Currently Evil Empire By Rage Against the Machine Bulls on Parade see related

Response Post -- Africa, Drugs, Cancer, et al

(edit: This is a reply to Joel's comments on my last couple posts.)

That's often true with respect to the intuitive power of visualizations.  Though graphics can be plenty misleading also. 

I always think it's funny when people make a big deal out of trace levels of carcinogens because those exist everywhere; your body constantly has to fight incipient cancers caused by various cell-damaging mechanisms; it's just that it mostly succeeds.  That's not to say there's no merit to such concerns, but dosage matters.  My dad once told me he and his classmates used to bounce mercury around on their fingers in high school chemistry class because it has a viscosity and surface tension that make it fun to play with.  So far he hasn't gotten cancer and I wasn't congenitally deformed.

I don't think I've heard of the campaign you're talking about.  I remember in 2005 the "Live 8" concerts were held in a (somewhat successful) attempt to convince the G8 nations to reduce third-world debt.  Apparently the G8 decided to double aid to a bunch of very poor countries from $25 to $50 billion by 2010.  Not sure if that's actually been achieved.  According to the campaigns website (probably only updated as recently as three years ago): http://www.live8live.com/datareport/ , debt cancellation was achieved but direct aid and trade structures conducive to African development were not; the former was increased insufficiently and the latter apparently got worse. 

But yeah, that's a pretty dramatic comparison vis a vis the defense budgets.  Of course a ton of things in defense are massively overcharged by contractors due to sloppy acquisitions standards and more rarely outright sweetheart deals.  
Even if they weren't I'd expect the defense budgets to be large in comparison to the African debt though. 

Until I was reading some stuff about fears of mid-term-future inflation of USD this summer I hadn't heard about why Zimbabwe's currency is hyperinflated; as best I can tell, it's due to war in the Dem. Rep. of the Congo and fast-track land reform that resulted in comparatively unprepared and consequently inefficient farmers taking control of a lot of land. 
And of course there’s a big issue of inequitable distribution among the blacks who did get land.  CIA's World Fact Book says the Gini was at 50.6 in 2006 though that's substantially worse for the poor population than e.g. the 45.0 in the U.S. for 2007 since it's a poor country and the poorest Zimbabweans are a lot poorer than most of the poorest citizens in richer countries.
*cries*

I also think it's endearing to go on tangents and of course I do it a lot myself.  It's not a non-story it's just a meandering one, which there's nothing inherently wrong with unless the reader is pressed for time.

Yeah, no overwhelming desire to do drugs myself.  I’m afraid I’d get addicted pretty easily because I tend to be compulsive about food, relationships, and math.

I assume by now we’ve all seen the video by “jono1170” who freaks out over COD MW2 (by “we” I mean
people like me who’ve been spending too much time online for the past several months).  Apparently on the 20^th he released another one called “MW2 Freakout Truth Revealed”, in which he promises to punch more walls.  I find this person excitingly disturbing because (assuming he’s not faking it in over a hundred vids which I find possible but unlikely) he’s not quite in his right mind, but also isn’t as dumb as he might appear at first glance.  Gives me goosebumps a little in between the giggles.

Too lazy to find pics that are actually illustrative of this post but I feel they've become a trademark so anyway...

Here's a shot of my totally undecorated side of last year's dorm:

and a very unglamorous shot up my nose from a few months ago.  Makes you realize that when we say people are attractive (in the physical sense) we usually mean only some particular views of them.  Like there's that film from a camera inside someone's mouth that shows them kissing, and it's not very romantic IMO.  But if you really like someone, you can probably deal with the disgusting and decaying nature of the body:

More on Afghanistan, GDP, Inflation, etc.

So this might be kind of boring.  The first few paragraphs are what I'm saying and the rest is basically comparing values for current spending on military/reconstruction, gov't spending as a whole, and U.S. GDP during the years of the recent wars.

It may be that some things can't be fixed in the foreseeable future but I try not to be cynical. That doesn't mean I think it's a good idea to keep doing the same thing when it isn't working. But that I think it's unscientific and dangerous to assume that "x,y,z people are always going to be our enemies / won't ever really have democratic governments / see the world in a fundamentally different way / etc."
Not to say there aren't cultural, political, traditional differences between people and so forth but I think ultimately people have basically the same needs: material prosperity, security, hope for the future, love, education, a measure of control/choice in what they do with their lives (not like this is an authoritative list or anything but it's indicative of what I'm getting at).

I think structures and policies that achieve real progress on these things would generally make societies less divided and less prone to violence. It's actually achieving them (e.g. in foreign policy) which is the trouble.
For instance it probably wouldn't be politically feasible costly to allocate ca. 5% of U.S. GDP per year to reconstruction in Afghanistan and even if it were it would be very hard to manage logistically and even harder to ensure that the investments were being made wisely and were relatively free from embezzlement by corrupt officials. There's nothing special about 5% GDP; it's just an arbitrary large figure that I chose.

My numbers might not be the best but I figured I'd try to estimate the factor of difference 5% would be over current spending. From September 2001 through 30 September 2009 the government has spent about $944 billion total for all of: Operation Enduring Freedom ($227 billion ~ 24%), Operation Iraqi Freedom ($683 billion ~ 72%), enhanced security at global military bases ($29 billion ~ 3%), and veterans’ healthcare costs related to the recent wars (accounted for as part of the OEF and OIF totals above).
Source: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

The U.S. federal budget for these years can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

(Basically the budget has gradually increased each year from about 1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2001 to about 3.6 trillion for FY 2010)

and U.S. GDP for these years, at: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=230&count=all

(the site says the source is the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank which I think sounds pretty legit)

A rough average for GDP 2001-2008 (I did no “actual” calculations on this; just looked at the figures and estimated) is $11 trillion (1.1 * 10^12) per year.

So spending 5% of GDP annually on Afghanistan would mean about 0.05 * $88 trillion = $4.4 trillion over eight years for Afghan military security and reconstruction alone. Which is almost 18 times the current level. And there are already a lot of people dissatisfied with how much is being spent over there seemingly to little ultimate effect.

I’m pretty sure all these values aren't indexed for inflation. Average annual inflation for 2001-2008 has been 2.83% per year according to (insert), so the 2008 nominal value is inflated about 1.25 times the 2001 value, or in other words a given amount of currency can only buy 4/5 as much in 2008 as it could in 2001.

Because inflation is a continuous process, the factor by which the nominal cost of a given value (troop salaries, materiel purchases, engineering services contracts, etc.) has increased over 2001 is roughly given by 1.028^n ; where (n) is the number of years since 2001. A more accurate estimate for a given year is given by using a table of annual inflation rates like the one at the link above.

So um, yeah. More if I think of it...

Sometimes Afghanistan Makes me T_T

What worries me is that those troops might increase security temporarily but there's an underlying economic problem.  Afghanistan has crappy physical and human infrastructure (not saying there's anything inherently bad about Afghans, just that their education system has lagged for a long time) and a lot of people have great incentive to grow poppies and pay a portion of the profits as "protection money" (i.e. "we won't hurt you money") to the Taliban.  Apparently about one-third of the national GDP currently comes from opium cultivation.

Of course we can and have provided money to support infrastructure.  So far I think a lot of this has necessarily been of the most basic sort (e.g. clean water & sewage, electricity, road and housing construction) and there’s still a crap load of unskilled workers many illiterate, and comparatively low female participation in the labor force and education.  Since 2001 some skilled expatriates have returned or at least been able to wire money effectively back to the country.  And they have some mineral wealth and natural gas.  But still.

Even if it couldn’t help fund resistance militias, the opium industry would be a problem since opium and heroin are almost universally prohibited in legal markets.  IMO this is for a good reason due to the negative health effects, lost income, possible resort to crime for funding, and probably diminished productivity associated with addiction to the products.  O’Neil certainly made it sound grim enough in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. As with everything maybe I’m wrong on this point.

(Edit: sorry for the crappy image layout once again; Xanga's editor is definitely not WYSIWYG and I'm not so much into messing with the html to overcome this.  Maybe eventually...)

It seems plausible that usage rates wouldn’t substantially increase if opiates were legalized for general use.  But unless they were legalized in most nations distributors would still find it profitable to import to those where it’s still outlawed and supply constraints consequently drive up prices.

The economics of the drug trade also don’t seem very conducive to eventual diversification, generalized innovation, or equanimity of income (though I guess even small producers can do pretty well for themselves when it comes to opium). 

There are proposals to establish a legal poppy trade whereby the crop would be used to produce morphine and (insert) for medical use.  But to compete with the price fetched by opium for illicit use, we'd need to compensate the farmers at an unfeasibly high mark-up above the usual market price for medical morphine precursors.  This is basically bribing a lot of people not to sell illegally, which is something we're doing now (incentives to shift fields from poppies to cereal grains etc.) but doesn't seem sustainable in the long term.

The feasibility of crop eradication using herbicides, firebombing, etc. also seems low.  Such efforts targeting cacao plants in Colombia basically resulted in shifting production towards more remote areas, better-concealed fields, and human-facilitated natural selection in favor of herbicide-resistant crops.  Not to mention the obvious humanitarian impact of rendering fields infertile (I haven't looked up for how long e.g. w/ the herbicides used in Colombia) and possibly poisoning residents and livestock.  

So anyway yeah I hope this strategy in Afghanistan will work but especially on an 18-month planned timetable I think we’d need to accelerate reconstruction substantially and I don’t really see that happening soon.

Oh by the way there's this soul-wrenchingly cute manga "Afghanis-tan" (or Afghanisu-tan; it's only written in Japanese kana) featuring national anthropomorphizations including the title character, Pakis-tan, Uzbekis-tan (all punning on the -tan suffix), Meriken, Al-Nyaida etc.  Obviously I only read about this on Wiki and haven't actually read it, since I can't read Japanese and the site where it was originally released as a webcomic is no longer up. 

(Note: all images taken from Wikipedia and licensed under GFDLexcept Afghanisu-tan cover, which is claimed as fair use)

Currently Blue Submarine, No. 6: Anime Legends Complete Collection By Artist Not Provided see related

Politics, Patents, Prostratin, etc.

This is basically a response to Joel’s response to my post from 28 Nov. but some free-association quickly turned it into a geopolitical statement of sorts so I’ve posted it separately.  None of this is very new for me though maybe I haven’t articulated it this way before, and I don’t assume that I’m right about anything.  Though of course I think I’m more right than wrong or I wouldn’t say it.  I also don't plan to be ranting like this (well hopefully I'm not just ranting but you know...) on a regular basis.

There’s the whole “if you pay taxes / buy x,y,z products etc. you’ve got blood on your hands” philosophy which like you say is true to a point, but for both selfish quality-of-life and strategic reasons (people like you and I probably can do more good from the inside) that’s not a philosophy I live by.

My feelings about working in military technology are very mixed. 
Like you say most technologies and sciences can have some relevance to military operations. 

I remember in junior high school physics one of the kinematics problems we did in class was about the trajectory of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 
My teacher (who’s an astronomer and far from being a militarist) was like “the nuke was air-exploded, which is ‘better’ to the extent detonating a nuke in a certain way can be ‘better’ because it doesn’t fling up so much radioactive soil like it would if it penetrated the ground first”.  My grandfather who narrowly avoided Korea when it ended trained as an artillery officer.  I assume he learned kinematics and stuff derived therefrom.
If I do computer/electrical, it’s virtually guaranteed to have military applications whether I intentionally design something for that reason or not.  Smaller and faster chips and improved programs can go into almost anything.

Some things like precision-guided munitions, non-lethal small arms, tazers, etc. might reduce the negative impacts of war.  On the other end there’s stuff like VX which can only be used as an instrument of highly efficient death and destruction. 

But even atomic weapons might have contributed to a reduction in the scale and overall deaths in war in the last 65 years.  But is that really a property of weapons of mass destruction or a property of the mutually assured destruction doctrine?  Couldn’t we adopt a MAD outlook toward conventional warfare also?  Hopefully, but apparently less so than with nukes, and bio/chem weapons (which of course do get used sometimes like in the Iran-Iraq war, and we’ve only avoided using nukes by a narrow margin at least in ’63 and maybe in several false alarm incidents thereafter).

And again being selfish (and/or altruistic within my national/regional social group) I’d rather that “we” have something before or at the same time as our competitors.  Because I don’t trust them not to use it if they’re convinced the other side can’t retaliate.  Of course I don’t trust us not to use it either.  So yeah it sucks.  I imagine our counterparts in China, Russia, India etc. feel about the same way.

So anyway I wouldn’t want to work on something that seemed to have a high likelihood of being used unilaterally in the pursuit of oppression.  But I might not be able to accurately judge whether it would be, and perhaps more importantly, “oppression” is subjective.

Is the U.S. currently an oppressor in Iraq and Afghanistan?  I don’t think so exactly, in the sense that we’re not (to my knowledge) just trying to take all their resources for no compensation and use the locals for slave labor.  But we’re there for our own interests, not because we love democracy so much we want everyone to experience its blessings.
 
It seems the goals in these wars are to create states that are military and trade partners with us and that don’t provide the sort of conditions that make people want to become guerrillas or terrorists.  I don’t think those objectives necessarily mean the populace of these counties has to lose; it’s not a zero-sum game. 
However a large part of making people not want to become fanatical resistance fighters consists in offering them a decent quality of life by abstaining from exploitation of the sort we currently subsidize in China, Saudi (where bin Laden’s from), and elsewhere, and allow at home though to a less dramatic extent.

Of course I don’t think there are any really easy solutions to this.  Developed nations could decide to be a lot more altruistic tomorrow and we’d still have problems.

Hopefully positive technological developments (cheap non fossil-fuel electricity generation, water treatment, carbon sequestration, vaccines, recombinant crops that increase yields without intensive fertilizer and pesticide needs, etc.) and their equitable sharing throughout the world (e.g. exceptions and limitations on intellectual property rights for technologies that enable basic infrastructure needs rather than “luxuries”) will help.

This all reminds me of Blue Submarine No. 6, Rage Against the Machine, and perhaps most importantly this:
http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/ ; http://pngsummer.wordpress.com/; http://invertedalchemy.blogspot.com/

The links are two complementary projects served by, and a blog by the founder of, the company my dad works for.  Obviously I have a potential conflict of interest here.  But I mention them because I know a decent bit about them and think they have potential, and because they’re nonprofit efforts.  Though the sort of reform to the international intellectual property system they advocate would help the sponsoring company, it seems a far less exploitative and more socially just pursuit than a lot of businesses I know about.  Unless I’m just too dumb and being totally deceived but obviously I doubt that.

The first is a freely accessible (registration required) index of life-sustaining and quality-of-life-improving technologies that are in the public domain in some or all nations.  The second describes an intellectual property framework designed to ensure that “indigenous knowledge” (medicinal uses of plants, agriculture, materials science, etc.) is fairly compensated and controlled by those with whom it originated rather than whoever can get the locals to explain it to them and then file a patent on it (cf. the HIV antiretroviral drug prostratin).  The last is a personal blog that deals with the above subjects and others related to the intersection of technology development, ethics, economics, etc.

Okay.  Sorry for the long post.

Currently Mechanical Animals By Marilyn Manson The Speed of Pain see related

Just a Car Crash Away

One of my cousins and his girlfriend died in a car crash yesterday.  Well technically a step-cousin; my dad comes from a ten-sibling blended family.  He was eighteen.  I didn’t really know him so I didn’t feel terribly bad when he died.  But it could have been me.  He wouldn’t have felt very bad when he got the news that I died. 

The family members calling about this said no intoxicants were involved though it’s not clear whether a toxin screening has really been done yet or they’re just assuming that.

Neither of them was wearing a seatbelt.

I always wear my seatbelt but I also like to drive fast; like 75-80 mph ( about 124-132 kmh ) on the interstate and 35-45 (58-75 kmh) on windy local roads where 25-35 (41-58) is often suggested if not limited.  So it could have been me, especially if there happened to be a deer or a van with my name on it.

I’m kind of disgusted to admit it but I got a bit of an adrenaline rush, maybe a less intense version of what you get if you’re shot at and missed.  The exhilaration of “I survived”.  How pathetic.  All’s vanity.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/11/29/dublinteens.html?sid=101