Category Archives: Web Article Review

China and Taiwan

What would a China-Taiwan military conflict look like, and could it happen in 2021 or in the relatively near future? Would the U.S. necessarily get dragged in?

I don’t really trust what I read in the media about China. It’s not that I assume everything I read is outright lies, but I assume there are layers of misunderstanding and intentional bias along with facts. For one thing, we know the U.S. military-industrial complex needs enemies to continue sucking in a quarter or so of our tax payments and our government’s spending. Then there is just the general American lack of ability to see things from other peoples’ and countries’ points of view. It can help to read accounts from international sources, although they will also have biases. Anyway, this particular account is from The Diplomat, which seems to be a reputable news source from what I can tell, and the author is a Taiwanese academic. So exercise your own judgment in evaluating the source, but here is my summary:

  • China’s official stated goal is “peaceful unification”.
  • China is engaged in propaganda, disinformation, and putting pressure on other countries in the region. (I would imagine this is true of both sides, and in fact most countries in any kind of conflict.)
  • China’s goal in a military conflict would be for any conflict to be over quickly, before other countries have much chance to react.
  • China is currently engaged in what the author calls a “gray zone strategy”, in which it uses ships and aircraft to harass and threaten Taiwan without actually attacking. It might also be doing things underwater in “blind spots that Taiwan’s surveillance and reconnaissance systems fail to cover.”
  • Further escalation could be to blockade offshore islands claimed by Taiwan, and possibly occupy them.
  • The next major escalation could be stopping ship traffic to and from Taiwan, which would cut off energy supplies and trade.
  • China would likely amass a large number of troops nearby, whether or not it had immediate plans to use them. The initial goal would be to intimidate politicians in Taiwan in hopes they would agree to negotiate.
  • The Taiwan military and leadership would have to decide at this point whether to defend itself militarily, which could launch an all-out war.

This article doesn’t quite hold together for me. A protracted blockade seems like exactly the thing that would give Taiwan time to appeal internationally for help, and other countries time to decide what to do.

24 million people live on Taiwan, and they have many more people who care about them all over the world. The human cost of any military conflict would be horrific. Let’s hope none of this ever comes to pass!

study skills and note taking

I find theories on study skills interesting. Even if you are not a student anymore, they can be generalized to try to be more efficient at work and outside of work, and try to learn something every day. I’m the type of personality that concentrating and learning is the most fun thing I can do every day, but only if I can really concentrate without distractions and interruptions (especially noise and people rushing around) and only if the thing I am learning is something I want to learn at my own pace, not something I have to learn at someone else’s pace. And of course, this is not how real work or life work most of the time.

Anyway, this article and lecture on study skills is interesting. The main premise is that people can concentrate for about 25-30 minutes, after which they need a short break. And after several of these short bursts of focus, they need a long break to do something else in another location. I’ve experimented with the Pomodoro technique, which is based on this idea. I think something in the neighborhood of 40 minutes works okay for me. A 5-10 minute break is long enough to take a mental break without losing focus. For those of us chained to our desks by billable hours, this is about the longest break we can take without raising eyebrows with the boss and/or our own consciences.

Anyway, beyond that, the article also mentions Richard Feynman’s “notebook technique” (fill a notebook with notes on a particular subject, then plan out a class where you teach the subject to other people, even if it is only pretend) and some note-taking techniques. Drill down into the links a little and you come to the Cornell note taking system, which I find interesting. I have actually seen real people from Cornell use it.

My teachers really emphasized note taking around 7th-8th grade, and I think what I learned then has served me well throughout school and life. They also focused on how to research a topic and how to write an essay. They taught a preview-read-take notes-review technique that I still think works well. I used to assume other people had learned similar skills around middle or high school, but I have found since then that most otherwise intelligent, educated people actually do not have this skill. The main thing, beyond taking notes, is reviewing them regularly. I actually try to review mine daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, the last two being more of a heavy skim. I used to use loose leaf paper and a clipboard, after which I would move the notes to binders. The binders would have tabs and occasionally indexes. These days, I use mostly Microsoft OneNote for note taking, with lots of tabs and some hyperlinks. I don’t do a lot of sketches and pictures, I think mostly through lists and writing although I will draw diagrams where my words and lists are in boxes and connected by arrows. I know pictures are more important for a lot of people.

2020…in space commercialization

One thing that happened in 2020 is some long-term trends in space commercialization started to come to fruition in an obvious way. Axios has a roundup:

  • record (unmanned) “commercial launches”
  • U.S. astronauts traveled to the International Space Station on a privately-owned-but-publicly-funded rocket.
  • A bunch of space-related companies sold public stock

A “trend to watch” for 2021 is “megaconstellations of internet-beaming satellites like Starlink”. Wait, “like Starlink”? So there are others? How much space is really out there? This article says the business model is still unproven, but I say the real reason is that Elon Musk is a Bond villain.

This article is about near-Earth space commercialization, not space exploration or travel. Not covered are the wrinkle-resistant flag that China planted on the moon, a variety of un-manned missions to Mars and other planets/objects in the solar system, and the usual array of stories about physics and possible alien signals/contact.

game-changing technologies from 2020

Here are a few from various places around the web:

Nabeel S. Qureshi: From what I gather, this guy works at the RAND corporation, and is not related to the author with a similar name who passed away a couple years ago. Anyway, he has a list on Twitter:

  • mRNA vaccine
  • Apple M1 chip – it’s a computer chip, I guess a bit faster or more efficient or whatever than others
  • SpaceX rocket launch
  • GPT-3 – this is a machine learning thing that has to do with computers generating text that sounds very realistic to humans. Or to put it another way, computers can write now? But they still can’t think, that we know of. This seems concerning.
  • various initial public offerings
  • “V-shaped recovery” – optimistic, I hope it turns out to be true in retrospect
  • electric cars
  • “Crypto going mainstream” – cryptocurrency? I’m not sure how/if this affected me directly in 2020, but I do know that for the first time I used almost no cash at all from March-December.

scrolling through the comments, some of which have additional suggestions from nice people, interspersed with some nasty and stupid ones of course.

  • Bt eggplant – this is a crop with a relatively harmless insecticide built in. It basically targets a particular type of caterpillar. Okay I guess as long as it doesn’t escape into the wild and kill beneficial insects or outcompete unmodified plants. I sprinkle Bt for mosquitoes on my garden and in my storm drains.
  • technology and widespread adoption of remote working – some of this will fade after Covid, I assume, but I also assume it will settle at a level significantly higher than before Covid.
  • Neuralink, Starlink – these are micro-satellites
  • Cerebras – this is another computer chip
  • “BCI” – brain-computer interfaces? There is also a company called Buckeye Corrugated Inc. that makes cardboard. come on people, enough with the undefined acronyms
  • “6dof video capture” – “six degrees of freedom”, which has something to do with more realistic virtual reality
  • mixed reality – is this different from “augmented reality”?
  • GAN – this might be a “generative adversarial network”, which sounds like two AIs duking it out and coming up with something new
  • disinformation

Tyler Cowan, an economist who wrote “The Great Stagnation”, says the Great Stagnation is not over but it might be getting close to over. He says “the vaccine-driven recovery will measure as a rise in labor inputs, but in reality it will be pure TFP.  In 2021 (but which quarter?), true TFP will be remarkably high, maybe the highest ever?” Ooh ooh, I know this one! TFP is total factor productivity, which is the rise in productivity that can’t be attributed to capital and labor inputs. So it can represent some combination of innovations, or intangibles, errors and unknowns.

New technologies can take some time to come to fruition, even decades. So maybe we are starting to see an AI/biotech/renewable energy acceleration that we got excited about a long time ago and then forgot about? There are also some dangers and unintended consequences lurking on this list, as always.

The map of doom!

This is a nice piece of risk communication from Dominic Walliman at Domain of Science (which I discovered on Open Culture.com). The “map” is actually a log-log plot of severity (number of deaths) and likelihood (average return period), but this guy manages to convey all that in a digestible way without dumbing it down. You can just stare at the chart, but in this case it really is worth watching the video.

Domain of Science

So what should we be paying more attention to? Well, we might actually pay more attention to pandemics now, and we should. The AIDS pandemic has actually been really bad, and is a good example of how we can just get used to and accept a hugely terrible event that unfolds over a long time. Also antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues. This last he explains pretty well and succinctly between about minutes 12 and 13, so that is worth watching if you have only one minute.

If I were a politician, I would want a chart like this on my wall, prepared by experts in risk management and system theory, and tapping into experts on each of the major risks. I would also want to add more mundane risks that are certain to happen and killing a lot of people, like air pollution, motor vehicle crashes (and pedestrian and cyclist deaths), and diabetes. Then I would tackle some of the worst ones and try to align my policies and budget allocations with them. Not glamorous stuff, but I would hire this guy to try to help explain it to the public. If he wasn’t available, I would pick another photogenic person with a soft and pleasing British (Australian?) accent to help.

vertical farming

Forbes has an article on vertical farming under lights, claiming that a 2-acre vertical farm can replace a 750 acre outdoor farm and use 95% less water. It doesn’t talk about pollution, but in theory it should be relatively easy to collect and recycle/compost/digest/burn solid waste, and collect and treat wastewater, from a farm like this. I know LED lights are efficient, but you do have to produce enough energy to replace the sunlight that would have fallen on 750 acres of the Earth, plus some extra because the system is not perfectly efficient, and you have to produce fertilizer of some sort. These things will have an ecological footprint. On the other hand, if this is in an urban population center, you potentially have a lot of waste streams you might be able to recover energy and nutrients from. Then you also have 748 acres of land somewhere that you can theoretically reforest or re-wetland. Then you might have a healthy fishery somewhere downstream that is no longer choked by sediment and nutrients from farm waste.

Bernie Sanders makes the case to (UK?) voters

A guy named Bernie Sanders has an article in The Guardian. Who is Bernie Sanders, asks the UK audience. According to the article, “Bernie Sanders is a US senator. He represents the state of Vermont”. According to this Bernie Sanders,

If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.

And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.

If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.

The Guardian

It’s ironic that as the excitement of the election begins to fade, and the feeling sets in that we have dodged the bullet of a second Trump term, we now feel comfortable with beginning to feel disappointed with the Biden administration before it even takes power!

Prove us wrong Joe! I think Bernie has it right. The Democratic party’s message is overly focused on putting everything in race and gender terms, and not focused enough on an economic message that appeals to the working people of this country, which is the vast majority of people. Getting the basic benefits in place that people in other functioning modern societies take for granted – child care, education, health care, infrastructure in good repair – would disproportionately help people who need the most help, without the race and gender-based messages that are a turnoff to many voters and are ultimately ineffective at bringing about change.

“Fighting the special interests” means campaign finance reform. It probably means legislation or even a constitutional amendment clarifying that the right to free speech applies to humans and not dollars.

I have friends and family that voted for Trump. None of these people is openly racist, although only the hypocritical or naive among us think we are completely free of bias. Most of them honestly believe that Trump lowered their taxes and that Biden will raise them. Some are small business owners who honestly believe Trump, or any Republican at all, is pro-business and that Democrats are hostile to business. Some believe 1990s-era free trade agreements took away their jobs, the issue that I still believe edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The solutions are pretty clear. The U.S. probably needs to take in more taxes and reinvest the money in smart ways that benefit working people, and that set the stage for long-term sustainable growth and innovation. This means the social programs I mentioned earlier, plus investments in infrastructure, capital goods, skills and training, research and development. These are also pro-business policies!

But how can you get people to support paying taxes when they have been subjected to decades of extreme anti-tax propaganda? This is really tough. That propaganda was created by decades of the rich and powerful buying off politicians to implant their extremist ideology in all our heads. I think Bernie is right that attacking those forces of propaganda is absolutely necessary. This is politically very tough and a very long game, and it is fighting the anti-tax message which is so simple to understand and so brutally effective.

Another idea, also politically very, very difficult, is to make taxes psychologically easier to pay. A value added tax would do this. This is how the rest of the developed world does it. It is the equivalent of a saved credit card in your iTunes app being so much psychologically less painful than writing a check each month to pay the electric bill. You just don’t “feel” that payment as much, and you see and enjoy the benefits that you getting in return every day. When I worked in Singapore, I submitted a tax return not unlike the one I submit here. But then someone reviewed that tax return and sent me a clear bill for the exact amount I had to pay. I was then able to set up an auto-pay from my bank account in twelve equal installments. Anything that gets tax payments into the background of people’s minds, kind of like the stored credit card on your Netflix account, might help.

People need to see and understand the value of the goods and services they are getting from the government in exchange for their taxes. We get enormous value from the government but we tend to take it for granted. Part of the propaganda has been for working people to believe that the taxes they pay provide benefits to other people, people not like them in one way or another, or people far away. I don’t have all the answers here, we could look at how companies create a sense of value for services. Advertising, branding, and marketing are part of the answer, whether we find that unsavory or not. Monthly statements, or the digital equivalent, might help.

There is also the flip side of helping people understand how much they pay for war and weapons, payments that do not bring any direct, measurable benefits to the people paying them. Federal tax revenue also gets sucked out of population centers where most economic value is created and redistributed to rural areas where it is not (out of proportion to the populations served, I am not suggesting rural people deserve nothing.) The brilliant, successful propaganda then convinces those rural voters that the exact opposite is true, that they are subsidizing the lazy people in the cities who do not create value! So we have to fight this too, and it brings us back to campaign finance reform, constitutional reform, and maybe democratic (small-d) reforms that get us closer to one-person, one-vote and lower the barriers to entry of candidates outside the two large parties. All politically very, very difficult! So who in the next generation will take up the Bernie Sanders mantle and make this case to the UK voter?!?

energy directed weapons

An energy directed weapon is basically a microwave beam directed at people. They have been developed for both military and riot control purpose. The U.S. says it has them but has never used them. The Daily Mail (a UK semi-respectable paper, known to sensationalize but not outright fabricate) says China may have used one against Indian troops.

military robot dogs

The Air Force now has robot dogs patrolling at least one base in Florida. Fun pictures here.

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubberpadded paws…

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began…

It was half across the lawn, coming from the shadows, moving with such drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence. It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red colour like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (I am not guaranteeing this download is legal. If you ever see a book lying around and you are not sure if the copyright intellectual property rights of The Man have been followed, BURN IT!!!)