Winter corn and other trades

With Midwest corn and soy crop ruined by the drought, this will be an excellent year for the tropical and subtropical farmers in the US to grow winter corn for Ethanol and finishing live stock. Florida and Puerto Rico can't make up for the crop failure in the Midwest but depending on the availability of seed the farmers could make an excellent profit. The issue is that the acreage that will be used for corn will not be available for whatever crop would normally be planted there, so while we might have corn for Ethanol we might not have lettuce or tomatoes this winter.

Obamacare decision is not what it seems

People are saying that Chief Justice Roberts is a traitor to the conservative ideals for upholding Obamacare. However, in the long term I think he will be hailed as a hero of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

By upholding Obamacare and forcing it to be called a tax, Roberts has given the RNC an incredible gift.

I am talking full Fox News sainthood, Gretchen Carlson will wear a WWRD bracelet, Sarah Palin will have a sparkly Roberts pin, and all Fox New staff will have to genuflect when Roberts’ name is mentioned.

If parts had been struck down planning could have been held off well into 2013. But instead the victory was decisive, now the Democrats actually have to start planning for implementation before Nov 6 and they don’t want that. Also they have to talk about their victory as creating a health care tax. On the other side of the aisle the Republicans will unify and with a single voice pin what will likely be the biggest tax increase in history solidly on Obama and the Democrats. The debate will shift from Obamacare being about health care to being about paying for it and the massive complexity of running a program that pays or penalizes in advance, then once the year ends requires people to go back and justify the amount they received. It puts a massive paperwork burden on the people who generally have the least interaction with the tax code, and can least afford to repay any overpayments.

In my mind Roberts used the liberal judges, and has to set the stage for a full legislative repeal of Obamacare, instead of the long slog the Republicans would have had to endure to dismantle it piece by piece. I am sure where ever Niccolò Machiavelli is, he is smiling.

What is a kilogram?

I know that everyone lays awake at night worrying about this, but the international prototype kilogram (IPK) the world's reference kilogram is losing weight. It has lost less weight than a single grain of dust, but it a world where so many things are reference against mass having the kilogram get lighter is a dangerous thing.

I think the kilogram should be referenced off the electron Volt (eV). But wait you say the eV has Joule as unit and the Joule is based on the kilogram, so you can't do that!

However, I would counter that even if you don't know what the resting mass of an electron or proton is, as long as all the particles of interest have the same resting mass and we can accurately measure speed we can accurately derive mass. There are even artifacts of the speed of a particle related the color spectrum of the photons produced, etc so instruments can be double checked.

The next complaint is that to accelerate a particle to speeds where the mass would be a significant fraction of a kilogram would require a particle accelerator and every particle accelerator would be slightly different. However, there are lots of natural processes that produce beta and alpha particles of fairly tight spectrum's that could be used as a natural source of non-resting mass particles. There are also a variety or fission or fusion events that could be a source of data for meaureing the nature of the kilogram.

Final critism of my eV plan is that it is an abitrary measure, however a meter is the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second. If we can measure time and speed accurately enough to base a unit of measurement on a time scale that small it should be a simple matter to determine the speed of a subatomic particle moving at less than 99% the speed of light.

That is just my thought...

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I'm not dead, I just have a lot to do.