Keep Your Daughters Out of Massachusetts

I say to keep your daughters out because I'm assuming all of the adult women already know how to behave properly in this situation.

So since the Massachusetts High Court ruled that you have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" while out in public in the state, and that the state's laws prohibiting peeping Tom voyeurism doesn't cover taking those "upskirt" photos.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled the practice does not violate the law — a so-called “peeping Tom” law written 10 years ago — because the women who were photographed while riding Boston public transportation were not nude or partially nude.

The current state law prohibits photographing an unsuspecting nude or partially nude person “is concerned with proscribing peeping Tom voyeurism of people who are completely or partially undressed and, in particular, such voyeurism enhanced by electronic devices,” the court ruled.

"not nude or partially nude"?   Isn't everyone nude or partially nude under their clothes? 

So what do I mean about adults knowing the right way to behave?  I personally think the right response to someone swiping a camera under your skirt would be a 2x4 or a couple pounds of steel up side the cretin's head.  Something that would induce a coma.  While a couple of JHPs to the center of mass wouldn't seem like too much of an overreaction to me if it was my daughter, in The Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts that would probably be considered antisocial and get you put away for a long time in a small cage.  Like New York, it's a place where self defense is considered criminal. 

Anybody Running .300 Blackout?

Actually, I was going to title this, "Anybody playing with 300 Blackout", but we're serious gunnies, right?  This isn't play, this is training.  Yea...no.  I'm playing. 

But to the point, ARs are like potato chips: you can't stop at one.  Y'all know I have my home made AR, in 5.56 - everybody's favorite poodle-shooter cartridge, right?  The biggest advantage of .300 Blackout, from what I've read, is that it's 30 caliber and the whole idea was a compromise intended to get 30 caliber into the M-4/M-16 platform with minimal changes.  Well, I have a DPMS .308 AR-10 clone, a .308 Scout rifle, plus a pair of M1 Garands and a Remington 700 BDL in .30-06.  Not to mention Mrs. Graybeard's .30-30 Marlin.  I think we have that 30 caliber niche pretty much filled in. 

So, while I've been noticing the .300 Blackout thing going on around me, I haven't entered the game.  I suspect it's not worth it for me, and I should go for something else in the AR platform for my next project.  What's it going to be used for?  Punching cardboard for fun.  I have a 200 yard range anytime.  Longer is possible, but 600 is moderately inconvenient and 1000 yards much more so. 

I'm thinking it's either .458 Socom, or one of the slightly bigger calibers like 6.8 SPC or something.  

(Left to right: 223/5.56 NATO, 6.5 Grendel, 6.8 SPC, .458 SOCOM, and .50 Beowulf) (source page)

Opinions appreciated.  Other than "your gun sucks and you're holding it wrong". 

Techy Tuesday - DARPA Investigating Nanoparticles to Fight Disease

It really shouldn't come as a surprise that DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - is very interested in ways to reduce the war fighter's susceptibility to disease.  Armies down through history have been hobbled in battle by diseases - everything from malaria, typhus, pneumonia and a host of other infections to trench foot (seriously gross pictures, BTW).  But an announcement in the "new contracts" section of one of the microwave engineering trade magazines I get caught my eye last week.  It was that a biomedical company in Pittsburgh was awarded a contract in the area of "In Vivo Nanoplatforms" (IVN):

DARPA’s In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN) program seeks to develop new classes of adaptable nanoparticles for persistent, distributed, unobtrusive physiologic and environmental sensing as well as the treatment of physiologic abnormalities, illness, and infectious disease.

The Latin translation of "In Vivo" is "in the living", and here means "in living people".  Medical research is often broadly classified as being either in vivo or in vitro - in glass: test tubes, Petri dishes, tissue cultures, anything outside living critters.  "Persistent, distributed, unobtrusive" sound (to me) like the idea is to inject these nanoparticles into soldiers' general circulation (blood stream) so that the particles are there when needed.  Perhaps more would be injected for a faster treatment of an acute condition?  It's possible nobody knows how all this would work, yet. 

DARPA linked to this image from Northwestern University of what appears to represent a gold nanoparticle with strands of RNA on its surface.  On a second page, DARPA says:

While the medical community has been using small-molecule therapeutics to treat diseases for years, traditional drugs are often effective against only one disease, are associated with significant side effects and are very expensive to develop. “Doctors have been waiting for a flexible platform that could help them treat a variety of problematic diseases,” said Timothy Broderick, physician and DARPA program manager. “DARPA seeks to do just that by advancing revolutionary technologies such as nanoparticles coated with small interfering RNA (siRNA). RNA plays an active role in all biological processes, and by targeting RNA in specific cells we may be able to stop the processes that cause diseases of all types—from contagious, difficult-to-treat bacteria such as MRSA to traumatic brain injury.”  (emphasis added - SiG - it explains the image)

The program is divided into Diagnostic and Theraputic sides. 

The IVN Therapeutics (IVN:Tx) program effort seeks unobtrusive nanoplatforms for rapidly treating disease in warfighters. This program aims to develop nanotherapeutics that:

• Increase safety and minimize the dose required for clinically relevant efficacy
• Limit off-target effects
• Limit immunogenicity
• Increase effectiveness by targeting delivery to specific tissues and/or uptake by cells of interest
• Increase bioavailability
• Knock down medically relevant molecular target(s)
• Increase resistance to degradation

Successful nanotherapeutic platforms should enable treatment of military-relevant diseases such as infections caused by multi-drug resistant organisms and conditions due to traumatic brain injury.

In my mind, this is way cool.  DARPA specializes in things that are beyond the usual budgets and approval cycles; a bit riskier, but with potentially big payoffs.  Anything that can knock down "multi-drug resistant organisms" (MRSA) sounds like a good thing in my book, and it goes without saying that anything that can prevent the horrible damages from traumatic brain injury would benefit the whole world.  

A Little Solar Update

I've been posting updates on the solar cycle roughly every six months for a while, with my last one in early January.  In that post, I suggested we might be seeing a second peak in this cycle, just like the previous cycle (23), but that it was too early to really know.  It is still looking like we'll have a double peak.

The sun let loose an X5 class flare last week to close out February (actually X4.9), and the last month has been the most active of the current cycle.  Both sunspot number (here) and the 10.7 cm Solar Flux reached their cycle highs at the end of February. 

An X5 flare is noteworthy, and under precisely the right conditions might be able to cause damage to things on earth.  Fortunately, this flare was directed almost 90 degrees to our direction and while we got some effects from it, they were of the type you need instruments to see. 

Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That, one of the big name blogs concerned with the truth about climate change, has a series of interesting plots and text comparing this cycle to past cycles, including the Dalton Minimum in cycle 5 around 1800.  It's a rather interesting set of plots. This one, for example, shows how the current cycle is the lowest peak in about 100 years (green arrow marking "End of the Little Ice Age")

While we here in Florida have had a mild winter, at least in terms of dramatic weather events, it seems much of the country is having a much snowier and colder winter than in quite some time, with the Great Lakes looking to exceed the percentage of ice cover they had in 1994, and it looks like the all time record ice cover from the 1970s is in the realm of possibility.    

I'd Have A Grumpy Going On

... if it weren't for the highlight of the day.  Got the smoker running later than usual, after 9:30, but we only had a 5 pound pork butt and a couple of chickens to smoke, so I knew it wouldn't take too long. 

The view at 5 this afternoon.  The Masterbuilt electric smoker holds temperature very well, and allows better control of the temperature in the pork butt than I ever got with my wood-fired smoker and yet still gets a good bark on the pork. 

If a good barbecue doesn't make you feel better about life in general, than you and I can no longer be friends, m'kay? 

Ramirez = Genius

(Source)  Quite deliberate, of course.  As the posters say, we have two classes of people: those who work for a living and those who vote for a living, and the intent is to transfer as much wealth as possible to the second group.

When you hear the line that our military will be decreased in numbers to pre-WWII levels, bear in mind that the long logistics tail of today's military is quite a bit longer than 70 years ago.  In other words, there are fewer rifle barrels on the front lines for any given number of people in the Army. 

From what I'm able to determine, of course.  AM, you drop by on occasion, or other military voices who stop by, please let me know if I'm wrong!

Money Printing Leads to Problems, So Let's Print More to Fix It

Mish Shedlock has been warning of coming deflationary economic collapse, as opposed to inflationary collapse, since at least the end of January.  I've always leaned toward an inflationary collapse because of the QE to infinity being pushed out by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and - to be honest - every freaking central bank on earth.

But Mish is looking right, at least for now, as Reuters reports that lending is shutting down in the EU. 

Lending to households and firms in the euro zone fell again in January and money supply growth remained subdued, adding to pressure on the European Central Bank to take action next week to support the economy.

The ECB has cut interest rates to a record low, pumped extra liquidity into the banking system and announced a fresh government bond purchase program, but the measures have so far not managed to unclog lending to the real economy.

Euro zone inflation is also running at only 0.8 percent - far below the ECB's target of just under 2 percent.

So despite creating trillions in new currency, in an attempt to whip up demand, lending is going down.  Of course the monetarists will say they need to create even more currency to get out of this, despite the utter failure of what they've done so far.  It's all they know.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who occasionally writes some reasonable economics articles, is already advocating for more QE!

Pritchard ignores the fact that equity prices are back in bubble land. He ignores the fact that QE did not bring inflation to Japan. He ignores the fact that consumers desperately need falling prices. He ignores the fact that falling consumer prices do not stop consumers from buying anything.

Pritchard clings to the centrally bad idea that falling consumer prices will cause consumers to perpetually delay purchases.

In the real world, people have to eat. They have to buy gasoline for their cars. They have to buy clothes when they wear out. They have to heat their homes.

Those are relatively inelastic demands.

Earth to central bankers!  Earth to central bankers!!  If consumers are maxed out on their ability to pay back what they borrow, they won't borrow no matter how much money is put out in front of their faces, regardless if the interest rates are zero.  If folks can't afford to borrow, they won't.  If Janet Yellen got her wish of charging you interest to save, people would take their money out of the banks, and put the cash in their mattress or buried in the back yard. 

I've said it a million times: inflation is good for banks but kills average people.  The central bankers have created all this money in order to inflate the stock and real estate markets, and they've succeeded at it.  Yet we've been living under this idea of "persistent benign inflation" for so long, people have come to expect it.  People expect their house to be worth more next year than this year, but why?  If anything, an older house should be worth less every year as more and more of it breaks or wears out and has to be replaced.  The only reason it should be worth more in a real marketplace is that demand increases, presumably because people favor where the house is built as a place to move to.  The only thing that makes it seem to be worth more is the same persistent inflation that has destroyed the savings of anyone able to put dollars away.

 

We're Like All Brothers, Man!

Sorry, my inner hippie - long thought to have withered away and died - had to say that.  Don't worry.  I punched myself. 

Inner hippie was awakened by this interesting story in Der Spiegel, H/T to Small Dead Animals.  The Crow Tribe allowed DNA testing to be done on the body of a young boy, said to be two years old at death, and a special ancestor to the tribe.  Artifacts found with the body trace him to the Clovis people, among the first peoples to inhabit North America,

The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child's burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the Yellowstone River, the boy's Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.

Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev did the analysis and was surprised at what he found about the ancestors and descendents of the boy.

(Willerslev) discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy's ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany. 

A two year old certainly didn't have descendents of his own, but they find his DNA in virtually all modern American populations. 

Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas -- from the Alaska's Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes -- are descended from Montana boy's lineage.

The Clovis people are associated with a particular type of arrow or spear point made by breaking flint in a particular way. (Clovis points from the Smithsonian)

There's somewhat of a resurgence of making this sort of stone knife/cutting tool, called flint knapping and they say that modern flint knappers consider this a particularly hard technique to do.  I've watched people do this at a rock show and it's pretty neat to watch; I've never tried it myself, though.  One of the factoids bandied around is that a knapped obsidian stone's edge is the sharpest edge known, and some surgeons are using obsidian scalpels to minimize scarring. 

But getting back to the original story, the genetic linking of the Clovis people to Europeans was a surprise to me; not so much the link to Siberia.  It adds credence to the argument that we are one race, the human race, and apparent differences are more from local populations interbreeding than from deep biological differences.  This is what one would expect if all humanity came from one place and spread out around the globe; whether they be Zinjanthropus at Olduvai or Adam and Eve in Eden.  Among humans studied, most genetic variation is within, not between, "races."  Just as a great dane and a poodle are both the same species; the differences in appearances were originally different populations breeding with each other.  A short dive into the comments of that Der Spiegel piece will remind you that this is a minority view, and people love to cling to their group identity, so that they can feel aggrieved and hurt by others.

Alex Sinks

Former CFO for Florida, Alex Sink, stuck her foot in her mouth yesterday with a quote worthy of Joe Biden.  Campaigning for the House of Representatives from a district that includes Tampa, Sink said,

"We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers, and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean out hotel rooms or do our landscaping?"

When I first read that she had said that, I assumed it had to be either out of context or a very unguarded moment; perhaps a hot mike was on while she was having lunch with power donors.  But no... she said it in political debate in front of cameras she knew were on in answer to a question about immigration and amnesty. 

 

Predictably, the reliably leftist major papers, like the Miami Herald are rushing to her defense, saying her answer was "right but dumb" and those of us opposed to the defacto slave class she just endorsed are expressing "phony outrage".   The same basic wording shows up on the reliably left wing web sites. And there's a good reason they think they need to defend her quickly and vocally: the Tampa/St. Petersburg area has had a large Hispanic population as long as people have been living there.  I think everyone in Florida has heard of Ybor City, for example.

This is a special election to replace a representative who died, and the election is soon. 

Is This Where Sniping In the III Community Comes From?

While at Harvard in 2008, before becoming Obama's Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein co-authored a paper on how the government should handle conspiracy theories.  He suggested government agents or their allies "cognitively infiltrate" conspiracy theorist groups by joining "chat rooms, online social networks or even real-space groups" and influencing the conversation.  They went so far as to suggest the government "formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech."  The Chinese government does this today, with the "50-cent party", so-named because of the fee they get for each positive, pro-party/government posting they make.  Hey, any good communist policy is a natural for the Obamanoids, right?

How this would work in practice would be that these government employees would be paid to find people who spout "conspiracy theories", and they would comment there.  Consider blogs in the liberty sphere; there's no doubt that a Big Government guy like Sunstein would believe that anyone who values personal liberty is a conspiracy theorist and potential terrorist who should be targeted (I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here is attributing this belief to Sunstein).  They could post blog comments disagreeing with aspects of the stories on the blog, trying to break the credibility of the reports, and the trustworthiness of the story. 

It can now be confirmed that this is actually going on.  At least in the UK, in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, and reported by Glen Greenwald, formerly of the Guardian and now with FirstLook.org.   I urge everyone to read that piece, and see the formerly very classified documents detailing how the UK's GCHQ has given life to Cass Sunstein's wet dream of making disagreement with the government go away by "nudging"  everyone's behavior.  (And does it seem just a little too convenient that Bamster put Sunstein in charge of the oversight committee looking at whether or not the NSA has been "doing us wrong"? )

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four  classified  GCHQ  documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking  “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”  

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

Now that we know for sure it's going on (as if we doubted), perhaps some of the bickering in the III-per community needs to be looked at as tactics being used against us.  I'm sure I'm way too small potatoes for them to care about dropping by here, but think of the big guys.  I personally think I've seen this sort of thing happening on some big commercial sites, like the Blaze or PJ Media.  Have you ever noticed how quickly comments about anything veer from the subject at hand to straight political diatribe, or ad hominem attacks on the people involved?   

(Cass Sunstein) 
I'm not suggesting there aren't real and legitimate disagreements between members of the Liberty / III-per movement, and I don't want to imply any dissent indicates the commenter is a stooge.  These things always happen.  But we have a government regulator who has admitted in open press that he wants to do this, even going as far as false flag operations, and now it turns out to be verified that it is actively going on.  It would be silly to think it can't be happening here, too.  Plus, having an argument with a troll has a whole new meaning when the troll is getting paid to argue with you, doesn't it?

Techy Tuesday - Great Balls of Fire! Batteries and Burning Teslas

Let me start out by saying that I don't own an electric car.  I've been pretty hostile to the Volt, but to be completely honest, if I had the nearly $90,000 it takes to buy a Tesla Model S I probably would.  Electric motors tend to have maximum torque down to stall (zero) speed (some have max torque only at stall), and while a Model S doesn't look the part, it delivers more torque to pull a boat up the ramp than my '09 V-6 Explorer.  Yo, Elon!  Why don't you guys make an electric SUV? Oh, of course!  The demographic that would spend that much on a car to feel good about themselves wouldn't want their friends or complete strangers in traffic to think they were driving an eebil SUV.

You don't have to look too far to find references to the Tesla having a problem with catching fire.   Is it true?  It's difficult to determine how bad the problem really is, but estimates are that Tesla has sold around 20,000 of these cars and perhaps five have caught fire (these three don't include the second link above).  That's one in around 4000; compare that to gasoline cars where approximately one in 1350 conventional cars burns (derived in this pdf).  One source I ran into said 17 gasoline powered cars burn every hour.  Balance those little facts with this: Teslas are new - the company just hasn't been in production very long.  The 20,000 can't be more than a couple of years old; are the conventional cars that are burning two years old, or older cars, possibly with less than stellar maintenance. Whether or not you view the one in 4000 risk of fire as too great is your personal choice for the moment, but you might be interested to know that GM just recalled 370,000 of their GMC Sierra pickups for a software fix that had caused eight fires, or 1 in 46,250.

The Tesla design uses lithium ion batteries and they're mounted low to the ground in the car's frame.  Low-mounted batteries may be subject to impact damage from road debris, and at least one fire was attributed to road debris.  Lithium, as an alkali metal, is extremely reactive.  Crack the battery and expose lithium to oxygen from the air and you have an instant problem. Put in a little water and you have a fire. See a good chemistry text or even Wikipedia for details.  But the fact remains that gasoline stores far more energy in a tank: it's one of the reasons electric cars don't have the useful range of gasoline cars. 

That said, like the writers at Design News, I believe Tesla will resolve these issues.

But if there is a change, it will be a tweak. It won’t be a huge fix. Nor will it be a sign that EV batteries are inherently unsafe. Remember, gasoline is far more energetic than lithium-ion chemistry, as is jet fuel. Yet every day, engineers successfully design safe cars that burn gasoline. They design safe planes that burn jet fuel. They design safe machines that burn coal, hydrogen, and even uranium. In all cases, they take a package of energy, figure out how to use it in a productive way, and then build in safeguards.

Take Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.  Last January, Boeing grounded their fleet of 787s after some lithium battery packs caught fire.  Unlike a Tesla, if your airplane catches fire, you can't pull off to the side of the sky and get out.  You need to put it on the ground in a very controlled way, and that complicates things. (Obligatory old aviation joke: commercial aviation has a perfect record - after nearly a century flying we've never left a single plane up there).  Boeing and their battery supplier redesigned the battery pack and got the fleet back in service in a couple of months.  The new design doesn't make the battery pack absolutely fire proof, but it's designed to prevent cell failure, and then prevent propagation of a fault, so that only one cell in battery pack would fail.  Indications are that the approach worked. 

Last fall, an Ethiopian Airlines 787 caught fire on the ground at Heathrow Airport, burning a hole in the carbon fiber fuselage of the plane, just in front of the vertical stabilizer (tail) and the "scuttlebutt on the street" was that it was the 787 battery pack failing.  In fact, it was the batteries in an Emergency Locator Transmitter, a small box that transmits the aircraft's position to satellites in low earth orbit in case of a crash.  The ELT, an option to increase flight safety, took out the airplane and led to a worldwide check of that company's ELTs (thereby illustrating the first law of reliability engineering: adding parts never improves reliability). 

(source)
Bottom line: a battery is like a gas tank; it's an energy storage facility.  Storing energy anyplace automatically stores the risk that the energy gets released in an uncontrolled way.  Even relatively small batteries can produce stunning amounts of current when short circuited and the heat can ignite sensitive materials.   A NiMH AA battery, for example, can put out over 50 Amps for a little while, enough to weld light metals.  You don't want to short out something the size of a car starting battery, let alone the massive batteries in Tesla.

To Obama, We're Living in Times of Austerity

No, really.  It's being reported that Obama is submitting a 2015 budget which he's calling an "end to austerity". 

With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans. Instead, the president will focus on pumping new cash into job training, early-childhood education and other programs aimed at bolstering the middle class, providing Democrats with a policy blueprint heading into the midterm elections.

Austerity?  Austerity??  As the meme goes, "You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means".  Nick Gillespie at the Reason.com picks it up:

The Democratic logic behind increasing spending runs something like this: Because we no longer regularly post $1 trillion deficits, we've got no reason not to spend more and more every year. Don't you know that deficit spending helps expand the GDP (which registers virtually all government spending as adding to GDP)? If the government will spend enough, we'll lick this recession/slow-growth phase, just wait and see once slack demand gets taut again. Then we'll slow down spending...and everything will be fine. Just like we did, er, don't look at the chart about spending...

Personally, I can't figure out what austerity they're talking about.  While it's true deficits have been declining, mostly due to tax increases, we're still running some of the biggest deficits in history.  I hope they don't think that a spending cut as small as the dreaded sequester, which amounted to 1 or 2% of spending, was austerity.

How big is the new spending going to be?  Ed Morrisey from Hot Air chimes in:

Outlays for FY2014 authorized in the recent budget deal are still a bit ambiguous in the reams of data from both Congress and the White House, but CBO estimates it at $3.54 trillion. At that level, we are spending 9.3% more in FY2014 than in FY2008, the last budget signed by George W. Bush (Democrats stalled the FY2009 budget with continuing resolutions until Obama signed an omnibus bill in March 2009 to complete that budget).  If the new budget ends “austerity” by returning to Obama’s original top-line outlay demand of last year’s budget request, that will mean an additional increase of federal spending of 6.7% in just one year. If it’s just $56 billion more than the actual FY2014 outlays, then the notion that this ends “austerity” is doubly laughable.

If you hear Evil Party talking points, you'll hear them brag about the CBO showing deficits going down and they're the party of fiscal sanity.  But the CBO shows deficits going up again by 2016, the line labelled "Total Deficit" in this spreadsheet, and then rising forever. And that was before this coming "end of austerity" was leaked to the press.

Nick Gillespie has a good quote to close with:

Fear of persistent deficits and increasing national debt isn't an accounting fetish. It's rooted in the universally accepted notion that once debt gets too big, it can swallow whole economies and often does. Everyone knows that current entitlement spending - especially on Medicare - is unsustainable and a mortal threat to the federal budget (you can toss in Social Security and Obamacare, too, neither of which is paying its own way). With notable individual exceptions, nobody in either party is seriously engaging this problem, which is frustrating as hell.

"Time and Tide Wait for No Man"

I had an interesting time trying to find out who first said that.  Answers.com attributes it to Chaucer in 1390, although I think it's a bit of a reach:

For thogh we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme; it nil no [will no] man abyde.
[c 1390 Chaucer Clerk's Tale l. 118]

I think it's more like this quote from 1592

Tyde nor time tarrieth no man.
[1592 R. Greene Disputation between He Cony-catcher & She Cony-catcher X. 241]

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that we spent the morning fishing the outgoing tide at Sebastian Inlet, a state park on the East Coast of Florida, not too far from the Silicon Swamp.  (Occasionally really nice pictures here.)  We were up before 5 this morning to be on the water at sunrise because time and tide...  Possibly.  By the clock we were, but you couldn't prove it looking for the sun.  Today was one of those rare days around here with really dense fog - so dense it was hard to tell if the sun was up; so dense it was hard to find markers and stay in safe water until we got into the channel.  Sebastian is a rough inlet, and I definitely don't have a boat safe enough to run it when it's nasty - and it's nastiest on the outgoing tide when the winds are strong out of the east or when big swells from far away storms are bucking the tide.  When these things happen, the inlet gets large standing waves; a set of breakers that stay in the same place for a couple of hours.  I've seen 25 to 30' foot boats almost roll in there.   But it's pretty safe on the inside, and well sheltered from the winds.   

 

By the time I grabbed this picture, the fog had mostly lifted and it was possible to see around.  The sun eventually burned off the fog and turned it into a normal day.  What we were doing there was drifting the inlet channel casting artificials: jigs and plugs. There's always a small fleet of boats in the inlet drifting in the strong current and doing the same thing.  The current runs several knots so we drift from the west end almost to the bridge (a few hundred yards from the mouth of the inlet) then run back inside and start over.  It wasn't much of a fishing trip, we each caught one jack crevalle of about one pound.  As the day wore on, we switched from rain jackets to shirt sleeves and it ended up about 80 by the time we left.  Just a little sunburned. 

The trip to the inlet adds about an hour and a half getting there and back, with around another hour or so cleaning up, but today added even more time.  It was time to change the oil in the outboard, and a bit more oil hit the garage floor than should have leading to more time in cleanup.  Pretty much shot the day. 

Today I Am Four

Today is this blog's fourth birthday.  It seems to me that in blog years, that's about 100.

With the exception of a "hello world" post to make sure I knew how do anything, this was my first rant.  There's very little I'd like to change about it.  (note for those even more anal retentive than I - my actual blogiversary was yesterday, but I always celebrate on the closest weekend).  Blogger tells me this is my 1356th post and I've had over 809,000 page views.  I know there are bloggers who do that in their first year, but they usually do more than my (attempted) one thoughtful post per day.  

Thanks to all of you who stop by.  I hope to be worth the time you spend here, and provide information or perspectives that are useful.  Or, at least, worth more than you pay!  

The FCC: Board It Up, Send Them Home, They're Done

By now, everyone has heard the story that the geniuses at the FCC thought they had the power and the right to put monitors in newsrooms around the country.  The latest update today is that the FCC is apparently backing off from this plan,  which anyone who watches the Obamanoids knows is an utter bullshit statement.  They'll back off until they think no one is watching, or they find another insidious way to implement their plan.  As I've said before, the current FCC is heavily influenced by self-described Marxist Robert McChesney and his organization Free Press.  Like most Marxist organizations, Free Press is dedicated to the exact opposite of what its name implies; they want government owned press.  Think Pravda and Izvestia of the old Soviet Union and you're right there. 

To bring everyone up to date, the announced purpose was to “to identify and understand the critical information needs (CINs) of the American public (with special emphasis on vulnerable/disadvantaged populations).”  They planned to do this with an intricate, voluntary (ha!), study (78 page pdf) that was leaked to the press by one of the commissioners, Ajit Pai, in the Wall Street Journal.  They had a list of things they wanted to ask which are clearly beyond the legal basis of their formation:

• What is the news philosophy of the station?
• Who is your target audience?
• How do you define critical information that the community needs?
• How do you ensure the community gets this critical information?
• How much does community input influence news coverage decisions?
• What are the demographics of the news management staff (HR)?
• What are the demographics of the on air staff (HR)?
• What are the demographics of the news production staff (HR)?

For any supporters of this nonsense who drop by, pardon us if we don't wait for you while you go look up the Communications Act of 1934 that established the FCC (and its updates) so you can come back and tell us just what section says they have anything to say about station demographics.

Ajit Pai noted that it gets more intrusive than this:

The FCC also wants to wade into office politics. One question for reporters is: "Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?" Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions.

Now it's clear from the recent history of the FCC that their real goal is to redistribute the broadcast spectrum to these "vulnerable/disadvantaged populations" that they're asking about so a key question is: what can this survey possibly do to further that goal?  The answer is to disqualify the current owners of those stations so that the FCC and pull their license and reallocate it to the politically favorable groups; "my people" as Eric Holder said.

As that September 2010 link above shows, I've been ragging on the FCC for almost as long as this blog has been here, and a simple search shows that in June of '11 I was explaining why I think they're a useless agency.  Let me put it plain and simple:  I'm a radio engineer.  I work with the FCC requirements.  I know what the FCC certification tests are and I know the FCC rules.  The FCC hasn't done anything worthwhile technically in so long I can't remember.  You might suggest the introduction of digital TV, but that was a pretty royal fustercluck.  The technically sharp minds at the FCC get run over by the political apparatchiks all the time.  The result is the agency is useless.  Shut them down.  Board it up.  Send them all home. 

Except that you can't; at least, not completely.  Not without tearing up tons of international and US laws.  See, the radio spectrum is allocated so that specific services get bands of frequencies allocated to them.  Here's a simplified version of one - you'd need the wall-sized version to read it.

Historically, as new communications systems developed, the FCC and equivalent groups in other countries would coordinate where in the frequency spectrum these systems went, so they could operate with each other.  It would make life difficult for a pilot or boater who needed totally different radio systems for every country they visited.  The regulatory bodies would put compatible services near each other; for example the taxi radios would be near the police radios because both were local communications, intended to not travel very far, and used similar modulation types at similar powers.  Marine radios got placed in the same general part of the spectrum.  High power services, like FM or TV broadcasters, were separated from services subject to damaging interference from them.  Likewise, weak-signal satellite services like GPS receivers were kept far from the strong broadcasters (the ill-fated Lightsquared service threatened to disrupt every GPS receiver in the US by putting a stronger local signal where it could interfere with the much weaker GPS). 

While we could change this approach with modern technologies, to disrupt these allocations would require every radio owner in the country to get new radios compatible with however the spectrum was reallocated, and that is such an economic disaster we couldn't possibly change over to such a system.  (A disaster for everyone except for whoever sells the radios ... and the government officials who order the change).  So we need an FCC enforcement force to monitor interference issues and enforce spectrum rules.  The enforcement arm of the FCC, which simply mails out citations, collects fines, and negotiates settlements (example) is a substantial part of the commission's budget, but there's much money to be saved by shutting everything else down, too.

As long as people get apoplectic from a wardrobe malfunction, de-funding the FCC is going to be an uphill battle.  Maybe this tyrannical power grab by the FCC might make that fight a little easier.

How Big A Lathe Do You Need?

That's easy:  about one inch in diameter and two inches longer than whatever you have.  (Yeah, it's an old joke ... sorry, but if you don't know it, someone has to be the first to tell you). 

I've posted before about having a Sherline lathe, smaller than the ubiquitous 7x10 or 12 mini-lathes that everyone sells, and more often called a Micro lathe.  The 3.5 x 17" description on their web site is typical of the way lathes are described: 3.5" is the diameter of the biggest piece that will turn over the lathe bed (not the cross slide), and 17" is the long length of the bed.  Sherline, an American made tool, is famously accurate out of the box.  Those "7 by" and "8 by" lathes imported from the Chicoms usually require more work, more futzing around to get good results - although I'll be the first to say I hear they get better every year.  At machine tool shows, a standard trick is for (a very experienced) Sherline representative to pull a new one out of the box, chuck up a small length of half inch steel bar, and in a few cuts turn it down to a .010" diameter nub about 1/10" long.  Then he'll take a home made drill bit and bore a .005" hold down the center of that .010" nub.  The main drawback of the lathe is that out of the box it doesn't handle large diameters.  Sherline responded by making riser block systems that add 2.5" diameter, making it a 6x17 lathe.

For example, here's my lathe at some stage in the past, showing the riser block under the head stock (black block with metallic ends at left).  The riser changes everything.  By raising the centerline, it forces risers under everything - or taller tool posts, etc..  It also makes the lathe a bit less rigid, and rigidity isn't its strongest point to start with.  (Yeah, it's quite the mess.  Bonus props for anyone who can tell what the large roundish thing is at upper right, that roundish thing with squares of darker brown in a lighter brown field.)

The real answer to how big a lathe one needs is what you intend to do with it.  If you want to do large things regularly, get a larger lathe.  If you only need to do them rarely, a small one may work well for you.  Let's look at some specific things:

Barrel work:  this is going to require a large lathe, and you're going to want to look for one sold as a gunsmith's lathe or a tool room lathe.  In any lathe, working on things more than one diameter out of the chuck and unsupported leads to loss of accuracy so most work on barrels; like reaming them with a chamber reamer, squaring the breech face or crowning the end, is done by chucking the barrel with just the little bit you need access to sticking out of the chuck.  The barrel would extend to the left in this view, through the head stock and sticking out for the rest of its length, which means the headstock had better have at least as big a bore as the barrel diameter!  Somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2" is needed. 

Something a lot of folks might be interested in is making an AR lower receiver from a blank forging, or "0% lower".  (Ooh! A ghost gun!)  This guy used the big lathe at his disposal, along with his big milling machine and metal shaper.  The only reason not to use those tools if you have them is for the challenge.  I can't say I've sat around for a long time and pondered how to do it on a Sherline, but the basic problem is drilling and tapping a large hole in a large chunk of metal.  I've cut holes that big in metal, just not metal shaped like that - which means it's all about fixturing and lining up the cutting before you tool touches metal.  It might be possible to fixture the receiver on the cross slide and advance it into the chuck, boring the hole to size ... and it might be possible to do it on the mill. 

You may want to turn a large flywheel or large cylinder for something, but if you have only one or a few operations, you may be able to carefully plan out some ways to exceed the rated size of your lathe.  I've seen some pretty wild tricks to do that on the smaller lathes where the headstock is rotated 90 degrees from its regular orientation (pointing off the bench in that photo).  Be careful!  Take light cuts, and remember the adage of "measure twice cut once" should start with "think it through three times".  I think the important part of that trick is that a large flywheel doesn't need to be turned to the accuracy of a rifle chamber.  Always remember that a milling machine can do much of what a lathe can do, if you think of the cuts differently. 

For most of the rest of life, cutting screw threads on rods, fixing standoffs, turning most objects (how many tubes bigger than 6" do you work with, anyway?), and most repairs that you'll do in gunsmithing, the Sherline or any of the "7 or 8 by" lathes will do just fine. 

Another old saying in the world of tools is that "a horse can do the work of a pony, but a pony can't do the work of a horse".  If you have the room and money for a big tool room lathe, do it.  Take some classes in it, get any training you can.  Any machine that can cut steel isn't going be slowed down in the slightest taking off a finger.  But the most common mistake is to start a lathe with the chuck key in place (or Tommy bars in the case of the Sherline) and throw it at anything/anyone in line.  They can put a serious hurt on you. 

Techy Tuesday - Build Your Own Airplane

There's a rather large and healthy experimental aircraft hobby group in America, and while it may be I work with an unusual sample of folks, I know a half dozen guys who have built their own airplane.

One of the more interesting things I've come across is a open source airplane group called MakerPlane which lists their vision as:

“We want more people to safely and quickly build and fly their own airplanes.”
...
Basically we are designing an aircraft that can be built on a computer controlled mill at home, or at a makerspace which is easy to assemble and quick to build. The plans and instructions will be available for free to anyone that wants them!

The emphasis on MakerPlane is an airplane that can be built with small tools, like using a CNC router to cut foam or plastic pieces and laying them up with fiberglass.  From my vantage point, it seems the majority of homebuilt airplanes are made of fiberglass and foam (like these kits).  Behind that are riveted aluminum planes, and there are certainly some made of wood and fabric.  I have different friends that have built each kind. 

There's just one big problem.  It's a hobby project and the design isn't done yet.  This is a rendering of the tentative design.

I started out by saying there's a large a vibrant community of homebuilders out there.  There's a large  national organization, the Experimental Aircraft Association, the EAA.   See their Hints for Homebuilders video page and the general homebuilding channel.  There are chapters of the EAA around the country, and a lot of homebuilders out there.  The EAA also runs classes and workshops around the country to teach folks the techniques required to build their dream plane.  There's a fire hose of information out there.  Enjoy!

Don't forget there are helicopters out there, too.  (H/T to Kerodin)

Central Bankers: All Your Money Are Belong to Us

Thomas Sowell, one of the great minds in economics, once said, "I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."  If you're like me, the clarity and sheer obviousness of that statement is like a slap to the face, or a cold water splash.

Socialists, of course, believe that no individual earns money.  Everything belongs to the state and is collective.  "You didn't build that" because your company couldn't exist without what government supplies.  As Elizabeth (Princess Fauxcohontas) Warren put it:

"You built a factory out there? Good for you," she said last year. "But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."

Of course, this wasn't her idea, nor Obama's, and while Legal Insurrection Blog credits the main idea to progressive professor George Lakoff, I'll bet the belief goes back at least as far as Karl Marx.

The world today is abuzz with claims being shot around that are paving the way for confiscation of savings.  It's coming, folks.

The European Union's "Competition Forum" is "investigating" whether nations having lower business tax rates amounts to giving businesses subsidies.  In other words, allowing them to keep some of what they earn is subsidizing them.  In our country, aspects of the tax code that give any break in taxes are being renamed "spending in the tax code". If you're not under double-taxation, you're cheating. 

One of their favorite examples to eliminate such "spending" is the IRA.  A conventional (non-Roth) IRA allows you to save pre-tax money, under the arrangement that you'll be taxed at regular rates when you withdraw it.  Presumably, your tax bracket will be lower, so you'll pay less tax at that time than if you paid taxes on it now.  To liberals like Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post, you're getting a benefit they're paying for, not using your own money.  It's society's money, not yours.  Furthermore, you're greedy if you don't agree with what he says.  Writing about Obama's plan to restrict the amount that can be saved for retirement, Hiatt writes:

This spring Obama proposed a cap of about $3.4 million on how much people can save in their tax-advantaged IRAs and 401(k) plans — enough to generate an annual retirement income of about $205,000.

The response to that modest proposal, which would raise about $9 billion in tax revenue over 10 years, says a lot about what — and who — is wrong with Washington these days.
...
But Obama isn’t keeping people from saving as much money as they can or want. The question is how much the rest of us should have to chip in. Obama is suggesting that at some point retirement accounts, invented to encourage working people to set aside enough for their sunset years, no longer need a helping hand from taxpayers.

So if you don't think that's a reasonable law, you're who's wrong with Washington!  But wait, that's not all!  In his twisted little mind, because someone is not paying some extra tax - today; they'll pay it eventually - on their earned income, he is somehow paying their way, giving them a helping hand!  

For the record, his attempt to gather $9 billion over 10 years - $900 million/year - is a rounding error compared to our spending.  With a projected deficit this year of $744 Billion, or $2 billion deficit per day his tax revenue doesn't even pay for 11 hours worth of spending.  Obama's plan is nothing but punishment for people who can afford to put more than that into a 401k (and equally for the record, my two chances of being taxed under his law are slim and none - but I still think it's bad law).

That's clearly not enough money to make a difference, and central bankers/planners around the world are looking at direct confiscation of savings.  Of course, they can't say that in so many words, so they refer to "haircuts" or "negative interest rates", and while that article is about the EU, our own Janet Yellen has advocated negative interest rates in the past.  Marc Faber has said that Yellen will make Bernanke look like a restrained-spending kind of guy; a fiscal hawk...

In 2010 she said if she could vote for negative interest rate, in other words you have a deposit with the bank at $100,000 at the beginning of the year and in the end you would only get $95,000 back, that she would be voting for that.

As if the inflation they're trying to create isn't a bad enough tax on savings, she wants to actually take money out of your account.  It's not like they don't realize this is going to hurt savings, they want to discourage savings, because in their models, money being spent is better than money being saved or invested. 

While I find that every coworker I've spoken with this sees this coming, there's some differences in how we think we should respond.  A while back, Ann Barnhardt said to simply get out of the game.  Take the tax penalty and get out of your 401k.  Regular savings or other places you can put your money are less likely to be targeted.  While I can't fault that, I stay in my 401k because my company gives me 6% more pay in matching funds while I'm in it.  I'm not ready to turn down "free" money. Of course, I think the timeless advice about "beans, bullets, bullion and band-aids" is golden; there's wisdom in the view that if it's not in your possession or some place you can defend it, you don't own it.  I have friends who are talking about buying real estate or second places to live, or adding on to their houses.  I may be naive, but I think your primary residence is safer than a second home if confiscation starts.  A move to start taking everyone's primary residence would absolutely start the next civil war. 

That 1929 Stock Market Parallel Chart

By now, most people have seen the chart by market analyst Tom DeMark:

You can probably guess that the people whose livelihood depends on churning the markets have all dismissed this as silly speculation, "Woooo..  a line resembles another line ... woooo" - that sort of reaction.  A few minutes of search finds article dismissing it in MarketWatch ... Wall Street Journal ... Business Insider ... CNN Money ... need I go on?  They point out, for example, that the scales of the two curves are so disparate that it's only the number crunching that makes them look similar.  Obviously, their self-interest would tend to make them think this way.  The question remains of whether it's a valid comparison. 

My all-time favorite quote about prediction is from physicist Neils Bohr, who said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."  Yet every trading firm in country (world?) has someone on staff who studies charts of the market just for this sort of pattern - maybe several people.  It's also possible that Technical Analysis works (to the extent that it does) simply because of the fact that all the major brokerage houses have technical analysts and they all see the same signs.  Self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Another favorite quote of mine that applies to this sort of analysis is, "If you torture numbers long enough they'll confess to anything".

But I'm not answering the question.  Is it valid?  Is it real?  By this chart, the market crashes by the end of March.   Of course, I can't answer the question because I can't see the future either.  The fact that everyone knows about this chart hinders its ability to predict.  If everyone changes their position to protect themselves from a bad collapse, or to take advantage of some opportunity (if it showed that) that mass behavior shift changes the shape of the curve.  Is it reasonable to suggest the market is really overvalued now?  Sure, but it has been overvalued for some time.  Is it reasonable to say there will be a correction?  You bet.  The questions are when? and how big? 

Tom DeMark, whose chart started this whole thing, gave an interesting interview on Glenn Beck's radio program.  Tom is a guy who says he's been doing this sort of work for 45 years, and claims to have been called too Pollyanna-ish for being too optimistic in his forecasts - up to a five or six years ago.

“We try the measure supply and demand because that’s what drives prices. There’s a major component, which is sentiment, and extremes are met at highs and lows. There’s extreme optimism or pessimism. So we try to measure those and incorporate them into fundamentals,” Tom said. “But what’s happened in the last five years has been really troubling. What had worked in the past and seems to work globally – it works very well in the Far East, Middle East and our analysis there – but the domestic market here in the States is troubling.”

“It seems like there’s an influence that seems to incite fear every time we approach what appears to be a top in the market,” he continued. “At bottoms, it works very well, but at top, there seems to be interference, and we don’t know where it’s coming from… It became common knowledge that it was the Central Banks… It’s tough to adjust at the tops. With the bottoms, we are able to identify bottoms.”

And there you find the same thing I've said here over and over and over again: the market is not being shaped by normal buying and selling, it's being shaped by the Fed and the Central Banks.  They own it all now.  I recommended getting out of the stock market years ago - and did so with my own money, with the exception of two things that I can't get out of the market.  You may argue that I've lost money by not riding the flood of QE into the market.  In paper terms, at least, I have lost money.  My perspective is that one only makes or loses money when they sell.  If stock that I had in my account went up and down 1000%, if I didn't sell it when it was worth more than I paid, I haven't made anything.  And I think going up and down is all that's going on now. 

The Day It Snowed in Miami

The company I went to visit in Canada twice last year sent some folks down to do some work at our place yesterday, and naturally talk turned to weather.  When I went to the lobby to pick them up, one of the two was standing outside feeling the sun on her face and reveling in it being above freezing.

Comparing notes on what each other's weathers are like over lunch, I remembered the day it snowed in South Florida.  Coincidentally, tonight I run across this link to the Miami Herald, "Jan. 19. 1977: The day it snowed in Miami". 

Thirty years ago today, snowflakes briefly dusted palm trees, windshields and people from Miami to West Palm Beach -- a freak but brief winter wonderland and the only South Florida snowfall on record in the 20th century.

Like all Floridians here at the time, I remember it very clearly.  I was working as tester/technician for a company that made transformers, and was waiting to go into work at 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning.  The place was outside Deerfield Beach, about 40 miles north of downtown Miami, and 10 or so from my home in Ft. Lauderdale.   My car: a '72 Ford Pinto with minimal creature comforts.  It was cold and I was waiting in the car rather than standing outside by the door.  All of a sudden motion caught my eye and I noticed something white blowing around (it was windy as well as unusually cold).  It didn't take long to realize it was snow flurries. I was wearing a lightweight, navy blue, nylon jacket, and I vividly recall the snow bouncing off the dark jacket.  

Mrs. Graybeard, whom I wouldn't meet for another two years, tells me that she called the day care center where her son was and asked if they would take them out to see the snow.   The person on the phone, undoubtedly fielding the same call 40 or 50 times, said, "do you think we could have kept them in?"

Miami's snow fall during the Blizzard of 1977 was caused by a combination of two artic cold fronts -- one passed the region on Jan. 16 followed by a second faster-moving one in the middle of the night the day it snowed.

That second front chilled the region and moved so quickly that moisture -- usually ahead of such fronts -- instead lagged behind, setting the stage for the snow.

"Basically, what happened is that the precipitation formed in the clouds did not have enough time to melt before it reached the ground, " Molleda said.

This picture from Tampa, midway up the state on the west coast, where they had measurable accumulation. 

I live close to 200 miles from Miami, now, near the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast.  We've had brief flurries here twice since then.  Once in the late 1980s and once in 2010.  On that day in 2010, we were supposed to be taking a tactical pistol class outside in the weather all day.  High for the day was 34 and class was postponed.  We didn't get snow at our place, but we did have some sleet and snow was reported around the area, and I saw pictures of it.