Leapfrog Technology and the Auto Industry

BOULDER, Colorado -- Much has been made in international development circles of the idea of "leapfrog" technology - that is, countries can skip over earlier generations of a particular technology and immediately adopt the latest and greatest, thus avoiding the costs of building outdated infrastructure that will inevitably have to be replaced.

This idea has been illustrated most effectively in the telephone business. Many third world countries have chosen to forgo building a land-line system, with miles and miles of costly copper wire and thousands of switchboards; instead, they have gone straight to mobile phones. The infrastructure is cheaper, and it can be easily erected in the most remote locations. Mobile phones are also cheap to own, and they allow the world's poor to gain access to many other important services, like banking, without the need for a fixed, legal address.

But is the model applicable to other technologies? Oft-touted efforts to distribute laptops to the poor have been dismal failures, and poorer countries invariably opt to build older, dirtier power plants instead of adopting expensive, cutting-edge green technologies.

As the Economist reports, the leapfrog phenomenon may be quite unique. Thanks to increased global flows of trade, capital, and people, advanced technologies are easily spread across the world. According to a World Bank study, in industrialized countries, once a technology - items like cell phones or PCs - is adopted, it takes only a short time to reach a market penetration of 25%-50%. In emerging markets, the Bank found penetration rarely broke the 5% barrier, meaning poorer countries can get access to the technology, but rarely can they put it into broad use. This is largely due to the fact that these countries have high levels of income inequality, meaning this technology rarely makes its way from the urban elites to the rural poor.

I should add that there is a great deal of variation across countries and with different technologies, but the basic point stands - it is overly optimistic to think that leapfrogging can happen everywhere with everything, as the evidence for it remains largely anecdotal.

Which brings us to an interesting example related to cars. In the past, poorer countries adopted older technology first when it came to cars. Car makers took their older models and exported them or manufactured them in emerging markets where safety and pollution standards were lower - think of the VW Beetle in Latin America. These countries also had large markets for second-hand cars from the rich world - think of all the right-hand drive Japanese cars in Russia - and these two sources made up the bulk of their fleets.

But rich world car makers don't operate that way any more. They are making more cars specifically designed for emerging markets, and they are introducing cleaner technologies as the cost of producing these higher-tech cars falls, the price of oil remains high (believe me - it will be going up again soon), and concerns about pollution and climate change become more widespread. Nissan-Renault has made grandiose statements that all car makers must aim to make their fleets zero-emissions, GM is hoping its plug-in Chevy Volt will beat out hybrid technology and become a big seller worldwide, and even local manufacturers in China and India are poised to launch alternative fuel vehicles.

So, this is where the leapfrogging comes in. Most developing countries, including places like China and India, do not have the infrastructure to support mass automobile ownership - things like gas stations, auto parts stores and mechanics. What this means is that electric or alternative fuel vehicles are not at an immediate disadvantage when breaking into the market; the infrastructure to support them can be built as they gain popularity, and it won't have to compete with gasoline filling stations, because they are not there. In the US, for example, the lack of these alternative resources - as well as the lack of an adequate power grid to support the widespread ownership of electric cars - can dissuade buyers and has allowed gasoline-powered hybrids to be the become the preeminent lower-emissions vehicle technology.

So, the potential is there for cleaner cars to fill the roads of the developing world as the global automobile fleet swells - it is slated to reach 2.9 billion cars by 2050, up from 600 million in 2005. The mighty automobile may join the modest cell phone among technologies that have successfully made the leap.

[Photos: Brazil's first car, the three-wheeled Romi; the Chevy Volt]

Middlebury College: A Model For Rural Development?

BOULDER, Colorado -- Like every small rural community, Starksboro, Vermont is facing changes. No longer a remote locale, the sleepy farming community is being drawn into the orbit of the nearby city of Burlington, and there is increasing pressure to develop and build on agricultural land.

To help it cope with these challenges, the town has enlisted the help of nearby Middlebury College, my alma mater. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Middlebury has partnered with the Orton Foundation and the Vermont Land Trust to launch a project that will enlist undergraduates from an environmental studies course called "Portrait of a Vermont Town" to interview local people in Starksboro about how they they view their town's past, present and future.

The goal here is "enriching the context in which towns think about their planning process," according to Prof. John Elder, the course instructor. “The key is to project beyond immediate controversies over applications for subdivisions and to say, ‘Let’s envision the future that we would love to have,’ ” said Elder, “at which point there is considerable agreement.” The final product will be library transcripts that can then be employed by town planners as a valuable repository of public input.

When I attended Middlebury, I was constantly encouraged in my classes and extracurricular activities to engage with the local community, and to use this engagement as both an opportunity for learning and to make meaningful impacts. As a geography major, we were constantly doing projects that revolved around local issues. The department has always played an important role in the development planning of both the college and the town, offering up expertise in Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing, as well as the more qualitative methods employed in this project. I personally conducted research on local flood mitigation and the Middlebury Police Department as an undergraduate; for my coursework in GIS and cartography, we did projects on issues such as preservation of historic buildings and finding suitable sites for industrial parks in Middlebury.

I would like to thank my professors at Middlebury, especially my advisor, Guntram Herb, for instilling this interest in the local community, and I hope I have carried on this commitment in my graduate school career and in my new surroundings. On the geography department website, you can see the local projects that students and faculty have been engaged in recently.

Watch Prof. Elder discuss the Starksboro project:



Thanks to Itchy, a fellow Middlebury alumnus, for the link.

How Saying S**t Can Save the World

BOULDER, Colorado -- Shit, especially the human kind, causes a lot of problems. In most countries, there are wholly inadequate systems for dealing with the stuff - there are no proper sanitation and treatment systems, let alone toilets for people to sit on. This causes all manner of public health problems, such as euphemistically-termed "waterborne diseases" and a lack of clean drinking water.

British journalist Rose George addresses these issues in her new book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. In it, she examines not only the big public health issues related to shit, but also the social factors that have allowed some societies to embrace solutions to the poo problem, while in others significant impediments remain.

One serious problem is that no one likes to talk about it. In English, there is no polite substitute for shit. "Excrement," "feces," and "waste" all have a ring of medical euphemism, and we can all use them without thinking about the product or the deed. Perhaps in American English, using the Britishism "shite," or the improper past tense of the verb, "shat," are less profane than straight-up "shit," but this is hardly a solution.

The word is entirely unspeakable in the news media, and mostly unprintable, though some newspapers have relaxed their arcane decency standards. Nothing doing for the New York Times, though, which refuses to print any form of profanity. In their interviews with George, they prefer instead to use the word "poop," repeatedly, than allow the stain of "shit" on the Gray Lady.

The Economist has a review of the book, as well as an audio interview with the author that is worth a listen - they use the word "shit" dozens of times, much to my delight.

So, we can logically conclude that the New York Times is giving millions of poor people cholera and dysentery.

What Magazine Titles Say About Russia

BOULDER, Colorado -- Every country has their fair share of stupid publications that probably should not exist - in the United States, U.S. News & World Report probably comes to mind first. Russia is no different.

Russia is facing a severe economic crisis. Its stock market is down 70% in the past six months, and oil prices have dipped below $50 per barrel. The country's richest men have seen nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars shaved off their collective net worth. As Miriam Elder reports in The Independent , Moscow's annual Millionaire's Fair was not the usual exuberant celebration of capitalism run amok. With America's own economy going in the toilet, our super-rich also seem to be turning away from ridiculous magazines about decadence.

Perhaps the age of the oligarchs as it an end. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ethic of the nouveau-riche has taken hold in Russia, as robber barons and criminals sought only to display their ostentation and extravagance, eschewing any notion that with wealth also comes some obligation (other than to the Kremlin). Perhaps. But Russia continues to churn out insipid magazines dedicated to this shameless pursuit of wealth and power. Here are five of my favorites, and what they tell us about contemporary Russia:

Golf Style Next

I first encountered this awkwardly-named magazine several years ago, and I guess it is about golf, and all the sexy, stylish things associated with golf. Someone needs to explain to Russians that yes, golf is a game for rich people, but it is also kind of a game for old people, and few would associate it with cutting-edge style. Like yachting and jet-ski racing, golf remains the ultimate status symbol, but I really don't see any potential for its popularity to take off in Russia anytime soon. There are currently about a half-dozen courses in the country, most of them are only nine holes, and all are located in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas. There are projects underway to build more, including a professional-quality, 27-hole course designed by British golfer Nick Faldo. The Russian Golf Federation even has an insane plan to build 500 courses in the country in the next 10 years. In the magazine's defense, they seem to have finally excised the nonsensical "Next" from the title, but their website remains an incomprehensible mishmash of Russian and English.

Snob.

Russian billionaire and accused human-trafficker Mikhail Prokhorov announced this past September that he would be launching a magazine with a provocatively dumb title, Snob. Despite our highest hopes, this title does not solely cater to the super-rich, with articles about the latest model jetpacks and vacations to Svenborgia, but is a more middle-brow affair aimed at professionals. It's too bad, because I was really hoping for a magazine that only Russia's 82 resident billionaires subscribed to. Even so, the title continues the irritating practice of adopting English words into Russian (as almost all these titles do), and it promotes the idea that snobbery and elitism should be embraced.

Sex and the City

Russia has already been cursed with their own version of this tedious program, and now they have a Sex and the City magazine as well, something we can't even claim in the US. The Russian television program, called The Balzac Age, or All Men Are Basta--, was never as celebratory of casual sex or unsustainable shoe consumption (one of the characters drives a gypsy cab) as its American counterpart, so maybe this magazine will survive Russia's economic collapse. It's your standard fare for a women's magazine - articles about how to bone Sergei Lazarev and about marriage by radical writer Eduard Limonov.

Cosmo Магия (Magic)

This magazine is part of the Cosmopolitan brand and is published by Independent Media, one of Russia's largest magazine publishers. I have read this magazine, talked to people who work there, and I still cannot figure out what the hell it is supposed to be about. It has something to do with magic, or horoscopes, or psychology - honestly, it can be hard to tell the difference between those things in Russia sometimes. This is how I-Media describes the title: "This magazine is targeted at educated, successful women who are trying to understand themselves and find inner harmony, beauty and energy." Granted, this is probably no more vague than the PR crap most English-language magazines generate, but I would still like to know what the "magic" is all about.

Ultras Life Magazine

No matter what happens to the price of oil or the financial markets, Russians will always have their national pastime - soccer hooliganism. Luckily for them, there is now a magazine dedicated to it, Ultras Life Magazine. "Ultras" refers to the extreme soccer fanatics - it was a term first used in Italy for the totally awesome club supporters who killed cops and assaulted rival teams' players. So, if you're not in the mood to read about astrology or the new Gulfstream jets, you can read about who's skull got cracked at the latest Dynamo-Zenit match.

[The Independent: Millionaire's Fair: Oligarchs on their uppers]
[Gawker: The Future of Luxury Magazines]

Very Small Array: National Rail Line

BOULDER, Colorado -- The folks over at Very Small Array have made a map of America's passenger rail network, and added an intriguing component - what if the network were run completely with high-speed trains?

This map shows the travel time between cities traveling by train at 240 km/hour (roughly 149 mph). The distances are estimated, as they are based on Google Maps driving distances rather than the actual rail routes. As you can see in the comments, there might be some discrepancies in distances and times recorded here, but it is still nice to dream, isn't it?


This map illustrates, however, that an important problem remains - the network of rail lines available for passenger traffic, whether on high-speed or conventional trains, remains woefully inadequate.

Roast Beef and Leftover Turkey: Michael Lewis' "The End"

WINDSOR LOCKS, Connecticut -- In the December issue of Portfolio, Michael Lewis chronicles the Wall Street collapse and ensuing global financial crisis, tracing its roots back to the financial innovations - and excesses - of the 1980's.

The article opens with some reflections on his brief career at Salomon Brothers 20 years ago, an experience he described in his book Liar's Poker:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

In an earlier post, we discussed how this may have, in fact, come to pass as the big downtown firms gut their staffs. Hopefully, the chaff has been discarded, and the truly talented remain, though the reckoning came several decades too late, and at far too high a cost. Let's hope, for the sake of us all, that an Ivy League diploma and a letter in varsity lacrosse are no longer the most important qualifications for a six-figure salary on Wall Street.

Here's another tip, courtesy of my father: never invest your money with a publicly-traded investment firm. People are far less likely to screw around when their own money is on the line. And former Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund - the man that took his firm public, a move that was soon followed by most of the big investment banks - basically admits that they started screwing around. "When things go wrong, it’s [the shareholders'] problem."

No, John, you dumb shit. It's everybody's problem now.

Turkey Day Update: Gozzi's Turkey Farm

QUECHEE, Vermont -- The turkey is in the oven, the Lions are losing 38-10, and we are all waiting for my brother - it must be Thanksgiving.

Watching Sarah Palin visit a turkey farm brought back memories of picking out a turkey for Thanksgiving as a kid. Growing up in Connecticut, the only place to buy your turkey was Gozzi's Turkey Farm, located along Route 1 in Guilford. The place was always best known for the pastel-colored birds they had roaming a pen in front of their store (pictured above). Though the birds look radioactive, Gozzi's developed one of the most delicious and popular local varieties of turkey, the Gozzi White, without the use of hormones or genetic modification. It has been a family-run business since the 1940's, and founder William Gozzi's wife began coloring the display birds during the company's early days to attract customers.

Finally, can the Detroit Lions get in on the auto industry's government bailout package?

Thanksgiving Special: Hard Time Killin' Cone Blues

BROOKLYN, New York -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin can't seem to catch a break. After a vice-presidential campaign that all but the Bible-thumping-est of the GOP would rather forget, she was part of a gruesome and comical scene back in her hometown of Wasilla on Friday.

Palin came to the Triple D Farm & Hatchery to take part in an annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony. Unfortunately, local TV station KTUU filmed an interview with her in which birds were being butchered rather unceremoniously in the background.



This latest piece of political theater got me to thinking - how exactly do you kill a turkey? The man in the background was doing his best to be discrete about the grisly deed he was engaged in, apparently unsure if he was actually being captured in the frame (though he was so confident that he wasn't, after dispatching the first fowl, he came back with a second while the interview was still going on), so I thought I would investigate the business of turkey slaughtering.

Killing a turkey is a simple process. In this case, the turkeys were being slaughtered with the aid of a device called a "killing cone," which holds the birds in place as their throats are cut. The cone prevents the turkeys from thrashing around (though as you can see, they still tend to move quite a bit) and allows the blood to drain cleanly into the receptacle beneath.

Blue Oak Ranch, an organic poultry farm in Santa Barbara, California that raises "heritage poultry" - traditional varieties of birds that have not been genetically modified - describes their "hand processing" by means of a killing cone:

A bird is placed in the cone headfirst to restrain it during the killing process. I find the killing cones especially useful for the larger turkeys. My cone is a modified road cone - I find it a better size for processing large framed birds like turkeys than the smaller metal cones available commercially. All but the largest toms can fit in a generously sized road cone! Killing cones also restrain the bird better and prevent bruising of the carcass as the bird convulses. Simply chopping their heads off is messy - blood goes everywhere and can be aspirated back into the lungs. It also makes it hard to restrain the birds, and it flopping around can bruise the meat and even break wing and leg bones in the process, leaving an unappetizing appearance.

Many companies manufacture commercial killing cones, though a traffic cone with the end cut off will get the job done just fine. For a mature turkey, a cone 20" deep and 12" across is recommended.

Before birds can be slaughtered, by law they must be stunned - supposedly a more humane killing method - either by use of an electric shock or by a swift stab to the brain. In large commercial operations, birds have their throats cut along a conveyor belt and are suspended upside down by leg shackles. They then pass through what is called a "killing" or "bleeding tunnel," which is a large metal cabinet where most of the blood is drained from the body.

Back to the Palin fiasco, the cameraman responsible for the footage claims that he asked the governor if she wanted to move so the killing cone was out of the shot, to which she responded, "No worries," and the interview went forward from the same spot.

It appears as if most of the reporting on this story is actually being done by the evening entertainment news programs. Entertainment Tonight reported that the Palin camp is denying that the cameraman asked if the governor would like to move so the butchery was not in the shot, claiming they had no idea what was going on in the background. Even the television audience can clearly hear the bird struggling in the stainless steel death chute, so Palin and her staff must have been struck by an electric stunning knife (another implement used to kill poultry) if they couldn't hear that racket.

Another of America's favorite infotainment television nightmares, Inside Edition, managed to snap up an exclusive interview with the farmhand immortally captured on Youtube, Brian Tomes. He described his valiant efforts: "I thought they had panned in on her face…I did try and block the process," adding the nonsequitur, "Don't mess with my governor!" I didn't manage to catch this program, though I usually like to catch up on my celebrity rehab stories after Jeopardy! I will venture a guess that this segment lasted approximately 11 seconds. Great reporting, as always, IE!

Of course, the American people will fall into two camps over this story. Either they will believe that Sarah Palin is again the victim of a vast liberal media conspiracy to wreck her public image, or they will believe that she is blood-thirsty imbecile who revels in watching animals twitch in the throes of death. I think she just needs to be a bit more aware of her surroundings, and she should probably fire her entire incompetent staff.

Finally, for your listening pleasure, Skip James performing "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues."

Happy Thanksgiving, America! Eat turkey and stuffing until you pass out while watching football - my game of choice this week will definitely be the Egg Bowl, Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State in Oxford.

CNN, Congress Want All to Experience Joy of Air-Traffic Delays

NEW YORK, New York -- Coverage of the "bailout" the Big Three US automakers are requesting has pivoted in recent days on the fact that the companies' CEOs took private jets to Washington. I have primarily watched CNN's reporting and can say that Anderson Cooper & Co. have emphatically reminded viewers at every turn that "these guys took private jets to Washington!"

I agree that Rick Wagoner and Bob Nardelli are probably morons. Not only are they unfit to run large corporations, they probably aren't even fit to attend a PTA conference: You'd have to be a social twit to fly your Learjet to DC when asking for a taxpayer handout, whether or not your corporate charter has provisions stipulating private airtravel for you for "safety reasons."


Mr Wagoner, does GM make a short bus for you?

Still, CNN's near-obsession with Bob Nardelli's preferred mode of transportation obscures a much more important point: millions of jobs, municipal and state budgets, dozens of industries connected in seemingly arcane ways to the automotive sector, and a nation's morale all hinge on the existence of the US auto industry.

What happens to the industry is unclear. In order to be long-term competitive, union contracts will have to be ripped up, and bankruptcy is as good a way as any to welch on your contracts. But if the automakers go into Chapter 11 protection, they'll need to get new financing to restructure after getting rid of the union agreements that are crippling them. Their ability to find financing at this particularly lousy moment is ... not so hot. The government would save the country a lot of pain -- and probably more than $25bn in long-term unemployment checks, Medicaid/Medicare expenses and lost tax revenue -- if it would guarantee to bail out any automaker that goes into bankruptcy, provided they meet certain demands (rewrite your labor contracts, fire your incompetent CEOs, start making your European fuel-efficient models here now). But the government's coy little patty-cake game is stupid. Grilling the automakers and refusing to definitively say to what fate you'll sentence them creates uncertainty and drags down the markets. And after Lehman Brothers' demise, I doubt many people have faith the government will always step in when it should.

In light of that, harping on the aloof, Asberger's tendencies of auto CEOs does little more than push the public -- and therefore lawmakers, who seem unable to buck what they think will be popular anger against unpopular decisions -- against any bailout for reasons that have nothing to do with the soundness of the bailout itself. That's hella dumb.

Before turning the country against this proposal, Silver Fox Cooper and his ilk should consider not whether the CEOs of these companies took private jets or whether they have fancy suits (most CEOs of the world's top companies do, after all, and you can't expect to convince JPMorgan to lend you money when you fly coach and wear Skidz), but whether the bailout has merits of its own.


Clowns to Cooper: Get us back on the Gold Standard!

I don't know if it will lead to a depression, but allowing a major company like GM to fall apart now certainly won't help us avoid one. At this point, we should probably not take any chances in doing everything possible to move away from that outcome, and we shouldn't flirt with depression because of the fact that a few inept CEOs are too obtuse to fly JetBlue. Judging their stupidity should not be substituted for judging the merits of this country having an auto industry and the harm its collapse would bring to the US economy and people's confidence in the economy or themselves.

Chinese Democracy Finally Achieved

BROOKLYN, New York -- Chinese Democracy has finally come to pass. No, the People's Republic of China has not had free and fair national elections, nor has it permitted an independent press, or the free exercise of religion. Rather, Axl Rose and company have finally completed their record that was more than 17 years in the making.

Expect there to be mass arrests of Chinese Guns N' Roses fans who are just trying to use the Internet to find out more about their favorite band.

The New York Times likens Mr. Rose to another singer who had a catastrophic meltdown which led to years and years of promising an album that never came, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. Rose has shaken that monkey off his back, but as the Guardian described in 2004 - Shields' first interview in 12 years - he was still saddled by an inability to finish off the follow-up to 1991's Loveless, as well as being surrounded by a dozens of chinchillas.

UPDATE: It appears as if Guns N' Roses has genuinely raised the ire of the Chinese authorities. According to the Economist, the Global Mail, a communist party newspaper, said the album was part of a Western plot "to control the world using democracy as a pawn." The government has blocked access to websites related to the band, and not just to the forbidden search term of the new album's title.

Axl Rose does mention the banned religious group Falun Gong in his lyrics, as well as the violent suppression of dissidents. Overall the album is an absurdly overproduced shriekfest devoid of political substance, but it looks like it won't be officially distributed in China - that probably won't stop anybody for getting it who wants it, though.