News Brief, Do The Whirlwind Edition

Cross-posted at The Conjecturer. 

The Pentagon

• DARPA wants American snipers to have fool proof sniper scopes that are accurate out to 2000 meters. It also wants to expand its Boomerang sniper-detection system from simple location (which is itself a big achievement) to preemption. That’s cool, and both promise to dramatically improve the 4GW battlespace.
• The Air Force continues to make its case for skarking all UAV duty from the other branches. Why, I’m not sure. Strikes me as a power grab—an especially lame one given all the Network Centric Warfare jimjaw they spew.
• Lockheed insists it has the right product strategy, despite mismanaging its LCS program so badly their portion of it was canceled. Luckily, the Pentagon is considering a shift toward more fixed-price contracts instead of the current cost-plus contracts, a move that would force the defense contractors to shoulder more of the financial risk of research and development. To wit: fixed-price acquisition is why EDS has almost gone bankrupt over their hilariously over-cost NMCI. And they deserve it, for deliberately underbidding by several billion dollars and expecting the DoN to make up the difference. We need more of that, to force these companies into at least a semblance of responsibility.
• A bipartisan panel has also recommended some much needed contracting reform. Finally!

Around the World

• Rebiya Kadeer, whom I supported this year for the Nobel Peace Prize, is possibly the most hated women within the Chinese government. Her work in exposing the horrendous abuses of Uyghurs in Xinjiang have earned her Beijing’s wrath, wrath which now apparently extends to her children. To destroy her children for the crimes of their mother is beyond reprehensible. It is, to put it kindly, very North Korean of them.
• The International Business Leaders Forum has released a How-To guide for combining the needs of the poor with growth markets. Much of it is common sense (like knowing the market you’re either catering to or trying to create), but it’s good to have it laid out. The poorest 5 billion people of the world represent a huge opportunity for business. It is high time we develop it.
• Related: Microrate has released a report highly critical (pdf) of the role of IFIs in microfinance. Basically, the big financial institutions, eager to get in on the growing BoP market, have essentially crowded out private investors, which are then forced into much riskier loan arrangements. Now it’s not yet clear that public IFIs are better suited to risky loans (or that those loans are worth such risk), but the idea of crowding out a groundswell of private financial support for third world entrepreneurship is a troubling one.
• Bonnie Boyd on how the treatment of journalists is a good gauge of the general human rights environment. She also has a good backgrounder on the show trial of American businessman Mark Seidenfeld on trumped up charges in Kazakhstan, and what that can also say about a country’s rights.
• She also got a thread started on Tajikistan’s regulatory environment. It harkens me back to a post on PSD about the very same thing, and how such an ungainly regulatory environment unnecessarily strangles economic development.
• Steve Levitt looks like he might be turning his methodologically challenged mind to tackling the incentive structures of queue discipline.
• The PM of Somalia wants to declare victory and go home. Woops, he already is home, though the rest of his government is still locked up in Baidoa. Maybe he meant the more than 340,000 people who fled Mogadishu to escape the brutal fighting, martial law, and tank shellings could now come home, despite the continued fighting. I don’t really know what he’s saying.
• Meanwhile, the Somali conflict spilled over into occupying Ethiopia and resulted in the shocking slaughter of 74 oil workers, some of whom were Chinese.
• Azar Nafisi, whose book Reading Lolita in Tehran is one of my favorite memoirs, sees her homeland as deep in crisis. Assuming she’s right, we have little to fear from Tehran—its people appreciate both their newfound respect, their lack of basic dignities, and their independence. Direct intervention by Washington could upset this delicate balance that is slowly tipping the country toward eventual reform.
• Pakistan looks set to compete with China in terms of building dams that swamp ancient Buddhist artifacts. Because they love history.

Back at Home

• Someone should tell Al Gore and his gang of private jet environmentalists that carbon credits are worthless. Passport had more a bit back on the naivete of assuming carbon markets behave like regular markets, or are useful in any real way toward alleviating pollution.
• So is it a scandal that federal employees are taking their subsidized metro credits and selling them on eBay? Well, yes. Though I’m ordinarily all about creating new markets to bump up value, I’m also all about not lying. These federal employees declared their intention to use public transit, then simply pocketed the money. That is probably theft. It is definitely dishonest. What’s worse, the federal agencies, themselves rather opaque to most forms of audit, can’t be bothered to even make sure the people they hand metrochecks out to work for them. Your tax dollars at work.
• Today is the 400th anniversary of the first modern European landing in the New World, when English colonists landed at Cape Henry at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. My fine, frustrating state has quite a bit of history, for America.