* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.
* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed previously in this column, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been engaged in a contest of wills with Disney Corporation, whose Orlando Disney World is a major attraction, and employer in the state. DeSantis threatened to take over Disney's self-run Reedy Creek Municipal Improvement District -- but that proved impractical, since it meant the state or some other Florida municipality assuming Disney's big municipal debt. That failing, DeSantis satisfied himself by appointing a new state oversight board, made up of Right-wing culture warriors, to ride herd on Disney.
That immediately led to the question of how a state oversight board focused on the operation of the Reedy Creek District could have any influence on Disney policy. Apparently, the new board could in principle make trouble for Disney -- and so in February, Disney worked with the then-existing board to mark out what the board could do and what Disney could do. The result was to give Disney total control over the development of the district, and also denied the board to make use of any "fanciful characters", such as Mickey and Donald and Goofy.
Brian Aungst, a member of the new board, called Disney's actions "a naked attempt to circumvent the will of the voters and the will of the Florida legislature ... We're going to have to deal with it and correct it."
Good luck with that, since it is unlikely that Florida courts will regard attempts by state officials to whimsically control a private company as legitimate. Incidentally, the agreement obtained by Disney is, as per its verbiage, valid until "21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England." Such "royal lives" clauses have been found in legal documentation since the late 17th Century, and they are still found in some contracts in the UK, though rarely in the USA. It appears to have been added as a lawyer's prank.
* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Russia's Population Nightmare Is Going To Get Even Worse", 6 March 2023), Russia's invasion of Ukraine has proven a disaster for both countries. Even though the war has not done much damage to Russia on its own territory, it substantially accelerated an ongoing population decline.
Over the past three years the country has lost around 2 million more people than it would otherwise have done, as a result of war, pandemic, and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10 million.
The country reached peak population in 1994, with 149 million people, dropping to 145 million in 2021 -- and on the trendline, will be only 120 million in 50 years. Population decline is not unique to Russia: most post-communist states have seen dips, though not like this. Their declines have been slow but also manageable. Russia's population in recent decades has seen a precipitous slump, then a partial recovery, followed by a renewed fall. The decline was largest among ethnic Russians, whose number, a 2021 census said, fell by 5.4 million. Their share of the population fell from 78% to 72%.
That was before the war and the COVID-19 pandemic. Exact Russian casualties of the Ukraine War are not really known, but could be as high as 250,000 -- while from 500,000 to a million fled the country. Official Russian statistics give the number of COVID-19 deaths as less than 400,000, but nobody believes the official statistics, with estimates giving three to four times that number. Russia may have had the largest death toll in the world after India, and the highest mortality rate of all, with roughly deaths per 100,000 people.
It is not so surprising, then, that the Russian invaders have taken to kidnapping Ukrainian children, though it is still appalling. There is no prospect of conditions for Russia improving as long as Putin remains in power -- and even his eviction is unlikely to change the grim realities faced by what was once a great power.
* A Polish Twitter poster tipped me off to a combat system, developed by Poland's WB Group, that is in service with the Ukrainian Army. It integrates a range of different battle elements, including a set of drones:
The drones are under the control of the TOPAZ distributed battle-management system, with nodes dispersed among battle forces down to the level of infantry. Through TOPAZ, warfighters can obtain intelligence, determine disposition of forces and assets, and direct attacks. The entire system is linked through a "Silent Radio Network (SRN)".
The SRN uses a coded frequency-hopping scheme, in which data transmissions jump from one frequency to another across a wide band, with both receiver and transmitter following the same pattern of jumps. It appears that the data is also encrypted. Exactly what security is used to prevent adversaries from using a captured node to penetrate TOPAZ is unclear. Incidentally, the Polish KRAB 155-millimeter self-propelled gun, one of the stars of the war, is also linked into TOPAZ.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The War In Ukraine Has Made Eastern Europe Stronger", 27 February 2023), the war in Ukraine has led to Eastern European nations becoming more conscious of their strength. As the peoples there see it, power is shifting from the "old Europe" -- discredited by having been so wrong for so long about Russia -- towards countries now doing their all to push back against President Vladimir Putin's aggression. The war presents an opportunity for fresh thinking and new leadership. Some see a new axis emerging between Warsaw and Kyiv that could provide a counterweight to the one between Paris and Berlin.
The strength of the mood is obvious, but is it more than a mood? It is not so clear that the influence of the "Bucharest Nine" club of Eastern European nations -- the three Baltics, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, with Bulgaria and Romania following in 2007 -- will prove enduring. The region has wasted opportunities for a greater EU leadership role before.
Even Western Europeans do accept that this is Eastern Europe's moment. Warnings from former Soviet satellites about the risk of relying on Russia for gas used to be seen in Germany as neurotic; now they are accepted as having been wise. There is widespread admiration for the way central European countries took in millions of Ukrainians fleeing war, and have done their all to provide military aid to Ukraine. That has given Eastern Europe a degree of moral leadership, and a louder voice at the EU table. One Western European diplomat says: "We always listened to them. Now perhaps we listen a little more."
That doesn't mean a perfect meeting of minds. Leaders in Eastern Europe despise and fear Putin as a mortal threat; while Western Europeans are supporting Ukraine's fight, they see Putin as no more or less than one challenge among many. Life goes on despite the war. Energy systems have been rewired. The EU has faced lots of challenges in the past decade, whether around the euro zone, migration or Brexit -- and will face more in coming years. They do not share the belief that the war in Ukraine overshadows all other issues.
Western European governments have certainly not changed their assessments of their Eastern European counterparts. The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, has accused Poland of flouting basic principles of the rule of law and of the EU -- with the result that EU funding to Poland has been held up. In addition, influence in the EU is rooted from population size and economic heft. Failing that, smart diplomacy can help. Small countries like Denmark and Ireland, and some bigger ones like the Netherlands, can make up for their smaller size by crafting alliances and generating new ideas for the EU.
Eastern Europe lacks weight. Taken together, the Bucharest Nine have a population of 95 million, around a fifth of the EU total; their combined GDP is only about a tenth of the EU's. The group's economic weight has been rising, with living standards gradually closing the gap with Western Europe. The need for Europe to pull back some supply chains from China could give it further heft. But a lack of financial integration -- Poland is not in the euro zone -- somewhat limits its clout there, too. Worse, all nine Bucharest countries get more from the EU budget than they pay in.
There's no edge in diplomacy, either. One EU diplomat says of the Poles: "On any topic other than Ukraine, they don't even pretend to care." The current Polish government also has been picking fights with Germany, demanding WW2 reparations so huge that the Germans have brushed them off. As discussed a few weeks back, the French have been pushing for European "strategic autonomy" -- but the Bucharest club see NATO, meaning effectively the USA, as their guarantor of autonomy. The war in Ukraine is certain to lead to great changes, but many things may well still remain the same.
* The Muslim Ramadan is now in progress, with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy announcing that the government would host "iftar", the meals breaking the daily fast of Muslims. A Ukrainian-American named "Barwin", from Long Island, that I follow on Twitter passed on an article about it, commenting:
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Barwin / @Barwin1986: A Jewish President ruling over a Christian majority country presiding over a Muslim Ramadan Iftar tradition.
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I replied:
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Wily_Coyote (MrG) / @gv_goebel: Zelenskyy seems to embody a Ukrainian determination to shake off the backward Soviet past and make Ukraine into a Westernized, pluralistic liberal democracy.
At a time when a good part of the USA wants the backward past. Fortunately, they won't get it.
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He came back with:
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Barwin / @Barwin1986: Usually societies at war become more closed off and chauvinistic, while Ukraine is having a liberal awakening in the middle of an apocalyptic invasion. Pretty weird.
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In other Ukrainian news, a wealthy Ukrainian is hosting a contest to develop a drone that will land on Red Square in Moscow on 9 May, when the Victory Day celebrations take place. There were suggestions on what it would carry. I commented:
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Wily_Coyote (MrG) / @gv_goebel: An arrest warrant for Putin should be in the payload.
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* In other items on Twitter, a Twitterer named "Davram" posted a news video in which he starred. It was a news camera video at a demonstration in New York City, concerning Trump's recent indictment at the hands of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. A reporter talked to a protester with a sign denouncing "BRAGG'S JEWS", the reporter asking: "You think Jews control the country?"
The protester replied: "Yeah. They control the f***ing country!"
"Oh, interesting."
"They control Wall Street! They control the banks! They control Hollywood!
Davram walked up to the protester: "Hey -- I'm Jewish."
"I don't give a f***!"
"You gotta get out of here."
"I ain't goin' noplace!"
"I control everything. You gotta go."
"I'm not goin' no f***ing where!"
"You gotta go, I'm Jewish."
"F*** you!"
"But I control everything, so you gotta go."
"Move me."
"I'm just sayin' ..."
"Aw, f*** you." The protested walked off.
Davram faced the camera and said: "So there you have it. Jews control everything. I was able to clear the square there. I just commanded him to leave, and he left."
I replied with a GIF of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Greg House, saying: YOU ARE GOOD.
* As discussed in a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("Thermophotovoltaic Cell Converts 40% Of Heat Energy To Electricity" by Steve Dent, 14 April 2022), MIT researchers, working with the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), have now developed a highly efficient thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, with applications in renewable energy.
Thermophotovoltaic cells are based on semiconducting materials that will produce electrons from combined heat and light, with the input energy driving electrons across an energy "bandgap" to generate current flow. To now, TPV cells have achieved no more than 32% energy conversion efficiency. The new design from MIT-NREL improves on that by extracting energy at higher temperatures -- producing power from heat sources between 1,900 to 2,400 degree Celsius (3,452 to 4,352 degrees Fahrenheit).
To pull off that trick, it uses high-bandgap metal alloys sitting over a slightly lower-bandgap alloy. The high-bandgap layer captures the highest-energy photons from a heat source and converts them to electricity, while lower-energy photons pass through the first layer and add to the voltage. Any photons that run the two-layer gauntlet are reflected by a mirror back to the heat source to avoid wasting energy.
Measuring the efficiency using a heat flux sensor, the researchers found that power varied with temperature. Between 1,900C to 2,400C, the new TPV design produced electricity with about 40% efficiency. Steam turbines are comparable in efficiency, but are much more complicated -- lots of moving parts -- and don't operate at such high temperatures.
In a grid-scale thermal storage unit, the system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources and store it in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When needed, the TPV cells would then convert that heat to electricity and feed it to the power grid. It would take about 930 square meters (10,000 square feet) of TPV cells to do the job, but the researchers say the technology is scalable.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("From Strength To Strength", 13 April 2023), Americans seem addicted to proclaiming the decline of the USA:
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Voices on the Right claim that big government has stifled the frontier spirit and that soaring debt has condemned future generations to poverty. The Left worries that inequality and corporate power have hollowed out the economy. In a rare display of unity, all parts of the ideological spectrum bemoan the death of American manufacturing and the crushing of the middle class.
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Well, yes and no. It is true that, by the measure of national purchasing power parity -- "PPP", in effect what the people of a country can afford to buy -- China represents 18% of the global economy, leading the USA at 16%. In 1990, China's was over four times smaller than the USA. However, America's $25.5 trillion in GDP in 2022 represented 25% of the world's total, almost the same share as it had in 1990. On that measure, China's share is now 18%. More significantly, by a range of measures, the USA has moved ahead of other developed nations economically:
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In 1990 America accounted for 40% of the nominal GDP of the G7, a group of the world's seven biggest advanced economies, including Japan and Germany. Today it accounts for 58%. In PPP terms the increase was smaller, but still significant: from 43% of the G7's GDP in 1990 to 51% now.
... America's outperformance has translated into wealth for its people. Income per person in America was 24% higher than in Western Europe in 1990 in PPP terms; today it is about 30% higher. It was 17% higher than in Japan in 1990; today it is 54% higher. In PPP terms, the only countries with higher per-person income figures are small petrostates like Qatar and financial hubs such as Luxembourg.
... A hundred dollars invested in the S&P 500 ... in 1990 would have grown to be worth about $2,300 USD today. By contrast, if someone had invested the same amount at the same time in an index of the biggest rich-world stocks which excluded American equities they would now have just about $510 USD.
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To be sure, much of the growth in income in the USA was among the ultra-rich, but most other Americans have done pretty well, too. It can be and is replied that Europeans enjoy benefits outside of simple pay not enjoyed by Americans: they have longer holidays, generous maternity leave, and less expensive health-care systems. Still, Americans have been pulling ahead in monetary terms -- one reason being that the USA has a higher fertility rate and a more open immigration system than Western Europe, meaning a bigger workforce. Americans are also more productive:
QUOTE:
The Conference Board, a think-tank backed by American business, has found that between 1990 and 2022 American labor productivity -- what workers produce in an hour -- increased by 67%, compared with 55% in Europe and 51% in Japan. Add on to that the fact that Americans work a lot. An American worker puts in on average 1,800 hours per year (a 36-hour work week with four weeks of holiday), roughly 200 hours more than in Europe, though 500 less than in China.
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Much of the productivity boost was in America's booming information-technology sector, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, with its knock-on effects in other industries. At the peak, productivity growth of American businesses doubled to more than 3% annually. Nowdays it's back to its long-term average of about 1.5%, but that's still above the average.
There are fundamental strengths underlying American economic power. First, somewhat surprisingly, American workers are, on the average, highly skilled. Ignoring the uneven quality of schools, the USA roughly 37% more per pupil on education than the average member of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. When it comes to post-secondary students, it spends twice the average. As a share of its working-age population, roughly 34% of Americans have completed tertiary education. America is home to 11 of the world's 15 top-ranked universities in the most recent Times Higher Education table. The universities also help introduce bright and energetic immigrants to the US workforce, with industry putting its educated employees to good use.
Second, America is a big country, with a unified internal market that drives the economy. Neither Europe nor Japan can compete in that regard; China did for a time, but now seems to be slowing down. The USA also has vast natural resources to exploit -- as demonstrated by the fracking boom, which has made the USA a net energy exporter. Fracked gas has also reduced America's carbon emissions and driven the decline of coal. Growing American efforts to develop renewable energy are likely to accelerate the decline of emissions.
Third, America is dynamic, with a sizeable fraction of the working population willing to relocate to where the jobs are, or at least where the jobs are most attractive. In addition, the USA also has the world's most powerful financial systems. Half of the world's venture capital goes to firms in America. Americans energetically start new businesses; many fail, but an OECD measure of the personal cost of failure for entrepreneurs consistently puts America and Canada at the bottom of the pain scale. Finally, despite their sometimes deservedly-bad public reputations, America's corporate bosses are well more effective than their counterparts elsewhere.
The greater effectiveness of the bosses does translate into a greater willingness to fire employees, and America's assistance to the unemployed is not generous. The USA has other drawbacks as well, a big one being that America has the most unequal income distribution in the G7. Worse, the life expectancy of Americans is 77, about five years less than for Western Europe. For the poor, with less access to medical care and more violence around them, the deficit is particularly obvious.
This inequality was the consequence of deliberate decisions, most notably by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. Conservatism has only become more extreme since then, with efforts to restrict immigration, and to punish companies judged to be "woke". Trade policy has become increasingly protectionist and with bipartisan support: the Biden Administration has been pushing for bringing jobs home in semiconductors, electric vehicles, and renewable energy. Partly that's been driven by an urge to cut economic dependency on authoritarian states like Russia and, to a lesser degree, China; but it remains unclear that America's allies are seen in a much better light.
America has been an economic powerhouse for a long time -- but it is not inevitable that it should stay that way. On the other hand, there's no reason to assume that will fix the downsides of the system and emerge even more powerful. [ED: As of 2025, that has been called into question.]
* In 2021, the US Air Force (USAF) signed a deal with startup Tomorrow.io to develop a constellation of small, relatively cheap satellites with rain-mapping radar. At present, there is only one platform in orbit doing that job: the "Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory" satellite, launched in 2014 by a collaboration between the US NASA and Japanese JAXA space agencies. GPM has the ability to observe inside cloud layers to help determine when and how much precipitation will fall.
The USA and many other countries have networks of ground-based precipitation radars, but many other countries do not. Rei Goffer, a former pilot in the Israeli Air Force and the cofounder of Tomorrow.io, says:
QUOTE:
When you go to these regions, there are no functioning weather systems on the ground. And even if they do exist, the US doesn't really have access to them. And that impact, I can tell you as a pilot myself, that impacts every single decision you do in the military, What we have done is miniaturized the radar instrument. We've taken it from a school bus-size instrument, to something that's about the size of a mini fridge. We really see ourselves as the SpaceX of weather. Weather is one of the last domains that has not seen massive investment and massive innovation coming from the private sector, until now.
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Tomorrow.io's first satellites are scheduled to launch by the end of 2022, and the company hopes to have the full constellation of approximately 32 small satellites operational by the end of 2024. It takes the GPM's core satellite, two to three days to "refresh" a scan of the entire planet. Tomorrow.io is aiming to get that refresh rate down to once an hour. The weather data will fill in the gaps in coverage, and also permit better forecasts.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("On China, Japan's PM Wants Diplomacy, Not War", 22 April 2023), China's belligerence toward Taiwan has led to pushback from the USA and America's allies in the East Pacific. Even notoriously pacifistic Japan has made its commitment to the defense of Taiwan clear, and is engaged in a major arms buildup.
Nonetheless, the Japanese regard the military option as the last resort. In an interview, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio was asked what Japan was doing militarily to contain China. With Japanese indirectness, he replied: "What must be prioritized is proactive diplomacy." He stated that Japan wants a "constructive and stable" relationship with China. Japan has been successfully ramping up diplomacy with China, even recently having established a defense hotline. Parliamentarians in Japan's Diet are also taking a soft line on Beijing, avoiding the shrill denunciations coming out of America's Congress.
The Japanese still remain very wary of China, Kishida asking for "peace and security in the Taiwan Straits", and saying Japan was unwilling to tolerate "changes to the status quo through force" -- of course, meaning Chinese action against Taiwan. The Japanese do regard China as a dangerous threat; Americans can talk excitedly of a war with China, but Japan is in the line of fire, and is likely to do the suffering if the shooting breaks out. Japan has good cause to tread carefully. Japanese officials have talked with their American counterparts, and the Biden Administration is now trying to lower the rhetorical temperature -- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen saying recently that America wants "constructive and fair" ties with China.
Unfortunately, temperature control will only get harder as America's 2024 election approaches; the fact that the election is going to be noisy and chaotic won't help matters. In addition, Beijing has not demonstrated much interest in Japanese diplomatic overtures, the general belief being that China wants to drive a wedge between Japan and the USA, which is not going to happen. Japan, however, has nothing to lose and much to gain by playing the diplomatic card. Either Beijing can play along, or take action with its shoelaces tied together diplomatically -- and find out pacifistic Japan can and will fight.
* This last week, a billion-dollar defamation suit being pressed by Dominion Voting Systems on Fox News -- Fox having falsely claimed that Dominion voting machines were implicated in election fraud -- was about ready to go to court, when the two sides announced they had a deal, Dominion settling for a $787 million USD payoff.
That would seem like a serious blow to Fox, but there was much complaint in social media about the settlement, which was actually labeled as a Fox win. That was nonsense; Fox was taken down a peg, even if it wasn't put out of business. The negative response to the settlement gave the impression of being orchestrated by unknown bad actors. It mattered not, Fox took a hit, and is not out of trouble by any means -- Dominion's lawyers publicly saying they weren't done with Fox yet. It's just getting started.
How contrite Fox is hasn't become clear, but that didn't stop THE DAILY SHOW from taking clips of Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson, and generating an apology out of them:
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There is much fall-out this evening, and there will be for months ... We are admitting that we lied to you ... for saying the wrong things about the 2020 election ... Now WHY is that? Well, the truth is ... Donald Trump lost the election ... but no, we didn't tell you because: WE DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK ... Now we have to pay ... hundreds of millions of dollars ... we were wrong, we are completely irresponsible, and we're sorry, America ... I'm sorry for repeating something that was untrue ... I'm sorry, I've just got to take a quick break and go cry in a closet, while squeezing a stuffed animal.
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I usually can't stand to listen to Tucker Carlson, but this time I didn't mind.
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