Obsidian Wings

selling the hangman the rope

by liberal japonicus

ProPublica has had a number of great deep dive exposes lately. They seem to do particularly well with problems in the Navy and their most recent piece about the Navy's failed Littoral Combat Ship program is the latest.

One point that caught my eye (and accounts for the title) was this

General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and equipment on the LCS proprietary — a problem that the GAO has identified throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to do certain repairs, former officers said. This sometimes meant that contractors would go overseas to help, adding millions in travel costs and often delaying missions. The Navy recently purchased some of the data. A Navy spokesperson would not disclose the price “due to proprietary reasons.”

Watson and others spent much of their time escorting contractors while on board because so many areas on the ship were considered classified, reducing their ability to do their own jobs, according to interviews with multiple officers who had served on the LCS.

Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. The delays were especially frustrating when trying to fix the computer network that connected everything from the radars, to the weapons systems, to the ship’s canteen. That system, another former lieutenant said, frequently shut down because of software glitches.

“You can’t ask for help from your superior commands” on shore, said the former lieutenant, who worked as a communications officer on Independence-class ships. “And you can’t even go buy yourself a soda.”

The ships needed constant repairs. But technical manuals were sometimes written only in the native language of the contractor that built the equipment. One former officer said that a manual for a davit, a type of crane used to lower a search-and-rescue boat, was written in Norwegian. He said the Navy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly in a contractor from Norway to change two fuses.

Somehow, I don't think this is a problem for the Chinese. Anyway, talk about that or something else.

Seasons Come, Seasons Go

by JanieM

In my love of springtime, I tend to forget how lovely late summer and early fall can be. July is the only month that consistently brings us stretches of sweltering weather here in central Maine; August is almost always moderate and pleasant. September is similar, if a little cooler, but because the kids are back in school and autumn color hasn’t really gotten going yet, it too is a bit underappreciated.

At least by me.

This time around I’m enjoying it immensely. Fall color makes it easy to find beautiful pictures (see below), but really, there’s no hurry.

*****

Open thread.

*****

ETA: Link to a bigger version at Flickr.

Stuff happening

An open thread. Georgia is a brand of canned coffee sold in Asia, originally a Coca-Cola and Nescafe collaboration, but then, Coca-Cola took over the brand. Anyway, it seemed apropos.

Another thing, we had a bizarre spike in visits two weeks ago. Here is the jump and two days on either side.

2023-08-09	314
2023-08-10	368
2023-08-11	4874
2023-08-12	282
2023-08-13	318

Anything happen on August 11th?

Climate change and geoengineering

by liberal japonicus

I'm not sure about this, but I seem to recall a couple of years ago a spate of articles about dealing with climate change through geoengineering, but with the current weather problems around the world, I'm not seeing them. I can adduce several possible reasons, listed in order of likelihood:

1. I'm not looking in the right places
2. People have given up
3. A cabal of industrialists has cut the legs off these solutions
4. People have realized the issues and have sworn off quick fixes
5. There are actual problems to these solutions that need to be worked out and journalists have learned not to tout them as transformative

Like I said, order of likelihood. A quick dive indicates there are three broad possibilities

1. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere
2. Injecting particulate matter into the atmosphere to reduce the incoming shortwave radiation
3. increasing the albedo to reflect more short-wave radiation rather than allow it to be converted to long wave radiation.

While reason 5 is highly unlikely, I'd like to think that the folks here would prefer (as I would) to talk about them. Here's a good starter
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-is-not-a-quick-fix-for-the-climate-crisis-new-analysis-shows/

And this page has more details
https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/08/21/understanding-climate-engineering-pub-72846

Why this interests me is that here in Japan, we are being struck by increasingly more powerful typhoons and really astonishing heat effects. While this story may be an outlier, there are other stories of people suffering from the heat. Yet I don't get a feeling of 'why doesn't someone do something?' This might be the distance between my internal psychology and the general Japanese psyche. But reading other sources outside of Japan, it seems like geoengineering has gone missing, and I'm not sure why. Is it that polities are so divided that proposals along these lines would just be seized on as another anti-government lever? Or are finances so bad that the economics of this are just not going to happen? Or that current governments have so many problems to deal with that they can't devote any effort along these lines? Or, improbably, have they thought better of this?

This last link is a paper that discusses the Japanese public's perception of geoengineering. It shows a different reaction than I think you would get in the US.

Anyway, another post to talk about the weather. Have at it.

History Lessons

by JanieM

Taking off from lj’s thread, I confess to some bemusement at the worry people express these days over children’s screen time. It’s not like screen time is new; we watched TV all the time when I was a kid. I could sit here all day listing the sitcoms and cartoons and TV dramas we tuned into faithfully every week, or in some cases every day.

Walt Disney was the source of some of both: The Wonderful World of Color on Sunday evenings, and The Mickey Mouse Club every weekday afternoon. Disney offerings were so pervasive that I was pretty sure the world would end if Walt Disney ever died.

I was lucky enough to visit Disneyland in 1961, at the age of 11, and I was dazzled beyond measure. I went again in 1972, by which time the world had changed, or I had changed, or both. I was just out of college, with a world view turned upside down. In the soldiers’ graveyard in Frontierland I saw a gravestone for a brave lieutenant etched with the inscription, “He died fighting for the right.” 

"The right," of course, was not the political right (as we might read it carelessly today), but the “moral” right – i.e., the killing of Native Americans to further the cause of stealing their land. My view of Disney was changed forever.

Although it’s not all that much bigger than the fort in Frontierland, the picture below shows not a fake fort in an amusement park but a refurbished real fort (now a museum): Fort Western in Augusta, Maine, where I go now and then with a camera to explore the geometry of stockades, rooftops, and sometimes piles of snow.

Bigger version of the picture, at Flickr.

Open thread.

Whatcha watching?

by liberal japonicus

What's a old fart to do? Facebook slides into irrelevance, Instagram is a bridge too far, and Tik-tok might as well be from another Galaxy (not to mention X/Twitter), I end up going to Youtube. I use it to show things to students and it is possible to curate lists of videos, but it does wreak havoc with the algorithms. But I thought I'd crack open a thread and ask what folks are watching. For me, a couple of things

I like the Asianometry channel, the person who makes the videos is in Taiwan. I found him because he did some enlightening videos about TSMC, which is building two factories in my hometown, but stayed because he has a lot of interesting takes, not all necessarily confined to Asia. He has a Patreon channel.

The Roseanvil channel, where he cuts modern day and historic boots in half and discusses how they are made and what strictures are involved. I started by clicking on him cutting a Japanese military boot in half and I was off.

My seminar is about Marvel comics and the MCU, so a lot of videos related to that.

PMQs, usually on the Guardian channel

Flexibility posts, which is a cop-out, if I would spend the time actually stretching, I might get more flexible.

Two threads I'm an slowly weaning myself from, I was watching beekeeping videos, which included channels of people dealing with massive hornet nest, which I think started when I was looking at some killer hornet videos in Japanese and hoofed animal foot care videos, probably when I googled some stuff about why horses should have horseshoes. Fortunately, those have stopped popping up, especially after my wife said that the buzzing really bothered her.

So what are y'all watching?

Fantasy Land

by JanieM

I could note the reality of details like the utility pole, the shed, and the float thingie that's sitting under a tree in the middle distance, but the feeling that the picture gives me is quite different from that reality.

In my imagination, every time I look at it I think of a stopping place on a long ago journey. It doesn’t look like the upper portion of a public beach set in a modern town (however tiny and rural), it looks like a place in the wilderness that some travelers come upon with relief (a clearing is nice, water is nice), that gives them the possibility of a resting place before they have to continue their journey.

All by itself the picture has cut out of my perception any sense of the reality of what I know is behind me (my house...), or in front of me just to the right (the town beach), or to the far right (a restaurant...).

It’s the edge of winter, when the water is almost but not quite frozen over. It’s early morning (early for me, at least)—which, now that I think of it, may be why it looks like fantasy land to me.

*****

I figure pictures are nice even when it's quiet around here. Open thread.

Living Space

by JanieM

The picture was taken on December 11 of last year, just across the road from where I live. I wanted to catch the last bit of open water before it disappeared for the winter. 

In relation to the topic you’ll find below the fold, note that there are both year-round and vacation homes tucked under the trees all along the far shore of the lake. You’d never know it if you were to fly over this landscape; it mostly looks like unbroken forest. A lot of Maine is unbroken forest, or at least no one lives there, though a lot of the land is “working forest” and is  accessible by dirt roads. But along lakeshores, the forest cover is deceptive. Waterfront property, after all . . .

A Day at the Coast

by JanieM

Rockland is my favorite of the string of lovely little towns known as “midcoast Maine.” It’s an easy drive for me, a little over an hour on mostly quiet roads. It’s the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum and hello hello books, which is owned by one of my family’s long ago babysitters. The town has a working harbor and a breakwater that extends almost a mile to the lighthouse, which fitter/younger people than I enjoy walking along. The ferry leaves from Rockland for Vinalhaven, Matinicus, and North Haven islands.

Despite all the galleries, museums, restaurants, and shops-catering-to-tourists, Rockland feels more down home and welcoming to me than Camden, which is a lot of other people’s favorite midcoast town.

This picture was taken in mid-May of 2021, when I ventured out of my immediate neighborhood for the first time after a year of Covid-19 isolation. Covid numbers were down, people had been vaccinated, and it seemed like maybe we were heading back toward normal life. (Ha!) One of the things that struck me that day was the number of couples I saw where one person was wearing a mask (even outdoors) and the other wasn’t. I wondered how the conversations went in those households.

The outdoor tables in the picture were a Covid innovation. They’re still around almost everywhere I look, an indication that even though most people seem to be behaving as if Covid is only a bad memory, or even a myth, some of our customs aren’t going to revert to the old ways very easily.

ETA: Open thread.

 

Rockland, Maine, May 15, 2021

Looking for the union label

by liberal japonicus

Being on the left of the political spectrum, I wish the members of SAG-AFTRA the best of luck. If you read the reportage, they do seem up against the cartoon villains of the Judge Doom sort in Roger Rabbit. Here is the Guardian's take. However, just following some of the discussions, I don't see any sort of realistic compromise, it's either break or be broken.

But one thing that I find interesting is that this is a very US-centric story, or, given that the British union, Equity, has expressed their full support, an Anglo-American story. It certainly is complicated.

Many actors belong to both SAG-AFTRA and Actors' Equity since they work both on film and television and in the theater. But the two unions, though they often share similar interests and members, are not one and the same. The current SAG-AFTRA strike is specifically for TV, theatrical (meaning theatrical release of feature films), and streaming, not for stage work, which is covered by a different set of contracts negotiated by Equity.

This might be especially confusing given that in the United Kingdom, actors are represented by Equity UK for stage, film, and television work. Additionally, though Equity UK released a statement standing in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA, they also made it clear that their members do not have the legal right to participate in the strike if they are working on an Equity UK contract due to separate labor law in the country (hence why House of the Dragon is still filming).

Two of the issues are the payments actors and writers get for streamed content and the looming possibilty of AI created work, ranging from appearances to fully generated characters. I thought this Youtube video shows some of the possibilities. But what I wonder about is whether the world of -woods (Bollywood, Nollywood (Nigeria), Hallyuwood (Korea)) as well as other world cinema markets (Japan, China, Hong Kong and France come to mind). This link discusses the case of Priyanka Chopra, and she and other stars are allowed to work on within their own indigenous cinemas, but not in the US.

There are a couple of obvious explanations, perhaps the payment model for foreign cinema industries is different, so these issues don't come up and perhaps the level of CGI use within movies is also minimal, so the idea that an actor could be AI generated seems far off as well, though the Youtube video suggests that it is out there. It may also be that the stars for foreign movies do not have the power that US/UK stars have, so raising these issues could be too dangerous for them. To me, that is the most intriguing: Part of becoming a Hollywood player is to not simply act, but to write, direct and produce. And the Directors Guild agreed to a new contract 3 months ago:

With screenwriters on strike and the actors’ union still in negotiations, the directors saw their deal as a first step on the way to labor peace in the entertainment industry. It included improvements in both wages and the amount of royalties that directors would receive from projects on streaming services, and it placed guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence.

However, it wasn't a slam dunk, the deal passed with 87%. On the other hand, 98% of SAG (actors) and just under that for AFTRA (writers) voted in favor of a strike. I imagine that if there were a bright line between producers and actors/writers, the situation would be the same as overseas. However, as I understand it, to bring the biggest stars on to a movie, they often demand production credit, so the battle lines are blurred. Every labor fight I've been involved with has had two sides, so I'm wondering if what makes this different. Your ideas are welcome.