Lithium ion batteries and Samsung

There are many ways to store energy. Gasoline is chemical storage. The energy is released through combustion. Water and gas reservoirs store potential energy, released when pressure is relieved. Pushing a boulder over a cliff turns potential energy into kinetic energy. The more compact the energy storage, the more violent the energy release. High explosives are among the greatest energy storage mechanisms per unit mass. The greater the amount of energy stored per kilogram, the more compact and lighter the device. We work harder and harder to store the most energy in the least mass and volume. Lithium ion and other advanced batteries are pushing the energy storage boundary closer and closer to explosives. The more explosive an energy store, the more careful we must be.

Like nitroglycerin. We just have to decide how much the advantages are worth in order to benefit from the efficiency. Lithium ion batteries are fine. They are worth it. But we must be more diligent about handling and charging. The explosive phones are not Samsung’s fault, in my opinion.

David Finkleman

Colorado Springs

Column was out of touch

Clintonista Froma Harrop’s comments (“Candidate health issues produce VP discussion” The Gazette, Sept. 13) make one wonder on what planet she lives. Regarding an assumed death or incapacity of a President Donald Trump, Harrop writes: “Trump would no longer be able to turn American foreign policy into an instrument of self-enrichment.” Is she afraid that payments to the Trump Foundation from favor-seeking foreign potentates might skim off the Clinton Foundation’s take?

A little further down she says: “As president, Trump could trade American foreign policy interests for unimaginable personal wealth.” We know he certainly could, because we know how successful Hillary has been, through her power as a mere secretary of state, at selling out American interests to foreigners in exchange for cash payments to the Clintons.

Eric Nickerson

Colorado Springs

Insufficient focus on responsibilities

There seems to be insufficient focus and analysis given to the responses that Hillary Clinton has been giving to the allegations made against her regarding her use of personal email servers and the handling of classified information, for not ensuring that emails subpoenaed by Congress and the courts were preserved and provided as ordered and her management of the Benghazi disaster.

Regarding the thousands of emails that were not preserved, the response given is that they were accidentally destroyed or deleted. If her staff caused or allowed these emails to be lost or destroyed, they were either following her direction to destroy them or they disregarded her direction to preserve them. As an attorney, she was fully aware of her legal responsibilities to preserve the emails. As a manager, it was her responsibility to make sure that her staff was complying with the law.

The same criteria applies to how she handled the Benghazi attack. She has claimed that she was not responsible for security at Benghazi. As secretary of state, she was responsible for the security of all State Department employees and facilities worldwide. While it is appropriate for a chief executive to delegate the day-to-day security responsibilities to a lower-level manager, it was her responsibility to provide direction and guidance to her staff on how they should report to her impending threats to those employees and facilities. It was also her responsibility to bring these threats to the attention of the president and secretary of defense so they could be neutralized.

On her responses to her failures to safeguard classified information, the same issues apply. It was her responsibility to ensure that proper procedures were implemented to prevent any classified information from being sent through her personal servers. If such safeguards were not put in place, and that appears to be the case, it is her responsibility and hers alone.

Do the American people want a president who cannot manage and direct her staff on important issues as noted above?

Bob Lee

Colorado Springs

Anti-war Fonda unwelcome

By far the worst of the Vietnam anti-war punks is Jane Fonda, who was photographed wearing a North Vietnamese hat in an NVN anti-aircraft gun site. She should have been prosecuted!

Mick Greene

Monument

Protecting us from big banks

I saw in the news that Wells Fargo Bank has been fined $185 million for pulling a huge scam on its customers: over the past five years (at least), Wells Fargo employees have created more than 1.5 million sham checking accounts and applied for more than a half million credit cards using customers’ names and money without those customers’ knowledge. Apparently, employees have daily quotas to meet and are threatened with termination if they don’t meet them.

This scam resulted in customers being charged overdraft and other fees for accounts they didn’t even know existed, and some customers’ credit scores were adversely affected. The bank has fired 5,300 employees in connection with the scam and must also refund about $2.6 million in fees and penalties assessed on the sham accounts, in addition to paying the above-mentioned fine.

And how was this scheme discovered? It was thanks to a federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a watchdog group established in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The agency’s job is to protect ordinary folks from the sorts of scams that banks have shown, time and again, that they’ll commit if nobody is watching them.

Republicans would love to abolish the CFPB, as well as other legislation enacted to prevent another economic crisis after banks wrecked our economy in 2008. Republicans are interested in protecting billionaires, not people like you and me, so if they win big in the upcoming election, watch your back. They’ll work to abolish our ally, the CFPB, and the next time a bank rips us off, we’ll be helpless.

Fred Kormos

Colorado Springs