g m g D e s i g n . c o m

This is a very good idea:

[A program meant to beef up military enrollment by guaranteeing US citizenship for military service]  was authorized without fanfare late last year by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to attract temporary immigrants who speak strategically important languages such as Arabic, Farsi and Korean. The bait: The soldiers could immediately apply for U.S. citizenship, skipping the sometimes decadelong process of securing a green card first.

So many Koreans have applied, however, that the Army doesn’t need them all.

While some people scream that our country is being “diluted” (whatever that hell that’s supposed to mean), I argue that this is a very good idea. No nation in the world that exists (or has ever existed) integrates disparate groups and cultures better than the United States. Arabs in this country are freer and wealthier than Arabs in the middle east. Asians in America are better off than Asians in their ancestral homelands. Ditto for Latin Americans.

No one beats America at integrating multifarious people groups and cultures.

Citizenship following military service is just another win-win outcome that serves our strategic interests & theirs.

From the WSJ:

Mr. Gates, who believes that future wars will involve conflicts more like those in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than taking on superpowers such as China or Russia, is using one of his most potent weapons—the annual budget—to quickly bring about changes in how the Pentagon arms for conflict.

Yes, obviously, the US and China aren’t going to war. That would wreck both of our interconnected economies (oh yeah, and we both have nukes). The “war” is with the visionary head of DoD (Gates) and Congress, who derive thousands of jobs developing unneeded “big war” items rather than spending more judiciously on things our troops actually need.

Niall Ferguson suggests that we need good regulation, not simply more regulation.

Check it out:

Human beings are as good at devising ex post facto explanations for big disasters as they are bad at anticipating those disasters. It is indeed impressive how rapidly the economists who failed to predict this crisis — or predicted the wrong crisis (a dollar crash) — have been able to produce such a satisfying story about its origins. Yes, it was all the fault of deregulation.

[…]

The three problems with this idea (quoted with minor edits):

1. Deregulation began quite a while ago (the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act was passed in 1980). If deregulation is to blame for the recession that began in December 2007, presumably it should also get some of the credit for the intervening growth.
2. The much greater financial regulation of the 1970s failed to prevent the United States from suffering not only double-digit inflation in that decade but also a recession (between 1973 and 1975) every bit as severe and protracted as the one we’re in now.
3. Europeans — who supposedly have much better-regulated financial sectors than the United States — have even worse problems in their banking sector than we do.

Snippet of last para:

All of these were sins of commission, not omission, by Washington, and some at least were not unrelated to the very considerable political contributions and lobbying expenditures of the financial sector. Taxpayers, therefore, should beware. It is more than a little convenient for America’s political class to blame deregulation for this financial crisis and the resulting excesses of the free market. Not only does that neatly pass the buck, but it also creates a justification for . . . more regulation

Dr Martin Hellman (the “Hellman” in Diffie-Hellman… in other words, a prominent cryptographer) writes about our relative risk of nuclear annihilation. Bottom line is that if we’re 99% safe from nuclear annihilation, we’re in grave danger. Check it out.

Phoenix Technologies is putting Linux not just on the desktop, but in the BIOS (basic input-output system). Most people only sporadically access the BIOS (to change the boot sequence, for eg), and many people have undoubtedly never heard of it. Having a quick-boot version of Linux (called HyperSpace) at users’ fingertips would be a big paradigm shift.

From an economic/market standpoint, this is exciting.

But from a security standpoint, I’m concerned. I loathe the idea of the BIOS becoming a major attack vector for malware. I’d love to get details on what steps are i place to protect the BIOS from the sort of infection that would require the BIOS to be flashed to correct.

Latin America has had plenty of wealth-destroying, freedom-reducing revolutions. But the WSJ reports on a revolution that’s actually for good. Final para:

ProReforma [pushing the “good” revolution in favor of human rights and individual freedoms] needed 5,000 petition signatures for its proposal to be introduced into Congress for debate; it has collected more than 73,000. Now the ideological left has begun a campaign of its own, marked by vituperative and personal attacks against ProReforma’s promoters. The proposal might be defeated, but the good news is that ProReforma’s civic education project has already succeeded. Today, more Guatemalans are aware of their inalienable rights. The question is how they can wrest those rights from the collectivist left.

I’ll take personal freedom and economic prosperity over the leftwing alternative that’s all the rage in Cuba and Venezuela.

Radical and slightly demented economist Paul Krugman makes some suggestions on climate change. He suggests that Chinese imports be tariffed as a way of “coaxing” them into adopting a more Earth-friendly policy. Krugman seems to approve of the cap ‘n trade system that’s been proposed for the US, despite the economic inefficiencies that such a system would produce (for eg, a carbon tax would make more economic sense).

Krugman’s gotta be the dumbest Nobel prize winner I’ve ever heard of (except maybe Yasir Arafat). As an economist, he should really know better. Legislation meant to achieve something, in this case a reduction in carbon output, is often fraught with unintended consequences that stifle innovation and exacerbate the problem, often creating many new problems.

Helpfully, the MarginalRevolution blog sums things up pretty well as to why we should be circumspect of Krugman’s idiotic advice. Key points (some edits & emphasis added):

1. The Chinese are often paranoid (arguably for good reason) and we will get further being nice to them than by being confrontational.  […] Chinese citizens wanting clean air at home are possibly our biggest ally so let’s not alienate them.

2. Last I checked China was funding a big chunk of our government’s debt.  Confronting them would have to be bundled with a regime of extreme fiscal conservatism and unilateral foreign policy.

3. It can be very hard to identify and isolate the energy inputs into an exported product…

4. We cannot credibly penalize the Chinese until we solve our own pollution problem…

5. Once the political process gets its hand on such tariffs they will be directed against, say, Chinese cars, including maybe relatively clean ones, rather than the dirtiest Chinese exports. [In other words, our congressional luminaries will take these tariffs, politicize them, abuse them, and worsen Sino-US relations for no good reason.]

6. […] I don’t favor [a “league of democracies” or similar non-UN construct to deal with China, climate change, etc.] but if we are going to do it we need to realize how radical a foreign policy step it would be and how Russia would respond as well.

It’s uncertain that the “cash for clunkers” program will move forward, but if it does, it might look like this (emphasis added):

Say you owned a 2001 Dodge Ram four-wheel-drive pickup with a 5.9-liter engine. That truck has an EPA combined fuel economy of just 13 miles per gallon. Under the House proposal, you could scrap that vehicle and get up to $4,500 toward a truck weighing more than 6,000 pounds that got at least 15 miles per gallon. One that might qualify — depending on how weight is defined and measured — is a 2009 Dodge Ram 1500 four-wheel-drive pickup with a 5.7-liter V-8 and a combined 15 mpg.

So, a multi-billion dollar program will subsidize Big Auto and, of course, Big Labor. It will trade gas guzzlers for gas guzzlers on tax payer expense.

Pretty stupid, even by our political leadership’s very low standards.

Esquire has a piece by Tom Barnett on the “war against Robert Gates.” The war against the Secretary of Defense concerns Gates’s efforts to re-allocate spending to where to belongs: 21st century threats rather than the threats of the 20th century.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock, the US hasn’t had any “near-peer competitors” since the cold war. That threat was the USSR, and that threat was toppled both by efforts to beat the US in defense spending and on its own inefficient, marxist model for sustaining that weapons development. The drop in the price of oil broke the USSR’s back, causing their idiotic system to implode.

The reason the US and the Soviet Union never went to war is because both sides had too much to lose since the development of the nuclear bomb. Suddenly, entire countries could be taken out in a single, multi-warhead attack. The survivors who don’t die of radiation poisoning live in miserable condition absent infrastructure and electricity. This stalemate is called MAD, or mutually assured destruction.

Members of Congress probably know this, security neophytes as they are. But they ignore this reality. Rather than favoring the sorts of monetary re-allocations—money taken from the “future combat” budget and sent to the “current warfare” budget—they deny US troops better equipment and resources for the sake of keeping jobs in their own congressional districts. It’s the ultimate smack in the face to our troops.

Barnett cites Saxby Chambliss as an example of such a senator. Chambliss claims its naïveté to believe “big state warfare” is going away, yet he ignores the reality on the ground today. Summing it up (some emphasis added):

America hasn’t fought a war against another great power since 1945, coincidentally the year we obtained and first used nuclear weapons. Since then, no two great powers armed with nukes have ever gone to war — one of the longest droughts since nation-states were invented. Since the Cold War, meanwhile, our global-security environment has witnessed a serious ratcheting-up of transnational terrorism, failed states, internal strife, and all the accompanying interventions by outside great powers and international organizations.

Frankly, given the profound financial interdependence among the world’s great powers today, the prospects for great-power war — conventional or otherwise — are arguably dimmer than they’ve ever been in modern history. Layer on additional environmental interdependencies generated by climate change, and the case against America being drawn into great-power war over the next fifty years seems all the stronger.

So is big-state warfare a thing of the past? I suspect it is in the normal sense of the word. I imagine trade wars, while still destructive and hurtful, being the new warfare of choice. Proxy wars are still likely: we had those with the Soviets on such battlegrounds as Afghanistan and Vietnam, and more recently Israel fights proxy battles with Iran, typically in Lebanon. If (or when) Iran gets the Bomb, they would almost certainly be less aggressive against Israel, as those countries would both be nuclear powers and would both have greater incentive to avoid cataclysmic misunderstandings.

Don’t try telling all this to members of Congress: they have jobs in their districts to keep. Don’t try telling this to the “cold warriors”: they have big war fantasies to imagine (US vs China, anyone?). Don’t try explaining all this to ideologues who lack Robert Gates’s obvious capacity to see the larger picture. It’s rarely productive to thoughtfully explain a broad, strategic vision to people bent on greed, stubbornness, and stupidity.

Apparently, school reformists are right. David Brooks (the token conservative at the NY Times) tells an inspirational tale about school reform an Harlem. Teaser:

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”

From the Freakonomics blog site:

[A study] finds that a successful unionization vote significantly decreases the market value of the company even absent changes in organizational performance.

I’m not exactly at a loss for why investors would divest from companies in the face of unionization at those companies. Unionism gives workers the opportunity to be lazy and go unpunished for it, lest the company suffer a strike or some other retribution.

Just finished watching 20/20 (w/ John Stossel). Predictable positions, but unusually good today. He asked the questions we’re not allowed to ask, and it was quite refreshing (even on points that I don’t necessarily agree w/ him). Key points of interest…

1. He points out that anti-discrimination laws, such as those protecting pregnant women, actually make employers less willing to hire women in the first place (!), fearing lawsuits later on.
2. Stossel questions why more food isn’t irradiated as a way of augmenting food safety. The reason is that people are scared of the process (it has the word “radiation” in it, after all), despite the illogic in that position. Hence, thousands will die every year in preventable food poison deaths & many more will be sickened, unnecessarily.
3. Finally, he questions legislation such as Medicare, a generational wealth transfer program that takes money from younger people and gives it to older people, regardless of the elderly person’s material wealth. He correctly points out that the potential support ratio (ratio of working persons per retiree) has declined over time as people live longer & have fewer children, making the wealth transfer program unsustainable and unfair.

Not that anyone wants workplace discrimination, carcinogenic food, or old people w/o medical care, of course. His bottom line point is that government legislation is a) often ineffective and counterproductive, and b) fraught with unintended consequences.

On those points, I couldn’t agree more.

Apparently, conventional wisdom is wrong about a few significant things, according to a Slate article.

Key points where conventional wisdom is completely wrong, allegedly:

1. Nuclear proliferation is bad
2. Climate change will be catastrophic
3. China is stable
4. Homeownership is better for us
5. Stocks outperform bonds in the long run
6. Detroit can’t compete
7. We’re running out of fossil fuels

RTFA (read the article) for the case on each point. I have mixed feelings about some of them, of course.

The first is quite controversial. Certainly, nukes precluded a “hot war” b/w the US and the Soviets, possibly saving thousands of lives that would have been lost in direct state-on-state warfare. Having said that, a counter-example would be the DPRK (N Korea), wherein having nuclear arms is not to any overall advantage for anyone but the despots that run that country. Further, there’s always the concern about trans-national actors (like terrorist nut-jobs, or even international criminal groups) getting nuclear material for dirty bombs… or worse. I’d say this one is a wash.

Number 6 is another one I question. On that, the bottom line is that “Detroit” can compete, but will probably flounder without generous largesse from the government (a UAW bailout), something that (thankfully) doesn’t appear to be happening. Getting past vast mistakes made by the Big 3’s management doesn’t do anything about handling the “union problem,” nor do I think the “legacy costs” will be whisked away as quickly as the editorial suggests. In the end, it would be better for the Big 3 to morph into knowledge and IP (intellectual property) companies, as IBM has done by moving away from PC manufacturing. The emerging markets can do the manufacturing, where labor costs are lower and the presence of absence of unions is, for now, less of an issue from a cost standpoint.

Tom Barnett puts it in perspective for us.

Few things are more consistency and fallaciously hyped as linear projections in demographics.

Societies are–oddly enough–social creatures that adapt to signals from the larger environment, and those signals tend to be quite similar, the world over, when it comes to modernization and urbanization and industrialization and globalization–all residual belief aside that claims a lasting, distinct cultural value…

Here’s a great blog entry on Freakonomics that puts the swine flu in perspective.

Swine flu isn’t much more dangerous than seasonal flu, it just struck a particularly vulnerable population.

The “vulnerable population”—living in squalor in Mexico City—sounds similar to the squalor contemporaneous with the 1918 pandemic.

UPDATE:

FP lists 5 disease outbreaks that are worse than the swine flu. Maybe people will start panicking over cholera and HIV now.