John Robb's Weblog

GGs Target China's Plans to Buy Resources

An attack on a Chinese oil field in Iraq (indirect approach): 

Unidentified gunmen have destroyed a power station feeding the Ahdab oil field which a Chinese firm is developing. “The attackers targeted the electricity system linked to the field as well as the lines carrying power. The damage is estimated at more than $1 million,” the source added. He said the authorities believe the attack is a warning for the Chinese to leave

Welfare Kings

How to get rich off of welfare?  Work on Wall Street.

Arg Cyber Command

What a boondoggle this is going to be.

Privatized Traffic Ticket Collections

On the road to privatopia.  Here's an early example (a canary in the coal mine) of violence in Arizona:

Public sentiment against photo enforcement started growing in September when the DPS began rolling out its program, which was to have 60 fixed cameras and 40 mobile units around the state. 

Townsend, 26, took a pickax to a photo-enforcement camera near 59th Avenue and the Loop 101 late last year. He was sentenced to one year of probation and was issued a $3,500 fine but not before photo-enforcement critics came out in support of him. 

"When you create an atmosphere where someone comes at a camera with a pickax, and people are talking about giving him a medal, logically it's going to continue to escalate, and it feeds the feeling that vigilante activity is appropriate or OK," said Josh Weiss, a spokesman with American Traffic Solutions, which is based in Scottsdale. 

Doug Georgianni, 51, of Cave Creek, was shot and killed while sitting in a van alongside the highway and monitoring cameras that snap photos of speeders.

Nice graphs....

  

Napoleonic woes

Kunstler on role:

Mr. Obama looked to be the man-on-a-white-horse -- on the exhaustion of Reagan-Bush Jesus-Republicanism -- but he's coming off more like Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orléans, duc d'Orléans) in 1793, with perhaps Newt Gingrich waiting offstage to become Robespierre in 2012 -- and some obscure US Army captain now toiling in Kirkuk slated to become the American Napoleon of 2015. As you've surely heard a thousand times now, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. The enormities of Wall Street today are a little like those of the French Ancien Régime at Versailles. If America encounters the sort of disruptions of food and energy supplies that are brewing on the horizon, and unemployment keeps arcing up its current trajectory, civil uproars could easily follow. Readers think I joke about the Hamptons going up in flames. But the antics of the bankers, hedge funders, the CEOs, the Madoffs, and even the P. Diddy's of our time, are liable to attract murderous attention as the public mood moves from sour to wrathful.

No Carrier Defense Against Ballistic Attack

Hilarious post from the War Nerd:

You know that Garmin satnav you use to find the nearest Thai place when the in-laws are visiting? If you were the Navy brass, that should have scared you to death. The Mac on your kid’s bedroom desk should have scared you. Every time electronics got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, the carrier became more of a death trap. Every time stealth tech jumped another step, the carrier was more obviously a bad idea. Smaller, cooler-running engines: another bad sign for the carrier. Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had “Stop building carriers!” written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention. 

The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you. 

Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.” What does that tell you about the distinguished gentlemen with all the ribbons on their chest who’ve been standing up on carrier bridges looking like they know what they’re doing for the past 50 years?

Stories like this were all over the place in the last days of the British Empire. For some dumbass reason, these reporters love the Navy. They were waving flags and feeling good about things when the Repulse and the Prince of Wales steamed out with no air cover to oppose Japanese landings. Afterward, when both ships were lying on the sea floor, nobody wanted to talk about it much. What I mean to say here is, don’t be fooled by the happy talk. That’s the lesson from GM, Chrysler and the Navy: these people don’t know shit. And they don’t fucking care either. They’re going to ride the system and hope it lasts long enough to see them retire to a house by a golf course, get their daughters married and buy a nice plot in an upscale cemetery. They could give a damn what happens to the rest of us.

Public Jobs

Historically, one of the best ways to weather a depression is to get a government job. Public incomes don't decline as the economic situation gets bad. In fact, they can often grow. In contrast, people in the commercial sector will find themselves chasing after fewer and fewer jobs (as in, and everyone is hearing these stories repeatedly, even for minor jobs there are thousands of applicants). This competition results in a declining market clearing price for unprotected workers (if you do finally get that job).

In short, if you have a government job (there are a couple states that are problematic), you can sail through a depression without much inconvenience.  In fact, your disposable income will actually increase as the prices for goods/services fall precipitously.  

Of course, if there is hyper-inflation...  The incomes from government jobs might work in reverse since the government will be adamant about slowing inflation growth by keeping a lid on pay increases for government employees (to avoid locking in inflation expectations).  

This is a good question...

From the Guardian:

As NME editor Conor McNicholas pointed out on Radio 4's Todayprogramme this morning, the 'capturing' of music within pieces of plastic is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries, music existed only in the ether, shared vocally between people and only paid for through performances. What these companies are protecting is not the music, but the business model around the music.

The question: does copyright protection for music actually produce better music today actually improved it (we can assume that widespread distribution costs are now zero, so there's no need to protect that)?  

Secret Debt Auctions

The lifeblood of bottom feeders.  Why aren't debt auctions automatically open to the owners of the debt?