John T. Reed’s news blog

I saw a National Geographic Air Disasters tonight. I thought I had seen them all. But I did not recognize this one. Then the announcers said neither the crew nor the manufacturer nor the safety investigators would talk to the TV producers. .WTF? All these shows are centered on the safety investigators interviews..Big Airbus ran out of fuel because of a leak. They had to glide a could or hundred miles and managed to land at Lajes FB in the Azores..But it was not as easy as that made it sound. You have to get lower for oxygen because you...

Liberals are pushing. Its main virtue seems to be that it replaces fossil fuels, at least inside the heat pump. It runs on electricity. It is essentially an air-conditioner that you turn the opposite way in winter. Air-conditioners throw heat outside in summer. Heat pumps also do that then reverse direction and throw heat inside and cool air outside..I studied a lot of engineering in college. I do not give a rat’s rump about the Marxist climate cult. All I am interested in is whether the life cycle cost of the heat pump is cheaper than the fossil-fuel furnace..The basic...

For a year, my wife and I paid a monthly fee to an HVAC company to take care of our central heating and air-conditioning. They were so big on smiling and neat uniforms and returning phone calls and chirpy TV commercials..Then they recommended getting a new downstairs HVAC for our two-story house. I agreed mainly because the AC had a leak, which maybe could not be found or fixed, and even if it could be both, it needed increasingly expensive, no-longer-manufactured freon..Anyway, they bid over $16,000. We got another bid for $9,000 something. We knew that guy and had worked...

Today’s WSJ had a 6-page insert called Investing Monthly. And what is their definition of investing? Apparently, stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs. Bonds, did not even make it into the insert And forget about the most widely-owned best investment in America—your principal residence

Much talk about risk management in crypto. Does anyone know what risk management is? Or are they magic words like “Open sesame” or “WD-40” or “elbow grease?” .There are five ways to manage risk:.• avoid it, e.g., refuse to own any crypto• shift it to someone else, e.g. purchase a crypto insurance policy (there is no such thing)• hedge it, i.e., invest an equal amount in an asset that moves in the opposite direction when crypto moves—a way to lock in the current price—being long and short in the asset simultaneously which is much more complicated to do that it is to...