How parts of the US manifest getting poorer

My local municipality monthly newsletter came in the mail over the weekend along with the local utility bill. News You Can Use put out a new snow policy and it's a statement admitting growing financial problems (at least between the lines).

Mains and secondaries will only be salted at intersections, railroad tracks, school zones, curves, bridges and around hospitals. Once the snow event has stopped, we will salt the mains and the secondaries all the way through and then we will move into the residentials. We will only salt residentials at stop signs once the snow event has stopped. We will no longer salt mid-block of the residentials

It's in little statements of service cutbacks and quietly deferred maintenance that between the lines often announce financial decay in the US. During the recent fiscal crisis, miles and miles of asphalted road were converted back to gravel. The trend is getting push back but even oil booming Texas tried it out in 2013 on two roads before public anger made them permanently shelve the idea a year later. The Texas case might be a matter of a fiscally responsible state running into the high depletion nature of shale oil wells but that circumstance seems to be an outlier.

So keep an eye out for those little announcements. Lowered salt usage on icy streets, asphalt going back to gravel, changes like these that can be pushed through relatively quietly are going to be more frequent signs than big changes like government pension cuts and municipal bankruptcy.

SpaceX making history this week?

In 2014, I thought I was in luck. We were going to Disney World and SpaceX was going going to run its first attempt at launching a rocket with landing gear. I was going to see history being made. Except I didn't in the end. A range safety failure closed down Cape Canaveral to launches for a few weeks and the historic launch was postponed.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Tuesday's historic launch will fly without a hitch. This time, they're trying to actually land a 1st stage Falcon 9 component. It's landing site is going to be on an autonomous barge in the Atlantic ocean for now but the ultimate aim is to have return flights go directly back to a maintenance facility where the stages can get refurbished and reused.

If a full Falcon 9 can get reused even once, it will chop off 40% or better of the cost to launch as the $54 million construction cost can be amortized over two launches. If the components can be reused more than once, the savings get even more spectacular.

These are heady days for spaceflight, even if Tuesday's launch develops a glitch. I'm very confident that they'll get it done relatively quickly.

Unhackable systems and the dumbness of trying to get into it on twitter

It is theoretically possible to create an unhackable system. From Instapundit today Neil deGrasse Tyson shows how not to talk about the subject.

Chasing your tail, California Style

Instapundit today offers up a Police Chief magazine article talking about increasing revenue streams to fund policing in California. There is exactly zero attention paid to increasing economic activity. Of the twenty item list for revenue enhancers, the vast majority have a side effect of shrinking the local economy. The three exceptions are selling ride alongs, selling ad space on the police website, and allowing advertising and branding using the police department's name.

Socializing economic activity or launching government economic activity in competition with private firms occupies 7 of the 20 slots. The rest is mostly raising taxes and fees of various types.

Reducing nuisance laws in order to make economic activity cheaper (increasing ordinary tax revenue) is just nowhere in sight.

It really is just sad.

New Year's Day

New Year's day is a time for reflection, a time for new beginnings. In my case it is a time to return seriously to blogging.

Taking the midnight train

Road trip to NY for Christmas!

3d printing news

My son's 3d printer just got a brain transplant. XYZ printing jumped the shark when their 1.2.3 firmware for the Davinci 1.0 printer instituted 'phone home' code that would make it refuse to print if your cartridges didn't match their central database. Sorry fellas, we have a need to print in colors you don't sell. We'd have continued buying the colors you did sell because you make good hardware for the money and we believe in supporting that.

I just finished doing a brain transplant and the arduino due brains powering the printer no longer thinks that it's an XYZ brand printer. Instead it's a repetier, open source printer. As a bonus, we should be getting better control of our printing, which means setup will take longer but the results should be improved so long as we know what we're doing. Whether that will happen remains to be seen.