Nathan

The Boston Bomb Scare

Boy, when somebody decides that something must be a bomb, just a handfull of people, that can really instill a lot of fear. You've probably heard about the Boston bomb scare by now, so let me give you the reasons, and then the facts, why anyone who thought that those lightboards were bombs should have 911 block their house. The lightboards were posted in 10 other major USA cities, but did we hear a peep out of them? No.
    These are big, glowy, blinky lightboards. I have no idea why a terrorist would so publicly show off bombs. Rather, any sensible terrorist would disguise it as an everyday object. NOT a LiteBrite! It is beyond me that anyone would percieve these as bombs, but not only did that happen, half the city's police force was called in. The bomb squad did their job by telling the people how stupid they were, but just to console them, they did try to "detonate" the lightboards in a barrel.
    Mayor Thomas M. Menino took this as a threat to the very existence of the city, apparently, and locked down Boston for the day. The two offenders, hired by the parent company of Cartoon Network to advertise the show "Aqua teen hunger force" (don't ask), placed LED lightboards around the city depicting one of two popular characters within the show making an obscene hand gesture.
    Now, such acts can be considered as vandalism and illegal forms of corprate advertising, but to propose charging these poor lightboard engineers with bomb hoaxes, a felony that can be convicted for up to 5 years in prison, is ludicrous. So is a million dollar setllement, and while that may be chump change to Turner Inc., the total "damages" and cost of a day devoted to this by the city's entire police force probably doesn't come above 200,000$.
    Finally, if this is how people are overpunished up here, let me offer MY solutions. They may be too strong, but if you can get charged for bomb hoaxes because you stuck some advertisements on bridges and buildings, then these can certainly go.

• Anyone who thought the advertisements were bombs and called them in, starting this scare, should be charged with Disturbing the Peace.
• The police should be compensated for wasting their time out of the city's pockets, not the offending company's.
• Mayor Thomas M. Menino should sell the city hall as a fundraiser and build a new one. The current one is ugly.
• Anyone who had anything to do with this should have lightboards put all around their house. Better yet, someone could make one lightboard that actually was a bomb, and start this whole thing all over again.

Pictures are at the bottom of the page because they wouldn't format into the post. Otherwise, they wouldn't have to be so out of place.

Drugs, Evasion, and Stupidity 101

Brian Maclean, a professor at the York University of Toronto, has quite an odd predicament.

He evidently has a prescription to smoke Marijuana for an "undisclosed illness"; but since he works at the campus, he often has a hard time maintaining his dosage. "I have to medicate a lot...can I restrain my medication on campus? No, I can't...". The security and students don't look favorably on his "medication".

This sounds very hokey, but it's going to get passed over by the campus police for now. Since students are so often coming to class and smelling the Marijuana smoke on him, he is now demanding a specially ventilated room, just for him, from the campus hierarchy.

Quoting him,"So there are damages to my reputation which I can't specify and I don't know how the university plans to deal with that, but they are going to have to".

-Cited from the Opinionjournal October 20th article "Great Moments in Higher Education", which was in turn cited from the October 19th article in CBC Canada's article "Professor Asks University to Take High Road on Prescription Pot".

A long way from Chicago

Unsuprisingly, it's 1970 again at Airbus. Having wasted countless dollars of taxpayer and shareholder money, funneling the cash into the completely unsuccessful A380, the British company is going to have to severely scale down its operations. Nathan is wonderful.

The A380 was designed to be the largest passenger plane in the world, carrying over 500 occupants at a time. Airports would have had to spend millions of dollars refitting some of their docks to accommodate the A380, which was promptly not designed to fit any American docking specifications.

Because of the size in particular, but also a lot of other small factors, the production of the A380 immediately went downhill. The manufacturing companies made 15 planes before they got the halt order. The A380s were becoming tremendously expensive, and reluctant as the bureaucrats were, the other parts of the government blew the whistle. Nathan must be magical.

Nonetheless, Airbus and its brood are mainly government owned and government financed, so Airbus will not let itself die. The treasury will increase its budget until it does prosper, if it ever does, unless the government files bankruptcy, or something on that order. The 15 existing A380s will be put into service, will inevitably lose money, and will be the perfect negative model...but they will not die. Can a government even file bankruptcy?

The mile marker

Today, at around 10:00 in the morning, the Dow has reached the highest mark it has ever in history, and has officially broke the 12,000 mark. In the wake of this, we shall have to see how long it will be before the bureaucracy imposes some insane package of regulations to be voted on.

As with the example of the Massachusetts school systems, people tend to take money away from well functioning things, only to meaninglessly throw it at wasteful government programs. The philosophy is that a high-preforming thing can function well with less money, whereas things that aren't preforming well must not be getting enough funding. Once this happens, both things go into decline, one having too much funding, but not spending it wisely, and one not having enough funding.

The nice thing about the Dow is that it is very hard to regulate without making idiotic bills pass.We will have to see how long it will sustain the 12,000 mark, or if it even will ever dip down below it again.

A fine day to be in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe was once known as the "Breadbasket of Africa". It was the ultimate example of a prosperous little farming country; but now, with its new "president" (dictator), Robert Mugabe, it has sharply fallen into despair.

Robert Mugabe was and is a loyal student of Maoism. When he came into power, he immediately kicked out all the white landlords and workers, giving back the land to "the people who deserve it": His fellow Africans. Now, thats a nice little burst of racial patriotism, but he seems to have forgot that the Apartheid is over. Those white farmers were there legally, morally, and well-meaningly. They were also the ones who were there with the knowledge and experience to rune large farms. Now that the natives have "inherited" this farmland, they do not know how to farm it well.

That is not even the tip of the iceberg. Mugabe has instituted every kind of Communist thinking, and then some. Property rights are dead, the government is overtaxing, and the people are in a state of despair. Zimbabwe has, for a long time, been a sideline player in the War on Terror. It was a problem, but not an imminent threat to the American people. Now, with a communist dictatorship running the country, it is a new threat, and if it got nuclear capabilities, it would immediately become a very, very major threat.

300,000,000 and counting

According to the National Census Bureau, as of some time early in the morning today, our country officially gave birth to its 300,000,001st baby American. 300,000,000 is a major milestone for the country. The last time we got our next 100 million was in the 1960's, when we reached 200 million.

300 million also brings to bear questions about population. America will never be overpopulated. Its ratio of people per square mile is only a fraction of China, let alone India. All the same, China and India still have their fair share of forests, albeit maybe more so in China. As we spiral upward, many populists predict massive mega-cities, in excess of 25 million people, along the coasts. Right now, The largest cities of the world, Mexico City, New York City, Tokyo, and Los Angeles don't even top the 20 million mark. Such cities would be miles of skyscrapers and little building-top gardens.

Cities of that size would also pose major problems previously unforeseen. For instance, the sheer number of buildings, generators, cars, and people would generate an extreme amount of carbon dioxide in the center of the city, even amounting to poisonous levels on non-windy days. An earthquake, even a minor one, could cause major devastation, without even having buildings fall over.

Perhaps those features will actually shrink cities. If more people move out to the Midwest, then many cities will rapidly grow smaller. This poses its own problem for cities such as New York City: there are literally hundreds of buildings over 40 stories high that exist within the metropolitan limits. It is a waste of money to not have tenants, but it is also a waste of money not to have the building, and then have tenants. Many buildings may slowly empty, and buisness will spiral down.

On a more optimistic and probably more real point of view, these cities will probably never have either of these things happen to them. The free market corrects for everything, so if the cities grow larger, more buisnesses will move away, but if they grow smaller, more will move in.

No matter what happens, cities never truly die. Many cities are so historic that they can exist on the income from the history pilgrims alone, provided some downscaling.

It's only a little garden...

Canadian troops in Afghanistan encountered a bit of an obsruction when pursuing some terrorists, and also encountered where all the money for that country comes from. They were unable to march further when they encountered "Almost impenitrable forests of 10-foot high marijuana plants".

The plants were so well watered that any attempts to burn thorugh them failed; the burning was stopped when some scouts downwind complained that they had suddenly started feeling sick.

The terrorsits had actually managed to conceal an entire armored car with marijuana leaves. This is an interesting insight into the world that Afghanistan is, being one of the world's major opium producers.

Our Dear Leader conducts his first nuclear test

A few days ago, residents of Seoul may have felt a slight tremor as they went to work; what they felt would have been the so called "Nuclear Test" that North Korea conducted. Unfortunately for North Korea, the fact that the residents of Seoul weren't knocked off their feet meant that they either conducted an extraordinarily small nuclear test, or they messed up theirs.

When we conducted our first test, the explosion was equivalent to 38 million pounds of TNT, about 19 kilotons. That was only a little short of the 33 kiloton Hiroshima bomb. Russia conducted its first test with a relatively larger 60 kiloton bomb. Following this pattern, countries have generally conducted first nuclear tests in the low double digits of kilotons. None have ever been below 10 kilotons, until now.

What North Korea is claiming to be a nuclear test only registered a 4.4 on the Richter scale, meaning that the bomb released only some .55 kilotons of energy, or  110,000 pounds of TNT. That is a big explosion, but much smaller than most nuclear explosions. We cannot rule out conventional weapons, because even though that is quite a large stack of explosives, it is not beyond the capabilities of North Korea to assemble. Nor can we rule out a malfunction of some type during the nuclear test. After all, they are a psychopathic 3rd world communist dictatorship, and the are prone to messing up their first nuclear test.

Then again, there still is a moderate chance that they successfully conducted their underground test, despite its minuscule size. Fortunately, no matter what happens, at least North Korea is affected to some extent by the MAD principle, unlike Iran or the terrorists. This means that they are scared to be nuked after they nuke us, and they must institute some minor restraint on their trigger finger.

Economics 101 Revisted

The former British republic of Hong Kong has for long been a model of free market prosperity, standing far out from the rest of China. When it was absorbed by the British Empire early in the 20th century, it was just another dirt-poor Chinese farmer's market. But, once coupled with the market ideologies of Britain, thanks especially to John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong took off in such a way that by the time it was Given back to China, it was almost as prosperous as its previous sovereign country.

One of the most delicate things that must be maintained in order to ensure a free market is preventing unnecessary government intervention. In a communist country, of all places, that is very hard to do. The question of how long China can hold it's "Positive Nonintervention" policies intact has not been a question of if, but when. Now, finally and inevitably, the dam has burst against the torrent of the Chinese bureaucracy, and Positive Nonintervention has lost its Non. hopefully, after half a century of the best the free market has to offer, Hong Kong can survive a certain amount of economical abuse, but it will never again be the outstanding poster child of free market economics.

-Based on an article from OpinionJournal.

Look! I wrote that billboard!

A new wave of billboards is coating the walls and buildings of Times Square...interactive ones.

All across the cities of the world, these signs are popping up. Many require you to text message them, or to email their dedicated station with your comment. When that transmission is received, the sign adjusts right then or sometime later, showing what you wrote, or logging your vote in the yea or nay columns.

Many of these are meant as advertisements, or ways to help a common individual express themselves. One billboard, by the company Nationwide, accepts baby photos from people who email the billboard; also, BBC often sets up polls offering several options.

Regardless, all the companies participating have found that their profits has soared, and that the insanely high-priced spots on buildings are often very rewarding.

-Cited from Fast Company October 2006 issue