China, Afghanistan, dreams, and operations research: a mailbag

Mail 717 Saturday, March 24, 2012

· China Coup

· Bell Labs

· VIP’s

· Red Tails

· Operations Research

· Ornithopter

· Jobs, Gates, and dreams

· Nation Building

·

SUBJ: Chinese economic stability

Jerry –

It has been several days since you mentioned rumors of a Chinese coup, and it seems fairly clear that they were unfounded. However, your comment that "China’s economic boom is said to be faltering, but that’s a slowing of growth, not an actual collapse." is true, but not necessarily relevant. A polysci course I took some time ago invoked the Davies’ J-Curve to explain why revolutions often succeed when things don’t seem to be all that bad. It’s all about expectations and perceptions. As a related condition in the US, I suspect that Obama’s chances of reelection will depend on his ability to get folks to evaluate their economic condition in terms of last year ("what have you done for me lately?"), rather than before he took office.

Regards,

Jim Martin

 

That’s the classic theory on revolution, and Marx dealt with it a bit; but it depends on the structure of the society that is undergoing the revolution. China hasn’t really followed that pattern, and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between a revolution and a coup, or either from a revolt of janissaries. Some African ‘revolutions’ were engineered, and certainly one failed attempt at a coup by foreign invaders led by rather famous mercenaries would have been a ‘revolution’ to the world had it succeeded.

China’s history is more one of changes in dynasty, and contests between war lords. Sun Yat Sen led a real revolution in 1911 that established the Republic of China in name, but in fact the country was torn apart into semi-independent provinces under war lords. The Communists were active in forming a national party, as was Sun Yat Sen with his socialist nationalism. The Japanese invasion broke things apart even more and for a while there was a genuine three-way war between the Japanese invaders, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (usually referred to as Nationalists). After World War II there was a vicious civil war, extraordinary inflation, and a collapse of central government that ended when Chiang took his army to Formosa (which had been liberated from the Japanese mostly by the US Navy).

That’s not much of a history: the point is that China never had a revolution in the usual Western sense of the word. Both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang claimed to be the people’s party with revolutionary goals, and both organized armies. Both professed reforms, and both were corrupt. Both were in essence dictatorships under their party leader, and both had support from foreign powers (US and USSR).

Historically China has often solved insurgencies by the “two province” system – take all the food from one province and distribute it to the people of the other. One starves and can’t rebel, and the other is dependent and grateful. There are also divisions along racial lines. The current CCP rules through an extraordinary party organization system; the only effective opposition to the party would be the People’s Liberation Army, which is a political and economic power as well as an army.

As to the US economy and elections, elections matter less and less as the regulatory authority of the central government expands. I remember when the only Federal official who mattered in Shelby County, Tennessee, was the Agriculture Department County Agent, and even after Pearl Harbor the federal government was far away and didn’t much interfere with daily life.

_The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation_

<http://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-American-Innovation-ebook/dp/B005GSZIWG/>

Roland Dobbins

– – –

Subj: Bell Labs, scale and innovation

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/294143/bell-labs-scale-and-innovation-jim-manzi

>>[B]y the 1980s, Silicon Valley, math-intensive finance and similar

>>ecosystems were exploding. Talented, ambitious young people could go

>>to these places, and make both a huge individual impact and a ton of

>>money. The Labs still had a lot of smart people, but you can imagine

>>the selection-bias problems in recruiting and retention once these

>>alternatives were available.<<

Perhaps Pournelle’s Law of Bureaucracy applied to Bell Labs, too?

Perhaps we need to think in terms of stimulating the creation of new industrial labs — and the creative destruction of old, degenerated ones

— rather than of trying to preserve old industrial labs as National Treasures?

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Bell Labs was an extraordinary institution. There have been many attempts to copy it, but the general consensus is that they have not been very successful. Bell was owned by a private company which wasn’t really private – as a regulated public utility it had its own form of bureaucracy – but Bell management understood that the Lab was different, and its management was quite different from that of The Phone Company.

I would not quarrel with the notion that we need some new creations and creative destruction.

It is possible to have a Strategy of Technology. US Air Force Systems Command was a rather successful attempt to build an institution for creation of technology on demand. It’s gone too.

VIPs

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20120322.aspx

Why can’t the ride the jump seats (webbed seats) or crammed among the cargo like I (and all my Marines) had to? (Besides can you think of a better campaign photo op?)

Cheap energy = prosperity!

Drill here, DRILL NOW!

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

I suspect that is not sufficiently dignified for the Command in Chief, or even the Deputy Assistant Associate Secretary of Defense…

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Hello Jerry,

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/17/effective-world-government-will-still-be-needed-to-stave-off-climate-catastrophe/

(Note that the world government must be ‘effective’; ‘totalitarian’

carries SUCH negative vibes.)

But we already knew that 20 years ago when Climate Science, a formerly unknown scientific backwater, burst on the scene with the announcement that CAGW was upon us, the science was settled, that ONLY an omnipotent world government (Marxist of course) could snatch us back from the jaws of disaster, and only if action was taken IMMEDIATELY.

Well, they were right about one thing; climate science was indeed settled 20 years ago. Not surprising when the entire ‘science’ is based on an axiom: ‘CO2 introduced into the atmosphere as a byproduct of humans using combustion as their primary energy source is causing the ‘Temperature of the Earth’ to rise drastically and at in increasing rate. The effects of that temperature rise are uniformly negative and can ONLY be ameliorated by the establishment of a world government with authority over every aspect of energy production and consumption.’

Other sciences, based on a never-ending loop of data collection and theorizing as to the explanation for the observed data rather than a single immutable axiom, are never settled, of course. But then other sciences are actually scientific, unlike ‘climate science’ which is and always has been a political movement which uses the trappings of science and the threat of imminent catastrophe as its justification.

Bob Ludwick

Surprise!

Red Tails

The Tuskegee Airmen gave good, faithful, and valorous service, and deserve to be remembered. But–

As a child in the early Fifties I listened to my father and his contemporaries, all of them Southerners who had "been in the War", and I can say without fear or favor: The Red Tails deserve honor, but if there had been no Red Ball Express — taken as an eponym of the support troops, construction, logistics, and the like, staffed by blacks, which were many — there would have been no Civil Rights movement. The matter-of-fact valor, persistence, and dedication of those units was seen by people who would be the leaders of the next generation, and that was among the first chinks in the dam of irrational prejudice. These were people who sprinkled their conversation with the n-word and worse as a matter of unthinking routine. I often heard things like "I don’t think we could’ve won without the n–rs", and it was such sentiments that allowed people like Dr. King to exist and present their ideas without being simply slapped down.

The romance and importance of aviation in WWII has grown enormously in retrospect, to a level not present among the actual fighters. LeMay and many others engaged in a decades-long PR campaign designed to promote Air Power to a position of glamor and admiration, and largely succeeded, but the citizen-warriors who prosecuted the effort and won thought of the Air Corps as a sort of sideshow, useful in some cases but paling in importance compared to the grunts and sailors who ground out victory one bullet (and one blob of mud) at a time. That includes the pilots, air crew, and support people who prosecuted the war in the air, many, if not most, of whom considered themselves privileged characters lucky to be mostly behind the lines, enjoying many of the comforts of home, and basking in the admiration of the noncombatants they mixed with at the expense of the people who deserved it. Dad and the others knew of the Tuskegee Airmen and praised them as they were due, but thought the truck-driving, shovel-wielding black men who brought, and built, the things needed by the troops were more important.

Regards,

Ric Locke

There is a wonderful movie about the Red Ball Express, by that name actually. It used to be shown to every incoming class at West Point along with They Died with Their Boots On… I say a wonderful movie although I only saw it that once.

Escort Mission

The idea of what the mission actually is was questioned in other areas during the war. The Brits put AA guns on some merchants running solo in the Med. After a few months, the people in charge of the AA guns wanted them removed, because the AA gunners on the merchants weren’t shooting down very many enemy aircraft, and in their view, their effort was being wasted. Then, the people in charge of shipping went- WHOA! The ships with the AA mounted weren’t being sunk- enemy aircraft swerve off when the flak starts up, and the bombs either miss or aren’t released. The cargo was getting through.

The AA guns stayed, and were placed on more ships as time went by and they became available.

Harold

The key to effective operations research is to figure out what the real criterion is. OR was invented, sort of, by Brit boffins looking at the Battle of the North Atlantic. It’s a classic story: the Royal Navy discovered that hasty attacks on submarines immediately after one was spotted didn’t get many submarines, so they devised new tactics to make attacks with precision and bring other escort craft to the location. The boffins analyzed the data and discovered that this was indeed true, but those tactics lost more ships than the hasty attacks – what was important was to break up the wolf pack and send the subs diving so the convoy could get past. Hasty attacks got ships through – and that was the real goal of the convoy.

Figuring out the true mission so that you don’t optimize on the wrong criterion is probably the most important job of an operations research team; and it’s astonishing how many operations commanders don’t know what the true strategic mission is.

Jerry

He did it! A man flew with his arms and custom-built wings:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/human-bird-wings/

It will be a sport. Olympics, anyone?

Ed

– – –

Subject: fake? Re: I never thought I’d live to see the day of human powered flight

*sigh*

maybe fake.

http://gizmodo.com/5895235/cgi-experts-say-flying-bird-man-is-fake

– Paul

:wq!

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 14:34, Paul D. Walker wrote:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/houston-we-have-liftoff-humanbirdwings-guy-finally-enjoys-the-miracle-of-human-flight

– Paul

Just given the physics and biology I would say that it’s more than questionable: I’ll bet a dollar that it’s true but only if I’m given extreme odds. Say a million to one.

‘Microsoft never seemed to recover from the shock of achieving their original 1975 goal.’

<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/welcome-to-the-post-pc-era.html>

Roland Dobbins

I said that some years ago. But Microsoft has a lot of bright people, and its management may be able to give them more control while they try to find a new dream. Gates and Jobs had both genius and vision but in quite different ways. Jobs had to spend some years in the wilderness letting the technology catch up with his new visions; Gates stayed on his, and took a while recognizing the impact of the high speed internet even though he had written about it; but he always did have faith that the technology would bail him out if he went a bridge too far. Jobs went two bridges too far with the original Mac and it took a while before the technology let him build the machine he had envisioned.

Combating climate change

Hello Jerry,

Dr. William Briggs (Statistician to the Stars: http://wmbriggs.com/) most recent blog entry is entitled ‘Bioengineering Humans To Combat Climate Change’. In it, he provides some excerpts from a ‘forthcoming peer reviewed “Human Engineering and Climate Change” in the journal ‘Ethics, Policy and the Environment’.

Your readers may be interested in his excerpts and his commentary thereon. Reading the actual journal requires a purchase. I, for one, don’t want to encourage public insanity, so I declined.

When reading Dr. Briggs’ piece, keep in mind that people who think like the authors of ‘Human Engineering and Climate Change’ are currently setting the policies, energy and otherwise, of the United States and much of the remainder of the formerly civilized world.

Bob Ludwick=

Humans have been reengineered to adapt to climate changes several times in our evolutionary history either through genuine climate change or because of migration, but we have let nature and nature’s God do that. I once had a job in a department of human engineering, and I did human engineering work, but we thought that mean engineering the device to be easier to use and more effective for humans.

We know pretty well how to survive warmer. We learned how to live at the edge of glaciers a long time ago.

Energy and global warming

Jerry P:

I think I sent something along this line previously, but will do so again. The heat engine, the earth and atmosphere, converts thermal energy, solar flux, into mechanical energy. This moves the atmosphere and hydrosphere. I don’t have the desire to figure out the balance, but it is not an isentropic process and so there is loss of solar energy to movement of stuff; like air and water. Now someone could probably calculate how much energy it would take to move the Gulf Stream faster by say a mile per hour on the average. And it would be difficult to measure accurately. But it would be worth while to think about the claims that climatic warming will produce more and more severe weather patterns. So if that is true, then we want to know if there is a conversion increase and what balances it all out. I have not looked closely at this topic but have not found anything readily available to equate thermal/ mechanical conversion: solar flux vs ocean flux & atmospheric flux. Just pondering a bit.

CBS

The problem is that when you try to model these things you drown in complications, so you need to make a bunch of simplifying assumptions. In operations research we learned that the assumptions often govern the outcome, so we tried to build models in which the outcome was fairly insensitive to the assumptions. The climate modelers haven’t been able to do that. It’s still just too complicated; we don’t even have good agreements on measurement operations.

Nation building

Hello Dr Pournelle, here are some of the reasons Afghanistan is different than Germany and Japan.

Both are homogeneous. Slice up Germany and Japan and you’ll find ethnically, culturally and even theologically homogenous populations.

The percentages who don’t fit the mainstream are small enough to be trivial. Iraq was three major groups, if you pick the three biggest groups in Afghanistan you can’t get to majority status. This means that since you have to do things different to deal with local conditions based on culture and other such factors, you essentially have to crack a new code for every little hamlet in Afghanistan.

Germany and Japan were logistically straightforward. While combat units move about relatively easily, the supplies you need for a population and an army are another matter. The sea gets you close to anywhere in Japan and the roads, rails and rivers allow you to move about in Germany without too much trouble. That sort of transportation network isn’t there in Afghanistan.

Germany and Japan were full of cosmopolitan, educated, motivated people who can and did take responsibility and control of local leadership and business. Afghanistan is dreadfully short of cosmopolitan, educated, motivated and not overwhelmingly corrupt people who can be trusted with important things like power over their neighbors, water or money.

Germany and Japan are culturally honest and hardworking. Afghanistan is culturally corrupt and lazy. I actually heard an uncorroborated story about a border policeman fired because he wasn’t taking in enough money in bribes, and passing a sufficient percentage along to his superiors.

There are others, but those are all huge problems for Afghanistan.

Serving Officer

The only thing that has ever united the people who live in the geographical area called Afghanistan is the presence of armed foreigners. That has been true since Alexander the Great. The Khan in Kabul never united the country for any length of time, and the President has even less power. The writ of Kabul does not run everywhere. Why we fight to subdue the Afghan people to the Mayor Kabul is not clear to me.

nation building; what works, what doesn’t

Dr. Pournelle,

I had a thought that not every nation building effort of the U.S. has been an unmitigated disaster, and I wondered what did we do different in Germany and Japan? The answer was not a big surprise. In Japan, Gen. MacArthur did 1) defeat the enemy utterly and completely. 2) Break up the existing Oligarchies and (I hate to say it) redistribute the wealth. 3) Rule as absolute dictator for several years while building a new, western style government. 4) Dictate a new, western style, Constitution. Simple. As speaker Gingrich is fond of saying; "Simple doesn’t mean easy".

By contrast, in Iraq, the U.S. military ruled for about 30 days. Then the state department took over, putting the worst proconsul in the history of the world (Paul Bremer) in charge. I don’t know what criteria he used in employing and installing a new civilian government, but he did it quite quickly, and left everything else up to them. This resulted in the same power structures, same ownership of wealth, etc. And of course the new bosses wrote a constitution to benefit themselves and no one else. Even your youngest readers (any idea what that age might be?) can see how well that has worked.

It strikes me as reasonable to assume that Japanese peasants started from the same point of ignorance of republican style government as Iraqi peasants. The results are so dramatically different because the methods were dramatically different, or so I see it.

Martin Lee Rose

Pueblo, Colorado

So far as I know we never had any clear goals in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I opposed going into Iraq at all, and advocated driving out the Taliban and getting out quickly in Afghanistan, leaving behind the impression that it would be a good thing not to annoy the United States – while we invested the money we weren’t spending on wars in building energy independence. I was told the Iraq war would only cost $300 Billion, but I never got a very detailed account of how that number was arrived at. For what we have spent in the years since 2002 we could have energy independence and a new Fleet.

Afghanistan makes nothing we want. Iraq has oil but we don’t get any. As an old operations research man I was trained to identify the goals and criteria. I am not sure that was done for either of those operations. We knew what we wanted from our occupations in Germany and Japan.

Regarding Fluke

I don’t think you need to suppose that government subsidies for birth control will inevitably follow the HHS mandate. I think there’s another way to demolish the Fluke argument:

First of all, mandates have ALWAYS increased health insurance costs. The size of the uptick varies, of course, but there has never been a mandate that has NOT increased monthly premiums. And who pays those higher premiums, pray tell? Employers. People who buy their own health insurance plans (like yours truly). In short, a lot of people who are NOT Ms. Fluke. So yes — our thirty-year-old Georgetown coed IS asking other people to pay for her birth control.

Further, once ALL contraception is declared "free," do you think people will continue to buy the generics? Of course not. They’re going to go after the pricier brands. Big Pharma will certainly make a killing — especially after those companies start jacking up their prices in response to the utter lack of cost-reducing incentives. And what’s going to happen once the insurance industry is hit with larger bills for their government-mandated birth control coverage? Insurance companies will charge higher premiums. So once again, employers and individual health care consumers will end up footing the bill.

Personally, I don’t think it’s just to ask me to pay more for my health insurance so the CEO of Pfizer can swim in a pile of money. Do you?

Stephanie S.

Well said.