China Aircraft Carrier / Navy needs proper context

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Wired and others have been nattering about the Chinese carrier, it’s nascent flight wing, how crappy the hardware is, how hard the job is, etc, etc. working to defuse the China threat they think is being blown up by the Pentagon and congressional hawks.

Look at the two pictures above, the time from first flight to rational threat back ‘in the day’ was a few years, the big gun guys were laughing the whole time. That Fighter struggling off the Lianoning is a threat today if need be, and you do not have to impress an admiral to be able to sink his fleet. No it’s no realistic threat today but don’t make the mistake of equating little with none, the US capability with the capability required to be a threat, or today with forever. The US CVN capability is essentially static or downtrend, China is on the edge of asymptotic rise, with a century and millions of man years of prior experience across the world to pull up on. As other articles in have discussed, what really is a CV in the 21st century? So how long could it be till a Chinese CV threat is more than a wild card? Not long is my estimate.

How to Choose an LED Light Bulb | MIT Technology Review

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

How to Choose an LED Light Bulb | MIT Technology Review.

Useful article, I’m glad LED’s have caught up so quickly, compact fluorescent seemed like a dumb stopgap before, now it’s like some kind of gov’mnt boondoggle or something.

Public Sector Unions and their fundamental Downside for the Public/Taxpayers

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Hat tip to Instapundit and Joel Gehrke for the pointer to this excellent article

The New Tammany Hall
Public sector unions have become a labor aristocracy–and they are bankrupting states and municipalities.
OCT 12, 2009, VOL. 15, NO. 04 • BY DANIEL DISALVO AND FRED SIEGEL

laying out the fundamental problem with public sector unions. When I started and even ended my 15 years as a civil servant working for the DoD I/we accepted the trade of lower wages for more certain and good benefits including retirement. That is no longer true, public sector wages have overtaken private sector wages as time has gone on and supporters have tweaked the laws to make it possible. Worse the system puts a lot of power in their hands leading to excessively aggressive defensive tactics on their part and concomitant anger on all sides as the Public – Taxpayers claw back what their supine “representatives” gave away.

The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan – By Vali Nasr | Foreign Policy

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan – By Vali Nasr | Foreign Policy.

This seems to say it all and Tragically this looks like an I told you so from a huge number of angles, and perhaps it need not have been so.

Antifragile | NYTimes oped that says a lot

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

A very good short piece in/on the NYT ‘Stabilization Won’t Save Us‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “a former derivatives trader, is a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and the author, most recently, of “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.”” The succinct and I believe very accurate + timely article is hopefully a sign that thinking is broadening among the elite, left and even right. To big to fail is a failed concept and our continued federal go’t idiocy shows the danger of letting too much power float to the top. It would not take that much to force (over a few years) the big banks and other over sized and overly protected corporations and guilds ( doctors, lawyers, politicians, AARP, …) to fragment into more useful+effective small scale somewhat competitive (or at least less centralized) organizations.

From my viewpoint large protected organizations with access to Big Data are somewhat troubling since the tools could facilitate continued centralization of wealth and power.

Fox News | Ripped apart by financial crisis, Greek society in free-fall

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Ripped apart by financial crisis, Greek society in free-fall

This could happen to parts of the US if we do not fix our fiscal house. And that does not mean higher tax rates. It means reduced special deals for everyone, like a cap on mortgage interest tax relief at the average home price in the country etc.

Also this is in some ways a pointer to the effects of a corrupt and ineffective tax authority, Greece’s is awful, the IRS is quite good if not perfect, just remember taxes are a necessary evil, make sure the taxman is competent and fare or things can get ugly.

WSJ | There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn’t one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Good pep talk from the Wall Street Journal

Mr. Obama’s campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.

He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.

This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign’s turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls.

There were several other pieces today that said some of the same things, essentially you cannot win against the progressive / liberal patchwork with a pure social conservative / fiscal conservative mantra.

The Republican side was made up of:

survivors of the old line right center Big Business Republicans
evangelical social conservative/moderate
moderate libertarians
constitutional originalists
small business owners
And a rather long list of single issue activists
anti immigrant
gun rights
anti-abortion
anti-tax

The problem seems to be similar to one that the democrats used to lay claim to, Big Tentism…trying to pander to too many one topic interests to the detriment of a centralizing theme. No party can offer blanket coverage for all the rather distantly touched special interests without weakening itself.

The centralizing theme of the Republican party is, personal responsibility and non intrusive government, based on the rule of law centered on a relatively strong reference to the Constitution.

The centralizing theme of the Democratic party might be seen as common responsibility, government central mediator, based on the interpretation of law referring to the constitution among other iconic law systems.

A key problematic special interests in the Republican party today is Big Business (as a themed entity not as the people in the companies,) not because Big Business is evil but because its interests are really more in line with the Democratic Party centralizing themes, not the Republican party’s. The only reason Big Business tents in the Republican camp is because the Democrats demonize it, and the actual ‘People’ (i.e. agents) who are the cells of the Big Business are generally very much aligned with the centralizing theme of the Republican party. But the Players and the Companies when operating in aggregate (or for the company) are much more likely to support the Democratic baseline than the Republican one.

Various single issues activists, particularly the semi organized Tea Party activists of various sub stripes, have pushed their way and their interests into the Republican party. As above providing huge clubs to beat the overall party to death with. The TP has tried to remake the Republican party in its image…which purposely does not exist. This has again and again wrecked the chances of the party by putting up candidates who are very easily caricatured by their opponents and driven into defeat.

That’s not to say that some of the single issues activists are not right and that they all should be driven out. The gun lobby while demonized is a strength in the party as long as it sticks to the line it has in recent years, this resonates well with personal responsibility and non-interference. Anti tax when not carried to caricature. Pro life, when not carried to the level of stupid anti-abortion extremism (as I’ve said before almost everyone is pro-life, most are modestly anti-abortion, but the paternalistic-extremism of an Akin or a Mourdock is nuts in this day.)

Consistency to theme should be considered strongly: For example: Pro-Life –>anti-abortion, anti death penalty, limits to the pursuit of extra territorial murder (drone wars.) pro scientific medical advances (with ethical limits.) In other words limit very tightly the ability of the government to kill anyone unless they pose an immediate threat to the US, which of course has to be defined pretty damned broadly but still consistently. (i.e. OBL raid was a perfectly reasonable action.)

If you look at the paragraph above you would realize that the Catholic Church while staying out of politics is going to support the Republican theme much more strongly than it did,does today.

Same goes for immigration, we are a nation of immigrants, and the nation needs the flow of immigrants because population growth is inherently good for the US economy in every way for the foreseeable future. Yes borders should be protected from military incursion (which I think we do pretty well) but no country with a border as long and open (no geographic obstacles like seas, cliffs or rivers) as the US’s can seal its borders without imposing a police state, which largely stops people coming because there is no reason for them to want to go into bondage, who really wants to go to North Korea, all their walls are to keep people in, not out. Like abortion this is a sore point with fundamentalists but at the end of the day I have never seen anti-immigration sentiment that is not at base about fear of the other or of having to compete.

One of the biggest most fundamental issues that the Republican majority has to come to grips with is that the US has always been about creative destruction and that nothing can stay the same in an evolving world. We have to compete on the global stage in every venue and that means that in some niches we go up and others we go down. At the end of the day nothing can protect you as a person from the winds of economic and social change and trying to do so just fosters tyranny. The only thing that provides you a shield is flexibility and the willingness to learn and adapt, which in general the average American has been better at than the rest of humanity, partly because of the freedoms that the country provides to fail and try again.

The Republican party needs to focus on the themes I think it stands for: personal responsibility and non intrusive government, based on the rule of law centered on a relatively strong reference to the Constitution.

Moderate taxes (limit on income taxes, everyone pays income tax
Moderate, smart and regulation (stop regulators getting captured by those they regulate)
Pro immigrant
Pro small business (not anti big business, just stop giving them special treatment)
Pro gun
Strong defense
Pro Life (not anti-abortion) (anti death penalty)
Pro Free trade even if it hurts

Then you have my dreams:

One term at a time (no re-elections, you can be president as many times as you want, but only one term at a time, then you take a break before running again.)
Individual Health Care:
Individual Retirement.

If you know we’re in trouble but can’t quite figure out why? Adam Garfinkle at American Interest has a key

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Great Primer on why bureaucratic / regulatory purgatory has descended on our heads in this blog post at the American Interest site.

America’s political institutions are so fouled up at both the politics/decision-making and the bureaucratic/administrative levels that one can actually make a plausible case that all the variance we are trying to account for lives here. One can make this case regardless of political affinities, too. Liberals argue that our economic situation, touched off by the financial collapse of autumn 2008, is all the fault of anti-government, market-fundamentalist types obsessed with deregulation. Conservatives argue that our economic situation is what it is because we are hopelessly in debt thanks to the futile and counterproductive meliorist entitlement policies of bleeding-heart liberals who invariably care more about intentions than outcomes. Both are partly right, but also partly wrong or, better, incomplete, in their analysis—which brings us to part three, next time.

Couple of updates, Alan’s post really starts here with Section 1 which provides background, that points back to Walter Russell Meade’s The Collapse of the Blue Model series I’ve posted about earlier. Read it all, Alan says much more clearly and with more background what I have tried to say in various small ways for almost a year now.

The system is systematically broken, it has become so broken that it is self reinforcing and is pointing the nose of the ship of state down, harder and harder as we try to fix it.

How can Romney respond to Candidate Obama’s exposure of his underlying socialist mindset?

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Respond to what, it was just a misstatement, right?

Wrong!!

if you listen or read more it’s quite obvious he meant it in a deeper sense than a softly communitarian sense, he denigrated the hard work and smarts it takes to build up the smallest or commonest business. Yes you need infrastructure to build on, but it was leaders and tax paying citizens who built that, government is at its best when it’s a framework of self organization not the organizer.

How could Romney respond…by declaring a regulatory holiday, for two years. Also rescinding all new regulations from the last eight years unless the were a relaxation of prior rules or to do with acute toxic threats…and I know that even that would be abused.

During the holiday the US’s regulatory framework would be changed from mostly a matter of sovereign law to contract law. Regulations would be matters of goals and baselines and an standard if unwritten contract line item not a legal straight jacket. Don’t feel the regulation is best for your customers, neighbors, employees etc? Then write it up and submit it as a change to your social contract. Regulatory law is ‘now’ contract law, you pay for your day in court to review your change, if someone protests they have to pay the extra court costs (and by the way court is in your HQ’s state capital or a nearer regulatory court, not in your or their venue of choice.) If you’re sued on a ‘regulatory’ item, first hearing is split if it’s extended the ‘suit filer pays’ unless they can prove that you lied, if it’s a question, you split costs.

Simple minded you say? Good laws are simple and philosophically clear. Applying law to complex and ambiguous reality is what we pay judges and lawyers for.

Such a plan would lay the foundation for a new US boom, it would take the shackles off and let people’s ingenuity and desire to build something for the future blow the roof of the doldrums the regulatory over reach of the last several decades has built over our dreams.