International Affairs: November 2009 Archives
I'd venture that most software geeks are fairly leftist and generally support the theory that human activity is causing global warming. In that light, the biggest revelation from the recently hacked global warming emails might be the awfulness of the climate simulation code.
I've examined two files in some depth and found (OK so Harry found some of this)
- Inappropriate programming language usage
- Totally nuts shell tricks
- Hard coded constant files
- Incoherent file naming conventions
- Use of program libray subroutines that appear to be
- far from ideal in how they do things when the work
- do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing
- but which fail at undefined times
- and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error
AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!
More code analysis.
I'm pretty proficient at writing simulation software: it's how I earned my PhD and how I earn a living. I've also worked closely with self-trained programmers who only write code to advance their research in other fields, and I can tell you that their code is almost always terrible. Writing good software is extremely difficult, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the climate modeling software is so bad as to be useless. It is always wise to be skeptical about the outputs of simulations, especially if you cannot see the source code for yourself.
I'm not sure how the anonymous writer can characterize this as a wrongness by the Right while agreeing that Obama humiliated himself and America by groveling before Japan's emperor.
Obama's handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush's back-rub of Merkel.Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.
The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms....The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.
I'm glad our current president is so much more subtle and nuanced than our previous.
I find this display of obsequiousness both distasteful and insulting to me as an American citizen.
(HT: Gateway Pundit.)
Eamon Javers asks a contrarian question: "Is China headed toward collapse?".
Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”
Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth. ...
This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.
So how to hedge against China's failure?
The Obama administration is apparently negotiating a secret copyright treaty whose absurd contents have been leaked.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
That's just the start of the badness. The whole thing is completely impossible to enforce, so I'm not particularly worried about it. intellectual property is dead and a piece of paper won't bring it back to life.
(HT: RD.)
Ezra Klein notices that American pay more per unit of health care than other countries, but completely fails to understand why.
In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. You'll also notice that the bit showing American prices is separated into blue and yellow: That shows the spread between the average price (the top of the blue) and the 90th percentile (the top of the yellow). Other countries don't have nearly that much variation, again because their pricing is standard.
Other governments set prices that are artificially low, often barely above the marginal cost for drug and equipment manufacturers. These prices are just barely high enough that it's worth selling products in these countries given that the products have already been developed, but the margins aren't high enough to actually finance the research and development that goes into creating the drugs and equipment. These R&D costs are carried by American consumers, which is why our costs are higher.
The problem, however, isn't that our costs are too high -- the problem is that foreign countries are free-riding on the American consumer and thereby paying too little. If the American government attempts to set our prices as low as those of other countries, the health care industry that cares for the world will wither and die. Instead, we should be looking for ways to force foreign countries to pay more reasonable prices.
One possible approach is to pass a law prohibiting the sale of any specific drug or equipment in America at a price more than X% higher than that paid by an average of the next 10 highest price countries. Such a rule would force the health care industry to either push for higher prices in foreign countries or stop sales there entirely, instead of settling for prices barely above their marginal cost.
Anyway, the point isn't that the health care industry is ripping off Americans, but that foreign countries are free-riding off our mostly free market.
