This week’s rant of the week is Patenting Life by Michael Crichton.
Rant of the Week: 11/16/08-11/22/08
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Author Archives: the editor
Essay of the Week: 11/16/08-11/22/08
This week’s essay of the week is Foreign Aid Goes Military by William Easterly.
Everyone Has To Start Somewhere
If Gene Logsdon makes me feel like a noob, Amy Scott reminds me of how far I have come. Of course, I started out as scared kid with an ax working with a Dad who had done it before. So I had some advantages.
This Sums Up The Last Week
In Pakistan they protest receiving aid. In Iceland they protest not receiving aid. In the U.S. everyone just becomes a bank …
Anything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong
The Netherlands’ emergency preparedness personnel spent all of last week conducting an exercise dubbed “Ergst Denkbare Overstroming (EDO),” or worst possible flooding, a scenario in which they virtually placed one-third of the country underwater. In the computer models, the entire west and north coasts, as well as low-lying areas in the large Rhine River delta where two-thirds of the country’s 17 million people live were submerged.
The scenario spells pure horror for the Dutch. Just in time for the spring tide, under a full moon, a giant low-pressure zone with force 11 to 12 winds (wind speeds of 64 to more than 73 miles per hour) rolls in from the North Sea. The storm surge pushes five-and-a-half-meter (18-foot) waves against storm barriers along the coast. But the elements have even more in store for the unfortunate Dutch. There is a thaw in the Alps, and it has been raining heavily in Germany for days. The Rhine River is carrying 16,000 cubic meters (4.2 million gallons) of water across the German-Dutch border — every second.
The experts have calculated that this scenario is likely to occur once every 4,000 years. “But what good is this number to us? It could happen in a week,” says Berghuis, “and that’s why we would rather be prepared.”
I am surprised that the Netherlands has lasted as long as it has. I would not want to be dependent on a man made systems of dikes to keep dry.
Welcome To The Future Part III
More senior citizens are picking pockets and shoplifting in Japan to cope with cuts in government welfare spending and rising health-care costs in a fast-ageing society.
Criminal offences by people 65 or older doubled to 48,605 in the five years to 2008, the most since police began compiling national statistics in 1978, a Ministry of Justice report said.
I had to read that twice to make sure that elderly crime had doubled since 2003, not 1978. It would have been no surprises had it doubled since 1978 since absolute number of elderly people has probably doubled since then. But it seems as if Japan is truly seeing a crime wave of sorts from its elderly citizens. From later on in the same article….
“Some elderly, particularly men who lost their wives, even turn to crimes to be put in jail so they can be fed three times a day,” Yamada said.
The whole article is pretty depressing.
Meanwhile, On a different island nation they are dealing with a different problem. From the Telegraph….
Girls as young as 13 will be pressed to have contraceptive jabs under Government plans to “urgently” bring down teenage pregnancy rates.
Ministers have ordered council and health chief executives to increase the uptake of “long-acting” contraception in teen pregnancy “hot spots”.
The government also wants more school-based clinics to administer the jabs, which can make girls infertile for up to three months.
Teenagers can receive the injections or implants without their parents’ knowledge.
Critics warn that the controversial move will promote promiscuity and that injections and implants will not protect against the rampant spread of sexually transmitted disease. Some health experts also say that the drugs are unsuitable for girls who are still growing.
Its a wonderful world.
The Games We Play
Four insurance companies on Friday asked the government to allow them to buy thrifts so they can qualify to receive federal money under the financial rescue program.
Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Genworth Financial Inc., Lincoln National Corp. and Aegon NV, a Dutch company that owns U.S. insurer Transamerica, each asked the Office of Thrift Supervision for permission to acquire an existing savings and loan.
Calculated Risk has more on Hartford’s request.
This should not be allowed. If we are going to bail out insurance companies, let us bail out insurance companies. But let us not encourage insurance companies to buy small savings and loan operations just so that they can get billions of dollars from the Federal government.
Some one who did their best for the future of Ireland….
Mrs Ward and her late husband Charles had 15 children, 172 grandchildren, 36 great grandchildren and 18 great-great grandchildren.
Things you would rather not know
From a Spiegel article on lost nuclear weapons….
But what made this incident famous was the bomb that landed in a tree. Five of its six fuses designed to prevent a detonation failed, with only the last one averting a nuclear explosion. After this near-disaster, the security systems in US nuclear weapons were revised, and Washington asked the Soviet Union to do the same.
The Next Bank Failure?
The massive Wall Street rally this afternoon, and a statement in support of Citigroup’s chairman, didn’t help Citi, which closed down slightly on the day at $9.45 a share. Clearly the market is very worried about Citi’s future, and the fact that it’s trading in single digits — which means that a modest $1 decline in the share price means headlines about a 10% plunge — doesn’t help.