April 2004
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
TheOpenCD
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
"CHALLENGES FACING INDIAN DEFENSE POLICY..."
Interesting lecture transcript [pdf] - "FUTURE FIRE: CHALLENGES FACING INDIAN DEFENSE POLICY IN THE
NEW CENTURY"
Conclusion paragraph -
"Where does all this imply in terms of conclusions about India's capacity to develop the
defense capabilities that would make it a great power in this century? My argument
essentially would be that its capacity to master the creation, deployment and use of
military instruments is still not assured at this point in time. Whether it will succeed in
this endeavor will depend greatly on how it resolves the three macro (Economic growth rate, National Vision, Exploiting the existing international system [i.e. unipolar world])
and five micro (Neutralizing Internal Security threats, Preserve effective external defense, Provider of regional security, Effective and economical Nuclear detterent, Policy on indegenous/external Defense Industry) problems that I have identified.
India may not succeed in this endeavor for many
reasons, the most important of which may be, in the final analysis, its lack of, in Sunil
Khilnani's phrase, "an instinct for power." At one level, however, that may be what is
most attractive about India: its innate tendency towards moderation and its reluctance to
resort readily to the use of force to secure the political outcomes it desires. India still
remains, in my judgment, a deeply conservative, relatively inward looking, state that has
focused more on "satisficing" rather than "maximizing" military power. But that also
implies that as far as military instruments go, India might be condemned to remaining a
middle power for at least for some time to come, as opposed to becoming a true great
power in the Kennedysque sense of the term. And if that be the case, then perhaps the
"bridging strategies" that Sunil Khilnani spoke about may turn out to be even more
important than the votaries of a strong Indian military capability might be willing to
countenance today."
- Chinmay
Categories -
~India~
~World~
Edited on: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 5:11 PM
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Monday, April 19, 2004
Management and the Konkan Railway Corporation
The Konkan Railway project is certainly an anomaly in the usual Indian Goverment way of doing things. E Sreedharan, the man in charge himself tells us how superior management overcame the numerous ways of inducing delays, corruption and substandard work into a goverment project - including a war induced petroleum shortage!
While rather long, and a bit rambling, the lecture transcript is definitely worth a read when you have some time.
In Passing: Read the report 'Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science' - by the Union of Concerned Scientists, signed by a bunch of eminent scientists, including ~20 Nobel Laureates.
- Chinmay
Categories -
~India~
Edited on: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 5:38 PM
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Thursday, April 15, 2004
The accept cheques???
More dark comedy - A bizzare theft in Pune - since the link won't be stable due to Sakal's serving scheme, I'll summarize...
Six thugs enter a home [in Karve Nagar...] forcibly, terrorize the poeple with choppers and such, and take a cheque for 5 lakhs from the folks! Two thugs leave and find out how much money the bank account has - turns out it's only 3 lakhs. So they come back, take a cheque for 3 lakhs, return to the bank and withdraw the money. Then they call the four that are still in the house to tell them that the job is done. [I guess then they rode off into the sunset or something...]!!!!!
What The Aitch man! I can understand that they could have taken a cashiers check, but how could they verify the amount? [Maybe the cashier told them that they would be overdrawing.. hmmm...] The police are investigating, of course... :-|
I suppose the morale of the story is not to keep a lot of money in a bank account... and not open the door to strangers...
Since now you don't want to keep your money in the bank, better educate yourself about mutual funds, or take a 10 day email course... :->
- Chinmay
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
USD 2 INR
Check this out! We who came to US in August 2002 paid the absolute maximum price for our dollars, ever!
Price then ~ Rs. 49/$. Price now ~ Rs. 43/$. A difference of Rs 6000/1000 $!!! Argh!
Meanwhile, although I haven't read any analysis of the current strengthening of the rupee, I won't be surprised if is somebody's [illegal] way of making a lot of money.... The jump is rather anomalous in recent past....
- Chinmay
Monday, April 12, 2004
More Dubya..
While I have marked this post as fun, it's a dark comedy type of fun. An article in The Atlantic talks about how Bush 43 is making all sorts of decisions without the backing of any facts, rationality, or even thinking...
The Faith-Based Presidency
You can question Bush's veracity, his grip on reality, and the rationality of his policies, but not his faith.
George W. Bush has made rationality an antonym of Republican. His is the first faith-based presidency....
read on....
- Chinmay
Friday, April 09, 2004
The Rothschilds
There was a news article in IndianExpress about the Rothschilds visiting India, which set me thinking, we all hear their name as 'The Intenational Bankers' but I've never heard anything more about them! So did a little search. Here are some of the better results -
A Wikipedia article.
An official Rothschild Archive. [which pretty much does not tell you anything...]
A conspiracy theory type description of "THE ROTHSCHILD DYNASTY"
A BusinessWeek piece, on the other hand, gives a radically different picture [from the conspiracy theory]
Interesting...
- Chinmay
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Religion etc...
Interesting discussion on /. Stemming from news reports about spantaneous fires related to electrical equipment, the trail goes on to discuss religion and science...
Lately I've myself been thinking about why humans need/want religion/god. Maybe I'll do a post on that as and when I get time to organize and elaborate my thoughts...
- Chinmay
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Better Photography?
Got the first roll of my photos back. Most of them are crap. Some do look somwhat like I wanted them to, but need reshooting.
Will work for Perfection.
Meanwhile - Mandatory reading for anyone who wants more than just to take snaps.
and
Understand some of the Master's work at SFMOMA's online exihibit.
- Chinmay
Categories -
~Photo~
Edited on: Thursday, April 08, 2004 4:13 PM
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Sunday, April 04, 2004
Changing All the Rules
A very detailed [and long!] article in the NYTimes Magazine [free. reg. req.] on "How the Bush administration quietly — and radically — transformed the nation's clean-air policy" For the worse, of course...
An Excerpt:
Quote
...the [Bush] administration's real problem with the new-source review program wasn't that it didn't work. The problem was that it was about to work all too well -- in the way, finally, that it was designed to when it was passed by Congress more than 25 years ago.
[Energy companies] faced potential fines of tens of millions of dollars. Cost estimates for fitting power plants with new scrubbers and, in some cases, reconfiguring entire plants to run on cleaner-burning natural gas were estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, the companies were not about to be put out of business by complying with E.P.A. regulations. In 1999, the Southern Company reported profits of $1.3 billion.
Thomas R. Kuhn, a Yale classmate of President Bush's and president of the Edison Electric Institute... sent energy-industry executives a confidential memo, on May 27, 1999, later made public in the course of a lawsuit, advising them to bundle their contributions to the Bush campaign under a tracking number to ''ensure that our industry is credited'' for its generosity.
"Taking a lesson from Reagan's experience with Gorsuch and Watt, Bush officials realized that it would be self-defeating to appoint to public positions people with outspoken views on the environment, so they found noncombative figures instead.... they adopted a two-track strategy. Publicly, the president asked Congress to pass major environmental legislation like the Clear Skies Initiative and a sweeping energy bill, which he knew would face considerable opposition. Privately, the president's political appointees at the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Office of Management and Budget would carry out those same policies less visibly, through closed-door legal settlements and obscure rule changes.... These second-tier appointees knew exactly which rules and regulations to change because they had been trying to change them, on behalf of their industries, for years."
"President Bush went on CNN and blamed environmentalists for the [California electric energy] crisis. ''If there's any environmental regulation that's preventing California from having 100 percent max output at their plants -- as I understand there may be -- then we need to relax those regulations,'' he said. California utility officials denied that environmental rules had anything to do with the crisis. But their protests didn't matter. The president had forged the link."
President Bush's final National Energy Policy (N.E.P.) was published on May 16, 2001. [laying] the administration's vision of the environmental future of the United States. The policy's defining notion was simple: environmental regulations have constrained America's domestic energy supply. In broad strokes, the N.E.P. laid out the next three years of the Bush administration's energy and environmental agenda: roll back wilderness and wildlife protections to open up more public land to oil and gas development; establish fast-track hydropower permits; expand offshore oil and gas drilling; and replace tough Clean Air Act rules, including new-source review, with an industry-friendly market-based pollution trading system.
...when President Bush announced Clear Skies, the E.P.A. was already on track to require deeper reductions in air pollution than his cap-and-trade proposal would produce. So the air would actually be dirtier under Clear Skies than if the president allowed the E.P.A. to enforce the existing law. Clear Skies allowed 50 percent more sulfur dioxide, nearly 40 percent more nitrogen oxides and three times as much mercury as the Clean Air Act -- rigorously enforced -- called for.... ''We can do better under current law than what they're putting on the table,'' Eric Schaeffer told George Stephanopoulos [ABC's ''This Week'']. Schaeffer, the E.P.A.'s head of civil enforcement from 1997 to 2002, had worked on the new-source review lawsuits since their inception. He left the E.P.A. in early 2002, tired, as he said in his letter of resignation, of ''fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.''
Sylvia Lowrance, the E.P.A.'s deputy assistant administrator for enforcement.. a 24-year veteran of the agency, had officials in her office study years of data, looking at figures that came from actual power plants, and on June 3, 2002, she wrote a memo to Holmstead indicating that her office thought 0.75 percent was a reasonable figure.In other words, if the total value of a generating unit was $1 billion, a power company should be able to legitimately spend up to $7.5 million a year on routine repair and maintenance without being required to install new pollution controls. Marianne Horinko, acting E.P.A. administrator...said, utilities would be allowed to spend up to 20 percent of a generating unit's replacement cost, per year, without tripping the N.S.R. threshold. In other words, a company that operated a coal-fired power plant could do just about anything it wanted to a $1 billion generating unit as long as the company didn't spend more than $200 million a year on the unit. To E.P.A. officials who had worked on N.S.R. enforcement, who had pored over documents and knew what it cost to repair a generator, the new threshold was absurd. ''What I don't understand is why they were so greedy,'' said Eric Schaeffer, the former E.P.A. official. ''Five percent would have been too high, but 20? I don't think the industry expected that in its wildest dreams.''
The framework of new-source review would remain, but the new rules set thresholds so high that pollution-control requirements would almost never come into effect. ''It's a moron test for power companies,'' said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group. ''It's such a huge loophole that only a moron would trip over it and become subject to N.S.R. requirements.... the new rules would result in emissions increases of 7 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 2.4 million tons of nitrogen oxides per year by 2020.
By the end of 2003, with new-source review all but dead, the White House began moving on to other projects. Mike Leavitt, the newly installed E.P.A. administrator, proposed two new regulations. The first suggested new standards for mercury emissions that would in the short term permit the release of as much as seven times as much mercury as current law allows. The second, known as the interstate air-quality rule, and was seen by many as the administrative enactment of Bush's Clear Skies Initiative.... Yet the new rule set higher national limits for emissions of dangerous chemicals like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides than Clear Skies, which in turn was considered by critics to be weaker than the existing Clean Air Act.
UnQuote
Just one of the reasons why I recently termed him a dispicable thug of the worst kind.
- Chinmay
Industry Shining
Thursday, April 01, 2004
April Fools?
Tagore and his Medal
Why we should be more concerned about what's happening to his philosophy, than what's happening to his Medal. Highly recommended read.
- Chinmay
Categories -
~India~
Edited on: Thursday, April 01, 2004 1:40 PM
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