Boone County Watchdog

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Re-Elect

BILL PYSSON

District One Boone County Board

Bill’s initiatives over the last two years have improved your county government. These are a few of Bill’s accomplishments:

· ·Suggested and succeeded in having all appointed posts and jobs openings posted on county website
· · Insured that the required disclosures of employee salaries are available to the public; by name not merely job description.
· · Demanded the County Board Chairman posts all proposed appointments in advance. Based upon the requirement of the board’s advice and consent, Bill votes on no appointment unless they are posted in advanced on the website and the application letters of all applicants are made public. Unfortunately the chairman only sometimes complies with this request.
· · Questioned why the county has not completed a physical inventory of property in over seven years. In 2014 such an inventory was finally completed and a perpetual inventory system is being devised. County ordinances required such inventories yet the county failed to comply with the requirement for years.
· · Written evaluation of employees supervised by the County Administrator will now occur once per year. Previously formal evaluations were not required and did not occur.
· · Discovered that Freedom of Information (FOIA) Requests were sometimes completed incorrectly. Personnel completing requests had not completed the two hour on-line training. Personnel are now properly trained and hopefully all FOIA‘s now comply with statute.
· · For the first time ever, farming of the 68 acres of cropland owned by the county went out to bid. The high bid was approved by the county board in September 2014. Despite this year’s fall in commodity prices, the bid is $30 per acre higher ($280 vs. $250) than last year’s price which was privately negotiated. Bill adamantly requested open bidding in 2013 and now it finally happened.
· · The county code posted on the website was years out of date. The only means of knowing the actual code requirements was to contact county administration. Based upon Bill’s questioning --changes to the code will now be updated quarterly.

It is the duty of the county board to provide general supervision of the Animal Services, Planning Enforcement, Building Department and the County Administrator’s office. Bill criticized the county for not having written procedures for each of these activities. Bill suggested written logs of zoning complaints, car usage, office calls and office contacts; unfortunately these suggestions have not been accepted. Hopefully the accountability benefits of such rudimentary recordkeeping will eventually be accepted.

Bill’s two District One opponents are opposed to Wind Farms. Bill voted against the ordinance change because the proposed 2000 feet set back would effectively prohibited commercial wind turbines in the county. Wind turbines can be effectively regulated by the special use provision of the county zoning code. This position was recommended by the professional staff of the County Zoning Department.

--THERE IS MUCH MORE TO DO--

Re-Elect BILL PYSSON

District One Boone County Board

Compact Fusion · Lockheed Martin

Compact Fusion
It’s no secret that our Skunk Works® team often finds itself on the cutting edge of technology. As they work to develop a source of infinite energy, our engineers are looking to the biggest natural fusion reactor for inspiration – the sun. By containing the power of the sun in a small magnetic bottle, we are on the fast track to developing nuclear fusion reactors to serve the world’s ever-growing energy needs.
FUSION VS. FISSION
More than 50 years ago, nuclear power through fission was the excitement of its day. People tried using it to power almost everything, even planes. In the end, operational hurdles prevented fission from widespread use.
While fission continues to power our nuclear reactors today, fusion offers a cleaner, safer source of energy.
Fission occurs when one atom is split into two smaller fragments, creating an explosion of sorts and resulting in the release of heat energy.
Fusion is the process by which a gas is heated up and separated into its ions and electrons. When the ions get hot enough, they can overcome their mutual repulsion and collide, fusing together. When this happens, they release a lot of energy – about one million times more powerful than a chemical reaction and 3-4 times more powerful than a fission reaction.
Energy created through fusion is 3-4 times more powerful than the energy released by fission.
HOW COMPACT FUSION WORKS
Nuclear fusion is the process by which the sun works. Our concept will mimic that process within a compact magnetic container and release energy in a controlled fashion to produce power we can use.
A reactor small enough to fit on a truck could provide enough power for a small city of up to 100,000 people
Building on more than 60 years of fusion research, the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works approach to compact fusion is a high beta concept. This concept uses a high fraction of the magnetic field pressure, or all of its potential, so we can make our devices 10 times smaller than previous concepts. That means we can replace a device that must be housed in a large building with one that can fit on the back of a truck.
The compact size is the reason that we believe we will be able to create fusion technology quickly. The smaller the size of the device, the easier it is to build up momentum and develop it faster. Instead of taking five years to design and build a concept, it takes only a few months. If we undergo a few of these testing and refinement cycles, we will be able to develop a prototype within the same five year timespan.

To mimic the energy created by the sun and control it here on earth, we’re creating a concept that can be contained using a magnetic bottle. The bottle is able to handle extremely hot temperatures, reaching hundreds of millions of degrees. By containing this reaction, we can release it in a controlled fashion to create energy we can use.
The heat energy created using this compact fusion reactor will drive turbine generators by replacing the combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power for a number of applications.
Rapid design cycles allow for less conservative design choices, faster consideration of alternatives, less capital, and the ability to maintain momentum moving forward with constant progress.

Compact Fusion · Lockheed Martin

Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project - Yahoo Finance

breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.

Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.

In a statement, the company, the Pentagon's largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years.

In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.

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Chief Executive Officer of Lockheed Martin Corp Marillyn Hewson speaks to journalists at a news conf …

Lockheed's work on fusion energy could help in developing new power sources amid increasing global conflicts over energy, and as projections show there will be a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation, McGuire said

Friday, October 10, 2014

Monday, October 13: Columbus Day-- Government Holiday

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Thursday, October 9, 2014

Boone County considering expanded breeding kennel regulations - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

By Ben Stanley
Rockford Register Star
Posted Oct. 9, 2014 @ 12:01 am
Updated at 1:57 PM

BELVIDERE — Accusations of animal cruelty and abuse aimed at a Caledonia dog breeder earlier this year have raised questions concerning county regulations governing breeding kennels. As a result, several amendments have been proposed to extend kennel regulations in the county zoning ordinance that would ban stackable dog cages, ban wire or mesh flooring in dog cages and kennels, and require raised beds for each animal.

The proposed amendments moved through the county Planning Zoning and Building Committee on Wednesday night and will be reviewed by the Boone County Board on Oct. 15.

Before a text amendment to county ordinance can be approved by the County Board, it must first pass through the Regional Planning Commission, the Zoning Board of Appeals and the Planning, Zoning and Building Committee.

Members of the PZB voted on Wednesday to bring the amendments before the board with the intention of eventually forming a committee to refine the amendments, which, once completed, would then be reintroduced to the ZBA, PZB and County Board for approval.

The process could take three to five months.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

China Just Overtook The US As The World's Largest Economy

By Mike Bird 2 hours ago

Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us back in April this year that it was all about to happen.

Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.

The simple logic is that prices aren't the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than San Francisco, so it's not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist's Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.

So the IMF measures both GDP in market exchange terms, and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world's biggest economy.

Keystone Be Darned: Canada Finds Oil Route Around Obama

…By Rebecca Penty, Hugo Miller, Andrew Mayeda and Edward Greenspon

…Thus was born Energy East, an improbable pipeline that its backers say has a highly probability of being built. It will cost C$12 billion ($10.7 billion) and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer (2,858-mile) path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude.

Supertanker Access

Its end point, a refinery in the blue-collar city of Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply.

As well, Vladimir Putin’s provocations in Ukraine are spurring interest in that oil from Europe and, strange as it seems, Saint John provides among the fastest shipping times to India of any oil port in North America. Indian companies, having already sampled this crude, are interested in more. That means oil-sands production for the first time would trade in more than dribs and drabs on the international markets. With the U.S. virtually its only buyer, the captive Canadians are subject to price discounts of as much as $43 a barrel that cost Canada $20 billion a year.