Mail 681 Friday July 1, 2011 – 3
Duties and Rights
Regarding your comment re responsibilities versus benefits, the Google Ngram of “duties” versus “rights” tells the story.
http://m-francis.livejournal.com/203878.html
Mike
= = = = = = = = = =
Dept. of Agriculture Spending
Victor Davis Hanson points out in the link below that the Dept. of Agriculture annual budget is greater than the entire nation’s annual net farm income this year. Somehow that doesn’t make good sense to me.
Good luck with the new system. What you have to say will always be worth reading, irrespective of what it looks like. We know you’ll figure it out.
Best Regards,
— Lindy Sisk
I recall way back in the Eisenhower Administration there was an effort to have a public law to the effect that there could never be more employees of the Department of Agriculture than there were farmers and farm workers. That failed every time it was proposed.
I would think, though, that given the financial circumstances we could eliminate the entire group of inspectors and supervisors who enforce the regulation that stage magicians must have a Federal license to keep rabbits, and anyone who sells rabbits as pets (although not if they sell them to eat or to feed alive to serpents) must have a Federal license. Perhaps when we are rich again we can afford such people but surely we can do without them now? Incidentally if a stage performer slays and eats alive a rabbit he does not need a Federal license; only if the rabbit is used as a pet in a performance. And grown people enforce this.
The lesson is clear. There are a lot of Federal jobs that we can spare in these troubled times; many people doing things that we can do without, certainly that we do not have to borrow money to pay for. Why is there never such discussion in debt ceiling debates?
= = = = = = = = = = =
Bill Quick on CA vs. Amazon
http://dailypundit.com/?p=41973
Somebody ran the numbers and reached the conclusion I immediately suspected. Driving away Amazon is going to result in a serious loss of tax revenue rather than the intended gain.
It’s like trying to get through grocery shopping with a grabby toddler in the cart.
Eric
= = = = = = = = =
TSA – another astonishing gaffe
Message Body:
Dear Jerry,
I am sure you have read this, and probably had a flood of email about it too, but there is a story in today’s LA Times about a man making flights with someone else’s expired boarding pass and no valid id. He was detected (but not arrested) after passengers ‘complained that the man seated in 3E reeked of body odor’. I find it difficult to comment on this – I am filled with outrage over the indignities I have endured in the name of flight security, and incensed that this man was allowed to travel (apparently many times) like this.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0701-airport-security-20110630,0,2315584.story
Regards,
Dave Checkley
PS I find the new site layout interesting. It is very good for reading the most current stuff, but when I went back and tried to reread a whole week I found myself wishing that the order was reversed.
PPS I probably should have done a separate email on this, except that my comment is so slight. Analog are running a serial (Energized) by Edward M. Lerner on Space Solar Power (and terrorists hijacking the system and frying various industrial complexes on earth). I suppose it is a cautionary against this technology, although I haven’t read the final installment yet.
I am trying to figure out how to set things up as we used to do. Some read this daily or several times a day. Others once or twice a week. Clearly the old order was better for those who come here at intervals not several times a day. We will see what we can do. There must be a way.
It’s very hard to turn a solar power satellite into a sun gun. That was one of the first things we thought of back in the original Boeing proposal I worked on. A long time ago. Sun guns require high energy densities and the ability to keep the beam collimated when it is off target. That’s pretty hard to do even if you are the legitimate owner of the SSPS, and we don’t think hijackers can do it at all, whether they hijack the ground control room or actually get to space… As Wina Sturgeon asked me once, the only way I know of to make a nuclear power plant explode with a nuclear blast is to smuggle in a nuke…
As to TSA and its kabuki security theater, why are you surprised?
