7/02/2017

Thoughts On A Sunday

The long Fourth of July weekend is here, though the Fourth isn’t until Tuesday. Deb and I head out onto the lake at 10AM yesterday, hoping we’d beat the heavy boat traffic and be back in in an hour.

It didn’t work out that way.

It seems a lot of other folks had the same thought we did, making for a lot of wake driven chop, lengthy lines waiting to get through the Weirs Beach Channel, and then rain showers to cap it off. A leisurely 1 hour jaunt on the lake turned into two hours constant vigilance, rough water, aching knees, and a sweat/rain-soaked tee shirt.

Yet we still enjoyed it. A paradox, I know, but even a bad day out on the lake is better than a good day at work.

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The ongoing battle between the DNC-MSM and President Trump continues, with the duo of Scarborough and Brezenski seeing just how low they can go. They and their colleagues keep hammering at Trump as if they were back in high school and they show themselves to be the bullies, but their target stands strong and is not cowed by their tactics.

Is it childish? Yup, no doubt. But sometimes ‘childish’ is the only thing that gets through to these self-important defenders of the Leftist faith.

In the meantime Trump is getting things done while the DNC-MSM is focused on Trump’s tweets, remarks, and family. He has them totally suckered. Then again he’s manipulated the media for years and it comes to him as naturally as everyone else breathes.

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Those of us in the technical field understand things about the Internet that those outside the field rarely think about. That’s understandable. Most folks just want to know that it will work when they need it.

But too many, even in the tech field, have little if any understanding of the dangers that go along with the conveniences of the ‘Net.

As more things become connected to the Internet, more things can be controlled via the Internet, for good or bad.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality, the vulnerabilities mount. Would you like it if someone could control all of the systems – lighting, heating/air conditioning, TV, appliances, the locks on your doors – from outside of your home? That’s what the IoT has as a major downside. While some of these things are quite convenient for a home owner, they have to understand the downside. (It’s one reason we have no such connections of anything to the Internet.)

As utilities and other infrastructure use the Internet for command and control, the ability by cyber-warfare hackers to shut down or damage that infrastructure increases. (None of that stuff should be ever be connected the Internet. They should be fully insulated from any Internet connections of any kind. While they would use the same kind of network structure as the Internet, they should be totally independent with no access from the outside.)

As one of the aforementioned engineering geeks, I am fully cognizant of the risks. It’s one reason I don’t have a smart phone. (I still use flip phone, something that can’t be hacked, or at least not as easily as smart phones.)

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It is one thing to not understand economics. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if someone with no such understanding figures they know better about how things should be run, doing things like artificially raising the cost of a commodity – labor is a commodity – and there being no fallout, then they are deluded. Such is the case with New Hampshire House Representative Timothy Horrigan.

After a post about McDonald’s installing ordering/payment kiosks in its US stores, Horrigan commented to the post, trying to use Switzerland’s McDonald’s franchises as proof that a $15/hour minimum wage won’t affect the costs of food, citing the “Big Mac” Index.

One thing Horrigan missed (or chose to ignore) is that they use ordering kiosks in Switzerland, just as they do through parts of Europe (France was where the first kiosks were installed some years ago, if memory serves). The McDonald’s franchises there have fewer employees than US franchises do, hence a skewed Big Mac Index.

Oops.

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I have to agree with David Starr on this: the F35 has turned the corner.

As the various problems have been sorted out, the F35 has turned from a very expensive dud to something that is making everyone sit up and take notice.

Let’s hope it turns out that it will be everything it was promised to be. If it does, it will be one kick-ass plane.

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Which state will default first- Connecticut or Illinois?

That’s a tough one to call, but I’m leaning towards Illinois.

Connecticut won’t be far behind, particularly in light that another corporate heavyweight, Aetna, is pulling up stakes and moving to another state. This follows on the heels of General Electric’s departure for Boston last year. Connecticut’s hostile tax code and business atmosphere has endeared it to no one and both businesses and the wealthy are leaving in droves, taking any tax revenues with them.

Illinois will fall first because they’ve been doing this for years longer than Connecticut and haven’t been able to pass a budget in three years. They’ve also had to stop selling some lottery tickets because they can’t guarantee they can pay off winning tickets. At least Connecticut can still make those payments…for now.

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OK, how do they explain this?

Phoenix, Arizona drops its sanctuary status and crime drops…unexpectedly.

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Any chance to play to the narrative that “We’re all gonna die!” if we don’t do something about climate change is used to prove the CAGW scenario. However, it’s one thing to take a catastrophic weather event to prove a point and yet another to turn a molehill into a mountain.

In this case a gust of wind was turned into a tornado in Hamburg, Germany. What’s worse, it was picked up by the international press even though there was absolutely no evidence such a tornado took place.

But it fits the narrative and that’s all that counts.

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Hey, SJW`s! Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you! You need to hear this:

With free speech comes consequences.

And here’s something else you need to know – Both the freedom of speech and its consequences also apply to you.

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Another note to the CAGW faithful: Too little CO2 is worse than too much. Of course “too much” CO2 is a matter of opinion.

As we’ve been seeing the increased CO2 has been beneficial, with increased greening of once barren areas, better crop yields (all while requiring less water), and apparently less severe and less numerous hurricanes. All of this is the opposite of what the CAGW faithful have been claiming. They have also been saying a major climate catastrophe will occur by 2100 if we don’t do something now despite even the best estimates showing that if we eliminated all anthropogenic CO2 the difference between CAGW climate models and ‘fixed’ CO2 models show such a small difference as to almost be lost in the noise. Yet we’re supposed to spend trillions of dollars on a problem that isn’t really a problem? We’d be better off spending that money on getting us out to other planets.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summerfolk are here in droves, the lake is busy, and where we’re looking forward to our Fourth of July cookout and fireworks.