The Big Picture Archives - Page 25 of 34

September 19, 2013

Companies Unplug From the Electric Grid, Delivering a Jolt to Utilities | WSJ.com

On a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, two big wind turbines crank out electricity for Kroger Co.’s KR +0.02% Turkey Hill Dairy in rural Lancaster County, Pa., allowing it to save 25% on its power bill for the past two years.

….From big-box retailers to high-tech manufacturers, more companies across the country are producing their own power. Since 2006, the number of electricity-generation units at commercial and industrial sites has more than quadrupled to roughly 40,000 from about 10,000, according to federal statistics.

By REBECCA SMITH and CASSANDRA SWEET

September 11, 2013

Retired general speaks out against across-the-board spending cuts

Retired General Carter Ham, former head of U.S. Africa Command, speaks out against across-the-board spending cuts at the National Association for Business Economics in San Francisco:

“My least-favorite saying on the planet is to ‘do more with less.’ You don’t do more with less, you do less with less,” Gen. Ham said. “You have to figure out what’s most important.”

One solution would be to give federal agencies the flexibility to find savings where they can, rather than mandating how they make the cuts, he said. The government also needs to have frank discussions about how to reduce the military budget and shift priorities to address current and future threats.

~ From Sarah Portlock at WSJ online.

August 29, 2013

The Qatar Problem – By Jeremy Shapiro | The Middle East Channel

Jeremy Shapiro at Foreign Policy discusses the role played by Qatar in the Middle East, their expansion of Al-Jazeera into the US, and their support for the Muslim Brotherhood:

On the face of it, Qatar has been one of the United States’s most valuable allies in the Middle East over the last decade. Qatar hosts a large U.S. Air Force base in the Persian Gulf and has often provided political and financial support for U.S. initiatives in the Middle East. Indeed, Washington has often encouraged Qatari activism to legitimize U.S. diplomacy, including its political support at the Arab League of a potential U.S. strike against Syria.

But Qatar’s role in the United States’s Middle East policy is far more problematic than is commonly recognized. The tiny yet ambitious Gulf emirate has sought to use its immense hydrocarbon wealth to finance and arm civil wars in Libya and Syria, to support Hamas in Gaza, and to mediate disputes in Sudan and Lebanon. Its interest sometimes align with the United States’s — but too often, they do not. The launch of Al-Jazeera America, the news network its government owns, should redirect attention to Doha’s goals and means……

August 29, 2013

The true cost of drones: Unending war?

James R. Holmes at The Naval Diplomat describes how the function of drones has evolved from artillery spotting to armed UAVs capable of waging war without direct human intervention. Whether armed, or merely used for surveillance and accurate delivery of independently-launched (naval, aerial or land-based) weapons, the low cost of drone warfare raises the prospect of an unending conflict:

…..Two, Clausewitz urges senior leaders to let the value of the political object determine how many national resources they expend to obtain that object, and how long they expend those resources for. Professor Byman appears to define success — again, whether drones work — partly in terms of how much drones cost the United States and its allies. Drone warfare is cheap relative to keeping expeditionary forces on the ground, projecting force inland from the sea, or otherwise prosecuting operations via traditional, resource-intensive methods. But flip the relationship around. By Clausewitzian cost/benefit logic, holding down the magnitude of the effort may let Washington continue with drone strikes more or less indefinitely, even if U.S. leaders are only tepidly committed to the endeavor. A forever war, even an inexpensive one, is an unsettling prospect.

August 12, 2013

Only Capitalism Can End Poverty | Cato @ Liberty

Marian L. Tupy argues that free enterprise is the best cure for poverty:

According to the World Bank, global poverty is declining rapidly. In 1981, 70 percent of people in poor countries lived on less than $2 a day, while 42 percent survived on less than $1 a day. Today, 43 percent live on less than $2 a day, while 14 percent survive on less than $1. “Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history,” wrote Brookings Institution researchers Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz in a recent paper. “Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”

August 4, 2013

Sprawl Does Not Reduce Economic Mobility | Cato @ Liberty

Randal O’Toole writes that economic mobility is unrelated to urban sprawl as suggested by Paul Krugman:

The Equality of Opportunity Project found that economic mobility is low throughout the South (except Texas), not just in Atlanta. But the differences in the unit measured — the percentage of children in the bottom fifth of incomes who end up in the top fifth — are small, ranging from 4 percent in Atlanta to 11 percent in San Jose. Moreover, what differences there are appear to be unrelated to sprawl: Chicago, a fairly dense area, is almost as low as Atlanta, while Pittsburgh, a fairly low-density area, is almost as high as San Jose.

The study lists a lot of factors that seem to correlate with low economic mobility, but none of them are related to population density or sprawl. The most important factors appear to be tax rates, racial residential segregation, K-12 school quality, and the percentage of single-parent families. The South scores particularly high on racial residential segregation and low on K-12 schools, which together go much further toward explaining its relatively low economic mobility than urban sprawl.

The factors that affect economic mobility or equal opportunity are fairly obvious but worth repeating:

tax rates;
residential segregation;
quality education; and
family structure.

The first three are within reach of positive government intervention, but I suspect the last — broken family ties — is the most pernicious and difficult to reverse.

July 9, 2013

BBC News: Could one man have shortened the Vietnam War?

Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of story of Konrad Kellen, a “truly great listener”:

Everyone believed what [Leon Goure, US expert who believed the Vietcong were demoralised and about to give up] said, with one exception – Konrad Kellen. He read the same interviews and reached the exact opposite conclusion.

Years later, he would say that his rethinking began with one memorable interview with a senior Vietcong captain. He was asked very early in the interview if he thought the Vietcong could win the war, and he said no.

But pages later, he was asked if he thought that the US could win the war, and he said no.

The second answer profoundly changes the meaning of the first. He didn’t think in terms of winning or losing at all, which is a very different proposition. An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all.

Goure’s analysis is a classic case of confirmation bias: he sought evidence to support his preconceived ideas, rather than gathering and evaluating evidence objectively. This applies as much to investing as it does to war.

June 30, 2013

Youth protests: The “legitimacy crisis” of modern democracy

The youth riots in Brazil, Chile, the European Union, the Arab Middle East, Turkey, and even the “Occupy” movement in the West all reflect what political theory broadly calls the “legitimacy crisis” of modern democracy – the notion that participation in democratic politics does little to change the actual process of government, that elites are dug-in and immoveable, that cronyism is endemic, and so on. Young voters particularly become cynical of the formal electoral process, either dropping out in disdain, or expressing their grievances “extra-parliamentarily”, i.e., on the street.

June 1, 2013October 5, 2017

Trust: Easy to Break, Hard to Repair | WSJ

Excellent interview of renowned short-seller Jim Chanos by Jason Zweig. Chanos list three reasons why the average investor is right not to trust the integrity of the financial markets…

First, in recent years financial fraud has rarely been detected and exposed by the people the public might reasonably expect to do so: accountants, regulators and law-enforcement authorities, whom Chanos calls “the normal guardians of the marketplace.” Instead, frauds more often have been rooted out by whistleblowers, short-sellers and journalists.

Second, prosecutions of financial crimes are essential in the minds of investors, but are discretionary in the eyes of government officials….. the so-called too big to jail rationale.

Third, individual investors will never trust the market until these issues are addressed.

To me the list is too short.

Chanos fails to mention the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street where regulators frequently swap sides — working for government the one day and in high-paying jobs on Wall Street the next — and have one eye on their career path rather than focusing on their current job.

Fifth, the massive financial leverage that Wall Street has on Capitol Hill where Congressmen, dependent on fundraisers sponsored by Wall Street lobbyists, allow same lobbyists to write some of the legislation that passes through the house.

May 6, 2013

Beware China’s civilian-military relationship | The Japan Times

Masahiro Matsumura, professor of international politics at St. Andrew’s University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) in Osaka, writes

…….the Chinese state apparatus is largely detached from the military, while the party’s top civilian leaders have only a loose grip on the generals.

Worse still, the current fifth generation of civilian leaders is made up of veritable dwarfs in military affairs. By contrast, the PLA’s leaders have become increasingly professionalized, but without the tempering influence of effective civilian control, which might well collapse entirely if China’s leaders continue to accept unauthorized military actions, particularly in the East or South China Sea, as faits accomplis. Line commanders could take advantage of the equivocality of civilian policy, particularly given the military’s growing political clout and the CCP’s dependence on popular nationalist sentiment.