Category Archives: Front Page

What do you make of this?

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This is Christian from Defense Tech’s take….

My thought is this: First of all, NO DUH they denied your plan to approach Tora Bora from Pakistan…the risks, both diplomatic and military were too much to contemplate. It’s one thing to have planes flying out of remote bases; another to have an “invading” ground force try an Alpine assault from an area teeming with AQ and their sympathizers. Also…LAND MINES!? Come on, you HAD to have known that would never fly. As if Afghanistan doesn’t have enough of them littering the landscape already. What are we, the Soviets? (their potential words, not mine)…

And here is more info from Defense Tech.

In theory its unbreakable, but in practice…

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In theory quantum cryptography is unbreakable with giving away the fact that you are intercepting the data. But in practice…

Quantum cryptography has been used by some banks to protect data, and even to hide election results in Switzerland last year. But it has been discovered that shining bright light into the sensitive equipment needed makes it possible to hijack communications without a trace.

Pension Funds to the Rescue

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From Felix Salmon….

In a nutshell, the government first guarantees all the banks’ deposits. Then the buy side — the Icelandic pension funds, which have billions of dollars in foreign securities — sell everything they own abroad, and bring it back home. At an exchange rate of 126 kronur to the dollar, that will buy them a lot of kronur. (The currency has lost fully half its value over the past year.) The banks, too, will liquidate their foreign holdings, and bring them all back home.

Mr. Salmon thinks that this is a shrewd move. But how would you like to be a pensioner in Iceland right about now? This is a trick that only works once and then what?

For more info on the current sate of Iceland see this piece in Spiegel.

China’s Low Capital Dairy Farmers

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I got into a discussion the other night about China’s milk scandal. I was arguing that China’s dairy farmers were unlikely to be responsible for the contamination of the milk. As best as I understand it, China’s Dairy farm’s are all small low budget affairs. In my view, the types of people who run those farms are unlikely to have the accesses to melamine or have the kind of knowledge that it takes to understand how to use melamine to fool milk testing equipment.

This article from the New York Times strengthens my view. Especially this part….

Sanlu, which is 43 percent owned by the New Zealand-based Fonterra Group, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, controls the only milk station in Nantongyi village, giving it monopoly pricing power in the area. Every day farmers guide their cows to the village milking station, pump milk directly into the station tanks and then return home, waiting to hear how much they will earn, if their milk passes quality inspections.

In the first place this shows how poor China’s dairy farmers are. They don’t even own their own milking equipment. In the second place, it makes hard to understand how the farmers could have contaminated their own milk when they sold the milk straight from the cow to the company.

If the article is to be believed, third parity milking stations are quite common in China.

The Russians are dying faster then ever before

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From the Washington Post…..

So what’s killing the Russians? All the usual suspects — HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular and circulatory diseases, suicides, smoking, traffic accidents — but they occur in alarmingly large numbers, and Moscow has neither the resources nor the will to stem the tide. Consider this:

Three times as many Russians die from heart-related illnesses as do Americans or Europeans, per each 100,000 people.

Tuberculosis deaths in Russia are about triple the World Health Organization’s definition of an epidemic, which is based on a new-case rate of 50 cases per 100,000 people.

Average alcohol consumption per capita is double the rate the WHO considers dangerous to one’s health.

About 1 million people in Russia have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, according to WHO estimates.

Using mid-year figures, it’s estimated that 25 percent more new HIV/AIDS cases will be recorded this year than were logged in 2007.

And none of this is likely to get better any time soon. Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, the U.N. agency created in response to the epidemic, told a press conference this summer that he is “very pessimistic about what is going on in Russia and Eastern Europe . . . where there is the least progress.” This should be all the more worrisome because young people are most at risk in Russia. In the United States and Western Europe, 70 percent of those with HIV/AIDS are men over age 30; in Russia, 80 percent of this group are aged 15 to 29.