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December 3rd, 2009
01:27 am - Does Tiger Burn and Seethe?
THE TIGER, by William Blake.
TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
latimes report of a cryptic but highly suggestive mea culpa from that famous golfer.
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November 29th, 2009
11:55 pm - Astronaut Shit Burns In the Atmosphere
You all know that human waste generated by air passengers is NOT dumped into the sky. It is brought back to earth and disposed of using a quaintly named vehicle called a honey cart.
But where does astronaut waste go?
It is significantly more expensive to bring back anything from space than from the altitudes plied by jetliners. Hence, there is only one practical solution. Fling it into outer space.
Of course, they couldn't actually leave it as part of yet another satellite orbiting our big blue marble, so they have to burn it up along the way. By sending it hurtling back into the atmosphere and hence burning the stuff literally into thin air.
The Progress (Russian: прогресс) is a Russian expendable freighter spacecraft. The spacecraft is an unmanned resupply spacecraft during its flight but upon docking with a space station it allows astronauts inside, hence it is classified manned by the manufacturer. It was derived from the Soyuz spacecraft, and is launched with the Soyuz rocket. It is currently used to supply the International Space Station, but was originally used to supply Soviet space stations for many years. There are three to four flights of the Progress spacecraft to the ISS per year. Each spacecraft remains docked until shortly before the new one, or a Soyuz (which uses the same docking ports) arrives. Then it is filled with waste, disconnected, deorbited, and destroyed in the atmosphere.
wikipedia
So don't laugh at NEWater; we're all breathing astronaut poo right now.
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November 28th, 2009
01:23 am - Putting the horse before the cart
Dubai's rulers had a simple theory: build it and they would come. Hence, they built bigger (and biggest) in order to attract more and better. More and richer tourists. More and talented entrepreneurs, technologists and celebrities. If they all came, eventually, a first world, world beating economy would rise from the sand. After all, their goal was to build the Singapore or Hong Kong of the Middle East, and they aimed to do it in double quick time.
From the time Dubai started experiencing large scale flight of jobless foreign workers fleeing 'draconian' poor laws, trouble was clearly brewing and visible for all to see. The news only got worse when big brother - and some time bitter rival - Abu Dhabi had to step in to bailout the ailing flashy emirate last year. And then, not much news apart from some murmurs of a possible comeback riding the wave of China, Australia and petrol prices inching upwards again. But now, the bad news is back with a vengeance.
The government of Dubai, in a blunt acknowledgment of the severity of its financial position, said on Wednesday that it had asked its banks for a six-month stay on its schedule of debt repayments. The terse statement came in the middle of negotiations between creditors and Dubai World, the corporate arm of Dubai, which has led many of its most ambitious real estate projects, but is now struggling under the burden of $59 billion in liabilities.
For the banks that financed the debt-fueled ascent of Dubai — analysts’ estimates put its total debt at about $80 billion — the move by Dubai to obtain a standstill highlights a truth that many in the region had been trying to make clear to bankers. It is that Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich governing emirate of the United Arab Emirates, will not unconditionally bail out its more profligate neighbor. Instead, a genuine restructuring of Dubai’s debt, with pain being shared equally between Dubai and its bankers, needs to take place.
nytimes
The brutal truth is that building a shining city in order to lure the big businesses of the world can only work for a short time. It is far better to start with modest digs and build local human resources and local capacity in technology and management before investing in the smart cityscape. Dubai, being relatively oil-poor compared to most other Emirates in the Gulf, was vulnerable to financial shocks in a bigger way than, say, Kuwait. They decided to ignore it and gamble big time nonetheless, and for a time the markets favoured them immensely. Now is crunch time, and time to face reality. Singapore and Hong Kong were dumps for a long time, even after foreign investment had begun to pour in. It is only relatively recently that both have acquired the gloss of modern metropolises, after they had already earned some serious coin. Dubai put the horse before the cart by spending the serious coin first on spanking towers and splashing water parks in the hope of drawing yet more coin. A hope that now appears entirely misplaced.
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November 27th, 2009
12:04 pm - Aid To Grow?
When Japan first embarked upon its modernisation programme during the Meiji era, they did not enjoy the advantages of foreign technical assistance or financial aid. There were no most-favoured nation status benefits for less-developed countries. Concepts such as obligatory technology transfer or the like were non-existent - if you wanted technology you bought it. Students being sent overseas to acquire technological skills were either funded by their own domainal government, or later by the Imperial government. The government taxed the rice farmers in order to accumulate the funds needed to send these students overseas, hire foreign talents at special expatriate pay scales, and build the railroads, ports and telegraphs needed to operate a modern industrial economy. While today there are all sorts of 'obligations' undertaken by the wealthier and more developed nations of the world to lend a hand to the poorer countries on their way up, we must remember that none of us need to wait for this help to come first in order to get moving on with a development agenda. Our nations are not damsels in distress reliant entirely upon the white knight of UN agencies to rescue us from poverty or underdevelopment.
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November 26th, 2009
11:47 pm - To Copenhagen
Barack Obama has not got much of a choice. He has to return to Copenhagen again, this time on official U.S. Government business. If he does not show, he will prove that he is in fact 'more of the same' of the Bush II Administration. Climate change is one of the few areas which the left has staked out a different and opposing position to the conservatives, and it does matter a great deal if this administration is serious about playing on a multilateral field.
China's apparent commitment on this issue has clearly put pressure on Americans to up the ante. We on this side of the world have long known that for the Chinese, it is not anti-science skepticism or a pandering to entrenched business interests that has kept it from committing to emissions targets. Rather, it has always been their belief that they ought to get a fair deal from the developed world. Less charitable observers would label them as greedy grubbers trying to shake down the west for any money they could get their hands on under the rubric of climate change technology assistance.
The chinese have, however, consistently taken action in this direction. They have put money into new, cheaper nuclear reactors, required new coal firing plants to have clean technology and pushed their wind and solar sectors to world leadership positions. They have also imposed tighter mileage standards for cars sold than in the U.S. Farsighted as they are, they are pretty much agreed that even if global warming science is still not proven, peak oil certainly is. On the other hand, a commitment to an international treaty that conforms to existing policy positions is not quite so simple. Treaties involve a great deal of face and demands for quid pro quos. Even if a given state is already moving in a direction consistent with a treaty being negotiated, the details between national policies and collective national interests will vary. Reconciling the two categories is the job of conferences and summits.
A treaty that brings on board both China and the U.S. will be a good way forward. For the rest of us, that could mean pooled resources, trade liberalisation in the green tech sector and a sense of equitable bearing of burdens between the north and the south. Even if the targets are not quite met this time round, at the very least there will likely be a move in the general direction of less carbon and more energy security.
nytimes
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November 21st, 2009
01:44 pm - Giving Bicycles To Fish
Iraq is not a poor, underdeveloped country. Or at least it was not always so. Bad decisions under Saddam Hussein, compounded by American-imposed sanctions, war and occupation, have rendered it much worse off than it could have been. Be that as it may, it is NOT a country unsuited to advanced technology.
In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges. But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people. The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers cannot decide how to share, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity.
Given the state of Iraq when the occupation by the U.S. began, it could not quite make use of the advanced equipment and facilities bestowed by their 'protectors'. From the American point of view, this was money-in-the-kitty. Consider it a pre-recession (or perhaps bubble-inflating) stimulus package of the Bush-years. With most of the suppliers and contractors of these things being American companies hiring American workers, they were a shot in the arm for the U.S. economy at a time when growth had been flagging outside of the Bush deficit spending.
And whether or not the American-built health centers and power plants are ever used as intended, the American companies that won the lion’s share of rebuilding contracts from the federal government have been paid.
As I said, Iraq was a decently advanced country prior to the invasion, and more so prior to Saddam's adventures against Iran and Kuwait. But instability under U.S. occupation was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Exacerbating the problem, Iraqi and American officials say, is that hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and the like.
But it could all have been avoided had the Americans been more diligent in TRAINING their successors. This is proof, once again, that pork projects are biased heavily towards brick-and-mortar, or otherwise assembly line products. Services and training are always low priorities. I suspect it is because with services, suppliers find it harder to skim off some creamy excess profits. Hence, all over the world, we see the same trend of ready-built buildings with insufficient staff or budget to put the newly built facilities to use.
nytimes
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November 18th, 2009
01:04 am - Modernity is getting old
Ever rode on a plane? Moved along a walkalator? Collected luggage at a carousel? This was Dustin Hoffman doing it back in 1968. If anything, this ought to remind us that many of the basics that we take for granted as part of modern life are actually no longer really new. E-mail? It's been around 40 years too, although you've probably only been using it for the past fifteen or so years. And everything else was already sort of predicted by E.M. Forster way back in 1909. This old world is getting old ever faster.
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November 16th, 2009
11:59 pm - My Favourite African Animals Film
I first watched this years ago, and found it funny. I'm no fan of Animal Planet, but this one docu-movie has always stayed with me.
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November 10th, 2009
03:23 pm - Throwing Eggs
I'll be honest and make a confession. I used to throw eggs at other people. In fact, given the right combination of factors, I just might someday in the future. Though I think that would be very unlikely.
Be that as it may, I'm just astonished that a kid could lose his eardrums through an egging.
Melbourne High student Elwin Sia, 16, said he was walking through a park with friends near the Domain interchange on October 21 when they were chased by a group of at least four young men wearing white plastic masks.
The students tried to take shelter behind a car but an egg broke against Elwin's ear with the force of a ''bomb going off'', leaving him with a perforated ear drum, bleeding and egg shell and yolk inside his inner ear.
Elwin's mother, Rina Lee, said her son was terrified and did not know his attackers were year 12 students.
''They could have been thugs, they could have been killers, they could have been anyone, all dressed in black,'' she said.
The Age.
If there is one thing I don't like about Australian life, it has got to be the way the young people there muck around. I mean, I was quite a terror when I was a kid, but nothing quite as bad as these rascals. Certainly not the type to cause permanent or life-threatening injuries.
My personal experience - I was going up the escalator at the Darling Harbour Bridge, and this white guy in front of me spots his pals below. He's a lot younger than me, but tall and big. So he decides to do some kind of stunt which involved climbing up on to the handrails of the escalator. I didn't know what exactly it was that he was trying to accomplish. Inevitably, he lost his balance and fell back... on to me! Well, I think I was pretty fortunate not to have tumbled down with him like Jack and Jill; we both regained our balance. I suppose he might have been high on something, even though he didn't quite look all that shitfaced at the time.
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01:49 pm - Saya Setuju Dengan Artikel Ini
A journey through the Travel Channel. Slate
Moving from the hellish to the merely purgatorial, we discover Samantha Brown, the host of shows including Passport to Europe and Great Weekends. She seems to be a very nice lady—just the person to lead those 12-year-olds on a field trip. But she is also a painfully uncool person, as her chirping spunkiness makes gruelingly apparent. She self-identifies as "a foodie." She coos on seeing that her chambermaid has twisted a bath towel into the shape of a swan. Strolling among punks and bohemian kids at London's Camden Market, she does a double take at a girl dressed in a basic Gothic Lolita pinafore dress: "I mean, c'mon! Where else ya gonna see that?" Has she never been to a shopping-mall food court? Brown is a tour guide who needs to get out more.
Yes, Indeed!!! I don't like her Polyanna-ish perkiness, although the destinations that she visits, and the upper class accommodations that she usually features, are right by me. But no, I don't like the softie attitude she carries with her; I much prefer a bit of rough edged-ness in my travel channel feed. Where to get it?
The best show on the Travel Channel—one of the best shows on American television—is Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, hosted by the Kitchen Confidential author and occasional Top Chef judge. Despite his innate magnetism and cultivated glamour, Bourdain functions less as the star of the show than as its narrator, a deft raconteur with a Romantic disposition.
There you go! I like Anthony Bourdain very much. I even liked it when he went to Laos and got served some ugly fresh water fish numerous times. Though, to be frank, I'm still waiting for a documentary based on his aborted trip to Lebanon which suddenly changed from a restaurant and pub crawl into a real-life version of 24. I guess we're never gonna see that stuff.
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01:13 am - Do I look like a Bogeyman??
Recalling Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak's message during the premier's visit to Sabah recently that business was no longer as usual, Musa said the people, especially the younger generation, were becoming more educated which meant the their expectations of the government's performance were high.
"Everybody now has access to the Internet. They even have their own website, their own blog, their own Facebook. Do not fool around with the people.
"Whatever wrong you do, even the smallest mistake, will be aired on the Internet. It is quick and word spreads fast.
Bernama
Do I look that intimidating *ahem*? I think the tone is quite a scold, isn't it? Which suggests that for today, at least, it's Musa himself that ought to be critiqued. Why?
Because, while bureaucratic rigmarole is detested, it is in many ways the natural outcome of the imperious attitudes of those at the very top. Little Napoleons are bred by Big Napoleons. When people complain on the Inter-tubes, they usually do so with honest reasons, although perhaps misguided at times. The problem is only exacerbated when an honest remark expressing dissatisfaction - with quality of service rendered, a payment charged or an answer given - that people lay it on in their blog or on some forum. The likely reason for the original problem is almost always rooted in a lack of empathy for the people who are being served.
When a leader to talk down to his underlings in this manner, it suggests that he has an attitude problem too - that he is all-wise and capable while his subordinates are the ones screwing up. Everyone would have a much better time if they'd just look up to their betters, namely leaders like himself. But I think what they should be doing more of is show some empathy, both for their personnel and for the end-users who are effectively their customers. With empathy, comes the ability to plan and act in consideration of the needs of the customers and the constraints faced by your staff. Don't just scold someone and hope that they'd 'buck up'. Recall Khir Toyo's 'Broom Awards"? Same problem there as here.
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November 9th, 2009
12:19 am - FRG/GDR
Once upon a time, the majority of Germans lived in a country known as the Federal Republic of Germany. Or FRG. Sounds like Fridge, doesn't it? Actually, the majority of Germans still live in the Federal Republic, except that at present, there's not much of a reason to call it that anymore. Why? Well, there is no longer any chance of it being confused with the other Germany, the German Democratic Republic, or GDR.
Of course, those initials aren't exactly universal. The FRG would be BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) while the GDR would also be the DDR. But as far as most of the rest of the world was concerned, the English initials would be the ones that matter, since this was how the countries were represented at the Olympic Games.
Apart from its stamps and the odd exported microscopes and stamps, East Germany only really existed to the rest of the world as an Olympic team. A ruthlessly successful one at that. The first East German whom I could actually identify was Katarina Witt, the great figure skater. The fact that her personal life did not quite seem sufficiently 'Communist' - she was glamourous, spent a lot of time travelling in the West and there was a Time Magazine feature on her pretty ordinary life - made her a little less clearly East German. But then, a little while later, she was actually found out to have been a Stasi Informant, which would not have been all too surprising given her high status and relative freedom. (I recall that the well-worn microscopes in my secondary school were East German Karl Zeiss Jena products, which are NOT West German Zeiss products which come from Oberkochen).
By contrast, West Germany's presence in these parts was huge. There were the World Cup winning football teams, the Mercedes Benzes and Porsches, stuff made by Siemens and Bayer, Rotring pens, Agfa Film (not very popular but still out there..) and the Deutsche Bank downtown. We all knew where the West was, and we all knew that it was huge.
Which brings us to the little event that is now 20 years past, more or less. The Fall of the Wall. Like most people with any awareness of the wall, I too expected it to remain standing for a long, long time to come. Like the rest of them, I expected the Communist World to remain standing for the rest of my lifetime. Naturally, the events of November 1989 surprised me a great deal, much as those of 9/11 did too later. I guess I couldn't have expected to have known any better, if even the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did not either.
The next year or so was a whirlwind on the autobahn towards re-unification. Helmut Kohl would give the fabulous dowry of 1 Deutsche mark for every Ost mark - a substantial gain for those holding near worthless Eat German money. People were talking about how the reunified country at the heart of Europe would simply become a Uber-Deutschland, a richer, more assertive and influential version of the already powerful West German state. And for the once wretched Ossis - the bounty of being able to buy Mercs and Beamers with the new Marks they would be getting paid in. The press were even speculating how Korea might follow the German blueprint for reunification (and whether they could afford to go what Kohl did).
Next came the after-party hangover. The new government had to figure out how to privatize the vast nationalized industries of the East. Suddenly, the now-legendary Trabis were as good as rubbish, cast aside like so much litter on the roads leading west. The depopulation of the East, which was the main catalyst for building the wall in the first place, continued apace despite the country now being one and the same. This led to the rusting of large areas of Eastern Germany. There were those who argued that while Kohl's dowry had seemed to be a blessing initially, it had also had the effect of making the East a lot more expensive to invest in, given its poor state of technology and infrastructure.
Gradually, ever so slowly, the country has emerged from the post-merger era. Parts of East Berlin and other former GDR cities like Dresden and Leipzig have been redeveloped to Western standards. The standard of living has caught up a great deal, though it is not at parity yet. An East German now runs the country, thereby dispelling to some extent the sensation of being dominated by overbearing Wessis. There are new problems, such as the decidedly more racist sentiments of the former East towards the more cosmopolitan West's ethnic groups who had arrived during the postwar era.
I once met a young German in my previous job. Since he came from Dresden, I assumed he had spent at least his childhood under Erich Honnecker's regime. (That's a safe assumption since few Wessis have moved to the East). He did not appear in any way particularly 'Commie', apart from the fact that maybe the company that had sent him along to scout Cyberjaya seemed a tad impoverished. But then and again, it was a tech startup, and in the post-dotcom boom you really couldn't afford to be a spendthrift outfit. I suppose this in itself was a sign of how far things had come since the heady days of champagne and chisels back in 1989.
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October 30th, 2009
06:23 pm - The Messy History of Irish Independence
For Centuries, the Irish people were forced to live under English rule, which was often oppressive and brutal. The most memorable episode of this brutality was probably the Irish Potato Famine, which killed millions. Callous policy making from London led to a disastrous outcome, with wheat still being exported from Ireland even as poor labourers starved for want of potato - which was the default staple food. It did not occur to anyone that the starving Irish should be fed with Irish 'corn' (grains).
And so, intermittently, the Irish took up arms to fight for their rights and dignity, and the English customarily ignored them, or set their bayonets and guns upon the islanders. Dublin Castle became notorious as the centre of this imperial government. France may have been the first colony of England, but it was the Emerald Isle that they held on to the longest.
Fast forward to the late 19th Century when talk of home rule emerged. There were English (British) politicians who favoured the change towards greater liberty. But then a new problem emerged - what about the Protestants settled up north?
The struggle shifted from peaceable means through the leadership of Charles Stuart Parnell to the more violent rebels, when the former failed to deliver the desired results. The events of 1916 Easter around the Dublin Post Office are but a part of the story of the great struggle against British Imperialism. The time was finally ripe, and home rule finally arrived.
It turned out that home rule divided the Irish themselves more than it united them. Independence war gave way quickly to civil war, between those who were willing to accept British terms and become a dominion on the lines of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, and those who wanted nothing to do with the English King. I think the most important lesson of all this is that no matter how hard fought independence might be, there is usually a huge risk of the new polity tearing itself apart as a result of the heated passions of the various factions who have combined against a common external threat.
It's the same story in many such places. After the U.S. gained its independence, the 13 states slowly became hostile against one another, and it was only through the establishment of the Constitutional government of the U.S. that we are familiar with now that an early civil war was averted there. Similarly, when British India was partitioned into two, the new polities emerging soon found themselves locked into hostilities with one another; the first Indo-Pakistan war was practically a civil war as the two had been so recently bound as one.
We must heed the lessons of these struggles. While in our context, the country has always remained at peace, a democratic transfer of power will inevitably be a momentous event in our nation's history. Will we, too, be consumed in the flames of victory? Will the end of the rule of an unpopular regime - when the time comes - usher in a period of unstable rule marked by grandstanding and power plays by the new power players?
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October 28th, 2009
10:20 pm - Dancing With Tears In My Eyes
A long time ago, they made music videos with nuclear power plant disasters for their theme.
Note: Hope people like John McCain and Charles Krauthammer recall the risks of nuclear energy before pushing ahead.
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October 26th, 2009
10:13 pm - Polyglot is We
In human history there is no purity, only change. There is no stability, only flux. The past always inhabits the present, even as the present tries to distort or co-opt the past in its own myths and dreams. That many white Americans do not even acknowledge or realise how black they are — and that many African-Americans do not grasp how utterly different they have become from those Africans they were forced to leave behind centuries ago — does not alter this reality. In some ways, it deepens it. It is so deep it has become unconscious.
These varied roots, these mongrel evolutions, this hybrid inheritance make us who we are. And it is this mixture that is authentically American, just as the wave after wave of immigration, ancient and modern, has made Britain Britain. It is a pied kind of beauty, this diversity. And those who wish to simplify it, to reduce it to some biological or racial element that renders us something other than we actually are, are not in any way conservatives. They are fantasists and bigots, deaf to the music true nations make, and the many variations that still make their melodies soar.
The Times
The same, of course, may well be said of our own country. Like all countries.
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09:29 pm - American Crimes Against Humanity
Food relief shipments to Germany had been prohibited by the U.S. until December 1945, since "they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living to the average of the surrounding European nations".[1] "CARE Package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946"....
...Throughout all of 1945 the Allies forces of occupation ensured that no international aid reached ethnic Germans. [9] It was directed that all relief went to non-German displaced persons, liberated Allied POWs, and concentration camp inmates.
General Lucius Clay, then Deputy to General Eisenhower, stated:
“ I feel that the Germans should suffer from hunger and from cold as I believe such suffering is necessary to make them realize the consequences of a war which they caused."
wikipedia
I think it is important for us to remember that when a war ends, the winner almost always commits some kind of atrocities. The passage of time and the subsequent good works of the U.S. in Germany has tended to obscure the first few years of postwar life in Germany. But it is clear that this conduct was probably much worse than the behaviour of the western allies after the end of the First World War. And that time it enraged enough Germans to back Nazism.
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October 18th, 2009
04:55 pm - The Hubris of America
Most of U.S. government spending is directed at consumption—in the form of subsidies, wages, health benefits, etc. The bulk of China's stimulus is going toward investment for future growth: infrastructure and new technologies. Having built 21st-century infrastructure for its first-tier cities in the last decade, Beijing will now build similar facilities for the second tier.
China will spend $200 billion on railways in the next two years, much of it for high-speed rail. The Beijing-Shanghai line will cut travel times between those two cities from 10 hours to four. The United States, by contrast, has designated less than $20 billion, to be spread out over more than a dozen projects, thus guaranteeing their failure. It's not just rail, of course. China will add 44,000 miles of new roads and 100 new airports in the next decade. And then there is shipping, where China has become the global leader. Two out of the world's three largest ports are Shanghai and Hong Kong.
China is also well aware of its dependence on imported oil and is acting in surprisingly farsighted ways. It now spends more on solar, wind, and battery technology than the United States does. Research by the investment bank Lazard Freres shows that of the top 10 companies (by market capitalization) in these three fields, four are Chinese. (Only three are American.) It is also making a massive investment in higher education.
"For the last decade, as China's economy kept growing at unprecedented rates, most Western analysts kept discussing when it would crash," says Zachary Karabell, the author of a smart new book, Superfusion, on the Sino-U.S. economy. "Now with China surging ahead through this crisis, all they can discuss is, when will China stall? It's as if they see the facts, but they can't quite make sense of them." China's strange mixture of state intervention, markets, dictatorship, and efficiency is puzzling. But it's time to stop hoping for China's failure and start understanding and adapting to its success.
newsweek
For almost a century, Americans have gotten used to the idea that theirs was the country that was always No. 1. It has become a hard habit to break. Example: when China's Olympics team started to haul more gold medals than the U.S. one, NBC's medal tally board kept Team USA at the top because the total medal count for their team was higher than China's. Every where else, China was usually on top on account of its higher gold medal haul. Oddly, the American press never seemed to have such a problem with Russia being ahead in the past.
I have always had the feeling that the smart people in the U.S. are afflicted by the 'we can't be behind China' mindset. Economists would say that China's rapid rise is unsustainable and would soon end in a crash. Industry policy folks would say that China is stuck in the lower end of the technology value chain, and would not soon overtake the west at the top. Pundits of all manner take much pleasure in pointing out the dangerous food, faulty construction and harsh police tactics as signs that a collapse must surely be imminent. A collapse that will conveniently relieve pressure being placed upon the U.S.' number one status.
Granted, all the reported shortcomings of the PRC are absolutely true. But the one thing that has remained consistently untrue, so far, is that the shortcomings will lead to collapse. Surely Americans must be absolutely puzzled by the resilience of that state in the face of all these allegedly insurmountable, structural problems?
They are missing the forest for the trees. The 'surprisingly farsighted ways' of the PRC leadership are, in my opinion, the fundamental source of the country's strength. This is a group of well-educated and experienced administrators who take the trouble to identify big, long term goals and then map out the pathways to achieve those goals. Want to host the Summer Olympics? Plan for it. The first plan failed because of the environmental aspect (Beijing lost the 2000 Games to Sydney). Solution: sit out the next edition and work out the green problems for a 2008 bid. Result: Success. This was on top of existing plans already drawn up from long before.
The leadership must have been concerned with the pollution problems plaguing China for a long time already. Surely they must have read Time Magazine's articles, if they have not already paid attention to internal assessments. Surely, they are also just as concerned with the stability of Middle East petro-states as the U.S., even if they are less gung-ho about marching in to prop one regime or overthrow another. Green energy is just as important to China as it is to any other country in the world. And yet western observers almost always feign astonishment at the 'farsightedness' of China's leaders when it comes to their willingness to commit resources and enforce rules to make China's air cleaner and its economy less vulnerable to fluctuations in the prices of energy imports.
To me, America's tendency to express surprise at intelligent leadership in Beijing smacks of jealousy. Once upon a time, the U.S. had the political will to put together a space programme to put a man on the moon. Today, the Chinese are seen to be the ones most likely to have the perseverance to return a man to the moon and probably keep him there for a spell. NASA, being a hostage to the erratic political winds of beltway horse trading, will probably never be able to keep up.
I think this head in the sand attitude makes it easy for Americans to comfort themselves about their gradual decline. How else to explain the anti-science creationist mindset among so many conservatives, when faced with a competitor who is unfettered by that ideology? Oh, I forget - these guys don't even know they are in a competition.
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03:51 pm - Russia, Inc.
..the most vulnerable places (in Russia) are the company towns, which could catalyze a nationwide explosion of political turmoil.
Products of Stalinist industrialization, an estimated 460 company towns grew around a single plant or factory. Hence their Russian designation: “monotowns” (monogoroda). Most were erected, often by prison labor, in the middle of nowhere and in complete disregard for long-term urban viability, not to mention the needs and conveniences of the workers and their families. In addition to being the single employer, these “town-forming enterprises” are responsible for providing all social services and amenities, from clinics and schools to heat, water and electricity, for populations of 5,000 to 700,000. (There are also more than 1,000 similar but smaller “workers’ settlements.”)
These crumbling monotowns seem frozen in the 1930s or ’50s; the fat years of 2000 to 2008 have passed them by. Worse yet, many of these places were among the first victims of the plunge in industrial output last year, when production fell by almost 20 percent — a rate of decrease unseen since 1941 and 1942, the years of the Nazi onslaught. As a result, the “town-forming enterprises” have begun laying off or furloughing workers, and salaries have been cut, delayed or unpaid for months.
nytimes
In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have tended to forget the formidable achievements of the Soviet Union throughout its seven-odd decades life. Building upon the backward, slowly industrialising but agrarian economy of Imperial Russia, Lenin and his gang were able to rapidly industrialise the largest country in the world, and in the process built what was for a long time the second largest economy in the world. From the breadbasket of Europe, the country became a leading producer of science and technology, sending the first man into outer space and was for a long time the second most powerful military force on earth.
The country was reshaped into something that was unique in the world. Under its communist leaders, it literally became a single giant company. The politburo was its board of directors, its central planning offices were its strategic development department and individual towns became, effectively, the company's production plants. There were the great iron and steel towns like Magnitogorsk and the new science and hi tech hub in the middle of Siberia known as Akademgorodok outside Novosibirsk. These 'monotowns' functioned well within the system because the whole country was practically a combined unit of production, tasked with producing everything from tanks to toilet paper.
Within this structure, monotowns made sense because each was essentially a specialised production unit. The division of labour was carried out on a regional geographic scale - this would become television tuners town, that would be linen shirts ville. With the state being the monopoly firm, the towns did not have to worry about foreign competitors or more creative and efficient production units emerging within the borders of the Soviet Union. Trade and currency barriers prevented imports while the lack of available capital and severe industrial regulations prevented domestic competitors from entering the captive market. Since the 'cash nexus' was strongly discouraged by Marxist ideology, it made sense for firms to pay mostly in kind - in the form of housing, health care and recreation facilities for its company town denizens.
Monotowns cannot survive in the new Russia because the cash nexus has made a roaring comeback. Over the past two decades, firms have become classic profit seeking ventures while pay is now in cash and no longer in kind. In any case, firms are short on capital since they no longer have a generous parent company - the old Soviet State - to give them money and in-kind capital (fuel, food for workers, cement and steel for construction etc.). The superstructure of the Soviet state collapsed completely between roughly 1989-1994, leaving the production units in bad shape and ill-suited to the new capitalist age. Already, the monotowns had already been suffering from decades of under-investment even prior to the collapse of the Soviet state. No wonder they are in such a bad condition now.
Russia's post-Soviet leadership has not been sufficiently serious in addressing the huge structural problems left behind by the collapse of communism. They have been distracted by major current events, both negative (the 1998 ruble/default crisis) and positive (the oil boom). Russia must be serious about building a manufacturing base that will make goods that the 21st Century economies will want to buy. From medical equipment to wind turbines, from passive heating systems to smart power grid management software, I think the opportunities for Russian industry are next to limitless. The only way that they can take advantage of their strengths is through decisive leadership, from the very top, aimed at making these industries take off. In that sense, the challenge faced by the Medvedev/Putin duo is a mirror of the one facing the U.S. - how to polish rusted cities into shiny new industrial powerhouses?
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October 12th, 2009
01:09 am - Better than Obama
I don't know the names of all the smart people who could potentially be an American President. But I do know that Glenn Greenwald is an exciting thinker who has proven not only to be provocative but also solidly grounded in empirical research as far as his positions and opinions are concerned.
In fact, this former civil rights litigator may already be far more 'qualified' to be a U.S. President inasmuch as he has done far more serious research in legal matters of public interest than Obama apparently had as a member of a law school faculty. The subjects that Greenwald plays with - torture and drug legalization - are sexy but require a great deal of intelligence to make convincing and bravery to put out there for the public to tear away at. Bravery and intelligence are desperately needed in order to fix the structural problems of the U.S. and the world.
I would not be the only person out there who is a little more than disappointed with the apparent incapacity of the American President to get things done. I do accept that the problems that he has to deal with are enormous and that the resources at his disposal are necessarily limited. Even having accounted for such limitations, I still feel that this government, almost a year in, has offered 'more of the same' than he should have, given his strong message of change. If he isn't the change that we've been waiting for, then Barack Obama does not deserve to be the President of the United States.
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October 10th, 2009
12:47 am - Train Crazy
Mr Lane's report said electricity poles holding up train overhead power lines were spaced so far apart that, in last summer's heat, wires had sagged badly.
''The top of trains came into contact with the overhead lines, which could easily have resulted in the wires being pulled down.''
Overhead power lines touching a train triggers a circuit breaker, cutting power so there is no danger to passengers. While the report said much of the system coped ''reasonably well'', it is a sign parts of the system are in poor repair.
In Melbourne, poles holding up train power lines are up to 100 metres apart - the pre-1918 standard. In Perth's smaller, more modern system, poles are 50 metres apart. Mr Lane said more must be done to achieve ''a step change in performance such as experienced in Perth and Adelaide''.
A Senate report into the federal funding of public transport released last month found that Melbourne's system was badly managed in comparison to Perth's system, where there is a government operator in charge. Melbourne's system lacked accountability because it was unclear who was in charge, that report found.
Mr Lane's report noted that the privatised system in Melbourne meant Connex had locked in set maintenance levels in its contract with the Government. Skyrocketing patronage meant trains were being run further without adequate servicing, leading to more breakdowns, he said. Connex rejected this, saying its recent performance had been outstanding.
The Age
A privatisation contract that actually promises to pay a set amount of subsidies per annum to the operator. Why? Might as well own the train company directly and try to wring out better efficiencies and quality of service directly, rather than pay someone in the hope that they would do the job? I have always thought that privatisation implied boosts to efficiency, so that governments can actually save money? In other words, Malaysian Highway operators are not the only guys getting away with these scams. What it means is that privatisation in many cases should never be attempted in the first place.
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