A rhumbline is a direct heading to a point. On a map it's a straight line. It looks like the perfect way to get where you're going. On a globe, though, it may be the long way around. For example, New York and Madrid are about the same latitude. On a map, a course due east from New York is the shortest distance to Madrid. On the round face of the earth, though, a curved path (called the great circle route) passing over Greenland and the northern Atlantic is shorter. Try it with a string and a globe if you don't believe it. That's probably what a lot of the comments on this blog will be like. Random? Disconnected? Circular? Probably. But maybe they will lead to a point eventually.



Saturday, October 15, 2011

The Solyndra problem

The collapse of Solyndra illustrates every reason I've ever heard for not allowing the government pick winners and losers.  First, it turns out some of the Solyndra investors have connections to the Obama administration.  Next, it now surfaces that Solyndra was using political connections in an attempt to garner big Navy contracts.  Third, many people warned the DOE that Solyndra was heading in the tank, but the politics outweighed economic logic.  Finally, once it was obvious that Solyndra was going down, some law that evidently no one sponsored and no one voted for magically came into existence and moved private investors ahead of taxpayers in a bankruptcy liquidation.

I didn't know until I read a WSJ article today, though, that the "green energy" loan program that Obama used to fund Solyndra was a Republican idea enacted in 2005 - at the height of the Republican spending binge.  Corruption and stupidity are bi-partisan in Washington, even if nothing else is...
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