Silicon steppe

Via Slashdot, I find this interesting article about Russia pumping money into a high-tech centre to rival Silicon Valley. It’s based around the existing academic centre of Akademgorodok, near Novisibirsk. I have a gut feeling that it won’t work… On the other hand, if they put money into a new tech centre in the Russian Far East, which I’ve been keeping an eye on ever since I started blogging, something might come of it; that’s potentially a much more happening area…

The heat…

Eek – got just back from practising Taiji outside the hall. I did a round of sword, then a round of fist, and then as I was bending down to pick up the sword from where I’d put it down on the ground, a VERY large spider scuttled away from underneath the handle… It didn’t go far, either; it stayed nearby, moving away slightly whenever I approached while I was going through the form…

Coming back, there were some Chinese students out running. I think I’ve mentioned before that the local students jog around midnight, when the temperature is lowest. This afternoon, I noticed a couple of Western girls jogging soon after noon… I don’t know what nationality they were, but anyway it made me think of Kipling – mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun, and all that.

And that in turn reminds me of an article in yesterday’s IHT, about the new Hindi, mixed with English, that is emerging in India. Very interesting for an outsider to read about how it is affecting relations between regions, classes and castes.

And, in the same edition, an article about the Russian Far East, which long-term readers will know I like to keep an eye on, because it’s such an interesting part of the world.

Change

I like the new navbar, but Blogger seems to have slowed down a lot in the last few days… The ‘next blog’ button is cool, it’s taking me to a lot of Singaporean blogs I didn’t know about before.

Last year I wrote a number of times about the Russian Far East, and I’ve been a bit quiet about it since, though I still think it’s going to be an important area. Anyhow, ATOL has a very interesting article today on the emerging Eurasian power bloc. At first glance, it’s about Russia – the only truly Eurasian country. On further reading, it’s about the growing concern in both Europe and Asia about the growing instability of the American economy, and the weakening of American military power, and how these countries are attempting to insulate themselves from the possibility of an American economic crash. Whether they can aspire to replace the US market as the consumer heart of the global economy is not the issue, just whether they can avoid going down with the States should the US economy implode…

Bloomberg, via the IHT, have an article on labor shortages in China. The article is mainly concerned with the inflationary effects of wage rises, and with the knock-on effect of higher wages on prices. However, one thing I take from it is that “Fewer workers are coming down from rural areas than in the old days”, because rural incomes have risen to the point where factory work is less attractive. Now I need to have more information, but my first reaction is that this is a positive thing in terms of China’s stability: one thing that has concerned the Chinese leadership (and should concern the rest of us) is that economic imbalances within China will lead to social and political instability. If the countryside is becoming wealthier, then China should be more stable. And that’s good.

Sun Zi wrote
With thorough and detailed planning, one can win
With less thorough or detailed planning, one cannot win
How much more certain is defeat when one does not plan at all!

Bear that in mind as you read this IHT article on the Najaf fighting. Apparently, the US marines just decided to escalate firefights into full-on conflict. They had no authorisation from senior officers, either American or Iraqi; they just wanted to fight. And caused a major rise in instability. For the second time. Someone needs to tell them: Just do it (see the article’s last page) is a trite three-word marketing slogan. It’s not supposed to be the basis for major military activities.

Ong Bak, Matrix, time

I’ve said all along that I have a plan B if the MBA application doesn’t work out. I now have a plan C, which looks very attractive indeed. I’m going to be actively looking into it over the next couple of weeks.

I had some visitors the other week from the UK. I’d been using the date of their visit as a target by when I should have lost x amount of weight. It hasn’t happened (hardly any weight loss, actually), but I do look a lot trimmer, thanks to the exercise.

I’ve found the most amazing shop, near the harbor here. I’ve bought a Russian Vostok KGB watch, mechanical, which has 1945 on the dial and quite a low serial number on the back. I’m far from convinced that these are genuine, but nevertheless, after a great deal of googling, I haven’t found anything online which looks like it. The back shows signs of damage, like it’s been ground hard by something (tank tracks? Just my imagination…). I’m intrigued,and even though I probably paid too much for it, I don’t mind; it feels like it has a story to it. I think this may well be a common trait; as a ‘computer guy’, spending most my time online, I like having things around me that are handmade and totally free from electronics… The guy who runs the shop was saying that he used to get lots of amazing stuff from Russian sailors, but now the small shipping lines have gone bankrupt and the big ones don’t call anymore, at least while he’s open.

I caught the Matrix Revolutions last night, on IMAX no less. Like Kill Bill, another film I’d been looking forward to, it was a great disappointment, Never mind that it left lots of questions unanswered: the spirit of the series has changed. After seeing the first one, I felt the message was that individual revelation was possible: maybe with the help of more advanced friends, each of us could ‘wake up’, along Buddhist or Daoist lines, and escape the rules on our quotidien existence. Watching Revolution, the message has changed: the individual is helpless, and can struggle but depends on an external ’savior’ to achieve change. I don’t like that message.

I did enjoy Ong Bak. This film is incredible! I don’t often laugh out loud whilst watching films. I don’t often find my jaw dropping in amazement. Both happened a lot while I was watching this film… If you are interested in martial arts in any way at all, you have to see this film.

I see that the UK, where I worked for some time, is changing its residency rules; citizens of lots of countries from the Asia-Pacific region are having their residency eligibility tightened. Of course, I can understand why the UK is doing this, but I nevertheless find it worrying: it’s a retreat from globalization, and globalization is good when it works to build an equal society of nations.. I’m an idealist, I know.

Tech, TESOL, East Asia, Iraq

Lots of interesting things to mention today.

It seems that Australia’s biggest phone company, Telstra, is switching to Linux. The support jobs will either be going in-house, and/or the support contract may be switched from the US to an Indian company.

If you are a TESOL teacher, maybe you should go to India yourself, where the tech boom has many Indians learning English. On the other hand, infrastructure problems may limit Bangalore’s expansion of its tech sector. Still, it’s not just the tech sector any more: “the hottest ideas in car design are happening right now in the back streets of Mumbai“

A US study has discovered that employees perform better and are more loyal if treated well. Hmm. I wonder how much that cost to find out.

More on the Russian Far East: the state’s share of eastern ports is up for sale. China has already tried to acquire some Russian ports.

China is of course under pressure from the US to reconsider its dollar-yuan peg; the IHT examines another such peg, in Malaysia. It points out that Malaysia prospered in and after 1997 by completely ignoring IMF instructions.

When will Washington learn? Even when countries are your allies, it’s polite to ask first before you announce policies on their behalf. Remember Turkey before the war? Washington announced its troops would invade Iraq from there. Only later did they bother to ask the Turks, and then insulted them as the Turks dared to consider their own national interest. Now the same thing seems to be happening again. The US announced that thousands of Iraqi police and militiamen will go to Hungary for training. The trouble is, this seems to be news to the Hungarians. The ancient Greeks knew: hubris is followed by nemesis.

Russia, Islamic Banking, ghosts, puppets

Another article has appeared on the development of Sakhalin, in the Russian Far East; this time in the always-interesting Asia Times. Russia will supply 2.3 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas per annum to Japan for the next 20 years; construction of the processing plant will cost $2 billion.

This is interesting not only because of the potential of the Russian Far East which I referred to before, but also because energy shortages are now becoming the single biggest bottleneck for growth throughout Asia. (See also this in the IHT). Which leads me to comments by Eric Chaney of Morgan Stanley on the outlook for oil prices.

That kind of segues into the outlook for the gold market. Malaysia is doing a lot of out of the box thinking, and trying to lead the development of an Islamic trading and finance system. Here Asia Times looks at plans to re-establish the Ottoman-era gold dinar as the main trading currency between Islamic nations, instead of the US dollar. Since many Muslim nations are not currently big holders of gold, this could have a big impact on its price. One analyst is quoted as saying that this currency is “in direct contradiction to and forbidden by the existing rules of the IMF” – but is this a good argument? (George Monbiot in the Guardian). Also, from Bloomberg news via the IHT, Malaysia is working hard develop an Islamic financial hub in which returns are not based on interest payments. Apparently HSBC say the market for Islamic Investments is worth over $200 billion.

Both of these seem relevant to the future of the dollar in international trade – remember I previously mentioned that Indonesia is thinking of switching to the Euro. Is trouble building up for the dollar at a time of record US deficits? Also: during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the war in Iraq, and now the ongoing resistance, there has been a lot a commentary bemoaning the economic backwardness of much of the Islamic world. Are we now seeing the beginning of a serious effort, led by the stronger Muslim states, to remedy this? What are the implications for the global economy of a strong alternative based on Islamic principles and solidarity?

I’ve been reading more articles from the Prudent Bear site that I mentioned before, and I’m cooling on them. I liked the first few articles I read, but the language of some contributors seems to be so anti-government, and pro-unfettered capitalism that they’re verging on tin-foil hat territory. IMHO, of course. Read them for yourselves and see what you think.

I spent quite a bit of last night watching a traditional puppet show, put on for a ghostly audience (this Singaporean article gives some background on the tradition), and then went to check out the paper creations – including a huge Junk and warriors on horseback – which are being stacked up in a temporary temple nearby prior to being burned as offerings in a few days. However, I also found time for a Guinness!

H1-B, XSL, Sakhalin

In response to the current wave of IT outsourcing, lots of coders in the US have been complaining that their government should stop issuing H1-B visas to foreign, and specifically Indian, programmers. Well, it looks like that might not be necessary. In this Straits Times story, it looks as if Indian coders are returning to India of their own accord – because that’s where the jobs are now.

The character encoding issue for HTMLDOC only needed a change of one line in my XSL file, and now works perfectly. There are still occasional oddities where a character can’t be handled properly, but it looks great overall. I had difficulty letting my users know for a while; a lot of them in China and Korea were knocked off-line (or rather, their DNS servers were) by the various worms floating around this week.

Buried in the IHT, this article is about the governor of Russia’s Sakhalin region going missing in what sounds like a plane crash. The interesting quote for me, though, was that “foreign investment in the remote island region would double to $1.3 billion this year, putting it on track to surpass Moscow as the country’s top destination for foreign capital”. There’s a lot happening in the Russian Far East. I can’t find a link, but I read an article recently on Chinese and Korean migrants moving – sometimes invited, sometimes not – into Russian provinces which are suffering a major population drop. This is the best I can find online, but I saw something similar only a few weeks ago, and which was more explicit about the ‘threat’ to Russian control. This expands on the theme. Also, just a few years ago, there were mutterings of a secessionist movement springing up. Give the resources there, including oil, which both Japan and China have been competing for to gain access to, this must be a region to keep an eye on.