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Wednesday, December 24, 2003
William Lind, a military historian, has a 4GW (4th generation warfare) viewpoint on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that is worth reading.
How to fight 4GW (part 2) One of his major points: we lost these wars when we destroyed the Afghan and Iraqi states and turned them into a lawless mess. He maintains that it is very hard to rebuild a state once it is destroyed and we will leave well before these countries are stable states again (the implication: this would turn Iraq and Afghanistan into Lebanons). [John Robb's Weblog] comments < 9:48:07 AM 
>The Top Science Stories of 2003 [Scientific American] comments < 9:44:55 AM
>Global warming gets ever more confusing. NASA says soot accounts for 25% of "observed" warming (according to the IPCC, the estimates of warming range from 0.3 to 0.6 degrees C over the past century - a very broad range - leading some to question the accuracy of those observations). Others report that the sun/s increasing output accounts for 40% of the warming - or maybe 100%. Thus, using the current computer simulation models (a.k.a. computer games), things other than CO2 are said to account for 65% of "observed" warming. (Warming?) The remaining 35% is then explained by the other greenhouse gases, of which water vapor is the overall largest contributor and CO2 is 25% of the 35% - or less than 9% of overall greenhouse effects (note: not all effects are equal so this analysis is simplified). The Kyoto Protocol would reduce CO2 levels by 5% if their models are accurate. That would reduce CO2 from 8.75% to 8.31%. Stated another way, total greenhouse gases would drop by less than 1/2 of 1%, which is likely to be well within the standard error of the estimates and the models. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:44:36 AM
>CDC still uncertain if this year's flu season is worse than normal. The head of the CDC says we are now at "epidemic" levels (which is actually a normal flu season), even though the data published on their own web site still shows the flu season being only just up to seasonal norms, and not yet at the epidemic level. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:44:01 AM
>"America" On Line moving its software development to India. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:43:38 AM
>Microsoft CEO insists that to keep tech jobs in the U.S., the U.S. must produce more engineers - and cut salaries in half. Translation: Let's flood the market with more engineers in order to lower their price (salary) to third-world nation levels. Ballmer actually says that if we lower pay levels for U.S. engineers, then the jobs will stay in the U.S. No Mr. Ballmer. Smart American students will do as they always have, and will follow those jobs that provide careers and a good return on investment. Why on earth would students choose a field with plummeting salaries and the constant threat of job elimination due to offshoring?Only a monopolist would believe in such distorted economic thinking. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:43:17 AM
>IBM may lay off and move up to 25% of its jobs overseas in the next two years says this report, which says companies are moving jobs overseas en masse in a "hush hush" manner for fear of major political fallout. (See my notes below about how Steve Ballmer cannot get his facts straight on U.S. software development.) Maybe none of this matters. The Department of Homeland Security's "orange" alert level is said to be based on very serious threats and specific and credible information, depending on what sources are read, including overseas reports. Some say that suspected terrorists have been moving in large groups in the Mid-East, to deploy both in the Mid-East and also overseas. Other reports are saying the government has good information on specific targets in the U.S., selected to cause mass fear and hysteria. In which case, who cares about CEO's who can't get their numbers straight. Further terrorist attacks within the U.S. will be a big dent in the offshoring and "insourcing" trend. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:42:27 AM
>The following two links are interesting in that they show how culpable the media is to spin. In the first item, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, says that companies need to hire in India because it costs $120,000 per year to hire a software engineer. Yet the U.S. government said that in 2000, a peak year for IT hiring, and thus, a peak year for wages, the average computer programmers was paid $47840 per year, not $120,000. But note how Steve crafts a phony argument to make his point, knowing that very few people ever bother to fact check the data. He then goes on to argue that if U.S. engineer salaries were to fall to $50,000 per year, then he can justify hiring more U.S. engineers versus hiring in India. Again, note how the official data says we already pay below $50,000 per year. His entire argument is based on an apparent falsehood, followed by peculiar economics thinking - if engineering salaries would fall, we will employ more engineers in the U.S. I guess Steve missed his economics class in college; also the one that covered monopolies. In the second set of articles, NASA scientists hypothesize that diesel soot may account for up to 25% of "observed global warming". They did not actually measure that, by the way - it is merely an hypothesis that they could plug into their computer weather video game. When I add up the current estimates on sources of global warming, CO2 becomes an ever smaller contributor. Which means that the global warming models are getting ever more bent out of shape to create a simulation of global weather, based also on the extreme unlikelihood of predicting human behavior and invention over the next 100 years. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:42:01 AM
>(Link to Microsoft's web site transcript of interview with Steve Ballmer, where he suggests we need to dramatically lower the salaries of U.S. engineers so that we will have more of them ... very unusual economic thinking going on here)... STEVE BALLMER: China and India. And if you look at it, a higher percentage of the best and brightest, more kids in absolute graduate in computer science in those two countries, their growth rates in graduates are going up. In the United States actually we have fewer computer science graduates today than we did five years ago. [Ed. As the technology and telecommunication sectors collapsed, enrollment in U.S. computer science programs has fallen by 60% to 80% in the past two years. For some reason, this is a mystery to CEO's like Steve. We must also note that India has about five times more people aged 20 to 29 than does the U.S. They will always win any battle based on numbers of people. China has about ten times more people aged 20 to 29 than does the U.S. So of course, "more kids in absolute graduate in computer science in those two countries". This is a surprise? No, this is failure to look at the whole picture by those who want to spin the story.] So in a sense part of it's just about the hubbub of labor rates and blah, blah, blah. The bigger issue is what kinds of things do we need to do to encourage more American kids -- STEVE SHEPARD: Yeah, but how does that solve the problem? I mean, if we had more software engineers graduating from American universities and those jobs are going to India anyway, we just have more unemployment among software engineers. STEVE BALLMER: Well, no, you might look, if you told me you can hire somebody in India for $20,000 a year, which would be a great, high paying job, and the -- STEVE SHEPARD: Equivalent job. STEVE BALLMER: -- sort of equivalent is $120,000 job in the U.S., that's a very tough tradeoff, and not for me because we like to do all our R&D in Seattle, but there are some jobs for which that would be a tough tradeoff for some people. We have a small facility in India. It will grow, but we don't anticipate it being very large so far from an R&D perspective at Microsoft. But if you say to somebody, look, the Indian engineer is $20,000 and the engineer in the United States is $50,000 a year, which is still a very respectable job in the United States, it's not a $120,000 job, the whole economics of that proposition start to look quite a bit different.. [Ed. Note: The average computer engineers salary in the U.S. is $47,580 per year at the 104th highest pay grade in the U.S., not $120,000 per year, in the year 2000. Salaries have gone down since then. So why is Steve Ballmer hiring in India when his own argument says he can hire U.S. workers today?] The communication hassle, the time zone hassle, there are many things that you say the hassle of those things, are they worth the cost savings and at some big delta some people are going to say they are and a much smaller delta people are going to say they're less valuable and that's partly the function of how many folks are graduating with technical degrees here in the United States. Note: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay for a computer programmer in 2000 was ">$47840 at position #104 on the list. [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology] comments < 9:41:39 AM
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