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- Charlemagne: No time for doubters
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- China's foreign policy: Setting sail for Libya
- Language and opinion: Framing climate change
- Precautions in Xinjiang: Catching a whiff of jasmine in Kashgar
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- Turkey's election: A Muslim democracy in action
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Over the past five days
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@Zambino
Point well taken, my friend. I actually do know several trend-conscious individuals who are on their third iPhone by now.
If I add all the bars in this chart, I get close to a billion tablets in about 5 years! Something tells me 1 out of 7 people on earth will not own a tablet computer, when about 3 out of 7 are still trying to get food, shelter, and basic ameneties. This is reminiscent of the irresponsible extrapolations of fiberoptic capacity trends in the late 90's.
This is the kind of innovation the west needs to stay ahead of China, which now produces 40% of the worlds steel and is a distant cost leader.
Temperatures seem to be a meaningful factor. Another might be the availability of national/state parks or simply the beauty of the state's landscape. Mountainous and picturesque seems to beat flat, dusty or swampy.
The battle has begun indeed. However, judging from how the physical mail and email spam battles played out, the prognosis is not good. For every 2 bits of spam that get nabbed, 3 more seem to get through. And the cost of sending all 5 keeps decreasing.
It may have been worth mentioning that centuries later modern particle physics has made turning lead into gold possible. It can be done by knocking protons and neutrons out of a lead atom in a particle accelerator. Though as one can imagine, it's not a process conducive to getting rich.
Bad publicity probably should have been split into a few more subcategories here. Comic bad publicity, as in the case of Borat, can clearly help recognition. Bad publicity loosely related to the quality of the product, like a management scandal, might work too. On the other hand, uncontrolable acceleration probably won't earn you points, whether you're the world's number one carmaker or an amateur mechanic tooling around in your garage.
Finally, a great article that answers with cold hard numbers all those nagging questions you had over the years:
1. Why is America so involved in Arab affairs?
2. Why did we invade Iraq?
3. Why are we supporting Israel unconditionally?
4. Why did we not go after the real perpetrators of 9/11?
5. Do western "big oil" companies really control oil prices?
6. Why did every president since LBJ talk about independece from OPEC? And why they all ended up lying.
7. Why will our kids all drive Priuses?
8. Why was the game over for the "Big Three" when they lost the small car market? And why bailing them out will just delay the inevitable?
9. Why will we soon be vacationing a lot closer to home?
10. Why will the world end in enthropy?
Well, if you didn't before, now you know.
False Alarm indeed! What a silly article that turns logic on its head by claiming the handlers are interrupting the dogs' work. It basically concludes that the famed 19th century horse should be allowed to do the math.
The dogs are not meant to do the reasoning. They merely lend their sharp noses to the handlers. The handlers combine the dogs' noses with their other four senses to assess the situation. If the handlers are being prejudiced, surely they can be trained too.
On a side note, Israeli security forces, which use profiling unapologetically, have shown that it can be quite effective when used with purpose.
Finally, that stereotypical overweight and lazy guard has justification to snooze or watch sports.
Ahh, looks like China cautiously embarks down the slippery slope, which the U.S. has been on for a while. Just google the BLS with "CPI substitution" and "CPI hedonics". A tweak here, a tweak there... no harm done, right? Then twenty years later the "food" category has ramen and spam where steak and caviar used to be.
To make better sense of this data I would recommend segmenting it into three groups:
Autocratic regimes are obviously only limeted by their own life expectancy. Power is pried away from cold, dead or very wrinkled hands.
Young vibrant democracies with large voter turnouts tend to make a logical connection between age, experience and competence, electing leaders in their 50s and 60s.
Lastly, old, stale, populist rich world democracies with low voter turnouts have seen their elections gradually devolve into televised beauty contests.
The king is dead, long live the king!
Not all forests are created equal when it comes to value for the environment. The conifers of Sweeden and Norway do little to absorb CO2. Little better are the fast-growing softwoods that China is planting in orderly rows around its new coal power plants. It's the primeval rainforests of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Indonesia that are the "lungs of the planet", and we're still losing those. Still, it's nice to see an iota of progress.
Of course the current consumption growth curve is unsustainable. Technological progress may or may not keep up with it. But there may be a different curve worth focusing on - the consumption-utility curve.
In a poor country, the first few items of consumption contribute a lot to utility (sastisfaction/happiness). In the West we are probably already in the flat portion of that curve. Do you really need a tv in every room of the house? Do you need an urban assualt vehicle to get around? Did you ever need to get things shipped overnight to you, before FedEx came up with it? Do you really need the ability to eat all produce regardless whether it's in or out of season? Does your indoor temperature always need to be around 75F? Etc. etc.
So I submit to you that yes, our children's children will have to live with less. But will they be less well off, or less happy? Will they even know to miss some of the excesses we enjoy today? Probably not.
Being a complacent market share leader is a dangerous thing in an industry that changes so fast.
Yawning wealth gaps are the stuff of revolutions. All governments have to decide whether to try to raise the bottom boundary or push down the top. The latter is enticingly easier.
@Zambino
Spot on. Finding an earthlike planet and reaching it a very different things. Assuming the speed of light is the cosmic "speed limit", even if we figure out a way travel that fast, it will still take 2000 years to get there. Paradoxically, that means we have to develop sustainable ecosystems on earth before we can attempt to leave it.
So 40% of the unrest can be explained by simply having a large population under 25? Boy, this chart sure chocks up a lot to raging hormones :)
Thank you for some thoughtful responses to my earlier comment. Here are some follow-up thoughts:
- Oil is a global commodity, so it doesn't matter that OPEC is no longer the biggest supplier to the US. We have always strived to control the region to secure the flow of oil, not its destination.
- Looking back over the dacades, Im not sure our middle east strategy has been paying off. At best, we have been securing stable oil supplies for the world while shouldering a lion's share of the costs. We do the same thing with trade routes.
- Israel was always a useful check on the Arabs for us. It was the stick while direct aid was the carrot. We were better off letting the Israelis do the fighting, but in '91 we had to get involved directly. The success of Desert Storm led us to overestimate our chances in 2003, much like the "win" in Korea led us to try our luck in Vietnam.
- My support for Israel is not unconditional. Lately politics there have become too divided, which led to some bad strategic moves. More and more they look like the aggressor in the region instead of a scrappy little survivor. Pulic opinion is turning away from them, and that's a shame.
This has been a great discussion to launch the new blog though.