One year ago today: October 26, 2019, my idiot bank.
Five years ago today: October 26, 2015, printing’s the easy part.
Nine years ago today: October 26, 2011, batbike sneak preview.
Random years ago today: October 26, 2008, ketchup, cops, printer ink.
Nuclear rocket motors make the news again, this time a Seattle outfit. The mechanics are the same, using spent reactor material that still has enough power to super-heat some compound and spray it out the nozzle. This new model uses fuel already available from the existing sources without much preparation. A small but constant thrust is all that is required to send missions to Mars in around 12 weeks. The challenge isn’t to built a powerful enough device, but how to protect the crew from said radiation.
You gotta admire that German trade surplus. China’s surplus is falling due to the tariffs while Germany seems to consistently pull in $10 billion per month minimum. The simple explanation is quality and they don’t export the high paying jobs nor the technology. Merkel doesn’t dare pull a stunt like that. Europeans are less keen on morons than the USA, where we often lose $20 billion per month, but that is not the whole story. Allow me.
Economics is weird because money is complicated. No matter what is said, there are an equal and opposite number of economists who bitch. I have a personal theory about all their shortcomings. Want to hear it? Sure. All economic moves have a delayed effect. The simplest example is probably interest rates. They rise and people save, which is good, but which takes money out of circulation, which is bad—depending on who you listen to. My position is that saved money eventually gets spent, net effect zero.
There is always a time lag between the two If the economists were doing their job, they would get better at determining all those delays and be able to adjust the system to their advantage. Instead, they prefer to wait until somebody else takes a stand and rag on him. You don’t have to be a career economist to know these people are more reactive than proactive. They also tend to toward an outdated concept of goods and services. The US economy has a huge surplus in services.
But a large part of that money is spent by consumers importing cheap goods, primarily from China. It is those manufacturing jobs that were lost here. The more profitable ones are slowly returning due to Trump’s hard line on dumping. My position is these are jobs that require skills and infrastructure that America has which China cannot allow in their system or impute into their character. I doubt there will ever be a return to the manufacturing base that made America great, but nor is there any need to. America is geared to change and progress, I’ve often pointed out how Asian countries can copy that far easier than they can come up with anything of their own. But copycats are always past tense.
By stepping through the menus again on my new smart phone, there seems to be a method to block calls without paying for an app. Await my testing, as there appears to be no manual on-line and the people that sold me the phone certainly have no idea about it. The procedure appears to be setting up your contact list and enabling a feature called Do Not Disturb. I see two sides to that coin, possibly three.
One side says old people don’t know how to use new stuff, the other side says young people don’t know how to write good instructions The third side is, I suspect, a lot of the so-called power users don’t have this feature set because unless somebody tells them, they don’t even know about it. The people who sold me the phone are definitely category 3. I’ll set it up and let you know whether it works.
Royal poinciana.
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I’ve not been at Cracker Barrel since so long ago I can’t pinpoint where. It was one of the first, where (if I recall) even the wooden chairs were for sale. Not the rockers outside, the actual chairs. And the goods for sale was a much smaller section. Today we went to the location on Donelson Pike. They’ve reopened with a shorter menu, most missed item is likely to be no more omelets. It’s pretty authentic southern cooking, I had the chicken dumplings. I’m glad the Reb was up to going out. We walk the dogs together, but that’s it most days.
SOFIA, the flying telescope, has detected the characteristic infra-red signature of water in the shadows of lunar craters. To me, this says what I always have—that water exists up there if you look hard enough for it. So now we have found caves to live in and water to drink, there are no more acceptable excuses for not going there. Enough social programs, already. Trump needs to fire 90% of the civil service and phase out welfare, then use the money to set up shop on the Moon. Big scale, where there is water there is rocket fuel for Mars, enough for powered flight there and back.
ADDENDUM
Big tech has a good spanking on the way. There are a number of methods to deal with their censorship, or whatever they prefer to call it. One plan I like is to call their support of one side over the other a political contribution. One way or another, around 80% of the upper level staff at these big tech companies need to be sharpened up for their callous disregard for the taxpayer. Every leftist I have ever met in America eventually revealed themselves to be two-faced, putting on a good show in public, despicable in private.
