Category Archives: Politics

Purchasing Chemicals from China

Leave a reply

I’m having to search far-off China for raw materials much more frequently these days. The availability of many US manufactured chemicals is slowly falling off.  Especially for really basic materials.  I’m not referring to those mundane elements like iron or soda ash or copper. No no. materials from the folds and deep recesses of the periodic table. Elements with relativistic electrons.  There are short term economic pluses and minuses to this migration of manufacturing.

On the plus side, Chinese prices are often, well,  quite low. Even with multimodal freight charges from across the Pacific. When you pay peasants fresh off the farm $40/month (or whatever insane wage it is), you can undercut nearly everyone in pricing. 

But there is a down side to spot buying from China.  This is to be distinguished from contract purchasing.  In contract purchasing, you work out an agreement with a manufacturer and you lock in quality, price, and delivery in exchange for long term business.  Spot buying, however, is much more risky. What do I mean by that?

Spot buying is where you find a merchant supplier who can furnish material without the fuss and obligations of a contract.  Either they have it in inventory, they can source it quickly, or they themselves will make it pronto.  A supply contract has to be managed or enforced.  For raw materials that are less than critical, finding a spot supplier makes sense. 

Locating a spot supplier in China that you can trust is problematic. I’m not suggesting that Chinese suppliers are dishonest.  I am saying, however, that culling out a supplier from a list of unfamiliar names from the other side of the world without the benefit of a site visit or a Dunn and Bradstreet report can be risky. Spot buying anywhere is risky, but when it is complicated by international transactions, the risk multiplies a bit.

It is relatively easy to find contacts on the web that will reply to an RFQ (request for quotation) by email (often “hotmail” accounts) and make an offer.  But what you find is that you may be in contact with an agent of some description in an office suite in Shanghai, far from the factory.  Indeed, it is hard to tell just what the relationship is between the factory and your contact.  To salve over some of the uncertainty westerners may have, it is common now for these web contacts take on western names. 

Brokering goods is common in some parts of the world and scarce in others.  In the USA, brokering chemicals is fairly uncommon.  Most US companies prefer to do bulk business with the manufacturer or a catalog house.   Sigma Aldrich, for instance, is both a catalog company and a manfacturer of bulk and semi-bulk materials.  Purchasing from a broker (as opposed to a distributor) rather than the manufacturer will add costs to the transaction.  A broker is someone who connects the purchaser with the supplier.  Usually they perform drop shipments to the purchaser directly from the manufacturer.  A broker is a sort of “free agent” sales group.

I have found that there is a greater reliance on brokering in Asia and to a lesser extent, the EU.  The internet has made life a bit trickier for brokers in that a search for manufacturers is a lot less painful than it used to be.

A company will work through a broker for several reasons. Brokers are usually specialists, so a company can tap into considerable expertise in supply chain management.  And, the broker only gets paid if they find a qualifying supplier, so a manufacturer could conceivably keep the head count down. Brokers might be better at the intricacies of negotiation as well.  There are a lot of tough guys running companies out there who are actually poor negotiators.

These agents seem to work in organizations that carry on the sales and marketing activity for a factory or a series of factories.  In addition to unfamiliar business practices, there is the matter of payment.  Many Chinese companies want prepayment- they do not automatically offer 30 days net.  This makes company controllers and project managers nervous.  Since this is an international transaction, customary business laws covering remedies are not applicable. In other words, you can get royally screwed. But from their perspective, it is the same issue.  So settling into a supply relationship can take time.

To the Moon!

4 Replies

It is hard for most of us to tell but the US is in the early phases of a moon project.  It has adopted the same configuration of command module and lander as the Apollo program.  NASA intends to make a few exploratory missions lasting a week or so and then develop the capability for 180 day missions to the moon. This lunar “base” project is really a local rehearsal for a more ambitious manned Mars landing.  It is called the Constellation Mission. 

NASA has announced the development of two rockets for this mission- the Ares I and the Ares V.  The Ares I uses an in-line single solid rocket booster (SRB) for the first stage and a liquid propellant second stage to boost a 55,000 pound payload into low earth orbit.  Ares I is equipped with a emergency escape rocket in a tractor configuration analogous to Apollo.  As stated in the website, Ares I will be used to put the crew module in orbit for rendezvous with the ISS or cargo modules. 

The Ares V uses two SRB motors strapped to a liquid first stage engine in a fashion similar to the space shuttle. But the crew module will not be on this system.  Ares V is a cargo lifter and will carry 286,000 lbs of mass into low earth orbit.

NASA will be retiring the space shuttle system in a few years. The next man-lifter will be Ares I.  Evidently their faith in the SRB system is high.

That sucking sound heard around NASA these days is the sound of money being pulled from all over the agency and being dumped into this program. We’re going back to the moon, but with no real increase in funding.  Program managers are nervous. 

Alberto Gonzales as Jungian Archetype

Leave a reply

For a good essay on the Alberto Gonzales mess, see The Smirking Chimp.  Th’ Gaussling has been searching for a Jungian archetype representing people who are “never in doubt, but frequently wrong”.  Maybe Gonzo is the man. 

There have been many possible nominees in the Bush II administration- POTUS, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc. But Gonzo seems to be the most tragic of the lot.

Note to future generations: I was going to further criticize POTUS, but given that he is sure to be savaged by historians, I’ll just stand clear and let experts have at it.

Dammit. The three horses I bet on in the Kentucky Derby all lost.

Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburgers

2 Replies

I suppose I have lost more frequently than I have won in my lifelong avocation of taking on sacred cows in the battle of wits.  But, truly, sacred cows make the very best hamburgers.  Pass the A1 …

Some new blogs have been given a place of honor in the blogroll.  Good writing and laser sharp insight are the keys to this ascendency. If the dear reader is conservative and prone to weeping or bed wetting, it is probably best to click along at this point.  

There is a hilarious post over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money called Birthday Girl.  Side note: A lawyer friend is fond of saying “Lawyers, guns, and money- pick any two”.  

And then, what can I say about Jesus’ General?  Read General JC’s letter to the Secret Service re Cheryl Crow.  If you are keen on some serious in-your-face-atheism, check out Hellbound Allee. Then there is one of the best Christian evangelical lampoons ever, Landover Baptist. 

The Huffington Post is a recent find and is a treasure trove of political blogging at its finest- well, if you are a liberal.  Read the open letter to Rudy Giuliani by my fellow Coloradoan, Gary Hart. 

Then there is the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.  The post on the Do-Nothing Machine is particularly amusing.  The reader may recall Th’ Gaussing’s previous post on the Katzenklavier. 

Finally, The Agonist has some interesting insights into politics and is well written. I also like Goosing the Antithesis for its skeptical stand against belief in the supernatural.

Jane Goodall

2 Replies

Went to a public lecture by Jane Goodall last night. The arena was packed.  She and members of her institute have found a type of formula for combining conservation and economic growth.  At some point she realized that you can’t sell conservation in a vacuum.  People who live near fragile preserves like Gombe have to make a living.  They need food and firewood. 

Human population pressures also threaten the shrinking wildlife preserves all over the world and in Africa in particular. One way to encourage lower population growth is to look after public health and, in particular, the welfare of women. They’ve noticed that families naturally tend to have fewer babies when infant mortality rates lower. Lower mortality rates can be achieved through the application of very fundamental improvements in hygiene and health care.

One of the critical approaches they are taking in Africa is to improve the life of women through micro loans.  This has proven effective in many other parts of the world and Goodall reports it is having a beneficial effect in Africa as well.

As I sat and listened to the lecture, I was overcome with the futility of our ever increasing consumerism.  Take our collective response to the increasing scarcity of petroleum.   The big ideas seem to involve finding new ways to sustain high consumption- e.g., the replacement of petroleum with ethanol or hydrogen.  The idea that we might have to throttle back our per capita consumption of stuff extracted from the ground is ignored.

Well, of course the national stage isn’t filled with people promoting reduced consumption.  There is no money in reducing demand. Who wants to hear that? 

Minimally, the USA must go the way of Europe in terms of lower average consumption.  Higher population density combined with higher priced energy will lead to more modest consumption of goods due to lifestyles adjusting to scarcity. 

Bush II. Sphericated or Flaticular?

2 Replies

Here along the front range of the Rocky Mountains we have a few alternative newspapers available- you know, the kind not owned by Rupert Murdoch. They tend to be a bit Bohemian and consequently are shunned by righteous Dittoheads. Other parts of the country have them as well- college towns mostly. They cater to those of us who aren’t afraid to be known as liberals.  These papers run a syndicated cartoon called This Modern World by a guy known as Tom Tomorrow. 

Because of copyright issues, I’ll have to link to the site rather than paste an image.   

Happy 100th Birthday Albert Hoffmann!!

2 Replies

Albert Hoffmann, the discoverer of LSD, turned 100 years old this year on Juanary 11th.  Happy Birthday, Albert!  Scienceblogs.com relates the story of Hoffmann’s first deliberate LSD trip on April 19th, 1943.  You might recall that Hoffmann was the Sandoz chemist who stumbled upon the psychotropic activity of lysergic acid diethylamide.  

Just this last week, the medical journal The Lancet called for an end to the “demonization” of psychedelic drugs, according to Guardian Unlimited.  The motivation behind the editorial in the Lancet was to urge a loosening of taboo’s connected with the use of psychedelic compounds.  The widespread criminalization of psychedelics has made research with these interesting molecules quite problematic. 

Perhaps the day will come when such materials are decriminalized and it will be possible to visit a psychedelic spa where one could go to have a safe dosage administered by qualified staff.  But it wouldn’t be all fun and games, though.  While the euphoric experience can be prolonged and profoundly vivid, there is a dark side.  An account of the experience of the psychiatrist Werner Stoll is described in Chapter 4 of Hoffmanns book “LSD. My Problem Child”.

Hoffmann and Sandoz would watch their discovery move from a psychiatric adjunct to a full fledged inebriant adopted by a counter culture movement.  In his book, Hoffmann laments-

    This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. It was strange how rapidly LSD adopted its new role as inebriant and, for a time, became the number-one inebriating drug, at least as far as publicity was concerned. The more its use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm.

    It was obvious that a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the outer and inner world would also arouse interest outside medical science, but I had not expected that LSD, with its unfathomably uncanny, profound effects, so unlike the character of a recreational drug, would ever find worldwide use as an inebriant. I had expected curiosity and interest on the part of artists outside of medicine-performers, painters, and writers-but not among people in general. After the scientific publications around the turn of the century on mescaline-which, as already mentioned, evokes psychic effects quite like those of LSD-the use of this compound remained confined to medicine and to experiments within artistic and literary circles. I had expected the same fate for LSD. And indeed, the first non-medicinal self-experiments with LSD were carried out by writers, painters, musicians, and other intellectuals.

Today, psychedelic substances are considered to be drugs of abuse and their use will lead to a long stay at the Gray Bar Hotel. Our Puritanical heritage seems everlasting. But rather than wallow in pity for my unenlightened brothers and sisters, I look forward to a brighter future where one could sit in a licensed psychotropic suite and explore the deepest recesses of consciousness brought out in full non-linear display, say, while listening to music. Everybody associates acid rock with LSD. That’s too easy. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to listen to Leon Redbone in an altered state of consciousness.  Kinda curious about what a baritone sax does to a brain on acid.  Or David Bowie- Major Tom.  I’m showing my age. 

Yet another mass shooting in our USA

10 Replies

The news of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech just seems to get worse as the day wears on.  There aren’t words to describe it. 

After the grisly scene in Blacksburg is cleaned up and the bodies are buried, we’ll once again switch on the TV and watch programming glamorizing gun-toting tough guys and violence. Not a night goes by on television where some plot isn’t based on the menacing of women by crazed or angry men, most with guns.  Some people will solve problems with guns and others will cause problems with guns.  The message is that guns bring satisfaction and command respect. Just look at the very title of the series The Sopranos and listen to the lyrics.  “Woke up this mornin’ and got myself a gun …”

Maybe there is no causal connection between entertainment and what this shooter did.  But I cannot help but believe that the more or less constant exposure to violence in our entertainment doesn’t dull our sensibilities and lower our threshold for what constitutes acceptable behaviour.  Regardless, we have to start somewhere and cleaning up our tastes in entertainment is relatively painless.  We need to create less demand for this crude stuff.

Obviously, the shooter is responsible for the murders, not the inanimate steel mechanism.  But the common fascination we have with the gun and it’s stylized, even mythical, application means that this mechanical device has some kind of hold on us.  Its ease of use and its ability to deliver death from a great distance makes it possible for anyone to deem themselves a “warrier” for a few minutes.

We are horrified by such violence when it is real. But we entertain ourselves with painstakingly elaborate dramatizations of it.  We are gratified to watch fictional characters engage in gunplay with bad guys.  We cheer as fictional cops rough up suspects because, as we all know, bad guys really shouldn’t have rights. 

There is no mysterious or complex phenomenon to sort out here. Our American culture has a form of fragmented personality disorder with respect to gun violence.  I don’t know if it’ll do a damned bit of good, but we need to come down from the saturation level of violence in our entertainment and recreation. The first thing we must do is to remove a bit of the glamor of gunplay. 

We don’t have to give up our guns.  But we do need to develop a new viewpoint or an advanced ethos about them. We need new icons and archetypes.  It is time to retire CSI and The Sopranos as popular iconography.  We must find better ways to fulfill our self image and need for power besides being handy with a gun.  How do other societies do it?  Any suggestions??

Here is an interesting link to a rebuttal in the Daily Kos written by someone said to be from VT.

Bush Administration’s Soldiers of Fortune

Leave a reply

Lordy.  The very notion that our federal executive branch is managing a contractor army to promulgate its policies, apparently outside of the oversight of the legislative branch, is the kind of revelation that takes your breath away.  

The presence and extent of mercenaries, or commercial warriers, has been popping up in the news lately.  This video is given by Jeremy Scahill, an investigative reporter at The Nation.  The Bush II administration has placed soldiers of fortune in Iraq (and elsewhere?) whose fundamental operating sensibilities may be rooted in their company Articles of Incorporation rather than the ideals of a nation state.  On a recent edition of Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Scahill and he recounted some chilling observations related to the emergence of the private army business.

No doubt, the DoD has a thousand page contract and hard drives full of MIL-Spec terms and conditions that a contractor must abide by.  But the contractors are well paid for their trouble. 

What the people of the United States lose, apparently, is accountability.  One of the reasons a nation state has a military is to promulgate foreign policy.  The checks and balances and the separation of powers provided for in the US Constitution assure that power is shared and that there is accountability by each of the branches. However, what we have here is a circumstance whereby one branch of government has war-zone contractors obligated to the DoD, which is under control of the Executive Branch.  Exactly what is their status in regard to congressional oversight?

Let me clarify my point. It isn’t clear that there is anything inherently wrong with the US government hiring militarized contractors.  However, everything is wrong when we hire military contractors who are hidden from, or are not subject to our system of checks and balances.  It is doubly true when we ask these people to expend ammunition on our behalf.

What US law covers the conduct of US military contractors in a foreign conflict? What is their status if they are captured?  Would they be non-military combatants and be disqualified from international law covering the humane treatment of prisoners of war? Would other nations treat them like we treat the detainees at Gitmo- i.e., criminals with no rights or due process? 

What rights here at home do these folks have in comparison to US military veterans?  Do not the people of the US owe some debt of gratitude for their sacrifice? I think so.  Will Haliburton or Blackwater see to their medical needs in 20 years? Good questions.  The federal government, for all of its flaws, does have resources that function over multi-decade timeframes. 

Whereupon Gaussling spoke in allegory

Leave a reply

After a deep but unrestful slumber, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood. I cannot account for exactly how I came to be in this gloomy place. It is a hard thing to grasp even now.  As I look back to that dark encampment, my heart quickens at the knowledge of what is to follow.  

After many hours of climbing through the dense thicket, I chanced upon a path that lead through the gloom to a valley whose hilltops glistened in the morning sunlight.  As I trod over a small hillock to the opening of the valley, I spotted a jackal some distance ahead in the path before me.  I stopped to rest for a while and ponder the situation. As I rested, the fearful animal disappeared into the tall grass of the glade.  Having lost some of my weariness, I again took to the sinuous path in the direction of the now rising sun.

The day wore on and the shadows retreated to their origin under the noonday sun. I began to notice large, flat field stones along the path.  As I continued my journey, they became greater in number and were festooned with a great many lichen encrusted runes. The stones were partially buried and had evidently been organized at some time in the distant past.  I am familiar with many styles of writing and symbols, but these marks were decidedly odd. Not only were they unfamiliar, but they were chisled by a hand accustomed to a wholly different way of using language.  I found one particularly large stone with a great many markings on it.  As I looked at the marks, I stepped around it to view the runes from different directions, trying to ascertain some form of structure and syntax.

What could these stones represent? After some time, I began to note that certain markings were found elsewhere, though in different combinations. Perhaps through inattention I wandered from the path for some distance into the glade.  Finally, shaken from the enchantment of these stones I tried to regain my bearings. I struck off in the direction of a nearby col in the mountains, hoping to intercept the path by sundown. 

As I broke a trail through the high grass a moving shape caught my attention.  It was on the left side of my view and may have only been a bird taking flight from a shrub. I had nearly forgotten about the curious animal I spotted earlier in the day, so the movement startled me.  Was it a shy visitor or a predator? Trying to take my mind off this unpleasant topic, my mind returned to the runes. What could they be saying?

[With apologies to Dante Alighieri- Th’ Gaussling]