Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2014

Fran Tarkenton’s three suggestions to help protect Teddy Bridgewater

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Legendary Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton has some suggestions for the current coaching squad for ways to keep opposing teams from teeing off on Teddy:

The good news is, the Vikings’ defense is playing great. When you consistently hold teams to 17 points, you expect to win a lot of games.

The bad news is, the Vikings’ offense just isn’t producing enough. Even though the defense held Detroit and Buffalo to 17 points apiece the past two weeks, the offense has gotten only three and 16, and the Vikings lost both games.

No matter how many ways you analyze it, slice it up and study it, that’s not good enough. And it’s tough to watch great defensive efforts like Sunday’s against the Bills go unrewarded. When the defense gets six sacks and four turnovers, you can’t lose that game!

The offensive line is still struggling, and Teddy Bridgewater was sacked five times Sunday. That makes 13 sacks in the past two weeks. But the Vikings aren’t the only team in the NFL with offensive line problems, and there are things you can do to compensate.

You have to keep your quarterback upright. If the quarterback is on the ground, he has no chance.

Destroying the “too big to fail” meme

Filed under: Britain, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

In the Telegraph, Allister Heath makes a case for the looming end to the economically disastrous notion that certain entities are “too big to fail”:

Bank bail-outs have been a cultural catastrophe for those of us who support free markets, low taxes and enterprise. During the 1980s and 1990s, much of the British public came to accept and even embrace capitalism, in return for a simple deal: profits and losses would both have to be privatised. Clever entrepreneurs, savvy traders or brilliant footballers would be encouraged to make money; but companies and investors that placed the wrong bets would be allowed to fail, with no pity.

Not only did this trigger an explosion in prosperity, it also helped shift the British mindset towards a much more pro-enterprise position. The rules of the game felt fair: risk and reward went hand in hand. The government would serve as an umpire, not a supporter of vested interests.

But the crisis of 2007-09 put an end to this implicit bargain, at least in the eyes of vast swathes of the public. They saw large institutions bailed out at great public expense, and with substantial amounts of taxpayer money put at risk. It started to look as if — when it came to the banking industry at least — risk had been socialised while profits remained private. To many members of the public, it was a case of heads you win and tails we lose. Profits were retained by a small elite, while losses were spread much more broadly — or so it felt.

Needless to say, the reality was more complex. Shareholders of bailed-out banks often lost everything. But bondholders were rescued, institutions survived, staff contracts were not ripped up and the process of creative destruction was severely derailed. And while big beasts were kept afloat, many smaller firms went bust and many ordinary folk lost their jobs. This is one reason — together with an incorrect narrative of the causes of the crisis which wrongly absolves governments and central banks — for increased support for punitive tax and government meddling in prices and wages.

So why did governments turn their back on capitalism and suddenly refuse to let market forces do their work? The uncontrolled failure of a major financial institution has a much broader, system-wide impact than the uncontrolled failure of a hair salon. Under traditional bankruptcy law, however, both would be treated in the same way, which simply makes no sense. One needs a different approach to tackle the failure of major banks or insurers — a proper Plan B. With the right institutions in place, there need not be such a thing as “too big to fail”. With the correct planning and tools, even the largest of financial firms can be dismantled sensibly without wiping out millions of depositors and triggering another Great Depression.

They don’t like to brag…

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

John Turner sent me this link. I found it quite amusing:

JTF2 brag sheet from imgur

Harper government to restore part of the military budget?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

In the Edmonton Leader-Post, Michael Den Tandt reported last week on the chances of the Canadian Armed Forces getting back at least some of the most recent budget cuts, in light of the increasing deployment tempo in Europe and the Middle East:

Even as the Harper Conservatives have deployed CF-18 fighter jets to Eastern Europe, and now to Kuwait to join the air war against Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, the Canadian Forces have seen their funding slashed. But that may be about to change, as the government considers adding back part or all of the $3.1 billion removed from the military’s piggy bank in last February’s budget.

Friday, it was reported here that Prime Minister Stephen Harper personally intervened recently to settle a dispute between Treasury Board, led by Tony Clement, and the Defence Department, led by Rob Nicholson, over a pending $800-million sole-sourced purchase of next-generation Sea Sparrow naval missiles from U.S.-based Raytheon Co.

Concerns that the acquisition under the U.S. government’s Foreign Military Sales program would tilt the scales in favour of the Raytheon-Lockheed-Martin group in a burgeoning transatlantic competition for up to $18 billion in subcontracts on DND’s new Canadian Surface Combatant fleet, were overruled. As were, apparently, any worries about the optics of making another large military purchase, a la F-35, without opening the process up to competing bids.

Sharpening woodworking tools

Filed under: Technology, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Paul Sellers talks about the practical limits to sharpening woodworking tools like planes and chisels:

As I have said, we have become something of an obsessive bunch when it comes to the different elements of working wood; sharpness has become more and more obsessive. Now we are not talking about the violin maker seeking sharp levels for clear tone from the wood and who uses wood so soft, unsharp gouges and planes would bruise rather than cut the fine surfaces he strives to achieve. His standards parallel the levels needed for severing tissue by the surgeon’s hand, not the bench joiner chopping mortises and cutting a few dovetails.

Chisel edge degradation by Paul Sellers

It’s unfortunate that since the demise of ordinary craftsmanship we now turn to guru wood writers and not wood-wrights. Woodwrights are no longer there to give us our information of course. It’s true too that the sources of information become more and more questionable. Three recent sources of information teaching on sharpening techniques I tracked back to tool catalog and online sales people selling products for sharpening. Most of the information they have is not new but regurgitated. Each phase of sharpening change marks another saleable product and so we see Japanese water stones added to carborundum stones, Arkansas stones and Washita stones and then came diamonds and abrasive films, diamond paste and flattening stones. The list goes on.

We have survived the different gospels of scary sharp and micro-bevel methodology and are emerging to this very simple reality. As long as you start the cutting edge somewhere around 30-degrees and polish it out it will cut well. If you you sharpen to around 1200-grit it will cut most anything you need in woodworking. If you sharpen to a polished edge of around 15,000-grit you can slice the most delicate of materials effortlessly, but 98% of the time that’s far from necessary. What am I saying? I’m saying that we generally sharpen to task but often sharpen to a higher level because it’s not much extra effort. We all know after a few efforts at sharpening that the greatest effort comes at the start of the process when we have to regain ground to get through a fractured and dulled edge and back to a productive cutting edge. That said, it’s not a big deal, just a few extra strokes on the coarse diamonds gets you there. So, if that is the case, why do we sharpen to higher levels than are usually needed. Well, it is a fact that the more polished the two plains forming the arête for a cutting edge are, the sharper the edge is but the stronger the edge is too. As I said, the extra effort is worth the work because it’s so quick and effective. It’s not so much what we do to the edge to establish it but what we do to the edge after we have prepared it for work. Taking the chisel to the surface of the wood to work the wood begins an immediate process of edge reduction we now know is edge fracture but was once called wear. No matter the steel, edge fracture occurs at some level but some steels fracture more readily than others. What we often do not realise is that it is impossible to find a steel that both takes and retains an edge and at the same time has a level of durability we can rely on forever. All edges wear away by fracture and constantly need restoring.

QotD: Hugging

Filed under: Humour, Personal, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Part of the problem with hugging is that it has become a social convention, rather than what it once was, which was an expression of genuine emotion.

There are some times when a hug is appropriate. Those times are when there’s a marriage proposal in the air or a body in the ground.

Hugging is for celebration, or comforting someone who’s had a setback. Hugging is not for noting that two people have both managed to meet at Chili’s after work. Being at Chili’s is not a cause for celebration, and nor is it quite dire enough to require comforting.

An even more important rule is Men don’t hug. The only time men should hug is when male family members are observing a major life milestone, such as a major promotion, the safe return from overseas deployment, or noting a witty observation in the commentary audio track of Die Hard.

The only exception to these guidelines if a man tells another man, “Boy, I could sure use a hug.” But he won’t say that, because he’s a man, so just stop with the male-on-male hugging.

To be serious, if I could: There are rules of physical distance, and there are meanings to breaches of those rules.

People of course do occasionally touch each other. But those touches have important communicative purposes precisely because of the general rule that we don’t touch each other.

[…]

There’s something a little child-like about hugging, too. It’s an innocent gesture — it’s intended to be so.

But it sort of ignores the adult-world meaning of intimate touching.

So I wonder if it’s somehow connected to a growing preference for Child World rules, and an increasing rejection of Adult World rules.

Ace, “Arms Are Not Made For Hugging”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2014-10-10.

Powered by WordPress