Assault Weapon Ban

I have been an avid hunter for over 60 years and have been following this whole business about the "Assault Weapon Ban" and have a few comments about it.

First off, I never heard one of my hunting friends ever refer to one of his rifles or shot guns as "weapons".  When I hear the word "weapon" I think of something that one might use to protect themselves.  We also had hunting knives that we used to skin and dress our game, but we never referred to them as "weapons".  Who ever came up with this name for rifles and shot guns did a real disservice to the public.  I once killed a rabbit with a stick, but I did not refer to the stick as a "weapon".  I am not into trapping, but the trappers that I do know never refer to their traps as "weapons" even though the game ends up dead in them.  It is interesting that the cooking shows on TV do not refer to their knives and forks as "weapons".  Are cooks some kind of protected class that can call their knives and forks by their regular names?  Are you starting to see how this is all playing out?  We know that a lot more people are killed by automobiles, but we don't refer to them as "weapons".  So that we can all communicate on the subject of gun ownership, why don't we all stop calling them "weapons"?

Next, how about the word "assault".  I never heard one of my hunting friends describe shooting a deer or a goose as "assaulting" the deer or goose.  When I was visiting the Gettysburg Battle Field they described what the Confederate Amy was doing when they charged across the open field toward the Union Army as "assaulting".  I guess that "charging" means the same thing as "assaulting".  If that is the case, why don't people refer to guns as "charging weapons" rather than "assault weapons"?  Are you starting to see how twisted all this is?

I often hunt with my 30-06 Springfield rifle.  It is over 100 years old and still shots and works fine.  Up until about 1940, this was the rifle used my the US Army.  It was the same rifle that was carried by our soldiers in WWI and was the same rifle that they carried when they "charged" across France.  No one appears to be trying to take my 100 years old Army issue Springfield rifle away from me.  Why is that?  I guess that it is because in their minds, it does not look like an "assault weapon".  Interesting!

When rifles were first invented, they also invented the "sight".  This is the two points on the barrel that you align on the target so that you know where the bullet is going to go when it comes out of the barrel.  Since the sights were on the barrel, you had to get your head down tight on the stock so you could see down the sights.  It was awkward to do this because you had to shoulder the butt of the rifle down on your shoulder to over come the "kick".  If you were to put the butt of the rifle in alignment with your eye, you would get a black eye or a broken jaw every time you fired the rifle.  Not good!  If the rifle was just a single shot, you had to reload after the shot, so there was no need to keep the sights on the target any longer, but along came repeating rifles.  Now, you could take a second shot right away if the first one missed.  This meant that you wanted to keep the sight on the target, but due to the fact that the kick that originated from the barrel was not aligned with the butt of the rifle, the barrel kicked "up" and off the target.  In the late 1930's a few inventors figured out how to solve this problem.

It was by aligning the barrel with the butt and the shoulder of the shooter.  Now the barrel did not kick up off the target, but in the process, the sights had to be raised significantly thus creating the rifle that most people equate with the "assault weapon".  The rifle is really no different from thousands of others in how powerful or how fast it can shoot,  This business of aligning the barrel with the butt was such a good idea that it has now become very popular with hunters of all kinds.  To keep the record straight there are no fully automatic rifles or shot guns that are legal for hunting and there never has been.  You will often hear people refer to a repeating rifle or shot gun or pistol as "automatic" when what they meant so say is "semi-automatic".  The automatic refers to the fact that you do not have cycle the bolt or lever with your hand to get another round into the chamber.  You still have to pull the trigger with your finger for every shot.  Holding the trigger down will only fire "one" shot!

There are fully automatic rifles, but these all require special permits to posses them and this has always been the case.  To my knowledge there has never been a person killed with one of these fully automatic rifles owned by a permitted citizen of the USA.  If that is the case, you have to ask why all these people who can vote but have zero knowledge about rifles, guns and hunting are so concerned about the current legal ownership of rifles and guns?

There is a problem with people who violate the current gun laws and those are the people that we should be concerned about.  No plan that I have seen from this concerned group appears would reduce the guns currently illegally in the hands of criminals.  It is much better to do nothing rather than waste time, money and violate our personal freedom in an effort that will have zero affect on the real problem.  The Blacks killing Blacks in Chicago will not be affected by taking away the guns from legal gun owners.  That is a fact.  I know that for some of my readers, this will be way over their heads.

Political Correctness And Warts

I have been watching this business with Trump and this reporter who tried to grab his arm.  There is more here than what you see and hear from the media.  That is the point of this blog.

Exactly what is political correctness?  Think about it.  The only reason that people behave under the unwritten rules of political correctness is to hide some thing.  Did you  ever think of that?  I saw an add on TV where they had Honest Ade's wife in a tight fitting dress and she asked Honest Abe if her back side looked large and he became totally silent.  Was Honest Abe being honest or politically correct?  The way political correctness is used is to "lie", without actually saying the words.  This is the way politicians "lie" every day right in front of your eyes.  What we need to start doing is calling it exactly what it is.  I spanked my children when they tried to use political correctness on me rather than telling me the simple truth.  Now back to Trump.

Every politician has a few "warts", but they want to keep them hidden from you and me.  In the case of Trump, he has enough confidence in himself that he does not need to hide behind political correctness.  That is why he answers questions directly and says things that some voters do not want to here.  If he were politically correct, he would hide his "warts" from the voters like all other politicians do and that is the problem.  How do really know what a politician thinks if he is using political correctness to hide his "warts" from you?

The problem is that this business of political correctness has been going on so long that most people have gotten used to it.  When a "honest" person comes along and you can see their "warts" people think that he is the only one with "warts".  When President Clinton got a blow job in the Oval Office that is the kind of "wart" we all need to pay attention too, but it was covered up with political correctness.

Now the reporter who tried to grab Trump's arm.  Everyone is telling Trump that he should apologize for the conduct of his staff and say that he was very sorry.  That is what would have been politically correct.  People have gotten so used to political correctness that they expect it and when does not happen and the person tries to use plain old honesty, they don't know how to handle it.  That is what we have here with Trump.  Had Trump just used a little old fashion political correctness, he could have swept all this under the rug, but he didn't.  Why not?  Down deep, when he thinks he is in the right, he is willing to be honest and face the music no matter where it goes.  Wouldn't you rather have a President who both told the truth and was totally honest rather than one who would and could lie at a moment's notice to pull the wool over your eyes?  I think that the problem is that most voters are not ready for a really honest President because we have not had one in so long.

Trump is smart enough to give you all the political correctness that you want, but down deep, he is too honest and too concerned about the future of "his" country to do it.  That is why Trump is willing to show that he has "warts".  Why don't the others want to show you their "warts"?

PS--Here is an example of political correctness.  When one of Trump's competitors was asked about the Trump dust up, here is how he answered.  "I was told about the altercation and feel that it is a clear example of how little regard Trump has for women."  Note that this not a direct opinion about the event, but an opinion about the opinion of the person who told him about the event, since he did not see any of the actual video.  If the whole thing turns out to be over blown, he can always claim that the person who told him about the event could have been mistaken.  With political correctness, there is always "wiggle" room to allow one to walk back whatever they have said.

Chickens And Their Feeding Frenzies

I am a farmer and have had  chickens for many years.  Whether you know it or not, you can learn a lot from a bunch of chickens, but most is not good.  That is the point of this blog.

I was listening to a conversation today that is similar to many.  This person was in an uproar about the fact that he felt sorry for this group of people who did not have "free" access to high speed internet.  This person seemed to think that it was some kind of "right" that everyone have access to high speed internet even if they could not afford it.  This is where it starts to get interesting.  I thought that it was only the single mover liberals who thought this way, but I was wrong.  This person went on with the logic that if the government paid for program "A", then they should pay for program "B".  Where the connection came from, I do not know, but after thinking about the logic pattern, I started to understand the person's thinking.  This  is when I started thinking about chickens.

When you go out into the barn yard with some grain and toss it on the ground the chickens come from no where to start pecking at the grain. If there was just one chicken, it would have pecked slowly until it was full, but if there are other chickens, it is not long before there is a total "frenzy" of pecking and it can get so wild after the grain is gone that the chickens often turn on one another.  If one draws blood, it is all over for that chicken because the other chickens will continue pecking it until it is dead.  That is how the "mind" of a chicken works.  If one chicken has something the other chicken wants it too.  Now back to the story.

Here is the pattern in the thinking of may liberals and in some cases conservatives also fall into this trap.  Here is how it works.  "If one group is getting something for free from the government, then why shouldn't I get something else for free?"  This occurs where the conservative does not need or want the same thing that the other person is getting from the government.  In the end, this kind of thinking and acting leads to more and more free government programs and in the process the conservative is just as big of a problem as the liberal who wants everything for free.  Are you starting to see how the process works?  Conservatives fall into the same trap as the liberals and the country ends up going broke.

Here is how a real conservative who is not a one mover would deal with this situation.  He would look for the root cause of why a particular group did not have access to high speed internet.  If you are familiar with Hughes Net then you know that there is no place in the USA that does not physically have access to high speed internet.  What this group apparently had was either of "two" possible problems.  First, they had the money to pay for the access, but judged that it was too expensive and that they would prefer to spend their money on something else.  Or second, they did not have the money, period, and thus could hardly afford food and shelter.  Now the problem is set.

As far as I am concerned, I have no sympathy for the "First" group.  They chose where they live rather than living in a place where cheaper high speed access was available.  That was their free choice and I have zero responsibility for their situation. 

Now, the second group.  There is another question that needs answering and that is, "Why don't they have enough money to pay for the high speed internet?"  Did they make irresponsible choices in their lives that, now, puts them in the situation where they can not afford high speed internet?  If so, like the first group, I have no sympathy for them.  This is the bed they made and thus have to sleep in it.  I am not going to try to list down all the stupid decisions that people make because there are too many. Some examples are "not finishing high school" or "getting knocked up out of wedlock" or "becoming and alcoholic" or "having more kids than you can afford".  About the only ones that I would support are those who are born mentally retarded or physically handicapped in some way.

It is a very big deal when a person feels that their concern is so important that it justifies them "voting" to send the police to my home to take my property and give it to the person they are so concerned about.  I am not totally against this type of action, but it demands a very high standard,  otherwise we will be living in a world where individuals have no freedom from the will of a "one" vote majority.  That was clearly the major concern of the wise men who formed this country and wrote the constitution, "that all states signed".  Using the logic of the person mentioned above, I think that you can see how our country as we know it could be changed into something that was never intended.
 

Another Value Added Myth Chapter

I am going keep harping on this point until it sinks in.  As I have blogged in the past, you will never hear anything like this in a college or university Economics class.  I know because I have been there.

Here is an example, but first I need to remind you that the objective or name of the game is "median family income".  The reason that I use this as the objective is that it has a one for one relationship to the median quality of life.  We can't go by the top 10% or the bottom 10% because in every country those at the bottom are poor and those at the top are rich, but we can compare the "median".

Now let's take a look at a company like Apple.  I know a lot of Apple people and some of them worked for me before they went to work for Apple.  Years ago, I was Chairman of the WEMA Industrial Engineering Management Round Table in Silicone Valley, so I know something about the place.  I have not verified these numbers, but I think they are close enough to make my point.  I estimate that the median salary for people working for Apple is about $100,000 per year.  That is over twice the national average so this should make them in the top 20% of all workers.  If you just look at the numbers for Apple, it looks great.  What we need is more companies like Apple, but wait.  Did you know that Apple does not make any of its products here in the USA?  They make most some place in Asia where the pay is a lot less. 

Now if we were to compare Apple with a door or window company in the Midwest, the door or window company would have a median pay for its workers that was about $35,000 or 1/3 of Apple.  We would then wonder how workers in the USA could ever expect to get rich by "value added" work?  Isn't it clear that we need more companies like Apple?  Let's look deeper.  If we were to construct Apple like the window and door companies and include all their workers in Asia, we would come up with a median pay of more like $15,000.  The only reason that Apple looks so good is that you are only looking at the engineering and  sales portion of the company or the high tech portion.

The point that I am trying to make is that technology does make those at the top rich, but it does not raise the median pay all that much.  If you look around the world, what you will see is that the only segment of the economy that significantly raises the median pay is the exploitation of natural resources.  You can find it in Oil, Gold, Timber, Coal and farming all over the world.  The only problem with the exploitation of natural resources as a means for wealth is that too much immigration spreads the wealth out too thinly, so to stay rich from the exploitation of one's natural wealth they need to control immigration, and that is exactly what the USA is not doing. 

Some of the poorest places in the world as well as the USA is where too many people immigrated into an area to exploit the natural resources and the resource played  out.  This is additional proof that immigrants do not create real wealth.  It can be even worse when the most talented people migrate "out" of one of these natural resource boom areas and leave behind the least talented.  This is what happened in coal mining areas of West Virginia or the iron ore mining area of Upper Michigan or the city of Detroit.  Not very nice places to live today  All would be better today if we had not had the over immigration into these areas and the same applies to the USA as a whole today.  We do not need any more low skilled people to work on farms, mines or to cut timber.  We have enough!!!

VA Hospitals And Distributed Control Systems

How could there be a connection between VA Hospitals and Distributed control systems?  There is a connection and that is the theme of this blog.

First, look at the US military who controls the VA hospitals.  This is clearly a top down type control system and it deals reasonably well where there are a very limited number of things that need to be accomplished.  The US military does it exactly the same way that Napoleon did it a few hundred years ago.  Don't know how he did it?  He wrote manuals and procedures for everything including how to feed a horse.  It would be like putting gas in a Jeep today.  If you think about it, the US military has procedures for everything and that is the problem.  When a big organization only has a few major tasks, this works fine, but not for situations where most people have to do different tasks.

In the past, I blogged about how honey bees are managed.  It is not top down, it is totally distributed.  When 100,000 bees go out in the morning to collect pollen from flowers, each bee has to figure out which flower to go too.  If bees were top down controlled like the US military, the honey bee could not carry the manuals and procedures, plus it would be spending all of its time reading the long complicated procedures to figure out what flower to go too.  Are you starting to see the difference?

In a VA hospital we have hundreds of very different patients and each requires a slightly different type of care.  We are talking about thousands of different tasks that change every day.  I think that you can see that no top down type of management control system could run this type of situation efficiently.  Well, top down is how the VA operates.

Now, look at boot camp and the way our military is organized.  We have the worker bees and the officers.  These two groups never eat or drink together.  The worker bees take orders from officers who are not qualified in the skills that it takes for the worker bee to do their jobs.  How is that for an arrangement that is doomed?  You know exactly what happens over time.  The work bees lose all of their initiative and just turn their brains off and follow the commands from above.  A worker bee in the above situation can never expect to get ahead by working hard or showing any initiative so they just do the minimum until retirement.  This is the atmosphere in the VA hospitals too.  Further, if the worker bee does more and show initiative, he does not get paid any more nor does he get promoted.

Rather than a top down system, what the VA hospitals need is a system directly opposite of the US military and that is distributed with individuals using their brains more and getting rewarded for it.  Honey bees and ants have figured this out millions of years ago, but our US military still has not gotten beyond  what Napoleon was doing a few hundred years ago.  Notice that ISIS uses a distributed control system and with just a few guys off the streets they are doing a better job and for a lot less money than the soldiers that our military has trained.  Sad, but true.

Top down works well for small organizations or where there are a limited number of tasks to be done.  The distributed organization does not work as well as a top down system for small organization or where the tasks are limited, but it works better when the organization get larger and larger and where the number of tasks gets larger.  There are all kinds of examples out there that prove this point.  Look at economics for large countries vs small or flocks of geese or fish that have to migrate.  All I ask is that we all keep an open mind on this and not think that to make a big system work that all you need to do is keep tightening the screws.  If we do that, we will all get screwed in the end.

PS----Look at two games, Football and Basketball.  Football is clearly a top down type of game where the Quarterback gives the "play" and all the bees carry out the "play".  In Basketball, they have general plays or strategies, but each players has to figure out exactly what to so "second" by "second".  There is none of this "second" by "second" business in Football.

Fish In A Pond

I am going to try to explain a complicated economic and political issue with "fish in a pond".  Don't think I can do it? Just wait!!

I have a stocked trout pond on my property where I catch fresh trout for dinner and for my grand kids to catch.  There are a couple of lessons that one can learn from a trout pond.  First, lets look at pond #1. In this pond there are one thousand nice fat trout. The farmer checks his pond every week to verify that there are still one thousand trout in his pond.  He feeds his trout only the best "all natural" fish pellets.  He is very happy with his trout pond and tells all of his friends about it.  Most are very impressed.

There is another farmer in the area who also has a trout pond and he too has exactly one thousand nice fat trout in his pond.  To the typical journalist, economist or politician all see these two trout ponds as equal, but there is a very significant difference.  What could that be?  Let's ask the trout and see what they have to say.

In the first pond, the trout have reached a "climax".  A "climax" in nature is where the population is stable and for every new fish, bear or tree born, one dies.  It is like the rain forest of Brazil.  No net new trees are growing.  Many of the forests in Canada are like this too, for every new tree that grows, one dies.  Are you starting to see where this is going?  In the second trout pond, the farmer catches trout for his Friday fish fry every  week and the same number of new trout are born so the pond stays exactly at one thousand trout.

The lesson is that if you stop focusing on just the pond and start talking to the individual fish what you will find is that those baby trout are growing bigger and fatter every day in pond #2.  The trout in pond #2 are optimistic about the future because they are growing and producing families of new trout.  When our typical politicians shoots his or her  mouths off about what is happening in the trout pond, they forget that the individual fish in pond #2 are growing fatter every day. While those in pond #1 are "not" progressing.

If the pay rate per hour or the minimum wage stayed the same for a factory worker over time, the individual factory workers would still make more each year!  It is only in government jobs like the post office where people expect to carry the mail in that leather bag for 40 years and expect to make more each year by doing exactly the same thing just because the Earth has passed around the Sun one more time.  In the real work world, people increase their skills and worth over time and thus continue to make more as they shift to jobs that recognize their new skills.  In the real world, just like the trout in the pond #2, they get "fatter" over time! 

Why don't our politicians and liberals understand this simple point just like the trout do?  People can get ahead even if the total size of the economy does not increase.  If you have too much immigration or breeding then the economy needs to grow to account for the increase in population.  Over the past 50 years the population of Russia has actually gone down so that even if their economy had not grown the people would still be more prosperous.

A Smarter Look At Global Warming

As a young child, I heard the story about Chicken Little and how he thought the sky was falling.  He ran around saying that the sky was falling until most of the chickens believed him that the sky was really falling.  As I see it today the story about Global Warming is about as logical and true as the story about Chicken Little.  I think the reason that his name  was "Little" was due to the size of his brain.  Now, Global Warming.

Let's apply good decision theory methods to this problem.  If we define global warming as an event that will significantly affect our quality of life in the next 50 years, we have basically two possibilities.  Global warming will affect us in a significantly negative way or it will not...Those are the two possibilities.  Do you agree with that?  This is just step one.

Given the above two possibilities, we have at least three possible actions. The first one is to do exactly nothing.  The second one is to try to stop global warming. Third is to mitigate the affects of global warming.  With me so far?

Next, we need to understand exactly what the affects would be if we have global warming.  If we don't understand the possible affects, how can we possibly figure out what action is best.  Isn't it interesting that so far the debate has not gotten to what the affects might be.  I think that we could agree that the affects should be judged on how they affect the quality of life for us citizens of the USA and the rest of the world.  I divide this into to two groups because I think that our government should give priority to "us" who are citizens of the USA.  What will happen if global warming is real is that some places will be warmer or better off and others will be too hot and not as well off.  Given that humans live in a wide variety of climate conditions now, we already have experience with the potential affects of global warming.  This not some big mystery.  Like all changes in the past, people who are living in worst places will try to move or migrate to places that are more favorable.  It happened during the dust bowl here in the USA and it continues to happen every day some place in the world.  This is a fact and is nothing new.  It just happens that the USA is a very nice place to live and even if we experience global warming, much of the USA will continue to be a nice place to live.  Just like people move out of the dust bowl or out of Detroit, we will see this same thing if we have serious global warming. 

Most people don't see beyond the migration and the affect that migration has on the places where the migrants move too.  I contend that it makes it "worse" for the people who already lived in the areas where the migrants move too.  Look at it this way.  Is California a better place to live now than it was in 1935 before millions of migrants moved in?  The answer is simple.  It is a lot worse and it will be the same for every place where a significant number of immigrants move in.  What I am trying to point out is the affects of global warming so that you can form your decision on what is best.  You now live in the USA, do you want more immigrants?

The next point that needs to be made is, "what if our efforts to stop or slow global warming don't work?  If that is the case, all the cost will have been worthless. Remember that the cost resulted in a lower standard of living for you and me while our wealth was diverted to battling global warming.  There is no free lunch.  The cost of fighting global warming was food taken from the mouths of your children.  Like anything else, you have to ask yourself if it was "worth it or not"?

I was thinking about getting into the details of the probabilities of each of the above events actually happening, but realized that I would lose most of you.  By grinding out the probabilities and the cost of each of the alternatives and possible out comes, it would be possible to find the "best" decisions.  I am going to jump to the end and state that, "if you have food and energy" you will be able to either survive any projection of global warming or at least be the "last man standing".  Compared to most of the rest of the world, we have food and energy!

Given the above, we should not be trying to save the world and prevent global warming. What we should be doing is figuring out how we can best survive global warming and "not" spend any money or punish any of our business in an effort to stop global warming.  As I stated above, when the time comes people in bad places are going to try to immigrate to better places.  What we will need to do is to prevent that from happening.  If you are following this point, why don't we get started right now?  Rather than spending our wealth trying to prevent global warming, we should be preventing any more immigration into the USA.  I think we should have "zero" immigration and anyone who is here now who violated our immigration laws should be deported.  Just as more immigrants into California have made the quality of life worse in California, it has been and will be the same for the rest of the USA.

Finally, how about the probabilities.  What is your probability estimate of whether global warming will have a significant affect on the quality of life in the USA in the next 50 year?  Further, what is your estimate that squandering our wealth on trying to prevent global warming is going to be affective?  If you grind the numbers, you are going to find that Obama is making a very bad investment of your wealth.  What has been his batting average on solar power, wind mills and Obamacare insurance Co-Op's? 

I  need to say no more!!!