18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Mexico

Discussion of Web Log and Analysis topics from the Generational Dynamics web site.
John
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18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Mexico

Post by John »

18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic spreads from Haiti to Cuba to Mexico

Does the Koran require a woman to wear a hijab?

** 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic spreads from Haiti to Cuba to Mexico
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e131118



Contents:
China's end of one-child policy doesn't dent Vietnamese wife trade
The Hijab becomes a national problem for Russia
Does the Koran require a woman to wear a hijab?
Cholera epidemic spreads from Haiti to Cuba to Mexico
Obamacare software contractor CGI reports unexpectedly high profit


Keys:
Generational Dynamics, China, one-child policy, Vietnam,
Russia, hijab, North Caucasus, Volgograd bombing, Koran,
cholera, Mexico, Nepal, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic,
Obamacare, CGI Group Inc.

NoOneImportant

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by NoOneImportant »

The Chinese 1.18:1 male to female birth ratio doesn't do justice to the enormity of the Chinese problem. From the ages of 0 - 20 China has approximately a 30 million female birth deficit.

The demographic for 2010 shows the enormity of the problem.
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/china- ... c11fe383e3

While the government is taking steps to reduce the problem. The birth projections through 2025 indicate a continued female birth deficit, albeit at a reduced rate for the foreseeable future. Estimating from the graphs by 2025 there will be somewhere in the area of 50 - 60 million marriage aged men for whom there will be no suitable Chinese women available for marriage.

I see several possible outcomes:
1. Provide significant economic incentives to single women to relocate to China - perhaps simply oodles of money, for staying for some finite period of time, with milestones, eg. learn to speak, read, and write Mandarin and, of course, marry a Chinese man. This, however, does nothing to mitigate the population control that led to the one-birth policy.

2. Mass migration - Chinese men who are able will leave China - at least temporarily - and will move to the ends of the earth in search of suitable female marry-able women. Many, once married, will eventually return to China. China's new found industrial power makes this potentially feasible - but even with China's new found industrial power we are talking the movement of very large numbers of Chinese men. The current entire populations of Russia: 142 million; that of Japan: 127 million; Vietnam: 92 million; Philippines: 105 million. Again this does nothing to address the population problem that led to the one-birth policy.

3. War - With monetaristic economies, where governments are able to print all of the money they can get away with, we of lose sight of and oft forget that throughout all of human history loot - spoils - were the desired outcome of conflict as assets and more importantly the supply of money was fixed and finite - gold, or silver. It was a zero-sum game, if you wanted it - money - you earned it from someone who had it - usually by trade - ; or took it from those who had it and were weak; or you mined more. If you were fortunate enough to have control of gold, and/or silver mines that was certainly good; but very few owned mines, a fact that gave rise to the philosophy of empire - gather up all that you could militarily hold. Women may be viewed similarly, they may not be printed - they are fixed and finite. If you don't have them there are a limited number of ways to obtain them - conflict is one of the most obvious. Even with sustained conflict - conventional - it it difficult to fathom 50 - 60 million deaths of Chinese men, or their opponents and the taking of millions of newly available women. Nuclear conflict - the unimaginable - can easily erase 100s of millions, but is hardly sex selective.

4. Civil War - Civil war is particularly uncivil, and barbaric, as exemplified by Syria. Unmarried men can be very vicious, as female companionship tempers the barbaric within men; thus men untempered can be very difficult to deal with, from a societal point of view. Again these are very large numbers, but the estimated number of deaths under Mao was 34 - 70 million - and that is without conflict per se, ref. The Black Book of Communism - https://ia700605.us.archive.org/22/item ... munism.pdf - , so numbers on the scale of 50 - 60 million are not without president in recent Chinese history.

5. Suffer in silence - This is self-evident and is the least likely outcome - IMO

JULLIEN1

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by JULLIEN1 »

Some Muslim countries require the hijab, some don't, but they're all Muslim countries
Simply told, the law of the land often doesn't enforce all religious laws. The hijab is mandatory in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia because the law of the land is religiously based. On the contrary, it isn't in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, etc. (in fact all the countries who were colonized by Europeans) but virtually all women there wear it out of custom and faith without the need of an order of police. Even in Western Europe where there is no Muslim-majority country you just have to look less than one second to know if a woman is a practicing Muslim.

NoOneImportant

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by NoOneImportant »

Cholera - diarrhea on steroids -, untreated has a mortality rate of >50%. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factshee ... index.html Cholera is one of the world's greatest killers of children under 5 years of age. The strange part about Cholera is that when treated with rehydration salts dissolved in clean water - usu. boiled - Cholera will resolve itself after 7 - 14 days. The difficulty is that Cholera can deplete the body of water and salt to >10% of body weight in just a few hours thus causing death - so most who contract cholera die long before the body resolves the Cholera bacterium. Cholera is effectively treated using Unicef formulated Oral Rehydration Salts dissolved in safe, clean water. ORS are a specific combination of: sugar, sodium chloride - table salt, potassium chloride, and sodium citrate. Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) begun early reduces Chlolera's mortality rate to <1%.

As John noted, Cholera is caused by either water, or food tainted with bacterium from human waste. The prevention for cholera is: appropriate human hygiene - washing of hands, suitable human waste disposal, and effective water treatment (tainted water is the most common means of Cholera transmission). Once contracted, however, Oral Rehydration Salts solutions are the difference between life and death.

Unicef (World Health Organization - WHO) created ORS in roughly 1980, and produces millions of ORS packets yearly. The packets, when dissolved into a liter of clean water and consumed, will replace bodily fluids, and electrolytes that would unreplaced lead to death in as little as one day - 3 liters/day of ORS for adults; for children, as much as a young child will consume while the diarrhea/vomiting continues. While the WHO packets are nice and highly effective, and cheap $.50 per packet, they are not raadily available in the domestic US. Fortunately a home-made recipe, shown in the TED video below, recommended by Unicef of 1/2 teaspoon of table salt, and five teaspoons of sugar mixed with a quart (liter) of water is almost as effective as the Unicef packets. Unicef identifies 25 pathogens that may cause diarrhea, some more virulent than others - the most common type being traveler's diarrhea - ORS may be used to treat the dehydration experienced from all of these sources of diarrhea - and is especially important in children under five, as they have so little mass. While normal table salt doesn't contain potassium Morton Salt company manufactures a product that contains both sodium chloride and potassium chloride in almost the correct proportions to emulate the Unicef ORS packets.

Lancet statement:
http://www.rehydrate.org/ors/ort.htm

TED Cholera ORS video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdAkufkAFk

Mixing ORS packets video:
http://rehydrate.org/ors/flv/how-to-mix-ors.htm

Home recipe for ORS:
http://www.rehydrate.org/solutions/homemade-ors.pdf

NoOneImportant

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by NoOneImportant »

The female infanticide problem is much larger than just China, if you've got a moment view the trailer - http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/

Anon

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by Anon »

Been working for govt contractors for most of my life, so an insight here might be useful. You can as easily say the ACA federal website cost nothing as saying it cost almost any figure you choose. And there is a reason for that. The reason is that there was no funding for such a website in the law, the law assumed that no governors would attempt to block a federal law, and obviously any attempt to pass later funding would meet the Republican stone wall of filibusters in the Senate and opposition in the House. Without funding, there is no way to issue a contract that meets GAO requirements.

So what happens? At that point, you pick some unlucky bastard and do an add on without funding. I've been that unlucky bastard in the past, and to cut to the chase, you get handed all the junk equipment, usually Dell crap that's out of date, out of warranty and past end of service life, a link to the government website for volume software, and you get told "build something". Without funding, without proper tools, without equipment that's reliable enough to even make a game server. Would you believe that for several years every movement order for the US Navy was processed on such an unfunded network? I watched that being built. Zero cost to the Navy, save for labor. Of course, it crashed every few days as hardware failed, but hey, that's the idiot contractors fault, right?

Not that the Navy has much of a record to brag about on the funded side. The reason that network was built was because their hugely funded (multiple billions) NMCI network "engineers" didn't have the ability to actually make bulk data transfer work on their piece of crap. Go read the GAO review of the NMCI project, it's "interesting" to say the least.

All this yammer about costs is just that, yammer. Pull any figure out of your butt that pleases you, I can pretty much guarantee you can find some way to twist the accounting around to make it fit, just like that Navy network I referenced above. Without a detailed examination of the books to determine hours spent and actual costs, you can NOT know what that site cost to build. I'd bet heavily on it being near zero, after amortizing the junk to market value.

John
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Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
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Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by John »

I don't understand what you're saying. I keep hearing various
consultants say that HealthCare.gov has about 500 million lines of
code, and cost $300-600 million dollars. What do you mean when you
say the cost was near zero?

anon

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by anon »

Figured that would surprise you.

Government contracts are supposed to be let for bidding by GAO rules. It's my understanding this was not, because of zero funding. Congress has to make funding available, there's very little in the way of slush funds in the federal govt, by design. The President has access to a couple of million, the military commands have about that much each in disposable funding, and that's really about it aside from the individual funding for offices.

So what had to be done was stick an add on requirement to an existing contract that was up for renewal. And it sucks to be that guy. Contractors will take that and do it, because they want to keep that contract going, but it's usually done by a trick the govt uses often, called a contract extension. You get a one year extension, at the same rate of funding as you had before, but you don't get any more money. You just get more work piled on top of what you already had.

Technically, this had to be an E&I contract, or should have been. (Engineering and Installation) An O&M contract should not have installation and design as part of their responsibilities, but I suppose it could have happened.

Anyhow, that's the buzz I've gotten, that this was just tacked onto an existing contract, and whatever they got to do with was about what you'd expect under the circumstances. Not that you or I will ever get any accurate confirmation of this, unless you get the GAO inspectors to do an verified audit of costs. Which is probably about as likely as pigs flying, there's too much politics involved and nobody wants this contract extension business getting much publicity anyhow. Bad for all parties if that happens.

John
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Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
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Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by John »

So, just to be clear, the project still cost $300-600 million. You're
talking about an internal government accounting issue, not the actual
amount of money spent. Right? And outside of the government, what
difference does it make to the average citizen how it's accounted for?

anon

Re: 18-Nov-13 World View -- Cholera epidemic reaches Cuba,Me

Post by anon »

And even the GAO will give results at odds with an engineers costing, like so. Take a Dell 1950 server, there's thousands of them in use, in clustered stacks as the basis for virtual servers connected to a SAN by a fiber channel backbone. If that server is about five years old, it will probably run for another five years, if you clean it out carefully and put in new drives. So what's the value of it? According to ebay, about 400 to 600 dollars, depending on the hardware configuration. According to the GAO, it may be worth the original server cost, unless they are requested to amortize in their calculations. Depends on how you take it, I've seen the govt try to charge someone new price for a ten year old piece of crap nobody was paying attention to, when it finally got thrown out as garbage, and the paperwork didn't get done properly.

So what's the worth to an engineer planning a new service? A five year old Dell is outside warranty and past end of service life, it's less than worthless. And there are thousands of them in use today.

Pick any number you want, somebody will tell you it's right. Believe me, I'm looking forward to retirement.

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