Yuksek - Tonight

DoCoMo P905i

Bored. Just a nice phone running Linux.



Panasonic, the Japanese giant electronics producer, showcased at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, its Panasonic VIERA P905i mobile phone (or simply Panasonic P905i), a handset that packs lots of evolved features and can stand beside any other high-end phone. Panasonic P905i offers a splendid 3.2 inch VIERA display with a 480 x 854 pixel resolution and a 2000:1 contrast ratio, hence being one of the best TV phones released until now. The handset is 1-Seg compatible, allowing users to watch a wide range of TV programs, and it can be opened both as a normal clamshell and in a TV mode, to offer an excellent viewing experience. Weighing 137 grams and measuring 106 x 49 x 18.5 millimeters (when closed), Panasonic P905i comes with a simple but elegant design and is one of the first phones that runs on the LiMo open source Linux OS. The TV phone offers HSDPA connectivity for data transfer speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps, built-in GPS, video and audio players, a 5.1 Megapixel camera with image stabilizer and video recording at 30 frames per second, and a secondary VGA camera for video calls. Panasonic VIERA P905i in TV mode Enlarge picture On WCDMA networks, the phone can provide 580 hours of stand-by time and 200 minutes of talk-time, while on GSM networks it can offer 260 hours of stand-by time and up to 190 minutes of talk-time. Panasonic P905i is currently available (as FOMA P905i) only via NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile operator in Japan, in black, white, red and pink-gold. However, I assume it can be used by consumers from other countries too, since it's a quad-band GSM / 3G phone.

Kyteman's Circus

Hip-hop, some electronica and a twenty man orchestra: Kyteman.



I am not easily impressed, but I am now. (kyteman@last.fm - I like French hip-hop so check out 'Un Seule Fois'; I also love Austrian hip-hop, but that's another story.)

Mobile Types for Mobile Code

Something I once dwelled upon: using modal logic to reason over mobile code. A PhD dissertation by Tom Murphy.



Modal logic allows for reasoning about truth from multiple simultaneous perspectives. These perspectives, called “worlds,” are identified with the locations in the distributed program. This enables the programming language to be simultaneously aware of the various hosts involved in a program, their local resources, and their differing perspectives on each other’s code and data. This leads to a clean and general type structure for programs that respects locality while permitting high-level language features.

Childs' Play

Last in a series of Geo-financial jokes trying to get my head around Economy 101 which I never followed.



It's a thing all children do: If you lose the game, you change the rules. In this article by Buffet et al., a tit-for-tat scheme is proposed to get US import and export balanced. A slightly more cynical view in a replay among two rivalling countries: Rice Land and Wheat Land.


Rice Land and Wheat Land are two countries of roughly the same size producing rice and grain. Both countries worship the Goddess of Finance which, in a divine intervention, placed magical machines in both temples. These machines, when prayed to, produce paper called Rice bucks and Wheat bucks used as currency.

The farmers of Rice Land are conservative hard-working savers and produce more than the life-enjoying Wheat Landers. For a generation, the Wheat Landers import rice and celebrate their fortune and easy living style. When needed, they turn to the temple and pray for Wheat bucks which they trade for rice.

The Rice Landers are at first very happy by their accumulated wealth, but become unhappy that they have to stash this unfortunate amount of bucks in their farms. The Wheat Landers propose a solution: they will stash the Wheat bucks in return for IOUs over which the Rice Landers will receive interest. The Wheat Landers find themselves pretty smart since they now have more money to buy rice and just need to prey to their Goddess for interest. Again, happy with this arrangement, both cultures thrive although the Wheat Land's fields become barren and their tools rusty.

After another generation, the Rice Landers again become unsettled by this arrangement. Their assumed number of owned Wheat bucks in IOUs grows and grows, but they wonder whether they cannot strike a saver deal with the Wheat Landers who are now almost fanatical in their worship of their Goddess. They start buying farms in Wheat Land which they rent back and start making a sizeable profit.

After a decade, Wheat Landers are getting annoyed. For some reason, they need to carry around bags of bucks to buy the smallest items and they are not enjoying the demands for production of their new masters. Some bright priests decide that it must have been the result of over-worshipping. The priests enforce a tit-for-tat scheme: A fixed amount of bucks may be spend and earned across the border. The amount is fixed with special tokens sold at the temple.

Within a few years, Wheat Landers are angry because they now need to work hard for their own consumption, and Rice Landers are furious because they thought they could retire but are still working hard and, internally competing, spend exorbitant amounts of Wheat bucks to buy grain tokens. They start to scoff at each other over the border, go to war, and both countries are burned to the ground in a hail of flamy arrows.


Will it happen? Probably not. But given this thought experiment, one might as well derive some laws and trends:

1. The ICs as proposed by Buffet are a thought experiment, but they do exactly the same as a hefty import tax combined with substantial export subsidies.
   


2. The US will not pay for Chinese or European pensions because it is not profitable for them to do so. It won't be ICs but a range of protective measures which will protect the US economy.
   


3. Lastly, most surprisingly, the most unsettling factor to world peace is not a bunch of Afghan goat-herders, puzzled by an exercise in misplaced American anger-management, but the US wallet.
   

(The good part of Buffet's proposal is that if all economies would implement such a scheme, no nation can accumulate wealth at the expense of another.)

Retirement

In the table below, import/export numbers in million dollars, volume number (gross estimate of economic activity), and ratio between import and export. The US builds up a trade deficit of about half a trillion dollars a year. China almost saves that amount a year and now holds about two trillion dollars of currency in banks, mostly invested in US debt.

---

Country	Import	Export	Volume	Ratio
United States	1,968,000	1,477,000	3,445,000	4:3
European Union	1,466,000	1,330,000	2,796,000	10:9
China	904,600	1,465,000	2,369,600	6:10

---

Ultimately, all money has to flow back to the country which issued it. Ultimately, all money can only be transferred into goods as exported by the country which issued it. Although, of course, the dollar is the currency of the world which means that there is a very large buffer before inflation will set in. Asians are increasingly investing in resource options, so they may be ahead of that problem - i.e., a large number of dollars will be milled around as oil for Asian cars.

Two trillion -if they didn't loose it- at, say 4%, means that the Chinese can now import 80,000 million dollars worth of products without doing anything. The Chinese hardly use that money to invest in their own economy. Why would they: They are the #1 rulers of the world according to their own standards and we should be made to serve them at some point. I wonder how many generation they need to starve before they can live like kings, import all goods by interest alone. Like, one or two?

(Why didn't it happen earlier?)

Hillary 'visits' China

Hilary Clinton is visiting China to talk about the financial crisis, trade, and human rights.

The US needs access to the wealth of US dollars owned by the Chinese which is the by-product of years of running a trade deficit. The Chinese need the American economy to run to achieve their economic goals, and stop the declining growth of their industrial expansion to avoid local unrest.

By borrowing Chinese dollars, the US has again grow their debt, but might also have set up future generations with an enormous task of paying back interest. American 'winner' mentality dictates that this cannot happen.

Nothing is what it seems. China is hardly a communist nation. In essence, it is closer to a imperialistic feudal technocrat society where in a one-party system the biggest manipulative technocrat 'entrepeneur' ends up on top. By standards, it more resembles one big capitalistic Coca-Cola Inc. than a European social state.

I have little doubt what will happen. The Chinese will keep on investing their money in the US but will strike a hard bargain in diplomatic currency. And not even improbable, given Chinese tradition, the actual ROI on their supplied capital will never be known.

A new Chinese-American symbioses will grow if the Chinese will agree to the right bargain, and the Europeans risk being not part of that profitable deal.