Chinese labor Renaissance

A Chinese lifeline for American workers
As wage inflation in China pushes up the cost of offshoring, “Made in America” starts to look a lot better
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/a_chinese_lifeline_for_american_workers/singleton/

As happened in Japan, Korea and pretty much everywhere else, labor rates in China are starting to skyrocket, thus pushing the price of goods up. Soon (in the next 5 years according to the article’s author), it will be cheaper (somewhat) to produce goods in the US. This assumes, of course, that the Chinese government is able to deflate their housing bubble without causing it to pop (like it did here). There central control over the economy and longer outlook by their government operators gives them a greater chance, I think, than we had here in the US, but their government is at least as corrupt as ours is (well, perhaps that isn’t fair to them, but their government certainly is corrupt). Plus, they have allowed market forces greater and greater influence on their economy (it could hardly have grown at the pace it has if they hadn’t) and now the central control is a lot looser and less effective than before, so I put the chances of them of being able to gently deflate their housing bubble at below 50%, so I consider it more likely they will have a crash. Of course, our crash could have been handled immensely better, so they might do a way better job in handling the crash, so they might recover way faster. It will be interesting to watch, but I suspect that if you want to maximize your portfolio over the next decade, you should consider the manufacturing industry here in the US and shift some money from services to goods.

The Genie Is Out of the Bioterrorism and Pandemic Bottles: How Scared Should We Be?

The Bioterrorist Next Door
Man-made killer bird flu is here. Can — should — governments try to stop it?
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/12/14/the_bioterrorist_next_door

It is a long article by most people’s standards (7 pages, my goodness!) but I encourage anyone interested in bio-terrorism/bio-warfare to read it. I know from extensive personal experience working in the lab that while not completely trivial, the skills needed to produce bio-weapons are very straightforward and can be taught to anyone who can follow detailed instructions. There really isn’t any possible way to make this technology not available to bad guys, short of sending our entire society back to the stone age (really, you can do this with stone age technology as well if you got the smarts).

Just like our planet being smacked by another massive asteroid or comet is an absolute certainty, given enough time, so is another pandemic triggered either by ‘natural’ (there is nothing natural about the way we house animals in our food chain) or deliberate evolution of some virus somewhere. In our older stone age societies, a whole village might die, but the people couldn’t travel fast enough to cause wide-spread death. Even the black plague, as brutal as it was, wasn’t carried by humans, it was carried by the fleas of rats, which meant that it was controllable (though it took centuries to work out how to do so). The worst-case scenario would be a long incubating virus that is contagious the whole time and then is slowly debilitating until it finally kills you. That would lead to wholesale infections all throughout the world. Something that hits fast and kills fast will move fast initially, but simply telling everyone to stay home for a week and then isolating the remaining victims would be all it would take to stop its progress. Whether or not the next ‘natural’ pandemic is the first type or the second type, the real worry is that someone out there can be busy creating the worst type on purpose, then deliberately releasing it everywhere at once (anyone see ”Twelve Monkeys’?).

While _engineering_ a virus to be maximally lethal is still quite a challenge (in many respects researchers don’t really understand how certain virus strains are so much more lethal than others), using the techniques described in the article (which already has enough information for me to replicate the experiments, and, I promise you, I am nothing special when it comes to knowledge about these things) semi-skilled people (at great risk to their lives, of course) can semi-naturally trigger evolution and produce quite lethal versions of a virus in well under a year, possibly in as little as a couple of months.

Stuff like this always reminds me of the book “The White Plague” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague) by one of my favorite authors, Frank Herbert. Basically, it is a molecular biologist who sees his family blown apart by terrorists and goes insane, but not so insane that he can’t function as a scientist. He then carefully engineers a disease that only targets women, but is carried by men and women. A devastating weapon as the men (it was mostly men responsible for his family’s death) get to spend the rest of their lives contemplating the demise of society and possibly the human species.

We need to eliminate all private finance from the electoral process.

There Is Only One Issue In America
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-van-zandt/democracy-in-america_b_1139463.html

A couple of great quotes in this article:

The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

and

…the amazing Orwellian staple of every newscast, selling the public on the lie that the Dow has somehow become America’s scoreboard!

We’re all hypnotized, rooting for them like they’re our home team at a football game, cheering for THEIR scoreboard mindlessly forgetting WE’RE THE AWAY TEAM!!

I feel the same thing: we must eliminate the money from politics in order to have any prayer of changing things so we can get a representative democracy. Until the money is eliminated, fixing Gerrymandering is irrelevant, so is adding third parties, reforming the way votes are cast and counted, etc., etc., etc.

As the author states, this should be the principle that unites the Tea Party with OWS, but somehow I doubt the oligarchy will stand by and allow something like this to reach critical mass.

Our police state is now official!

Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/singleton/

Its official! There are no more civil liberties in the US if the President decrees otherwise. Doesn’t matter if you are a US citizen and it doesn’t even matter if you are on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC, if the President declares you an unperson, an unperson you are!

Of course, as the article goes on at great length to detail, the new law alters exactly nothing with respect to what the President has already been doing, but now it has full legal support. The last possible point of contention would be the Supreme Court, but I doubt it has the will to contradict the two Presidents that have worked so hard to turn our country into a police state, so here we are, for the foreseeable future.

Once the OWS people start being rounded up, how much longer until Obama declares martial law? I thought Bush Jr. might have tried it, but I suspect if anyone will do it it will be Obama. The last time there was a law like this it was ‘limited’ to communists. At least there was a single ideology to point at; terrorism means everything and nothing, thus can be applied to anyone at any time. Want to run against Obama? You are a damn terrorist, off to Guantanamo for you! Dare to criticize the President (or, indeed, anyone in his party)? Off with your head! That should give pause to Romney and Gingrich; if they get too successful, off to the camps!

I wish them the best of luck…

Rocket system could lower cost of access to space, Allen says
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-57342610-239/rocket-system-could-lower-cost-of-access-to-space-allen-says/

I have remained unconvinced that using aircraft to bring rockets to merely 30-50K feet would make the slightest difference in the cost of launching. However, this statement did give me something to think about:

By launching the rocket in mid air, Stratolaunch will be able to avoid weather delays and ground-processing issues, sending satellites to virtually any desired orbit.

It is true that getting to that altitude dramatically reduces weather impact (not for nothing that commercial planes fly at that altitude), so there might be an overall savings given the number of scrubbed launches that NASA has due to weather, but scrubbed launches come for many reasons and I doubt weather is the number one factor (if anyone knows, please chime in).

To me the real breakthrough will come when someone develops a commercially effective means of putting mass into orbit that does not take so damn much fuel. I am sure that the commercial market will be able to dramatically reduce NASA’s cost of putting things to orbit (the figure most often quoted is $10K/lb) because I have always been certain that NASA does things using the most expensive method possible, but I doubt that achieving orbit will really become economical until it gets down to a buck a pound, or about what it costs to fly a plane.

Hurricanes and Global Warming

I found this interesting read here:

Science Settled: New Report- Hurricanes, Global Warming Not Linked
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2011/12/15/science_settled_new_report_hurricanes_global_warming_not_linked

and was more than a tiny bit skeptical with the whole “Science Settled” bit (largely because little is permanently settled in science and this subject is so politicized). After reading it I decided to read the work it is based on here:

Hurricanes and Global Warming
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/index.html

I strongly urge anyone with any interest in the topic of global warming (for, against or neutral (are there any that are neutral?)) to read the entire article. It isn’t a formal paper, but it is very documented and it is by a prominent climate scientists who has published a lot of peer reviewed data, so the guy clearly isn’t a fruit cake. He is staying clearly within his bailiwick and focusing entirely on hurricanes and their changes due to global warming and starts off by agreeing that global temps are rising and humans are likely responsible for a significant portion of the rise (he figures a quarter to possibly as much as half). So, with that as background (again, I urge you to read the whole thing, parts are quite amusing), here are two sets of images I would like to post for consideration (I copied the images to my web site, so if any changes are made on the originals they won’t be reflected here). The first set show the cost associated with hurricanes in the US. The image at the top is the actual cost to the US due to hurricanes, the bottom adjusted for the change in population and the amount of ‘things’ that people now own.


Non-normalized cost of hurricanes
Normalized cost of hurricanes

The second set I want to show is the number of hurricanes and/or tropical storms posited to be formed over time. The top one is the commonly accepted version based on the assumption (which the author calls into question quite convincingly) that the number of missed storms in the past (i.e., not observed because we lacked to tools/eyeballs to observe them) is insignificant and thus isn’t distorting the results and the bottom one is after adjusting based on the author’s (eminently reasonable in my mind) adjustment for almost certainly missed storms in the past.


Non-normalized frequency of storms
Normalized frequency of storms

If you consider the author as someone who is likely to be much more correct about assumptions, past trends, etc., it is very easy to agree with his conclusions that the cost/frequency/duration of hurricanes as the global temps rise another 4-6 degrees is not likely to be of any significance:

My interpretation of the climate change research suggests the following – assuming that there is a significant 2-3°C (4-6°F) global warming due to business-as-usual emissions (which is not a guarantee):

Overall Tropical Storm and Hurricane Changes Due to Global Warming by 2100

  • Frequency: Numbers may see a moderate decrease (~25%) (emphasis added)
  • Wind (Intensity): Small increase (~3% stronger)
  • Storm Surge: Small increase (~3% higher) produced by the hurricane (but also must add on additional amount from overall sea level rise)
  • Rainfall: Moderate increase per cyclone (~10% within ~325 km [200 mi]), but reduced overall numbers may offset increase per cyclone
  • Genesis Location/Track: Somewhat uncertain, but no indications of large changes

These overall changes that may occur are relatively tiny and are several decades away, in my opinion. These conclusions are similar, though slightly smaller, than those indicated by a review panel of the topic of hurricanes and global warming that was recently published in Nature Geophysics in which I participated.

Why can’t these sorts of discussions be part of the mainstream?

Yes, but will anyone actually listen?

Finally, A Rich American Destroys The Fiction That Rich People Create The Jobs
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-12/news/30500948_1_entrepreneurs-and-investors-capital-gains-and-income-jobs

I find these statements dead on. Rich people do not consume more than other people and tend to make very conservative investments that rarely lead to job creation. I am quite certain that if the 1% were to take 50% of their money and simply spread it via helicopter over the US that they would actually get that money back from a reinvigorated economy. However, rich people really have no incentive to get richer (once you reach a certain point more money is just a way to keep score). Their paranoia, and what they focus their obsession on, is not getting poorer. As a consequence, they tend to not even spend the income they do get instead ‘reinvesting’ it (not really reinvesting, the simply leave it in the conservative funds they initially placed it in) their money. Only when they finally achieve the exalted state (to which I aspire) of having more money than sense do they actually spend any of their money (and then typically on silly things since they already have everything they need). Investment funds that target novel business ideas are actually quite rare (I know this from having sought such funds for many years to back my ideas), the majority of them tend to be very conservative and generally invest in the same old thing over and over again.

So, contrary to the claims stridently shouted by the conservatives shilling for the uber rich, higher taxes for the wealthy (to a certain point, naturally, but that point is substantially higher than what we are experiencing now) do not inhibit growth, it can actually stimulate it (presuming, naturally, the money actually goes to people who consume and not just into the wallets of other, better connected, rich folk).

The eroding middle class…

A good start to reviving the middle class
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/12/opinion/frum-obama-speech/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

I really liked this part of the article:

Realistically, the president’s Kansas speech translates into a formula of higher taxes on the rich to pay for more spending on favored Democratic public-sector constituencies.

There are some good elements in the article, I urge those interested to read the whole thing. While I don’t personally recall such times, I do know from my study of history that until my generation it was taken as a given that a single middle class income could support an entire family, house, car, kids and school. Today it takes income at the 1% level to achieve that state so I would suggest that the real buying power of the middle class wage has been cut by well over half in the last generation. I know that in the Philippines, an excellent proxy for the third world state the US is on the verge of sharing, it is possible for a single wage earner to support family, house, etc., though at well below the standard of living we are accustomed here (my theory for why this is possible is largely due to the ready supply of food through the tropical conditions they live in and their ready access to the sea). While class mobility is far from excellent in the Philippines (it is quickly decreasing in the US and has been for decades (Bill Gates, btw, started life as the son of a millionaire, a real head start on becoming a self-made billionaire)) it does appear to me that there are more opportunities there for people trying to get by than here in the US. It may be an artifact of my observational position (my parents-in-law are wealthy and well connected over there), but I get the strong impression that there are way more entrepreneurial opportunities there than here.

For instance, one of the problems with a minimum wage is it sets a floor on the level of productivity for any given position. If you are required to pay, say, $10 an hour for your employee, that employee must produce on the order of $25 an hour to make hiring them economically viable. If minimum wage can float to the market place, then in parts of the country where the standard of living is quite low, it might be practical to pay someone a third of that, thus dramatically reducing the required revenue the position must produce, thus increasing the opportunities for employment, pumping money into the economy, increase tax revenue, upward spiral, etc. The market only really works when there is a certain minimum level of competition and when none of the competitors can afford to purchase politicians. In our ‘great society’ many corporations have concentrated so much business that they are ‘too big to fail’ and also have the resources to purchase our government outright, thus severely distorting any potential for a free and fair market (where _everyone_ is free to fail and go bankrupt, not just the ones that can’t afford politician).

Sure, but how to enforce it?

NTSB recommends full ban on use of cell phones while driving
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/13/us/ntsb-cell-phone-ban/index.html

I am morally opposed to creating laws impossible to enforce uniformly. If we presume it is totally OK for passengers to use the phones (I find it hard to argue otherwise), then it becomes essentially impossible to prove that the driver was using the phone if there are any passengers in the car. Indeed, with these many smart phones, the phone itself can be busy doing things without the user’s participation, so how to know someone is using a phone without actually seeing them do it. And what the hell is with this exception of ‘devices installed in the vehicle by the manufacturer would be allowed,’? Hands free is not OK, but doing it without your hands is? What the hell is the distinction?

The cops, btw, already have laws that ban distracted driving (which, clearly, means special laws for DUI are unnecessary), but don’t bother to enforce these laws any more than they enforce speeding, etc. Why should drivers give a damn about yet another law if they know it is so selectively enforced that the probability they will be caught is essentially zero.

And if someone is using one of those blue tooth ear dongles, how to tell they are on the phone and not talking to themselves? Why not ban passengers as they could be a distraction as well? Eating, drinking and smoking are certainly distractions, lets ban that as well. Also, pretty girls in other cars or walking down the road, they are certainly distractions, we got to ban all them as well. I really hate it when the sun shines in my eyes, lets ban that too.

Really, people, at some point you need to be responsible for your own actions. What a shithole our society has become!