Category: Current Affairs

A Quarter for Your Thoughts?

Earlier this year the US defense department warned of a new threat – Canadian spy coins.  Investigators have now uncovered the shocking truth.  Here’s the gist of the story from January:

In a U.S. government warning high on the creepiness scale, the Defense Department cautioned its
American contractors over what it described as a new espionage threat: Canadian
coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

The
government said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S.
contractors with classified security clearances on at least three
separate occasions between
October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through
Canada.

…The government
insists the incidents happened, and the risk was genuine.

"What’s in
the report is true,” said Martha Deutscher, a spokeswoman for the security
service. "This is indeed a sanitized version, which leaves a lot of
questions.”

The shocking truth?  The Royal Canadian mint issue 30 million "poppy quarters" in 2004 to commemorate Canada’s war dead.   When contractors found the coins in their coat pockets and in the cup holder of a rental car they issued reports that they were being spied upon with new nanotechnology. 

The worried contractors described the
coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked
like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government
reports and e-mails obtained by the AP….

The supposed nanotechnology actually was a
conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to
prevent the poppy’s red color from rubbing off.

Thanks to Monique van Hoek for the pointer.

Darth Vader’s wife likes micro-finance

Ms Portman, the 25-year-old Harvard graduate who co-chairs the Village Banking campaign, said it would seek to use social networking to galvanise her generation to support microfinance.

"I have seen that ending poverty is possible – it is just a mouse click away," said Ms Portman, whose video diary about Finca’s work will feature on its page on MySpace, the social networking website. "People check their MySpace pages 10 times a day, why not harness that tool to build support for microfinance."

Here is the story.  Complain all you wish, as celebrity activism goes this is a step up.  Here is an article on micro-finance spreading to Africa.

Markets in everything, Baghdad corpse kidnap edition

Criminals in Baghdad are stealing corpses from the scenes of car bombings and murders in order to extract "ransoms" from grieving relatives.

In a macabre off-shoot of the capital’s kidnapping epidemic, the gangs pose as medics collecting bodies to be taken back to the city’s overflowing morgues.

Instead, though, they take the corpses to secret hiding places and then demand payments of up to £2,500 a time to release them to relatives for burial. Because Muslim custom dictates that a body must be buried as soon as possible after death, many families simply pay up, rather than involve the police.

The new racket in "dead hostage taking" is thought to be run by gangs connected to the city’s sectarian militias, many of whom are already involved in conventional kidnappings.

Iraqi police said the gangs often responded to car bombings, which can leave more than 100 corpses on the streets. In the chaos, police and army units seldom questioned the credentials of people posing as ambulance crews.

Here is the full story.

When does Italy break free?

A loyal MR reader asks:

When does Italy leave the EC?  What are the likely costs of doing so?

Italy won’t leave the EC anytime soon, why should they?  I also don’t think Italy will leave the Eurozone.  It does give them an overvalued currency, but that is only the nominal exchange rate.  In the long run prices of exports can fall so the real exchange rate ends up where it should be.  In other words, the problem will cure itself with the passage of time, noting that Italian wages and prices are often sticky.  But everything adjusts, sooner or later.  If Italy can live with the Euro today, tomorrow will be just a wee bit easier.

Leaving the Eurozone would make it very hard for Italy to borrow at good rates again.  Plus the real value of their debt would rise considerably.  Nope, I don’t think they will do it.

#whatever in a series of 50.

The Grey Lady Today

1. Some brain injuries make people more like consequentialists: "Damage to an area near the center of the brain, several inches behind
the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in
life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting.  In a new study,
people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or
harm another person if doing so would save others’ lives."

2. Apropos Alex, here is Dave Leonhardt on credit: "It’s easy to see everything since then as a step in the wrong
direction, to romanticize a time when debt was less common.  But think
about what life was like before easy money.  Think about how hard it
would be to buy a house or pay for college if a 42 percent interest
rate still seemed normal. Some of the changes are surprisingly
recent.  Just a generation ago, a temporary setback, like illness,
divorce or job loss, was much more likely to force a family to take
drastic measures than it is today.  That’s in large measure because of
debt, which allows families to smooth out the rough edges of their
financial lives.

You can see this change in the national statistics on consumer
spending.  Since the early 1990s, the peaks in spending growth rates
haven’t been as high as they were in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, but the
valleys haven’t been as low, either.  Not coincidentally, recessions
have come less often over the last two decades and they have been
fairly mild."

Is there a political solution to global warming?

Some say no.  The challenge:

Name one government programme, in a democracy, for anything other than a war (on people, I mean, not ideas or natural conditions), that has ever forced the entire citizenry to do something as painful and inconvient as cut their energy usage by 20-50%.  If you can do so, I will reconsider my stance. I note that Britain is in the early stages of just such a plan, and if it works, I will eat my words with a glad smile.

Africa fact of the day

Advertising Age calculates that around $100 million has been spent blanketing billboards and magazines with images of Bono and other "celebrities", while the total sum raised for Africa is $18 million.

Just to be clear… Total spent on making Bono more famous = $100 million.

Total spent on drugs for Africans = $18 million.

Here is the link, and thanks to Chris F. Masse for the pointer.  Jason Kottke comments

Africa

A loyal MR reader asks:

Africa.  What are your long term predictions?  Which policies should rich countries adopt?  Which will they adopt?  What can I do?

My long-term prediction is that Africa will stay quite poor.  Rich countries should offer Africa complete free trade, but the benefits of this move are overrated.  Low productivity, and transport costs and corruption within Africa remain the central problems, not foreign tariffs. 

Libertarians are too quick to say that foreign aid is counterproductive.  Most African governments would be corrupt anyway, and there is usually some positive trickle-down from the aid.  The wastage is massive, and I can understand the desire to stop sending government-to-government aid, but there is a real moral dilemma. 

I also think most of Africa is in a Malthusian trap. That is perhaps the better critique of aid, but alas also of trade as well.  But even within this trap, wealthy foreigners can help make the transition from one steady state to another less painful.  And the trap need not hold in every local corridor.  Plus we are offering a lottery ticket (with what p?) out of the trap.  Malthus doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on suffering. 

The intellectual property issues, when it comes to copying drugs, involve an irreconciliable clash between rule and act utilitarianism. 

Africa is a much bigger moral dilemma than most people are willing to admit.  And that moral dilemma appeared pretty big in the first place.

I see some chance that parts of Africa, such as Ghana and Senegal, will escape the Malthusian trap within twenty to thirty years.  That’s the most positive prediction I am willing to make.

You can do some good if you are willing to directly administer medical treatments to Africans, in Africa.

Here is an interesting bit:

“Thinking about problems analytically can easily suppress sympathy for smaller-scale disasters without, our research suggests, producing much of an increase in caring for larger-scale disasters”, the researchers said. "Insight, in this situation, seems to breed callousness".

#14 in a series of 50.

This one is from Gingdao

[please discuss] China

I love China, and I love braised pork belly.  That’s why we have China Fact of the Day, and that is why I eat and cook so much Chinese food.  (French food is its only rival.)  The pragmatic optimism of the Chinese is a delight.  It’s a shame about the Great Leap Forward and all that other stuff.  I never get tired of reading books on Mao, the recent biography and the one by his doctor are especially good.  Chinese opera has marvelous quivering timbres, although they are usually ruined by electrification and by recording.  The Story of Qiu Ju is my favorite Chinese film, although there are many good ones.  Soul Mountain is my favorite Chinese novel.  China is also the future of Western classical music.  Tang horses are overpriced but still they are amazing and subtle.

Here is why China will not take over the world, sadly the trip to Shanghai still awaits us.  By the way, their nominal exchange rate peg is not a real peg in the medium- to long-run.

#09 in a series of 50.

China fact of the day

In parts of China, black ants are sold by the bagful to be steeped in tea or soaked in liquor as a natural remedy for ailments such as arthritis.

Wang sold packages of ants to the investors for up to as much as 10,000 yuan ($1,290) when they were only worth 200 yuan, China Central Television reported.

Here is the story, the sentence is death.  The total con is estimated at $387 million, what would Gary Becker say, in any case that is a lot of imaginary ants.