Friday, October 19, 2012

Iran Free Trade Zones

As countries around the world scorn Iran at the behest of the USGovernment for no particular reason, Iranian efforts at modern free trade are stymied.   Everybody wants a Hong Kong, and Iran is no different setting up three of them, one of them in Chabahar, a city whose very name means always Springtime.   The city is also in a prime trade route.
Baloch online
Problem is with sanctions and black ops it is hard to get anything going.  And then we have US Ally India financing the building of a port in one free trade zone, while China backs a Pakistan port.  Pakistan is supposed to be a USA ally as well.  This is one more thing that will end badly.


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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Moslem Anarchists?

This, from Wikipedia, is encouraging:
Tablighi Jamaat follows an informal organizational structure and keeps an introvert institutional profile. It keeps its distance from mass media and avoids publishing details about its activities and membership. The group also exercises complete abstinence from expressing opinions on political and controversial issues mainly to avoid the disputes which would accompany these endorsements.[32][33] As an organization, Tabligh Jamaat does not seek donations and is not funded by anyone, in fact members have to bear their own expenditures. Since there is no formal registration process and no official membership count has ever been taken, the exact membership statistics remain unknown.[34] The movement discourages interviews with its elders and has never officially released texts. Even though there are publications associated with the movement, particularly by Zakariya Kandahalwi, the emphasis has never been on book learning, but rather on first-hand personal communication.[6][35] A collection of books, usually referred as Tablighi Nisaab(Tablighi Curriculum), is recommended by Tabligh Jamaat elders for general reading. This set includes four books namely (Hayatus SahabahFazail-e-AmaalFazail-e-Sadqaat and Muntakhab Ahadith).[36]
The organization's activities are coordinated through centers and headquarters called Markaz. Tablighi Jamaat maintains its international headquarters, called Nizamuddin Markaz, in the Nizamuddin West district of South Delhi, India, from where it originally started. It also has country headquarters in over 213 countries to coordinate its activities. These headquarters organize volunteer, self-funding people in groups (called jamaats), averaging ten to twelve people, for reminding Muslims to remain steadfast on path of God.[25] These jamaats and preaching missions are self funded by their respective members.


What I read about Islam suggests they are quite open to anarchy, properly understood, and this seems to be a good example.  Encouraging.

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Estonia: So Close, Then A Wrong Turn

Estonia is just the sort of small country that can get wealthy in the sense of an ever greater array of goods and services while prices fall.  But alas, they joined the EU.  They were cutting back on government which was yielding good result, when they started the losing game again.  Sigh.

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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Trade In New Fruits

I insist on competing on design, never to buy off the shelf items. But some designs, as they are, look like a very attractive place to start.  I still say no, leave such items to the estabished firms, since if anyone can get your item, everyone will.  I'd like to try this lime in a gin and tonic.



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The Hops Market

When you wonder at Washington state agriculture, you might reasonably think Apples and cookie grade wheat.  What few people know is Washington is the world center for hops growing.  It takes barley and hops to make beer, and the hops growers generally grow to contract, that is they grow what and how much a brewery wants.  Hops do not store well, so packaging and storage of hops is an industry in itself.

The hops growers are tied into the big brewers, which are of course some 90% or more of their business.  The craft brewers, microbrews, are less than 10% of the business, but all hop growers talk about how fun it is to work with the microbrewers.

Yes, because they care, they have passion.

I was plagued with a malady called alopecia.  Top doctors and my cadillac grade insurance could not come up with a solution after ten years of trying.  I read somewhere that hops was a cure.  Hmmmmm...

No doctor ever told me this, they just wanted to shoot me up with steroids (which excites cancer) and other "remedies" with terrible side effects.  I'd rather be bald.

Pyramid Ales put out a triple hop beer that I came to love as it cured my alopecia.

If we had less subsidies of the big brewers, there would be more market for the microbrewers, and more care for ingredients.  And more research on medicinal uses of beers and wines.  But no, we must have subsidies and lockdowns.

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Pirate Party Seeks Patent Abolition! Sort Of.

This from a website of the Swedish Pirate Party:


"Patents should be abolished as soon as possible. An increasing amount of research, predominantly in the United States, shows us that the patent system as a whole has a negative effect on society. It can be positive for specific actors (mostly pharma companies and patent trolls), but for society as a whole, the patent system is damaging to innovation, to competition, and to economic growth."

Sigh.  Then it goes on to endorse Pharma patents advocating a public/corporate partnership to meet the needs of Big Pharma in developing new drugs.  Sigh.

1. It does not cost billions to create drugs, they merely spend billions.

2. The process is already political and invested with public funds, so how will doing more of the same change things?

3. There is no correlation between money spent and drugs introduced.  There is only inhibiting more better cheaper faster drugs due to monopolies.

And then the site goes on to praise trade marks!  Someone has not been doing his basic research....

The site is very crashy, so careful...

http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/13/what-the-swedish-pirate-party-wants-with-patents-trademarks-and-copyright/

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Cotton Crop In China

The cotton crop in USA is a big export item, heavily subsidized.  It is about to need more money to keep going, as the Chinese exploit their natural advantages to feed the market for cotton.

As late as the 1990s imported cotton garments from China were made of USA grown cotton.  As that market shrinks, new opportunities grow in China.  USA will no doubt double down on subsidies, denying the rest of us what good would come from ending cotton crop subsidies in USA.  O well.

The third page of the article looks at the harvest from the picker's point of view.  Very interesting.

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Monday, October 15, 2012

Drugging Children

The New York Times has a "mock-concern" article that comes down hard on drugging kids in school.  What do you do when you see parents drugging their kids stupidly?  What do you say to parents whose kids have gone off the rails after a decade or more of psychotropic drug experiments.

“These children are still in the developmental phase, and we still don’t know how these drugs biologically affect the developing brain,” he said. “There’s an obligation for parents, doctors and teachers to respect the authenticity issue, and I’m not sure that’s always happening.”

Yes, we have no idea what the long term effects...wait, yes we do, between LSD and Ritalin, the CIA picked LSD to use because Ritalin was too unstable.

“My kids don’t want to take it, but I told them, ‘These are your grades when you’re taking it, this is when you don’t,’ and they understood,” Ms. Williams said, noting that Medicaidcovers almost every penny of her doctor and prescription costs.

This is the 47% who fear without Obama their kids won't get blottoed.  

“It’s scary to think that this is what we’ve come to; how not funding public education to meet the needs of all kids has led to this,” said the superintendent, referring to the use of stimulants in children without classic A.D.H.D. “I don’t know, but it could be happening right here. Maybe not as knowingly, but it could be a consequence of a doctor who sees a kid failing in overcrowded classes with 42 other kids and the frustrated parents asking what they can do. The doctor says, ‘Maybe it’s A.D.H.D., let’s give this a try.’ ”

Kaching!

So what do you say when you here a parent put some kid on Ritalin?  You say "You are harming your child.  The drug is nastier than any recreational drug out there.  The long term effects are horrible.  ADD is not a disease, it is kids being kids. Not all kids learn on the exact same time frame.  Stop drugging your kids, they will be fine."

"Don't feel bad, just admit it and stop.  We all screw up our kids somehow, all the way back to the way Adam and Eve raised Cain.  But when you turbo-charge bad impulses with federal dollars, corrupt medicine and money-hungry doctors, the harm is wildly leveraged.  Stop now."

Until we make it clear there is no such thing as ADD, or anything that needs medication, we will never have anyone working on solution to the damage done by drugging these kids  Ands like the article says, we'll never get proper schools, ones designed for kids like me, kids with the gift of ADD/ADHD.

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Why Do We Need FEMA?

This from wikipedia:


The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the impact of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery. The measure is based on the reputation of the Waffle House restaurant chain for staying open during extreme weather and for reopening quickly, albeit sometimes with a limited menu, after very severe weather events such as tornados or hurricanes. The term was coined by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate in May 2011, following the Joplin tornado; the two Waffle House restaurants in Joplin remained open after the EF5 multiple-vortex tornado struck the city on May 22.[1][2] According to Fugate, "If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work."[3]
The Index has three levels, based on the extent of operations and service at the restaurant following a storm:[3]
  • Green: the restaurant is serving a full menu, indicating the restaurant has power and damage is limited.
  • Yellow: the restaurant is serving a limited menu, indicating there may be no power or only power from a generator or food supplies may be low.
  • Red: the restaurant is closed, indicating severe damage.
Professor Panos Kouvelis of Olin Business School says Waffle House, along with other chains, such as Home DepotWalmart and Lowe's, which do a significant proportion of their business in the southern US where there is a frequent risk of hurricanes, demonstrates the benefit of good risk management and disaster preparedness. Because the restaurants have a disaster plan and a cut-down menu pre-prepared for times when there is no power or limited supplies, the Waffle House Index rarely reaches the red level.[1][3]



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Sunday, October 14, 2012

More On Litigation than R&D

The New York Times has this to say:

Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.

Yes, vitally important, like a baseball bat to a thug.  Executives would say they could never justify spending fortunes, but they would say that, wouldn't they?  It is not true.  They like spending that much money on themselves, but new products do not cost that much. to develop. And what makes anyone think we need to spend fortunes on new designs?  These are people who spend fortunes on themselves and attorneys and sometimes come up with something useful.  To them it is not the "something useful" but the fortunes spent in taxpayer subsidized and patent monopoly industries.

Pharmaceuticals is the worst case scenatio, an awful mess, when it comes to patents.

Is not the simple fact that, as the article notes, more is spent on lawyers than R&D tell you something is wrong?

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