*21 entries including: US Constitution (series), public security & data privacy (series), infant learning and AI (series), digital payments for India, nerve agent threat, who pays for tariffs, 21st-century launderers, banks get marketable data from charge cards, Boeing T-X trainer, and AIDS weariness.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR NOVEMBER 2018: As discussed by an article from MSNBC.com ("Norway Calling Out Russia's Jamming Shows European Policy Shift" by Alexander Smith, 24 November 2018), in October NATO conducted the biggest military exercise the alliance has conducted since the end of the Cold War. Exercise TRIDENT JUNCTURE was hosted by Norway, lasted two weeks, and involved 50,000 personnel from 31 countries.
The exercise clearly was meant to show potential adversaries (read as "Russia") that NATO was still alive and kicking. To emphasize the vigor, in mid-November Norway announced that Russian forces stationed in the Kola Peninsula to the north of the country had jammed GPS signals during TRIDENT JUNCTURE, with NATO calling the act "dangerous, disruptive and irresponsible."
The Russians, of course, blandly denied they had done any such thing, and it seems the Russians often jam NATO activities anyway. The difference is that NATO is no longer taking a quiet approach to such provocations. Instead of closed-door discussions, NATO has become confrontational, with Jack Watling -- a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank -- saying that NATO is now using a "public engagement campaign, which basically calls people out for cyber attacks, jamming, and disruptive behavior to try and deter and discourage it."
There's been no official commitment to the new policy, but analysts say it's perfectly obvious, having emerged after the ex-spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned -- allegedly on Kremlin orders -- on British soil in March 2018. The Europeans have given up on low-profile discussions with the Russians, since all they do is deny and lie.
British authorities have publicly laid out in detail the attempt on Skripal's life, tracing out the movements of two men they identified as agents of Russian military intelligence -- still known by its old acronym of "GRU" -- who traveled to Salisbury in the UK, where they allegedly poisoned Skripal and his daughter. The British were able to list the flights they boarded, the trains they took, and the hotels where they stayed. This public revelation signaled that the gloves were off.
As discussed in this column last month, in October Dutch police described an alleged GRU plot to hack into the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. They caught four Russians involved, and deported them back to Russia. Just before the Dutch police made this announcement, the British government, backed by New Zealand and Australia, again named and shamed the GRU as being behind a number of "indiscriminate and reckless cyber attacks targeting political institutions, businesses, media and sport" around the world.
The list published by the UK government ranged from attacks on the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2016 to the now-infamous hacking of the Democratic National Committee in the same year. The same day as these revelations, the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against seven Russian military intelligence officers.
There have been complaints against the Russians before, but now a coordinated push-back is evident. According to Watling, the new policy is designed to put pressure on the Kremlin and associated individuals, making them think twice before engaging in behavior the US and Europe are likely to punish. Watling asks: "Are they prepared to live the rest of their lives in Russia? Are they prepared to not engage in the international financial system?"
Watling adds: "The Russians for a very long time have relied on deniability as a way of doing things that otherwise wouldn't be acceptable. Now the message is: Look, we know what you're doing, and it's not okay."
* As discussed in an essay by "Banyan", THE ECONOMIST's rotating Asia columnist ("How To Read Japan's Rapprochement With China", 25 October 2018), on 26 October 2018, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo paid a state visit to Beijing, to be given a lavish reception by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the two leaders signing a number of agreements for cooperation between their two countries.
Sino-Japanese relations have gone through a great turnaround as of late. In 2012, China and Japan almost seemed at blows over claims to the Senkaku Islands, known to the Chinese as the Diaoyu, with the government encouraging public hostility to Japan. Abe went to Beijing in 2014 to reduce tensions, Xi shook his hand with a theatrically sour expression on his face.
Xi is smiling now, having assessed that getting along with the Japanese is much more useful than fighting with them. Japan is an important source of certain imports, such as machine tools; but more importantly, with US President Donald Trump on the trade warpath against China, Beijing doesn't want a fight with Japan as well. Trump is also a deciding factor for Japan, the noisy American president having done much to make the Japanese nervous about their close and long-standing alliance with the USA.
Are the Japanese now deciding to re-align with China? The answer is NO. Japan is not giving up on its ties with the USA, since Trump will be gone sooner or later, and it is most unlikely his successors will have the same appalling contempt for America's allies as Trump does. Rapprochement between China and Japan doesn't mean an alliance can be seen down the road, it just means they don't feel like fighting any more than they need to. Japan's new agreements with China don't inconvenience the Japanese at all. The biggest agreement was re-establishment of a swap arrangement between the central banks countries. It may not amount to much in practice -- and if it does, it is likely that China, with its indebted banks and wobbly currency, would not be in the driver's seat in the dealings.
Similarly, although Japan is interested in taking part in China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), encouraging Japanese businesses to seek opportunities in it, Japan's goal is not to aid Chinese diplomacy but to counter it, by boosting Japan's own soft power in South-East Asia and beyond. Internationalizing the BRI undermines Chinese domination of it, showing how much more attractive the international rules-based system is than Chinese mercantilism.
The Japanese strategy even has a name: a "free and open Indo-Pacific". The alliance with America remains at its core. Australia is an enthusiastic accomplice, with British and French navies as supporting actors. Japan diplomats are courting India as well, and hope for success in their overtures. Again, the entire point is to balance China.
This is competition, not war, and Abe needs to keep it as friendly as possible. There are plenty of opportunities for polishing relations with Beijing. A new emperor will we crowned in the spring of 2019, with Japan hosting the G20 in Osaka that summer, and Xi making his first state visit to Japan around the same time. Tokyo will then host the Olympics in 2020. Nonetheless, however pleasant relations between China and Japan become, the Japanese know it is the alliance with the USA that counts. They don't like Trump's loud and uncouth hostility to China, that's not the way Japanese do things -- but they know that over the long run or even the mid-term, America is a friend, and China is a rival.
* As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Trump's Threat to Leave the WTO Could Be a Saving Grace" by Shawn Donnan & Bryce Baschuk, 11 October 2018), US President Donald Trump has rejected the traditional multilateral world trade system, in favor of bilateral "deals" involving a good deal of theater and not always much logic. The result has been to marginalize the World Trade Organization (WTO), the trade system's "referee", headquartered in Geneva.
Trump believes that the WTO, the referee for the world's trading nations, has favored China unfairly ever since the country joined the body in 2001 -- categorizing it as a "developing nation" even after it had become an economic powerhouse. In August, Trump said the US will pull out of the WTO if it doesn't "shape up". His administration is also strangling the organization by blocking the appointment of judges to the institution's appellate body.
While the European Union, Japan, and other major members of the WTO have no liking for Trump's bullying ways of doing things, there's a general consensus that things could be improved. Even Roberto Azevedo, the WTO's director-general, concedes: "This guy comes along, and he begins to shake the tree pretty hard. So let's make sure that some fruits fall. Let's make sure also that you don't kill the tree by shaking it too hard."
The irrelevance of the WTO in the trade war between the US and China has been lost on no one, and everyone also knows WTO's 164 members have over the past two decades acquired a reputation for failing to tackle anything difficult. Rescue efforts are under way. In September, Canada and the EU published separate blueprints for reforming the three pillars of the WTO's work -- negotiation, dispute settlement, and monitoring -- while pushing an update of global trading rules. In late October, Canada hosted a meeting of like-minded WTO members in Ottawa that excluded the US and China, with EU officials are fanning out to Beijing, Washington, and other capitals to put out feelers to probe support for reform.
In their papers, Canada and the EU argue for an update to global trading rules that have remained much the same since the organization was founded in the 1990s. Both also propose use of "plurilateral," sector-specific negotiations, which would allow smaller groups of members to circumvent the usual requirement for unanimity, bypassing the effective veto power that even a small WTO member can wield.
Much of the conversation is aimed directly at China, which the Trump administration complains the WTO has failed to keep in check. Dennis Shea, Trump's ambassador to the WTO, says: "China's economic model is inconsistent with the norms of the WTO, and this is something that this institution really needs to grapple with if we are going to move forward."
Again, America's allies agree with the USA that China's trade policies are annoying. The EU and Japan are joining hands with the USA to to draw up rules to address common complaints aimed at China over its industrial subsidies, state-owned enterprises, and theft of intellectual property. There's also a push to downgrade or eliminate China's status as a "developing" country. The Chinese are pushing back, Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen telling fellow WTO members in July: "For China, holding our feet to the fire never worked. Extortion, distortion, or demonization does no good to resolve the issues."
Once again, if there's agreement between the US and its allies in the WTO on the problems, there's not much appreciation of how the Trump Administration is addressing them. Trump, with his dislike of multilateral relationships and his boorish contempt for allies, makes efforts to devise a common front difficult. There is particular unhappiness with his blockade of the WTO's appellate body. The Trump Administration has managed to thin the ranks of serving judges from seven to three, the minimum needed for an appeal. The terms of two more judges expire by the end of 2019, meaning total paralysis could be approaching.
Many in Geneva suspect, with good reason, that the Trump Administration simply wants to discard the rule book, so the US can adopt any trade policies it likes to coerce trading partners to do America's bidding. In Trump and his trade czar Robert Lighthizer, a veteran of the Reagan administration's Japan trade battles, many in Geneva see two protectionists fighting to rewind the global trade order to the pre-WTO 1980s.
As a lawyer for the US steel industry for much of his career, Lighthizer was on the losing end of a series of WTO cases related to antidumping duties and the USA's method of calculating punitive tariffs. He and his supporters argue that those decisions amounted to violations of US sovereignty. James Bacchus, a former Democratic congressman and once head of the WTO's appellate body, says Lighthizer and his team are "a bunch of steel lawyers on the protectionist side" targeting the WTO out of spite, explaining. "They lost a number of cases they should have lost in the WTO, and now they are seeking revenge."
While some WTO members are seeking changes in the appellate body to appease the USA, they're contemplating stopgap measures to keep the WTO going in spite of American interference. One idea is to invoke an article that allows members to resolve disputes via arbitration. That is resting hopes on simply muddling along until Trump leaves office -- but some are also encouraged by the fact that, although Trump threatened to kill off North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in the end he negotiated a revision of NAFTA that left it basically intact, if not necessarily improved.
Azevedo believes that the Trump Administration can similarly come to an acceptable deal on the WTO, saying: "If you have enough things on the table that are appetizing enough, I'm pretty sure that the conversation in Washington is going to change pretty significantly, If you do nothing, just cross your fingers and hope things will get better somehow, I think you risk many things, including the system."
* British Prime Minister Theresa May has now come to an agreement with the European Union over the exit of the UK from the EU, with the proposed agreement now headed for Parliament for approval. As discussed by an essay from THE ECONOMIST ("The Truth About A No-Deal Brexit", 24 November 2018), there isn't much enthusiasm in Parliament for the deal, with Leavers pushing for a "hard Brexit", simply leaving the EU unconditionally.
The British government itself has acknowledged that the plan agreed with the EU would not be in Britain's best economic interests, but says a hard Brexit would be much worse. Leavers in Parliament are having none of it, saying that a hard Brexit would not be very troublesome, and many of the public feel the same way. THE ECONOMIST replies:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The reality is that no deal amounts to a very bad deal ... It would rip up 45 years of arrangements with the continent that in living memory has gone from existential threat to vital ally. It would swap membership of the EU's single market for the most bare-bones trading relationship possible. Reneging on 39 billion euros ($50 billion USD) in obligations to the EU would devastate Britain's international credibility. Reaching no deal on the Irish border would test the Good Friday Agreement that ended a serious armed conflict. And the violent dislocation of nearly every legal arrangement between Britain and Europe would affect daily life like nothing outside wartime.
The myth has taken hold that no deal simply means no trade deal. Proponents of a no-deal exit say it will involve Britain trading with the EU on the standard terms used by other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). No-dealers argue, correctly, that Britain could eventually adjust to this. It would be painful, but the economy could move beyond industries like carmaking, which would be ruined by the 10% tariffs that the EU would impose on British exports. Consumers would gain if the government took the highly unlikely step of abolishing all tariffs, as no-dealer economists recommend. But protected sectors, particularly agriculture, would wither. And many Leave-voters might be surprised that the price of exit was the collapse of much of Britain's high-end manufacturing and the demise of farming.
More important, no deal would mean not just no trade deal, but the rupture of a whole corpus of legal arrangements with the EU. Britain would be left without rules to govern the trade in radioactive materials, international electricity markets, financial-contract clearing, aviation, medicines regulation, immigration control and much else. What some Brexiteers describe as a "clean break" from Europe would in fact be horrifically messy.
END QUOTE
Leavers say that it should not be difficult to come to agreements with the EU, claiming it would be in the EU's interests to normalize relationships with the EU. However, the EU has never exerted itself to accommodate Britain's departure -- it requires a deluded view of Britain's bargaining position to think they would -- and it is ridiculous to think that, given a British default on its debts, the EU would feel cooperative at all.
It appears that Theresa May has done her best in an impossible situation, devising an agreement with the EU that does Britain the least amount of harm -- but which neither Leavers nor Remainers want. The Leavers continue to demand the Moon, but they aren't that strong; a recent attempt to push through a vote of no-confidence in the government fizzled when they couldn't get enough votes to even bring the motion to the floor. Nobody else really wants May's impossible job.
It seems the only option, once Parliament rejects the deal with the EU, will be a second referendum, with the simple choice of hard Brexit, or no Brexit. That's scary, because the vote might well come down in favor of a hard Brexit. Then again, that isn't the way to bet: the first Brexit vote was very narrow, and it won't take much of a shift to shoot down Brexit. Most of the Britons who voted for Leave want a hard Brexit, or at least they think they do. The question is then how many of those who voted for Leave have realized it's a delusion. It won't have to be too many to tip the vote.
As for Theresa May, she seems to have known it was a delusion all along. Unlike the Leavers, she understands the facts; and accordingly, has done exactly what the facts have forced her to do. May is caught in a trap? No, it is more that Britain is caught in a trap, created by the Leavers, and May is simply giving the Leavers enough rope to hang themselves.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("DARPA Demonstrates Fast Autonomous Scout Drones" by Graham Warwick, 6 August 2018), the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has demonstrated algorithms that could allow small commercial drones to become autonomous scouts in urban battle zones, or searchers for survivors inside buildings in disaster areas.
In flight tests conducted under Phase 2 of the agency's "Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA)" program, quadcopters flew between buildings and through alleyways in a mock town. They performed flight actions such as entering a building through a window, mapping the interior, and navigating autonomously down a stairwell, then out of an open door.
The current set of experiments -- at the Guardian Center urban training facility in Perry, Georgia -- build on Phase 1 experiments in 2017. The FLA work is being done by teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Draper Laboratory; University of Pennsylvania (UPenn); and Scientific Systems with AeroVironment, based on DARPA contracts made in 2015.
The program's goal is to developed advanced autonomy algorithms for quadcopters weighing less than 2.25 kilograms (5 pounds). According to DARPA program manager Jean-Charles Lede:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We go into an unknown environment that is cluttered with all kinds of obstacles, and we don't have the benefit of GPS or an RF link. How can we fly in that environment? That is essentially the challenge that FLA undertook.
Unmanned systems equipped with FLA algorithms need no remote pilot, no GPS guidance, no communications link, and no preprogrammed map of the area -- the onboard software, lightweight processor and low-cost sensors do all the work autonomously in real time.
END QUOTE
In Phase 2, the MIT-Draper team trimmed the sensor payload to a single camera to reduce weight and improve air vehicle performance. The Phase 2 flight demonstration objective was to build a geographic and semantic map of the city; explore the unknown environment to create the map; and autonomously recognize roads, buildings, and parked cars, to identify them on the map.
According to Lede: "We were looking at building a map of that environment. Not necessarily a dimensional map, but more like a semantic map where we have the streets, and then we say we have three cars in that street." Images of the cars could be downloaded in real time via wi-fi link, to the Android Tactical Assault Kit handheld app used by operational forces.
The UPenn researchers halved the size and weight of their air vehicle for Phase 2 -- to allow it to fly autonomously in confined spaces, through small apertures, and in a 3D environment. The research team development a single-board computer housing all the sensors and the low-power processor for the Phase 2 machine. The drone flew into a building through a narrow second-floor window to autonomously create a 3D map of the unknown interior; visit open rooms; and finally find a staircase, descending down it to exit the building via an open door.
DARPA doesn't work on operational programs, but the Army Research Laboratory will obtain the algorithms developed under the FLA program for further investigation. The DARPA team members also see the program furthering nonmilitary drone applications, such as entering a damaged structure after an earthquake to look for survivors, or determine if it is structurally safe.
* As reported by an article from THEVERGE.com ("A Little Uncertainty Can Help Drones Dodge Obstacles At High Speeds, Says MIT" by James Vincent, 12 February 2018), the traditional approach to drone navigation in, say, a cluttered warehouse, is to have a map of everything in the warehouse, with an efficient route then calculated to get a drone from HERE to THERE. However, this requires a detailed and current map of the warehouse, which may be troublesome as things are moved around. The drone can alter its map of the warehouse as it flies around, a scheme called "simultaneous location & mapping (SLAM)". The problem is that this puts heavy demands on sensors and computation, particularly for fast-moving vehicles like aerial drones.
Researchers at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have come up with a simpler approach than SLAM, which they call "NanoMap". The drone still collects data about its environment, but doesn't try to assemble it into a map -- instead taking "snapshots" of its current environment and modifying its course on the fly, without attempting to optimize the entire flight plan. That reduces the computing load on the drone.
NanoMap is a straightforward idea, useful for say, delivery drones -- but not so useful for drones that need a detailed grasp of the terrain, such as drones doing survey work in agriculture, or operating in search-&-rescue missions. If that kind of detail knowledge isn't needed, NanoMap means a cheaper and more agile drone at no real penalty.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("China Aerospace Showcases Mini Fire-&-Forget Weapon" by Jayesh Dhingra, 24 August 2018), the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) unveiled a new lightweight shoulder-launched smart missile during a tradeshow near Moscow in August.
The "FN-M" 60-millimeter multifunction missile system was developed by the Shanghai Academy of Space Flight Technology, a CASC subsidiary. It has autonomous guidance, using a camera that is locked onto a target before launch, to then track the target after launch. The missile weighs about 4 kilograms (9 pounds) and has a blast-fragmentation warhead weighing about a kilogram (2 pounds). It has pop-out cruciform mid-body and tail fins, with its solid-rocket motor giving it a range of about 2 kilometers (1.25 miles). The FN-M is intended to take on light aircraft and helicopters, drones, and light ground vehicles or boats.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* FISH FOR CITIES: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("How The Growth Of Cities Changes Farming", 15 February 2018), developing countries were traditionally agrarian. In the 21st century, their populations are increasingly urbanized, concentrated in growing cities. That change has, in a feedback process, altered farming in those countries in turn.
Welcome to the village of Mathabari in northern Bangladesh. Two decades ago, the area around the village was all rice paddies -- but now the land is all ponds, separated by earth embankments, where carp, catfish, tilapia, and pangasius are raised to feed the cravings of city-dwellers for fish. There are sheds for raising chickens on the some of the patches of dry land.
Shohel Matsay Khamar was one village's pioneers in fish farming, gradually renting more land from rice farmers; now he has 28 hectares (70 acres) of fish. He mostly raises pangasius, a silver-white fish native to South-East Asia, that doesn't require very much babying to grow. His operation is professional, with electric paddle wheels keeping the water oxygenated. He has also built his own feed mill to grind maize, mustard oil cake, and other food materials into fish pellets. His productivity per pond has doubled since the early days.
According to Khamar, poachers used to be a problem, but not any more, since fish are so plentiful and cheap that they're not worth the bother to steal. In 2016, Bangladesh's farmers produced 2.2 million tonnes (2.4 million tons) of fish, making the country the fifth biggest producer -- after China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Bangladesh's fish industry has doubled in size, and is 19 times as big as it was in 1984. The boom is due to many factors, such as improved roads and transport, as well as acquaculture research institutes, but the main boost has been the growth of cities.
Urbanization alters the market for food. City-dwellers tend to be more prosperous than villagers, and also more pressed for time, the result being that they prefer tasty, easy-to-cook, protein-rice fare. As Bangladesh's cities grow -- most notably Dhaka, not far to the south from Mathabari -- that means a growing, profitable market for fish. Nearly all of Bangladesh's fish production is consumed domestically.
Bangladesh's fish-farming industry is a capitalist success story, created largely by ordinary Bangladeshis out to make money. As is usually the case with boom industries, it's generated businesses to support it as well, for example fish-feed mills and fish hatcheries. Since fish farming is roughly twice as labor-intensive as rice farming, the industry has meant steadier employment for workers. On the average, more fish makes Bangladeshis better-fed, with a greater supply producing lower prices. That also means that migrant workers can spare more money to send home to families.
In fact, the boom in the fish-farming industry has, not surprisingly, led to a glut that is pushing down profit margins. Flooding in northern Bangladesh made matters worse, since it drove up rice prices, making fish less affordable for city dwellers. Nonetheless, the real problem for the fish farmers is their own energetic competition.
* Switch focus to Nigeria, and the same pattern emerges. AOD Farms, a few hours' drive north of Lagos, raises chickens for meat, with about 10,000 fowl on hand at any one time. In the run-up to Christmas, the firm adds a few hundred turkeys. Chicken has become big business in Nigeria, with about a thousand medium and large firms there -- up from about 400 in the 1990s. The quantity of maize used for feed shot up sixfold between 2003 and 2015. The average Nigerian only eats two chickens a year, so there's room for growth.
There are distinct differences between the West African chicken boom and the Asian fish boom. While Asian fish farmers are often former rice farmers, African poultry farmers are more likely to be wealthy, well-connected city dwellers. AOD Farms is owned by a civil engineer, while Olusegen Obasanjo, an ex-president of Nigeria, owns a large poultry farm as well. Still, the parallels are striking -- the most notable one being that the industry serves the big city, in the case of Nigeria that being Lagos.
In both countries, the industries are continually becoming more professional, adding new technology and improved livestock science. Most significantly, in both countries, the farmers complain about excessive supply and low profits. Nigerian chicken farmers complain about imported chickens, but it appears the proportion of such is low; the problem is mostly oversupply. However, there's few reliable statistics for the industries, so there is room for doubt.
The data problem also extends to certification; the farmers raising fish or chicken don't care much about establishing a paper trail, they just raise them and sell them. That means no exports to developed countries, where consumers want to know where their food came from and what it really is. Even locally, the lack of data causes problems -- for example, nonsensical rumors floating about in Bangladesh that pangasius are toxic.
The farmers respond to the pressures, trying to figure out ways to cut costs, or explore new market niches, while improving their record-keeping. For all the stress in the business, farmers generally appreciate that they, and their consumers, are better off than they were. A few decades ago, Bangladeshis were often hungry; fish farmers take a certain pride in knowing that hunger is much less common than it was.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DIGITAL PAYMENTS FOR INDIA: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Banning Rupees Didn't Work. This Might" by Saritha Rai & Anto Antony, 9 October 2018), two years ago, India's government abruptly banned most of the country's paper currency, leading to chaos as people lined up to trade in their soon-to-be worthless bills for new ones. The idea behind the "demonetization" scheme was to push Indians to use bank accounts and digital payments, instead of conducting business in cold cash, out of sight of the taxman.
The demonetization effort was not judged a success, but cash is going away in any case -- largely thanks to an initiative launched by the nation's lenders and the Reserve Bank of India in April 2016, a few months before demonetization. The "Unified Payments Interface (UPI)" -- mentioned here in 2017 -- provided a common platform for technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Alibaba-backed Paytm to set up online payment services. UPI links into more than a hundred major banks, allowing Indians to conduct transactions easily on their phones.
The result has been a lively, but generally manageable, chaos. Venkatesh Munivenkatappa runs a roadside stall in Bengaluru, selling hand-made sandals, shoes, and belts. He accepts payments on his mobile phone with a set of apps -- including WhatsApp Pay, Paytm, PhonePe, and an app promoted by India's central bank named the "Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM)". He says: "I never want to turn customers away, no matter which app they use." -- and adds that digital payments mean less worry about being robbed.
Previously, Indian banks had been hard-pressed to open branch offices in India's vast number of small and primitive villages -- but now Indians can use apps and electronic bank accounts to make utility payments, buy groceries, and book bus, train, and airplane tickets. Poor Indians working away from home can easily send funds to their families.
While mobile payment is catching on in the USA and Europe, it requires smartphones and payment terminals with near-field interfaces. In India, where many people have cheap phones, Google has introduced "Audio QR". Transactions are performed between two phones using a Google payments app, with the appropriate digital handshaking using ultrasonic communications. All a phones needs to engage in a transaction are a speaker and microphone.
Unlike China, where mobile payment is driven by two homegrown giants -- Ant Financial Services Group and Tencent Holdings LTD -- the business in India is wildly competitive, including global players such as Google, Amazon.com, and Facebook's WhatsApp unit, along with Indian payment startups. Indian customers have to sort through a confusing array of payment systems, with the companies backing them eagerly offering perks to sign up, such as discounts and cash-backs.
The different digital platforms don't necessarily play well with each other, but as a rule, each is effective and easy to use. The wave of payment innovation has largely bypassed traditional payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard, who are being left in the dust.
Credit Suisse Group AG forecasts the value of payments processed in India will rise to $1 trillion USD by 2023, five times the current level. The market is still growing: almost 15% of India's 1.3 billion people still don't have bank accounts, and about half of those who now have them don't know what to do with them yet. India's economy still remains heavily dependent on cash, but cash is on a slow retreat.
* In a related article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Visa Made A Signature Audio Chirp For Digital Payments" by Jennifer Surane, 10 October 2018), traditional charge-card business giants like Visa are working hard to keep up with the times, forming partnerships with manufacturers of everything from appliances to cars -- to allow these machines to make purchases.
A charge card is obviously nothing more than one type of key to a charge account, with Al Kelly, CEO of Visa, commenting: "The card is just a representation of a bunch of digits -- but those digits and the uniqueness of those digits can be in a Fitbit; they can be in my shirt; they can be in my refrigerator; they can be in my mobile phone."
A world where consumers can check out of a store by waving a phone, or order groceries by talking to a kitchen appliance, is a big opportunity for Visa and other payment networks, since they can collect a fee from merchants on every sale. However, if payments become invisible, so could Visa's brand. Visa's logo is recognized everywhere, but what happens when people make a purchase through Visa embedded in an appliance?
Visa came up with a solution, devising a two-note chirp and a distinctive vibration, plus a screen animation -- all of which may be triggered on various devices to declare "VI-sa!" when a payment is made. There's also a security issue, in that the proliferation of devices that can make payments makes for a "target-rich environment" for scammers. Visa, along with its rival Mastercard, is pushing a technology known as "tokenization": instead of sending out card numbers and other account information through the system, it uses digital-payment tokens that can be limited to a specific device or merchant. Even if the tokens are intercepted, they can't be used with other devices or vendors.
The digital payments scene is still highly unstable, with Visa and Mastercard faced with competition from the likes of Amazon.com, Google, Apple, and Facebook. Oliver Jenkyn, North America head at Visa, isn't intimidated: "I like our odds very much. Payments is not a nifty app or a nifty velcro thing you stick onto another capability."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (2): The police bodycam is at the base of the pyramid of 21st-century public-security technology, and that makes it a good place to start. On 25 August 2017, one Johnnie Rush of Asheville, North Carolina, was walking home after washing dishes at Cracker Barrel -- an American chain restaurant specializing in homespun fare. He jaywalked across a street to get some beer, to then be confronted by the cops. He argued with them and then ran. They took after him and beat him senseless.
A lawsuit followed. The officers were wearing bodycams, with Asheville officials releasing nine videos from them. Such cameras are typically clipped to the front of an officer's uniform, or fitted as a headset. They record audio and video, which may include date and time stamps as well as GPS coordinates. They can also be Bluetooth-enabled, and set to stream in real time. Some have to be turned on manually; others may triggered automatically by, for instance, an officer unholstering his weapon.
Bodycams are only one aspect of the way 21st-century tech is changing law enforcement. These new technologies help in investigations, and also enhance accountability: they make it more difficult for police and citizens to lie about confrontations, or whether a person or car was really at the scene of a specific incident. Despite their obvious benefits, they are still controversial. It is not yet clear whether bodycams improve police conduct; and there is also a potential for abuse through facial-recognition technologies, that could extend the reach of public surveillance.
In any case, the videos of the assault on Rush led one officer, who had punched him, to resign, with another officer reassigned, and a third disciplined; the city government issued a statement condemning their conduct. However, Rush had still taken a beating, and it wasn't clear from the statistics that bodycams would do much to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The first large randomized study of the issues was in 2012, which found that police use of force and citizen complaints in Rialto, California, dropped significantly when officers wore bodycams. A study conducted in Britain and California by Cambridge University two years later get similar results: wearing bodycams was associated with a 93% drop in complaints about police behavior.
The problem with these studies was that the improved results only came up in incidents where the cameras recorded complete encounters. Another study of eight British and American police forces conducted by Cambridge criminologists found that rates of assault against police were actually 15% higher when an officer turned his bodycam on in the middle of an encounter, compared with officers who wore no cameras -- suggesting that turning on a bodycam indicated an escalation. A randomized study of officers in Washington DC, found that wearing bodycams had no statistically significant effect on police use of force, or citizen complaints.
Bodycams are by no means universal just yet. They're expensive, at about a thousand dollars each, with another hundred dollars a month per camera for video archiving. Police unions are inclined to think they disadvantage officers, while civil libertarians tend to see them as a "Big Brother" scheme to keep an eye on heavily-policed communities. There is little in the way of common regulations and standards on their use. Nonetheless, bodycams are becoming more common: one in five American police departments uses them, while those that don't would like to. Some estimates place the market for bodycams and associated data management at a billion USD in America alone.
Even those favorably inclined to bodycams may be unsettled by the fact that authoritarian China is at the leading edge of bodycam technology, building them with facial recognition capabilities. China has also built and deployed glasses with cameras featuring facial-recognition capabilities, used to alert police if they are observing someone on a police blacklist. China is an authoritarian state that steps on activists and other social undesireables, arresting them as seen necessary. China's entire surveillance tech market has been estimated at $120 billion USD, and is doing an export business to other authoritarian states. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (37): The Sedition Act set the stage for the election of 1800, which was notably loud and bitter, and ended in defeat for the Federalists -- the two JDR candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, getting a tie in the national vote. That exposed the great weaknesses of the electoral provisions in the Constitution, since the tie had to be broken by a vote in the House of Representatives. The result was endless machinations behind the scenes; there were repeated votes in early 1801 that ended in ties as well, until Hamilton discreetly intervened to encourage Federalists to vote for Jefferson. Hamilton had many disagreements with Jefferson, but preferred him to Burr, who was a notorious intriguer. Jefferson became president, Burr vice-president.
Of course, the Sedition Act then died, with Jefferson pardoning everyone who had been convicted under the act, and Congress not renewing the law when it lapsed. Congress also repaid the fines that had been imposed under the act. Although the three branches of the Federal government had grossly misinterpreted the Constitution, the People, working through Jefferson and the JDRs, had overridden them. Unfortunately, state resistance to the Sedition Act also brought forth the notion of "nullification", the claim that the states had a right to defy Federal law -- in direct violation of the constitutional supremacy of Federal law. Nullification would prove a dangerously pernicious doctrine.
In any case, the electoral process clearly left much to be desired. Indeed, although the electoral deadlock had been overcome in the House, it might not have been, which would have led to even greater difficulties. Efforts began to amend the Constitution to create a better electoral process. The resulting Twelfth Amendment was proposed in late 1803, and had been ratified by three-fourths of the states by mid-1804. Three states rejected it, though one, Massachusetts, would finally ratify it in 1961.
The Twelfth Amendment reads as follows:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;
But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
END QUOTE
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* October 2018 was a busy month for launches:
-- 08 OCT 18 / SAOCOM 1A -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 0221 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put the "SAOCOM 1A" satellite into orbit for CONAE, Argentina's space agency. The "Satelite Argentino de Observacion Con Microondas (SAOCOM)" have been developed by the "Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE)", Argentina's space agency, consisting of two radar-imaging satellites.
SAOCOM 1A had a launch mass of 3,000 kilograms (6,600 pounds), and a design life of five years. It was built by the INVAP company of Argentina, and based on same satellite platform for the SAC-C remote sensing satellite, which was launched in 2000. SAOCOM's sole payload was an L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The SACOM SAR had two operating modes:
SAOCOM was to become an element of the Italian "COSMO-SkyMed" constellation -- consisting of four satellites launched from 2007 to 2010, with a new generation of satellites slated to begin launch in 2018. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a successful soft landing on the SpaceX drone barge.
-- 09 OCT 18 / YAOGAN 32-01 & 32-02 -- A Chinese Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0243 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Yaogan 32-01" and "Yaogan 32-02" payloads into Sun-synchronous orbit. They were only vaguely described as being for "electromagnetic environmental surveys"; they were clearly military surveillance satellites, possible for signals intelligence. The Long March booster in the launch was the first to feature the "Yuanzheng 1S (Expedition 1S)" upper stage. It was restartable, to allow multiple payloads to be placed in different orbits.
-- 11 OCT 18 / SOYUZ ISS 56S (FAILURE) -- A Soyuz booster was launched from Baikonur at 0840 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 56S" crewed space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) support mission. The crew included Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinen (second space flight) and American astronaut Nick Hague (first space flight). A booster anomaly was identified about 195 seconds after liftoff, with the Soyuz capsule firing its escape system. The two spacefarers were quickly recovered.
This was the first use of the Soyuz escape system since September 1983, when a Soyuz T booster caught fire before launch, with the escape system saving the crew before the booster exploded. The first operational use of the escape system was in 1975, when a Soyuz booster suffered an anomaly 295 seconds after launch, the capsule crew being recovered safely.
-- 15 OCT 18 / BEIDOU x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 0423 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Beidou 3 M15" and "Beidou 3 M16" 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.
The Beidou system is being developed and deployed in three phases:
The new Phase 3 satellites had a launch mass of 1,014 kilograms (2,235 pounds). They featured with a phased array antenna for navigation signals, plus a laser retroreflector for orbital tracking.
-- 17 OCT 18 / AEHF 4 (USA 88) -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0415 UTC (local time + 4) to put the fourth "Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF)" military geostationary comsat into orbit. It featured encrypted / low probability of intercept communications along with jam resistance and resistance to electromagnetic pulse. The spacecraft had a launch mass of 6,150 kilograms (13,565 pounds); it was based on the Lockheed Martin A2100 comsat bus, with a payload developed by Northrop Grumman.
AEHF is planned to eventually replace the long-standing Milstar military comsat network, with one AEHF having more bandwidth than all five current Milstar spacecraft put together. The Atlas 5 booster was in the "531" configuration, with a 5-meter (16 foot 5 inch) fairing, three solid rocket boosters, and an upper stage with a single Centaur engine.
-- 20 OCT 18 / BEPICOLUMBO -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0145 UTC (next day local time + 3) to put the ESA / JAXA "Bepicolumbo" planetary mission into space on a seven-year flight to Mercury. It included two orbiters, including the ESA "Mercury Planetary Orbiter" and the JAXA "Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MIO)". It was the third space mission to visit Mercury, and the first led by Europe.
-- 24 OCT 18 / HAIYANG 2B -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 2257 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Haiyang (Ocean) 2B" ocean-observation satellite into orbit. The satellite had a launch mass of 442 kilograms (974 pounds), the payload including a radar altimeter to measure ocean topography; a microwave radiometer to map sea surface temperatures; and a scatterometer to collect wind data over the oceans.
Haiyang 2B was launched into roughly the same orbit as the predecessor Haiyang 2A spacecraft, which flew into space aboard a previous Long March 4B rocket in August 2011. China operates two families of Haiyang satellites, including the Haiyang 1 series and Haiyang 2 series -- that carry different sets of oceanography instruments. The last launch of the Haiyang 1 family, "Haiyang 1C", was in September, the satellite carrying imaging sensors to measure ocean color, pollution, and ocean markers such as chlorophyll. The Haiyang satellite series is named for the Chinese word for "ocean."
-- 25 OCT 18 / LOTOS (COSMOS 2528) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0015 UTC (local time - 3) to put the "Cosmos 2528) satellite into orbit. It was believed to be the fourth "Lotos" electronic intelligence satellite.
-- 27 OCT 18 / WEILAI 1 (FAILURE) -- A Zhuque 1 booster, developed by the Chinese private launch company LandSpace, was launched from Jiuquan at 0800 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Weilai 1" microsatellite into orbit for China Central Television. The satellite weighed less than 45 kilograms, and was to collect imagery for use in TV broadcasts. The Zhuque 1 has three solid-fuel stages, and can place a 200-kilogram (440-pound) payload into polar orbit. The booster did not make orbit.
-- 29 OCT 18 / CFOSAT -- A Chinese Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0043 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "China-France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSat)" into near-polar Sun-synchronous orbit to study ocean surface winds and waves. CFOSAT was built by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), and was based on the CAST2000 satellite bus, provided by the DFH Satellite Corp. It had a launch mass of 600 kilograms and a design life of 3 years.
CFOSAT carried a payload of two instruments:
The launch also included five smallsats:
-- 29 OCT 18 / GOSAT (IBUKI) 2, KHALIFASAT -- A JAXA H-2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0408 UTC (local time - 9) to put the second JAXA "Global Greenhouse Observation by Satellite (GOSAT)" into orbit. GOSAT, also known as "Ibuki (Breath)", had a launch mass of 2 tonnes (2.2 tons) and was intended to monitor atmospheric greenhouse gas cycles for five years. Its payload consisted of a "Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS)" and a "Cloud and Aerosol Imager (CAI)" to map methane and CO2 emissions.
The launch also included the KhalifaSat Earth-imaging satellite for the United Arab Emirates. KhalifaSat had a launch mass of 330 kilograms (730 pounds), and carried an optical imaging payload. It was built by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai. Four other smallsats were on the launch as well:
* OTHER SPACE NEWS: Sounding rockets -- low-cost rockets to carry small payloads on suborbital flights -- have been around since the beginning of the Space Age, but they're generally taken for granted. As discussed by an article from NASASPACEFLIGHT.com ("Exos Aerospace's SARGE Rocket To Serve As A Platform For A Reusable Small Satellite Launcher" by Michael Baylor, 13 October 2018), the new reusable "Suborbital Autonomous Rocket with GuidancE (SARGE)" rocket -- from Exos Aerospace of Greenville TX -- extends this old technology.
The SARGE rocket uses NASA's "Morpheus" flight code. Morpheus ran from 2010 to 2014, NASA describing the objectives as development of "an autonomous, reusable, rocket-powered, terrestrial vertical take-off/vertical landing vehicle for testing integrated spacecraft and planetary lander technologies."
Initial flight of SARGE was on 25 August 2018, from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The vehicle, which was powered by LOX and ethanol, carried nine payloads including educational hardware, technology demonstrators, and memorabilia. The GPS-guided rocket used a parafoil for successful recovery, allowing it to be refurbished for another flight. Beyond SARGE, Exos is working towards a reusable smallsat launcher named "Jaguar" that will be able to put 100 to 200 kilograms (220 to 440 pounds) of payload into low Earth orbit. Exos hopes to have Jaguar ready for commercial use in 2022.
* In related news from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Europe, Japan Plan 2021 Reusable Launcher Demo" by Thierry Dubois, 25 October 2018), a collaboration of CNES, DLR, and JAXA -- the space agencies of France, Germany, and Japan respectively -- is planning to launch a reusable booster from Korou in French Guiana in 2021.
The "Cooperative Action Leading to Launcher Innovation in Stage Toss-back Operations (CALLISTO)" program will include five flights -- "toss back" refers to using the main engines for landing. The final flight will involve landing on a barge offshore. The launcher will be 12 meters (39 feet) high and 1 meter (3.5 feet) in diameter. Its dry weight be 1,300 kilograms (2,860 pounds), The throttleable engine, designed by JAXA with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, will provide up to 40 kN (4,080 kgp / 9,000 lbf) of thrust.
The flights will eventually reach altitudes of up to 40 kilometers (25 miles). More partner countries may join the effort, there being discussions with Belgium, Norway and Spain.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NERVE AGENT THREAT: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How To Defeat A Nerve Agent" by Richard Stone, 4 January 2018), nerve agents were developed by the Germans in World War II, but never actually deployed in combat by them. In the 1980s, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein demonstrated no such restraint, using them and other poison gases in his war against Iraq, as well as against the restive Kurdish populations of Iraq.
During the Cold War, the US military didn't take chemical warfare very seriously -- the US Army's Chemical Corps acquired the nickname of "Comical Corps" -- but Saddam Hussein's enthusiasm for poison gas was a wake-up call. During the 1991 Gulf War, US troops carried auto-injectors that, it was hoped, would counter the effects of nerve gases. The Iraqis didn't use them, but the chemical warfare threat didn't disappear; the use of poison gases by the Syrian government in the course of Syria's ongoing civil war has brought the issue back to the front burner.
A top priority is to obtain better countermeasures against nerve agents. Nerve agents kill by binding to "acetylcholinesterase (AChE)" -- an enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter "acetylcholine" after it binds to nerve synapses. AChE is extremely efficient: one AChE molecule can hydrolyze 600,000 acetylcholine molecules per minute.
Nerve agents disable AChE by binding into the molecule's active center, a narrow slot, binding so tightly that AChE "can't spit it out" -- according to James Madsen of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (USAMRICD) in Edgewood, Maryland. With AChE disabled, acetylcholine can't be released from the synapses, and neurons cease to function; victims become spasmodic, to suffer seizures, then lapse into a coma and die, no longer having the ability to breathe. Milligrams of a nerve toxin are enough to kill a full-grown male human.
For defense against seizures, US soldiers carry an anticonvulsant. Diazepam has been the treatment of choice, but the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and the US Department of Defense now prefer a faster-acting compound, midazolam.
The anticonvulsant only deals with the symptoms, not the root cause of the trouble: the buildup of excess acetylcholine. Atropine, a compound derived from the belladonna plant, blocks acetylcholine receptors, allowing neurons to function. Atropine was used to treat nerve agent victims in the Iran-Iraq War. Unfortunately, even with atropine, nerve agents continue to form bonds with AChE, with the bond becoming irreversible after an "aging time". Sarin has an aging time of about five hours. Soman, a much faster-acting nerve agent, has an aging time of about two minutes.
In effect, the nerve agent destroys a victim's AChE, and it then takes weeks to regenerate. Atropine is merely a stopgap; "oximes" are then administered to the victim, with these chemicals dislodging the nerve agent from the AChE. The only oxime currently approved by the USA for use against nerve agents is "2-pralidoxime chloride (2-PAM)" -- but it has a serious limitation in that it doesn't readily pass through the blood-brain barrier, while nerve agents can. 2-PAM can't clear nerve agents from the brain.
In 2001 Palmer Taylor, a pharmacologist at the University of California, San Diego, teamed up with K. Barry Sharpless, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, to come up with a better oxime treatment. 2-PAM is a positively-charged molecule; it has to be, to clear nerve agents out of AChE. Unfortunately, that positive charge is what blocks it from getting through the blood-brain barrier. The two researchers came up with a new oxime that's normally electrically neutral; once it gets into the brain, it then gains a positive charge, and goes to work, cleaning out AChE. Other researchers have developed improved oximes as well.
Sarin is regarded as the nerve agent of choice. It's as volatile as water, disperses easily in the air, and doesn't linger, so attacking troops can enter a battlefield soon after a chemical attack. However, soman does have an advantage, in that it evaporates only about a fifth as fast as sarin. If the objective is to deny terrain to an adversary, soman is the weapon of choice -- it's like creating a chemical minefield.
In addition, soman's quick aging time renders oximes useless. During the Gulf War, soldiers judge to be at a risk of exposure to soman in the field took pyridostigmine bromide, a drug used to treat a neuromuscular disorder called "myasthenia gravis". The drug pre-emptively, but only temporarily, locks into AChE, preventing a nerve agent from binding into it instead. Of course, a countermeasure that has to be used ahead of an attack is useless if there's no advance warning of an attack -- which makes soman a preferred weapon for terrorists.
So far, Islamic terrorists haven't got their hands on nerve agents. They're not so easy to home-brew, one big problem is that people who try it stand a good chance of being lethally poisoned themselves. Nonetheless, the threat remains of terrorists getting their hands on stockpiles set up by government actors, or being supplied with it by rogue states that are out to make trouble for the rest of the world.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WHO PAYS FOR TARIFFS? As discussed by an article from BUSINESSWEEK.com ("The Real Pain From Trump's Tariffs Trickles Down to Consumers" by Peter Coy, 28 September 2018), US President Donald Trump is particularly fond of the tariff weapon, as of late making considerable use of it in dealing with China. Trump claims that he's protecting American jobs, and bringing in more cash from China: "It will be a lot of money coming into the coffers of the United States of America."
In theory ... maybe. The notion of the "optimal tariff", one which gives the most benefit to the nation imposing a tariff, goes back to the 19th century. From the point of view of the USA, it is of course best if the tariffs are paid by businesses in the country providing the imports, so American consumers don't have to pay more. Thomas Pugel, an economist at New York University Stern School of Business, says the logic behind the optimal tariff is that "the US is often a large enough importing country that we can throw our weight around."
That may happen, but there's no guarantee that the supplying nations will foot the bill. The early rounds of US duties in the current trade war might not have been troublesome for the US, since they were slapped mostly on products for which the US could play supplying nations off against each another. However, as the war expands to cover goods for which a single foreign country is the sole or dominant supplier, American consumers will increasingly foot the bill for the tariffs. Pugel says: "If US buyers are desperate to get a Chinese product, the price in the US is going to go up."
According to estimates by Detsche Bank AG, in the first two volleys of US tariffs on China, which covered $50 billion USD worth of imports, only $1 billion USD were products where China had a dominant market position. In the latest round, which took effect on 24 September, American consumers are more vulnerable to price increases: about half of the $200 billion USD worth of products subject to the 10% duties come mainly from China. Things will get even worse for consumers if Trump makes good on his threat to place tariffs on the rest of Chinese imports, because for about 80% of those products, China is the majority supplier.
According to Panjiva INC -- a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence that specializes in supply chain data and analysis -- electronic components, furniture, appliances, and networking gear are among the products hit by tariffs for which the US relies most heavily on China. For some specialty items such as frogs' legs, boars' bristles, eels, and tin or silver ores, 90% to 100% of US imports come from China. Under pressure from American companies, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer spared from tariffs some products for which the US is extremely dependent on China, including rare-earth metals that are used in powerful magnets, smartwatches, Bluetooth devices, and bike helmets.
To complicate matters, it's not a simple trade-off between the supplier and consumer paying a tariff, because there's a chain of businesses involved between the two. The retailer, wholesaler, shipper, foreign manufacturer, and even the manufacturer's suppliers may end up swallowing some of the cost. According to Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who bears the cost depends on bargaining power. In addition, the margins of foreign suppliers are already squeezed by big American buyers like Walmart and Amazon.com; if they don't raise prices, they no longer can make any profit, and have to give up on the business.
Economists and company executives say that in practice, it's the US and not China that is mostly paying the tariffs. In July 2018, Coca-Cola CO cited US metals tariffs -- which weren't directed solely at China -- as a justification for raising US soda prices. Home Depot INC is allowing its suppliers to fully pass along their tariff-related cost increases, with Home Depot often passing the increases onto consumers. Washing machines, which are hit with a 20% tariff no matter where they come from, get the price markup at Home Depot. Tariffs give manufacturers and retailers legitimate cover in raising prices: "We didn't want to do it, the tariffs forced us to."
To be sure, it's not necessarily easy to determine if a price increase was due to tariffs, or other factors -- resource shortages, for example. There's also the subtle factor that manufacturers may raise prices even if they haven't been hit by tariffs, on the anticipation that they will be.
Of course, there's also the effect of trade retaliation on US businesses. Harley-Davidson INC said it would have to eat Europe's new 25% tariff on motorcycles, amounting to about $2,200 USD per bike, to avoid losing customers. Harley-Davidson, much to Trump's anger, accordingly plans to produce motorcycles for the European market in Europe. American soybean farmers have had to cut prices to keep from losing sales in China, which has alternative sources for soybeans.
There may actually be an optimal tariff -- but few think this is that. The best thing about Trump's trade wars is that they are giving Americans a crash course in global capitalist economics, to find out that glib campaign rhetoric doesn't really match the complicated real world.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (1): As discussed by a survey from THE ECONOMIST ("Data Detectives", June 2018), in 1749 John Fielding, working with his half-brother Henry -- still famous for the ribald novel TOM JONES -- founded the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force, mostly paid for by public funds. What distinguished the Runners from a traditional constabulary was the focus on data. For instance, Fielding kept descriptions of suspected criminals -- and even a "watch book", which contained details of timepieces to help identify them if stolen. In those days, a watch was a spendy item that was easily nicked.
By the middle of the 20th century, police forces worthy of the title were keeping extensive files to support their operations. It was, at the time, a very laborious process, involving transcribing conversations, most of which didn't yield anything useful; staking out subjects, with investigators maintaining records; taking photographs of crime scenes; researching documents and testimony; all embedded in a matrix of paperwork. In authoritarian governments, police could tap phones and open mail at will, but in democracies, civil rights complicated the job of the police. Police who wanted to listen in to phone calls could do so only for limited periods and specific purposes, and then only with judicial approval.
And then came the computer revolution from the 1980s. Today, people generate floods of searchable information that wasn't available to the police of 1950. Smartphones passively track and record where people go, who they talk to, and for how long; smartphone apps, online retail accounts, and social media postings reveal subtler personal information, such as political views, what people like to read and watch, and how they spend their money. As machines become smarter and society more wired together, the amount of information people create will continue to grow.
Round-the-clock stake-outs are largely a thing of the past; police instead seize a suspect's phone, and bypass its encryption. The license plates of cars suspects drive can be recorded by automatic license-plate readers (ALPR) AKA automatic number-plate readers (ANPR) mounted on police cars, streetlights, and car parks, allowing movements to be traced.
The big problem with the rapidly-expanding world of surveillance is that most privacy laws were written for the age of postal services and fixed-line telephones. Courts gave and still give citizens protection from governments entering their homes, or rifling through their personal papers. The law on people's digital trail is less clear. In most liberal countries, police still must convince a judge to let them eavesdrop on phone calls. But protection of mobile-phone "metadata" -- not the actual conversations, but data about who was called and when -- is a more ambiguous issue.
In 2006, the European Union issued a directive requiring telecom firms to retain customer metadata for up to two years for use in potential crime investigations. The European Court of Justice threw out law in 2014, after a number of countries challenged it in court, saying that it interfered with "the fundamental rights to respect for private life". Data-retention laws are currently in a state of flux, both in the US and Europe.
Anyone who drives in a city anywhere in the developed world is very likely to be traced by ALPRs. This is not illegal: the purpose of license plates is identification, and in fact it is illegal to deliberately deface or conceal them. Police don't need a warrant to track the movements of a vehicle on the public streets. However, most citizens are uncomfortable with the idea that, somewhere, the authorities have a system that is tracking all their movements.
Not everyone sees much cause to worry about this. Toplines, an Israeli ALPR firm, is working to add voice- and facial-recognition capabilities to its Bluetooth-enabled cameras, and install them on private vehicles. Cars with a Topline system would collect data and report it to a central control station, for use by security forces. The company's founder thinks that auto insurance could provide incentives for people to install a Topline module, to turn their cars into surveillance nodes in a police network -- which would maintain surveillance over all public spaces in a city.
On being asked about the privacy implications, a Topline employee shrugged, saying we're always being tracked by Facebook and other big websites anyway. If the data helps public security, what's the problem? He said: "Privacy is dead."
That mindset may not be out of place in security-conscious Israel, but elsewhere the reaction is one of unease. One of the subtle effects of new surveillance technology is to make police activities less visible. People would notice the police taking pictures of every parked car and pedestrian on a street; ALPRs and body-worn cameras ("bodycams") let the police do it without being noticed. That only increases the unease.
True, in Sweden or New Zealand, there's not much worry that the police will descend on citizens without good cause and arrest them, since the rule of law is robust in such countries, and governments generally respect civil liberties. Such worries are obviously greater in, say, China or Russia. However, even in Western democracies, nobody likes the idea that the police might be listening in on private telephone calls.
It's not a question of seeing the police as the enemy; in Western countries, the police are generally respected as defenders of public safety. Unfortunately, it's hard to expect them to play by the rules if nobody has figured out what the rules should be, much less articulated them. 21st-century technologies for public security do have a lot of promise, but also present a lot of threat. The trick is sorting out one from the other. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (36): George Washington did not run for re-election in 1796; he could have run again and likely would have won, but believed two terms as president were enough. Washington was supremely ambitious, but he also knew that power was a burden that he need not carry indefinitely. In limiting his presidency to two terms, Washington set a precedent even as he left office.
John Adams, his vice-president, was seen as the natural heir to the presidency, but he didn't get a free pass to the presidency, the election being heavily contested between the Federalists, backing Adams, and the Democratic Republicans backing Thomas Jefferson. Adams won a bare majority, with Jefferson, as runner-up, becoming vice president. The election laid bare the deficiencies of the Constitution's original definition of the election process, with the president and vice-president being political adversaries, from different parties.
Adams was saddled with a crisis from the outset. The French were of course not happy with the Jay Treaty, feeling betrayed by their once-ally; to compound their unhappiness, the US government refused to pay off the debts acquired during the Revolutionary War to the new French government. The result was that French privateers began to seize American merchant vessels trading with Britain.
In 1798, the US government accelerated the construction of warships and began naval operations against French privateers. The result was the "Quasi-War" with France -- effectively America's first of many military campaigns conducted without a declaration of war, under the president's authority as commander in chief. Federalists worried about a French invasion, and were suspicious of the loyalty of the JDRs. That led to the passage of the four "Alien & Sedition Acts" in 1798, which included the:
The first three acts didn't amount to much; the war scare passed, and nothing much followed from them -- though the Alien Enemy act would provide a foundation for later legislation to deal with foreign citizens from hostile countries who were living on American soil. It was the Sedition Act that was particularly unpopular, Democratic Republicans believing it targeted them -- with good reason, Democratic Republican newspaper editors being arrested and tried by the Federal government. It did not escape the notice of JDRs that the Sedition Act didn't make it a crime to criticize the vice-president.
While the Sedition Act was, from the modern perspective, outrageously unconstitutional, a blatant violation of the First Amendment, it is significant that it was approved by all three branches of government -- Congress, the executive, and the judiciary -- lending credence to Madison's suggestion that the Bill of Rights carried no more weight than the government wanted to let it carry.
The Democratic Republicans did protest mightily, of course, with the Sedition Act doing much to undermine the popularity of the Federalists. There wasn't much objection in the press, since protest might lead to arrest, but there was agitation in state legislatures -- with both the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures passing resolutions denouncing the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SPECTRUM.IEEE.org ("Firefighting Robot Snake Flies on Jets of Water" by Evan Ackerman, 4 June 2018), fires often occur in parts of structures that aren't easy for firefighters to access. To get to them, they have to go into the structure, which may be very dangerous; or just hose water into windows, which may be ineffective. Japanese researchers from Tohoku University and National Institute of Technology, Hachinohe College, have come up with an ingenious solution to the problem -- in the form of a self-propelled hose that flies into a structure on jets of water.
The hose features sets of steerable nozzle modules along its length, which bleed off water from the hose water stream and blast it downward. Each module is independently steerable, allowing the hose to twist its way inward. Details of how it's controlled are unclear; presumably the head has sensors, with the hose controlled by wireless via a tablet. The author suggested the same scheme could be used with a garden hose. Why not? It would be the sprinkler system equivalent of a Roomba, navigating over a lawn, surveying it with a camera system to make sure water is deposited where needed.
* As discussed by an article from MIT.EDU ("How To Control Robots With Brainwaves And Hand Gestures" by Adam Connor, 20 June 2018), as of late, roboticists have been pushing to develop schemes for human communications with machines that approximate telepathic control. For example, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is working on tech that will allow users to instantly correct robot mistakes with no more than brain signals and the flick of a finger.
The effort is based on earlier work by the same team on simple binary-choice activities, expanding it to to multiple-choice tasks. By monitoring brain activity, the system knows if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and select the correct option for the robot to execute. As a demonstration, the researchers used the scheme in a test in which a robot moves a power drill to one of three possible targets on the body of a mock aircraft. Test subjects were able to easily interact with the robot, even without practice.
In most earlier work, systems could generally only recognize brain signals when people trained themselves to "think" in very specific, if arbitrary, ways with the system cued by such signals. For instance, a human operator might have to look at different light displays that corresponded to different robot tasks during a training session. This was cumbersome and unreliable. In contrast, the MIT researchers leveraged off called "error-related potentials (ErrP)", which occur spontaneously when people notice mistakes. If there's an ErrP, the system stops so the user can correct it; if not, it carries on. The user did not have to adapt to the machine, the machine adapted to the user.
For the project the team used "Baxter," a humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics. To allow the system to read humans, the researchers used the system the team harnessed the power of electroencephalography (EEG) for brain activity and electromyography (EMG) for muscle activity, putting a series of electrodes on the users' scalp and forearm. By themselves, neither EEG nor EMG were all that effective, but in combination they proved very effective. The MIT researchers see the tech as potentially useful for the elderly or the impaired.
* As discussed by an article from MIT TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.com ("MIT Develops Autonomous 3D-printed Boats to Reduce Traffic in Water-way Rich Cities" by Loukia Papadopoulos, 26 May 2018), of course there's been a lot of work on robotic air and ground transport systems in recent years. Now another team at MIT has developed a low-cost 3D-printed robot boats for cities laced with waterways.
The boats feature a 16-piece rectangular hull that can be 3D-printed in about 60 hours, then sealed with fiberglass. The hull is equipped with features such as power supply, wi-fi antenna, indoor ultrasound beacon system, plus a GPS / inertial measurement unit (IMU) navigation system. The boat's controller system can navigate precisely and record its past movements. The boat's rectangular shape means it can move sideways and attach to other boats to support pontoon bridges or other temporary structures. They could also be fitted with sensors to monitor environmental water conditions.
Daniela Rus, one of the directors of the effort, commented: "Imagine shifting some of infrastructure services that usually take place during the day on the road -- deliveries, garbage management, waste management - to the middle of the night, on the water, using a fleet of autonomous boats.
[ED: This might seem like a niche technology, but with sea-level rise, there may be more cities that can use it.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* 21ST-CENTURY LAUNDERERS: As discussed by an article from BBC.com ("Why The Laundry Industry Is In A Spin To Save Water" by Padraig Belton, 5 October 2018), water shortages are becoming more common around the world, and having a range of effects. The laundry industry is having particular problems.
When Johannesburg native Charl de Beer moved back to South Africa, he started a company to to rent out freshly laundered linens to the 18,000 Airbnb hosts in Cape Town. Then the Cape Town water shortage hit, and his water costs quadrupled. He called the situation "catastrophic". Fortunately, he ran across a new technology that could dramatically cut the water needed to clean laundry: polymer beads.
A UK tech firm named Xeros sells specially-designed washing machines that use the beads, the scheme having been devised by researchers at the University of Leeds. Stephen Burkinshaw, chair of textile chemistry at the university, says that nylon polymers "have an inherent polarity that attracts stains" and can replace most water in a laundry cycle.
After a user puts laundry in the machine, it dumps about 23,000 nylon spheres -- which Xeros called "XOrbs" -- with a total weight of about 6 kilograms (13 pounds) -- plus a cup of water and detergent into the washer's drum. The spheres absorb stains; once they've done their job, they're collected and stored to be reused for the next batch of laundry. A Xeros home washer, using that quantity of spheres, can cut water use in half; an industrial machine, which uses 70,000 spheres with a weight of about 20 kilograms (44 pounds), cuts water use by up to 80%.
De Beer, not finding a local distributor for the machines, offered to distribute them himself -- not only to get the machines for his own use, but to service the market from other launderers. He says that a single industrial washing machine running 14 cycles a day will cut water use by 2 million liters (about 525,000 US gallons) a year. That translates into a saving of about 177,500 rand ($12,550 USD).
The use model of the Xeros machines is generally the same as for conventional washing machines, and launderers have little trouble making the switch. Xeros is currently working on licensing its technology to seven global washing machine makers, and its machines are being adopted by hotels in dry countries such as the United Arab Emirates. Water-intensive sectors -- such as hotels, hospitals, and caterers -- have wanted to cut water consumption for years.
For example, California-based Mission Linen Supply -- a uniforms and linen services company -- saved 534 million liters (141 million US gallons) of water in 2017, earning a "Water Hero" award from the drought-affected City of Santa Barbara. The company doesn't have Xeros machines yet, but developed a system for recycling and re-using rinse water, cutting overall water consumption in half. The company also treats the waste water before sending it back into the city supply.
Other companies are developing new ways to clean clothes with little water. Consumer goods giant Unilever, for example, has come up with a spray called "Day2" that works like dry shampoo, to refresh clothes left on the back of a chair overnight, but aren't really that dirty. Clare Dolan, Unilever's chief executive for Day2 and global water innovation director, says it's no good for muddy socks -- but for say, shirts, "it eats odors, leaves fibers soft, smooths out the wrinkles, and freshen clothes to wear again, without washing them". Dolan says a bottle of Day2 can save 60 liters (16 US gallons) of water. Working another angle, Swiss start-up Dolfi has come up with a device that cleans delicate fabrics using ultrasound to agitate a small amount of water and detergent.
The dry cleaning industry, despite its name, uses a good deal of water, in the form of steam, and also uses solvents that aren't environmentally benign. However, according to Nick Harris -- managing director of VClean Life of the UK -- new technology allows dry cleaning to now be performed with water, plus biodegradable detergents and conditioners.
The VClean system still uses lots of water for steam, but the scheme involves centralizing dry cleaning at a large facility, where the water is recycled, with the system having the "smarts" to make precise use of water. The company's business model envisions the facility being fed by family-owned dry cleaners, VClean being able to do the job more cheaply than they can do it themselves. The firm also is planning to install 24-hour "drop off and collect" vending machines at Tube stations and other locales throughout London.
Back in Cape Town, de Beer says tourists are becoming "more and more discerning" about whether places they visit "are good stewards of the environment." Businesses have to move with the times; but once they get over the threshold of adopting new ways of doing things, they often realize that they can't believe they were ever so backward as to do things any other way.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GOLD MINE: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK ("Banks Are Eyeing $1.5 Trillion in Credit Card Secrets" by Jennifer Surane, 16 August 2018), banks tend to live on narrow profit margins -- while they obtain a monster data stream on the buying habits of customers that use the banks' charge cards. Banks, then, have both the incentive and opportunity to leverage that data stream to their economic advantage. Scott Grimes and Lynne Laube co-founded the company Cardlytics INC to help banks mine that data stream, known in the business as "purchase data", with the banks using Cardlytics assessments to push products on those customers.
Cardlytics keeps a low profile in its operations. Customers know banks monitor their financial accounts and their purchases -- the banks have to -- and the banks dare not abuse that data access. According to a story that made the rounds in the summer of 2018, social media giant Facebook approached a number of big banks to see if they would be willing to share client data. The response from the banks was strongly negative. Several major banks immediately put out statements flatly denying they were sharing data with Facebook. The banks wouldn't have been keen on the idea from anyone, but they were particularly sensitive to the request coming from Facebook, which for the time being, has a bad smell for its misuse of user data.
All the data Cardlytics receives from banks is sanitized, stripped of customer names or other personally identifiable information. In 2017, the company analyzed $1.5 trillion USD in purchase data from 2,000 financial institutions, scanning the data to find out what people are buying. The data goes to retailers, who then pay banks to put customized coupons and other offers onto mobile apps associated with the banks. The retailers don't know who the offers go to; the bank keeps that data, with the banks in effect, offering ad services to the retailers.
In the US, customers of banks that work with Cardlytics are informed of the exercise, and given a chance to opt out; few do. People usually do not mind targeted advertising, greatly preferring it to being saturated with ads they have no interest in, and particularly like being given sales deals tailored to their preferences; the customers are effectively being paid for their personal data. When they are handed ads that aren't of interest or are annoying, these days the apps give customers the ability to reply: NOT INTERESTED. That's good data, too, that the bank wants to know, ensuring better targeting with offers. Grimes says: "Customers, in many ways, expect the banks to use their data to provide more value."
Cardlytics has an advantage over big retailers in its data assessments in that it can see how customers spend money across multiple merchants. For example, it might identify frequent travelers based on their spending on hotel stays and airline ticket purchases, to work with merchants such as Airbnb to make such customers offers. What's in it for Cardlytics? The advertisers pay the company a fee, typically about 4% of sales generated by an offer.
Bank of America Corporation's partnership with Cardlytics led to "BankAmeriDeals", which gives the bank's charge-card users cash-back offers at retailers. Consumers really like such "card-linked" offers, and they are growing rapidly. Cardlytics does pay banks for the data, but the real payoff for the banks is is increased use of charge cards. Cardlytics says the boost is about 9%.
Banks started out assessing purchase data primarily as a means of fraud detection -- trying to spot anomalies in purchases. Retailers and service providers then started to mine the purchase data for targeted offers, with the banks suddenly realizing they were missing out. Bradley Leimer, of financial consulting company Unconventional Ventures, comments: "Financial institutions are sitting on this gold mine of data. But the challenge has been that banks haven't really thought about how their business model has evolved beyond financial services."
Grimes says he's seeing the change in mindset: "We were thrown out of an awful lot of banks who were like: 'Are you crazy? We would never let another brand in our channel!' The good news is many of those are our customers today."
[ED: The whole nightmare scenario of commercial use of personal data is starting to be sorted out. Most customers don't mind use of their personal data, as long as it's to their advantage, and nobody gets data they don't have legitimate reason to have. As far as compensation for use of personal data goes, getting perks and coupons seems like plenty of compensations.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INQUIRING LITTLE MINDS (3): Other researchers are working to equip their AIs with the same intuitive physics that babies seem to be born with. Computer scientists at DeepMind in London have developed what they call "interaction networks". They incorporate an assumption about the physical world: that discrete objects exist and have distinctive interactions. Just as infants quickly parse the world into interacting entities, those systems readily learn objects' properties and relationships. Their results suggest that interaction networks can predict the behavior of falling strings and balls bouncing in a box far more accurately than a generic neural network.
Vicarious, a robotics software company in San Francisco, California, is taking the idea a step further with what it calls "schema networks". Such systems also assume the existence of objects and interactions, but they try to infer the causality that connects them. By learning over time, the company's software can plan backward from desired outcomes, as people do: "My nose itches -- I should scratch it."
The researchers compared their method with a state-of-the-art neural network on the Atari game Breakout, in which the player slides a paddle to deflect a ball and knock out bricks. Since the schema network could learn about causal relationships -- such as the fact that the ball knocks out bricks on contact no matter its velocity -- it didn't need extra training when the game was altered. Throwing tricks like moving target bricks or three balls at the schema network caused it little trouble, it still aced the game, but the conventional neural network flailed.
Along with instincts, humans have another thing that most AI's don't: a body that they are aware of, a perceived physical presence interacting with the world. To help software reason about the world, Vicarious is "embodying" it so it can explore virtual environments, just as a baby might learn something about gravity by toppling a set of blocks. Vicarious has developed a system in which a tiny virtual character explores a virtual 2D scene, with the character learning as it moves around. In doing so, the system acquired a better understanding of 2D scenes than a standard image-recognition system that simply observed a number of scenes. The company plans to use its "conceptualization" approach in warehouses and factories, to help robots pick up, assemble, and paint objects before packaging and shipping them.
Noah Goodman, a psychologist and computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, has taken a highly innovative approach to make rule-based systems more flexible, by developing "probabilistic programming languages (PPLs)". Instead of dealing with rigid certainties, PPLs use probabilistic reasoning: "If the grass is wet, it probably rained -- but maybe someone turned on a sprinkler."
What is particularly attractive about PPLs is that they fit neatly with deep learning networks. While working at rideshare giant Uber, Goodman and others invented such a "deep PPL" named "Pyro". Uber is exploring uses for Pyro such as dispatching drivers, and adaptively planning routes in the face of road construction and game days. Goodman says PPLs can reason not only about physics and logistics -- but also about how people communicate, coping with tricky forms of expression such as hyperbole, irony, and sarcasm. So far, nobody's duplicated the ability of a small child to learn in a machine -- but nobody involved in the effort thinks it's impossible, and everyone is excited about the challenge. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (35): The British were relieved that the US had declared neutrality in the war with France; an American military alliance with France would have been most troublesome to Britain. There was an inclination on both sides to normalize relations, trade between Britain and America being profitable to both sides -- and there was also an American faction that believed the US and Britain, despite recent differences, were the most natural allies. History would prove them right.
Besides, there was a good deal of unfinished business between the two countries, left over from the agreement that ended the Revolutionary War: the British were still occupying forts in the Northwest Territory that they should have vacated, American financial debts to Britain hadn't been resolved, and there were squabbles over the Canadian-American border. Washington saw the wisdom of setting things straight with Britain, and on his own authority -- without consulting Congress -- secretly sent Governeur Morris to Britain to sound out the waters.
That exercise proving positive, Washington officially sent Chief Justice John Jay to Britain to negotiate a treaty, with a preliminary agreement established by the end of 1794. After vetting by the Senate, the "Jay Treaty" was enacted by Congress in 1795, with the appropriate supporting legislation passed in 1796. The treaty did not in itself resolve American debts to Britain, nor fix border disputes, the agreement being to instead work things out through impartial arbitration -- this being one of the earliest uses of arbitration to resolve international disputes.
The constitutional system had worked as designed again, though the Jay Treaty would prove an ongoing flashpoint of contention between the Federalists and the JDRs. Washington played at being above the fray -- it was something of his instinct to hear two sides out, and then decide on the best course of action -- but his sympathies were more with the Federalists than the Republicans. However, the Federalist cause was gradually losing ground. In 1791, the new Federal government had passed a tax on distilled spirits, whiskey being in the widest use, with the measure called a "whiskey tax". It was not popular in the western regions of the USA, farmers and distillers finding the tax oppressive.
In July 1794, a US marshal came to western Pennsylvania to enforce the whiskey tax, the result being violent resistance. Washington himself raised a force of 13,000 militia and led them to the area, with the rebels dispersing before the force arrived. About 20 men were arrested, but they all were eventually acquitted or pardoned. The exercise was a bit of a farce, even more so because the whiskey tax continued to prove so difficult to enforce -- but it was significant in that the central government had demonstrated the will and capability to raise forces, conduct military operations, and maintain order.
As far as the president himself being the field commander, the Constitution gave him that right as Commander-in-Chief. That would not set a precedent. The action was publicly popular, but it also contributed to growing disaffection with the Federalists.
Washington had similarly demonstrated the willingness and ability of the US to flex military muscle beyond America's borders, having signed a "Naval Act" in March 1794, authorizing the construction of six modern frigates, and effectively establishing the modern US Navy. Of course, America had a navy of sorts during the Revolutionary War, but it was more or less a gang of privateers. It wasn't a lot of muscle, but it was a start. The new formal Navy would protect American neutrality, and also protect American shipping from pirates. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Why Not Sequence Everything?" by Ewen Callaway, 2 November 2018), on 1 November 2018, an ambitious effort to sequence the genome of all known eurkaryotic organisms was announced in London. The "Earth BioGenome Project (EBGP)" intends to sequence the genomes of the approximately 1.5 million known animal, plant, protozoan, and fungal species of the planet over the next decade. The cost of the effort is estimated at $4.7 billion USD, though only a small portion of the money has been committed so far.
As part of the effort, scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, announced plans to spend up to 50 million GBP ($65 million USD) over eight years to sequence the genomes of the eukaryotic species in the United Kingdom, estimated at about 66,000. This is one of the biggest commitments to date, with the money coming out of the Sanger's budget. Total commitments are now up to about $200 million USD, which is about a third of the funds needed for the three-year "phase 1" project: sequencing the genome of at least 1 species in each of the 9,000 known families of eukaryotic organisms.
The EBGP includes more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life -- such as birds, insects, or plants -- or on the biodiversity of a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially labeled the "Darwin Tree of Life Project". The aim of the EBGP, however, is not so much to consolidate all the projects under one command; it's more to ensure standardization, and minimize duplication between the different sequencing projects. The London meeting established guidelines for sample collection, sequencing, plus data curation and sharing. Everybody recognizes the sense of coordination, and cooperation is good.
* As discussed by another article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Malaria Infection Creates A 'Human Perfume' That Makes Us More Attractive To Mosquitoes" by Warren Cornwall 16 April 2018), the protozoan parasite that causes malaria, transmitted by mosquito, has acquired a lot of tricks in the course of its evolutionary history; in particular, it's acquired the ability to evade the immune system.
Research shows the parasite has another trick: altering the odor of its human hosts to attract mosquitoes, aiding in the spread of the pathogen. It has actually been known for some time that the Plasmodium parasites that causes malaria can influence how animals smell and attractiveness of human targets to mosquitoes -- but new research has expanded on the theme.
As a tool in the study, the researchers used the socks of 45 Kenyan schoolchildren, some infected by malaria. To see whether mosquitoes preferred the smell of people with malaria, the scientists placed socks the children had worn in a contraption of two boxes joined by a tube. They put mosquitoes into the tube and tracked which sock they flew toward.
The mosquitoes showed a preference for socks worn by infected children. When given a choice between those and socks worn by the same child 3 weeks later after medication had wiped out the infection, 60% of the mosquitoes flew to the infected socks. The mosquitoes showed no preference between two pairs of socks collected at different times from children who didn't have malaria.
The researchers then investigated what particular chemicals were cueing the mosquitoes. They ran foot odor samples from 56 kids through a chemical analyzer, then puffed individual chemicals at mosquito antennas hooked up to tiny electrodes. The test zeroed in on a handful of chemicals that activated the antennas, and that also were found at higher levels in infected children.
The primary ones were from a class of chemicals called "aldehydes", including heptanal, octanal, and nonanal. Aldehydes easily vaporize and are common additives in perfumes, some being described as having a "fruity" odor. They clearly smell yummy to mosquitoes, who then get a blood meal from the infected host -- and become infected with Plasmodium parasites themselves.
Study co-leader James Logan, a medical entomologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, comments: "The malaria parasite is sort of manipulating the system both in the mosquito host and the human host. It's very clever." The researchers are also curious as to whether the parasite alters the operation of mosquito antennas to make them more sensitive to uninfected hosts, further boosting the spread of the pathogen.
The researchers aren't sure how the odor difference comes about; the high aldehyde levels might be generated by the parasites themselves, or by the breakdown of fats in the course of infection. Other pathogens might be able to pull the same trick. The research team suggests that sniffer tool might be developed that could give a clue that a subject was infected with malaria.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Many Plants Need Bacterial Roommates To Survive -- So Why Do Some Kick Them Out?' by Elizabeth Pennisi. 24 May 18, some plants have nodules on their roots that provide homes for symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air, converting it into a form that the plant can use. So, why don't all plants have "nitrogen-fixing bacteria"?
OK, there's little inevitability in evolution; simply because an adaptation is useful to an organism doesn't guarantee the organism will get lucky and obtain it. More to the point, some species have given up on them.
Species from ten plant families -- including peanuts, beans, and mimosa trees -- support nitrogen-fixing bacteria, to allow them to grow in poor soils. The puzzle for plant biologists is why the other 18 families in this kingdom, and even some species within those ten, don't support nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
To investigate, researchers sequenced seven genomes of nitrogen-fixing plant species, along with three closely-related species that don't fix nitrogen. They compared these genomes with 27 other plant genomes, 18 of them nitrogen-fixers. The implication of the analysis was that the ability of these ten families to fix nitrogen was established in a common ancestor -- but was lost at least eight times in the descendants of that common ancestor, when a key gene was mutated or lost completely.
Plants that grow in soils with adequate nitrogen don't need to support nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and so when the gene needed to so broke, it had no effect on those lineages of plants. Indeed, it appears that nitrogen fixing imposes an overhead on plants, and so those lineages may have been better off without it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BOEING T-X WINS THE PRIZE: US aerospace giant Boeing won a big deal in September 2018, being awarded the contract for the US Air Force's (USAF) "T-X" next-generation advanced trainer program. The USAF plans to acquire 350 Boeing T-X (BT-X) trainers to replace its current fleet of Northrop T-38 Talon jet trainers.
The Air Force released the program requirements in 2015. Boeing had already partnered with SAAB of Sweden in 2013 on development of the BT-X, in anticipation of the issue of requirements. Competitors included Leonardo of Italy, with its "M-346 Master" trainer, and a collaboration of Lockheed Martin and Korea Aerospace Industries, with its "T-50" trainer. Both the M-346 and T-50 were already in service when the T-X competition was announced. Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems were in the competition early on, but dropped out without flying a prototype.
The BT-X is a new design, but follows in the footsteps of the much larger Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter, being configurationally similar:
The BT-X is built mostly of aircraft aluminum alloy, with no large composite assemblies. It has fly-by-wire flight controls; and tricycle landing gear, all gear with single wheels, all retracting forward, the main gear into the fuselage. The landing gear was inherited from the F-16 fighter. The aircraft is powered by a General Electric F404 afterburning bypass turbojet -- the same engine used on the SAAB JAS-39 Gripen fighter -- with 49 kN (4,490 kgp / 11,000 lbf) dry thrust, and 79 kN (8,030 kgp / 17,700 lbf) afterburning thrust. There's an inflight refueling socket on the spine of the aircraft. The student and instructor sit in tandem, the instructor sitting higher to give a good forward view. The canopy hinges to the right.
BOEING-SAAB T-X: ___________________ ____________________ ________________________ spec metric english ___________________ ____________________ ________________________ wingspan 10 meters 32 feet 10 inches length 14.15 meters 46 feet 5 inches height 4 meters 13 feet 1 inch empty weight 3,250 kilograms 7,165 pounds MTO weight 5,500 kilograms 12,125 pounds maximum speed 1,300 KPH 810 MPH (700 KT) service ceiling 15,000 meters 50,000 feet range 1,840 kilometers 1,145 miles (995 NMI) ___________________ ____________________ ________________________
The B-TX has high performance and is agile, making it an appropriate training platform for the latest generation of USAF jet fighters. It also has modern cockpit avionics, using sidestick controllers for flight control; plus a large display for both the front and back-seater, allowing them to coordinate more effectively. The Boeing contract includes flight simulation systems, along with service and support for the B-TX fleet. Boeing's winning bid prices the B-TX low, with little or no profit margin, it appears on the expectation that profits would be made in ongoing support and upgrades. This aggressive pricing strategy puts a squeeze on competitors.
Left deliberately unsaid was the possibility of sales of the BT-X as a lightweight fighter. KAI's T-50 has a fighter counterpart, the FA-50, which has been sold to a number of nations. There's a market for a low-cost, high-performance jet fighter, buyers being countries with limited military budgets and little need for "force projection", involving long-range aircraft that can carry heavy combat loads.
A combat-capable derivative would need a more sophisticated radar system, and a defensive countermeasures suite. It is unclear if the trainer has a datalink system. Although the trainer does have a centerline stores attachment, using the FA-50 as a model suggests a fighter version of the BT-X would have two stores attachments under each wing, plus wingtip launch rails for short-range AAMs. The centerline and inboard stores pylons would be "wet" for carrying fuel tanks. Total external load would be over three tonnes. It remains to be seen if a fighter version of the BT-X is offered.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AIDS WEARINESS: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("It Ain't Over Till It's Over", 26 July 2018), the 22nd meeting of the International AIDS Society (IAS) took place in Amsterdam in July. The IAS meetings began in 1985 as workshops for doctors and clinicians, to soon bring in activists and celebrities, with bureaucracies then getting in on the act:
Along with efforts of national health services, these organizations have helped turn things around. The annual death rate from an illness that has, so far, killed 35 million people, has fallen from a peak of 1.9 million to 900,000 -- still appalling, but a vast improvement. New-infection rates have dropped from 3.4 to 1.8 million, while 22 million people are now on antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).
There is, in short, much cause for celebration -- but there's a perception that the war against AIDS is bogging down. Targets are not being met; money is not coming in as per plan; a scandal at UNAIDS, involving allegations of sexual harassment by a former deputy director, is muddying the waters; and scientific progress is patchy. There has been no dramatic progress towards a vaccine, much less a cure.
Excited at progress, the IAS meeting in Melbourne in July 2014 represented a peak of optimism. Michel Sidibe, UNAIDS's director, announced the "90-90-90" aspiration -- the goal being that, by 2020, 90% of those infected would know they have the disease; 90% of those would be on ARVs; and 90% of them would have their virus levels suppressed to the point of clinical negligibility. In continued optimism, in December 2014, the UN proposed an "end to AIDS" by 2030.
Everyone at the 2018 Amsterdam meeting knew those things weren't going to happen. They did get some good news, in that Namibia has now reached its 90-90-90 targets. Unfortunately, that made it only the third African country that has -- after Botswana and eSwatini (the country previously known as Swaziland). In the world as a whole the numbers are 75-79-81, not all that close to target, if still up from 67-73-78 in 2015. As far as ending AIDS goes, nobody has figured out a cure for the disease. Patients stop taking the ARVs and the virus comes back, sooner or later.
In 2014, the UN also declared that HIV investments should increase to $26 billion USD by 2020, with a quarter of that for HIV prevention. That goal isn't going to be met, either: since 2014, only in 2016-17 did expenditure on AIDS rise, by 8% to $21 billion USD. The money really is needed: patients will need ARVs to the day they die -- and if they don't get on ARVs, they'll infect others, making the problem worse. Foreign aid is essential, but countries that can afford to do so also need to spend more to help their own AIDs victims.
As for priorities, the most important thing is to find people who are HIV-positive and get them on ARVs. More effort needs to be put on prevention, with PEPFAR spearheading that effort -- for example, arranging the circumcision of 15 million African men, substantially reducing their chance of being infected by HIV. PEPFAR has also had success with projects aimed at girls and young women, particularly by paying for them to stay in school longer than they otherwise would have. That grants them a degree of independence, making them less susceptible to the influence of "sugar daddies", who offer enhanced lifestyles in exchange for sex.
The big payoff, however, is likely to be "pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)" -- which means taking a combination of two well-established ARVs, tenofovir and emtricitabine, that prevent HIV from digging in to begin with. Trials show PrEP is highly effective; the problem is figuring out who gets it. Anybody who is HIV-positive needs ARVs, but obviously it's not practical to give PrEP to everyone. The consensus is to target high-risk groups, such as prostitutes, injecting drug users, and the promiscuous.
Trials in developed countries show that people identified as needing PrEP tend to come forward willingly. Studies in South Africa show that prostitutes only need a little encouragement to get on board. Generic versions of the combination drug are inexpensive, about a dollar or so a pill, about the same as the ARVs used for treatment. Studies show that targeting about 3 million Africans will do much to slow the spread of AIDS.
Other options for dealing with HIV are problematic. Cervical rings doped with dapivirine, which early trials suggested may be almost as effective for women as circumcision is for men, haven't got through regulatory approval. Work on a drug that to activate HIV in those body tissues where it hides, and then priming the immune system to recognize and kill it, has gone nowhere. New vaccine trials are in the works -- but all earlier efforts have been busts, so expectations are low.
The spearhead against AIDS necessarily continues to be ARVs. Nobody believes 90-90-90 will be achieved by 2020, but most believe they'll see it happen. It has to happen: the longer AIDS afflicts the planet, the more the planet will end up paying for it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INQUIRING LITTLE MINDS (2): Harvard University psychologist Elizabeth Spelke suggests we have at least four "core knowledge" systems to give us a basis for understanding objects, actions, numbers, and space. We are, for example, intuitive physicists, quick to understand objects and their interactions. One study showed that infants only 3 days old interpret the two ends of a partially hidden rod as parts of one entity -- that is, we appear to be wired to assemble elements into a single object.
Along parallel lines, we're also intuitive psychologists. In a 2017 study Sharon Liu, a grad student in Spelke's lab, found that 10-month-old infants could infer that when an animated character climbs a bigger hill to reach one shape than to reach another, the character must prefer the first shape. Marcus has found that 7-month-old infants can learn rules; they show surprise when three-word sentences ("wo fe fe") break the grammatical pattern of previously heard sentences ("ga ti ga"). According to later research, day-old newborns showed similar behavior.
Marcus has drawn up a basic list of 10 human instincts that he suggests should be incorporated into AIs, including notions of causality, cost-benefit analysis, and types versus instances -- "dog" as a general class, in contrast to a specific instance of a dog, say a pomeranian named Duke. Marcus has argued his ideas out with Yann LeCun, an NYU computer scientist and Facebook's chief AI scientist.
LeCun recognizes that instincts play a significant role in behavior; he simply doesn't believe they're hard-wired. LeCun is strongly focused on image recognition, and in the 1980s he began to argue that hand-coding rules to identify features in images wasn't really necessary. His critics thought that perverse, asking: "Why learn it when you can build it?" He replied that learning it would be easier than building it, and likely more accurate as well. He believes that current progress in image recognition bears out his claim.
Marcus has countered that LeCun had embedded one of the ten key instincts into his image-recognition system: "translational invariance", which means the ability to recognize an object no matter what its orientation is or where it's located in the visual field. Translational invariance is a fundamental principle in the construction of the "convolutional neural nets (covnets)" that LeCun has successfully pushed for image recognition.
LeCun believes that there's no real need to build translational invariance into an image recognition system, that it could emerge on its own, given better general learning mechanisms. LeCun says: "A lot of those items will kind of spontaneously pop up as a consequence of learning how the world works."
In other words, babies pick up fundamentals so quickly and easily that they appear instinctive -- but they actually are simply obvious, and so the first things babies learn. Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of machine learning at the University of Toronto in Canada, agrees, saying: "Most of the people who believe in strong innate knowledge have an unfounded belief that it's hard to learn billions of parameters from scratch. I think recent progress in deep learning has shown that it is actually surprisingly easy."
Advocates of instinctive wiring can reply: "Why are some things obvious, and others not?" The neat fit of a key in a lock implies a lock that has a specific configuration to accept it, and not other keys, instead of indiscriminately accepting all keys. Certainly, humans pick up language to a level of capability that no other species of animal could obtain, with any level of training; doesn't that imply optimizations of the brain to handle language? The argument over principle between rule-based schemes and machine learning goes on, but it tends to mask questions of practicality.
Yes, the idea of hybridizing the two approaches does have its appeal -- but how can it be done? That question becomes all the more troublesome because there's no strong consensus on what the rules should be, much less how to code them. However, some people are taking on the challenge.
A robotics laboratory at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, features a mock living room and kitchen, Computer scientist Michael Thielscher explains that the lab is a testbed for a domestic robot. Thielscher's team is trying to endow a Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR), which has one arm and a screen for a face, with two humanlike instincts:
So far, their software shows some humanlike abilities -- for example, having the good sense to fetch the blue cup, not the red plate. However, Thielscher is unhappy that the robot had to be give a rule that being a cup was more important than being red. This is the problem with rule-based systems: not only do all the rules have to be specified, the machine has no idea of how to handle something outside the rules. It would be better if the robot could quickly learn the preferences of people on its own. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (34): Another amendment was quickly tacked on to the Constitution following the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the new amendment being the consequence of the first major case tried by the Supreme Court. In 1792, one Alexander Chisholm of South Carolina, executor of the estate of Robert Farquhar, brought a suit against the state of Georgia before the Supreme Court, demanding the payment for goods supplied to the state by Farquhar during the Revolution. Georgia simply refused to appear, invoking the "sovereign immunity" of the state -- meaning the state government had the discretion of deciding to recognize a lawsuit, or not.
In 1793, judging on CHISHOLM V. GEORGIA, SCOTUS came down in favor of Chisholm by a 4-to-1 vote, upholding the validity of the suit, saying the state would have to answer to Chisholm in court. The state of Georgia didn't like that idea much, nor did most of the other states, and so the ball went into motion to introduce another amendment. The ball rolled swiftly, the going through Congress in 1794 and being ratified in 1795, by big majorities in all cases. The Eleventh Amendment read:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
END QUOTE
There was little ambiguous in the Eleventh Amendment; it simply said that the Federal judiciary couldn't get involved in lawsuits pressed on states, even if the plaintiff were from another state, or a foreigner. Chisholm's suit was dismissed, as were similar suits. If there was no issue of Federal law involved in such litigation, the Federal judiciary couldn't get involved. There was a certain justice in the Eleventh Amendment, in that it gave the states the same discretion in litigation with citizens not from a particular state as it did with citizens of the state. However, it would also provide a basis for gradually setting more limits on the ability of citizens to sue a state.
* The Eleventh Amendment was not much more than an add-on to the Constitution, protecting States' Rights. The real focus of the evolution of the Federal government remained with George Washington and Congress. In 1793, Congress passed a "Fugitive Slave Act", which provided the legal framework to allow slaveowners to regain their "property", if a slave fled to a free state. The significant clause in the act stated those hunting slaves were ...
BEGIN QUOTE:
... empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take him or her before any Judge of the Circuit or District Courts of the United States, residing or being within the State, or before any magistrate of a county, city, or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such Judge or magistrate ... it shall be the duty of such Judge or magistrate to give a certificate thereof to such claimant, his agent, or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor to the State or Territory from which he or she fled.
END QUOTE
The sticking point was that a slave-hunter needed the cooperation of state or local authorities to get a slave back -- but what if those authorities didn't want to cooperate? The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 was problematic.
Also in 1793, the new French revolutionary government declared war on Great Britain, placing the young United States in a difficult position. America had ties to France by treaty, going back to the Revolution; America would have been hard-pressed to win the Revolution had it not been for French aid.
However, those treaties had been established with the French monarchy, which had been violently overthrown. Did the US have obligations to the new government? Much more to the point, America had little to gain and much to lose by getting involved in a European war. After discussions, in April President Washington issued a "Proclamation of Neutrality", saying that the US would stay out of the fighting, and authorizing actions against Americans violating neutrality. He also recognized the revolutionary French government as the rightful successor to the French monarchy, even though the revolutionaries had sent the monarch to the guillotine.
Washington's refusal to join forces with France was controversial in his cabinet, with Treasury Secretary Hamilton, on the side of the Federalists, arguing it was within the rights of the president, as per the executive power, while Secretary of State Jefferson -- on the side of the Jeffersonian "Democratic Republicans", or "JDR" for short, not really the same as the modern Democrats or Republicans -- arguing that Washington had exceeded his powers. The view of Hamilton prevailed; after all, while the Constitution granted the Congress the sole authority to declare war, it never said that Congress could decide not to go to war. That was, at least in hindsight, clearly the prerogative of the commander-in-chief. Jefferson, strongly sympathetic to France, would ultimately resign over the issue.
Washington had been careful to get the opinions of his cabinet secretaries in making his decision, though the decision was, in the end, his alone. There was the issue of enforcing the Proclamation of Neutrality; to be put through criminal proceedings, those violating the act had to be breaking laws, but the executive couldn't make laws. Congress agreeably followed up the proclamation with the "Neutrality Act" of 1794, which made it illegal for American citizens to violate American neutrality. The Framers could take satisfaction in seeing the system work as designed. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: I took one of my occasional trips down to Denver for a photo-shoot in early October. It was a pleasant, inconsequential trip, doing some planespotting at Denver International Airport, and doing a circuit of the Denver Zoo.
I got a satisfactory number of good shots, nothing in particular new -- except for a plant at the zoo called a "tennis-ball bush". It's a species of milkweed, it seems, and just like the name says, it grows what looks like green tennis balls. I learn something new every day.
* I mentioned my new little RCA Cambio tablet-notebook computer last month, and I finally got it to working as my kitchen PC. I like to keep my Windows computers in a common configuration, with all the same apps and files, updated on a monthly basis. If my desktop PC conked out abruptly, I could use one of my notebooks until I got a replacement. Daily work is typically backed up to a OneDrive directory, shared between all my PCs, and in an online location.
It didn't seem practical to copy a full system to the Cambio, which only has 32 GB flash built-in, and I just wanted to use it as an appliance -- to run Japanese practice flashcards, listen to music, watch a video download every now and then. I gave it a minimal configuration to support the OneDrive directory. There was a little trick in doing so; although there was 7 GB left available on the Cambio's flash drive, I wanted to have the OneDrive directory reside on the extra 32 GB flash chip I had plugged into it.
No bother, all I had to do was unlink OneDrive from the network, change the directory setting in OneDrive to "D:", and it automatically put a OneDrive directory on the extra flash chip: I also found out I could select specific OneDrive sub-directories so they would be the only ones downloaded, which made the scheme very efficient. OneDrive did trip me up a bit, in that by default, it only downloads files as they are used, which was not satisfactory for my purposes. Not a problem, I just turned off the flag for "download on demand".
I use an external display with the Cambio in the kitchen. The display only has an old-style VGA connector, while the Cambio has an HDMI output. Not a problem, an HDMI-to-VGA converter module was cheap -- but I bought one with a micro-HDMI connector, not realizing there was also a mini-HDMI connector, which is what the Cambio had. Oh well, I bought a mini-to-micro converter cable, which fixed the problem, and incidentally made the cabling a bit easier. Once I was flying, I just had to tinker with turning off the Cambio's display and diverting video to the external display.
One other problem was that the Cambio has a flip-out panel as a stand, but the panel kept snapping shut, with the Cambio falling over in a clatter. I just found a washcloth, rolled it up, and stuffed it inside so the flip-out panel wouldn't close. Now it stays up very reliably. I didn't like the dinky keyboard at first, but I'm happier with it now. It's only good for two-fingered typing, too scrunched for touch typing, but as an appliance, I don't type on it that much anyway. There's something of a rat's nest of cabling out of the side of the Cambio -- power, HDMI, audio -- but I managed to tidy it up with tie-wraps and cloths.
Another problem with the Cambio is that the touchpad has nothing that looks like mouse buttons. The lack of a left mouse button is not so troublesome, since the ENTER key does the same job, but the lack of a right mouse button, to get an options menu, is troublesome. After poking around on YouTube, I figured out the procedure: I slap my index finger firmly onto the lower right area of the touchpad, then drag my fingertip over the bottom edge. It's tricky; sometimes I have to try it several times.
I'd long wanted a $100 computer, and the Cambio comes in acceptably close to that price. Lacking a hard disk drive and using an external display, it's likely to last a long time. Besides, it's cute; I like the purple keyboard. If RCA brings it up to 64 GB flash, it could do almost anything my desktop could, if not as efficiently. I might get another one if they do pump it up to 64 GB.
Somehow, I am reminded of the Sinclair-Timex ZX81 PC of the early 1980s, which was the budget PC of the era; it had a 3.5 MHz 8-bit CPU, one kilobyte of RAM, a TV for a display, and a cassette tape drive for mass storage. It ran BASIC. Now the minimal Cambio has a quad-core 32-bit Atom CPU running at about 1.5 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM -- an astounding jump of capability in a generation.
* As for the Real Fake News of October, it started out with Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, after a shrill Senate session in which Kavanaugh was accused of sexual misconduct. The confirmation was a success for the Trump Administration, one has to admit that, though the Trump White House tried to use it to discredit the Democrats in the upcoming election.
Good luck with that, the matter promptly disappearing into the noise. The NEW YORK TIMES came out with a report on Trump's taxes, investigation showing the Trump clan has, to zero surprise, a long history of playing fast and loose on taxes. The tale also undermined Trump's claim to have clawed his way up in the world, though few with sense believed that anyway. He was a millionaire when he was eight years old, and a million dollars was a fantastic fortune in those days.
The Trump Administration also scored another win by closing the revised NAFTA trade deal with Canada and Mexico, now rebadged as the "United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)". It could be thought of as "NAFTA-", THE ECONOMIST commenting:
BEGIN QUOTE:
[The new agreement] does not end the tariffs that the United States has slapped on steel and aluminium exports from Canada, Mexico and other countries. Nor does it end the threat that the United States will impose more tariffs on national-security grounds. Unlike NAFTA, the USMCA will be subject to review by its three signatories every six years, and can expire a decade after each review if any party wants it to. That puts the USMCA's long-term survival at the mercy of politics ...
Such uncertainties will reinforce the determination of Canada and Mexico to diversify their trade relationships. But the USMCA makes that more difficult. It warns that if signatories make free-trade deals with "non-market" economies the agreement could be terminated. That is designed to discourage them from making agreements above all with China.
The biggest changes in the new accord are to rules governing trade in vehicles, which were agreed on in advance by Mexico and the United States. These are double-edged. When the USMCA's new rules are fully phased in, as soon as 2023, cars will have to have 75% of their value created within North America to cross its borders duty-free. In addition, up to 40% will have to come from workers earning at least $16 an hour on average, which will mainly affect low-wage Mexico. Mr. Trump hopes that these measures will nudge carmakers in North America to buy more parts from within the region, and to assemble more of them in the United States. But some of the "cash and jobs" that Mr. Trump predicts will come from the new deal could also go to Canadian carmakers.
END QUOTE
US industry was, in general, more relieved than anything, on the basis of: "It could have been worse." How well the USMCA will work remains to be seen. What is clear is that it won't seriously affect the decline in American manufacturing employment, and is unlikely to do much to dent America's trade deficit. Americans are starting to feel the pinch of the trade wars, with CNN reporting on farmers who are faced with ruin because their China market is drying up. Strangely, most of the farmers interviewed remained confident in Trump's leadership.
On 9 October, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced she would be leaving her job at the end of 2018. Haley has been one of the most credible members of the Trump Administration, and her exit will diminish the Trump Administration accordingly -- but, unlike the exit of other senior Trump Administration officials, Haley's resignation was all very polite and smiles, no recriminations. It appears that her motive for leaving was largely due to needing to get a job that pays better, to address family debts.
At about the same time, reports started emerging about dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul on 2 October, and disappeared. The Saudis started out with denials that only inflamed world opinion, and finally admitted that Khashoggi had been murdered, the details remaining unclear.
The incident proved troublesome to Trump, who backed up Saudi denials even as they consecutively crumbled. Underlining the exercise was the Trump Administration's insistence that American foreign policy needed to be based on practical, instead of moral, concerns. The difficulty with that concept is that there's really no such thing as ethical neutrality: actions are either ethically acceptable or they are not, the only question being of degrees. As troublesome, confusing, and complicated as it is practice, there's an inescapable ethical component in US government actions, and attempting to pretend there is not, is the road to crime. That, of course, is the story of Donald Trump's life. The matter promised to sputter on.
The relative calm of Nikki Haley's resignation was contradicted ten days later, when reports came out of an angry, profane shouting match in the White House between National Security Adviser John Bolton and Chief of Staff John Kelley. The argument was rooted in Trump's unhappiness with illegal immigration. Trump has previously criticized Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen -- who has close associations with Kelley -- and when Bolton chimed in against Nielsen, Kelley pushed back hard.
OK, such things happen, and one White House staffer told the news media, off the record, such shouting matches are nothing unusual between Bolton and Kelley. The underlying difficulty with the scenario is that Trump likes to play his people off against each other, likes to see them fight -- which is an appalling notion of leadership, but nothing surprising any longer.
The noise got particularly loud towards the end of the month, when at least a dozen bombs were mailed to prominent liberals such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros, as well as CNN. They were primitive bombs, using black powder, but described by authorities as "functional". The nutjob Right immediately called the bombing campaign a "false flag" operation -- after all, it just seemed too suspicious to them that nobody got hurt. The humor mill suggested that Hillary Clinton really needed to be taken to task for not being blown to bits: "She's got a lot of explaining to do!"
The authorities quickly tracked down the culprit, a 56-year-old Florida man named Cesar Sayoc, who was a Right-wing nutjob himself, living out of a van plastered with Trump posters, with a long trail of Right-wing trolling online, and a longer history of scrapes with the law. That incident was upstaged in turn on 27 October, when an antisemite named Robert Bowers walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and started shooting; 11 were killed and 6 wounded.
* What to make of all this? It was hard to think of it as anything but ghastly business as usual. It won't much difference in the imminent mid-term elections: the two sides have made up their minds, and there's no wavering, no communications, just mutual hostility. In an interview with CNN, Hillary Clinton said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.
END QUOTE
Clinton's remarks provoked loud howling on the Right -- which was humorous, since she was perfectly correct, and the mindless hatred thrown back at her only proved it. It was startling that anyone on the Right could have claimed she was wrong. There was a silver lining in this, in that it is evident it's not a case of the nutjob Right versus the nutjob Left in the USA; it's much more like the nutjob Right, versus everyone else. The Right reached a zenith in 2016, but it's all downhill from there.
The only issue is to get people to vote. Donald Trump hit the road to back up Republican candidates, placing a strong emphasis on illegal immigration as a scare tactic, pumping up the hysteria on a "caravan" of migrants coming up from Central America through Mexico. Trump sent the military to the border to stop the "invasion", and made noises about eliminating "birthright citizenship" by executive order.
Birthright citizenship comes from the 14th Amendment of the Constitution which says, without qualification, that anyone born in the USA is an American citizen. There's a push from the Right to deny citizenship to children whose parents are illegal immigrants -- but it's a long shot, both because of the wording of the Constitution, and the fact that birthright citizenship is well-established in legal precedent. It would not be easy to overthrow, particularly if legal examination of the existing precedent showed it wasn't really troublesome. The idea that it could be overthrown by executive order is ridiculous. It doesn't seem any more credible than Trump's border wall, and it's unlikely to amount to anything.
In turn, Barack Obama stumped for Democratic candidates. Trump is not in Obama's league in any regard, but Obama's oratory puts Trump to shame -- as demonstrated by fiery speech Obama gave in Milwaukee on 26 October:
BEGIN QUOTE:
But what we have not seen before, in our recent public life at least, is politicians just blatantly; repeatedly; baldly; shamelessly, lying.
Making stuff up; calling up down; calling black white ...
... that's what Republicans in Congress are doing all across the country, on this pre-existing condition thing, they are running ads everywhere saying: WE ARE THE ONES PROTECTING IT. It's not true! The president said he'd pass a middle-class tax cut before the next election -- Congress is not even in session! He just makes it up!
He says: I AM GOING TO PROTECT YOUR PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS -- while his Justice Department is in court right now, trying to strike down those protections. That is not spin; that's not exaggeration; that's not trying to put a positive glow on things -- that's LYING!
... and accompanying making stuff up, they then try to scare the heck out of people before every election. It's always something a little bit different. And then, suddenly, the election comes, and the problem they were scaring you about is suddenly magically gone -- you never hear about it again.
... In the last election, it was Hillary's e-mails: THIS IS TERRIBLE! ... We were hearing e-mails everywhere: THIS IS A NATIONAL SECURITY CRISIS! They didn't care about e-mails. ... Because, if they did, they'd be up in arms right now as the Chinese are listening to the president's iPhone that he leaves in his golf cart. ... I guess it wasn't that important.
Now, now the latest thing ... they're trying to convince everybody to be afraid of a bunch of impoverished, malnourished refugees 1,000 miles away. That's ... the most important thing in this election, not healthcare, not ... whether or not folks are able to retire ... not ... doing something about higher wages, or rebuilding our roads and bridges, and putting people back to work.
Suddenly, it's this group of folks; we don't even know where they are ... That's the biggest thing. And you know, as soon as the election's over, everybody will be like: WHAT HAPPENED? WE WERE BEING INVADED -- WHERE DID IT GO?"
And you know what? It would be funny, except they do it every time, and too often it works. And everybody gets all freaked out, and we got to stop falling for this stuff. We're like Charlie Brown with football. ... Don't be hoodwinked; don't be bamboozled.
They're giving tax cuts out to billionaires -- they don't want you notice that: LOOK! LOOK! LOOK! OVER THERE! They're sabotaging your health care: WAIT! LOOK! LOOK! They're letting big polluters rewrite our laws to keep our air and water clean: IGNORE THAT! LOOK! LOOK! OVER THERE!
... There's a more important point here. When words stop meaning anything, when people can just make up anything, democracy doesn't work, society can't work. If you can say anything and there are no consequences if it turns out what you're saying is not true, well, how are we going to have any kind of accountability?
END QUOTE
In reference to Trump's promise to "drain the swamp," Obama said that instead "they have gone to Washington and just plundered away. In Washington, they have racked up enough indictments to field a football team. Nobody in my administration got indicted."
Obama was in good form -- but nobody really knows what's going to happen on 6 November. Still, signs look good for the Democrats. Trump barely won in 2016, and did so less on his own merits than by tearing down, with a tsunami of lies, a vulnerable opponent. Trump's trying the same trick all over again, but he doesn't have any particular convenient target this time, and all he can do is screech to the faithful.
A recent poll suggested that a third of Americans don't believe the media. Okay, taking the media with a grain of salt is wise, but any sensible person does that as a matter of course; flatly refusing to believe the media translates to embracing liars and frauds -- and so that third of Americans means Trump voters. Hillary Clinton is right, how can anyone respect people who are so ignorant that they elected a sham to be president? The contempt is only enhanced by the fact that there aren't enough of such people to sustain the Trump "movement". Trump sits on top of a limited and slowly crumbling political base, and their shrill insecurity shows they know it. His campaigning isn't bringing in votes, it's likely doing more to scare people to vote against the GOP.
Still, in these unstable days, there's no safely predicting what will go down on election day -- much less what will happen after. For myself, I got my mail-in voter sheet early in October, promptly filled it out, then put it in the drop box at the county office building. Now I wait and see, with anticipation.
* As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Shivering The Chains", 30 August 2018), the Era of Trump has meant a resurgence of the Left. Socialism is having a moment in America unlike any since, possibly, 1912, when Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate, won 6% of the popular vote. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founded in 1982, only had about 6,000 members up to the watershed year of 2016; thanks to Donald Trump, now it's growing towards 50,000.
The DSA operates as a Left-wing arm of the Democratic Party. DSA candidates did not do well in the Democratic primaries this fall, but two DSA candidates are very likely to be elected in November: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York City, and Rashida Tlaib, from Detroit.
A Gallup poll showed that 57% of Democrats have positive views about socialism -- but the poll didn't define "socialism". To the Troglodyte Right, "socialism" is simply an updated labeling of "Bolshevism"; the irony is that, to many in favor of it, it isn't that much more meaningful. For the most part, the sentiment seems to be that if supporting universal health care, more money for public education, and policies to combat climate change are "socialist", then socialism sounds like a pretty good deal.
Although the American Left has achieved a greater prominence in the era of Trump, the USA is not remotely close to a socialist revolution. While Maria Svart, the DSA's national director, says that her group "doesn't see capitalism as compatible with freedom or justice or democracy." -- such assertive hostility to capitalism doesn't fly well with the voters. Indeed, candidates endorsed by Democratic Party organs have won far more primaries than those endorsed by the Leftist "Our Revolution", which grew out of Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign.
Not all in the DSA are so "AntiCap", either. Sara Innamorato, a DSA member who won her primary in May and will probably represent a heavily Democratic district of southwestern Pennsylvania in the state legislature, says that "capitalism isn't working ... but I don't think that capitalism and socialism are necessarily opposites. There are good lessons to be gained from both."
Indeed, even the platform of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election left capitalism fundamentally intact, calling instead for a broader and more redistributive social safety-net. His supporters seem very fond of Nordic-style social-welfare policies -- but those countries are perfectly capitalist, being free-market economies, if with high rates of taxation that finance generous public services. The "socialist" aspects of those countries would be unaffordable without the capitalist part.
While the Left in the Democratic Party often snipes at the centrists, in practice that's more smoke than fire; it's mostly talk, being shelved when the time comes to work together. Only the wildest on the Left forget that those opposed to the Trump regime cannot afford to break ranks. Everybody is wise to Trump's reliance on the tactic of "divide & rule".
The Left has nothing much to complain about on that score anyway. On 28 August Andrew Gillum pulled off a surprise victory in the Democratic primary race for governor in Florida -- a state that has long preferred bland, centrist Democrats. Gillum is clearly on the Left; he wants to see universal health care, a $15 USD minimum wage, a more compassionate immigration policy, corporate-tax hikes to fund public education, stricter gun-control laws and the legalization of marijuana. The trick is that these positions were Leftist pipe-dreams a decade ago, but now they are the norm among Democrats.
Others -- such as Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillebrand, senators from New Jersey and New York, respectively -- have made favorable noises about a Federal jobs guarantee; and Gillum thinks Trump should be impeached. These things have no visible prospect of happening, but that's not the point. They are political statements designed to signal support for a bold, activist government, and to deny any willingness to compromise with the voters who put Trump in the White House. There is no compromising with them -- it's either push back, or get stepped on.
The election of Donald Trump meant an abrupt change in the political landscape, in a social upheaval of a magnitude not seen since the 1960s. Trump will be gone soon enough, and then the upheaval will move into a new phase. What role the Left will play when it settles out, as it surely will, remains to be seen.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE