Nouriel Roubini gives his assessment on the path forward for US banking and investment, and it’s, as is his wont, very negative.
He’s been right on everything so far with his predictions, except that reality has been even more bearish than he is.
That would be my assessment of the latest, because, I think that he underestimates the effect of the eventual stampede towards the exits of foreign investors in general and sovereign wealth funds in particular.
Human-to-Human Transmission of Bird Flu Discovered in China.
No known contact to poultry.
Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, has the scoop.
Money quote:
This is explosive news because Payne’s company’s entire business model is international influence peddling in exchange for oil and gas leases from politically unstable and dictatorial regimes.
Mr. Straight Talk, my ass.
So says World Bank President Robert Zoellick. He says that agreement on farm issues would bolster confidence in the world economy.
The subtext is that in a few months, any number of houses of cards in any number of nations will be collapsing, and after that, an agreement will will be unlikely for years, probably not for at least a decade, if the WTO doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
There’s a surprise. The walkback from Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s withdrawal plan came after a call from a Bush admin official.
And a horse’s head, one would assume.
Considering the fact that it has been at previous Red Flags, and it has zero role in the so called “War on Terror”, and they could shake one loose for the Farnborough airshow but this year, when the Indian AF will be sending Su-30MKIs to the exercise, David Axe reports that they are too busy to participate.
They are doing their hair, or some such.
I’m certain that they guys who actually fly the F-22 want to see how their likely adversary, advanced derivatives of the Su-27 will perform against them, what sort of tactics would be used, and similar issues, but the guys who fly desks, and are still interested in additional purchases of the white elephant, so they don’t want any losses in exercises, to get in the way of that.
Also some nice shots of the simulator, and the cockpit layout.
He founded Marman Products, an aerospace manufacturing firm, which purchased the patent for a new type of hose clamp, now called the Marman Clamp, which found its way onto all sorts high pressure hoses in aerospace, and were particularly useful for turbochargers, an area where the US excelled in WWII.
Additionally, they found their way into space applications, “When John Glenn rode into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, a six-foot-diameter Marman-type clamp released the capsule from the Atlas rocket, with explosive bolts blasting open the clamp,” and is still widely used today.
Nouriel Roubini makes a very very good point in his essay American Un-Beauty: The Crisis of the Suburbian (McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs) Way of Life:
The result was that the U.S. invested too much – especially in the last eight years – in building its stock of wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital and of larger and larger private motor vehicles (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth.
Basically, the as a society no longer invests in productivity, it invests in consumption (and I would add arbitrage to the mix), which means that in a world where increasing productivity is the path to greater standards of living, the United States is not even in the game.
Well, it appears that in an interview in der Spiegel, Nouri al Maliki, when asked about Obama’s 16 month time frame, replied, “US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
As Marc Ambinder noted, “Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, ‘We’re f#@$ed.'”
Seriously, John McCain is more than “Iraq Forever”, it’s “Iraq Forever, with permanent military Super-Bases”, and while Maliki’s government has backed off a bit on the statement, there is no way they want those US bases there, and what’s more domestic politics makes it politically untenable for them to want those bases there.
As if USAF Genearals weren’t already Pissy enough, it appears that General Charles Davis is upset about Boeing’s sales pitch for the F-18 E/F.
He’s upset because Boeing is, “predicting further cost overruns and delays for the F-35 program,” and using it as a selling point for the Super Bug.
Seeing as how the JSF has already had a, “50% cost increase and an at least 18-month delay during the first seven years of development,” perhaps the good general should look inward, rather than outward.
Telescoping rounds have always theoretically been a very useful concept: Put the round and ammunition completely within the case, with the space not taken up by the round being filled with propellant:
The idea is that when the round is fired, the ignition charge kicks the round into the barrel.
The round is more compact shorter, and the full cylindrical shape is packs more efficiently.
The devil has always been in the detail, and people have been working on this for about 30 years, and the folks at BAE Systems have apparently worked out the kinks on a 40mm autocannon:
It feeds through the trunnion, the pivot point for elevation, and then rotates 90 degrees to be inline with the barrel. This means that the feed point never moves relative to the turret, you don’t have to deal with flexible feeds.
In any case, the telescoping round allows more propellant and more explosive charge in the round, so the performance for BAE’s MTIP 2 (Manned Turret Integration Program 2) has a punch equivalent to a 50mm round, but the cannon is about the size of a 30mm cannon.
Pretty neat, and even neater is where they got their feed concepts:
The cylindrical rounds also pack more efficiently and are easier to handle, which is where the brewery comes in: BAE Systems designers visited a local brewery to gather ideas for automated storage systems and conveyors that would be used in the turret’s autoloader.
Beer, it does a cannon good.
At Farnborough.
MiG is saying that it will be MiG-29K carrier variant to the Indian Navy shortly.
Unfortunately, the ship that they are to serve on, the Admiral Gorshkov, is still in refit in Russia, and it will be at least two years late.
Of interest is that the MiG-29K’s avionics will operate on a MIL STD 1553B bus, a western standard.
I think that this is targeted at the specialized “Beluga” bloated variants used by Boeing and Airbus to transport sub assemblies of their aircraft.
Since the AN-124 is designed from the get go as a freighter, there are some advantages, such as a lower deck allowing for freight to be driven directly on.
It ain’t pretty, but it’s less ugly than the Airbus/Boeing “bloat planes”:
I’ve been posting a lot on the insolvency of innovative aircraft diesel manufacture and the conflict with it’s primary customer, Diamond Aircraft.
Well, it appears that their divorce is now final, with Diamond washing its hands of a bid for the engine manufacturer, and hoping for certification of its aircraft diesel in the next few months, followed by swapping out the old Thielert diesels.
Seeing as how much of the purchase price of the Thielert engine included scheduled maintenance, and now that it is in bankruptcy, it’s no longer covered, this is probably the best course of action for Diamond.
Background here.
Well, the GE-SNECMA joint venture CFM gas announced that they will be working on an advanced engine for the next generation of narrow body airliner (A320 and B-737) replacements using what they call Leap-X technologies.
In addition they are teaming with NASA to apply these technoligies involved in this engine to an advanced open rotor concept (Paid Subscription Required):
It’s clearly the same no-gearbox path that GE took in the late 1980s with its “un-ducted fan”, which was killed by lower oil costs and noise concerns regarding the counter-rotating fan interaction.
The research, at least for now is about keeping the pressure ratio low on the fans to minimize noise levels.
Rolls Royce is also working on open rotor studies (Paid Subscription Required), though it’s concept is more conventional, with a gearbox.
It’s applying the EU funded DREAM research program, and will probably borrow quite a lot from the 10,000+ hp TP400 turboprop used on the A400 military transport.
One of the interesting things here is that both concepts show the same number of blades front and rear, which I think will change, because you get simultaneous interaction pulses from all the blades at once then, which means lots o’ noise.
Basically, it comes down to the alternatives being too damn expensive or too politically restricted, and the additional payload/range/performance of the upgraded Gripen making it quite competitive, particularly with the option of an AESA radar.
This quote is intertesting to me:
[Robert] Kemp [senior vice president for international sales & marketing at Gripen International] says many potential F-35 customers were uncomfortable with the “You’re either with us or against us” approach to fighter sales. He claimed that growing dissatisfaction with technology transfer, workshare and offsets, coupled with F-35 cost escalation and slipping timescales have led “more and more JSF customers coming to talk to us about a replacement for JSF”.
It’s one of the concerns I have about the F-35 is that it appears to have a closed nature, and if a competitor to Lockheed-Martin’s weapons systems wants to get certified, I think that there are doubts about how cooperative LM will be.
I would also direct you toward Bill Sweetman’s snippets of an interview with Mr. Kemp:
“Schedule. So many governments have been grossly embarrassed by programs that run years late.” (Consider the Australian Seasprites and Canada’s CH-148 Cyclone.) Kemp points out that the last major Gripen program, the C/D update, came in on time and cost.
“Price.” Kemp continues. “If it works and you can deliver it, the price – including operational cost – is extremely important.” International politics are less important than they used to be, Kemp says, but domestic issues are more so. (It was the activism of coalition partners that forced the Netherlands government to re-evaluate its choice of the JSF.)
Close air support (CAS) missions are becoming more crucial as time goes on, particularly in countries which have supported operations in the Middle East. “The guys commanding those operational units were the ones who got promoted, and their influence and experience will be more important.”
I still think that the sales folks at SAAB are delusional about having a shot at winning in the Netherlands, because the Cloggies have spent too much money on the JSF already, but the basic sales strategy of, “On time and on budget,” seems to me very sound.
More specifically, they will be terminating production after their already-committed total of 124, and upgrading the remainder of their tank corps with some 1,657 1,657 T-90S Bhishma tanks of Russian origin.
Note that the design and development of this tank began in 1974, so after 34 years of development, it finally appears dead.
Not even US defense procurement programs are this screwed up.
It flew for the first time on July 11, on P&W’s 747SP, and they now are calling it the PW1000G.
Picture pron:
