Government

Policing for Profit

After my post from a couple of days ago, it has become apparent that some people think that speed cameras are a good idea, saying that they don’t speed, and are tired of people who do. It’s cute that those people think that speed cameras have anything to do with traffic safety or actual speeding.

In Baltimore, a speed camera issued a speeding ticket to a stationary car. The real story here isn’t that one car was erroneously ticketed. No, the real story is the fact that Baltimore’s 164 cameras have issued $48 million in tickets over the last three years. If the amount of the ticket, $40, is typical, this means that 400,000 tickets a year are issued by those 164 cameras: roughly 2400 tickets for each camera. The officers that review the pictures before a ticket is issued review and issue 1200 tickets per day. On an 8 hour workday, that leaves just 24 seconds for each picture to be reviewed and a citation issued. In other words, this is nothing but a revenue generator with few safeguards or oversight.

Officials in Heath, Ohio installed 2 speed cameras to watch for excessive speed on Route 79, an area that had seen only one crash in the previous two years. Those two cameras alone accounted for 5,000 traffic citations in just 4 weeks.

Since it was such a money maker, ten more cameras were installed to watch intersections in town and look for red light runners. Those ten cameras were responsible for 5,000 more tickets their first month. At those intersections, light runners had been responsible for only 16 traffic accidents over the previous two years.

In all, the traffic tickets will cost the drivers in the area more than $12,000,000 in fines each year, of which the city will keep $10,00,000.

Then there was the Long Island traffic cameras that were responsible for $2.4 million in School Zone speeding tickets during the summer, when there was no school in session.

The big winner here is actually the private company that installs and runs the cameras. They frequently are involved in kickback schemes.

Miami, Washington, DC, and half a dozen other cities have been involved in this fleecing of the public. No oversight, with a private company running the camera while giving some of the take back to the city.

By Divemedic, ago

Troops

The Biden administration is going to take us to war with Russia because his poll numbers are in the toilet, and it might as well be Ukraine we are doing it over, because after all, they paid for it.

The troops are moving. It looks like the following troops are being deployed to the area:

  • 82nd Airborne division is contributing an infantry brigade combat team
  • The XVIII Airborne Corps is moving a field headquarters to Germany
  • It also looks like the Second Cavalry Regiment (Stryker) will be deploying there from Germany.

The 82nd, being an airborne division, doesn’t have heavy enough equipment to take on the armor and artillery heavy Russian forces. The Stryker is essentially an armored car, and is by no means capable of taking on Russian main battle tank formations, especially considering that they are outnumbered and outgunned.

On the other side of the coin, we have the Russian forces. Nearly half of Russia’s 280,000 strong Army is arrayed near Ukraine. The Russians have amassed more than 1,000 tanks in theater.

This is a conflict that the limited number of US troops in theater can’t hope to win. This means one of two things: these troops are sacrificial lambs who will act as a tripwire to allow US expansion of the conflict, or that the Democrats are thinking that Russia will blink.

For those of you who think that the Republicans will oppose this, you have another thing coming. In fact, the Republicans in Congress told Tucker Carlson “We’re the decision-makers on Ukraine, not you” in a recent release that was intended to respond to the harsh criticism that Carlson has levied against Ukraine involvement.

“I don’t agree with those views,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said when asked about Carlson’s monologues. “[It’s] the U.S. interest not just in Europe but around the world in not having countries decide, ‘That belongs to us, we’re going to go ahead and take it.’”

I agree that one country shouldn’t be able to simply invade another. I also agree that it isn’t a problem that US citizens should be dying to correct. All of this could be avoided by simply not admitting Ukraine to NATO. Why should we go to war and chance a world war that would cost millions of American lives, all so that we can defend another country? Of course, that isn’t what all of this is about.

Joe Biden owes the Ukraine because he was bought and paid for by the ten percent he got as “the big guy.” Besides, he is lagging in the polls, and there is nothing like a war to boost sagging poll numbers.

It’s insane.

By Divemedic, ago

Isn’t it Still Tyranny?

Let’s say that the cops want to see if you have anything illegal in your house, but don’t have any probable cause with which to get a warrant. So instead, they coerce a local burglar into breaking into your home and reporting on what he sees, so they can use his report to obtain a warrant. Has the government still violated your rights? Many people would say yes.

Now let’s say that the government wants to control what you can say. It would be against the highest law of the land for them to do so. With that being the case, the government instead gets private industry to shut down what you have to say. Has the government still violated your rights? Many people would say yes, although sadly, many would also be OK with that.

So what if the FBI bought spyware that enabled them to break into your phone? Would that be OK? Even if they promised not to actually use it? Just the tip, I swear.

By Divemedic, ago

Troops to be Sent

Not to the Ukraine, but to DC. Expect the walls to go up, and the J6 prisoners will get some new neighbors in cell block 13. As people become more unhappy and protesting becomes more frequent, expect the communists to be more panicked and expect them to take more drastic and violent action.

How many truckers will be disappeared?

By Divemedic, ago

Still Counting Bullet Holes

Two cars full of NRA members white men gang members unidentified young men engaged in a running gun battle in Winter Haven, Florida. All four people riding in one car, and at least on person in the other car, were hit. The Sheriff’s Department spokesman said that they are still counting casings and bullet holes to try and determine how many shots were fired.

Winter Haven is known as the bailiwick of Sheriff Grady Judd. Some try to make him into some sort of ‘tough guy’ hero cop. While I certainly commend his stance on people who commit violent crimes, he is also the sort of grandstanding cop that I can’t abide.

Don’t forget that Grady Judd is also one of the Sheriffs who has broken Florida law by lobbying state legislators to defeat open carry and defeat Constitutional carry. It is illegal for government officials to lobby the State Legislature for changes to the law, but that doesn’t matter to a police official who supports ‘law and order’ when the law is in opposition to his orders.

His opinion on guns seems to change, depending on who is listening:

By Divemedic, ago

Analog Fire Control

When I was in the Navy, the ship that I was on had a 48 inch diameter carbon arc searchlight on it. The searchlight worked by taking what was essentially two welding rods, pressing them together, and maintaining an electrical arc in order to create a searchlight beam that was bright enough to be seen for miles. In fact, by shining that light at a cloud, it was possible to send Morse code signals to other ships over the horizon.

When my ship was built in the mid 70’s, these lights weren’t made any longer, and the one that was on my ship had been salvaged from a WW2 era destroyer that had been decommissioned. Built in the days before electronics, the system that ran this searchlight was incredibly complicated. It was an analog power supply that ran on a system of motors and gears, with lenses focusing beams of light on various parts of the system that turned motors on and off, pushing the rods closer together, or pulling them apart, as needed to maintain the light beam. A technical manual for a 24 inch example can be found here.

By the time I reported aboard the ship, the light no longer worked and no one knew how to fix it. At one point as a young E-4, I took an interest in this searchlight and decided to get it working. I made a project out of it. I found a manual in the ship’s tech library, brought the control unit down, and spent several weeks rebuilding it. When we finally got the thing lit, it was amazingly bright. The light hadn’t worked in years, and I didn’t get so much as an “attaboy” for getting it working. Nowadays, it seems like you would get a Navy Achievement Medal for fixing that thing.

I tell you this as a setup and explanation of where I got this interest in how early electrical engineers solved problems that seem easy today using electronics. The focus today is on the Ford Mark I fire control system.

The Navy needed a way to calculate the elevation and deflection of Naval guns so as to put shells on target. This was no trivial exercise in math. Both the target and the gun platform were likely moving, the target might even be airborne, the platform might be rocking in heavy seas. Different shells were of different weights and ballistic coefficients. Or you might want to put a starburst shell 50 feet over the target for illumination. Ranges were sometimes 30 or more miles away. All of these factors required math in three axes in order to be overcome: direction, distance, and elevation. Enter the Ford fire control computer.

A frigate might have one. Destroyers had two, allowing multiple batteries to engage different targets. An Iowa class battleship had four of them. They were accurate enough that this computer was still in use until the battleships were retired in the mid 90s. 50 years old is not bad for an analog computer living in the age of transistors.

Check out this video on how the system worked to direct the secondary batteries on the 5 inch guns of the battleship New Jersey.

What can be done today with a laptop computer took an entire room of switches and a 3,000 pound box filled with motors, switches, relays, and gears. It was bulky, heavy, and more complicated than a box full of Swiss watches, but it worked. It worked quite well, in fact.

I consider myself lucky to have worked on that searchlight. It was one of the most interesting projects that I have ever taken on.

By Divemedic, ago

Inflation

It’s been a month since we last looked at inflation here at Sector 8.

The government has been creating too many dollars. In December of 2020, one third of all dollars that had ever existed had been printed in the past ten months.

It appears as though the Federal government was just getting started. Six months later in May 2021, it was said that 40% of every dollar that has ever existed was created in the preceding 12 months.

Another 5 months later, that had increased to 80 percent of all dollars that have ever existed were printed in the past 22 months.

This is a cycle that causes hyperinflation: Printing more money causes that money to become less valuable. To counter this, more money is printed, which causes it to become less valuable. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

In fact, the Fed printed an average of $27 billion per day in 2020 and put those dollars into circulation.

In 2021, the Fed increased that rate to nearly double that. Of course, most money today isn’t physically printed. It exists only in the electronic minds of computer systems. That’s because no one could physically print that many bank notes.

This out of control creation of money is warping the entire economy. Excluding food and energy, consumer expenses are up 4.9 percent from a year ago. This is the largest increase in 40 years.

According to a friend of mine who works in the banking industry, the Fed governors were recently polled on where they see the Federal funds rate going in the next 24 months. The average was 2 percent.

A two percent increase is a big deal. It also isn’t enough. The greatest impact that higher interest rates will have is on the largest borrower in the world — the United States government. The United States national debt is nearly 30 trillion dollars, which it finances through Treasury bills, notes and bonds. The public holds 80 percent of this debt, which requires direct interest payments, rather than ledger transfers on the Treasury books.

The fiscal year 2021 United States budget included over $562 billion spent paying interest on the federal debt. To put this into perspective, the cumulative net worth of the five wealthiest people in the US (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet) was $465 billion. So, the interest paid on the debt in 2021 is more than these five people’s net worth COMBINED.

An increase in those interest rates will cost the government a lot of money. Money that they do not have. Any increase in interest rates will add hundreds of billions of dollars of interest to the federal budget. In fact, a one percent increase in interest rates means an extra $300 billion in interest on our national debt.

The only way for the government to pay the higher interest is- you guessed it- to print the money, which will cause the currency to be devalued, and worsen inflation, which will again cause higher interest rates. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

We are riding this sinking ship all the way to the bottom.

By Divemedic, ago