Month: March 2010

Somehow, I Think that This is Another Nail in Stealth’s Coffin

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As I have before, I think that increases in computing power may have the effect of making stealth less effective.

Well, Wired has an article about a new and very powerful algorithm for imaging, called compressed sensing, which uses the simplicity as a way to enhance images, the example they give is a non-military one, specifically the need to image the bile ducts of a small child to see if they were blocked, which required that he be heavily sedated and that his ventilator be shut down so as to keep him still.

With conventional imaging, it would take over 2 minutes and risk brain damage to get the resolution required, but with the new algorithm, it took only 40 seconds.

While this is an interesting possibility for many areas, I can see how this technique, when combined with data from multiple sensors could give a high resolution solution for an air defense system.

In fact, going around the web, you see examples of single pixel cameras producing decent imagery.

These guys see the primary application being low power, and non visible light, where massive arrays become impractical, but I think that military applications will come, and anti-stealth is a likely direction.

The Myth Of American Social Mobility

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We’re Number 3!!!! (From the bottom)

According to the the Grauniad,* the OECD has looked at social mobility in the developed nations, except for Japan for some reason, and determined that the UK has the least generational mobility of any of these nations.

I don’t find that surprising. I tend to think of class strata when I think of British society, what is surprising, at least for some, I already knew this, is that the United States is almost as bad at providing opportunity to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Essentially, look at the graph pr0n, the US is not a, “Horatio Alger makes good,” kind of place: You get where you are because of who your parents are.

It’s an artifact of a war on unions, both in the US and UK, which makes the sort of decent working-class jobs that parents could use to create upwardly mobile lives for their children are increasingly rare.

Additionally, a war on the safety net, and on public education has done more to make it difficult for someone on the bottom to get a well enough grounding in the basics to outperform someone on the top, regardless of innate ability.

To conservatives, the idea that their children can succeed by virtue of who their parents are, is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

Me, I think of it as a deep flaw in society.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

I Like This: Stick it to the Man, and Save Money

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Not a surprise

There have been a number of initiatives geared toward getting consumers to move their funds from the too big to fail banks.

All in all, this is likely a good thing, but one of the things that people have not generally noted is that moving your money to a smaller bank also personally benefits you, because smaller banks charge lower fees, and generally treat small customers better.

The promise that has always been made with bank deregulation has been that larger banks would be more efficient, and so pass the savings onto consumers.

The reality is the opposite. Large banks use their oligopoly positions to extract more money from consumers.

Too big to fail banks are also banks that do not serve the consumer, so let’s break them up.

H/t James Kwak

Adding Brad Miller (NC-13) To My Act Blue Page

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Basically, he has an idea so good, that I don’t care that he wrote it in The New Republic.

He notes that obvious, that the various ways that the government has attempted to deal with home foreclosures are inadequate, and what’s more, the banks aren’t cooperating with the program in any significant way.

His solution is brilliant, use eminent domain to purchase the mortgage backed securities that have locked homeowners into their unsustainable home loans:

The Obama plan, by contrast, has misunderstood the calculus faced by homeowners facing foreclosure. An underwater homeowner has little incentive to save their home from foreclosure, even if the monthly payment is reduced. Mortgage modifications that reduce the principal are far more successful than modifications that reduce the interest rate. A homeowner with equity to protect will find a way to pay the mortgage. In contrast, for underwater homeowners a mortgage payment is just expensive rent.

…………

Also, roughly half of troubled mortgages now have “second liens,” a second mortgage or a home equity line of credit. Second liens are secured by the value of the home in excess of the first mortgage. Home values in many markets have declined by well more than the amount of most second liens. A reduction of principal on the first mortgage would often just be a gift to the second lien holder, still leaving the homeowner with negative equity in their home.

…………

That’s why there’s a need for a much stronger government role in this crisis. Some in the financial industry may be more willing to sell mortgages to the government at a discounted price than they are to modify mortgages themselves. Servicers fear that if they offer affordable mortgage modifications to struggling homeowners, many more homeowners will stop paying and wait for an offer. Selling a mortgage to the government may avoid that problem because the government would modify the mortgage, not the servicer.

But for many of the same reasons that the financial industry has not modified mortgages voluntarily, others in industry would not likely sell many mortgages voluntarily either, at least not at a realistic discount. So how can a new HOLC
[Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, an entity created by Roosevelt to help homeowners by buying and managing mortgages duringthe Great Depression] work if mortgage holders will not voluntarily sell mortgages?

The new HOLC could buy mortgages by eminent domain. Eminent domain powers are most commonly used to purchase land for highways or public buildings, but also to renew “blighted” neighborhoods or clean up contaminated land. And existing law allows the use of eminent domain to purchase property interests other than the outright ownership of land.

Some uses of eminent domain have resulted in public wariness and resentment. The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London allowed the condemnation of family homes for an “economic development” project from which private developers profited. A mortgage in a securitized pool is no one’s castle.

The toxic assets backed by mortgages are impossible to value. The concern that taxpayers would get fleeced buying toxic assets from the financial industry was well justified. Whole mortgages are not hard to value at all. There are frequent, well-publicized auctions of mortgages with a sufficient number of informed, sophisticated buyers. The auctions are an almost perfect pricing mechanism. The problem for the financial industry is not the difficulty of valuing troubled mortgages; the problem is that many mortgages are not worth much. There are obviously many considerations in the price, but distressed mortgages generally sell for about 30 to 50 cents on the dollar at auction. And any honest valuation of many second liens would be pennies on the dollar.

Your mouth to Obama’s ear.

He is right on the law: In eminent domain, one is obligated only to pay market value, not par.

It won’t happen though, because Geithner and Summers would shoot it down, even it is legal, because, of course, it’s bad for the banks, and what’s bad for the banks is, to them, bad for America.

To be fair though, it should be noted that while Geithner and Summers may be financial Cossacks, it is also true, as Professor Delong is wont to say, “The Cossacks work for the Czar.”

So Now, Open Source is Piracy

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These are your friends

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a private group which is the demon spawn of the RIAA, the MPAA, and other evil organizations referred to by their acronyms, has submitted recommendations to the State Department for countries to be placed on a watch list for ineffective protection of IP, a so called “Special 301” list, and one of their criteria is now encouraging the use of open source software:

I am neither surprised nor upset by the addition of Costa Rica to the list, to be fair our enforcement is atrocious. Similarly, I am not surprised by most of the other recommendations, which seems like a rehash of past offenders. What I found rather surprising is that the IIPA seems to be using their Special 301 submission to attack open source software. According to Digital Copyright Canada, several countries are being included in the Special 301 watchlist because they have open source-friendly policies, or in their words, the IIPA would rather people “pirate” than switch to legal competitors.

This is quite a claim, so I have been going through the reports to verify it myself. The country reports for Brazil, India, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand certainly contain some comments about open source software. Particularly, the IIPA seems to be concerned that these countries have enacted or are in the process of enacting legislation that will make it obligatory for public entities to choose open source software over its proprietary counterparts. I have to admit that I somewhat share the IIPA’s concerns in this regard. I have never believed in open source procurement legislation, I think that forcing institutions to use a specific technical solution is wrong. Open source is an organic, bottom-up movement, and making it state policy seems not only counter-productive, but contrary to the very same principles of openness. Open source should not be imposed, it should win on its own merits.

Here is what the IIPA says:

“While IIPA has no issue with one of the stated goals of the circular, namely, “reducing software copyright violation,” the Indonesian government’s policy as indicated in the circular letter instead simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market. Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations. As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions to meet the needs of their organizations and the Indonesian people. It also amounts to a significant market access barrier for the software industry.”

Let’s see, the countries are saying that as a matter of policy, free and open is cheaper, and reduces the risks of violation of IP rules, which could result in US sanctions, so as a matter of policy, wherever possible, go with software that carries a “public license.”

According to the IIPA, that’s the same as piracy.

There is no right for private firms to demand that anyone buy their products, particularly not sovereign governments.

Defense Contracting in a Microcosm

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Canceled!


Available at 1/80 the cost

The US Navy has, for some time, been working on the Advanced Seal Delivery System (ASDS),* indended to deploy navy Seal teams from submerged submarines to shore.

The program has delivered one prototype, at a cost of $885 million, well above the initial cost of $80 million a boat, and so the program was finally canceled after a fire broke in the lead unit out when the batteries were being recharged.

Well a private firm, the Submergence Group, is offering their private venture proposal, which is smaller, about 1/3 the displacement, but only costs about $10 million.

And, by the by, that $10 million is a firm number. They have already built one, and it works.

What’s more it fits in the existing Dry Dock Shelter that he seals use for their current delivery vehicle, the Mark 8 Mod 1 minisub, only it has a dry environment, which means that transiting, or waiting over long periods of time won’t, as is the case with the Mk 8, require hanging out in wet suits in the water.

*Full disclosure, while I never worked on this program, I worked at the company that designed the Lithium-Ion battery packs for the ASDS, and talked with a few of the people who worked on its design.

Death Spiral, JSF Edition, Chapter 3 of Many

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A while ago, I wrote about the F-35’s exhaust being so hot that it required modifications to carrier and LPD decks.

Well, as Ron Popeil says, “but wait, there’s more/”

It is now likely that the exhaust will be hot enough so that the aircraft will be unable to operate from austere fields in STOVL mode, and by, “Austere,” we mean, “just about any non-military airfield in the world,” as well as a lot of the military ones:

But a Navy report issued in January says that the F-35B, in fact, won’t be able to use such forward bases. Indeed, unless it ditches its short take-off, vertical landing capability and touches down like a conventional fighter, it won’t be able to use land bases at all without some major construction efforts.

The newly released document, hosted on a government building-design resource site, outlines what base-construction engineers need to do to ensure that the F-35B’s exhaust does not turn the surface it lands on into an area-denial weapon. And it’s not trivial. Vertical-landing “pads will be exposed to 1700 deg. F and high velocity (Mach 1) exhaust,” the report says. The exhaust will melt asphalt and “is likely to spall the surface of standard airfield concrete pavements on the first VL.” (The report leaves to the imagination what jagged chunks of spalled concrete will do in a supersonic blast field.)

What’s more, if you make an appropriate landing area, it has to be in one slab, without joints, because there are current no existing sealers that can take the heat, and if the aircraft is waiting for clearance with its APU (the Integrated Power Pack or IPP) running, that can burn holes in the runway too.

Bill Sweetman is correct when he notes, “Worst case or not, there is a very big difference between a solid slab of high-grade concrete and the kind of surface you are apt to find anywhere ending in -stan.”

And then there is cost, where the JSF unit cost is up 50% from its 2002 number, shattering the Nunn-McCurdy barrier, and that is assuming that the purchase numbers remain the same, something is about as likely as Obama pursuing war crimes prosecutions against Dick Cheney.

T-50 & Su-35 Side By Side

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Source is the USAF via AV Week


Apologies for the cheesy music

The side by side picture, courtesy of Aviation Week (paid subscription required), clearly shows that the aircraft are very similar in size.

What is also clear is that the T-50/PAK-FA is rather more compact in appearance, and would likely be a little bit more difficult to detect visually at range, though it is clearly no F-5.

What is also clear, see the 1990s Northrop/Grumman YF-23 video, is that its fuselage is rather more like that failed ATF competitor than that of the F-22, though the wing and 4-post tail surfaces more closely resemble those of the Raptor.

H/t ELP Defens(c)e Blog for the vid.

Sharon Osbourne Has Something to Get off Her Chest

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She is selling her breast implants on eBay:

Unsatisfied with the result of her breast augmentation procedure, Sharon Osbourne recently revealed that she plans to sell the breast implants online once they are removed. Talking to Britain’s New! Magazine, the judge of “America’s Got Talent” admitted that she’s thinking of putting them up for sale on eBay.

“I wish I had never had my breasts done. They have put these bloody great bags in that are too ****ing round. It is like [having] a waterbed on your chest. I hate my [breasts],” the wife of Ozzy Osbourne first pointed out why she was left disappointed. She continued to say, “I want to have the bags taken out – then I will put them on eBay.”

Ummm……I got nothing here……Too weird for me to pull out any additional humor……

‘Phant Phamily Values

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The Majority (Republican) leader of the Utah House of Delegates has been forced to reveal that when he was 28, he went nude hot-tubbing with a 15 year old that worked for him in the warehouse that he managed.

What’s more, he paid $150,000 in hush money to her when he tried to run for Congress:

In the midst of his 2002 congressional campaign, Utah House Majority Leader Kevin Garn paid $150,000 to a woman threatening to go public with a past relationship.

………

Maher’s story is this: In 1985, then 15 years old, Maher worked for then 30-year-old Garn at his business, Pegasus Records and KSG Enterprises.

She said Garn, who was married, struck up a relationship with her and one night took her to a location in Salt Lake City where they hot-tubbed together nude.

It would be sleazy even if she weren’t 15. She was his employee, and this is sexual harassment.

And if that weren’t squicky enough, he is her, “onetime Sunday school teacher.”

One note: as far as I can tell, Kevin Garn is not related to former Utah Senator Jake Garn.

The Forensic Acountants Have Been Through Lehman’s Books

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And Maybe Some Water Boarding

And their analysis is that Lehman Brothers were insolvent for months, if not years before they finally collapsed, and that the firm use unethical, and possibly illegal tricks to conceal the amount of their debt:

But the examiner, Anton R. Valukas, also for the first time, laid out what the report characterized as “materially misleading” accounting gimmicks that Lehman used to mask the perilous state of its finances. The bank’s bankruptcy, the largest in American history, shook the financial world. Fears that other banks might topple in a cascade of failures eventually led Washington to arrange a sweeping rescue for the nation’s financial system.

That sounds like fraud to me, and I think that it warrants a criminal investigation.

What is even more interesting is that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was aware of the accounting activities, and that they appear to be in violation of regulations.

Yves Smith, reading the 2200 page report so that yiours’s truly does not have to, makes this clear, and makes it clear that regulators were complicit:

Well, it is folks, as a newly-released examiner’s report by Anton Valukas in connection with the Lehman bankruptcy makes clear. The unraveling isn’t merely implicating Fuld and his recent succession of CFOs, or its accounting firm, Ernst & Young, as might be expected. It also emerges that the NY Fed, and thus Timothy Geithner, were at a minimum massively derelict in the performance of their duties, and may well be culpable in aiding and abetting Lehman in accounting fraud and Sarbox violations.

…………

But here is the part of the report that discussed how the Fed aided and abetted Lehman misconduct:

[T]he Examiner questioned Lehman executives and other witnesses about Lehman’s financial health and reporting, a recurrent theme in their responses was that Lehman gave full and complete financial information to Government agencies, and that the Government never raised significant objections or directed that Lehman take any corrective action.

I would note that at the time of the Lehman collapse, and for some time before it, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was one Timothy Geithner.

I’m beginning to think that this is more than incompetence, I’m beginning to think that a criminal investigation should include our current Treasury Secretary.

Barack Obama, you need to fire Timothy Geithner. If the ‘Phants filibuster, then you recess appoint his successor.

James Dobson Forced Out of Focus on the Family

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My view of the conflict between Dobson and the FoF board is, but to quote Henry Kissinger, “too bad they can’t both lose.”

In any case, he’s stepped down from all corporate positions and his radio show, and starting a new radio show separate from the organization.

The cause of the split between appears to be the unwillingness of the board to make his son heir apparent, because they don’t approve of divorce, and Ryan Dobson got one in 2001.

Gee, self-importance masquerading as morality is a bitch, ain’t it?

Economics Update

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The decades long downward trend is improvements inventory tracking, largely from automation


It appears that stability looms

Again, abbreviated, because in addition to not fullying balancing work and blogging, I’m feeling a bit off today.

The lede is obviously that the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey showed a decline in consumer sentiment.

On the other side of the coin is that economics retail sales retail sales rose unexpectedly in February, confounding economists who thought that the snowpocalypse would push the numbers down.

Sales rose by 0.3%, which is beat expectations, but this is off a January where the delta in retail sales was revised from 0.5% to 0.1%, so the delta from is .3%-.4%=-.1%, so the total picture at the end of February is actually down from what it was on February 1.

Finally, Calculated Risk points out (see chart pr0n) that inventories are now basically in line with sales, which means that inventory replenishment bumps to GDP are pretty much done.