Tag Archives: political economy

Responsibilities

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Iran, as I write this (Monday), has rejected efforts to defuse the situation in the Arabian Gulf, a situation it has created with its piracy of and extended threats toward oil shipping in the Gulf and transiting the Strait of Hormuz.  Indeed, in response to a planned British redeployment of a couple of small combat ships to the Gulf to add to the protection of British tankers, Iran had this:

But Mr [Ali, Iranian government spokesman] Rabie warned Sunday that a European military deployment in the Gulf would be viewed as an escalation of the crisis. “Such moves under the current conditions are provocative,” he said, according to IRNA.

Thus, Iran does not want the nations trading in oil to be able to more effectively protect their shipping.  Iran demands to preserve its ability to seize those ships for itself.

This is not the action of a peace-loving nation. Piracy in the Gulf is the responsibility of Iran.

Freeze the North Pole

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…or keep it frozen.  Or add more ice to it.  Or something.

Here’s an idea:

A team of designers led by Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha proposes re-freezing sea water in the Arctic to create miniature modular icebergs using a submarine-like vessel, in a bid to combat climate change.
The Indonesian designer worked on the prototype with collaborators Denny Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa for an international competition organised by the Association of Siamese Architects.

And they won a consolation prize for that.  After all, as Kotahatuhaha said,

The main goal of this idea is to restore the polar ecosystem, which has a direct effect on the balance of the global climate[.]

And here’s some of the “engineering” by which the polar ice caps and their ecosystems would be saved [emphasis added]:

The submarine-like vessel would submerge to collect sea water in a central hexagonal tank. Turbines would then be used to blast the tank with cold air and accelerate the freezing process.
… A system of reverse osmosis would be used to filter some of the salt from the water in order to speed up the process.

Eric Warrell, over at Watts Up With That?, had some thoughts on this…scheme.

There is a slight flaw with this idea.
Refrigeration, reverse osmosis, pumping heat, all takes a lot of work. Both the latent heat of fusion extracted from the water to turn it into ice and the waste heat from the freezing process will have to be dumped somewhere.
If they dump the waste heat into the Arctic ocean, or the air, it will probably melt the ice their submarine just finished freezing.

And I have a couple thoughts on Kotahatuhaha’s…scheme.

All that melting fresh-watered-up ice restores the polar salt water ecosystem how, exactly?

All that heat (lots of it from a project of this scale) injected into the ocean, or worse, into the atmosphere, slows the warming of our atmosphere and our climate how, exactly?

Wait—I have an idea.  Recall all those efforts to capture and sequester atmospheric CO2 in holes in the ground, perhaps salt caves (known for their geologic stability) or holes drilled for the purpose: pump all that waste heat into those holes, too.  After all, that’s what heat pumps do—move heat from here to there.

And: think of all the green jobs and all the out-of-work elves who are between seasons.

And: think of all the starving children in Bangladesh and all the food these large-screen refrigerators could preserve and keep safe for them.

Engineers? Got their degrees from the College of Cracker Jack, did they?

A Foolish Question

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In a piece about British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new Brexit architect Dominic Cummings, a question was raised that’s central to the next three months of Great Britain’s future and perhaps to its future’s subsequent years.

The question now is whether he [Cummings] will steer the Johnson government toward swallowing a compromise divorce deal with the EU or prepare it to quit with no deal at all.

This is a foolish question. Not only are they not mutually exclusive, they must be done in parallel—or rather the better question must be done in parallel with the no-deal: steering the matter toward a better compromise from the EU.

The no-deal departure, fully set up, is the only lever the Brits have against a mendacious Brussels.

Finally

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Great Britain, early in this latest stage, might finally have a Prime Minister who’s serious about Brexit because he’s committed to it in his soul, unlike the Remainer Theresa May (whom I think made a good faith effort, but because her heart wasn’t in it, she couldn’t perform).

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a hard-line negotiating stance with the European Union, setting the stage for fraught Brexit talks before the UK’s scheduled departure from the bloc on Oct 31.

Among other things,

In a combative first speech to Parliament, Mr Johnson reiterated Thursday that the plan in place to avoid a border on the island of Ireland after Brexit—one of the central planks of the divorce deal—was “unacceptable” and would have to be abolished.

Of course it’s unacceptable, and it should have been all along—it is nothing but Brussels’ attempt to disassemble Great Britain in punishment for its effrontery in deciding to leave the EU and as a warning to other uppity member nations.

Which is sort of what Johnson said:

No country that values its independence and indeed its self-respect could agree to a treaty, which signed away our economic independence and self-government as this backstop does[.]
I do not accept the argument that says that these issues can only be solved by all or part of the UK remaining in the customs union or in the single market

Nor does this poor, dumb colonial from Texas accept such sewage.

Testing

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Boeing is going to be unable to return its 737MAX to commercial flight before 2020; the current latest guess is January, and that’s likely to slip.

Fixing the Boeing Co 737 MAX’s hazardous flight-control software and completing other steps to start carrying passengers is likely to stretch into 2020, an increasing number of government and industry officials say, even as the company strives to get its jet back into service still this year.
The situation remains fluid, no firm timeline has been established and Boeing still has to satisfy US regulators that it has answered all outstanding safety questions.
…
Boeing executives, FAA engineers, and international aviation regulators have steadily expanded their safety analyses to cover a growing list of issues spanning everything from emergency recovery procedures to potentially suspect electronic components.

That pretty much says it all.  Boeing needs to stop taking short cuts—legitimate as those might seem, and are in a variety of cases—and test this aircraft from the ground up as though every component in the control system were newly developed and never before tested.  “Every,” here, means physical components, electronic components, and software.  And pilots: their understanding of and interaction with the control systems, and with their training and operating manuals, needs to be evaluated de novo, also, as the Ethiopian crash suggests.

Too much of this stuff have not interacted with each other before in this particular aircraft, and even those components of subsystems and those subsystems themselves that have interacted within themselves have not, necessarily, interacted with other components and subsystems.

It would, in fact, be a good idea to do this from-the-ground-up retesting as a matter of routine whenever there’s a major software or hardware update to the aircraft.  Those updates create a nearly new aircraft, and accumulating changes in performance, however subtle or seemingly minor, can falsify a number of underlying assumptions and add up to large failures.

In the present case, the bit-by-bit testing is not saving much money, either.