Flooding in China

The Three Gorges Dam was built in China to reduce the flooding along the Yangtze river.  Even with that massive dam, they are having record floods this year.  Story here, and here.

Another flashpoint

While this blog tends to pay attention to the flashpoint that is the South China Sea as the most likely place things can go wrong in a big way, there are others.  Here is one that you don’t hear about often, Egypt-Ethiopia.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk may turn out to be the greatest American of his generation. (yes, he is South African by birth). He may end up contributing more to humanity than anyone since Norman Borlaug.

Naval construction

An interesting perspective.  If the economy bounces back to pre-pandemic levels quickly, then a wave of retirements really will result in a shortage of skilled workers.  Given the pay and employment security, these should be highly sought after jobs.

Commercial spaceflight

It has been a money saver and has let us develop faster than government programs alone. (post in memory of Mike Nofsinger)

Where have all the cruise ships gone?

Story here.  Fascinating stuff. Personally, I am not sure the industry survives.

Covid-19 (The Wu Flu)

An extraordinarily clear eyed assessment of our current situation.

Wuhan Flu

I know we are all over-saturated with information regarding the Wuhan Flu. This analysis is very interesting.  The sample may be to small to be statistically significant, but it may indicate that things aren’t as bad as they might seem.

Murder in Jamaica

Story here.  It is very unusual for tourists to be harmed in Jamaica, especially on the north side of the island where the locals depend on the tourist-related economy.  While Jamaica has been dealing with an uptick in violence (mostly gang-related) violence against tourists is nearly unheard of.  I’ll be interested to see what happened here.

More warfare by other means

I posted this yesterday.  Well, here is another case.  Unfortunately the universities involved have little incentive to crack down on this type of behavior.  The USA needs to restrict foreign students from some countries and incentivize the universities to monitor for this type of espionage.