Oh Drat

Next Year this time I plan to be in Japan sightseeing and doing interviews for a teaching job. I hope to start Next August (unlikely) or in January or April of 2013.

My cunning plan.....failed to take into account the march of technology.

Yes...boys and girls ...robot English teachers.

TIME magazine suggested the machines may threaten the jobs of some of the 20,000 to 30,000 foreign English teachers in Korea. It also named the robots one of the 50 best inventions of 2010.

BTW The existence of those two sentences in that order proves that TIME is staffed by dicks.

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Headline of the Decade

Blackberry Users Are More Important than iPhone or Android Users

Hah!

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Oh My!

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London Update

It doesn't look like its ended yet.
It's finally starting to illicit some coverage in the US and Drudge has a good chunk of his page  devoted to it as I type this.
More here, here and here.

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Quick! Go to Zoopraxiscope

Don has discovered all sorts of wondrous things, including this gem.

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Usagi Drop

   Pulpjunkie provided me with the first episode of this show, which I had high hopes for. It met and rather exceeded those expectations.

Daikichi Kawachi, a thirtysomething Japanese bachelor attends his grandfather funeral. To his astonishment he learns that his grandfather had, 4 years prior, sired Rin, an illegitimate child...a blonde illegitimate child...who he had been raising after the mother abandoned her.

The extended family is utterly appalled by the little girls existence and want nothing to do with her. Despite there being families with kids present, everyone refuses to take the girl and the family meeting quickly becomes an excersize to determine who will get rid of the little girl as quickly as possible. 

Daikichi is sickened by the rough treatment the girl is getting and cannot abide the child being disowned and sent to an orphanage. So he adopts his aunt...thus begins the series.

This is a beautifully done show that highlights the best and worst of humanity.

Particularly jarring in the first episode is the disdain shown towards Rin, a child trying to comprehend the death of her father who she obviously loved very much. Despite this rather dark subject matter, the show manages to be both upbeat and quirky. The balance is pitch perfect. Daikichi is a bit out of his depth and hasn't quite thought this all the way through, (thus comedy) but he is a decent guy and this looks to be a really, really good show.

I highly recommend it.

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Crazy Day

Been Distracted.
The mosquitoes are abominable this year.
One of the dozens of bites my mom received over the last few days got infected, so she went into the hospital.
She's out now, the arm looks better and she's on antibiotics.

Oh, and my sister just informed me, I'm gonna have a niece.

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What is going on in London?

Its not getting much play on the news on this side of the pond as it's lost in the frenzy over the downgrade and ongoing market crash, but something is happening in the UK right now and it looks pretty bad.

From the Telegraph, a cut and paste of their ticker at 05:20 GMT.

Residents told to evacuate homes in Clapham Junction and Croydon
• Arson attacks in Birmingham and Liverpool.
• David Cameron to fly back to London overnight.
• Emergency COBRA meeting tomorrow - sources
• Live map of the rioting
• Fires and looting in neighbourhoods across the capital
• Motorists attacked and pubs targetted in 'mass muggings'

More here and here.

What the hell!? It seems that this has been going on for three days and it's spreading, with at least Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol experiencing the same.

I realize that there are distractions here, but the fact that our fiscal house is an unsustainable mess of a Ponzi scheme is not really news. The UK suddenly erupting in violence is.

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Suddenly

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Well...Dang

There may be a thin silver lining to the downgrade, in that interest rates may go up substantially. This is terrible news for the economy of course but it will help those who are on fixed incomes with savings.

Allahpundit notes another possible non calamitous result.

Not only can’t the Super Committee fail, it’ll be under enormous public pressure to reach a grand bargain. That’s the silver lining in this cloud — they have to get serious now. They have no choice.

Pretty much all the other ramifications seem to...umm...suck.

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The Space Princess Equation

John C. Wright has postulated it!

Logically, Catgirl Space Princesses require only a few more variables be added.

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Dear God..Why Does This Crap Happen?

more...

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Most Impressive Link-Whoring Scheme Evah!

Don wants you to change your bookmarks NOW!

For the sake of Texas...DO IT!

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It's Not Politics..It's History

That is my story and I am sticking to it.

...and even if it was politics I don't have to put it below the fold 'cause to be appalled by it (or to suffer from cognitive dissonance) you'd have to click on it.

So I'll just leave this here...

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K-ON! DVD Volume 2

I had found the first 4 episodes of this show to be dry but cute and they had made me laugh. So last night, a friend and I popped in the second disc.

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Ultimate Source of US Political Corruption Found

Golly. It's always who you'd least expect.

I guess we'll have to resume sending in the beavers.

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How do We Fix ShipBuilding?

Shipyard prices are skyrocketing. The number of shipyards is dropping. As the navy is getting old and worn out ships are being laid up. Meanwhile, it seems that the ships the USN are procuring are being delivered 'pre-worn' so the bluejackets can skip the whole step of sailing them around before laying them up.

The waterjets of the LCS have fallen out due to galvanic corrosion, apparently because the shipbuilders didn't use zincs properly.

LPD 17 San Antonio has never worked right and appears to be a pier ornament now. Much of the issue there seems to stem from faulty welds which are contaminating the lube oil with metal shavings.

This story from my local paper is not strictly a manufacturing issue but speaks to massive incompetence in shipbuilding procurement. (We couldn't have used them as tenders...used them as SOMETHING?)

This crap is happening just as the Navy is approaching block obsolescence in almost every category except destroyers....while the nation faces bankruptcy.

These problems are deep and systemic. There are no quick solutions. However we may be able to at least move in the right direction. There are two historical parallels that we can use as examples.


In the1880s the UK was extracating itself from Afganistan and was facing some financial difficulties. At the same time the UKs shipbuilding program was terribly screwed up, with problems that included cost overruns, excessively long build times, ships massively over budget as well as overdue, quality control issues, problems integrating new technologies and simple corruption (sound familiar?). The response was to, for a time,  order only second line vessels such as gunboats and auxiliaries as well as a few experimental technology test beds such as experimental high speed craft (the torpedo boats).

These were often ordered outside the usual defense procurement clique. ^(eleventy)

In the meantime the procurement system was overhauled, investment was made in physical plant improvements at the shipyards and  the procurement system was reformed, Concurrently, a determination of what sort of vessels were needed was made. Then rational, attainable requirements for the various types of vessels were drawn up that matched the then current technologies, the national strategy of the time as well as the gamut of potential scenarios.

After several years of building gunboats and finishing the dubious vessels that were already ordered, the Royal Navy began building ships under the Naval Defence Act. William Whites design team produced the finest ships that had been built up to that time and for nearly two decades, every subsequent class was an improvement on their design predecessor in some way.

In the late 1920's the US Navy changed the design of its cruisers drastically, switching the emphasis from underwater protection to protection against shellfire. However, cruiser size was strictly constrained to 10,000 tons by the Washington Naval Treaty. Cramming all that extra armor needed to resist 8" shellfire and still come in under the legal weight pushed the state of the art to the limit. The commercial shipyards balked and quoted prices that were exceedingly high. The Navy built the first  New Orleans class cruisers in Navy Yards. This allowed the Navy to learn by doing the tricks to the new technologies and give commercial shipyards some training in those fields. This also gave USN officers a LOT of hands on experience in shipbuilding which was invaluble for both quality control inspections and giving a holistic view of damage control. Both stood the USN in good stead in WW2.

There are legal problems with this today as the government shipyards are not allowed to compete with commercial yards in procurement. However, Navy yards are still important in a wartime situation so it is beneficial to have them engage in some shipbuilding to keep their skills sharp. The abysmal performance of the commercial yards in such basic fields as welding and cathodic protection indicates that some remedial training is needed. Shipyards are a national asset. This is nova panacea and ought to be done as a very small percentage of a total procurement, but it has worked in the past.


On the flip side of this is a lack of competition. Government regulators like a few big companies because they are easy to regulate and control and they don't innovate much so bureaucrats don't have to face their own inadequacies. A handful of businesses make it easy to form cartels and grease beauraucratic palms.

We actually have a fair number of shipyards in the country but very few of them get involved in major defense procurement in part because cost plus contracting requires a byzantine army of accountants and lawyers that is larger than the total staff of some of these shipyards. This not only promotes corruption and cost padding, it is a huge barrier to entry for new firms...which isalmost certainlyone of the motivations. Get rid of cost plus and you get rid of several problems at once.

The lager problems involve planning, requirements and overall design. There needs to be something to dissuade crazy ideas like aluminum hulled frigate sized tenders that cost as much as European destroyers carrying the armaments of a coast guard cutter at...50 knots. That would require something like the old General Board...but that's a topic for another time.

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False Flag Fail

Much of what has been said about the Norwegian monster Anders Behring Breivik came from this translation of his Facebook page...Well, that appears to be fake. Someone was very anxious to tie this guy to the American right to the point of creating poor comedy.

Now this evil waste of skin certainly does appear to be a total nutter and he does seem to have things in common with the EUROPEAN right but he probably wasn't any sort of fan of Sarah Palin or Fox anchor Bret Bair as the 'fakebook' page suggests. Palin in particular has spoken out against discrimination against muslims and so would be anathema to the bastards core belief.

It bears remembering that the European right is vastly different in principle from the rightwing in the US. In the US the right is broadly about limited federal government power and adherence to the constitution. The farthest to the right in the US political spectrum would be the Libertarians, who chafe at virtually any role for government and seem to want to apply the 10th amendment restrictions on federal power to ALL levels of government. The farthest right electable movement in the US is the Tea Party, which has some libertarian ( Jeffersonian) elements but is really Hamiltonian or Whig in character....though rather less so than the Republican party as a whole.

In Europe what is called the 'right' is essentially monarchical and often obsessed with a nation being a haven for whatever ethnicity it represents...a relic of the fact that European nations were essentially tribal in origin. This means that right in Europe is often explicitly racist. Compare popular figures in the Tea Party who include Michael Williams, Nikki Haley, Allen West, Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Luis Fortuno, and Bobby Jindal.

Both the left and right in Europe see the state as all encompassing and can't really concieve of any restraints that ought to be placed on it in the pursuit of their goals...both are viewed as quite socialistic by most American righties.

Now Europe is a big continent and I'm generalizing. For instance Switzerland is much closer to the ideal of many on the American right than the US is now, and there are a few libertarian type movements such as the one in England (which is a revival of the old enlightenment civics that inspired Americas founders).

_{The point is that notwithstanding what non-fake motivations this evil bastard may have, US righties have very little in common with the far "right" in Europe.    We absolutely condemn this atrocity in Norway and will never afford the perpetrator any sort of respectability or elder statesman status (like certain circles have done with the likes of Ayers, Dohrn and Evans).}

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Norwegian Parliament Bombed

ABC (US) is reporting a massive vehicle bomb has gone off at the Norwegian Parliament, destroying the PMs office. At least one person has died. No word on if the fatality was an MP.

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A National Acetylene Shortage

Well this seems like important news that ought to be getting more play...
Classical Values reports that an explosion at a carbide facility in Louisville has precipitated a national acetylene shortage.

Given the ubiquity and importance of welding, I'm sure this has no economic, or strategic/industrial implications whatsoever.

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