Category Archives: Knowledge

Links for Today

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A very interesting post on the dangers of doing business in China. You must be very careful in negotiating lower prices from your Chinese factory because just asking for lower prices could cause your company some very serious blowback.

A useful complement to the Educated Deb Posts on japan if anyone has the time to read it. “Japan Raid by U.S. Is Out of Question”

This has been the story for a long time now. At some point it is going to end, but accurately predicting that end has made a fool out of a lot of people. How Best to Describe the U.S. External Balance Sheet

Project Educate Deb #7 Japanese Naval Battles

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This is a a departure from our usual Educate Deb fair in that it is multiple smaller videos strung together in attempt to give a complete novice a better than average understanding of the Navel War between Japan and the US.

To start with, we need to understand what Japan hoped to accomplish by declaring war against the US. And there is no more concise way to do that that look at Japan’s successful Naval war against Tsarist Russia.

Battle of Tsushima

Just as with the war with Russia, Japan sought to open its war with the US with a surprise attack.

Pearl Harbor.

Japan knew that it could not win a long war with America. The war against Russia almost bankrupted Japan and that was relativity short war. So even though Japan had many early success in the war, the Japanese navy knew they had to bring the US fleet to battle and defeat it just as they defeated the two Russian fleets if they wanted to have a chance to win the war. For this reason, Japan sought to bring about the decisive defeat of the American fleet at the battle of Midway.

The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective

After the battle of Midway, everyone with half a brain knew that America was going to win. But still, Japan fought on and on and on. The short little video below shows the changing tides of the war from the time of the pearl harbor attack until Japan surrendered.

World War II in the Pacific: Every Day

Almost everyone knows how America ended the war. But what was the alternative? The below video gives a good overview of one alternative way of doing things.

The Invasion of Japan – Operation Olympic / Downfall

If you still have patience, this last video is a good corrective to the view that “of course Japan would have surrendered even with out the dropping of the bomb.

Why the Japanese Military wanted to fight on after(!) the 2nd Nuke

Links for Today

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So few young people remember because many of their parents believed the same lies that they spout today with even less excuse. The Berlin Wall Is Gone, but Its Lessons Remain

It never does explain why because in a lot of ways we don’t know why. But still interesting to see how great the gap still is. Why explosives detectors still can’t beat a dog’s nose

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. New Jersey homeowners say aggressive turkeys are terrorizing community

Not to much media focus on this part of the world but a lot of people (far more then in the west) have been killed by terrorism over there. Islamic State Is Alive and Well in South Asia

Mostly Food Related Links

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I don’t know about mind boggling, but it is interesting: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling

Related to the above: Six of the nine core counties for America’s food supply are burning

Hard evidence of the scale of China’s swine flu problems: China’s pork imports are already set to surpass previous records this year, reaching between 3.1 million and 3.3 million tonnes including offal, the bank said in a report, up from 2.1 million tonnes last year.

Your daily reminder that there is so much that we are told as fact is actually wrong: “The olfactory bulb, a structure at the very front of the brain, plays a vital role in our ability to smell. Or, at least, so we thought. A research team has now discovered a handful of women who have a perfectly normal sense of smell but who seem to lack olfactory bulbs – completely altering our long-held views about smell.“

Links For Today

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Truth: Advocates argue their single-payer Medicare for all health care system will overall cost us all a lot less. They are right that their systems can be a lot less expensive by expanding Medicare to everyone––primarily because government payment rates are so much smaller.But here’s the hitch––paying Medicare rates on behalf of all patients would literally bankrupt the system we have.

A different view: Sunspots are continuing to become few-and-far between of late. And while it’s really anyone’s guess what next year will bring, the likelihood of 2020 surpassing 2019’s spotless days total is very high, as the sun looms inevitably-closer to its next Grand Solar Minimum.

That China is a threat is a pretty standard line. But not many people are paying attention to its problems. Beijing’s newfound assertiveness looks at first glance like the mark of growing power and ambition. But in fact it is nothing of the sort. China’s actions reflect profound unease among the country’s leaders, as they contend with their country’s first sustained economic slowdown in a generation and can discern no end in sight. China’s economic conditions have steadily worsened since the 2008 financial crisis. The country’s growth rate has fallen by half and is likely to plunge further in the years ahead, as debt, foreign protectionism, resource depletion, and rapid aging take their toll.

The Future Is Now Links

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Best break down on the quantum supremacy dispute between IBM and Google that I have seen yet. Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off

Increased copyright protection is almost always a bad idea. No one yet has shown that it benefits society as a whole and even most proponents don’t even try to make that case. The CASE Act’s goal is to make it simple and fast for copyright holders to get paid for infringement claims. The method it employs is to create a quasi-judicial body in the Copyright Office called the “Copyright Claims Board,” which would be able to award damages as high as $30,000 per proceeding, while also strictly limiting the ability of parties to appeal the decisions. $30,000 judgments issued by people who are not judges but rather officers of the Copyright Office, who see copyright holders—not the general public—as their customers, are not “small claims”. These are judgments that could ruin the lives of regular people; people who are engaging in the things we all do when we’re online: sharing memes, sharing videos, and downloading images.

I would put more focus on the idea that increasingly the State’s only commonly accepted justification for existing rests on ever increasing material befits. It is a short jump from there to think that if I am doing poorly, the state is no longer legitimate. Protesters Are United by Something Other Than Politics

More amusing and sly then the headline suggests. I think it strongly overstates its case though and in general it does not seem like it is written by someone who is deeply familiar with the past: How single men and women are making politics more extreme