China: economy grows 8%, prices fall 1.7%

Wow. Huh? Wow.

I didn't expect this. Talk about a stimulus package - vastly bigger than ours compared to the size of China's economy. China doesn't seem to have forgotten Keynes. Emphases mine.

BBC NEWS | Business | China grows faster amid worries

China's economy grew at an annual rate of 7.9% between April and June, up from 6.1% in the first quarter, thanks to the government's big stimulus package....

... Beijing now expects China to achieve 8% growth for 2009 as a whole, which compares with a predicted contraction of between 1% and 1.5% in the US.

... The BBC's correspondent in Shanghai, Chris Hogg, said China's latest economic growth was largely due to the government's 4 trillion yuan ($585bn, £390bn) economic stimulus plan unveiled last November.

... China's state controlled banks have lent huge amounts of money to the country's state owned and private sector businesses. Companies have used the cash to try to avoid shedding jobs and to invest in new equipment...

... The many new government infrastructure projects have provided employment for many of the migrant workers who have been laid off - mainly in the export sector....

... urban per capita incomes were up 11.2% from a year earlier, and that real rural per capita incomes were up 8.1%...

... Meanwhile, China's consumer price index fell 1.7% in June compared with the same month a year earlier, the fifth consecutive monthly decline....

Massive stimulus, surprising growth, income growth (and savings growth, presumably) and prices are still falling.

So if China's growing, and the US is "only" in a severe depression recession (sorry, typo), how do we explain world economic output falls? Does this explain why US inflation is relatively low? If China is growing like this, does the US really need a 2nd stimulus? (We are, after all, all connected.)

Our struggling journalists are not giving us a clear sense of how this story is unfolding.

Singularity alert: Nearest New York Subway for iPhone

I really do need to see “Minority Report” (censorship and added link mine)…

Daring Fireball Linked List: New York Nearest Subway Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

… This is one of the most impressive software demo videos I’ve ever seen. It’s like something from Minority Report. This is [*****] stuff. The developers, Acrossair, already have a similar app available for London; they’re waiting for approval from Apple for this New York one to go live.

When Gruber flips out, you know it’s big.

Awesome.

They’re looking for beta testers with a 3GS in New York, SF, Chicago, DC, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona …

Apple’s App Store frozen?

I’m used to getting App store updates to my iPhone apps every few days.  I haven’t received any updates for over a week, following a post-3.0 deluge. The last time I saw this kind of freeze was before the 3.0 launch.

Anyone else seeing an app store freeze? If others are getting updates I would suspect I have an App Store account bug.

Maybe it’s some kind of post-3.0 hangover, maybe a pre-3.1 freeze, maybe Apple’s just overwhelmed, but it is a tad weird.

Fortunately, except for an annoying but avoidable Byline crash bug, my apps are doing well.

Was the crash of ‘08 worse than the crash of ‘29?

In America we’re not (yet) reliving the Great Depression. In other parts of the world, people are.

So it’s plausible that the crash of ‘08 (really 2006-?) might, whatever its fundamental cause, be comparable to the great crash of ‘29 (really 1928 to 1932?).

Paul Krugman is digging deeper into this comparison. For example, if the crash of ‘08 was indeed comparable to the crash of ‘29, then Americans should be in much worse shape than we are. Our stimulus package wasn’t nearly big enough to stave off that sort of financial tsunami.

Today Professor Krugman points to a much bigger stabilizer – the size of the public sector and the national deficits that have kept it going …

Deficits saved the world - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs has a new note (no link) responding to claims that government support for the economy is postponing the necessary adjustment. He doesn’t think much of that argument; neither do I. But one passage in particular caught my eye:

“The private sector financial balance—defined as the difference between private saving and private investment, or equivalently between private income and private spending—has risen from -3.6% of GDP in the 2006Q3 to +5.6% in 2009Q1. This 8.2% of GDP adjustment is already by far the biggest in postwar history and is in fact bigger than the increase seen in the early 1930s.”

That’s an interesting way to think about what has happened — and it also suggests a startling conclusion: namely, government deficits, mainly the result of automatic stabilizers rather than discretionary policy, are the only thing that has saved us from a second Great Depression….

… In the 1930s the public sector was very small. As a result, GDP basically had to shrink enough to keep the private-sector surplus equal to zero; hence the fall in GDP labeled “Great Depression”.

This time around, the fall in GDP didn’t have to be as large, because falling GDP led to rising deficits, which absorbed some of the rise in the private surplus. Hence the smaller fall in GDP labeled “Great Recession.”

What Hatzius is saying is that the initial shock — the surge in desired private surplus — was if anything larger this time than it was in the 1930s. This says that absent the absorbing role of budget deficits, we would have had a full Great Depression experience. What we’re actually having is awful, but not that awful — and it’s all because of the rise in deficits. Deficits, in other words, saved the world.

I’m looking forward to reading the economic history books on the period from 1994 to 2014. They should be quite informative.

Incidentally, today’s comments on Krugman’s post are pretty low quality. He certainly has a eclectic readership.

Signs of the end times

Goal: Pay money to a big organization that wants my money.

Take One: Spend twenty minutes with web site. Old username doesn’t work. Start new account, find email taken (probably tied to old account). Try again with email and old pw – fail. Request pw reset – get a reset pw with a numeric username (a bug). Try reset – username not recognized.

Give up on take one.

Take Two: Print PDF and handwrite data – 5 minutes. Go to fax – 1 minute. Fax – hangs at dialing.

Give up on take two.

At least the handwriting and fax failed faster.

We’re in trouble deep.

The tyranny of the mean

Today I needed to set a calendar reminder of a morning appointment.

I needed a 14 hour interval. That’s easy in Outlook or in long lost PalmClassic DateBk app.

Alas, it can’t be done on an iPhone, where calendar alerts are very limited.

It’s only one rather painful example of the curse of Apple’s much praised software design – the tyranny of the mean. Apple’s products aim for simplicity and the features that Apple’s designers believe most people want.

Like all seemingly good things, it has its dark side.

Most obvious comment on that super-secret CIA program

When I read the WSJ’s claim that CIA’s secret program was about assassinating al Qaeda leaders my first thought was “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do for 8 years?”.

We’ve been using drones to assassinate alleged al Qaeda operatives for years. There’s no way that could be a top secret super-controversial we’re-not-sure-we-told-the-President program. The thought has occurred to others …

New Info Brings More Questions On Secret CIA Program | TPMMuckraker

… a program, launched immediately after September 11 to capture or kill top al Qaeda operatives just doesn't seem sufficiently radioactive to have provoked the kerfuffle it has...

… the US military has openly been trying to get Osama bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders "dead or alive" since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Would CIA involvement in that effort be so explosive that it would not only need to be kept from Congress in the first place, but would also have been shut down by Panetta as soon as he learned about it?

Nuking al Qaeda leaders would be controversial. Assassinating them – not so much.

The WSJ article is some kind of smokescreen.

Palin, Noonan, and the fears of euro America

Peggy Noonan recently outlined the GOP establishment’s personal fears (emphases mine) …

... Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate....

I channeled Noonan’s dog whistles to respond …

• … Secessionism?! That would imply she's worried about American right wing terrorism, and the intolerable burden of Black President.
• Bankruptcy?! Do the wingnuts in the GOP really believe that America will default on its debt obligations, or is this something they do to incite the lunatic fringe?…

Frank Rich’s July 12th OpEd is an indirect response to Noonan, pointing out that whatever she might want to believe, Palin is the heart of today’s GOP. Ironically the Palin-GOP is listening to the same tunes as Noonan, the song of the end of euro dominated America (emphases mine) …

She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It -Frank Rich - NYTimes

… The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

One must give a sort of odd credit to right wing whackos – they buy a lot of books!

There’s a lot of fear out there in white America -- the fear of an era ending. It’s a fear that attracts the GOP, from Noonan to Palin.

The Sotomayor hearings are over

They might as well be. I loved this amusing, but serious, pre-summary of the results:

Everything you need to know about Sonia Sotomayor's upcoming hearings. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

... how it's possible that she has ruled in a handful of abortion cases over the years without ever addressing the rightness of abortion itself. She will reply that she is a careful minimalist who answers only the question before her. Both sides will grind their teeth in frustration at this marked absence of judicial activism ...

It's worth a quick read.

I'm persuaded. The appointment is a done deal, the hearings are political rituals the vast majority of us can happily ignore.

The mindset of the GOP establishment - Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan, of Reagan era fame, represents the core GOP establishment. Her disgust with Sarah Palin is given full vent in a WSJ OpEd, though, as DeLong points out, she's completely oblivious to Palin's resemblance to both Reagan and George W Bush.

A Farewell to Harms - WSJ.com - Peggy Noonan

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama...

... She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

... The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon...

Bonbon Palin. Ok, so the GOP establishment has now declared war on Palin. I wonder if this is a prelude to declaring war on Limbaugh; I suspect it's a warning that he needs to join the Gingrich group as quickly as possible.

So far, so good. We need a respectable opposition party, and the Party of Palin would be a catastrophe. The more interesting bit of the essay, however, is the the conclusion. That's where Noonan outlines the bleak worldview of her cohort ...

... Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate....

It's interesting to note what the GOP establishment isn't worried about

• Anything Christian fundamentalists care about including abortion and gay marriage
• Global climate change
• Peace and prosperity in China and India
• Healthcare for all Americans

Instead they're worried about (I'm interpreting Noonan's dog whistles here)

• Secessionism?! That would imply she's worried about American right wing terrorism, and the intolerable burden of Black President.
• Bankruptcy?! Do the wingnuts in the GOP really believe that America will default on its debt obligations, or is this something they do to incite the lunatic fringe?
• WMD: This is the one area where the GOP establishment is not completely out to lunch, but of course they have no useful options to put on the table.

So the GOP establishment wants to run on

• Culture wars and Dangerous Black Men
• Defense

Hmm. Why does that sound so familiar?

Update 7/13/09: Frank Rich has a good counterpoint editorial…

… In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president…

Noonan represents a small slice of today’s wrecked GOP.

Understanding China - an excellent WSJ on ethnic identity in modern China

This WSJ article by Dru Gadney is essential reading for anyone who needs to understand modern China -- which means anyone who wants to be part of the modern world.

Gadney has written a clear and objective summary of the cultural and ethnic diversity of modern China. He explains, for example, how the "Han" cultural component has become so much more dominant than I once remembered (the term was redefined to become much more inclusive).

I don't have the connections to China I once knew, but the article fit very well with old memories and newer readings. The modern usage of "Han" covers a diversity of language and traditions almost as wide as Europe's national fragmentations -- and that's before one includes the "minorities" (who, at about 100 million people, would make up about 1/3 of the US population).

Highly recommended.

The post-lead era: living with less reliable electronic hardware

Years ago most of my computer problems were related to local software bugs. Those were the days before OS X 10.3 and XP SP2. (Ok, so 10.5 was a regression until about 10.5.6 -- the iPhone drained a lot of Apple's brain power early in 10.5 development.)

Excluding the nightmare of my corporate XP environment, I really don't run into that many serious software related problems at home.

Instead, I run into hardware problems. They're worse, because they can be really tough to diagnose. You can undo software installs, install new versions, restore from backup, etc -- but hardware is expensive to experiment with.

Everything fails sooner or later, like my mother's (8-10yo?) cable modem or my vintage (6 yo) AirPort Extreme Base Station, or one of my half-dozen hard drives (half-life 2 years) or cheap router/access points (half-life 1 year).

So things are already tough enough, but unfortunately they're likely to get worse. This rant about lead-free solder isn't new, but it's a timely reminder ...

Macintouch - reader report July 2009

... the lead-free solder mandate has changed the rules. The lead-free directive became mandatory everywhere last year so anecdotes about what was true prior to then are not accurate representations of the realities now.

I am the technical chair for a major electronics wafer and IC/ MEMS/ optoelectronics assembly and packaging conference scheduled for this fall. My technical planning team, with electronics manufacturing experts from many countries, has lined up experts from 19 countries to address better ways to deal with lead-free solder and other reliability and manufacturing issues.

I can assure you that the soldering problems are not unique to Apple--it is a frightening global problem. If you want some specifics, check out the following on lead-free solder problems items below.

Tin is the major metal in ALL lead-free solder alloys being used today by Intel, AMD, IBM and others. Tin is known to produce "tin whiskers" (dendritic growths) which cause electrical shorts if there is humidity in the area where equipment operates.

At a DuPont R&D facility several years ago, I saw USAF cruise missile (intended to carry a nuclear warhead) with a guidance system [on] printed wiring boards where tin dendritic growths had created new logic paths, thus enabling the missile to pick its own target. Not desirable. This is one reason the military avoids high tin content lead-free solders.

Cadillac, at about the same time, had an engine computer that would accelerate, change engine power levels abruptly or stop the engine, much to the driver's chagrin. It cost GM millions to recall and replace the faulty circuits.

The USA lost a multibillion dollar recon satellite last year because of lead-free solder failure problems, so it is not just a computer problem.

You can read "Lead-free solder: A train wreck in the making" from Military and Aerospace Electronics magazine ...

... The bottom line:

Lead-free solders used today simply cannot make as reliable mechanical bonds or as reliable electrical interconnects as older eutectic solders with 100 years of proven reliability.

This makes virtually all electronic products vulnerable to early failure....

So we can expect our device lifespans, from computers to routers, to shorten. How can we respond?

I suspect there will be several responses, partly planned and partly emergent:

• Outsource the hardware -- switch to the Google Book Chrome OS (Chromestellation). This device moves most of the hardware problems to Google. Their 2011/2012 Google branded netbooks will be very cheap, almost disposable. If there are reliability issues, buy a new one.
• Buy top quality with extended warrantees. Our costs will rise of course.
• Build in much better self-diagnostics: We're definitely seeing this. A lot more devices are including their own self-test software. IBM used to market this sort of thing in the 90s and I'm sure it's been a part of mainframe technology since the 1970s.
• Follow Gordon's Laws of Acquisition and Laws of Geekery. More simply, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Reliable hardware is the proverbial bird in the hand.

The Google Netbook is all about two things, and the big one is cheaper

How can it be that the vast majority of my fellow bloviators are ignoring what Google is saying here …

Google CEO Schmidt Thought Building OS Was A Lousy Idea (GOOG, AAPL, MSFT)

Schmidt now believes Google can withstand whatever counter punches Microsoft might throw as the company sets out to make computers cheaper to buy and more enjoyable to use with an operating system tied to Google's 9-month-old browser, Chrome.

Let me put this more clearly.

Cheaper.

Cheaper.

Cheaper.

Netbooks edged down the $350 range last year (Linux), but have now moved up-market to about $500 (XP for free).

Google wants them to be … cheaper. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to own.

I think they’re aiming for under $150 without a battery and without a wireless contract, and free with a Kindle-like Sprint/4G network plan.

I think the long delay from announcement is all about regs for the Sprint/4G plan and I wouldn’t rule out Google buying Sprint to enable that for the US market.

The Google Netbook will be very cheap, it will be Google certified if not Google branded, and it will be cheap but reasonably reliable.

It will be extremely disruptive.

Oh … and “enjoyable to use”? He means vastly fewer hassles.

Really, it’s not that complicated.

Sure is disruptive though.

I do like Google.

Facebook's ad voting - fascinating

I can't provide a link, but on my morning commute I heard a 63yo NPR journalist describe how her Facebook ads changed over the past year -- for the better.

A year ago, when she bothered to look, she found large volumes of wrinkle cream and weight loss scams. When she removed her age, the ads became more interesting -- or at least less irritating.

Advertisers were wasting money, targeting her based only on age rather than on other facebook profile data.

Recently, her ads became more appropriate. It turns out that women over 50 voted wrinkle ads off the island ...

Facebook Now Lets Users Vote on Ads (2008)

... Facebook quietly added the ability for users to vote up or down on ads last night. Facebook watcher Nick O'Neill points out that the site has recently gotten rid of the same voting feature that was in the Newsfeed for a short period of time. Will this work for ads?

Initially we thought this would be an ineffective effort, but the more we looked at terrible ads on Facebook and thought about how happy we'd be to vote them down - the more sense it made...

I didn't know about this feature, but it's brilliant in an retrospectively obvious sort of way. I didn't think of it, but then I don't consiously notice advertising of any sort (knowing the limitations of my own mind, I suspect I'm not imagining my ad neglect).

So why can't Google do the same thing?

Well, Google does click through, but Facebook has a strong advantage in this domain. Facebook has strong identity data about their customers. So they can focus the votes they track on a valid sample, and screen out various forms of vote attack.

I wonder what the wrinkle cream scammers make of this development? Was their ad money always wasted, or were the ads both despised and effective? Was Facebook making money on the ads -- in which case why does Facebook care if they weren't working?

Is your drywall emitting toxic radioactive gases? No, really …

This Consumer Report blog article is the first I’ve heard of this one. Apparently the reports started in 2007, with customers learning of corrosive gases emitted from drywall manufactured in China. Consumer Reports wrote of this in March 2009, and again today (emphases mine) ….

Homeowners seek remedy as probe of Chinese drywall continues: Consumer Reports on Safety

As if the problems with Chinese drywall weren't bad enough, two fires are being investigated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Florida State Fire Marshal's Office to see if toxic drywall contributed to the blazes. It's not too far-fetched given the reports of corroded electrical wiring, air conditioner coils, and other appliances and electronics degraded by the drywall.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that some experts believe the problematic drywall was made using a radioactive phosphorus substance—phosphogypsum—that is banned for construction use in the U.S. but has been used by Chinese manufacturers for almost a decade.

Copies of Chinese customs reports obtained by The Times indicate that drywall made with phosphogypsum was shipped to the U.S. in 2006 by at least four Chinese-based manufacturers and trading firms….

… Also this week, the CPSC responded to four senators who last month asked the agency to "expedite its investigation and testing" of the drywall. In its status report, the CPSC said it was working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies to "coordinate a federal action plan." This involves collecting samples of drywall and degraded electrical components, taking air samples in affected homes, and formulating health advice for residents.

… The CPSC says it has received more than 608 incident reports from 21 states and the District of Columbia with most coming from Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia.

In an earlier analysis comparing some samples of imported drywall with its American-made counterpart, the EPA discovered:

• Sulfur was detected in all of the Chinese drywall samples, but in none of the four U.S.-manufactured drywall samples.
• Significant levels of strontium were detected in the Chinese drywall samples. Strontium was also detected in the U.S.-made samples, but at much lower levels.
• Two organic compounds associated with acrylic paints were found in the Chinese drywall samples, but not in the U.S.-made samples.

… Unfortunately, it seems the only sure way to rid a home of problems is to tear out the Chinese drywall and replace it—a very expensive and involved process.

Our Take: While the finger pointing as well as the CPSC, CDC and EPA investigations continue, affected consumers should be extra vigilant in monitoring potential health effects as well as electrical safety hazards that might occur from yet another tainted product from China.

Thus far the problems seem localized to 3 states, but we’ll all need to keep an eye on this one.

We plan to cut our own trees and hew the wood for our future home remodeling projects.

On the bright side, Obama is resurrecting the government Bush wrecked. In a couple of years we might be almost back where we were in the year 2000.

See also:

• pufferfish and drugged eels
• poisoned toothpaste
• Christmas light lead
• counterfeit medications and glycol poisoning
• surgical supply fraud
• “fake” fur that’s genuine dog
• toxic heparin
• melamine infant formula, melamine and cyanuric acid in pet food, more melamine, more in Africa
• Salmonella snacks

Update 7/11/09: It's gone national. The US Consumer Protection agency has a drywall page. This is one of the agencies Obama has been raising from the dead. The CPSC PDF report from July 2009 has a lot of details. They're focusing on a particular mine in China, the problems go back to pre-2006. A lot of American construction may be affected.