* 23 entries including: US Constitution (series), infant learning and AI (series), rebuilding Iraq (series), IceSat 2, low-cost genomics, social-welfare funds, balkanization of US toll road system, global smartphone manufacturing complex, China gets tough on imports of US waste, automation not so scary, Aeolus winds satellite, and smart streetlights.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR OCTOBER 2018: As discussed by an article from BBC.com ("How The Dutch Foiled Russian Cyber-Attack On OPCW", 4 October 2018), in the spring, alert Dutch security services, assisted by British intelligence, swept up four Russians they determined were plotting an attack on the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. On surveying the known activities of the four Russians, the head of the Dutch intelligence service commented drily: "They were clearly not here on holiday."
The four Russians were identified as agents of a GRU (military intelligence) cyber warfare team -- specifically, the GRU "Unit 26165" AKA "APT 28", which has been accused of conducting malicious cyber operations around the world. Alexei Morenets, 41, and Yevgeny Serebriakov, 37, were described as "cyber-operators" -- while Oleg Sotnikov and Alexei Minin, both age 46, were named as support agents.
The OPCW has been an irritant to the Kremlin, the organization having investigated the poisoning with a nerve agent of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK. In response to the OPCW focusing the blame for the attack on Russia, the Russian government said the organization was going beyond its mandate; Industry Minister Georgy Kalamonov sneered that the OPCW was a "sinking ship".
The trail the four left behind them showed they arrived in the Netherlands on 10 April 2018, being admitted to the country on diplomatic passports. They were immediately under surveillance by Dutch intelligence.
The Russians then rented a gray Citroen C3 car and were seen scouting the area around the OPCW building. Serebriakov's laptop, after being seized by the authorities, revealed through its search history that he had researched the OPCW building and its surroundings. Minin's camera similarly contained a number of reconnaissance photographs of the area that were taken on 11 April.
The Citroen was carrying equipment to crack into the wi-fi system of the OPCW, using a directional antenna hidden under a waterproof jacket to steal login information, which would then be used to compromise the OPCW's systems. Such "drive-by" attacks are well-known in the cybersecurity world, wi-fi systems being noted for dodgy security. After carrying out the attack, the four planned to leave the Netherlands for Switzerland, as shown by train tickets in their possession.
They intended to leave on 17 April, but the authorities moved in on them on 13 April. The Russians had been careful to collect their litter in their hotel rooms, and one tried to smash his mobile phone when he was arrested. Serebriakov's laptop had traces of use in other missions in Brazil, Switzerland, and Malaysia -- data from the laptop linking it to the hacking in Lausanne of a laptop belonging to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which had exposed the taking of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian athletes.
Having diplomatic passports, the four Russians were expelled, instead of being prosecuted; they were escorted to Schiphol airport and put on a plane for Moscow, without any of their belongings. The director of Dutch intelligence commented: "The decision taken at the time of catching the operatives was to disrupt as quickly as possible, so we deported them. It was not a police operation."
The four weren't really the prime movers behind the operation anyway. Russian officials described the Dutch allegations as a "diabolical cocktail" and a "rich fantasy". One wonders if they even care if they're believed any longer.
* As discussed in an essay by "Banyan", the ECONOMIST's Asia columnist ("The Perils Of China's "Debt-Trap Diplomacy", 6 September 2018), in August 2018 -- three months after his opposition coalition evicted the Malaysian party that had ruled since independence -- Mahathir Mohamad, the country's 93-year-old new prime minister, went to Beijing, to deliver a simple message to the Chinese: NO.
Mahathir's predecessor, Najib Razak, had cultivated close ties to China. His loss at the polls was largely due to the reputation his ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) had acquired for corruption. However, his friendliness to China was also a factor, all the more so because the two issues were linked.
During Najib's rule, a state investment vehicle named 1MDB -- which Najib chaired -- went rotten from the inside, with the US Justice Department estimating that a staggering $4.5 billion USD was embezzled from the fund. More than somewhat suspiciously, while 1MDB was being drastically depleted, Najib's own bank accounts grew by $700 million USD.
As 1MDB teetered on the edge of collapse, Chinese state entities stepped in, taking stakes in 1MDB ventures. Cozy arrangements with China became more evident, particularly relative to China's "Belt & Road Initiative (BRI)" -- an international infrastructure program near and dear to the heart of Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Malaysian government tried to suppress public criticism, and in the run-up to the election, China's government lent open support to the ruling coalition. Najib's loss was a shock.
While it is difficult to characterize the BRI as purely malign, it clearly isn't purely benign, either. Many of the states that signed on to the BRI are struggling with debts to Chinese entities, taken on to fund Chinese-controlled projects. It is believed that about eight BRI countries are suffering from "debt distress", including three that border China: Laos, Mongolia, and Pakistan. Mahathir's efforts in disentangling his country from Chinese-funded ventures is being closely watched by other countries involved in the BRI.
In Beijing, Mahathir was direct, saying that Malaysia was canceling the $20 billion USD East Coast Rail Link, a massive BRI project, as well as two oil pipelines in Sabah province. Put in simple terms, he told the Chinese: "They're grand projects, but having come to office, we found out they're unaffordable." Left not quite said was: "They're unaffordable because the costs are inflated, and China gave us a back-handed deal on them." While the finances are hard to untangle, it appears the Najib government paid nearly 90% of the $2 billion USD price of the Sabah pipelines, although they were only 15% complete; and part of a Chinese loan for them appears to have been to paper over the financial rot at 1MDB.
Mahathir has continued to distance Malaysia from Chinese-backed projects, but he has been tactful in his dealings with the Chinese, and China's response -- which past experience suggests should be strident -- has been muted. The BRI means a lot to Xi Jinping, and he doesn't want Malaysia making China look bad to other states involved in the BRI.
The prime case is Pakistan, which is by far the biggest debtor to China. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of energy and infrastructure projects alleged to be worth $60 billion USD, is the biggest plank of China's belt-and-road strategy. Pakistan is creaking under the debt, and Imran Khan, the country's new prime minister, is in a position to push back on China, since Pakistan is seen as vital to Chinese ambitions: a counterweight to China's rival India, and a vital ally in the war against Islamic extremism.
Chinese commercial banks are starting to cut their BRI financing, though state-controlled "policy banks" continue to lend. There is also growing public criticism of the BRI. Foreign aid has always been troublesome in that it has aspects of being generous, and of being self-interested: Chinese citizens are inclined to take note of the generosity involved in the BRI, and overlook the self-interest, while recipients tend to notice the self-interest more than the generosity.
At a recent summit in Beijing with African leaders, Xi promised $60 billion USD for the continent. Why, Chinese people asked on social media, is an indebted China spending so much abroad, when it has pressing needs at home? Censors quickly deleted their criticisms. The BRI doesn't appear to be an inherently bad idea from anyone's standpoint; but like all grand plans, it's a big clumsy dinosaur, and keeping it on track may prove difficult.
* Another big issue of concern to Xi Jinping is the growing trade war with the United States. As discussed by an essay on CNN.com ("China May Wait It Out Rather Than Deal With Trump", 26 October 2018) by David Andelaman, of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York City, Xi has reason to dread the fight -- but is holding a strong hand of cards in the game.
Yes, China's economy is dragging, if only modestly, and its stock market is shaky. However, problems in China's stock market will inevitably cause problems in America's -- and far more Americans own stocks than do Chinese. The Chinese are showing no interest in coming to a trade deal on Trump's terms, only maintaining perfunctory diplomatic communications for the time being. As Larry Kudlow, director of the president's National Economic Council, commented recently:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We gave them a detailed list of asks, regarding technology for example ... they don't respond. Nothing. Nada. It's really the president and the Chinese Communist Party -- they have to make a decision, and so far they have not; or they have made a decision not to do anything, nothing. I've never seen anything like it.
END QUOTE
Andelaman suggested this should not have been a surprise:
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Of course he hasn't. This is not a negotiation over a new real estate or casino project. THE APPRENTICE might have a resolution in 52 minutes, but China has been prepared to wait out its adversaries for hundreds of years. This time is no different.
END QUOTE
The Chinese are perfectly aware that America's economic growth is cooling off, and is likely to get cooler as more tariffs kick in. A slowing US economy is obviously bad news for Trump. Trump sold his tax cut, to the extent it needed to sold to the GOP, on the dubious basis that go-go growth would head off budget deficits. It is difficult to believe many seriously bought that story, but it's even harder to maintain as the economy winds down.
Even ignoring a slowdown and trade wars, the hot economy has led the Federal Reserve to gradually tweak up interest rates to head off inflation. That works against the stock market, since investors start to like bonds more. The real trick, however, is that China also likes to buy US bonds, holding almost $1.2 trillion USD in treasuries -- in effect, China is financing the Trump deficit. That gives China serious leverage over the USA. One thing China can do is slow down purchases of securities, which means the Treasury will have to raise rates more to sell them, with all the trouble that brings.
China could even start dumping its treasuries, flooding the market and undermining their value. That would be "going nuclear" and it would cause China great pain, so it's not likely to happen. However, China has other options -- for example, organizing a boycott of American-made products. The Chinese are enthusiastic purchasers of the iPhone and other Apple products, as well as American cars, machinery, aircraft, and a range of luxury consumer goods. China is an authoritarian society, it's not that hard for the government to set up a boycott, and it's been done in the past. Andelaman commented:
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The big question is whether Trump ever explored the possibility of these deeply interrelated issues before he plunged into his trade war. Still, it's shocking that advisers as astute as Larry Kudlow would be surprised at China's foot-dragging. There seems to be little immediate incentive for China to make a move. In fact, it's possible that China is waiting until the trade war really bites, or even holding out for the next American administration, hoping for a better deal all around.
END QUOTE
No doubt China's leadership is watching the US mid-term elections with interest. The Chinese are not in a good position to judge the staying power of Trump and his doctrines; a major electoral defeat would suggest to them that they only need to tough things out for another two years. China has a long history; two years is nothing.
* As discussed by an article from BUSINESSWEEK.com ("The Tyranny of the US Dollar" by Peter Coy, 3 October 2018), the US share of the world economy has been drifting lower over decades, as countries like China become more powerful. America's current president, Donald Trump, is in belligerent retreat from America's traditional role of "leader of the Free World".
Despite that, America's dollar remains the world's currency. By the latest estimate of the European Central Bank, America's currency makes up two-thirds of international debt, and a similar share of global reserve holdings. Oil and gold are priced in dollars, not euros or yen -- and threats to be cut off from the dollar-based global payments system strike fear into Iran, North Korea, and Russia. America's clout from the dollar rivals its global military power.
Thanks to Trump, the dollar regime is chafing on the rest of the world. Political leaders who once accepted the dollar's hegemony, grudgingly or otherwise, are pushing back:
Of course, none of this is good news for the USA. The dollar's pre-eminent role in global finance is an "exorbitant privilege," as Valery Giscard d'Estaing, then France's finance minister, said in 1965. If the dollar loses that privilege -- which won't happen soon -- a loss of investor confidence might lead the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates to maintain investment. As it is now, when trouble breaks out, investors flood into US markets seeking refuge, oddly enough even when the US itself is the source of the problem, as it was in last decade's global financial crisis.
The more immediate risk to the dollar is that the US will overplay its hand on financial sanctions -- particularly those against Iran and countries that do business with Iran. In May, the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal; the US will re-impose sanctions on 4 November, and is already successfully pressuring companies outside the US not to do business with Tehran. European companies and banks could be punished if they inadvertently transact with sanctioned Iranian groups such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
European leaders, unhappy about being bullied by the USA, are working on a payments system that would allow their companies to do business with Iran, without getting snagged by the US Treasury Department and its powerful Office of Foreign Assets Control. One scheme is to set up a government-funded organization, which would be less vulnerable to US actions than a private company or bank, to arrange exchanges of Iranian oil for products from Europe, and possibly Russia and China as well.
French officials say the transactions might be set up as barters to keep banks out of the loop. Progress has been slow, with US National Security Adviser John Bolton sneering that the European Union is "strong on rhetoric and weak on follow-through. So we will be watching the development of this structure that doesn't exist yet and has no target date to be created."
Bolton may live to regret that sneer. Nothing ever happens until it happens, and European leaders aren't getting any happier with being pushed around by the White House. In 2016, Jacob Lew, then-President Obama's secretary of the Treasury, warned in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that "overuse of sanctions could undermine our leadership position within the global economy, and the effectiveness of our sanctions themselves."
Lew added that broad support is best, and that the US "must be prepared to offer sanctions relief if we want countries to change their behavior." Trump's re-institution of sanctions against the wishes of the coalition partners, without clear evidence that Iran has meaningfully broken its commitments, violates both of Lew's principles.
The best thing the dollar has going for it is that competitors are weak. The euro represents a monetary union, but there's no central taxing and spending authority, and there have been trouble in the euro zone in the past decade. China would like to get the world to trade in yuan, but the Europeans are leery of China's undemocratic leadership and lack of transparency. The problems with the USA and the dollar are temporary; China and the yuan aren't seen as an alternative just yet.
Nonetheless, the unhappiness with the USA is evident. Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist of S&P Global Ratings, asked at a recent meeting: "When does the rest of the world turn to the US and say: 'What have you done for me lately?' -- ?"
In the big picture, the US benefits from the dollar being the world's currency. The US can keep it on top by maintaining international alliances, making dollars freely available to trading partners -- and most of all, stop trying to use the dollar as a weapon against our allies. Alas, the Trump Administration is hooked on the brute-force / short-term approach, that mindset being coupled to a complete lack of long-term thinking.
* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Rouhani Reshuffles Economic Team, Says US Isolated Against Iran", 27 October 2018), in response to American pressure, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has carried out a government economic reshuffle to deal with sanctions. Academic Farhad Dejpasand, widely seen as a technocrat, received a vote of confidence in the Iranian Parliament by a wide margin as the new minister of economics and finance. The reshuffle, approved in a parliamentary session carried live on state TV, also brought in new industry, labor, and roads ministers.
The Iranian economy has clearly deteriorated in the past year, suffering rising inflation and unemployment, a 70% fall in the value of the rial, and state corruption. Despite the pressure, Rouhani's government is still committed to keeping its part of the nuclear bargain, and in fact Iran is getting diplomatic boost because of heavy-handed American actions.
Rouhani said: "A year ago no one would have believed ... that Europe would stand with Iran and against America. Russia, China, India, the European Union, and some African and Latin American countries are our friends. We have to work with them and attract investments." How well EU measures to bypass American sanctions work remains to be seen -- but Tehran has been pressured before. However unpleasant, it's nothing new, and Donald Trump's capricious rule will end sooner or later.
As with the Chinese, the Iranians are no doubt paying close attention to US mid-term elections -- whose results may well hobble a Trump White House not noted for its competence in the first place. Given a big defeat for the Republicans, the Iranians can confidently bet on a return to sanity in 2021. It isn't an exaggeration to say that anything would be an improvement.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ICESAT 2 IN ORBIT: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("NASA Probe Will Track Melting Polar Ice In Unprecedented Detail" by Jeremy Rehm, 10 September 2018), on 15 September 2018, a Delta 2 booster was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to put the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration's (NASA) "Ice, Cloud, & land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat 2)" into orbit to measure planetary ice thicknesses.
As the "2" indicates, this is the second ICEsat; the original "IceSat 1" was launched, also by a Delta II, in January 2003, to complete its mission in 2009. To maintain continuity of ice measurements, NASA and the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conducted aerial polar ice surveys in the interim, under Operation ICEBRIDGE. The European Space Agency has also conducted interim polar ice measurements with the "CryoSat 2", which uses radar to detect height.
ICESat 2 was built by Orbital ATK, now part of Northrop Grumman, and was based on the Orbital LEOStar 3 platform. It had a launch mass of 1,580 kilograms (3,493 pounds), and a design life of three years -- though it has fuel for seven. Its science payload is a single instrument: the "Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS)". ATLAS is a lidar, light radar, a green laser firing 10,000 pulses a second, with the pulses split into three pairs, scanning three strips spaced 3,300 meters apart. The return pulses picked up by a small telescope using an array of sensitive photomultiplier tube detectors. ATLAS can scan ground targets only 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) apart, and measure changes in ice thickness to within 5 millimeters, a resolution better than any previous orbiting altimeter.
That capability didn't come cheap, with the development of ATLAS running into problems that caused mission costs to swell, and schedule to slip out. Thorsten Markus, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, comments: "I'm a physicist, and I'm still shocked it works."
ICESat 2 was placed in a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometers (310 miles), to scan the globe once every three months. Four principal scientific objectives have been defined for the ICESat 2 mission:
The launch also included four CubeSat nanosatellites, flown under the NASA "Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa)", this being the 18th ELaNa flight. They included:
This was the final launch of the Delta 2 booster, which had 153 successful launches from 1989, with only one outright failure.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INQURING LITTLE MINDS (1): As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How Researchers Are Teaching AI To Learn Like A Child" by Matthew Hutson, 24 May 2018) Gary Marcus has two small children, Chloe and Alexander. Like most proud papas, he's attentive to his kids -- but Marcus is also a a developmental cognitive scientist at New York University (NYU) in New York City, and watching his kids figure things out is a matter of professional curiosity.
Marcus believes the study of the cognitive development of small children has applications as well, that it can provide insights for artificial intelligence research. AI researchers have yet to replicate the sort of sensible reasoning processes that little kids use to figure things out. Marcus is frustrated with the belief of some AI experts that they can do anything with machine-learning systems, just by giving them more and more data. He believes that AI would greatly benefit by investigating the cognitive processes of children as they learn about the world around them.
For the moment, there's not so much interest in that idea. According to Josh Tenenbaum -- a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge -- big tech firms like Facebook and Google are primarily interested in narrowly-defined, near-term problems, such as web search and facial recognition, for which naive AI systems work very well.
However, computer scientists do realize that over the longer term, AIs will need to become more flexible and intelligent -- for applications such as chatbots that can filter through, aggregate, and explain news or specialized subjects; robotaxis that can handle big-city traffic; or robots to attend to the elderly. Tenenbaum says: "If we want to build robots that can actually interact in the full human world like C-3PO, we're going to need to solve all of these problems in much more general settings."
Work is already underway to that end. In February 2018, MIT launched "Intelligence Quest", a research initiative now raising hundreds of millions of dollars to understand human intelligence in engineering terms. The goal is to provide underlying instincts to guide machine learning. Part of the effort is to assess the learning capabilities of babies, with the results then applied to machines. That will take time, according to Oren Etzioni -- CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington, which has announced a $125 million USD effort to develop and test common sense in AI. Etzioni says: "We would love to build on the representational structure innate in the human brain, but we don't understand how the brain processes language, reasoning, and knowledge."
AI originally tried to develop algorithms based on rules and logic, to then shift towards machine learning, which is basically learning by example -- trial and error. IBM's Deep Blue, which beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, relied on rules and logic. Babies learn by trial and error; but developmental cognitive scientists say we also have sets of instincts that support a flexible sensibility. Tenenbaum says: "We're trying to take one of the oldest dreams of AI seriously: that you could build a machine that grows into intelligence the way a human does -- that starts like a baby and learns like a child."
* Modern AI systems have proven very impressive, being able to translate speech, diagnose cancer, and win at poker. However, they are also prone to awkward failures. Image recognition algorithms can now distinguish dog breeds better than anyone but a human expert; but sometimes they classify a chihuahua as a blueberry muffin. AIs can play classic Atari video games such as SPACE INVADERS with superhuman skill, but when only one alien is left, the AI suddenly become helpless to cope with it.
The old rule-based AI schemes -- informally known as "Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI)" -- could do impressive things, but were very labor-intensive; everything the AI system did had to be meticulously specified. Machine learning, which didn't need all that meticulous programming, came to the fore with the growth of computer processing power, the accumulation of big data sets, and development of artificial neural networks (ANN).
As discussed here earlier this year, in a stunning demonstration of what modern machine learning can do, Alphabet's Deepmind division developed an AI system named "AlphaGo", which mastered the Asian game of go; with AlphaGo eventually evolving into "AlphaZero", which was unbeatable at go, chess, and shougi (Japanese chess). However, Alphazero's knowledge of the games was brittle. Go is played on a 19 x 19 board; if Alphazero were to play go on a 21 x 21 board, it would have to learn from scratch again. It had no way to leverage its knowledge from the first scenario to the second.
Going back to rule-based GOFAIs is not in the cards, however. A toddler doesn't recognize a dog with formal explicit rules like:
if number of legs == 4 AND tail == TRUE AND size > cat THEN dog = TRUE
A toddler will still notice that a chihuahua with three legs, though still a dog, isn't quite a right dog. Evidence suggests we have predispositions that help us learn and reason about the world; nature doesn't give us a library of skills, just the framework to acquire them. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (33): The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are declaratory:
BEGIN QUOTE:
NINTH AMENDMENT: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
TENTH AMENDMENT: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
END QUOTE
The Ninth Amendment is vague, disputable, and hasn't been a specific basis for major judicial decisions. It was primarily included in the Bill of Rights to give reassurances to the states, answering the worry that enumerating rights in the amendments might imply that the Federal government could deny rights not enumerated. In effect, the Ninth Amendment counterbalanced the Elastic Clause to ensure the Federal government could not overreach itself, and say the people did not have a right unless specifically granted. The Federal government was granted "limited supremacy", leaving "residual sovereignty" to the people. On one hand, the Ninth Amendment prevented the Federal government from overreach; on the other, the Ninth Amendment allowed new rights to be granted in law.
The Tenth Amendment is very similar, confirming the residual sovereignty of the states -- stating that the states are free to do anything they like, as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of the Federal government, nor is specifically barred by the Constitution. Of course, "or to the people" had to be added to the end of the Tenth Amendment to make sure the states didn't confiscate the People's residual rights either.
In modern times, the Tenth Amendment is sometimes read in a crazy backwards fashion, as saying the Federal government is only allowed the powers enumerated to it by the Constitution. Of course, that is blindly ignoring the Elastic Clause, which empowers the Federal government to do what needs to be done, as long as the government remains within the limits of the Constitution.
The Tenth Amendment does have the judicial implication that the states cannot be compelled to enforce Federal regulations. The Federal government can, however, exert pressure by withholding funds from uncooperative states, and also through the Federal government's authority to regulate interstate commerce via the Commerce Clause. The Ninth and Tenth amendments are important in principle, but more nitpicky tapdancing in practice. In a 1931 decision, the Supreme Court stated the Tenth Amendment "added nothing" to the Constitution as ratified.
* Madison actually proposed twelve amendments, but two of them didn't make it through ratification. The first of these two amendments supposedly clarified the apportionment of members of the House of Representatives, which was not specified in detail in the Constitution proper. Enough to say here that it didn't fly, not enough states ratifying it. The second of these two amendments ensured that if Congress gave itself a pay raise, it would only be put into application in the next Congress. This amendment didn't fly either -- but as discussed later, it didn't die, instead going dormant for a very long time.
Madison had no cause for serious complaint in the failure of these two amendments; neither were vital to the operation of the Federal government as Madison envisioned it. He could take satisfaction in the Bill of Rights confirming the democratic nature of the Constitution; and more, if quiet, satisfaction in the reality that implementing the Bill of Rights had forestalled attempts to revise the Constitution.
The reality was that the Bill of Rights was, in the origin, a largely cosmetic exercise. It only applied to the Federal government; it had no direct power over the states. While today the Bill of Rights is idolized, it wouldn't amount to so much until the last half of the 20th century. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: The US Army has long considered replacements for the service's M16 / M4 automatic rifle, one factor being an argument that the NATO standard 5.56-millimeter round used by these weapons lacks, ahem, "hitting power". Now the Army has issued a request for proposals for "Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW)", chambered for a new 6.8-millimeter round. The 6.8-millimeter round is seen as a reasonable compromise between the NATO 5.56-millimeter and 7.62-millimeter rounds, with the new round packaged up in a high-velocity configuration for more punch.
The request actually covers two weapons -- the "NGSW-R (Rifle)" to replace the M4 carbine, and the "NGSW-AR (Automatic Rifle)" to replace the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) AKA "Minimi" 5.56-millimeter light machine gun. Earlier attempts by the Army to obtain new infantry firearms were derailed by excessive ambition. However, these requirements do not really need advanced technology -- all they need to have is a modular design to allow them to accommodate advanced accessories. The competition promises to be interesting.
* As discussed by an article from BUSINESS INSIDER ("Up Close And Personal With The UK's Sleek New Fighter Jet" by Daniel Brown, 17 July 2018), the 2018 Farnborough air show in the UK featured a surprise, in the form of a full-scale mockup of a next-generation fighter jet, named the "Tempest" -- after the well-known British fighter of World War II. The fact that the original Tempest followed a fighter named the "Typhoon" also reflects on the fact that the Royal Air Force's current firstline fighter is the Typhoon.
The Tempest is a joint venture by BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Leonardo, and MBDA. It is a twin-engine design, with stealthy lines like most 21st-century fighters; vectored-thrust engine exhausts; a delta-type wing, with cropped wingtips and a "W"-configuration trailing edge; plus twin tailfins. It has internal weapons bays for stealthy carriage of weapons, and could be armed with a laser system; it will have advanced avionics, including networked intelligence with resilience against cyber attacks. It is also envisioned as a possible unpiloted aircraft.
Tempest is something of a reaction to an announcement last year that France and Germany would develop a next-generation fighter to replace French Dassault Rafales and German Eurofighter Typhoons. Britain plans to spend $2.65 billion USD to 2025 for initial / risk-reduction development, with a decision to be made at the time on whether to commit to full development. Operational service would not be expected until 2035.
ED: It is a truism that advanced combat aircraft cost a fortune to develop. It is, however, puzzling as to why that is so. The Tempest will leverage off technology developed for fighters like the F-22 and F-35, and there's no reason that, at the outset, it couldn't use existing engine and avionics technology, to be upgraded in the future. Alas, there are the formidable problems of system integration and particularly testing -- so that's likely making things far easier than they really are.
* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Augmented Reality Is Key To Future Fighter Cockpits" by Tony Osborne, 30 July 2018), combat aircraft cockpit systems design has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last generation. Augmented reality (AR) -- in which interactive computer-generated data is overlaid onto real-world data -- promises to take the technology one big step further, with fighter pilots becoming "air battlespace managers".
BAE Systems put AR cockpit concepts on display the Tempest future fighter mockup at the 2018 Farnborough air show. The company has been investigating next-generation cockpit ideas for several years; BAE is currently looking into the utility of wide-area displays for training or fontline combat, having installed a wide-area display in the front seat of its Advanced Hawk demonstrator. BAE is also working with Airbus to evaluate a wide-area display for the Eurofighter Typhoon.
Possibly more significantly, BAE is investigating AR with helmet-mounted displays. The firm's Striker 2 helmet is already capable of displaying night-vision camera imagery, eliminating the need for cumbersome night-vision goggles. The company has demonstrated the ability to feed multicolor mission data -- such as the "threat envelope" presented by surface-to-air missiles -- onto the helmet display as well.
Pilots will be able to see flight symbology and sensor data anywhere they move their head, with each pilot able to configure the system to preference. The primary mission or target data would, as a rule, be at the center of a pilot's attention, and positioned within the normal line of sight. Less significant information would be positioned elsewhere -- inside in the cockpit, above or to the left or right of the pilot's normal line of sight.
All displays will be interactive. BAE engineers want to use haptic feedback to tell pilots they have pushed a button. Wearable systems that can help manage mission data or control aircraft systems are also being studied. The AR system would make use of eye-tracking and gesture-recognition functions. Later generations of the Striker helmet will incorporate such improvements.
Farther down the road, BAE engineers think that monitoring pilot physiology, with an electrocardiogram (ECG) for heart rate and electroencephalogram (EEG) for brain activity, will be a significant factor in pilot-aircraft interaction. The idea is not to make the aircraft "telepathic", but to ensure that pilots don't get overloaded -- with aircraft's onboard artificial intelligence systems taking over if the pilot does get overloaded.
There's a certain circularity in this, in that smarter combat aircraft will tend to have a single seat, instead of two -- aircraft systems allowing a single aircrewperson to do the work of two, but necessarily increasing pilot workload. The single pilot will also end up controlling drones as "loyal wingmen", the drones adding weapons and sensors.
An AR cockpit might end up doing away with the traditional fighter canopy. The canopy is troublesome in stealthy aircraft, since it's hard to block radar signals from it. Already, the distributed sensors of the Lockheed Martin F-35 have demonstrated the ability of a pilot to "see through" the aircraft via a helmet-mounted display. The irony of AR is that, by making the aircraft transparent to the pilot, the need for the pilot to eyeball the world is thereby that much diminished.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GENOMICS FOR EVERYONE: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("A Genome In The Hand", 7 December 2017), the first deciphered human genome was release in 2000, after a 15-year effort and the expenditure of billions of dollars. Since that time, deciphering genomes has become routine; it now costs less than a thousand dollars to obtain a full human genome.
There's no doubt it's going to get a lot cheaper. As case in point, consider the "MinION", from Oxford Nanopore, of Oxford in the UK. The MinION is about the size of a fat mobile phone; it plugs into a laptop PC that provides power, and also runs control software. After a sample is inserted into the MinION, the instrument module pulls strands of DNA through a "flow cell", consisting of an array of "nanoholes", each a few nanometers in diameter. Each nanohole is electrically monitored, with the electrical signal changing depending on which of the four DNA base molecules is passing through the hole. A custom IC sorts out the data acquired from the array.
The MinION costs about $1,000 USD, while the flow-cell cartridges cost about $500 USD each, if purchased in bulk. The MinION is not intended to replace lab DNA analysis systems; it is instead intended to support "quick & dirty" DNA analysis in field locations. The device has been used in a wide range of environments, from sequencing the DNA of microbes found in Antarctica to those found deep in abandoned coal mines; it was also used to profile Ebola viruses during the outbreak in west Africa in 2015.
The major limitation of the MinION is that it requires hand-preparation of DNA samples; a preparation kit is included with the product. Cells have to be ruptured, a process known as "lysis", to get at their DNA, and the samples have to be purified to eliminate contaminants. That may require special reagents and centrifuges. Oxford Nanopore is working on a companion to MinION, named "Zumbador", that will prep samples, but the firm is saying nothing about details or schedules.
Many MinION users have no great trouble with preparing their own samples, since they no longer have to send samples off to a lab, and wait for results. Mars, a well-known manufacturer of candies and other foods, uses the MinION on production lines in China to find contaminations, particularly bacteria such as Salmonella and E. coli. Company officials are eagerly waiting for automated preparation, since it will provide real-time monitoring of the production process -- and also catch a wider range of contaminants than the assays previously used.
Tracing the origins of food is another good application of genomic investigation. Following a scandal in some British supermarkets, in which meat labeled as beef actually included horsemeat, there's a demand for tests that can validate meat products. Cranswick, a British supplier of cooked meats, is working with the University of Warwick on using of the hand-held sequencers to analyze samples of DNA extracted from packaged meat, to confirm what kind of meat it really is.
Cheap, on the spot sequencing promises to be particularly useful in the developing world. Agricultural researchers in Tanzania and Uganda plan to use Oxford Nanopore's devices to help identify the viruses that plague cassava crops. Right now, samples have to be sent abroad for analysis, and it can take weeks or months to get back results. With handheld sequencers, results can be returned in a day or two.
Clive Brown, Oxford Nanopore's chief technology officer, envisions a time when anyone can get a genetic profile of anything at minimal cost. Genomic analysis will then be almost as easy and ubiquitous as reading barcodes, and will be taken as much for granted.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BALANCING ACT: As discussed in an essay by Free Exchange, THE ECONOMIST's rotating economics columnist ("We The Shareholders", 22 September 2018), inequality is on the march in the developed world. Even though the economy is strong, the lower and middle class are struggling to stay where they are economically, while the rich get richer. The Great Recession laid the problem bare, but it had been brewing for decades before that.
The straightforward approach to dealing with inequality is redistribution: taxing the rich to fund spending on the poor. However, the rich quickly find tax loopholes to exploit, and have a disproportionate amount of political clout that allows them to chip away at high tax rates. The people on the bottom of the economic pyramid, in frustration, tend to want to redress the balance by revolutionary means -- but revolutions are hard to start, and hard to control once started.
Libertarian thinking favors the "magic of the market", believing that left to themselves, market forces will straighten everything out -- but things don't always work so conveniently, one reason being there's never really a level playing field. Even Adam Smith, an admirer of markets, wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."
19th-century socialists believed the best way to deal with the inequalities of capitalism was collective ownership. Experiments with socialist authoritarian statism in the 20th century showed the concept was deeply flawed. In practice, such societies tend to be oppressive, sometimes vicious, economically inefficient, and often corrupt. China is something of an exception, showing that authoritarian statism, with an eye towards capitalist practice, can fuel an economic powerhouse -- but inequality nonetheless is still a big problem in China, and its heavy-handed governance hints at problems down the road.
Nonetheless, the Left tradition has had good ideas, and continues to have them. What if, so recent thinking poses, the state owned a share of the economy's assets for the welfare of the population? In a recent paper Matt Bruenig, a Left-leaning writer, argues for the creation of an American "social wealth fund (SWF)". An SWF would accumulate stakes in equity, bond, and property markets, and then pay out a share of its investment income each year as a "universal basic dividend". All citizens become shareholders in the economy.
Even in the best of times in the 20th century, the richest 10% of the population controlled most of the wealth. Money is passed down the generations through gifts and bequests, but also through the extra educational and entrepreneurial opportunities wealth affords. An SWF, funded by a more aggressive tax system, would counter-balance this entrenchment of advantage.
There are examples of sorts of SWFs already in operation. Alaska's public fund, financed with royalties from its oil industry, is worth 113% of its GDP. The funds are invested in a diversified portfolio that has yielded annual returns of nearly 10% over its lifetime. The fund's dividend payments appear to reduce wealth inequality and poverty; Alaskans still remain hard-working and enterprising. Norway's government, through oil-funded funds created to protect its generous social safety-net against future declines in oil revenues, controls almost 60% of the country's wealth -- but the country has not turned into a gray socialist dystopia.
However, these are relatively small-scale experiments; they might not work so well at the scale of all of the USA's, an SWF resulting in the suffocation of the economy as it drifts increasingly under direct government control. That concern might be addressed by assigning the job to a semi-independent government agency, along the lines of the Federal Reserve, with a goal only of maximizing return on investment, with an indirect connection to the Federal regulatory apparatus.
It also poses some tricky questions -- for example, the drive to pay out dividends to citizens might well mean keeping the wages of workers low, and the public might be more willing to put up with monopolistic practices. On the more positive side, working people could feel differently about lay-offs, offshoring, and automation if their dividends stood to grow as a result.
Yes, there are risks, but any scheme to alter the social and economic status quo is going to have risks, and there are risks in retaining the status quo. An SWF has a particular attraction in that it doesn't attempt to overthrow the capitalist status quo -- the idea being to bring everyone on board the capitalist bandwagon. Instead of the workers versus the fat cats, they're both on the same side. Karl Marx would have been consternated.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REBUILDING IRAQ (3): Iran's politics, in short, are chaotic and lively -- but there remains a huge problem, in that the current government, installed by the Americans after the invasion, has little credibility. When not flying elsewhere, they remain holed up the Green Zone, the fortress-like inner city of Baghdad. The residents of the Green Zone say it provides a safe space for foreigners and officials to do business. Those who live outside of it are inclined to see it as a place where government officials skim off public money, out of reach of the public.
The government doesn't operate on the basis of division of powers; it is instead a big tent, where factions carve out their own turf, naming their own ministers, staking claims to ports, checkpoints, and even refugee camps. Opinion polls say most Iraqis want the lot of them gone. While the UN gets good marks from many Iraqis for the organization's handling of the refugee crisis, the government is seen as having done nothing. Three million children are still out of school; a quarter of Iraqis are poor.
Economic instability hasn't helped. Iraq's economy collapsed after the First Gulf War, and got another kick in the teeth from the Second Gulf War. Gradual improvement was derailed by the war against IS. However, things are looking up, oil production having almost quadrupled from its low point after the 2003 invasion. Iraq is now OPEC's second-biggest producer, with output predicted to grow, and the government having comfortable cash reserves.
There are some signs of government investment in the country, but they're mostly small-scale. Factories still lie idle, with the country importing almost everything from its neighbors; xenophobia, a relic of Saddam Hussein's rule, drives away outside investment. Oil keeps the economy afloat, with oil money lining the pockets of corrupt officials. The country has an anti-corruption watchdog, the Commission of Integrity, but unsurprisingly it is regarded as corrupt itself. Foreign governments are cautious of providing aid, a minister of one of the Gulf states calling Iraq "a bottomless pit."
The public is disgruntled, many Iraqis wanting a strongman government. Some even feel nostalgia for Saddam Hussein, who at least was more efficient in maintaining Iraqi society than the current regime. While Iraq is now peaceful, there's no guarantee that will last. Kurdish Peshmurga fighters think of destabilizing Iraq -- and raiding Iran, seen by Kurds as their primary enemy. The Hashd are armed, and may not take well to being ignored and dismissed. Many IS fighters went underground, with clashes increasing in frequency; refugee camps are thought to be full of IS sleeper cells.
There were hopes before. The overthrow of Saddam was botched by the US, which shut Sunnis out of the new order. The respite obtained by its surge of troops in 2007-08 was botched by Nuri al-Maliki, the then prime minister from Dawa, a Shia Islamist party, who ran a sectarian government. Can the current prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, do better?
The possibility is there. Iraq has a lot going for it, having plenty of oil and water, and an educated population. Haider al-Abadi is also popular among Sunnis, even though he is from the Dawa Party. Nonetheless, he is no strongman, instead seated precariously at the top of an unstable, factional human pyramid. There is little sign of energy from the Green Zone. Having won the war against IS, the Iraqi government doesn't seem to know how to win the peace. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (32): The Fifth through Eighth Amendments detailed the rights of defendants, the Fifth Amendment directing that defendants had to be indicted by a grand jury, under the "Grand Jury Clause" and couldn't be tried twice for the same crime, under the "Double Jeopardy Clause", nor be penalized without a proper judgement, under the "Due Process Clause"; the Sixth Amendment defining trial rights, as the "Compulsory Process Clause"; and the Eighth Amendment denying excessive punishment, as the "Cruel & Unusual Punishment Clause":
BEGIN QUOTE:
FIFTH AMENDMENT: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
SIXTH AMENDMENT: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
SEVENTH AMENDMENT: In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
EIGHTH AMENDMENT: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
END QUOTE
In sum, these amendments specify:
A "grand jury", incidentally, is called such because it has, in the USA, 16 to 23 jurors -- in contrast to a trial jury AKA "petit jury", which typically has from 6 to 12 jurors. A grand jury works in conjunction with a public prosecutor who wants to bring charges, with the grand jury agreeing or disagreeing to do so. A grand jury, of course, will obtain testimony from witnesses. Incidentally:
The concerns of the Framers in allowing defendants to "take the Fifth" and not incriminate themselves were sideways to the modern interpretation of this right. Surprisingly, in the time of the Framers, defendants in a criminal trial were not allowed to testify in their own defense. In modern times, that's universally seen as outrageous, but the modern view would need about a century to take hold. Incidentally, there's nothing in the Constitution that directly states defendants can testify in their own behalf, it's just become the legal custom.
In any case, the concern of the Framers was to prevent defendants from being legally coerced into testifying against themselves -- to then be exposed to charges of perjury if they lied, or contempt of court if they refused to testify. Today, the "right to remain silent" is an accepted principle of justice, though people often complain, since it tends to be thought of as a "get out of jail free" card. It isn't: defendants who "plead the Fifth" cannot incriminate themselves, but they cannot speak in their own defense either. That may simply reinforce an impression of guilt in the jury, and the jurors may hand down a "guilty" verdict anyway.
As far as the "Takings Clause" goes, it goes beyond government seizure of property with compensation. What if the government wants to run a road through property? That's not really so different, the government would have to pay for doing so. However, what if the government wants to set up a facility near the property of citizens that will reduce the value of their property? And does the government have the right to seize property to assist in commercial re-development of that property? That last has been done, as per the principle of "eminent domain" -- but it is now widely regarded as a dubious practice.
The rights of defendants outlined in the Fifth through Eighth Amendments are all commonly-accepted principles of justice today. Incidentally, there might seem to be a glaring omission in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, in that they outline the rights of the accused, but do not state the fundamental right of "presumption of innocence", that the accused is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. Actually, the presumption of innocence had been established as a fundamental legal principle as far back as the time of the Roman Empire, and was phrased in its modern form in the Middle Ages. It is implicit in constitutional concepts such as the right to remain silent, and the right to due process. Once again, not everything consistent with the Constitution is spelled out in the Constitution. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for September included:
-- 07 SEP 18 / HAIYANG 1C -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0315 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Haiyang (Ocean) 1" ocean-observation satellite into orbit. The satellite had a launch mass of 442 kilograms (974 pounds), the primary payload being two instruments:
The satellite also carried an ultraviolet imager, a calibration spectrometer, and an AIS system for ship tracking. It was based on the CAST968 satellite bus. Haiyang 1C was the fourth in the Haiyang series, with "Haiyang 1A" launched in 2002; "Haiyang 1B" in 2007; and "Haiyang 2A", the first second-generation spacecraft, in 2011.
-- 10 SEP 18 / TELSTAR 18 VANTAGE (APSTAR 5C) -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0445 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Telstar 18 VANTAGE / APT APSTAR 5C" into geostationary comsat into orbit, for a collaboration of Telesat of Canada and APT Satellite of Hong Kong. The satellite was built by Space Systems / Loral, had a launch mass of about 7,060 kilograms (15,560 pounds), and carried a C / Ku-band payload. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 138 degrees east longitude to provide communications services from India to Hawaii, including wi-fi links to airliners and ships.
-- 15 SEP 18 / ICESAT 2 -- A Delta 2 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1302 UTC (local time + 8) to put the NASA "Ice, Cloud and Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat) 2" satellite into orbit. It carried a precision laser altimeter to measure ice sheet thickness. ICESat 2 was built by Northrop Grumman's Orbital ATK operation, and had a launch mass of 1,580 kilograms (3,485 pounds). It was a successor to the original ICESat spacecraft, launched aboard a Delta II in January 2003, to be de-orbited in 2010.
The launch also included four CubeSats, flown under the NASA ("Educational Launch of Nanosatellites 18 (ELaNa XVIII)" mission umbrella. They included:
-- 16 SEP 18 / NOVASAR S, SSTL S1-4 -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 1637 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "NovaSAR S" and "SSTL S1-4" Earth observation satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit, along with several secondary payloads. The NovaSAR S space platform carried an S-band radar imaging instrument, plus an AIS ship-tracking receiver as a secondary payload; it had a launch mass of 430 kilograms (950 pounds). The mission was developed in partnership between the British government and the British satellite manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology LTD (SSTL).
The SSTL S1-4 satellite, also built by SSTL, was a high-resolution optical Earth observation satellite, identical to three DMC3/TripleSat Earth observation space platforms launched in 2015. It had a launch mass of 440 kilograms (970 pounds). The PSLV flew in the PSLV XL configuration, with enlarged solid rocket boosters.
-- 19 SEP 18 / BEIDOU 3 x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1407 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Beidou 3 M13" and "Beidou 3 M14" navigation satellites into orbit. They had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds) each, and were placed in a medium Earth orbit with an altitude of 13,350 miles (21,500 kilometers) and an inclination of 55 degrees. They were third-generation satellites, and were the first to carry rescue transponders.
-- 22 SEP 18 / HTV 7 -- A Japanese JAXA H-2B booster was launched from Tanegashima at 1752 UTC (next day local time - 9) to put the sixth "H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV 7)" AKA "Kounotori (White Stork) 7", an unmanned freighter, into orbit on an ISS resupply mission. It docked with the ISS Harmony module five days after launch. The freighter carried the first "HTV Small Re-entry Capsule (HSRC)", to carry experiments back to Earth, and three CubeSats:
These CubeSats were later deployed from the ISS. HTV 7 was built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
-- 25 SEP 18 / HORIZONS 3E, AZERSPACE 2 (INTELSAT 38) -- JP An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2238 UTC (local time + 3) to put the Intelsat / Japan Sky Perfect "Horizons 3e" and Azercosmos "Azerspace 2 (Intelsat 38)" geostationary comsats into orbit. Horizons 3e was built by Boeing; it has a launch mass of 6,411 kilograms (14,136 pounds), and a payload of C / Ku-band transponders. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 169 degrees east longitude to to provide aeronautical and maritime mobility services and support government networking applications in the Asia-Pacific region and in North America.
The Azerspace 2 (Intelsat 38) satellite was the second satellite owned by Azercosmos, the national satellite operator of Azerbaijan, and Intelsat. The space platform was built by Space Systems / Loral; it was placed in the geostationary slot at 45 degrees east longitude to provide direct-to-home television, government, and network services.
[29 SEP 18] CN JQ / KUAIZHOU 1A / CENTISPACE 1-S3 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0413 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Centispace 1-S1" satellite into near-polar orbit. The satellite was developed by Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; it had a launch mass of about 100 kilograms (220 pounds), and was flown as a technology demonstrator for a space-based network being developed by Beijing Future Navigation Technology LTD to augment satellite navigation services.
This was the fourth launch of the solid-fuel Kuaizhou ("Speedy Vessel") booster, and the second launch of the 1A variant. The booster was derived from military ballistic-missile technology; and the first commercial launch, carrying a new deployment system for multiple satellites. Kuaizhou 1A can deliver satellites of up to 300 kilograms (660 pounds) into low-altitude orbits.
* OTHER SPACE NEWS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("NASA Climate Mission Trump Tried To Kill Moves Forward" by Paul Voosen, 28 September 2018), the Trump Administration has taken a dim view of environmental research and has tried to impede it -- but in a peculiarly half-baked and half-hearted way. As an example, consider the "Climate Absolute Radiance & Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder", an instrument for environmental studies to be mounted on the International Space Station (ISS).
The effort was cut by the Trump Administration in 2017, with NASA halting work on it -- but Congress gave NASA the money anyway, and now the agency has awarded a contract to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder, to build CLARREO Pathfinder's primary component, a specialized camera.
CLARREO Pathfinder is not really intended to perform Earth observations as such; the space station's orbit doesn't cover the entire Earth, and so it's not a great platform for global environmental studies. The mission of CLARREO Pathfinder will be to establish a calibration reference for environmental satellites, improving their accuracy by an order of magnitude. CLARREO Pathfinder will carry an imager that will be able to take observations across 640 channels.
The revived CLARREO Pathfinder isn't the only environmental mission that's survived attempts by the Trump Administration to kill it off. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, which the Trump administration also proposed to cancel, is now set to launch in February 2019. Congress has drafted, though has not yet passed, language re-instating NASA's Carbon Monitoring System. In addition, the agency's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, has pledged to follow the guidance of the earth science decadal survey, a consensus wish list of NASA missions compiled by earth scientists that has endorsed many of the missions targeted for cancellation or budget cuts.
When Bridenstine was appointed as NASA administrator, there were fears that he would derail NASA's environmental research; he had made noises about climate-change denial, and there was a lot of talk from the Trump Administration that NASA shouldn't be in the environmental monitoring business. For whatever reasons, that talk has been effectively shelved -- possibly because it's simply been lost in the chaos of the White House, to be forgotten -- and Bridenstine appears to be fully behind NASA's "Mission To Planet Earth".
* In related space news, as discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Europe Eyes Fleet Of Tiny CO2-Monitoring Satellites To Track Global Emissions" by Alexandra Witze, 5 October 2018), European researchers are developing a miniaturized sounder / spectrometer that could be carried on a small satellite to measure carbon dioxide coming from cities and power plants. A constellation of such satellites could monitor compliance with global agreements on CO2 emission reductions.
A number of satellites currently monitor CO2 emissions, including Japan's GOSAT, the USA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO 2), and China's TanSat -- but they aren't really suited to the mission of guaranteeing compliance with CO2 emissions agreements. A constellation of about two dozen "Space Carbon Observatory (SCARBO)" microsatellites, each weighing about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) each, would be able to map CO2 concentrations to better than one part in a million at a resolution of two kilometers (1.24 miles).
The plan is that SCARBO will be initially tested on an aircraft in 2020. Assuming all goes well, the constellation could be in orbit by 2030. The satellites would also map methane concentrations.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GET YOUR TOLLS TOGETHER: As discussed by an article from WIRED.com ("Why Can't America Have a Single Tolling System? Because Bureaucracy" by Nick Stockton, 23 November 2017), those who spend their time criss-crossing America's highways dream of the day when toll roads are transparent: all they would need is a single toll transponder module that would work anywhere in the USA, debiting the toll out of an account as they cruise across bridges and through tunnels.
Nobody would think that a really difficult problem -- transponders are nothing complicated or expensive -- and Congress passed a law requiring the nation's various electronic tolling authorities to devise a uniform tolling system. It hasn't happened yet: the USA still has a patchwork of regional systems, plus a half-dozen states doing their own thing. Why this is so ends up being a study in bureaucracy.
Back in the 1950s, Canadian economist William Vickrey envisioned a future in which vehicles carrying radio transponders cruised through sensor-wired cities, to support various functions such as automated collection of tolls. It wasn't until 1987 that Norway became the first country to implement such a system. Other caught on quick. Patrick Jones -- executive director and CEO of the International Bridge, Tunnel, & Turnpike Association -- comments that toll operators thought: "Hey, this is something that will cut down on labor costs, and also be a convenience to our customers who don't want to carry cash everywhere."
The Dallas North Texas Tollway installed the first US electronic system in 1989. The early systems were not much of an advance on cash collection systems, since a driver had to stop at a tollbooth to present a tag to an electronic reader. This being obviously feeble, the scheme quickly evolved to the roll-through systems now in use -- reducing congestion, lowering emissions from idling cars, and greatly reducing toll-plaza accidents.
However, it led to a new problem: a proliferation of transponders to handle the different toll bridges, tunnels, or turnpikes a driver had to traverse. In 1993, the metropolitan region encompassing eastern Pennsylvania through New Jersey to New York City included roads and bridges operated by seven transit agencies -- meaning that a regular commuter might have to carry seven transponders. The seven agencies, recognizing the problem, got together and came up with the "E-ZPass" system. Today, E-ZPass coordinates toll collection for 38 agencies in 16 states, allowing a driver to cruise from Maine to Virginia, New York to Kentucky, without worrying about tolls.
The E-ZPass systems looks more complicated under the hood, with 38 agencies involved in the network. Suppose a driver named Bob obtains an E-ZPass transponder through the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, drives over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, then take the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to check out Long Island City. As he passes each toll, his E-ZPass sends out a code telling the plaza's sensor where he came from. The agency that owns that toll plaza -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for the bridge, New York's MTA for the tunnel -- sends the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission a bill. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission pays off and deducts the charge from Bob's account.
Meshing the different systems into a unified network was tricky, because each agency joining up had different ideas of the rules. Suppose, for example, one agency allowed an account to go $15 USD into the hole before declaring a user delinquent -- but another agency set the limit at $5 USD. A driver might be okay on one part of the road network, but not on another. The E-ZPass organization managed to hammer things into workable agreement.
Other regions do things a bit differently from E-ZPass. Florida's Turnpike Enterprise (FTE) acts as a clearinghouse, a hub, for partner agencies within the state, plus North Carolina, and, from 2018, South Carolina. Instead of dealing with each other, they all deal with the FTE. There's also a big hub in Texas that includes Oklahoma and Kansas, while all of California is interoperable under the "FasTrak". Six other states have their own toll systems, while the other 15 don't do tolls.
Most people don't need to worry much about inconsistent toll systems, but truck and bus drivers are still stuck with handling a box of different transponders -- along with mailboxes full of bills, from different tolling agencies. It's not a fatal affliction, but it's a damned nuisance. In 2012, Congress accordingly passed the "Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21)" act, which contains a provision stating that all toll facilities on Federal-aid highways were required to have interoperable toll booths by October 2016.
The target date of course wasn't met, but it was little more than a guideline anyway. It was simply not practical to tell all the agencies across the USA to update their systems, given the expense and inconvenience. The authors of MAP-21 accordingly had to say: "Figure it out among yourselves." However, it inevitably became a secondary goal. Neil Gray -- the International Bridge, Tunnel, & Turnpike Association's director of government affairs -- comments: "Most of these agencies are very local, creatures of a city or state government, and focused on daily traffic and large construction projects."
Everybody wants to get on the same page, and they will get there sooner or later. For now, however -- truck drivers still have to haul a box of transponders.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE GLOBAL SMARTPHONE COMPLEX: As discussed an essay from THE ECONOMIST's rotating economics columnist, Schumpeter ("iSupply", 8 September 2018), the smartphone is the iconic product of the globalized industrial complex. In 2018, about 1.5 billion of them will be made will be made by millions of workers at hundreds of firms in dozens of countries. The smartphone also embodies a growing weakness in the system, due to two factors: the saturation of the smartphone market, and increasing strains over the global production system.
Up to the 1990s, consumer electronics were generally produced closed to home, and shipped overseas to reach foreign markets. Nokia hit the big time while cranking out mobile phones in the small town of Salo in Finland. In the last decade of the 20th century a few pioneers -- including Cisco, and later Dell -- outsourced manufacturing to a network of factories, most of them in Asia. Steve Jobs of Apple liked that idea, and so in 1998 he hired Tim Cook, a supply-chain expert, to create a global network of contract manufacturers and suppliers. Today, the network involves hundreds of key sites around the world.
The four other big smartphone makers use variations on this theme. Samsung makes more of its devices in-house, but has huge factories in Vietnam, and sells semiconductors and displays to competitors. Huawei, based in Shenzhen, prefers to make components internally. Xiaomi and OPPO, both Chinese, are even more focused on outsourcing than Apple, leveraging off subcontractors at home and abroad.
A recent International Monetary Fund study showed just how big the smartphone's economic footprint really is. At the peak in October 2017, smartphone components accounted for over 33% of exports from Taiwan, 17% of those from Malaysia, and 16% from Singapore; smartphones comprise 6% of Chinese exports. The network is highly interconnected, with memory chips flowing from South Korea and Vietnam; system chips from Malaysia, Taiwan and elsewhere; and displays from Japan and South Korea. Parts are assembled, primarily by armies of Chinese workers, with production ramping up to millions of devices.
The first threat to the smartphone era is that the market is saturating and softening. The number of new smartphones sold fell by 0.3% in 2017. First-time buyers of smartphones are becoming less common, while long-time users aren't upgrading so often. However, despite the decline in unit sales, total revenues increased by 10% for all suppliers of hardware and services to smartphone firms. New phones have more fancy bells and whistles, and can fetch a higher price.
Nonetheless, smartphone capability is converging on a plateau, with new users declining in number, and new generations of smartphones not being such an advance over earlier ones. In a low-growth environment, smartphones will become a commodity, the market will be taken over by the lowest-cost mass producers. Games and services do promise to remain energetic, with sales from Apple's App Store, as well as Google Play for Android, booming -- but that can do little to reduce the growing pressure on the smartphone industrial complex.
The complex involves a handful of giants like Apple, Samsung, and the big Chinese firms, at the top of a hierarchy of firms of smaller size, with many little companies at the bottom of the pyramid. The little guys are already getting squeezed by the bigger guys above them in the pyramid, and more squeeze will kill many of them off.
Apple and 13 of its chip suppliers earn over 90% of the total pool of profits from Apple product sales. The little guys have a profit margin of about 2%. They're used to that, but even small changes in the direction of the winds can be fatal. The growing trade war between the US and China terrifies them; half of them would be losing money if tariffs drove up costs by 5%. The system could suffer a disastrous cascade breakdown, with millions thrown out of work in Asia, while smartphone prices skyrocket as supply falls. Stockmarkets on both sides of the Pacific would suffer.
Worried smartphone manufacturers have no choice but to hunker down, attempting to bring production back home, using automation to stay competitive. Yes, it will be nice for the USA if Apple brings its production back home, but automated factories mean that the many Chinese who lose jobs won't translate into a lot of new jobs for Americans -- while Apple's overhead will, at best, stay the same, and the company will still produce overseas to service export markets. In the era of Trump, there is going to be a changed world economic order, but it won't be radically different from that which came before. To the extent it's changed, it may well not be all that much for the better for most of those concerned.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REBUILDING IRAQ (2): The current unity of Iraq is startling, though not completely without precedent. In 1991, in the wake of Saddam Hussein's humiliating defeat in Kuwait, Kurds and Shias rose up against the regime together. Tens of thousands of Sunnis signed up with the Hashd al-Shaabi, or "popular mobilization units", while millions of Sunnis fled IS domination to seek refuge in Kurdish and Shia cities. They were given it; many Shia volunteers died liberating Sunnis from IS.
There were fears that Shia militias would be vindictive in the Sunni territories they liberated; but although there were incidents, there were no mass killings. A local councilor in Falluja, a Sunni city recaptured in 2016, comments: "We expected much worse." The Hashd remains a presence, but it is not overbearing, and Hashd groups tend to be mixed. A Hashd commander in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, points to a group of his men and comments: "Half of them are Sunni." That's not so surprising, Tikrit being a Sunni town; the surprise is that half of them are not.
With peace, the security forces are gradually adopting a lower profile. Many of the checkpoints snarling traffic in central Baghdad have gone; the curfew was lifted in 2015. It is now possible to drive from the Kuwait to Turkish borders without special permits or a security escort.
Iraqis who fled the country are coming back home. Generally, according to the UN, it takes an average of five years for half those people displaced by a conflict to return. In Iraq, it took 90 days. Lise Grande, who headed UN operations during the war on IS, says: "We've seen nothing like it in the history of modern warfare."
They came back home with little or no government help -- to neighborhoods that were dilapidated, without electricity or water. They are fixing things themselves. Lecturers at Tikrit University raised funds from private evening classes, rebuilt their war-battered campus and redesigned the curriculum "to promote peaceful coexistence". Half the university's 30,000 students are Shia.
Iraq's small religious minorities feel much safer. Over 70% of the 100,000 Christians who fled to Kurdistan have returned to their homes on the Nineveh plains. Sunnis from Mosul joined Chaldean Catholics to celebrate mass at their church in Bakhdida. The Islamic fanaticism of IS has, in an inevitable irony, led to a backlash against organized Islam: mosque attendance is down, and though rebuilding is going at a fast clip in Falluja, repair of the many minarets and domes in the city is evidently a low priority. Says a young construction worker: "Only old men go to pray."
IS banned designer haircuts and tracksuit tops, and so they are now all the rage. Says a Sunni final-year student at Tikrit University with a bouffant hairdo: "Our imams radicalized us with IS and terror, but refuse to admit it."
Clerics are no longer greatly esteemed in the Shia south of Iraq, either. Iraqis no longer look at them for leadership, as the people seek better lives. Cinemas banned for decades are re-opening, while Iraq's first commercial film in decades was released this year: THE JOURNEY tells the story of a female suicide bomber who, as she is about to die, questions the suffering she will inflict on her victims. The movie is one of compassion for all involved.
Secularism is making inroads even in the holy city of Najaf, the seat of Iraq's ayatollahs, which has thrived on Shia pilgrimage since the American invasion. The new public library at the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali includes collections of Marx's tracts and non-Muslim scriptures. Shia clerics who until recently banned Christmas trees and smashed shop windows displaying love-hearts on Valentine's Day have mellowed out.
Iraq's major religious parties used to play to factionalism; now they try to avoid being seen as factional. A 2017 opinion poll showed that only 5% of Iraqis would vote for a politician with a sectarian or religious agenda. Politicians who were once Shia supremacists now call for a diverse Iraq, and bring members of different sects into their own ranks.
This generates strange bedfellows. Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia cleric with a base in the shantytowns of Baghdad and Basra, has allied with Communists, once condemned as heretics. Iraq's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party, has joined forces with al-Wataniya, an anti-sectarian party led by a Iyad Allawi, once a member of Saddan Hussein's Baath Party. As old alignments break apart, the Iraqi National Alliance, which grouped the main Shia parties, has split into its constituent parts, while Kurdish and Sunni blocs have broken up too. Several religious factions have acquired secular names, with the leader of the Civil Democratic Alliance, a genuinely secular party, complaining: "At least five masquerade behind the word 'civil'." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (31): The Second Amendment supported the right to bear arms:
BEGIN QUOTE:
SECOND AMENDMENT: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
END QUOTE
The Second Amendment's support for a "well regulated Militia" and the right of the people to bear arms is phrased in a peculiarly disjoint fashion, which has led to confusion. Did the Second Amendment mean that citizens could bear arms as members of a militia? Or that citizens could bear arms and also act as members of the militia? In reality, to the Framers, the distinction was irrelevant: citizens with weapons could be called up as militia, whether they formally drilled as such or not.
The "well-regulated" aspect of militias did reflect the interest in the Federal government in providing oversight for state militias, and also the fact that the Framers, and for that matter the states, once again didn't foresee armed citizens fighting as guerrillas against government authority. If the central government exceeded its authority and violated the rights of the states, militias under state control would be able to offer armed resistance.
The modern judicial consensus is that the People have an individual right to bear arms -- though the Second Amendment doesn't forbid limitations on civilian arms, nor does it rule out government oversight of civilian use of weapons. Obviously, the phrase "well-regulated" also implies generous government control over weapons in civilian hands.
The Third Amendment stipulated limitations on the quartering of troops in private households:
BEGIN QUOTE:
THIRD AMENDMENT: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
END QUOTE
The Third Amendment is effectively obsolete. At the outset, it was seen as important because of the way British troops had been quartered in American households, a practice that was bitterly resented. The Third Amendment has never been a serious basis for a Supreme Court decision, being labeled the "runt piglet" of the Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment defined the rights of citizens against unreasonable search and seizure:
BEGIN QUOTE:
FOURTH AMENDMENT: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
END QUOTE
The Fourth Amendment's restrictions on search and seizure, as well as its stipulation that a proper warrant based on "probable cause" was required also did not deny the Federal government's rights of search and seizure, and also has been the focus of ongoing judicial interpretation -- particularly in the modern digital era, where the internet has thrown traditional thinking on privacy into confusion. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from MONEY.CNN.com ("Amazon Wants Alexa Everywhere" by Heather Kelly, 22 September 2018), tech giant Amazon.com is now moving its "Alexa" voice assistant into new niches, having announced 13 new Alexa-based gadgets in September.
Niches they are; it seems unlikely Amazon will make much money with its $60 USD, Alexa-controlled microwave, or with the Alexa-controlled wall clock that sets timers. Other entries are similarly low-end: new Echo smart speakers, an Alexa-driven DVR -- and "Echo Auto", which brings Alexa microphones and commands into the car. Like most first generation Echo devices, the Auto has an uninspired design: a black rectangle with buttons and a cluttering wire connecting it to a power source. Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant are already in vehicles, but they came in through smartphones and built-in car infotainment systems. Amazon is betting that the simple, low-overhead Alexa Auto will have an edge.
Of course, the Alexa-driven gadgets are all part of a greater plan -- to spread Alexa beyond smartphones and smart speakers, to become a continuous presence in our daily lives. Werner Goertz, an analyst at Gartner, comments: "It's absolutely not about the revenues or the gross margins that these devices create. It is investment in the proliferation of Alexa. Proliferation creates an infrastructure."
If Amazon were more crass, the slogan might be: "Dominate Voice Assistants -- Dominate The World!" Goertz suggests the Alexa drive is about drawing customers into the Amazon "ecosystem", with the payoff coming from Alexa users buying products on Amazon.com, consuming Amazon Prime content, and using Amazon Web Services.
It's all about data. Right now, Google has data on user email, calendar, and locations; Apple similarly knows what users do with their smartphones. Amazon primarily knows what users buy and watch; the Alexa push is intended to expand Amazon's data reach. Imagine users having conversations with their microwave ovens, and Amazon accumulating data on what users eat. Julie Ask, an analyst at Forrester, comments: "In order for any one of these virtual assistants to work well, it has to have a lot of contextual data about a consumer. Embedding Alexa would give Amazon a bigger data footprint."
Amazon thinks big. As far as user privacy goes, Amazon has traditionally understood that customers are sensitive on that issue -- but don't get all that upset, as long as Amazon uses the data to fine-tune its services to those customers.
* As discussed by an article from ENGADGET.com ("UPS Has New Electric Trucks That Look Straight Out Of A Pixar Movie" by Kris Holt, 9 May 2018), parcel delivery giant has been on the leading edge in delivery-truck technology, having invested $750 million USD in advanced vehicle tech since 2009. Now the company is working with vehicle manufacturer Arrival on a pilot fleet of 35 electric delivery vans that look like cutesy props in a Pixar animated movie.
The new vans will be tested in Paris and London, to be in service before the end of 2018. They will have a range of 240 kilometers (150 miles) on a single charge, and will have other innovative features -- such as a "highly advanced vehicle display"; a wrap-around windshield that give the driver a wider field of view, to keep a better eye out for cyclists and such; and a driver assistance system to lower driver fatigue. These trucks will add to UPS's armada of more than 300 electric vehicles and almost 700 hybrid vehicles across the US and Europe. UPS has also ordered 125 of Tesla's semi-trucks.
* Tech old-timers will remember, possibly with a certain fondness, the "Nixie" tubes of yesteryear. They were gas-discharge tubes with multiple cathodes and a wire-mesh anode; each cathode was in the form of a numeric digit, and so activating a cathode displayed the appropriate digit in a bright gas discharge.
They were kind of ingenious and also kind of hokey, but there was something fascinating about the way the digits danced forward and back as different cathodes in the stack were activated. Now, as discussed by an article from SPECTRUM.IEEE.org ("Build A Clock With Lixies, The Nixie-Tube Lookalike" by David Schneider, 26 January 2018), those fond of the jumpy Nixie displays can now get a 21st-century replacement, the "Lixie" display.
Lixies are the brainchild of an American inventor named Connor Nishijima. It's a simple idea: a stack of acrylic plates, each etched with a number as Nixie tubes, with controllable LEDs edge-illuminating each plate in the stack. It's just a hobbyist sort of thing, with tinkerers driving Lixie arrays using Arduino processor boards -- Nishijima having provided a library for Arduino users to control the Lixies. Lixie clocks? That might be nice: the digits shifting back and forth have a pleasant, hypnotic quality.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CLEAN UP YOUR ACT: China was once a major customer for America's trash, with a number of Chinese producers dependent on it for raw materiel. However, as discussed by an article from BUSINESSWEEK.com ("China Wants Only the Cleanest Trash" by Michael Sasso, 22 August 2010), China's government is on a major environmental push. In January, new rules went into effect to dictate that China would only accept cleaned plastic and paper waste, without contaminants like grease and broken glass. The Yunnan Xintongji (XTJ) Plastic Engineering Company had been employing 180 people to fabricate construction pipes, made from 1.4 million kilograms (3 million pounds) of plastic trash imported by the company each year. Now XTJ is running at 20% capacity, with only 30 employees left.
XTJ officials got their heads together with their US exporter, Atlanta businessman Song Lin, to come up with a solution. They're collaborating on setting up a recycling plant near Macon, Georgia, to collect scrap plastic, clean it, and "pelletize" it before shipping it to China. Other Chinese companies are also working towards buying or building recycling plants stateside to obtain materials from American trash for manufacturing in China. Recycling consultant Bob Gedert says: "These companies in China are absolutely starving for this material. Many have said they will close up shop if they don't get the materials."
Paper is a critical element in commerce, being used for everything from cardboard shipping boxes to packaging for consumer goods. China's forests are too depleted to be used for paper production, so the country ends up being heavily dependent on imports of wastepaper, or "fiber" as it's known in the industry, to feed its paper mills.
China's restrictions on waste imports have sent shockwaves through the global recycling industry, and have simultaneously inflicted great pain on China's manufacturers. Recovered cardboard now costs them 60% more than it did a year ago. The manufacturers are now hunting for sources of clean waste in the US, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.
In May 2018, a unit of Hong Kong-based Nine Dragons Paper Holdings LTD bought mills in Biron, Wisconsin, and Rumford, Maine, from a Canadian company for $175 million USD. The mills will make paper and packaging products for North American customers, but may expand production to turn American wastepaper into pulp, with the pulp shipped to China -- to be turned into paper products by Nine Dragons' eight paper and containerboard plants in China, plus one in Vietnam.
Similarly, Ecomelida INC -- a recycler controlled by Zhangzhou Sanlida Environmental Technology Corporation, based in China's southern Fujian province -- will collect Americans' used Tetra Pak cartons, which are used to store milk, juices, and broths found in grocery stores, and recycle their paper and plastic in a new $52 million USD plant in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Another of Ecomelida's US production lines will make pulp out of discarded paper and send it to China.
American recycling programs and processing plants have been struggling to meet the stricter standards. Exports of recovered paper have declined significantly in the first months of 2018 -- while the domestic market for recyclables so dismal that some US recycling programs are considering just putting the materials in landfills.
Giant waste hauler Waste Management INC, which has a big recycling operation, expects the effects of the glut in recycled products to reduce its earnings by $100 million USD in 2018. The company has been able to find new customers for some of its recovered paper in places like India and Thailand, but shipping to such countries is more expensive than shipping to China. China's boom trade with the USA has meant a surplus of shipping containers that would have otherwise gone back to China empty.
It seems as retaliation against hostile US trade actions against China, Chinese officials are considering a blanket ban on imports of wastes. That would be a disaster for American recyclers and Chinese manufacturers. Unfortunately, the trade war that has erupted between the US and China is likely to hurt both sides -- and there doesn't seem much prospect of sanity prevailing any time soon.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NOT SO SCARY: As discussed in an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("AI May Not Be Bad News For Workers", 13 September 2018) by "Bartleby", THE ECONOMIST's rotating work / management columnist, there have been worries that artificial intelligence (AI) will put huge numbers of workers out of jobs. A report by Ken Goldberg -- of the University of California, Berkeley -- and Vinod Kumar -- chief executive of Tata Communications, a unit of India's biggest business house -- takes a much more optimistic view, stating that in many cases, job satisfaction will be enhanced by the elimination of mundane tasks, giving people time to be more creative.
That assertion is backed up by a survey of 120 senior executives, conducted for the report, which found that more of them (77%) thought that AI would create new roles than believed it would replace existing positions (57%, respondents could choose both options). Extra skills may be needed to cope with the new technology, and more than half of the bosses are taking measures to train their workforces.
Fears of automation putting massive numbers of people out of work are not new, Goldberg and Kumar pointing to some well-known examples:
AI could make some jobs a lot more pleasant -- for example, truck driving. There's no prospect of making a heavy hauler vehicle that can safely negotiate city traffic just yet, but we've already got the technology to allow one to cruise the freeways on its own. Besides, it would seem like asking for trouble to dispatch a truck loaded with valuable cargo without someone going along with it to make sure it gets where it's supposed to go. For the foreseeable future, a driver will handle the vehicle in cities, then kick back on the cross-country shuttle. That isn't much different than with jetliners, in which the pilots get the machine in the air, turn on autopilot at cruise altitude, keep an eye on things, and then get the aircraft back down on the ground.
In the office, AI can help staffers deal with obnoxious and tricky tasks like managing supply chains and keeping records of meetings: imagine an AI system that acts as an interactive stenographer in meetings, keeping track of the back-&-forth, and summarizing conclusions. Getting rid of the fiddly tasks will let staff focus on real work. AI language translation will help workers deal with colleagues, partners, and clients in other countries.
The report argues that AI could even offer critiques and contrarian opinions on decision-making, to ensure that options aren't overlooked; or it could remind a team that they are straying from the plan established at the outset. When starting a new project, AI could suggest experts from other parts of the organization that could have useful contributions; or it could set criteria for "cognitive diversity", suggesting criteria for hiring people for a project, and working against biases in recruitment.
Companies are already using AI to suggest training options for their workers, and to assess employee feedback to sort through the usual griping and find where real problems exist. Yes, AI is a threat to some lines of repetitive work, but job dislocations due to technological and other change are nothing new -- they're just happening faster now. AI doesn't mean the end of work, instead a changed landscape of work -- and over the long run, everyone stands to be better off for it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REBUILDING IRAQ (1): As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Under Construction", 31 March 2018), when Islamic State (IS) controlled the Iraqi city of Mosul, a drink of booze was punishable by 80 lashes. Now the booze flows openly and freely in night spots. Shops have new fronts and are open for business; families crowd to restaurants. None of the women are wearing the niqab, the face-veil.
The revival of Mosul echoes that of Iraq as a whole. When IS captured the city in 2014, Iraq seemed hopeless. Its armed forced seemed to melt on contact with the enemy; the government controlled less than half the country, and IS appeared poised to grab Baghdad. The collapse of oil prices in 2015 left the government broke. The American invasion of Iraq had been performed with the stated goal of getting rid of the admittedly loathsome Saddam Hussein, with the expectation that a new, free, prosperous Iraq would emerge. What happened instead was a country in physical, political, and social ruin.
Now, after so much destruction and spilling of blood, Iraq is coming together. Its forces, with foreign help, threw out IS, Iraqi soldiers becoming skillful warriors in the process. Baghdad, whose streets were once unsafe for all, no longer exists in a state of fear. The recent growth in oil prices has made the government flush with money.
Given how unsettled the Middle East is and Iraq's recent past, it is startling that the country enjoys good relations with all its neighbors. America and Iran may be bitter rivals, but both give Iraq military and political backing. Gulf states have restored diplomatic relations, and are investing. Most impressively, Iraq is a democracy, its fourth multiparty election since 2003 having taken place in May 2018. Iraqis speak freely, while media and civic groups are lively.
Might it be said that the US invasion of Iraq actually achieved its goals? If so, it was at great expense. In the wake of the invasion, some 300,000 Iraqis and 4,400 American soldiers were killed. The fight against IS was particularly vicious, the numbers killed being estimated as at least 7,000 civilians, 20,000 security personnel, and over 23,000 IS fighters. Priceless heritage, like Mosul's old city, was reduced to rubble, while about 6 million people, most of them Sunnis, lost their homes.
However it was done, the end result was to tame Iraq's warring factions. Iraqi Sunnis were the big losers in the fall of Saddam Hussein: while no more than 20% of the population, they had dominated Iraq from Ottoman times. They bitterly pushed back against the new Shia-dominated government, only to exhaust themselves in the end, becoming more resigned to the new order. According to an influential government adviser: "Sunnis finally felt what it meant to be Kurdish or Shia. They know they are no longer top dogs."
It is easier for Sunnis to be resigned since the long-repressed Shia majority, which makes up about 60% of Iraq's population, have become to a degree exhausted themselves. Shias are weary of fighting, factionalism, and corruption in their own ranks. Iraqi Shias and Sunnis are increasingly realizing they're in the same boat.
The Kurds are finding that out as well. Under Saddam Hussein, they were brutally suppressed; under the new Iraq regime, they have enjoyed a degree of autonomy in their enclave in Iraq's northeast. However, in September 2017, Kurdish President Masoud Barzani decided to call a referendum for an independent Kurdish state. It was a painful blunder: America and Iran angrily protested, while the central government in Baghdad hit back selectively and effectively, with government forces seizing disputed territories held by Kurds outside their enclave -- the Kurds losing 40% of the territory that had been under their control.
The central government also shut down all foreign flights into the Kurdish enclave. That embargo's been lifted, while Kurdish leadership is negotiating a return to normalcy. Many Kurds were not that upset about Barzani's failure, his leadership being corrupt and autocratic. One teacher says: "It would have been a Barzanistan, not a Kurdistan." -- echoing the nasty governments of the Central Asian nations that emerged from the ruins of the USSR. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (30): The First Amendment protected freedom of expression -- freedom of religious belief being specified in the "Establishment Clause" and coupled "Free Exercise Clause"; with general freedom of expression being specified in the "Freedom of Speech Clause", "Freedom of the Press Clause", and "Freedom of Assembly Clause":
BEGIN QUOTE:
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
END QUOTE
The First Amendment denied the right of the Federal government to suppress or promote any religion, and affirmed the rights of citizens to speak out, assemble peaceably, or press their case on the Federal government. Although the amendment only specified "Congress", by implication it meant the rest of the government as well. Congress made the laws; the Federal government obeyed the laws.
While the First Amendment is often popularly interpreted in absolute terms, it is subject to constraints expressed or implied by the rest of the Constitution, with these constraints being gradually defined by judicial decisions. Freedom of speech is not unrestricted; if it contradicts other elements of the Constitution, the judiciary may decide against it. To modern times, exceptions to free speech have been established, including:
As far as First Amendment freedom of belief goes, there was a tension in the Constitution between those who wanted the Federal government to be impartial to religion, and those who wanted it to endorse religion. Those who wanted impartiality were generally members of minority religions, who feared suppression by the majority -- the state of Maryland, which was traditionally Catholic, had reason to worry about being pushed around by the other states, which were more or less dominated by various sects of Protestantism. Those states that didn't want impartiality were dominated by majority religions, and didn't want to see "Jews, Muslims, or Atheists" in government ... some might have added "Catholics" as well.
These two points of view were incompatible: one had to win, the other had to lose. Given there were frictions between some of the states over religion, there was no way that a workable central government could take sides, and so the Constitution came down solidly in favor of impartiality, the alternative being too crippled by contradiction to fly. Federalists reassured those who feared the government falling under the control of "Jews, Muslims, and Atheists" that such folk were unlikely to elected, or appointed to any high government position. That, at the time, was no doubt true, but the Constitution nonetheless left the door open to believers in non-Christian religions, or nonbelievers.
The First Amendment assurances of freedom of belief remain in tension, with persistent efforts in modern times by extremist religious groups to undermine the Federal government's neutrality towards religion. In the limit, these groups wish to establish a Federal government dominated by and beholden to religion.
The logical and Constitutional defects of this position are too obvious to need comment. What is relevant here is that the claim is made that the Constitution does indeed endorse Christian belief, one ploy to this end being that it doesn't mention "separation of church and state" -- which is how First Amendment religious impartiality is expressed in modern times. That's obviously a purely rhetorical and frivolous objection, but they don't stop there at frivolity.
In response to the fact that the Constitution never mentions God or endorses any religion, extremists like to point out that the signature page of the Constitution starts with:
BEGIN QUOTE:
DONE in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names ...
END QUOTE
The relevant statement here is "In the Year of our Lord", with this formalism proclaimed as amounting to a broad endorsement of religion by the Constitution. This is obviously reaching, but it does pose the question of: "Very well, if it's part of the Constitution, then why isn't it a constitutional endorsement of religion?" When it comes to legal documents, "obvious good sense" doesn't always carry the day.
In reality, the signature page was not included in the copies of the Constitution sent to the states for ratification, was not part of the document as ratified, and never has been a consideration in judicial decisions. To the extent that anything might be read into the comment "In the Year of our Lord", it was as an example of the exercise of freedom of belief on the part of the Framers, in the same way that a president can personally choose to swear the oath of office on a Bible -- or not. It is a sign of the extremism of the present day that it doesn't appear anyone made a fuss about the signature page until recent decades. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How Bright Colors Help These Poison Tree Frogs Hide From Predators" by Michael Allen, 13 June 2018), the poison tree frogs of the jungles of Latin America feature bright blues, yellows, and oranges, as a way of warning predators: I AM POISON AND YOU DON'T WANT TO EAT ME.
However, there's a problem with this sort of advertisement -- in that it only works with predators that have tried to eat the frogs before, and regretted it. That means the bright colors would, in principle, simply make the frog more noticeable to predators that hadn't eaten it before. In addition, there are some birds and snakes that can cope with the poison, and have no real trouble eating the frogs. Wouldn't that end up making the bright colors more of a drawback than an advantage?
Researchers got to wondering if, counterintuitively, the bright colors didn't actually amount to a sort of camouflage. They investigated the "dyeing poison frog" (Dendrobates tinctorius), which lives on the forest floor in the lowland tropical rainforests of South America's Guiana Shield -- an ancient geological formation underlying the northeastern coast and parts of Venezuela and Brazil. These frogs are blue-black with a bright yellow ring, sometimes a figure-8 around their head and back. Like a fingerprint, each frog has its own unique pattern.
The researchers began using computer models of predator vision to inspect images of the frogs -- to find that although the amphibians are obvious at close range, their colors and patterns merge into the rainforest background as viewing distance increases. Simulations being no more than clues, the researchers then placed model frogs on different backgrounds in a French Guianan rainforest to see how predators reacted. Predators attacked frog models more often when they were placed atop an image of plain soil or a colored paper square, but less often when they were on the actual rainforest floor.
Similarly, humans who saw images of frogs in the rainforest took longer to spot the real frogs at a distance than with the image frog that had been altered so that it didn't have the same colors and patterns. The researchers concluded that at short range, the frog coloration gives a warning; but at long range, it provides concealment. They also suggest, very plausibly, that the frog's color pattern has a specific ratio and distribution of colors, optimized by selection to work both ways.
* As discussed some time back in an article from NATURE.com ("Microbes Help Vultures Eat Rotting Meat" by Ewen Callaway, 26 November 2014), vultures thrive on a diet of rotting meat that would kill most other animals. A study shows that they get by using unusually aggressive gastric juices, and a gut microbiome adapted to the lifestyle of the birds.
The problem with eating carrion is that, after an animal dies, microbes that had been suppressed by the animal's immune system proliferate, generating toxic compounds; soil-dwelling pathogens like Bacillus anthracis, the cause of anthrax, also find a dead animal a productive host, with anthrax being a notorious source of toxins. To find out how vultures can eat such fare, Lars Hansen -- a microbiologist at Aarhus University in Roskilde, Denmark -- and his team analyzed the microbes growing in the guts and on the faces of two species of New World vulture: black vultures (Coragyps atratus) and turkey vultures (Cathartes aura). They sampled 26 black vultures and 24 turkey vultures that had been killed by US Federal officials as part of population-control efforts in Nashville, Tennessee.
When vultures gorge on a corpse, they sink their heads deep inside. It was little surprise, then, that their faces turned out to be microbiological menageries, with DNA from, on average, more than 500 species of microbe, as well as from cows, horses, pigs and other mammals.
On investigation of the birds' guts, however, they found many fewer microbes -- 76 species, on average, compared to the hundreds typically found in humans. There was also no sign of DNA from the birds' meals, the researchers report. Hansen says: "The vultures' stomachs are extremely harsh environments, frying everything that passes through. Even the prey DNA does not pass through."
The microbes that do thrive in vultures' guts are dominated by two types of bacterium: Clostridia -- which often produce toxins, including the one that causes botulism -- and Fusobacteria -- some of which are flesh-eating. It is not clear if the bacterial strains in the vulture gut are harmless, or if the immune system of the birds simply resists their harm. Hansen and his team are now working on obtaining the genomes of the bacteria to find out more.
Certainly, the bacteria help the birds survive on their nasty diet. A 2013 study of the gut microbiome of alligators, also carrion eaters, found high levels of the same two bacterial families. It's hard to think of that as coincidental.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This Saltwater Trout Evolved To Live In Freshwater -- In Just 100 Years" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 1 June 2018), the stereotypical view of evolution is that it takes millennia to notice changes. However, a new study shows how steelhead trout from a saltwater environment adapted to a freshwater environment, in little more than a century.
Oceanic steelheads do spend part of their lives in fresh water, hatching in rivers hundreds of kilometers from the Pacific, to migrate to the ocean, and then go back upriver to spawn. Rainbow trout, which are a variant of steelhead, spend all their lives in fresh water. The particular line of steelheads in question, however, spent all their lives in California's salty inland seas, being transplanted to Lake Michigan in the 1890s as game fish.
The fish adapted. To determine how, evolutionary biologist Mark Christie from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his postdoc Janna Willoughby sequenced the genomes of 264 of these steelheads. The genomic data suggested that most of the transplanted fish didn't survive. The few survivors didn't exactly thrive until the 1980s -- when their population began to boom and even diversify, it seems because of interbreeding with newly-introduced hatchery fish.
The study show that the Lake Michigan steelheads differed from their saltwater ancestors in three regions of DNA. Two of those regions contain genes critical for maintaining the fish's internal salt balance: freshwater fish must take in extra salts, while saltwater fish have to get rid of them, and moving salt in opposite directions requires different versions of the relevant genes. Another DNA region seems to affect wound healing -- which may allow the freshwater steelheads recover from parasitic lampreys, which are widespread in Lake Michigan.
The authors of the study see no evidence that the steelheads interbred with rainbow trout to get the right genes, and do not believe the genes arose by mutation after the transplants. They instead suspect the "right" genes were present in a few members of the transplanted population that survived the move, and were propagated via sexual reproduction through the Lake Michigan population. Further research is needed to validate that idea; there are other examples of fish adaptations between fresh and salt water, which are likely to involve the same genes.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AEOLUS IN ORBIT: As discussed by an article from NASASPACEFLIGHT.com ("Arianespace's Vega Rocket Launches ESA's Aeolus" by William Graham, 22 August 2018), on 22 August 2018, an Arianespace Vega light booster was launched from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, to put the European Space Agency's "Aeolus" satellite into orbit. The intent of the mission is to make the first comprehensive map of the world's winds -- in three dimensions, from the surface of the Earth to an altitude of 30 kilometers (100,000 feet). The data will help refine weather and climate models.
Aeolus, more formally named the "Atmospheric Dynamics Mission (ADM)", carries a single science payload, the "Atmospheric Laser Doppler Instrument (ALADIN)", built around ultraviolet lasers and a telescope with an aperture of 1.5 meters (5 feet). The lasers fire 50 pulses a second -- in 7-second bursts, on intervals of 21 seconds -- with UV light reflected from the beam by atmospheric molecules or particles picked up the telescope. The motion of the particles will cause a slight Doppler shift in the wavelength of the UV light, which gives the wind speed and direction. The beams are pointed 35 degrees off the satellite's ground track, away from the Sun, with the slant allowing horizontal atmospheric motion to be determined.
Earlier satellites were limited to obtaining winds measurements by tracking the movement of clouds and aerosols, or by measuring the effect of winds on the ocean surface. Aeolus, in contrast, can measure winds all over the world, all the time -- though it can't penetrate thick cloud cover. The Aeolus mission was initiated in 1999, and was supposed to fly in 2008, but nobody had built an instrument like ALADIN before.
Getting a high-power UV laser that was reliable enough to handle a space mission was a particular challenge. It was also tough to make optical elements that could stand high-power UV laser pulses. Another problem was that trace-gas hydrocarbon contaminants could blacken ALADIN's optics, with heating of spacecraft elements by the laser helping to produce such contaminants. The solution was to add an oxygen system so the hydrocarbons burn into CO2 and other gaseous products, instead of fouling the optics. The oxygen system is expected to last three years, putting a limit on mission lifetime. Finally, to get accurate wind measurements meant critical mechanical dimensions on the order of microns or even nanometers.
The Aeolus satellite was built by Airbus Defense and Space's spacecraft plant in Stevenage, England. The satellite design was based on that used by ESA's Rosetta and Mars Express interplanetary probes. Airbus Defense and Space's division in Toulouse, France, developed ALADIN, with the laser transmitters supplied by the Italian company Leonardo in Florence and Pomezia, Italy. Launch mass was about 1,365 kilograms (3,010 pounds).
Worries that pressure changes during air transport to Kourou might throw off ALADIN's meant that the Aeolus satellite was carried by a ship to French Guiana. The instrument was meticulously cleaned before launch to ensure pressure changes during ascent would do no harm. Aeolus was placed in a polar orbit at altitude of about 320 kilometers (200 miles) -- more specifically a "dawn-dusk" orbit, meaning the satellite roughly follows the boundary between day and night, as it performs an orbit about once every 90 minutes.
Aeolus was the fifth in ESA's Earth Explorer missions -- a series of satellite projects intended to observe a specific part of the Earth's land, sea, or atmospheric environments, while evaluating new technology for future Earth observation missions. Earlier missions included:
Earth Explorer missions consist of two categories, including "Core" missions, which are conducted with broad support from the science community to answer broad science questions, and "Opportunity" missions, which are lower cost, and flown to answer immediate specific questions.
Aeolus was named after the keeper of winds in Greek mythology. The Vega booster has three solid rocket stages, plus a liquid-fuel upper stage for orbital injection. Avio of Italy is the prime contractor. This was the 12th launch of the Vega, all 12 launches to date having been successful.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SMART STREETLIGHTS: As discussed by an article from SPECTRUM.IEEE.com ("San Diego Installs Smart Streetlights to Monitor the Metropolis" by Tekla S. Perry, 1 Jan 2018), it is obvious that the long-established metropolitan streetlight network provides a convenient foundation for 21st-century municipal technology. The city of San Diego, California, has set up a 21st-century streetlight network in the East Village neighborhood, with the "smart streetlights" monitoring conditions around them.
During 2018, an initial pilot network of 50 smart streetlights was expanded to 3,200. The streetlight were implemented by Current, a branch of General Electric (GE). Each smart streetlight incorporates a package of hardware that Current calls "CityIQ", which includes:
Much of the data gathered is processed on board, with selected events or streams of data uploaded to GE's Predix cloud, via AT&T's LTE network.
Each streetlight watches over an oval area of roughly 36 by 54 meters (120 to 180 feet). Initially, the city plans to allow the streetlight to point out vacant parking spaces, and spot illegally parked cars. Later, they will be used to monitor traffic flow to determine what intersections are the most congested, and have the highest accident rates. There's thought of integrating the smart streetlights into San Diego's existing "ShotSpotter" network, which listens for and locates the sounds of gunfire. Of course, the network could also monitor for other troubles, for example the sound of broken glass or a car crash.
Data from this urban sensing network will be publicly available, with software developers building apps to exploit the data. The city, GE, and other interested organizations have already hosted "hackathons", with emerging tools including:
Along with the sensing streetlights, San Diego will be replacing an additional 14,000 of the city's more than 40,000 streetlights with energy-efficient LED lamps with wireless links, allowing operators to adjust brightness to save energy. The cost of the LED lamps is about $30 million USD, but they're a bargain at the price, since they cut power consumption by 60%. Financial projections show they will save enough money to pay off the entire streetlight update in 13 years. GE is planning a second CityIQ smart streetlight network for Atlanta, with other US cities also considering the technology.
ED: I haven't heard privacy advocates complaining about the CityIQ network just yet. It does seem a bit like Big Brother -- but there's nothing to forbid any level of surveillance of public spaces. Any objections to smart streetlights would also apply to streetlights in general. Of course, access to the network has to be restricted, with commercial apps only able to access crunched data.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: I was out on my daily walk in the dark a few weeks back, and noticed a house with an amber driveway light. I found the warm color appealing, and thought I'd get one for myself. On investigation on Amazon.com, however, I ran into LED bulbs that changed color; they were cheap, so I bought one.
The bulb came with a little infrared remote. I didn't think the remote would work through the driveway light fixture; but I could screw the bulb into a light fixture in the house, set it with the remote, then unscrew it and plug it into the driveway light fixture. The bulb will remember its setting. I set it to slow continuous color change. It changes very slowly and it's boring to watch, but it's fun to just glance at it, and find it's a different color. I think I'll get one for my porch light, set it to blinking colors, and turn it on when I feel like it.
I also had two of the old PCs -- a notebook and a laptop -- that I use as appliances around the house finally die on me, at almost the same time. I ended up buying, as a replacement for one, an RCA Cambio Windows 10 combo tablet-notebook for $107 USD. It's a nice little item; it doesn't have a hard drive, just a 32 GB flash drive, but it works fine as an appliance. I bought a 128 GB micro-SD flash card for it, but it wasn't necessary.
The magnetic keyboard that came with it is cheesy, but the Cambio works fine with a Logitech wireless keyboard. I'm going to use the Cambio as my kitchen computer, with the Logitech keyboard an external display. The Cambio has an HDMI video output while the display only has a VGA connection, but an HDMI-to-VGA converter is cheap.
When I get a new PC, I have to integrate it into my household wireless network. While establishing a wi-fi hookup is easy, configuring a network is always a pain; sometimes I can get it to work, sometimes not. I finally realized that all I need is the OneDrive app, which shares a directory tree between all my PCs and an online page. All I want is file transfer, and OneDrive does it automatically. When I do update a directory under the OneDrive tree, I have to remember to fire up a PC that will use the files in the directory so it can update, but that's not much of a bother. It's kind of fun to finally have my house wired together over wi-fi, and I'll extend it in time.
* As for the Real Fake News of September, the month got started out noisily with the release of Bob Woodward's book FEAR, describing the chaos in the Trump White House. Of course, the book was something of a shrug, since it didn't really say anything that people with sense didn't already know. However, unlike the previous books released on the Trump Administration, Bob Woodward is a highly respected journalist, and so his words carry more clout.
One of the items from FEAR that was a little surprising was a report that Trump proposed to eliminate the budget deficit by printing more money. Even with Woodward, that almost defies belief. Comedian Jimmy Fallon said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Before his staff could stop him, Trump ran to Kinko's Copies with a $100 bill and said: "Make me a trillion copies."
END QUOTE
The release of FEAR was accompanied by the publication in THE NEW YORK TIMES of an op-ed by an anonymous Trump Administration insider, which emphasized the president's unsuitability for his office, and said White House officials were trying to work around him to keep the government on an even keel. The op-ed was denounced on the Left as an attempt by the GOP to cover themselves -- to blame all the troubles of the current political order on Trump, and cover up the fact that it was the Republicans, through their tilt towards extremism and white nationalism, who made Trump possible.
From a more moderate point of view, the op-ed less suggested fear as such, as it did desperation, with the GOP thrashing about in a trap of their own making. Certainly, it was gratifying to think of the Trump White House, which is nothing resembling efficient, further bogged down in paranoia and a hunt to find out who wrote the op-ed. It couldn't happen to nicer people.
However, after that, the month went relatively quiet, evidence that Trump has indeed run out of grandstand plays, with matters reduced to rumblings over squeezing Iran, pursuing a trade war with China, and other Trump games. As the month rolled on, he was increasingly upstaged by the Senate confirmation hearing for the appointment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court -- which developed into a noisy three-ring circus / five-alarm fire of accusations of sexual assaults in his youth. How that's going to play out, remains be seen; it's ugly, it's nasty, and it seems prudent to stay out of the line of fire.
Trump did get back in the headlines on 25 September, when he spoke at the United Nations in New York, saying: "In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country -- so true!" A titter of laughter broke out in the audience. He brassed it out, of course, but it was still unprecedented for a President of the United States to be laughed at in an international forum. One might wish it becomes a habit. A CNN editorial said that international leaders were going to regret laughing at Trump. Why? It's hard to believe Trump can treat his allies much worse than he already does.
The fact that Trump appears to be running low on steam was underlined at the end of the month, when Congress passed an ongoing budget resolution. Trump had promised to veto it if it didn't give him money for his border wall -- but, somewhat surprisingly, he backed down. Trump no longer seems very convinced that it will ever happen.
The other bottom line, however, is that no matter how much uproar comes out of the White House, there is no prospect of Trump being dislodged from office before 2021. Conviction in an impeachment takes a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate, and the Republicans are not going to play along. As for talk of removing Trump via the 25th Amendment, that implies his own cabinet will depose him, which is even more ridiculous. The only sensible counsel is patience: Trump's election was the result of a drift towards extremism over decades, and the problem is not going to be fixed overnight.
The facts, as they stand, show that Trump will serve out his four-year term. On an historical basis, two more years isn't that long a time, and ultimately Trump is going to be nothing but a very temporary lapse of sanity in American history. There's definitely a bright side, in that the Republicans will get a four-year roll down a flight of stairs under Trump -- and when it is done, they will have a very bad morning-after. Better yet, it won't be nearly as bad as Trump's.
Yes, it's painful for all, but the Civil War was much worse, and the USA came out of that conflict stronger than it was when it began. In comparison, the era of Trump is a low comedy. More significantly, Trump needs to run again in 2020, and be decisively crushed by the voters, to show those who admire him that the future of the USA is not Trump, or anyone like him.
* Beyond the Judge Kavanaugh hearings, the focus is now on US mid-term elections, with the Right clearly on the defensive. THE ECONOMIST took a close-up of Gary Johnson, previously Republican governor of New Mexico, now a Libertarian candidate for the Senate from that state. The article was sympathetic to Johnson, who commented about talking to voters:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The bad part is you find yourself with people that have really bad breath. What comes out of their mouth is just as bad. You cannot make heads or tails out of what the person talking to you is even saying.
END QUOTE
People tend to find Johnson honest, if somewhat goofy. It is ironic, then, that he's the most prominent advocate of Libertarian principles in America. Many Libertarians embraced Trump, who has no concept of any principles, Libertarian or otherwise. Trump is only about greed and white identity, with an associated hostility to foreigners, immigrants, minorities, and the poor -- who are believed by Trump supporters to be getting vast handouts from the government. Thomas Massie, a Libertarian-leaning congressman, honestly admitted that he was appalled by the voters:
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After some soul-searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas -- they were voting for the craziest son-of-a-bitch in the race.
END QUOTE
Trump has toadied up to dictators, blown up the deficit, raised barriers to trade and immigration, railed against civil liberties and states' rights, and put former lobbyists in charge of deregulation -- but Senator Rand Paul, a self-described Libertarian conservative, has been one of his most faithful allies. Paul occasionally raises concerns about Trump, but always quickly caves in and endorses the president.
Libertarians could take satisfaction in recent decades in watching the Republican Party learn to sing the Libertarian tune -- but Trump has proven Libertarianism hollow, revealing it to be a nattering front operation for white populism on one hand, and troglodyte capitalism on the other. Democrats have long claimed that Republican rhetoric about liberty amounted to no more than a pretext for lower taxes for the rich, along with fewer food stamps for the poor, and removing curbs on pollution. At one time, that could have been judged an exaggeration -- but not any more, the Trump party and its rich backers having proven their worst critics right.
Gary Johnson is a pragmatist, something unusual among Libertarians, Johnson knowing that ideology comes second to reality. He is appealing in his own way -- but does anyone want him? Not being the "craziest son-of-a-bitch in the race", Trump voters don't want him; and Libertarianism, now indistinguishable from Trumpism, into which the Republican Party has collapsed, has no appeal to the Left.
* Trying to predict how mid-term elections are going to turn out is a sucker's game, but the Left has good cause for confidence. Donald Trump lost the popular election in 2016, in an election with a voter turnout of only 56% -- when it had been 60% or better in the previous three elections. From the day he took office, his approval ratings have been effectively fixed: nobody who voted for him is going to budge, nobody who dislikes him is going to budge either.
There is some variation in his Gallup poll approval ratings. On the average, approval is about 40%, disapproval is about 55%. It can shift about 5% either way, with approval going up toward 45%, or down towards 35%, and disapproval tracking the shift in the reverse direction. The shift means nothing except that about 15% of the citizens don't have a strong opinion on Trump one way or another; and such people are too indifferent to vote. They're irrelevant. A comparison chart of Trump's approval ratings in his presidency to date as referenced to charts of the approval ratings of all postwar presidents shows that Trump's approval is effectively flat, and consistently low.
There is another factor in the mid-terms, in that Trump voters liked him because he wasn't a politician. They don't like any politicians, Republicans included. Trump voters are also not very interested in keeping up with events -- contemptuous of the mainstream media, inclined to grab onto conspiracy theories, preferring them to reality. This is not a voter base that Republican politicians can rest much weight on. Add to this the fact that voter turnout in US mid-term elections is traditionally low ...
... but in 2018, the Democrats are highly energized. The comparative enthusiasm of the Democrats does have a downside, however, in that the hothead Left have become very loud and belligerent. That raises the concern that, following Trump, the US will get a Left-extremist administration, which would founder and then inevitably cycle back to a Right-extremist administration in turn; but not to worry so much. While the Democrats have shifted Leftward as a group, in the Democratic primaries, the moderates predominated. Although the hothead Left scored some significant wins, they mostly did so in places where such folk are thick on the ground -- while some of them did so in places where the odds of a Democrat winning the mid-terms are very poor.
The California primaries were particularly noisy and acrimonious, but in the end, the results did not suggest a Leftist revolution. Those close to the race suggested that the sniping between the hotheads and moderates was mostly noise. As was said in another context: "If they were serious, they'd kill each other."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE