A Telephone Merger

The Wall Street Journal wrote about roadblocks in the form of nine Progressive-Democrat-run States’ lawsuit against a T-Mobile-Sprint merger.  In commenting on the article, a fellow reader wrote in part,

What about the customers?

His concern was centered on quality of service that would—might—flow from the merged company as well as the number of alternatives from which to purchase cell phone service.

Customers are an important factor, but businesses are obligated to make money for their owners, Progressive-Democrats’ virtue-signaling notwithstanding.

The importance of the customers will be exercised by their staying with the merged company or moving on if the post-merger business isn’t better.

Fiscal Management

In Tuesday’s Progressive-Democratic Party primary debate, Joe Biden made the claim that he couldn’t afford child care in 1972 on his then-income of $42,000/year.

Jan Brewer, ex-governor of Arizona, had a thought on that via Twitter:

“Jan Brewer @GovBrewer · 12h
“Biden just said he couldn’t afford child care in 1972 when he was making $42,000/yr. Today, that’d be $256,000/yr.  Really Joe?  If you can’t run your own household efficiently, I don’t think you can run our country!

“Vote @realDonaldTrump!”

She used an inflation rate of a bit over 3.5% to get there. I used an inflation rate of 3% to get a bit under $174,000. Over that long time frame, inflation rates bounce around; our two estimates, though, effectively bracket the situation.

Brewer’s point is eminently valid. If Biden can’t hack his own household budget, how can he be expected run our nation’s budget?

Oh, wait—the Progressive-Democrat thinks that, as President, he’ll be able to give himself a raise at convenience through tax increases and to borrow at will because…government.

Empty Rhetoric

More of it, this time from European signatories of the failed-at-birth Iran nuclear weapons deal. Iran has announced that it’s going to disregard entirely the deal’s limits on Iran’s production of weapons grade uranium, and in response, Britain, France, and Germany have said they’re going to trigger the dispute resolution mechanism that’s written into the deal.  That mechanism, on a finding of serious violation, involves getting the UN Security Council to reimpose UN-originated sanctions on Iran.

Of course, Britain, France, and Germany know full well that two other members of the Security Council, Russia and the People’s Republic of China, will veto any meaningful resolution, making the three’s decision meaningless chit-chat, intended for nothing more than dishonest virtue signaling (excuse the redundancy). The three also said, in the same statement, that

they weren’t joining Washington’s “campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran.”

And so the three continue to duck away from meaningful action against a nation that attacks its own people, funds and instigates terrorism around the Middle East and Europe, and is bent on getting a nuclear weapon with which to “wipe Israel from the map.”

Hmm….

Diversity Among Candidates

In an article reporting (now ex-) Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Cory Booker’s (D, NJ) withdrawal from Party’s primary campaign, The Wall Street Journal noted that Booker has, and continues to do so, decried the “lack of diversity” remaining among Party’s Presidential candidates.  Then the article’s author, Sabrina Siddiqui, asked the question

How could Democrats encourage more diversity in the presidential field?

To which I answer: any way that suits them.

Of course, the Progressive-Democrats should continue emphasizing ethnicity and race as the primary defining characteristics of a man and not the content of his character or the policies for which he argues.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

Climate Modeling

Readers here have known of my long-standing disdain for climatistas’ climate modeling skills: their models cannot simultaneously predict our past and our present, and their predictions of our future have wildly exaggerated for the last 20 years, and counting.  NASA (yes, an agency that has been caught altering past temperature data to “true up” current temperature change) also has commented on the matter.

Working from cloud modeling and clouds’ effect on climate change, NASA noted that [emphasis in the article]

In some models “clouds decrease the net greenhouse effect, whereas in others they intensify it.”
Because the uncertainties are so pervasive, NASA concludes that “today’s models must be improved by about a hundredfold in accuracy” if we wish to make climate projections.

And

When both the cloud and the forcing uncertainties are allowed to accumulate together, after 5 years the A2 [greenhouse gas-induced] scenario includes a 0.34°C warmer Earth but a ±8.8°C uncertainty. At 10 years this becomes 0.44±15° C and 0.6±27.7°C in 20 years. By 2100, the projection is 3.7±130°C.

So far, climate models are useless.