Quotulatiousness

March 3, 2010

Chilean earthquake damage may go above $30 billion

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:00

In addition to the deaths and injuries caused by the massive earthquake, Chile is still assessing the wider damage to the economy. The Guardian reports on the damage:

With the death toll unchanged at about 800 and aid flowing to southern cities, Chile today began to assess the industrial and economic cost of its earthquake.

After meeting business leaders, President Michelle Bachelet announced a grim summary of damaged industrial plants, ports and destroyed bridges. The cost could be as high as $30bn.

Significant amounts of damage impacted the grape growing areas, as they were in the middle of harvesting the grapes when the quake struck:

Southern ports were closed and inside dozens of bodegas, or wine stores, a river of wine soaked into the soil, raising concerns about damage to the industry. Initial estimates put the quantity of lost wine at 100m bottles, or roughly a sixth of the country’s annual export. Antonio Larrain, general manager of the Chilean Wine Corporation, estimated that 20% of Chile’s stored wine may have been lost. He calculated the value at $300m, which did not include the widespread damage to infrastructure ranging from underground irrigation tubing to warehouses.

Wines of Chile, an industry group, held an emergency meeting today and announced that 12% of the country’s wine production had been lost. Reports from individual wineries suggest that does not represent the true scale of the disaster. “Many wineries that lost 80% of their production are publicly saying just 15% was lost,” said one wine executive who asked not be named, citing the fear that distributors would terminate distribution contracts with wineries most heavily damaged. “This is an incredibly touchy subject,” he said.

The Chilean wine export trade has been a huge growth sector over the last twenty years, and the potential lost revenues could make recovery even more difficult.

Update, 4 March: Ironically, the LCBO’s latest issue of their Vintages magazine features Chilean wine:

That’s not data: that’s collated anecdotes

Filed under: Environment, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

The way things are going, we may need to throw out even more contaminated “data” that has been used to track climate for over a century, because it can’t technically be called anything other than anecdotal:

The network relies on volunteers in the 48 contiguous states to take daily readings of high and low temperatures and precipitation measured by sensors they keep by their homes and offices. They deliver that information to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which uses it to track changes in the climate.

Requirements aren’t very strict for volunteers: They need a modicum of training and decent vision in at least one eye to qualify. And they’re expected to take measurements seven days a week, 365 days a year.

That’s a recipe for trouble, says Watts, who told FoxNews.com that less scrupulous members of the network often fail to collect the data when they go on vacation or are sick. He said one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Volunteers take their readings at different times of day, then round the temperatures to the nearest whole number and mark down their measurements on paper forms they mail in monthly to the NCDC headquarters in Ashville, N.C.

“You’ve got this kind of a ragtag network that’s reporting the numbers for our official climate readings,” said Watts, who found that 90 percent of the stations violated the government’s guidelines for where they may be located.

Watts believes that poor placement of temperature sensors has compromised the system’s data. Though they are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, many of the stations are potentially corrupted by their proximity to heat sources, including exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, seas of asphalt — and even a grave.

There’s an old saying, frequently used in statistical discussions, that the “plural of anecdote is not data”. This is an excellent example of unreliable information being collated and depended upon as if it was rigorous and objective.

QotD: Canada’s national inferiority complex

Filed under: Cancon, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

But when I refer to casting off our national inferiority complex, I don’t mean the permission we suddenly seem to have given ourselves to be overjoyed by our nation’s athletic accomplishments. Rather, I’m talking about the way most of our major national policies of the past half-century have really just been masks for our national angst. Multiculturalism, universal health care, soft power diplomacy, economic and cultural nationalism and others are all, in part, efforts to downplay our own fear that we are an insignificant nation. Through them, we reassure ourselves of our moral superiority, especially toward the Americans.

Maybe Vancouver finally made us willing to stop defining ourselves through our belief in giant government programs and our fear and resentment of the United States.

Now, perhaps, we can also give ourselves permission to stop trying to manufacture a distinctly Canadian culture and just let one evolve naturally.

We are not Americans. We are never going to be Americans. No amount of economic or cultural protectionism is going to keep U.S. influences out. But also, American influences were never going to impoverish us or strip our identity away.

Maybe now, with the Olympics over and our new-found national confidence high, we’ll get past our common belief that universal health care makes us a better country and gives us superior care. For far too long we have planned health care through this sort of political filter rather than a medical one.

Perhaps instead of sneering at the Americans about their melting pot approach to immigration and insisting our multicultural approach is superior, we’ll now come to see the two as different sides of the same coin.

I think we have already come to understand that while we were tremendous peacekeepers under the UN, what the world needs now is peacemakers. There was nothing wrong with our old role. We were very good at it. But now we have moved on. We have re-equipped ourselves and are getting on with the heavy lifting of fighting in hot spots and bringing aid directly to stricken regions.

Those who still cling to the old notion of Canada as only ever a non-fighting nation, that works only through the UN and cares deeply what the rest of the world thinks of us, have been left behind by events.

Lorne Gunter, “In Vancouver and Whistler, shades of Vimy”, National Post, 2010-03-03

Horses for courses: weapons and targets

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Strategy Page reports on changing conditions in Afghanistan forcing troops to adapt, especially in the personal weapons category:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has learned that the safest way to attack foreign troops, is at long distance (at least 300 meters away). That’s because most foreign troops are armed with 5.56mm assault rifles. These are very accurate, and deadly, at under 200 meters. But beyond that, the 5.56mm bullet rapidly loses accuracy and hitting power. So the Taliban will set up a long range ambush using one or more 7.62mm machine-guns, 7.62mm rifles (preferred by snipers and sharpshooters everywhere, but in Afghanistan this often means a decades old bolt action weapon) and RPGs(rocket propelled grenades.)

[. . .]

The foreign troops have learned to adapt. For example, British infantry squads in Afghanistan have learned to adjust their armament to the mission. For example, when the troops will not be travelling long distances, over rough terrain, and expect to encounter armed resistance, they will carry more firepower, including more long range weapons. Thus an eight man squad will go out with two men armed with L85 5.56mm assault rifles (one equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher), two with 5.56mm LSW automatic rifles (an L85 with a longer and heavier barrel), two with 5.56mm FN Minimi machine-guns and two with FN-MAG 7.62mm machine-guns. The latter are particularly useful if the squad is fired on by an enemy several hundred meters away. These “heavy” squads are also receiving the new 7.62mm L129A1 semi-automatic sharpshooter rifles, and one of those will often be carried along as well. Most squads already have one man armed with the existing FN-FAL 7.62mm sharpshooter rifle. Thus the heavy squad would go out with only one standard L85 assault rifle, and that one carrying a 40mm grenade launcher attachment under the barrel. The 40mm grenades are officially accurate out to 400 meters. But an experienced grenadier can put rounds on targets at twice that range.

Under normal conditions, the squad is armed with four L85s, two LSWs and two FN Minimis. One L85 has the 40mm grenade launcher and, especially in Afghanistan (where longer shots are more common), one L85 is often replaced with a 7.62mm sharpshooter rifle. In some cases, one or both of the LSWs are replaced by a 7.62mm or .338 sniper rifle.

This informal upgrading of squad firepower is nothing new, and was quite common during World War II, where even captured enemy weapons (particularly automatics) were carried instead of the standard infantry rifle.

During peacetime, there’s the official, standard TO&E. When the shooting starts, the troops on the ground quickly adapt. That’s SOP.

Exact terminology aids understanding

Filed under: China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Apple Computer has been accused of exploiting child labour, indirectly, in factories that make iPods and iPhones. This is a serious charge, and the moral outrage it provokes is understandable. It evokes images of Victorian factories (those “satanic mills”), with children as young as seven or eight being starved and abused in horrific conditions.

However, the term “child labour” isn’t particularly exact, as Whit points out:

What I found most interesting was the “child” part — when I was 15 I would have slugged anyone who called me a child. During the summer of my 15th year, I was working in our metal stamping plant where the highest temperature reached 103 F (40 C). I had my first factory job when I was 14 turning wheels on a lathe. My Father never read child-labor laws, and thank God for that. It was an invaluable experience that I am sad to say I won’t be able to give to my son.

I can remember in 1998 visiting a factory for a major automotive supplier in Taiwan. There were 14 year old boys working on the lines making seat belt assemblies. I asked about it and found that they were students at the local technical school. They worked half a shift on the line and spent the rest of the day in class studying engineering. Today, 12 years later, they would be around 26 with degrees in mechanical engineering and over a decade of hands-on experience. I imagine some of them are running plants in China now.

So, there are the imagined children in a Dickensian hell, and there are teenagers (“young adults” in some situations) doing co-op terms in factories. Remember that our ideas about appropriate ages to leave school and work in factories or on farms have changed dramatically over the last two generations. Our grandparents wouldn’t have batted an eye at 14-year-olds working in factories. For most of their contemporaries, the concept of “teenage years” just didn’t have any particular cultural meaning. You were a child, you went to school, then you left school and got a job.

Even 60 years ago, however, they would have objected to under-12’s working away from home (but not on the family farm . . . farming families still looked at kids as extra working hands).

I understand that Apple is worried about its image, and I acknowledge that those eleven 15 year olds may not have wanted to be there. But there is a big difference between a 15 year old farm kid fibbing about his age to get a good factory job to help support his family and using 6 year old slave labor in an illegal fireworks factory in Sichuan. It would be nice if the amazingly flexible English language had a concise way of stating the difference. I think “under-aged labor” is more reflective of the reality of the situation.

It’s also not to excuse bad employers or condone involuntary labour (permitted in some developing countries).

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