11/08/2015

Thoughts On A Sunday

The warm weather we experienced over last week has fled, with daytime temps in the upper 40's and overnight temps below freezing. This meant we had to fire up the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove to keep the chill off overnight.

The colder weather also brought a lot of gusty winds, meaning a lot of the leaves remaining on our trees came down over the weekend. The wind also meant it would have been futile to rake the yard, so no actual yard work was done.

***************

Bird Dog points us in the direction of an old Yankee cuisine staple: Fluffernutters.

***************

Oh, I like this!

Here's where you can find a list of gas stations in your state or province that sell ethanol-free gasoline.

Fortunately there's one in a town not too far from here that does so and I am up that way every other week or so.

I wish the US would end the stupid ethanol mandate because it doesn't do anything it promised it would do, particularly reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce carbon emissions. We have plenty of oil here in the US and if we chose to do so, would not have to import a single drop of overseas oil. Corn-based ethanol is a loser from the get-go, costing the taxpayers a lot of money, taking otherwise productive farmland out of food production to produce corn for ethanol, and actually causes more CO2 to be generated than if we did nothing.

***************

Another DNC media organ admits to fabricating a story about one of the present GOP presidential candidates. Sound familiar?

Politico‘s Kyle Cheney admitted that he fabricated a negative story about Ben Carson. At least, according to his own standards, he admitted the grievous journalistic sin.

In a story published early on Friday, Politico’s Kyle Cheney authored a piece headlined “Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship” with a subhed “Carson’s campaign on Friday conceded that a central point in his inspirational personal story did not occur as he previously described.”

There were at least five major problems with the story:

The headline was completely false
The subhed was also completely false
The opening paragraph was false false false
The substance of the piece was missing key exonerating information
The article demonstrated confusion about service academy admissions and benefits
I'm wondering how long before Politico borrows the CBS News justification: “Fake, but accurate.”

***************

David Starr makes a good case for repealing Dodd-Frank.

...we passed a law, Dodd-Frank, which makes bailouts policy.  Dodd-Frank  sets up which companies will get bailouts, how much.

The real problem with bailouts, is they urge on crazy behavior.  In no-bailout world, company management is pretty careful about the risks it runs.  If they do something really risky, and it fails, the company is toast, they and everyone in the company are out of work, the investors loose everything.  All around badness.

But when Uncle Sam says he will bailout companies, all bets are off.   Now management can do all those crazy things, and if they fail, the company survives, they keep their jobs, and the investors are untouched (mostly).  No pain.  And without pain, nobody learns anything. 

That's what happens when you privatize profit but socialize risk – Risk 'disappears' and the constraints on investments disappear with them. That's never a good idea.

***************

You're kidding me, right?

As if we need more evidence that “much of the student body is mentally ill” at Yale, Glenn Reynolds points us to a Hot Air story reporting that Yale administrators have apologized for not creating enough “safe spaces” on campus.

Anyone requiring such safe spaces isn't competent to survive in the real world and, for the good of the rest of the student body, should be expelled until they can prove they are no longer mentally ill. It isn't fair to the rest of the students or the faculty to be forced to go out of their way to cater to someone who shouldn't even be there.

***************

I think they're grading on a curve.

Obama earns a 'D' on handling the economy.

If he was being graded on how to weaken and/or destroy an economy, then he would deserve an 'A'.

***************

Microsoft's “hit” OS, Windows 10, isn't much of a hit with a lot of PC support reps, with some of them discouraging their customers from upgrading to the new OS.

I know a lot of corporate customers are staying with Windows 7, seeing no good reason to abandon an OS that is stable and does what they need it to do.

I know my company has a few PCs running Windows 10, but mostly to help us ensure our software will work when run on a Windows 10 platform. All of the rest of our computers are running Windows 7 Enterprise and corporate has no plans to make the switch to 10 any time in the near future.

***************

To make space more accessible we need a better way to get spacecraft into orbit. The old tried-and-true method works, but it's hellaciously expensive and inherently unsafe as compared to driving a car or taking a flight in a plane.

While some companies have been working on making spaceflight less expensive, too many of them are merely using a variation of the system we've been using since the late 1950's. Companies like Scaled Composites and Xcor are on the right track, but they aren't there yet and their existing systems are only good enough for sub-orbital flights. Others, like Reaction Engines Ltd, are working on better systems that work little different than existing airliners, albeit with a lot of upgrades to make orbital flight possible.

***************

And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the last of the boats are being pulled from the lake, summer cottages are now closed up for the winter, and where the smell of woodsmoke is becoming more prevalent.