Getting a Little Scary on the Korean Peninsula

Nearly lost among headline's of Lee DeWyze's American Idol victory and (albeit significant and important) news on the BP oil spill in the Gulf, is what I think is the biggest development on the Korean Peninsula I can remember.  Almost exactly two months ago the 1200t South Korean corvette Cheonan broke in two and sank after an explosion at her stern.  46 of her 104 man crew were killed.  An investigation was performed and despite hopes to the contrary, when the wreckage was raised the presence of remnants of a North Korean torpedo have confirmed that the Cheonan was deliberately sunk by hostile action (in this case suspected to have been a torpedo delivered by a North Korean Yeono-class minisub).

This is a big deal.  It's not a case of a bit of sabre-rattling gone a little too far such as the "Second Battle of Yeonpyeong."  In that battle, or the others like it, both sides were pushing each other's buttons in disputed waters and shooting broke out.  In this case, a DPRK minisub evidently stalked the Cheonan before the decision was made to fire on the ROK corvette.  At any time in history, between any two countries, this is reasonable cause for war-- and the two countries in question in this case are already at war (still).  The weirdest part is, I can't figure what the reasoning behind it was.  Usually Kim Jong Il seems to be perpetrating a game of brinkmanship wherein he shakes something up or pushes some agreement to the point of strain and then lets ROK or the US or whomever buy him off.  In this incident I can't see what he'd be looking to gain or why any usual gain would be worth the risk of such a bold move.  It begs the question, how monolithic is North Korea? I'm not sure which is more scary, a North Korea dominated by a generally unstable and seemingly batshit-crazy Kim Jong Il, or a North Korea being fought over by several extreme factions with competing goals and resources.  One angle that's been troubling my mind ever since it was reported that his health is failing, what if he's decided he should be the one to unify Korea and he feels time running out? 

From what I can gather from the news, South Koreans are angry.  And well they should be!  Can you imagine the response from the government and the populace if some one sank a US naval vessel?  That raises the question of a response.  In my opinion, if this was "brinkmanship," then you've already gone over the brink.  Appeasing Kim hasn't ever gotten us anywhere (though it did eventually lead to North Korea conducting two nuclear tests), and if he's resorting to overt military action to try to get whatever it is he wants then you certainly cannot countenance giving it to him.

Any military response would have to be exceuted very carefully.  I'm pretty confident that any general engagement between allied ROK and US forces versus an outdated, outmoded, and probably underfed DPRK military would be very one-sided.  Such an engagement needn't necessarily be "general," as you could, through any number of mechnaisms, probably sink a North Korean sub or five without it necessarily looking like it was you-- but a strategy like that could very easily and quickly escalate into a general engagement.  The problem with a general engagement, beyond the fact that war is almost always an undesirable outcome, is that Seoul is too close to the border with the North, and DPRK artillery assets could be used to bombard Seoul for at least a short while before it would be neutralized by allied response-- and that could cause lots of damage and many civilian casualties.

In any case, it's not a war yet, but I feel like there are a lot of scenarios that could turn it into one.  I hope it can be resolved via some reasonably peaceful approach that doesn't involve appeasement... But as long as an apparent madman like Kim Jong Il is in power, the North will be unpredictable and dangerous.

Link to something I found interesting about the oil spill in the Gulf

I thought this was pretty cool... Gizmodo's link to a CNN video about a few proposed solutions to cleaning up the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  That's really a disaster down there, and I'm struggling to see how we're practically going to fix it any time soon.

Triumphant Return from The Japans

I'm back, even if some of you didn't know I'd gone!  I took a business trip for my huge corporate employer to Japan over the last week.  I didn't have a lot of warning that I was going which is why I didn't post a "see ya's all later kinda blog" before heading out.  I even made a weak effort between the very long working days and numerous drinkings of Japanese beer to update the blog with an "I'm in Japan!!!!" kinda post, but was defeated by the intermittent wireless in the hotel.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I've been to Japan several times (including a year-long stint as a college exchange students), so it's a place I'm pretty familiar with... I like it there a lot and enjoy any chance to go that I can get.  This trip took me to Kobe, a small city on Shikoku, and a smaller industrial city near Nagoya (or maybe more accurately near Toyota).  I had been to Kobe (maybe known to you as the site of the devastating Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995) once before during high school for a volleyball tournament, and I think that's probably when I started my love affair with things Japanese that resulted in my aforementioned college exchange there-- interestingly enough, I don't recall discussing the earthquake much or noticing a lot of damage or anything, even though I was there around one year later.  Kobe is a pretty cool city with some neat features (the Ijinkan-- barbarian houses-- left over from when Kobe was a trade port for early European traders are an example) and some cool places to hang out. 

I got to travel with three other guys, who all turned out to be decent travel companions.  Work travel in Japan was fairly fascinating as factories there are very different from our own.  There's a ton of automation, and the Japanese are able to cram a decent process into an unbelievably tiny space.  Supplier relationships are also executed in a very different way-- kind of paternalistic and definitely not arms length.  I think there's some things we could learn from each other.

This blog has been brought to you by mild jetlag, which saw me awake at ~4:30 AM and has given me a bit of extra time before work.

Absurd, Hilarious and Pretty Scary Actually.

Amit sent me this MSN moneycentral article today at work as we discussed the huge crap the market took today.  So, in case you don't want to link over there, it's possible that the minipanic today (which included the largest intraday market decline since 1987) may have been triggered by a trader at Citigroup fat fingering a sell order.  The story goes that he hit "b" instead of "m" when trying to place a $16M sell order on Proctor & Gamble.  This caused P&G stock to plummet from $62/share to $37/share in practically no-time.  Luckily for P&G, NYSE has some built in technology to watch for something like this, and basically slowed down transactions of P&G for a short time (1-2 minutes) while things were sorted out.

I read this and laughed a lot... Immediately took the article around to coworkers to make fun of the poor SOB who happened to have a really really bad day at work today.  In all seriousness though, this may or may not have caused the intraday dip before the end-of-day rebound-- I'm guessing the Greek financial disaster also had something to say about it... But it's incredible to imagine that whatever system the poor Citigroup trader was using doesn't ask you to confirm a 16 BILLION dollar trade request.  I'd personally like to think better controls were in place since for at least short time major damage was done to at least one company and perhaps the market on the whole.

Trying to Make Some Sense out of the Tea Party Movement

Is anyone else out there struggling a little with how to feel about the Tea Party Movement?  I have this feeling it's a bit natural to struggle with what appears to be an actual grass roots movement... It actually has no center and no leading authorities.  Anyone can go to a "Tea Party" but you can't really go to the Tea Party.  The Tea Partiers have certainly gotten some attention in the media so it's hard to miss that they exist, and I think they've presented the media outlets (all of whom seem to show a certain bias one way or the other) with a little bit of a problem-- they too appear to have no idea how they should address the movement.

I decided to do some research on the thing, and with me that means a quick jaunt over to wikipedia.  Their article indicates that it's a populist movement that arose early in 2009 in response to the 2008 bailouts and 2009 stimulus package.  In general, the article states, the movement appears to be focused on constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets.  I am a very big fan of all three of these ideas.

On the other hand, the article goes on to discuss some of the controversy surrounding the movement.  They indicate that some believe the movement is actually an example of "astroturfing."  Other than the carpet that was put down in the Astrodome, I had no idea what that meant.  So, I went back to the wikipedian well and their article on astroturfing defines the practice as, "political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but are disguised as spontaneous, popular "grassroots" behavior."  I'm worried that even if the movement isn't an example of astroturfing, that it could be easily co-opted and turned into an example of astroturfing.  The recent appearance of Sarah Palin (who I don't think believes in those things the movement is supposed to be focused on) in the town I live in, with a lot of "Tea Party" sentiment, has reinforced that particular fear.

In the end, I don't want the Tea Party Movement to turn out to be the crazy end of the Republic Party in disguise-- or other unsavory elements: homophobic, xenophobic, racist, or otherwise.  This is because I like the Tea Party rhetoric and am encouraged that apparently a lot of other Americans do too.

My (Over-)Simplified Model of Government

The government, in its most basic form, is just another business-- or maybe more accurately a not-for-profit.  Its customers (the citizens of a nation) employ it to provide certain services or products.  The citizens (customers) convert their wealth into government revenue by paying taxes and fees back to the government (the business).  The real questions about government then become how nimbly can the government adjust to the changes in the service profile their citizens require, how well can the government provide those services, and will the government be able to fund the activity through a level of tax collection acceptable to their citizens.

In such a model government employees exist only to carry out the supply of services to a citizen... So why then is government structure important?  Well, government structures and organizations are going to be more or less effective in understanding the needs and expectations of their citizens.  The ideal structure would provide the citizen-desired services exactly when they are wanted and at least cost.  The other side of the coin is how are revenues are collected by the government, or to put it another way, tax structure.  To my way of thinking taxes should serve only one purpose: to deliver the necessary coin to pay for the services we want.  Any other defined objective for a tax is going to drive inefficiency into the system and waste resources. 

So, my over-simplified solution is to start discussing things in terms of what I described above.  I believe that if we all approached government in this way, we better establish government goals, better define the expenditures required to achieve those goals, and then execute.  In future posts I will explore what services I believe the government should provide and why, as well as how I believe they should collect taxes to secure the revenue needed to provide those services.

CNN article about setiQuest

I read a brief opinion piece on cnn.com called What if There's Somebody Else Out There?  I enjoy such articles, in general, and cnn.com delivers from time to time with some really weird-ass space/tech articles.  My all-time favorite was called something like "Scientists Believe Language will Evolve on Space Colonies."  I think that's probably true, but it was so out of left-field that seeing it on CNN's front page had me laughing out loud in the cube at work.  So, anyway, I think the question of extraterrestrial life is completely fascinating, and I was interested in an unexpected and random cnn.com front page article exploring the idea.  My excitement grew a bit when I realized the article was written by a ranking scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), named Jill Tarter.  Jill has just been awarded the TED award (no idea really what that is, but the article seems to indicate that it's an organization that tries to spread good ideas) as her team at SETI had just begun the roll-out of something called setiQuest.

I'm not sure I understand it very well yet, but setiQuest is SETI's latest effort to engage and include the general population in their research efforts.  Previously the best way for an individual to try to help SETI out was through something called Seti@Home.  Seti@Home was an experiment in distributed processing, where people installed a screen saver on their computer that would process packages of data distribued by SETI while people's computers were idol.  setiQuest sounds a little different, in that it sounds like they're going to make their research and analytical tools available over the internet.  Almost like they're going to let you sign in and "turn some of the knobs" and see what comes out of the system.  The website is setiQuest.org... Haven't taken a look yet, but you can be sure I will monitor how it develops.

Anyway, that was really the extent of the article and that was disappointing for me.  I'm pretty sure that Jill Tarter isn't responsible for the misleading headline, but shame on whoever did write it.  I love to try to think through the question posed by the headline, though.  What if there is other intelligent life out there?  I tend to believe the sheer scope of the universe means there probably is other life out there, and that some of it will have evolved intelligence... The universe would be pretty boring if not, eh?  That aside though, what are the social implications of "first contact?"  I feel like the entire world changes the very instant we do make contact.  Wouldn't our own trifles and sources of conflict might not start to seem pretty trivial if we answered the "are we alone" question negatively.  Maybe I'm to optimistic about human nature, and our own petty squabbles (and they're usually pretty petty if you break it down) will persist in the face of extraterrestrial opportunity or threat.