For American business, the United States currency dispute with China is a two-sided coin.
On the tails-we-lose side are companies like New York-based PS Brands, one of the biggest American importers of socks. With the Obama administration pressing China to raise the value of its currency, the cost of Chinese-made socks is likely to rise. So PS Brands’ main supplier here is demanding shorter contracts at higher prices.
“Before, I could price six months out,??? Elie Levy, chief executive of PS Brands, said during a recent factory visit here. “Now they only want to price 30 or 40 days out because the dollar could lose value.???
Meanwhile, the American companies most likely to oppose Washington’s currency fight with Beijing are businesses like PS Brands — Wal-Mart would be another good example — that get their goods from China
and sell them in the United States. Those companies’ balance sheets are likely to suffer, and American consumers more likely to feel the effect …
Which is entirely true. The middle class gets a great coin toss coming and going. It’s always heads China and corporate America win, tails it loses.
It got pole-axed when all the manufacturing moved from here to China and we lost the ability to make socks to a country that sells them back with holes ready to appear after one wash.
Jobs went to China for the sake of cheap shoddy goods bought by people who still had jobs or who could put more and more on credit. And now that the economy is shot, the same among us have a hard time even affording the cheap stuff. Wal-Mart is beset by more and more of its customers only spending their food stamp budget.
What a moral business model. The national economic policy that caused it could not have been spun from finer cloth.
Then there’s those who benefit from the currency war. The few in the new “artisan” economy. Businesses that hardly employ anyone in the US and make high end goods the Chinese state buys.
For American exporters like Staco Systems, above, a weak dollar makes its products more attractive abroad … an American company 9,000 miles away, in Irvine, Calif., where the prospect of a weaker dollar is actually good news. There, Staco Systems, a maker of aerospace electronics, has a growth business selling parts to state-owned aviation companies in China. If anything, a stronger Chinese renminbi would make Staco’s products even more attractive to buyers in China.
Got rid of mass middle class work for the sake of penny-ante Swiss watch-type businesses. That’s progress.
As usual, I have a song for that. And I had it yesterday.
The China Shuffle — about socks with ready-made holes and other stuff — here.
“Act Naturally” is the first time I’ve ever had advertising stuck on my music. There wasn’t much opportunity for that back in the days of The Four G’s Hotel in Bethlehem.
YouTube checks your videos with some type of scanner when uploaded.
It determines if some of the content is raided from other sources, which — of course — it is in the spirit of fair use. At which point you get a note telling you ads will run with it.
In this way YouTube monetizes things it thinks have a chance at being popular due to the way sheep 15-17 year-olds search the site. The joke is the unsophisticated viewer may not realize you’re not the one putting in the overlay advertising.
So “Act Naturally” now has lots of ads attached to it, some coincidentally amusing. Dick Destiny and Honey-Nut Cheerios. Or pastries and cupcakes made in a regional bakery/supermarket. Or Susan Boyle’s new album on iJobs. You haveta admit that’s really choice considering the nature of DD stuff.
Also common, ads for Rhapsody, the other on-line music store.
Everyone with any brains knows no one small is allowed to earn any money making music. In the age of the web it’s all for the famous.
Backed by a label, great publicity and a place like Nashville or LA, the known fancy and fine can get dispensations from Steve Jobs, the most powerful man in the world, and other barnacles and wanna-bes, to sell music and grant them a piece. Even the Beatles, half of them dead, serve iSteve.
Additionally, the famous can get more by having the intros to their vids as conveyors for television-style commercial advertising.
Of course, there was a brief period when stupid people believed the Internet was a liberalizing and leveling thing. But they’ve all been shown the door after helpfully lubricating the running off of all B, C and D list talent. Rightly so.
What’s important is that the wonderful people get all the spoil. And that’s how it should be. Anyone who doesn’t know that isn’t mentally fit.
The Register summarizes recent findings that the Stuxnet worm targets mechanisms which are export-controlled under US anti-nuclear proliferation regimes.
New research, published late last week, has established that Stuxnet searches for frequency converter drives made by Fararo Paya of Iran and Vacon of Finland. In addition, Stuxnet is only interested in frequency converter drives that operate at very high speeds, between 807 Hz and 1210 Hz.
The malware is designed to change the output frequencies of drives, and therefore the speed of associated motors, for short intervals over periods of months. This would effectively sabotage the operation of infected devices while creating intermittent problems that are that much harder to diagnose.
Low-harmonic frequency converter drives that operate at over 600 Hz are regulated for export in the US by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as they can be used for uranium enrichment. They may have other applications but would certainly not be needed to run a conveyor belt at a factory …
The gist is that it seemingly confirms a malware jab at Iran’s nuclear program.
“Plant officials at the controversial Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran admitted the malware had infected its network in September,” continued the Reg.
“This had nothing to do with a recently announced two-month delay in bringing the reactor online, government ministers subsequently claimed.”
Could be true.
And nuclear power plants do not enrich uranium, perhaps indicating that Stuxnet’s creators have lousy aim, a topic I’ve addressed earlier. (We’ll get to it.)
In any case, various news agencies report Bushehr ready to join Iran’s power grid in 40 days. Exposing again a hard limit on using software to sabotage stuff in the physical world.
The Reg concludes:
The appearance of the malware has provoked talk of cyberwar in some quarters and certainly done a great deal to raise the profile of potential attacks on power grid and utility systems in the minds of politicians. This is regardless of the potential likelihood of such an attack actually being successful, which remains unclear even after the arrival of Stuxnet.
I’d only add that the lack of substantial proof of success in offensive malware operations won’t stop anyone in the business of insisting just the opposite.
However, Iran’s nuclear program also won’t be stopped by a piece of malware aimed at controller software in its factories.
And the liabilities of employing something like Stuxnet are now fairly obvious.
The most glaring being that such a thing is immediately seized upon and pulled apart by the worldwide distributed network of computer security researchers. And second, that even granting for a moment that it was designed to be directed at Iran, the intelligence requirements for it to be solely limited to that were still way too great to limit its spread to that country.
Another ramification is the identification of the originating country. But if the country of [creation] is already an international pariah, then it doesn’t matter if Stuxnet is pinned on [it].
For the purposes of nations with offensive cyberwar operations, Stuxnet shows there is no obstacle or particular reluctance to shoot a weapon across the networks. Even if it doesn’t achieve much from an outside perspective. Stuxnet is all good for the computer security business. Contractors love it. That’s just the way things work here. Nothing could be better than for nations to secretly make more of them.
Any interior arguments — coupled with the natural bent of the computer security industry — would validate operations, anyway. So the US or Israel can be bad actors all the time in this area, if they so wish.
There’s no oversight and little practical interest outside of the malware story’s use as a justification for more offensive and defensive spending.
The political leadership, particularly the right, doesn’t care about the magical malware on Iranian networks. It is far more interested in just unleashing the bombers.
The next post is only made as another illustration on how almost no thought goes into the media’s coverage of bioterror research in this country.
In fact, one might say that only anti-thought is allowed, a desire to see only people who are groupies to the scientists at work in the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center lab.
Today’s episode of The Dr. Oz Show will give the national audience a look at something most local residents have not even seen: the Department of Homeland Security’s containment lab at Fort Detrick.
Two weeks ago, Mehmet Oz and his production team got a sneak peek at the yet-to-open National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center lab. Today’s episode features a walk-through of the $147-million facility and its two core missions: threat characterization to determine how the U.S. is susceptible to bioterrorism and biocrime, as well as bioforensics to track down the culprit in the aftermath of an attack.
Oz wrote that he was shocked to hear there are people who would want to harm the country in such a terrible way, but he said his show serves as a tribute to the Homeland Security employees working to prevent that.
In the television broadcast, taped at the NBACC in Ft. Detrick, there is not a single mention of Bruce Ivins. Not one!
And it’s the central question hovering over the laboratory — one that tells us the world’s most successful bioterrorist came from Ft. Detrick. And everyone at the NBACC surely knows it, in spades.
The “don’t touch my junk” story catalyzes a noticeable measure of public dissatisfaction with the national security apparatus in the US. And the buzzing technology and frequently mediocre people, often afflicted with normal human bad judgment, required to run it.
Most people who know anything about security saw this coming years ago.
American leadership believes there is a technological answer for everything. And it has led to the permeation of increasingly prying and degrading machinery throughout society. When you couple that with average workers, often plagued by bad thinking and judgment but trained to strictly enforce senseless rules, you have what you do now.
All things considered equal, enduring vile mechanisms and/or frisking your johnson is now made permanent.
The assumption that terrorists have become increasingly ingenious has also been pernicious.
Reality shows that isn’t the picture.
The reality is that not only have terrorists been forced into building more unreliable devices to get past security but that they’ve also been compelled to rely on average to bad or even totally incapable human resources.
And there simply are not enough of them to pose the national threat pundits normally assign. Although in the future, if they try enough, they certainly have their chances of being infrequently successful.
This has all been said, in various forms, in this blog before.
And the latest failed plot has nothing to do with onerous whole body scanning. But everything to do with the stupid practice and business procedures of UPS and Fed-Ex in the crap country of known terrorists, Yemen.
In essence, any random nuisance could walk into an UPS store and send a small IED in a cardboard box into the air.
Those are just facts, and not proper justification for antagonizing passengers on American flights more and more until they totally detest going up in the air.
However, I’d be lying if I thought anything would change. Instead, like everything else it will only get worse. And people will just learn to stomach it, the businesses involved in making widgets for searching people perfectly happy with the state of affairs, one in which they can sell more and more odious mechanisms into the queues.
The battle is over here. The underwear bomber and the national security business won, even though the former is in jail.
This was written for La Puta, slated for later in the week. But I’ve moved the tune up as a teaser. It fits the leaden Made In China green reusable grocery bags story perfectly.
Go to neighbor store
Buy stuff for the poor
Socks, socks, socks with holes
Crap that’s full of mold
Go to Acme store
Buy stuff that falls apart
Toothpaste made of dirt
Pills to make your head hurt
Pills to make your head hurt
For the ladies, a cheap skirt
Now stores all full of shit
All made with plastic bits
Wigs all full of lead
Things to make you piss red
Socks, socks, socks with holes
Socks, socks full of holes
All things now with mold
Socks, socks, socks with holes
All things now full of mold
Toothpaste made of dirt
They also make black T-shirts
Toothpaste full of dirt
Pills to make your head hurt
On being pathetic: Scurry around rationalizing how to make tax cuts permanent for the wealthy, the only ones who did well during the last year.
Sneak them in on the two year thing under the buzz-term compromise, which actually means collapsing before your sworn enemy. From the LA Times political page:
“I’d love to see a longer extension, but I think two years gets us to where we need to go and then we can focus on these other issues coming forward,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce letter Monday urged a “preferably permanent” extension, apparently leaving the door open to something less.
The president has invited House and Senate leaders to the White House on Thursday for a meeting at which the tax cut issue is expected to dominate the discussion.
“The president’s priority is providing permanent middle-class tax relief, and he is willing to compromise to get that done,” said Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman. “But he has been clear that we cannot afford to make the high-income tax cuts permanent.”
The New York Times reports Wal-Mart’s business is off in the US.
In the United States, where Wal-Mart stores open at least a year saw a 1.3 percent drop in revenue, a measure known as same-store sales, executives said they were continuing with changes like increasing the number of items for sale, adding in more $1-and-under products and underselling competitors.
Still, visits to Wal-Mart’s American stores declined from a year ago, as did the average price paid at checkout, Wal-Mart executives said.
“They’re focused on necessities and being practical with how they spend their money,??? the company’s chief financial officer, Thomas M. Schoewe, said in a call with reporters. “We still see what we call the paycheck cycle, where you see the spikes in comps the day or two after a payroll check,??? or from food-stamp programs, he said. “It’s every bit as pronounced as we’ve seen it.???
The nasty truth, unmentioned, is that Wal-Mart’s business model has a lot to do with why their customers now only buy necessities and use food stamps.
Selling only Chinese-made goods, so that everyone could be undercut, Wal-Mart contributed in a major way to the destruction of industry that makes stuff in the US. And when all the credit ran out and the economy went bust for its heartland customers, this is what they have.
And no amount of feel good commercials built around a few select workers praising their Wal-Mart careers on network TV will bring it back. They helped break it. Now we can count on Wal-Mart, whose owners are always in the list of Forbes’ richest Americans, to dry and do it somewhere else.
I couldn’t have hoped for better timing. Although it won’t do any good.
From Newsweek, on Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the mom bending down upon her grizzly knee:
Watching Sarah Palin’s new reality show Alaska is like listening to Sgt. Pepper.
You can’t buy a better ridiculous lead sentence.
More:
While driving a dog sled across the wilderness, her fur-trimmed parka so perfectly frames her face, she evokes Audrey Hepburn.
===
As Sarah Palin continues her climb, her knees feel trapped, she doesn’t know how to maneuver. Somehow, she musters the strength to climb higher, helped by the coaching from her guide who acknowledges her “Alaska-girl grit.??? He adds, “Good job, Sarah.??? And great job, Mark Burnett, who mines one more nugget from his newest reality star who says it was tough, but, “It’s fun when you reach the goal.???
Cue “Act Naturally.”
The Democratic Party has no one “white and crazy.” Nobody to beam at the camera with their name upside down in the background and have it painted as victory. No one for the media to gush over, to compare to Audrey Hepburn while outdoors fishing or sledding. It has no story, not even a ludicrous or bad one.
And I mean that in a critical way.
They have no one except Barack Obama to dominate television shows or news appearing to “Act Naturally.” Not a soul to destroy any mainstream media journalistic narrative by making their own. And he won’t do it, going absent without leave.
Instead, there are the likes of Heath Shuler and Jason Altmire. Fake Republicans only known to political junkies and news show tv producers — and not for any good things. Even as fools they have no hope of hitting the bigtime.
Even when the Democrats have MSNBC, they nuts it up, finding a situation in which Keith Olbermann has to take a few days off while no one bats an eye at Glenn Beck calling George Soros a Nazi collaborator.
On tv, even though they retain control of two-thirds of government, they appear a party of people with little backbone but lots of buyer’s remorse, eager to try and figure out how they can make tax cuts for the rich and even more decline look good.
And if they keep on going like this the Republicans will be able to get even someone fresh from a pharmaceutical straight-jacket elected in 2012.
The request line is open! If you have an idea for a tune you’d like to hear DD make a spoof of, suggest it either in comments or in private mail. Really.
If I think I can do a good job, I’ll give it a shot.
This as advance teaser/warning of sorts for DD’s ZZ Top hard rock in the Seventies boogie satire/tribute, La Puta.
I’ll be posting the album in its entirety here sometime next week as part of a fundraiser.
Since you can’t actually sell music CDs unless you’re famous anymore, it might as well be threatened as the gift part of a PBS-like plea for the collection cup.
