Price increases

I have been a big fan of DPMS. I was just doing some digging and found that I have in the past ordered some AR-15 magazines from them. I decided to do a little digging and find some of the historical prices. Below is the result.

Date	Black Teflon	Gray Dry Film
2/07	$12
3/07	$12	$13.50
2/08		$11.95
11/08		$13.50
2/09	$19.95	$19.95

I am sort of amazed that the prices stayed low for as long as they did after the election. Also that is a 48% increase in price. Do you know of anything else that in three months increased in price 48%... other then gasoline? Best investment that could have been made as far as I can tell.

IOUSA - How long will it take us to work this off?

I noticed over at My Modern Country Homehttp://mymoderncountryhome.blogspot.com/2009/01/iousa-to-boston-tea-party-part-2.htmlthat there was some excitement about the IOUSA documentary and the repercussions. The numbers are so large that I didn't really understand what they meant. One way to remedy that is to put it into terms that we can understand. I go to work (or will be starting soon, yeah!) and I make some amount per hour. OK great, how long would it take to pay this national debt off?

IOUSA's number for our debt is $53 Trillion. This is the total of government debt. But that number was from 2007. They also claim that the debt climbs $2-3 Trillion a year, lets call it $2.5 Trillion. We also had a large bailout, at the end of the day lets call that another $1 Trillion. I am going to ignore the cost of ongoing wars, the numbers that I have seen are wrong in many different ways. So this leaves us with a total of about $59 Trillion for the start of 2009.

From the CIA World Fact Book the GDP per capita is $45,800, about $22 per hour. It also says that we have 303.8 Million people in this country. Doing a little bit of math and we get that every single person in the US would have to work for 4.25 years to work off the debt. This is with every cent going to pay off the debt, with no new debt.

That is not a reasonable estimate because not everyone works in this country. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only about 143.3 Million people are employed. That means us working folk would have to work for 9 years with *everything* we make going to servicing the debt assuming no interest or no new debt.

But this is government debt, government money is going to pay off the debt. i.e. only the money they take by force or print is going to be used. Lets assume that they don't just print their way out, even if that is what Ben Bernake has said he is going to do, and only count the money that the gov't is taking in taxes. In my pay range they take about one third. That drops the average pay for the government to about 7.25 an hour. This results in a pay back time of 27 and a quarter years. Basically the rest of my adult working life they would be paying off the debt not including interest or further debt.

So that estimate isn't even correct, because we are still spending money hand over fist. Let us take that $2.5 Trillion per year that we estimated from IOUSA's numbers. If we paid all of our money to service this debt we would work (those of us that do work) about 40% of the year to service the years spending. That isn't paying anything down, that is just paying for what we will spend this year. If only the current tax rate is used to service this years spending then it would take 115% of our work. Hmm that is more then a year. That means we are spending ourselves into debt faster then we can pay it off at the current tax rate (the source of the problem).

Because our currency is only backed by "The full faith and credit of the United States", at some point people are going to look at the numbers and say "Wait a second, these guys can't pay back what they already owe us. We are not going to give them more of our stuff." There are a couple of simple options.

1. Increase taxes to get more money to pay back our creditors. As you can see that point will fall somewhere between the current 33% tax rate and 100%. Running the numbers to just service this years debt we would need a 38% tax rate. To start paying down the total debt the tax rate would need to be higher. This is a pretty good way to shut the economy down and lose our credit rating.

2. Print more money. This works in the short term and the politicians don’t even have to raise taxes (something they don’t like to do). It is great until you consider that it would cause inflation. If you want to see what inflation does to a country just look at Zimbabwe. No one wants to live there.

3. Tell our creditors that we are not going to pay them back. Ya that just isn’t going to work out. We don’t have much industry left. What we do have left produces massive amounts, but is highly specialized. If we say that we are not going to pay people back then they are going to stop selling us the things that we need. Then all of a sudden we have a very serious problem.

None of these are good options, but knowing the politicians, they will come up with some scheme that would be called fraud if anyone else had done it.

Door locks

I have three locks on my door. The bottom two have locks that can be accessed from the outside with a key.

The top lock is obviously there to help secure the apartment when someone is home.

I was just thinking that because I live alone if I hurt myself and needed an ambulance if the top lock was locked they have to find someone to knock the door down, and to do that might even need to find someone to open the bottom two locks.

If on the other hand only the bottom two are locked then they just have to find someone with a key.

All of this comes up because I just about died this morning when I backed up in the kitchen and tripped over the open dish washer door and nearly impaled myself on several knives in the silverware holder. Yes I know, keep the door shut when moving about the kitchen, but there are many other possibilities.

I find this to be an interesting trade off in that it is trading one type of security (physical) for another (allowing emergency personal quicker access to me).

1943 Operation Chastise

In WWII there was a need to attack the industrial heartland of Germany. An idea that was hit upon is to attack dams in the interior of Germany. This resulted in the Germans not being able to produce as much steel as large amounts of water were needed in the process of creating steel, it would also flood the country side denying ground transportation and food as well as denying water transportation to the Germans. A normal bombing mission was studied but rejected because of strict accuracy requirement which probably would not be able to be met under the level of anti-air fire expected. The next idea was to drop torpedoes into the river to blast the dam. This wasn’t feasible because the Germans had strung torpedo nets across the river.

A man by the name Barnes Wallis came up with the idea of skipping a bomb across the surface of the river, much like a stone. To get this to work one needs to fly low and spin the barrel along its long axis. If one spins the barrel away from the direction of flight an interesting thing happens. But first I must divert to some fluid dynamics for the explanation to be complete.

One of the fundamental theorems of Aerodynamics is the Kutta-Joukowsk theorem. In its final form it is very simple, elegant and powerful. This equation will tell you if your airplane is going to fly or not, how much down force will be exerted by a NASCAR, how a golf ball flies, etc. It states simply that the lift force on an object moving through a flow (think airplane wing or ball flying through the air) is directly related to the density of the fluid (water is more dense then air), the velocity of the object through the fluid, and the flow around the object. This equation is so amazing because no where in it appears the shape of the object. You would think that a baseball might produce lift differently then an airplane wing. It is the same equation for both. Shape comes into flight in that it changes the circulation and drag.

But what does an aerodynamics equation have to do with blowing up a dam? Well the way that this Kutta-Joukowsk theorem is arrived at is by modeling the flow around a rotating cylinder moving through a flow. Sound familiar? Looking at the diagram below, we have a fluid moving over the barrel (doesn’t matter if it is the barrel moving or the fluid) and the barrel is spinning. Lets do some simple qualitative fluid dynamics (trust me it will be fun). We have a spinning barrel and a fluid flow. Because of friction the spinning barrel is making the fluid around it spin also (see Boundary Layer for more information on how this works in more detail). Fluid flow in this case is additive. When we apply additive flow to the area at the bottom of the barrel we see that the velocity of the free stream fluid flow will cancel to some extent with the boundary layer fluid flow around the barrel resulting in low velocity. When there is low velocity there is high pressure. Looking at the top of the barrel the velocities will add creating high velocity and low pressure. This is *exactly* what happens with an airplane wing, and in this case also there will be lift on the barrel, just like with an airplane wing. The reason that we fly around on airplanes with wings instead of rotating barrels is because of the previously mentioned drag forces that would be much increased with a barrel.

Now we get to the good part. The next diagram shows the barrel sinking through water after it has hit the dam. This is basically the previous diagram rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise. The barrel is sinking so the free stream flow is now coming from the bottom of the barrel. This exerts a net force on the barrel to the left, pushing it into the dam. Now you can have a timer delay on the bomb that allows it to sink and be more effective.

This was done in Operation Chastise of May 17, 1943. Chastise when very well in terms of the strategic objectives being met. This included massive lose of food production, both plant and animal. 53 of the 153 air crew members were killed in action, with 8 of 19 planes lost in the action. Operation Chastise was portrayed in a movie called “Dam Busters” which I found to be very good.

In the intro of “The Century of Warfare” there is also some footage of planes dropping what appear to be supplies. They bounce the barrels off of the sea and they skip into a holding pond.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Wallis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutta-Joukowski_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_function
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

Obama's Economic Vision

I am subscribed to the change.gov news posts. The included link is the latest:
http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/american_recovery_and_reinvestment/
Let me quote just a bit of text

We must make strategic investments that will serve as a down payment on our long-term economic future. We must demand vigorous oversight and strict accountability for achieving results. And we must restore fiscal responsibility and make the tough choices so that as the economy recovers, the deficit starts to come down.

and

To save not only jobs, but money and lives, we will update and computerize our health care system to cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help reduce health care costs by billions of dollars each year.

How are you going to do these things? He still hasn't outlined how his plans are going to work.

1. I worked in the health care field for a short period of time. For all of that time I sat right next to the wonderful ladies in the billing office. We have been working on this computerized health care thing for a long time now and there are just not solutions for some of the problems. Like the unique identifier for every patient in the country. This is very simple right? One just needs a unique number for every person. We already are most of the way there with social security numbers. But we can't use those for legal reasons. And there is the huge problem of making old data to a new number. The simple fact is that the current state of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems is amazingly bad. Multiple records per patient, incorrectly recorded information, etc. The premise of President-elect Obama's thought is that using computers can work miracles. This just isn't the case, and their is not a good engineering solution.

2. How are you going to reduce the deficit while spending on infrastructure? The math of spending more on various social programs while reducing the deficit simply does not work.

3. How does increasing "oversight", which should really read 'government red tape', help the economy in the long term? It simply increases the overhead (aka cost) of doing business. That doesn't make us more competitive. Instead it makes our goods and services more expensive. The Dollar is currently strong against other curencies. The rest of the world is in a recession. That means that our goods and services are already expensive compared to others. Why should we make them more expensive and become less competitive?

Rifle case mod

The included image shows a AR-15 in a M4 configuration, the so called M-4gery. You will also notice a pistol and several pistol mags. I am thinking of sewing in some elastic pockets to hold those items in place. Possibly add storage capacity in the same fashion above the hand guard and barrel for more rifle mags.

The rifle is a tight fit in the case so doesn't move around much. This seems like a good solution for carrying a complete rig in one case.

Project will have to wait until after the move.

Noch and Post vs Aperture sights

To Ride, Shoot Strait, and Speak the Truth, Jeff Cooper, "Principles of Pistol Sighting"

Non-telescopic rifle sights may be set far enough apart so that front and rear lie at significantly different distances from the eye. The farther they lie apart - the greater the "sight radius" - the more precise may be the alignment they afford. However, the greather the sight radius the less it becomes possible to focus on both sights at once. Therefore the aperture rifle sight is better than the open rifle sight since the latter requires a short radius, with the notch set well forward on the barrel, while the former allows the ring to be set close to the eye, to be looked through rather then at. With a well-designed aperture rifle sight - large diameter, thin rim - you may disregard the rear sight as long as you are looking through it.