Happy Birthday Devil Dogs

Not in the Drakes Cakes sense, but to the US Marine Corps.  November 10th is the day traditionally celebrated as the founding of the Marines in 1775 at Tun Tavern, making this the 243rd anniversary.  Which means there were "US Marines" before there was a US.  What did they call themselves in 1775?

As I've said before, everyone knows there's a constant din of the different services poking fun at each other, but I don't have a dog in these fights.  Never was in any branch.  The systems I've worked on tended to be for the Navy with some split between the Air Force and the Navy.  All I can say is that I've worked on some of their toys. 

I know that all sorts of kids from all sorts of backgrounds go into the Marines, but I've never met an ex-Marine who wasn't an honorable man.  Considering that perhaps the most famous marine, Chesty Puller, is quoted as having said, “Take me to the Brig. I want to see the 'real Marines' ”, maybe I've only been meeting fakes.

On Account of I'm Sick of Politics Again

Some more fun stuff. 

A couple of weeks ago, a friend called me up about a puzzle he had.  He's a disabled Navy Vet who has a hard time getting around but his only daughter lives far away so he has no family in town to rely on.  I've taken him to the VA hospital in Orlando a couple of times.  That aside, his puzzle is that he has taken up sign making in wood with a router and templates.  I think he's using something similar to this kit from Rockler.  His problem concerned the back side of the sign and how to hang it on the wall.  Turns out Rockler sells a handy template kit for that problem and he bought that one, too. 

His problem was that of the three places to rout a hanging slot, he used only a short one and the setup time was lots longer than cutting the router pass.  He said five minutes to make the setup and a few seconds to make the cut.  He wanted to know if I could see a better way. 

I gathered that how he located the slot was by lining the top edge of the template with the top edge of his board and the long edge (on the right in that photo) over the edge of the board.  Then, while holding the template down on the board, he taped it down to keep it from moving.  I suggested I make something like the Rockler template but which had vertical straight edges on the sides and he could pull it into place in the corner.  I'd make a pair of templates, one for the left and right corners.  As a guide, I sketched up the left corner template in CAD and sent it over to him. 

I could hear the answer without the phone and he lives about a mile away.  So into the shop.  All the measurements came from taking his Rockler template for the slot and the slot's position with respect to the edges. I made two identical pieces of quarter inch thick aluminum for the templates and identical pieces of 1/8" aluminum for the edges.  The two quarter inch pieces were clamped together for all the operations so that the sizes came out the same and the position of the slot in the center were cut in one pass.  Top and side vertical pieces are held by two 6-32 machine screws each.  

To use, they're slapped down onto the board, the right angle edges find and hold the board's corner in a second.  He says he holds them down with painters tape to make the cut.  Dropped the time to make his slot to small fraction of what it was.  

My friend is apparently getting a little business going making wooden signs.  He's asked me for fixture ideas a couple of times since then.  While none of it was in mechanical manufacturing, 40 years in the manufacturing industry has left its mark on me and I've passed on ideas about fixturing to make jobs less fussy. 

Meanwhile, I continue down the road of making my CNC lathe ready to thread.  My optical sensor board is here.  I found the part number and looked up the data sheet to get the part dimensions.  Modeled the part and a way of using it on the Sherline.  (I didn't do the model of the Sherline lathe itself. Just the parts in green and turquoise)

Work never goes as quickly as I'd like, but it's moving along. 

Can't Help But Laugh

The news today is all abuzz over the fact that Darth Vader Ginsburg fell and broke three ribs. 

The thing I can't help but laugh over is the rush from some people to donate their ribs or internal organs to the octogenarian. 

When was the last time you heard of a rib transplant? The only thing I could find is some leading edge science?  It's just not done.  Listen, I've had broken ribs before.  It's not a picnic; in fact it hurts like a bitch for the first couple of weeks.  OTOH, transplanting ribs into someone is going to hurt about a thousand times worse.  Getting split open, old ribs sawed off, new ribs bonded in place, sewn back together... 

Her biggest risk for broken ribs is that because of the pain she may not be able to breath deeply enough to ward off pneumonia.  I bet that chance would double or triple if someone actually transplanted ribs into her.  Getting hit by a truck is likely to feel good by comparison.  (I've been there, done that, too - getting hit by a truck - take my word it and don't try this at home: that really hurts, too.) 

Just let her get some rest with some quality opioids for a week or two and she'll be fine - as long as the fall is the only thing that broke those ribs. 

As for the other offers of letting her have "any internal organs", that actually makes more sense except for the part about broken ribs probably not causing any damage that won't heal on its own so there's no need for a transplant.

The only rib transplant that makes sense is transplant those beauties into my stomach!

Premature Congratulations and Big Picture Ramifications

By the time I shut down the computers for the night last night, Andrew Gillum had conceded the Florida Governor's race to Ron DeSantis.  Governor DeSantis had a thin margin of victory, on the order of 45,000 votes, but it was expected to be a tight election.

In the senate race, celebrations from this morning are looking premature this evening.  I recall seeing a statement that Bill Nelson had conceded the senate election to Rick Scott overnight, but most reports this evening say he refused to concede.  The Internet doesn't forget (although it can certainly hide things), but the story is at the Orlando Sentinel.

By tonight, the margin is 0.32%, 26,056 votes in Scott's favor.  State law triggers a recount when the difference is less than 0.5%, and Nelson has requested one, which indicates he has not conceded.  Welcome to Hanging Chad 2.0.  They say we'll know by noon Saturday.

Most of the races went as I voted, although some of the amendments did not.  I'll explain two in particular that passed and I voted against.  First is No. 9, which both bans offshore oil and gas drilling and Vaping in enclosed workplaces.  First, I don't see the sense in lumping these together - they have nothing in common.  Second, I think banning vaping should be left up to the businesses running those workplaces and the state shouldn't be involved.  Third and most importantly, I'm in favor of offshore oil and gas drilling.  Heck, I'm in favor of leasing part of my backyard for fracking.

The other amendment that passed which I opposed bans dog racing.  Sorry, I love dogs (nowadays, just other peoples' dogs) but I don't see anything wrong with it.  Yeah, I've been to dog racing, but not since I turned 18 or whatever it was that made it legal for dad to take me.  Lets say I haven't been to a dog track in 45 years.  Another area I don't see the government needing to be involved in.

The bigger picture I believe I see in the country is one I think I first wrote about back in 2011, that divide we all talk about, the one we call "red state vs. blue state" is really big cities vs. more rural areas.  It can be seen in a map of how Florida voted in the 2012 and 2016 presidential races, from a paper called Your Observer.

There are minor differences between them in the counties - a couple of blue counties went red in 2016 - but the big cities are in the three counties on the southeast coast (Palm Beach, Broward and Dade in north to south order), Tampa in the county numbered "4" on the west coast, and then Orlando and its suburbs in the area marked 7 and 8 in 2016.  The area numbered 1, which I believe represents the highest percent votes for the Democrat is Alachua county, home of the University of Florida.  The counties numbered 3 and 5 are close to the state capital of Tallahassee and home to Florida State University.  No wonder they vote for big government.  (There are big state universities in Tampa and Orlando as well, and big private universities in SE Florida).

This isn't a new phenomenon and I'm certainly not the first to comment on it, but I think it's getting worse.  A new complication comes from the Democratic Socialists of America (no link; you have a search engine if you care).  It's one thing that Occasional Cortex talks openly about getting rid of the electoral college (I've done a couple of posts about that movement this year); just as dumb, the DSA and some of its minions are talking about getting rid of the Senate.  The main argument is that the senate isn't fair because each state gets the same number of senators (I'm not making this up).  To paraphrase Senator Diane Feinstein (D - Uranus) "why should Wyoming’s 500,000 residents have equal have status with California’s 36 million?"  There is no mention that other side of the capitol building houses a body where representatives are proportioned by population.  It's a rather elegant way to try ensure big cities don't rule everything in the country.  But having a few big cities control all those icky deplorables is what the Democratic party wants.

But, hey!  The CATO Institute ranks Florida as the #1 Most Free state in the country.  Details here.

The data only covers through 2016 and we've been #1 since 2014.  Before that, going back to 2000 we were in the top 10 every year except one, and only made #1 in 2014 on Rick Scott's watch.  I can't say it was all his work.  It is, though, easy to break things and from what I know of Gillum's policies, we would have been knocked down to the bottom tiers. 

EDIT 2255 EST 11/07:  Thanks to commenter Aesop for pointing out I barfed the first name of Diane Feinstein calling her "Babs".  Short Attention Span. 

My First Florida Man Story

I'm pretty sure.  Most of the time I remember things and can't find them; tonight I don't remember and can't find evidence. 

A Florida man, from my city, Melbourne, was arrested for threatening to blow up the Supervisor of Elections office. 

A Melbourne man said he was fed up with political robocalls, prompting him to call the Brevard County Supervisor of Elections and threaten to blow up its office Monday, according to his affidavit.

What makes this a Florida man story is that the supervisor of elections has absolutely nothing to do with regulating or controlling robocalls or the mailings the candidates do.

Well, that plus this:

"During the call, Mr. Chen identified himself by name and even gave his phone number," the Sheriff's Office said.

Blink.  Blink.

I gotta tell you; all disclaimers about violence and bombing offices aside, I kinda see his point.  I'd like to be rid of the robocalls, too.  Thankfully, we will be tonight. 

The other day there was a story that Alec Baldwin punched out a guy over a parking space.  Again, all disclaimers aside, part of me said, "two guys fighting over a parking place in NYFC?  Why is this even news?"  This Florida man story is the same sort of story. 

Staying Off Social Media

I used to have a Facebook account.  Closed it several years ago because I could see that it wasn't doing anything for me.  It wasn't worth the price, and no, it's not Free.  The only things FB ever did for me was allow me to swap emails with one or two guys I haven't heard from since high school - and haven't heard from since.  In trade, FB takes everything you do or say and sells it to companies that try to monetize it. 

I've never had accounts on Twitter, Instagram, or any of the startups like Gab.  The only two social media presences I have are this blog with the list of blog friends I read, and I have an account on Pinterest.  There's virtually no person-to-person interaction on Pinterest and I'm not sure why it's considered social media.  The only thing that makes it social is that other people can see what you "pin" (save to a dedicated area of yours).  What tends to happen is that if someone likes what you pinned, they copy it from your area to theirs.  That's all.  If they don't like it, chances are they don't even see it.  I've never had a conversation on Pinterest with another user in the couple of years I've been there.

Google's monopoly is the only social media I stay within the confines of, and I'm always on the verge; always just one more, "that's it", from leaving.  Google links Gmail, YouTube and their other services into a social network of a sort. 

Where am I going?  Why am I writing about this?

It's becoming widely known that social media was designed to get us addicted to it, and that the executives from high tech companies are so concerned about the behavioral changes that it can cause that they're strictly limiting their children's screen time.  From the first link, Computerworld:

If you're a social media addict, and your addiction is getting worse, there's a reason for that: Most of the major social network companies, as well as social content creators, are working hard every day to make their networks so addictive that you can't resist them.

And from the second, Business Insider:

Business Insider previously reported that parents who work in Silicon Valley tech companies are limiting and sometimes banning their kids' access to the devices they helped create. Even tech titans like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates have placed restrictions on their kids' technology use, Business Insider previously reported.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, has said that he doesn't allow his nephew to join online social networks. And the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in 2011 that he didn't let his kids use the iPad.

Business Insider links to other stories that underline how the generation of the engineers and programmers raising their kids in Silicon Valley now are strictly limiting screen time.  They see how much time and effort goes into making digital technology irresistible.  I think it's worth noting that the people who get the closest view of how the things work are becoming the first group limiting their kids' exposures to them.

Lately, you can't go a day without reading about a Twitter rant or fight, shadow banning of any opinions other than far left, and other bad things linked to social media.  Would Twitter fights happen in real life; or would they have happened in a real life that hadn't been conditioned by social media responses?   Would incidents like this young twit throwing coffee or whatever on the FSU college Republicans happen in a world that hadn't been conditioned by the instant pleasure/instant rage responses of social media? 

From what I see, social media brings out the worst in humanity, by making the services as addictive as crack cocaine.   I say to work on becoming free of that addiction.  There are online programs to help you get over Facebook addiction, 99DaysOfFreedom - which strikes me as an ironic statement.

Hours Until Polls Open

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the crapfest election we have coming in Florida.  Trying to mimic the announcer at the Indy 500, I changed "Gentlemen start your engines" to "Gentlemen, choose your turd".  In particular,

There has been a lot of ink pixels spilled over the Scott/Nelson choice by fellow Florida bloggers.  It's one of those classic instances of there not being a good choice and I'm not sure I remember a time when the choice in an election included someone I thought was really good, just the lesser of two evils.  In this case, again, it's like digging in the cat box for the cleanest turd. 

This is one of those cases where (I believe) people of good conscience can and will disagree.  I know there are people who will abstain completely and people who will say I can't vote for [insert name here] . 

I've left this choice running in the background of my mind, like a background processor in your computer, and periodically asked myself if anything makes sense or stands out.  A dim concept has emerged from the fog.  

Similar to the "cleanest turd" analogy, the thought is "which one is more harmful?"  I have to come down that Nelson is more harmful.  Allow me to explain a minute.

Rick Scott damaged us badly as the CEO of Florida and the de facto head of the Stupid Party of Florida.  If he goes to the Senate, Scott goes from being CEO (as he's been for most of his adult life) to being the lowest man on the totem pole.  He'll just be one of a hundred in the world's most overpaid debating club.  He has no power over us.  He'll be one of the most junior members and therefore essentially powerless.  He can propose any stupid law he wants, and Turtle Boy just has to ignore him.  If Scott proposes things that the majority opposes, he gets nothing.  I frankly don't know he can adjust his ego from being almost all-powerful, to being the 100th most powerful person in the senate (or even the 90th most important). 

Bill Nelson has been in that sort of check since the GOP took the senate back the latest time.  It's why there's a prevailing opinion that we can work around him.  We can work around him because the situation has him powerless.  I see Nelson as being potentially more damaging.  He has a lot of seniority, which brings power in the arcane world of the senate.  He has been a reliable vote for Chuckie Schumer.  IF the stupid party retains control of the senate, or expands control, and Nelson wins, he will remain in check. If Nelson wins and the legendary "blue wave" happens, giving the majority to the Evil party, he can do more damage. 

Nelson, by the way, screwed over US ham radio operators in a way analogous to how Scott screwed over Florida gun owners, by refusing to vote for a pro-amateur radio bill because it threatened home owners' associations (which I see as intrusive government; Nelson's home field).  Which means both of them have screwed me.  

...Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) has been the lead obstructionist during several stages of efforts to enact the Amateur Radio Parity Act, which has passed the US House of Representatives four times. Lisenco further added that that Nelson’s opposition makes no sense as Florida desperately needs effective Amateur Radio disaster communications during hurricanes, and hurricane season is rapidly approaching.

No senator can do the damage that the CEO of a state and party boss can do, though. 

Neither one is pro-gun.  If the Senate stays "red" and decides it's going to pass national reciprocity or something for gun owners, Scott would vote for it to stay in the good graces of the party; Nelson would vote against it for the very same reason.  If the senate turns "blue" and decides it's going to ban all the things, Nelson will vote for it and Scott will vote against it.  Not for us but to stay in the good graces of the party.  Nelson is absolutely a big government guy while Scott's tenure in the capital shows he's not.  Neither is likely to be influenced by "write your senator" campaigns, unless they see a much bigger picture than just a handful of riled up constituents. 

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.  I know some people who will abstain (or have).  I know some people who held their nose and voted one way of the other.  I'm just sharing my thinking in the hopes it might be helpful to someone else. 

“Breakthrough” Fuel Cell Could Advance Widespread Use of Fuel Cells

"Breakthrough" might be a loaded word to use when describing alternative energy sources, which always seem to be just beyond reach, but Machine Design uses it to describe a new type of fuel cell from Georgia Tech.  There, a team of researchers under Principal investigator Meilin Liu developed a new fuel cell that runs on methane at temperatures comparable to automobile engines. The key to developing this fuel cell was the discovery of new catalyst.

The catalyst does away with [high-]priced hydrogen fuel by making its own out of cheap, readily available methane. And improvements throughout the cell dramatically cooled the operating temperatures customary in methane fuel cells. Methane fuel cells usually require temperatures of 750 to 1,000°C. The Georgia Tech fuel cell needs only about 500°C—a notch cooler than automobile combustion engines, which run at around 600°C.

That lower temperature could trigger cascading cost savings in the ancillary technologies needed to operate a fuel cell, potentially pushing the new cell to commercial viability. The researchers express confidence that engineers can design electric power units around this fuel cell, something that has eluded previous methane fuel cells.

Fuel cells and the circus of trying to put them in cars (which have never been sold at a profit) are not new topics around this blog.  I'm always trying to keep an eye open for new technologies that might change the dynamics of the field and turn the "$100k car they can sell for $40k" into something more practical. As I said a while back:

I'm not suggesting that nobody works on these things, that's how big breakthroughs happen, I'm just suggesting the odds for that aren't very good and that those R&D projects should not get funded out of tax money. 

This new catalyst fuel cell could be the real thing.  The transition from laboratory to production is famously difficult and a lot of ideas die along the way.  Back to Machine Design for the gritty details:

The research was based on a type of fuel cell with high potential for commercial viability, the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). SOFCs are known for their versatility in using different fuels. If the new fuel cell goes to market, it still might not power automobiles for a while. Instead it could first land in basements as part of a more decentralized, cleaner, cheaper electrical power grid. The fuel cell would be about the size of a shoebox, not counting the other equipment needed to make it run.

Cascading innovations, including a brand new one, let researchers reimagine the fuel cell, making it run on methane at lower temperatures. The ruthenium-nickel based catalyst, here in green, was the latest materials innovation in the new fuel cell. (Credit: Georgia Tech/Liu lab)

“The hope is you could install this device like a tankless water heater,” Liu says. “It would run off of natural gas to power your house…That would save society and industry the enormous cost of new power plants and large electrical grid expansions.

“It would also make homes and businesses more power independent,” he adds. “That kind of system would be called distributed generation, and our sponsors want to develop that.”

Hydrogen is the best fuel for powering fuel cells, but its cost is exorbitant. Researchers figured out how to convert methane to hydrogen in the fuel cell itself via the new catalyst, which is made with cerium, nickel, and ruthenium and has the chemical formula Ce0.9Ni0.05Ru0.05O2 (abbreviated CNR).

When methane, water molecules, and heat contact the catalyst, nickel chemically cleaves the methane molecule. Ruthenium does the same with water. The resulting parts come back together as hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO), which researchers put to good use. Although CO causes performance problems in most fuel cells, in this one they can use it as a fuel.

H2 and CO move on to other catalyst layers that make up the anode, the part of the fuel cell that pulls off electrons, making the carbon monoxide and hydrogen positively charged ions. The electrons travel via a wire creating the electricity flow toward the cathode.

There, oxygen sucks up the electrons, closing the electrical circuit and becoming O2 ions. Ionized hydrogen and oxygen meet and exit the fuel cell as water condensation; the carbon monoxide and oxygen ions meet to become pure carbon dioxide, which could be captured.

The ability to create its needed hydrogen out of methane is very strong advantage for this fuel cell.  Among the drawbacks of current fuel cell-based cars are the high pressure hydrogen tanks involved; one source said the Toyota fuel cell vehicle is using 11 lb tanks at 10,000 PSI.  Assume that about half the hydrogen is replaced with air, and you get a nice explosive mixture with an energy of around 300 Mega Joules (MJ) - equivalent to about 300 sticks of dynamite or nearly nearly 80 lbs of TNT.  Fuel tanks over 11,000 MJ are being planned for trucks.

This fuel cell looks to be able to eliminate the hydrogen tank.  Whether it can be "safe" or not is going to involve a lot of engineering.  I always assume that anything capable of producing or storing energy is potentially unsafe, from the gallon gas can for the lawnmower to the starting battery in a car, to smaller batteries, too. 

Something I've Been Predicting For Years Seems to be Happening

Far enough back that I don't clearly remember when this dawned on me, I came to the conclusion that full time employment is going to go away.  There will always be some, but companies will reduce the amount of employees they hire and instead rely more free lance contractors.  The reason: too may regulations bring too much cost to comply with those reg.s.  Every time congress passes a new law to "protect workers", the costs on companies go up, impacting more workers.  A simple example is from back when Obamacare was mandated: my insurance premiums went up (doubled?) but my deductibles skyrocketed.  The company could have provided the same plan, but it would become a "luxury Cadillac plan" and they would have had to pay the "Cadillac tax" for providing better insurance.  That means they're paying twice: once to the insurance companies for the better coverage, and then paying the Fed.gov for the privilege of buying a more expensive plan.

Today, Human Resources costs have gone up so much that small companies are outsourcing their HR tasks to service contractors.  If you're a small company, perhaps around the 50-employee mark, the amount of time required to ensure compliance with the many laws interferes with the other things managers need to do.  As a result, they hire HR service companies to ensure they're meeting all the regulations. 

In the case of big engineering/manufacturing companies like the one I'm retired from, they will probably only keep the people who are their technology leaders as full time employees.  There will be fewer new graduate engineers hired: big companies were typically where new grads went for their first job because they're too expensive for a small company to make productive. Perhaps those companies will soon be a few percent long-term employees, maybe twice that percentage in promising young engineers, but the majority of the "heavy lifting"; the jobs that require experience and the engineering judgement that experience brings, will go to contract engineers.

What brings this to mind is that over the last few months I keep seeing articles like this, with the theme that by as soon as 2020, which is about 15 months from now, the number of Americans who will be contract employees or self-employed in other ways will reach as much as 50% of the workforce.  The exact number or percentage varies with the source, but there's wide agreement on the general trend.

“Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the notion that a successful career means climbing the corporate ladder,” FreshBooks CEO Mike McDerment told Quartz. “Whether or not the shift to self-employment occurs at the velocity our study indicates or not, the real significance is the mindset shift of the American workforce.”

You may have heard this referred to as "the Gig Economy"; you don't have a full time position anywhere, but you have a handful of part time jobs that you do as needed.

According to a recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, up to 162 million people in the United States and Europe are involved in some form of independent work. That said, as scary as change is, we need to embrace the gig economy as central to the future of American work. This shift has already begun to turn the age-old advertising industry on its head. The explosion of smartphones has turned everyday consumers into content creators, giving brands seemingly unlimited options outside of the traditional creative agencies and making content available with greater speed and lower costs than anything ever seen.  

What does the Gig Economy look like?  For people who would fill minimum wage jobs, perhaps they have gigs with Uber or Lyft.  Perhaps people will make income from AirBnB or something similar.  It seems that with online shopping growing as it is, delivery services and couriers will be a growth industry.  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics put together an overview with some ideas of the kind of jobs being talked about.  I can envision work being easiest to find for people with trade skills such as appliance or air conditioning repair.  They can can probably sign on to work on installations for the big home improvement centers for as many hours as they'd like.  Not to mention the apps like Takl that are setup to for this sort of worker.

This is not written in hopes of showing everyone what a beautiful future we're heading for.  It will be hard, especially for the less-skilled workers.  On the other hand, that has always been the case.  This seems to be a pretty reasonable assessment of the concept of the Gig Economy.

(From statista - as it says)

Some Astounding Halloween Facts

From the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

1. An estimated $575.26 million total will be spent on Halloween pumpkins alone in 2018, according to Finder, at an average price of $3.89 per pumpkin. That will exhaust about 80 percent of the US pumpkin supply.
2. An estimated 95 percent of Americans plan on buying candy during the Halloween season, spending a total of $2.6 billion. 
3. Americans are projected to spend some $9 billion total on Halloween in 2018, according to the National Retail Federation. That’s a couple billion dollars more than was spent on federal elections in 2016.
4. Americans will spend, on average, a record $87 per person on Halloween in 2018, according to The Balance. (Meanwhile, more than half of Americans don’t have enough money in savings to cover the cost of a $500 emergency.)
5. A single business produces nearly half of all costumes worn during the Halloween season, Bloomberg News reports. The company? Rubies Costume Co., the world’s largest manufacturer and designer of costumes.
6. The top five most popular candies during the Halloween season, according to CandyStore.com, are: 5) Starburst; 4) Reese’s Cups; 3) Snickers; 2) M&Ms; 1) Skittles. These five candy brands will sell 55,000 tons of candy (11 million pounds) during the Halloween season, according to The Daily Meal. Skittles alone will sell 3,487,101 pounds.
7. Americans spend more money on costumes than any other Halloween expenditure ($3.2 billion). The most popular costumes in 2018? Adults: witch, vampire, zombie, pirate, and Avengers characters. Kids: A princess, random superhero, Batman, random Star Wars character, and witch.

Some of those number boggle my mind.  11 million pounds of just those five candy brands (in #6)?  3.5 Million pounds of Skittles alone?  Maybe it's because candy isn't a routine part of our lives, and with Precious Grand Daughter and family a thousand miles away, we're hardly around candy at all, but that's a jaw-dropping amount of candy.  The Daily Meal has an article on the 25 most popular candies for Halloween, ranging from licorice at #25 with a mere 17,000 pounds being sold to that 3.5 Million pounds of Skittles.  Although I counted in my head, from #25 to #6 added up to about another 11 million pounds of those candy brands, bringing the overall total close to 22 million pounds of candy being sold.

Halloween trick or treaters, from the FEE article.

Space Can Be Spooky

An appropriate Halloween deep sky photo, this is a nebula cataloged as IC63 (for Index Catalog), seen in the direction of the north circumpolar constellation Cassiopeia.

The cloud looks like a ghost rising out of a foggy patch.  I see a head facing left, perhaps with a ridged helmet, and shoulders, and can follow it down to a body.  This is a portion of an image copyright Ken Crawford (Rancho Del Sol Obs.) and featured on the Astronomy Photo of the Day for the 26th.  To borrow from the description at APOD:

About 600 light-years distant, the clouds aren't actually ghosts, but they are slowly disappearing under the influence of energetic radiation from hot,luminous star gamma Cas. Gamma Cas is physically located only 3 to 4 light-years from the nebulae, just off the top right edge of the frame. Slightly closer to gamma Cas, IC 63 is dominated by red H-alpha light emitted as hydrogen atoms ionized by the star's ultraviolet radiation recombine with electrons. ... 

This was cropped from a larger photo at the APOD link. In that photo, the field of view spans about 1 degree or 10 light-years at the estimated distance of the field of view.  That would make this cropped view around 1/2 degree.

US Poverty Ended a 20 Year Decline When LBJ Declared War On It

There's a quote attributed to Milton Friedman that goes, “if the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five years.”  There's some dispute over that (there seems to be dispute over virtually every famous quote), but the sentiment is right on. It's a wonderful description of the ineptness and incompetence of the big governments.  It has been used to describe the Soviet Union, Sweden and Dubai - and I'm sure that's just the ones the quote reference found.

In this case, FEE.org points out that poverty in the US had been in decline for 20 years, from 32.1% the end of WWII to 14.7% when LBJ started his famous War on Poverty in the State of the Union speech of 1964.

Since 1966, the first year with a significant increase in antipoverty spending, the poverty rate reported by the Census Bureau has been virtually unchanged…Transfers targeted to low-income families increased in real dollars from an average of $3,070 per person in 1965 to $34,093 in 2016…Transfers now constitute 84.2% of the disposable income of the poorest quintile of American households and 57.8% of the disposable income of lower-middle-income households. These payments also make up 27.5% of America’s total disposable income.  [Emphasis added: SiG]

The FEE article is by Daniel J. Mitchell, who's a good guy to read if you're interested in smaller government and free market economics, both of the subjects here.  The article gives large chunks of text to different authors with extended quotes, like I'm doing in quoting his piece, so it gets a little messy to keep all the attributes in place.

When you look at the numbers in that quoted paragraph: 84.2% of the disposable income of the bottom quintile of American households, 57.8% of the disposable income of the next quintile up, and 27.5% of all the disposable income in the country, it's a bit shocking.  Not surprisingly, this huge amount of money being thrown around has negatively impacted incentives to work.  Quoting from Mitchell, quoting from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled):

The stated goal of the War on Poverty is not just to raise living standards but also to make America’s poor more self-sufficient and to bring them into the mainstream of the economy. In that effort the war has been an abject failure, increasing dependency and largely severing the bottom fifth of earners from the rewards and responsibilities of work…The expanding availability of antipoverty transfers has devastated the work effort of poor and lower-middle income families. By 1975 the lowest-earning fifth of families had 24.8% more families with a prime-work age head and no one working than did their middle-income peers. By 2015 this differential had risen to 37.1%…The War on Poverty has increased dependency and failed in its primary effort to bring poor people into the mainstream of America’s economy and communal life. Government programs replaced deprivation with idleness, stifling human flourishing. It happened just as President Franklin Roosevelt said it would: “The lessons of history,” he said in 1935, “show conclusively that continued dependency upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”  [Emphasis added - SiG]

I find it interesting that even FDR realized that the lessons of history show that dependency on relief  destroy the national spiritual and moral fiber.  It's almost as if he read Ben Franklin (1766)

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

The problem with providing 84.2% of the disposable income of the lowest income quintile is the perverse incentives it provides for people to not do anything to improve their lot in life.  If they do improve themselves, their taxes go up and their disposable income goes down.  It's the Welfare Cliff.  That linked article is over four years old, but it shows in graphic form as well as numbers that a single mom is better off with a $29,000 job and welfare than taking a $69,000 job!  A quote in the FEE article updates the numbers a little but the conclusion is roughly the same. 

The welfare cliff drops off when income exceeds that $29,000 and the combined benefits and pay stays below that level until income exceeds $69,000.  Combined pay/benefits climbs from $30k to $43 and then drops off even more when income goes from $43 to $44k.  Going from $43 to $44,000 is a 2.3% raise in pay, but that leads to a roughly 23% decrease in total pay & benefits.  Would you turn down a 2.3% raise if led to 23% less take home pay?   If that single mother stayed sober and didn't put every dime she received up her nose,  $29,000/year is the peak lifestyle on this chart until work pay reaches over $70,000/year.

Welfare programs have constructed a trap there's no way out of.  Who wants to go to school nights, probably while raising kids, and basically turn themselves inside out for 8 to 10 years, only to find their new pay rate drops their welfare benefits and they would have done better financially just sitting home and taking the welfare checks?

How do you get rid of this?  Mitchell (at FEE) reports:

Folks on the left think the solution to high implicit tax rates (i.e., the dependency trap) is to make benefits more widely available. In other words, don’t reduce handouts as income increases.

The other alternative is to make benefits less generous, which will simultaneously reduce implicit tax rates and encourage more work.  

Of course, making the benefits less generous would lead to large scale screaming and protests from both the Free Shit Army and their government enablers.  Not to mention every invective known to man will be thrown at us - plus a few never-before-heard insults.  Hater. 

It's an axiom as true as any that you get more of things you subsidize and less of things you tax.  The open, free market was reducing poverty for 20 years until the War on Poverty started subsidizing it.  There has been no progress in 50 years.

Mitchell included a link to his blog, where he included this helpful diagram to show just how the Federal Welfare state works.  Get out your magnifiers and have fun!

Letting Out the Magic Smoke

Some of you understand that perfectly - so skip to the next paragraph.  "Letting out the magic smoke" is one of those jokes that I think everyone in electronics shares.  The standard form is that while they teach a lot of theory for technicians, all electronics is actually operating on magic smoke, not "transistors" and all the other made-up parts they talk about.  You can verify this because if you ever let the magic smoke out of the package, the circuit will never work again.  ^*

When I talked about moving threading onto my CNC Sherline lathe, I neglected to talk about the whole effort relying on a circuit I built back around the end of 2008, and that I was trying to understand how to make that work again.  After studying everything I could dig up to resurrect the the box and how it interfaced to my CNC controller, I decided it was time to hook it up and look for signs of life.  When power was applied, the magic smoke came out and I'm sure it will never work again.  (By the way, magic smoke stinks with a bitter, acrid smell.  A small source fills a room.)

Let me back up a minute.  When threading manually on a lathe, what those gear combinations do for you is to set the pitch of the screw in the spindle.  That is, they're setting how far the cutter moves along the screw in one revolution.  A 32 turns per inch screw moves the cutter 1/32 inch per turn; a 40 tpi screw moves it 1/40 inch and so on.  A side benefit of "locking" the movement of the cutter to the rotation of the screw is that the cutter always starts a thread at the same point on the screw's circumference.  Under manual threading like this, I'll start the cutter at some point on the screw, advance it along the screw toward the head, and stop when I reach a mark I've cut into the shaft.  Then I'll back the cutter out of the thread (a few thousandths of an inch is fine) and turn the shaft the other direction, so that the cutter goes back past the end of the screw and start of the thread.  Finally, I'll advance the cutter farther into the work by a small amount and cut another pass along the thread.  This process is repeated until the thread is cut.

If there are no gears connecting the spindle and tool (which is what I'm moving toward), how does the system synchronize the cutter and the screw being cut?  The CNC software will do that, but needs to know the position of the shaft of the screw.  That's done with something that tells the software where in a rotation the top is.  Years ago (the end of 2008), I made this little circuit box and, after some experimenting, got threading to work.  Here it is while I was getting it to work the first time:

The red oval is around the part that blew up (a Schmidt trigger for the curious, 74LS14).  What went wrong?  I simply misread a spot on the 10 year old diagram for the control board I was hooking the wiring up to.  I read VBB as VCC.  No excuse.  As a result, I put 20V on this part, which ordinarily runs on 5V.  Ooops.

On the right, four wires (orange, green, blue and white) are visible, the last three in big loops.  These are connections for the heart of the box, an optical sensor.  This part, barely visible at the right wall of the box, shines an infrared LED onto the reflective shaft of the motor, and then senses the reflection.  A small strip of black tape breaks up the reflection, which creates a pulse going to the computer when that tape passes under the optical sensor.

Part of getting this approach working is ensure you can cut a spiral groove on a blank. This was my first successful attempt at that from early 2009.

The barfed looking left half of that: not really threaded, not really not threaded, was another experiment that went bad and led to doing the scratch test.

I started looking for the parts to build another optical detector like the one I had, and found the transistor I used is obsolete and hard to get.  Looking around, I found that CNC4PC has a slightly different optical sensor for not much more than I'd pay for one of those transistors (Mouser.com had the transistors for about $18 each).  The major difference is that while mine worked by reflection, this one works on transmission.  The sensor has two arms with the LED on one side and the phototransistor on the other.  A common use would put a disk with a hole through it onto the spindle and let the disk spin in that slot between the two arms, so that when the hole lines up, the software knows the index position just happened. 

So now what?  Now I figure out how to build the disk with the hole or slot in it, and how to mount both the disk and the sensor.  My little box goes away and the new little board goes inside the CNC controller box. 



^* I imagine that like all specialized fields, electronics has its own jokes, legends and lore.  I didn't hear about the smoke theory until I was in the field for quite a while, maybe a decade.  Before that, the joke was that microprocessors ran on IBM theory.  Itty Bitty Men inside the components did everything.

It's Looking Like Falcon Heavy Was A Successful Product Launch

Since it was so visible from my backyard, I naturally covered the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.  A couple of weeks later, I covered a review of the "heavy lift landscape" on Ars Technica that became one of my top 10 most popular posts. 

I say this so newcomers to the blog know I've been on the story for a while.

This week, ARS Technica reports that the Falcon Heavy seems to have caught on well with its intended customer base.  Part of that, I'm sure, is because (as ARS put it), "The Falcon Heavy is an absurdly low-cost heavy lift rocket". The other part seems to have something to do with the flamboyance of America's Favorite Huckster, Elon Musk, and the first mission which famously flung a Tesla roadster into solar orbit.

It's easy to forget that when the rocket first launched, the critics were saying that the company's Falcon 9 rocket had become powerful enough that it could satisfy the needs of most commercial customers, and that, "The Falcon Heavy is just a vanity project for Elon Musk."  It's as if the critics never expected customers to sign up for the big rocket.

At the time, the rocket only had a couple of launches on its manifest, including the six-ton Arabsat 6A satellite for Arabsat of Saudi Arabia and the Space Test Program-2 mission for the US Air Force. However, since that time SpaceX has seen the rocket certified for national security missions by the US military and has signed several additional launch contracts.

Last week, the Swedish satellite company Ovzon signed a deal for a Falcon Heavy launch as early as late 2020 for a geostationary satellite mission. And just on Thursday, ViaSat announced that it, too, had chosen the Falcon Heavy to launch one of its future ViaSat-3 satellite missions in the 2020 to 2022 timeframe.

Both Ovzon and ViaSat cited the ability of the Falcon Heavy to deliver heavy payloads "direct" - or almost directly - to geostationary orbit.  The Heavy's ability to do that direct-to-geostationary-orbit profile was the hidden meaning of the test flight.  The thing is, it didn't have to be the red Tesla, glitzy launch it became.  NASA was offered a more or less "free" launch if it wanted something delivered into deep space, but they had to follow the mission profile itself, which was a test flight.  That first test flight could have launched another mission for NASA and not the red Tesla/Starman publicity stunt. 

On the day before launch, SpaceX founder Elon Musk explained that the rocket would demonstrate the capability to send payloads directly to geostationary orbit by firing its second stage after a prolonged shutdown during which the rocket would coast. “The six-hour coast is needed for a lot of the big Air Force intel missions for direct injections to GEO,” Musk said. 

The ability to do the six hour coast, about twice as long as the longest coasts the Falcon 9 rocket has ever made, was absolutely not lost on the satellite industry.  It was watched closely, as you'd expect it would be; we are talking millions of dollars in cost impact to these companies, after all.

This turns out to have been a shrewd move. The demonstration flight of the Falcon Heavy apparently convinced not only the military of the rocket's direct-to-geo capability but satellite fleet operators as well. The Falcon Heavy rocket now seems nicely positioned to offer satellite companies relatively low-cost access to orbits they desire, with a minimum of time spent getting there in space.

 

I'm About Sick of Politcians Talking About Income Inequality

"Income inequality" is just one of those terms that doesn't seem to have any formally-agreed upon meaning, and is primarily used to inflame class envy.  The term seems to have a poorly-concealed core belief that all income should properly be given to the Glorious Motherland to distribute equally.  Once they take their cut off the top, of course.  The Motherland always gets their cut.

Pretty much every Democratic party candidate I can see is running on some version of claiming they'll do something about income inequality, like our Dem Soc gubernatorial candidate Telehassle Mayor Gillum.  

Well there are definitions of inequality, they just don't mean anything.  They don't give us any tools we use to answer the big questions:  (1) is it a real problem?  (2) is it something that can be fixed?  (3) is the cost to "fix" the problem worse than the problem?  

For example, Investopedia says:

Income inequality is the unequal distribution of household or individual income across the various participants in an economy. It is often presented as the percentage of income related to a percentage of the population. For example, a statistic may indicate that 70% of a country's income is controlled by 20% of that country's residents.

My response to that might well be, "So what?  How do I know those percentages aren't right?  What should they be?"  I might even say, "I should hope there's income inequality; why should I expect a daycare worker, plumber or taxi driver to make as much as a surgeon?" 

Here's the big problem.  Since income inequality isn't defined precisely, it's easy to manipulate methods to get whatever results the person complaining about inequality wants.   For example, how many times have you heard that the only growth in the economy has gone to the wealthy?  This is an argument exemplified by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, December 2016.  Russ Roberts takes on this subject in the online magazine Medium.

They write, “Looking first at income before taxes and transfers, income stagnated for bottom 50% earners: for this group, average pre-tax income was $16,000 in 1980 — expressed in 2014 dollars, using the national income deflator — and still is $16,200 in 2014.”¹ Piketty, Saez, and Zucman also found that incomes of the top 1% tripled over the same time period.

What that statement implies is that we're looking at the same group of people 34 years later, and they're both working the same jobs and making the current pay rates.  It's comparing a snapshot of the pay rate for people in that income slice in 2014 from one in 1980.  In 34 years, lots of things will have changed, including both people dying and no longer being in the sample, and jobs being obsoleted.  More importantly, after 34 years, it's highly likely the 1984 workers have children that are now in the income distribution.  The important part is that these samples are not the same people. Their statistical method is just looking at pay rates and ignores upward mobility.

Studies that use panel data — data that is generated from following the same people over time — consistently find that the largest gains over time accrue to the poorest workers and that the richest workers get very little of the gains. This is true in survey data. It is true in data gathered from tax returns. [Bold added: SiG]
...
This first study, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, conducted by Leonard Lopoo and Thomas DeLeire uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and compares the family incomes of children to the income of their parents.⁴ Parents income is taken from a series of years in the 1960s. Children’s income is taken from a series of years in the early 2000s. As shown in Figure 1, 84% earned more than their parents, corrected for inflation. But 93% of the children in the poorest households, the bottom 20% surpassed their parents. Only 70% of those raised in the top quintile exceeded their parent’s income.

In another study,  children from the poorest families ended up twice as well-off as their parents when they became adults. The children from the poorest families had the largest absolute gains as well. Children raised in the top quintile did no better or worse than their parents once those children became adults. 

When looked at as tracking people and not comparing "classes" in society, the results are completely different than the first paper.  We find that the bottom quintile of incomes is the most upwardly mobile; much like the old saying about "when you're down and out the only way is up".  What's going on here?

One explanation of these findings is there is regression to the mean — if your parents are particularly unlucky, they may find themselves at the bottom of the economy. You, on the other hand, can expect to have average luck and will find it easier to do better than your parents. At the other end of the income distribution, one reason you might have very rich parents is that they have especially good luck. You are unlikely to repeat their good fortune, so you will struggle to do better than they did.

But that doesn’t change what actually happened in the last three decades of the 20th century in the Isaacs study: the children from the poorest families added more to their income than children from the richest families. That reality isn’t consistent with the standard pessimistic story that only the richest Americans have benefited from economic growth over the last 30–40 years. Or that only the richest Americans have gotten raises. The pessimistic story based on comparing snapshots of the economy at two different points in time misses the underlying dynamism of the American economy and does not accurately measure how workers at different places in the income distribution are doing over time.

Part of the false view we get of income inequality comes from simple arithmetic.  If you measure inequality by comparing the number of dollars it takes to land at a certain income percentile, with a hard floor on the low end ($0 per year in wages) but no ceiling on the top end, any growth in the economy combined with simple arithmetic demand that incomes at the top will pull away from incomes at the bottom, for the same reason that any point on the surface of a balloon will get farther and farther away from an imaginary fixed point at its center as the balloon is inflated. 

I get that it's a political season, and if you honestly could ask one of these candidates what Income Inequality means you wouldn't get an honest answer.  Or a worthwhile or meaningful answer.  Final words to Russ Roberts:

There’s a lot more to study and understand. But what the studies above show is that the economic growth of the last 30–40 years has been shared much more widely than is generally found in the cross-section studies that compare snapshots at two different times, following quintiles rather than people. No one of these studies is decisive. They each make different assumptions about income (see the footnotes below), which people to include, how to handle inflation. Together they suggest the glass isn’t as empty as we’ve been led to believe. It’s at least half-full.

This does not mean that everything is fine in the American economy. There are special privileges reserved for the rich that help them reduce their risk of downward mobility — financial bailouts are the most egregious example. There are too many barriers like occupational licensing and the minimum wage that handicap the disadvantaged desperately trying to succeed in the workplace. And the American public school system is an utter failure for too many children who need to acquire the skills needed for the 21stcentury. But the glass is at least half-full. If we want to give all Americans a chance to thrive, we should understand that the standard story is more complicated than we’ve been hearing. Economic growth doesn’t just help the richest Americans.

This Never Happens

Computer image recognition is so good that this never happens.

I mean besides all day every day.

Image from the great Sargasso sea of the Internet, Pinterest.  

I'm Not Saying I'd Like to Build One...

... I'm just saying I'd like to be able to build one.  That said, there are many things I can say that about.


Forged and Filed from Jesse Beecher on Vimeo.

Build one?  I'd need a manual just to open it.

Five minute video. 

Using WiFi to Detect Firearms and Bombs

I've had this story lingering around for several weeks and never gotten around to posting it.  It has to do with adapting common WiFi hardware to find bombs or weapons before an attack.

According to a peer-reviewed study led by researchers from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, ordinary Wi-Fi can effectively and cheaply detect weapons, bombs, or explosive chemicals contained within bags.

WiFi signals can be used to penetrate bags to get the dimensions of dangerous metal objects and identify them, including weapons, aluminum cans, laptops and batteries for bombs. WiFi can also be used to estimate the volume of liquids such as water, acid, alcohol and other chemicals for explosives, according to the researchers. 

For their study, the researchers built a Wi-Fi weapon detection system that could analyze what happened to Wi-Fi signals as they encountered a nearby object or material.

When they tested their system on 15 types of objects and six types of bags, they found that it could distinguish dangerous objects from non-dangerous ones 99 percent of the time.

It could identify 90 percent of dangerous materials, accurately identifying metals 98 percent of the time, and liquids 95 percent of the time.

The author notes that if the material was in a backpack, the system could detect that object with a 95 percent accuracy rate.  If it was wrapped in something else before being put in the backpack, though, that figure dropped to 90 percent.

The intended application for this isn't airports, it's for public spaces.  Think the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester, UK, in May of  '17 or the French Bataclan night club shooting in Paris in November of '15 or the Orlando Pulse Night Club shooting in June of '16.  Airports use X-Rays and other scanning devices, while concert venues are more likely to use security personnel manually searching bags.  The goal here is to use existing WiFi hardware to increase the effectiveness of the attempts to find bombs and other ways to attack.

Demo photo from Rutgers University.

Rutgers University professor and paper co-author Yingying (Jennifer) Chen notes that, “In large public areas, it's hard to set up expensive screening infrastructure like what's in airports.  Manpower is always needed to check bags and we wanted to develop a complementary method to try to reduce manpower.”

This low-cost system requires a WiFi device with two to three antennas and can be integrated into existing WiFi networks. The system analyzes what happens when wireless signals penetrate and bounce off objects and materials.

Federal Income Tax at an All Time High - Why is Anyone Surprised?

There was a headline last week that caught a bit of a buzz.  Business Insider reported it as, "Go Figure: Federal Revenues Hit All-Time Highs Under Trump Tax Cuts".  "Go figure"?  This is a business magazine writer?  I bet you regular readers figured revenues would go up last year, while that tax income was still being paid, just on economic principles.

The Treasury Department reported this week that individual income tax collections for FY 2018 totaled $1.7 trillion. That's up $14 billion from fiscal 2017, and an all-time high. And that's despite the fact that individual income tax rates got a significant cut this year as part of President Donald Trump's tax reform plan.

There's an important point left out of that paragraph.  The Trump tax cuts didn't start until the second quarter of fiscal 2018, when calendar 2018 started.  That means the increased revenues aren't the full effect of the tax cuts. 

 But if you limit the accounting to this calendar year, individual income tax revenues are up by 5% through September.

Other major sources of revenue climbed as well, as the overall economy revived. FICA tax collections rose by more than 3%. Excise taxes jumped 13%.

The only category that was down? Corporate income taxes, which dropped by 31%.

That corporate income tax burden moved partially to the personal income taxes because (say it with me) corporations don't pay tax, they collect tax from their customers.  To the extent those corporations sold to Americans, I'd guess over 80%, their tax burdens were paid in US income tax.  

One of the drums I beat all the time is that tax rates and tax revenues are not the same thing.  The classic example is Hauser's Law, after Stanford University professor Kurt Hauser, and as reported on these pages a bunch of times.  Here's a graph I've been using since 2012 (don't worry, it goes back to 1945, so it's not a big modification to leave out the last six years - here's a nice explanation from 2009)

With a few short-lived exceptions, it's obviously true that tax revenues are essentially constant (as % of GDP), regardless of tax rates.  That can only mean that when taxes are higher, the GDP contracts.  The government doesn't collect any more money because there's less to take a portion of.  When taxes are lower, GDP expands and taxes take a smaller percentage of a bigger pie, giving the same percent of GDP as tax revenue.

It's election season (much like allergy season or painful rectal itch season) so you'll hear a lot of talk about various Republicans having passed "tax cuts for their rich buddies" or their "corporate benefactors"; just like (often times) the same idiots saying the solution to our problems is to raise the minimum wage, you just can't get through to people like this. 

A few weeks ago, I swapped emails with a friend who was adamant about this.  As a fellow retired engineer, I thought he was better at math than his argument.  I said that I thought last years' tax cut was a pretty good attempt to try to target tax cuts for the middle class.  Since the upper incomes pay all the tax, giving even a tiny percentage cut to the rich will be bigger numbers than the amount given to middle or lower incomes - that's simple arithmetic.  I pointed out things like the lowest 50% of incomes pay 3% of all tax revenue, and the top 3% of U.S. taxpayers paid practically 90% of all taxes.  The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).  The numbers of taxpayers paying most of the income tax become shockingly small. The top 0.1% of income tax payers, who paid more than the bottom 70% of the population combined, is just 1409 taxpayers.  Those 1409 people paid more than 98.7 million other taxpayers. 

I posted this quote back in June of '17, but it really stuck with me and became one of those quotes I can't forget.  It really fits here.  It's from David Stockman, Reagan's budget chief, who said,

The income tax has been slashed so many times since 1981 that it’s no longer a broad based societal tax; it’s a kind of luxury tax on upper income salary earners and the small share of households which garner most of the capital income from dividends, interest payments and capital gains…

By the way, that "fellow retired engineer" I sent some of these facts to never replied to me again.  I told him I could find these facts online within a few minutes while typing the email and I'm sure he could, too. 

First Man

We decided to take a chance on the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man today, at the suggestion of a friend.  Here in the post-career phase of life, it's hard to say exactly which of two big influences in my life pushed me more in the direction of engineering: ham radio or being a space-geek.  Among my earliest memories in life is being herded down to the only classroom in my elementary school to watch Alan Shepard's first suborbital flight, and a little less than a year later herded to watch John Glenn's first orbital flight.

As a space geek kid, I thought I was fairly familiar with Neil Armstong's life, but there were a couple major things I didn't know.  I'm familiar with his NASA career highlights, just not familiar enough with Armstrong the man.   I wasn't aware that early in his career he lost a very young daughter and that it was hard for him to get past - as I think it would be for most of us.  The movie isn't "the life of Neil Armstrong", starting at childhood, it's about 8 years out of his life: roughly 1961 to 1969.  It opens with him doing a flight in the X-15 rocket plane while working as a civilian at Edwards Air Force Base.   According to an authoritative summary on Ars Technica

Of the 12 people who flew the X-15 airplane more than half a century ago, just one of the pilots is alive today, Joe Engle. He was a consultant on the film. (The film consulted with numerous astronauts, engineers, and historians to ensure accuracy when possible. There are some liberties taken, such as the clouds during the X-15 flight. These were needed to show the dramatic speed of the X-15, but the rocket plane would not have flown on such a cloudy day). Ars spoke to Engle on Thursday and asked him about the depiction of Armstrong's flight in the movie.

"I never had a launch day that turbulent," he said. "But I did hear from many people that that day was, by far, the most turbulent they had ever seen in the program at launch conditions." As for the exhilarating action scene, no, it doesn't compare to the real thing, Engle said. That was truly spectacular. However, he added, "I think it's as close as you can get."

"I think it's as close as you can get." is probably an apt summary for the movie.  I wasn't concerned with the whole daily outrage over the movie not depicting Armstrong and Aldrin planting the American flag; in the small print during that, most writers acknowledged that they showed the flag on the moon, they just didn't show the actual planting.  They also showed the ALSEP on the surface (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package), but didn't spend time showing details of how that was deployed.  It seemed to me that they cut the film at the end.  The emphasis was getting to the moon.  It almost felt like it was fast-forwarded for the last few scenes on the moon and after their return. 

I was concerned about the movie over-dramatizing things just to be more dramatic; perhaps ginning up fights or tension between Armstrong and his wife Jan.  One might think it's hard to over-dramatize space flight, but I'm aware of film and TV doing things to "make it more watchable". 

Did they?  I think, yes, to some degree, but all in all it was a good movie.  IMO, they do a bit of over-exaggerated "shake the camera" in a few places so that it's impossible for the audience to see the panels and instruments.  At those times, they do things in the sound track to increase the tension in the movie; in other words, to manipulate us a bit.  Did they drum up tension between Neil and Jan?  No one that knows would tell, but the scenes between Ryan Gosling as Neil and Claire Foy as Jan grappling with the risks and reality of space flight come across as believable.  As an example, Ed White's wife Pat was the first person in Houston to welcome and befriend Jan; and throughout the start of the film you can see a closeness grow between the two couples.  The film barely touches on the personal devastation that Ed's death in the Apollo 1 fire causes but it seems it could be a contributor to the tension between Neil and Jan.

It's a good movie for space geeks and anyone interested in that period of history.  
 

Scene of Armstrong (center), Aldrin (left) and Collins heading for the Apollo 11 capsule.  IRL actors Ryan Gosling, Corey Stoll and Lukas Hass.