world, too, with smaller companies and the vast multinational majors. 

In this case, the juniors are likely to get squeezed out.  The small budget American frackers are going to be in trouble.  The big Majors, though, have the resources and intercontinental connections to survive it.  Those companies will go on a buying spree, picking up sources for pennies on the dollar starting soon (if they haven't already) and stretching through '16.  If this happens in 2017 as outlined, they'll start making money at a prodigious rate. 

Standard disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this stuff at all.  I'm just some random dood on the Intertubes with a blog.  I just observe things and think about them.  If you're taking advise from random people on the Web, you deserve what you get.

Brent Crude - one of several benchmark prices for crude oil.  Looks like it's staying in a trading range to me! 

Still Cutting Pieces

I've been working on my G0704 CNC Conversion project as time allows on weekends.  Today, I wrapped up the last of the lathe work - I think.  Four more threaded spacers, 1.5" and 10-32 threaded both ends, and then a couple of shaft collars.  Along the way, I got quite a bit more efficient at making these.  The first ones took a long time.  The last four took a few minutes each. 

I should probably powder coat those, or some other sort of finish, but not right now. 

The next phase is to make the motor brackets.  I plan to make those on my CNC Sherline, which requires I create instructions to make the part; numerically described tool paths called G-Code.   This is a standardized language (RS-274), although not every system has to recognize all of the possible codes.  G-Code can often be generated by hand with a dimensioned drawing, but complex shapes (for example, carving wax for jewelry casting) require another software package to take a 3D model and convert it to tool paths.  This is called a Computer Aided Manufacturing, or CAM, program.  If a CAM program is required, the first step is to draw them in 3D Design Software. 

It has been a while since I've looked to see what software is out there, but the program I use is Rhinooceros, usually called Rhino3D.  If you're not familiar with this world, it's got quite a learning curve.  Rhino is considered a modelling program rather than a true Computer Aided Design (CAD) program.  The differences are kinda subtle, but while Rhino can give you dimensions of anything you draw, and allow you to do things like rotate something to make sure it clears some other part of your design, it takes a bit more manual effort than a true CAD program.  While Rhino probably comes across as pricey, it's around what a mid/high end production pistol costs (my current "object du lust"), the true CAD programs cost quite a bit more, like 30-40 times that.    

The advantage of using CNC for this is that it will make doing anything other than drilling or boring holes easier.  I'm not doing this because I intend to make lots of these, just to make my work at the milling machine easier.  The work shifts from cutting metal to moving traces on this screen or deriving XYZ coordinates for where cuts have to happen, or where holes have to be drilled. 

Early Retirement Forecast

All the paperwork is in place for me to be out by the week before Christmas, so I went looking for the annual Florida Dry Season Forecast.  As you've probably heard, a strong El Nino is developing in the equatorial Pacific.  The effects on Florida are pretty well understood, and while they don't set the absolute forecast in stone, they do create a direction.  It looks like this.

Hmmm.  Both precipitation and storminess (don't they go together?) are predicted to be well above normal, with normal temperatures through January, and below normal until April.  This is, after all, our usual dry season.  My impression is that December brings more rainy cold fronts than January.  I have many memories of adjusting outside lights after cold rains before Christmas, but I also have lots of memories of bike riding on achingly beautiful days in January and February.  Our coldest time tends to be January - sometimes extending into mid-February

Sounds like I'm likely to be spending more time in the shop than fishing for the first few months.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Free College For Everyone!

I didn't pay too much attention to the Evil Party debate this week.  Didn't watch a minute of it, but since I do keep up with the news, it wasn't hard to grasp the essence of the debate:  Free Stuff for All!  Free health care!  Free College!  Wage Inequality! Greed!  Free stuff for everyone, except of course those who have to pay for it.  Those people won't get anything. 

Matt Walsh, a blogger for The Blaze wrote a really good piece on the debate, "Democrats Are Godless Heathen Tyrant Maniacs Because That's What Voters Want" - I suspect that's a deliberately over the top title.  It's a must read.

I just want to address one thing:  Free College.  Now we know that Free simply means someone else pays for it, and Comrade Sanders says he's going to tax Wall Street.  Because those costs will never be passed on to anyone, right?  Still, it's a plan that's going to attract the coveted young moron demographic along with the "let someone else be responsible for me" crowd; both are core Democrat constituencies.

Here's a couple of rough numbers for you.  The college age population of this country is roughly 22 Million people.  That census data on Wikipedia is for 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 year olds; both ages were close to that.  According to this statistics page, just over 2,136,000 Associates and Bachelor's degrees were awarded  (not sure where they come from, exactly, but the date says April, 2015).  In other words, 1/10 of the eligible population completed two or four years of college.  I include the two year associates degrees because since Sanders said four years of public college should be free, I assume he meant "up to" four years.  

It's a straightforward argument that we have far too few seats in college for the number of butts that want to occupy them.  Why do I say that?  College costs have increased at three times the rate of general inflation so if prices are going up like crazy, there's shortage of supply.  The cost increase is aided by the Fed.gov's willingness to supply educational loans at a virtually infinite rate.  Colleges find themselves in the happy place of being able to charge anything they want for those seats, and the butts that are going to be sitting in them will gladly take all the money from the Fed.gov and transfer it to those colleges.   Of the 22 million college-aged people, vs. 2.1 million who graduate, how many would go to college if it was arranged for them?  Do we need to build more colleges and hire more staff to get more seats available?  For what? 

As we're seeing emphasized recently, a college degree doesn't guarantee a well-paying job; meaningful skills do.  There's a tremendous emphasis on STEM degrees, but my guess is we're graduating too many now.  Data is saying only 1 in 4 graduates is getting a job in one of those fields.  It's true that those pushing for more STEM graduates have included fields like psychology, and social science degrees such as economics, anthropology, sociology or political science; anything that can throw the word "science" into its name.  These aren't the type of jobs that Silicon Valley (or our own Silicon Swamp) is looking for.  

Besides, it displays a stunning ignorance of how the world works.  Comrade Bernie and Comrade Chancellor Hildebeest are saying that since some college graduates appear to have an increased value in the job market, we should create more of them.  This shows complete ignorance of the law of supply and demand.  If people coming out of college make more than those who didn't go, it's because they are worth more to employers.  To create more of them is to reduce their differential value and make college even worse of a deal than it is for so many graduates today.  

(Michael Ramirez in 2012, but just as valid today)

Techy Tuesday - Cheap Chinese HF Transceivers Arrive

I've been expecting this. 

A couple of years ago, the amateur radio world was shaken by the introduction of cheap VHF/UHF handheld transceivers like the Baofeng HTs.   With a low price like $30 or $40, notoriously cheapskate hams bought a lot of these.  There are several manufacturers with varying degrees of quality in their reputation, but the point is the market is open and if you want an HT, it's low dollar risk.  The more established brand HTs, Yaesu and Icom, come in at over $100 to start, and over $200 is more common. 

Today, while looking at some old clutter, I stumbled across this link to a Chinese HF transceiver, the Xeigu ("zia goo") X108G.  I'm not sure how long these have been on the market in the US, but they're apparently on the market in Europe.  I see a few videos dated in July of '15, I found a forum dedicated to them that appears to be in German (I speak about as much German as Obama speaks free market). 

It's considered a low-power (QRP) transmitter at "greater than 15 W", but it appears pretty full-featured.  The manual (pdf)  says it receives continuously from 500 kHz to 30 MHz (a common range) and transmits on all amateur bands.  It only operates in Single Sideband voice and "CW", as hams refer to Morse code modes.  Its rear panel has an external audio pin (in a 6 pin mic. connector), so I assume it will do the audio modes hams like, such as PSK31 and RTTY, although those require use of software running on something and probably wiring up some connectors yourself.  Given its small size and the amount of features you activate through that small front panel, it's probably a bit tedious to operate, but that's the way these small rigs tend to be. 

Here's the drawback: they are not duplicating the price shock that Baofeng has done in their market.  It's $599.  For the same price I can get this Yaesu FT-817ND.  I've had one of these (well, the earlier, non-ND version) and it's a fine little radio.  A little lower transmit power, but Yaesu is a rock-solid manufacturer, and I'd trust their radio implicitly over the X108G.  It will do everything this will do, although it is slightly lower power, and the Yaesu has a bunch of aftermarket accessories and support.

For scale, that connector on the lower left is an RJ-45 network connector.  The front panel is about 4 3/4" by 1 3/4 and it's 7.1" front to back.  It doesn't say if that includes the handles, so I'm guessing it doesn't. 

The Martian

Yesterday, we went to see The Martian at the local multi-cinema.  I was going to write some mini-review thoughts down, but it all pales next to Adaptive Curmudgeon's take on the movie:  "For Once, a Movie Didn't Suck". 

Short review:  Go. See. It. 

Sure it's a movie.  They got the science more right than not, but some times they just had to exaggerate things for dramatic effect.  Several people have commented that the atmosphere on Mars is so thin that a storm of the force required to throw a fully grown man just isn't happening.  But they needed the plot device to separate Matt Damon's character Mark Watney from the rest of the crew and provide a plausible reason for the mission to leave him.  From the IMDB trivia page:

The atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface averages 600 Pa (0.087 psi), about 0.6% of Earth's mean sea level pressure of 100 kPa (14.69 psi). It is so low that a "fierce storm", as they put it, would be something akin to a very light breeze messing up your hair. Author Andy Weir admitted this was his biggest inaccuracy in the story...

...and the technically weakest part of the whole film.   They speed through the delay in conversations, after saying light time to Mars was 24 minutes, but that has to be done.  In one or two scenes, the people waiting on earth were in different positions or moved to reflect the long wait between sending and receiving messages.  But that's all minor.  Go. See.  It. 

At one point, Watney talks about the simple fact that everything he does and everyplace he goes he's "The First Human Ever".  It's not dwelled on, but it does help you think about what it would be like, marooned in an extremely hostile environment for two years.