The Shanghai Accord and other somewhat secret monetary agreements

In 1989, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum was established in Shanghai, China. The founding of this organization is sometimes referred to as the Shanghai Accord; see below¹ for further details about APEC. (Referring to APEC as a Shanghai Accord is a misnomer, and quite confusing, as will be explained.) 

Also, please be aware that APEC has no affiliation with AIPAC despite the similar acronyms! 

In 2016, there was talk of a Shanghai Accord, one that had less to do with APEC and much more to do with the Plaza Accord. 

First, let's go back in time a bit, to 1985.

Weakening the U.S. dollar then...

The Plaza Accord is a 1985 agreement signed by then-U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker and the finance ministers of pre-unification West Germany, Japan, France, the UK and the other G8 countries. The intent was to guide the U.S. dollar lower versus the Japanese yen and German mark.

The Plaza Accord was motivated by the U.S. dollar's sharp appreciation with respect to other countries' currencies. It was put in place in order to jump-start growth globally while easing the U.S. current-account deficit. This would be accomplished by weakening the U.S. dollar and making U.S.-manufactured goods and services more globally price competitive.

1985 was the era of GATT (PDF "restricted document). The World Trade Organization (WTO) was still in the future (1995). China did not achieve most-preferred trading status in the WTO for another 15 years.

...and now?

Since 2010, the Bank of China (China's central bank) had been under pressure to allow the Chinese yuan to transition to a floating currency. The yuan remained a pegged currency in 2015.

Due to the prominence of China's production output (and maybe other reasons?) the International Monetary Fund (IMF) included the yuan in its basket of global reserve currencies as of 2015 onward. See Special Drawing Rights which explains the underlying concept of "global reserve currencies" plural. The IMF assumed that Chinese monetary policy would soon become more consistent with that of a free market, rather than a centrally-planned economy.

China Dream

The IMF was wrong.  The yuan continued weakening against the US dollar. China remained "socialist with Chinese characteristics" which, according to the Chinese Communist Party, is synonymous with the Chinese Dream. In 2013, a related slogan was "aircraft carrier dream".

"China Dream Shines Out" in city of Changchun formerly
the capital of Manchuria and now the capital of the Chinese
automotive industry; photo credit Wikimedia Commons

Mercantilism, protectionism, fixed-rate currency, and state-sponsored enterprise are also components of the Chinese dream. A transition from investment to consumption for the Chinese people has not happened, despite former UK Prime Minister George Osborne's rosy prediction in 2013. Instead, there has been a convergence of market economy values and state nationalism. The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a metaphor for the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese race".

Fear at the time (2016) was that further Chinese central bank actions to sharply depreciate the yuan (thus making Chinese goods relatively cheaper for export) would send the trade-weighted dollar sharply higher, perhaps even into hyperstrong terrain not seen since 1981 to 1984.

How to inspire household animal spirits

This article in the Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch publication, To stave off currency war, is it time for a coordinated response to the Chinese yuan? conjectured that another accord might secretly take place at the G-20 meeting of central bankers in February 2016, in Shanghai. Instead of paraphrasing, I'll include an excerpt.

Is the United States moving nuclear weapons to the United Kingdom?

Preface

I wrote this in late September 2023, and updated it on 27 January 2024. The questioner likely was motivated by the Russia - Ukraine war. Um Russian Special Military Operation? Invasion of Ukraine by Russia? You get the idea.

Has the U.S. recently moved nuclear bombs to the UK?

No, the United States has not moved nuclear weapons to the UK. Well, not yet and even if we eventually do, not for awhile. More on that in a moment. First, a bit about why it might not even be necessary.

The UK already has nuclear weapons

England developed nuclear bombs in 1953, and has been able to deliver them on submarines since 1969. That is to say, the UK can deliver (launch?) nuclear weapons from its nuclear-powered submarines. According to the sometimes lefty or maybe just contrarian Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the cheery people with the Doomsday Clock), 120 of the UK’s stockpile of 225 nuclear warheads are operationally available as of 2024.

UK as nuclear monad?

No, I'm not referring to monads in Haskell, nor in APL!

The UK is the only “nuclear weapons state” which has a single nuclear platform: Four Vanguard-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). To be precise, the SSBNs are the nuclear platform and the submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) are the nuclear delivery system.

The UK limits its SSBNs to carrying no more than 40 nuclear warheads at a time. Prior to 2010, each submarine carried 48 nuclear warheads. The reduction from 48 to 40 was probably a strategic decision rather than a tactical one, i.e. there is still room for the extra warheads.

The nuclear warheads are named Holbrook. All 120 have the same name. More on that in a moment too.

Only one of the four submarines is at sea at any time. Two stay in port, while a fourth undergoes routine maintenance and repairs. This is why it makes sense to have 120 operational warheads (SLBMs): 40 go with the one submarine at sea. 40 remain on each of the two submarines anchored at dock but ready to be deployed if needed. Since the fourth submarine is undergoing maintenance, it wouldn’t do to have nuclear warheads on board! So, 40 x 3 = 120

Nuclear triad

In contrast to the UK, the US has a nuclear triad. That means that the US can dispatch nuclear warheads in three different ways: by Polaris submarine, by airplane, and by land.

“Land” doesn’t mean putting a nuclear bomb on a flatbed truck and just driving it up to wherever needs to be bombed, shoving it over the side, then driving away and detonating remotely from a safe distance. Instead, nuclear-tipped ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) get the nukes where they need to go. ICBMs are launched from one continent, travel quite low, though always above ground, to hit a target on another continent. ICBMs can be conventional too, i.e. they can ferry non-nuclear (conventional) bombs to their destinations. There are a few genuine and many CGI videos of ICBMs in action (most are courtesy of defense contractors). All depictions are impressive.

ICBMs are distinctly different from nuclear bomb delivery by airplane. In the latter case, the planes are flown to the destination, then the nuclear missiles are dropped from a height and detonate slightly above their targets.

US nukes in the UK

CNDUK No US Nukes Day of Action demonstrators

What happens if a supercomputer is used to mine bitcoins?

This has happened. I wrote about incidents of supercomputers being used to mine cryptocurrency a few years ago: Subverting computing research for fool's gold.

Bitcoin

NSF sponsored-researcher misused supercomputers to mine bitcoin via BBC June 2014:

A researcher has been suspended from a US national agency for misusing supercomputers to mine bitcoins at two universities. In a report, the National Science Foundation (NSF) revealed that more than $8,000 worth of bitcoins had been generated from NSF-funded computers... It is claimed that the unnamed researcher used remote access software and may have been attempting to cover his tracks.

So, he knew it wrong, tried to hide what he did including remotely accessing the supercomputer from Europe, and got caught.

@EllieAsksWhy @psnively $150,000 spent to make $8,000 of personal profit. What a waste.

— Emin Gün Sirer🔺⚔️ (@el33th4xor) June 14, 2014

The researcher’s access to all NSF-funded supercomputer resources was terminated, and after the NSF Office of Inspector General investigated (pp. 30-31), he was suspended from any further activities government-wide.

Was the Turkic Khazarian empire the only non-Semitic Jewish nation?

Khazaria was NOT a Jewish nation! Given that fact, Turkic Khazaria couldn't have been a non-Semitic Jewish nation.

The idea first got widespread attention from Arthur Koestler's book, "The Thirteenth Tribe" in 1970-something, it has persisted. 

Many current proponents find such an explanation for Jewish ancestry to be a politically expedient justification for redrawing territorial boundaries in the Levant. Others, including some Jews, find the Khazar-origins idea to be interesting and compelling because, well, it is!

The Jews-as-Khazars idea has been thoroughly debunked by modern genetics:

Plausible at the time, the Khazar-origin premise has crumbled under the onslaught of modern molecular genetics. The latest volley: a study published this week in Nature Communications. The study’s senior author...[uses] high-resolution techniques that have highlighted the historical hopscotch of other migratory peoples... The authors analyzed the Y chromosome – a piece of the human genome invariably handed down father-to-son – of a set of Ashkenazi men ...

If Ashkenazi Jews were the progeny of Khazar royals, their DNA would show it.

--New genetic study: More evidence for modern Ashkenazi Jews’ ancient Hebrew patrimony via Stanford University School of Medicine

The same Y chromosomal signature was found in every one of a large sample of Ashkenazi Jews, and quite a few non-Ashkenazi Jews. However, it was not present in the Y chromosomes of modern European non-Jewish men, nor in male inhabitants of what was once Khazaria.

What do people mean when they say "this is why we can't have nice things"?

“This is why we can’t have nice things” is an idiom. It connotes a more complex layer of meaning since its origin. Here’s a good definition: A phrase used to blame someone or some group for engaging in the kind of behavior that has led to something valued becoming damaged, ruined, or corrupted.

In a 21st century context, it means this:

… it voices the earnest class aspiration of a dupe who believes that "things" are "nice" (a humorously innocuous word) based on some standard class grid. Then anything that goes wrong points to the larger (comic) frustration of not being able to achieve the standard class-inflected goal. Like Ralph Kramden or Lucy in I Love Lucy. 

The decontextualization of the phrase makes the writer or speaker (not the character) and the audience in cahoots against the position of class dupe.

What's it like to be a member of an Ivy League university's secret society?

If sworn to secrecy, such individuals are unlikely to answer, even as Anon on Quora.

We know that some of these societies exist e.g. Skull & Bones. My father was at Yale in the 1940s and told me that it existed, not that he knew more about it than someone who never went to school there. 

I went to Wharton, 50 years later. University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League school but generally considered a lesser one. There was a rumor, never anything documented that I ever read, of a secret society for the 2nd year MBA's. 

It worked in the usual way: A fixed number of students, maybe 15 or 16, were asked to join each year. They were the "power elite" of Wharton Business School, and passed their spot on to successors upon graduation, but remained affiliated throughout their working lives. Only men were members, in keeping with tradition. I forgot the name of it, don't know if it even existed, or was just something UPenn students made up, so they would have a secret society of their own, like the other Ivy League schools!

Who is Sidney Blumenthal and why was Hillary Clinton contacting him via private email?

Sidney Blumenthal is the father of Max Blumenthal. Max is not a fan of Israel. It is peculiar how Sidney is such a neoliberal Hillary fan yet so defensive of Max. Clinton Adviser Sid Blumenthal's New Cause: His Son's Anti-Israel Book (2013):

A veteran confidant of Hillary Clinton has waded into a bitter argument over the explosive topic of Israel, defending his son’s intensely anti-Israel book from a liberal critic. 

Sidney Blumenthal, a former New Yorker writer turned Clinton adviser from the White House to the 2008 campaign, has been waging an online campaign against Nation columnist Eric Alterman for negatively reviewing his son Max Blumenthal’s book, Goliath. The book was described by Alterman, himself a frequent critic of Israel, as “awful” and something that “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”

Clinton Foundation officials refused to respond to questions of whether the elder Blumenthal is currently on a Clinton payroll.

Sidney contacted Hillary by private e-mail during the her destabilization of Libya because he had various business ideas, for himself, and wanted her feedback and insights. He stopped after the U.S. ambassador was killed at the consulate in Benghazi. Hillary thought Sidney was very insightful, and had been forwarding excerpts from his emails to her staff and friends for years. 

Sidney Blumenthal's Mosaic Mugshot by Kevin Vaughn, on Flickr

Are clothes the root of all evil?

How would today be different if humans rejected clothing and nudism prevailed?

Let's start by turning to Biblical scripture for help in answering the question. In Genesis, Adam and Eve ate an apple, i.e. fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, despite it being forbidden. (Blame the serpent.) Upon doing so, they felt shame at their nakedness, and covered themselves. In fact, that is how God immediately knew that Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

naked = without wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge 




clothed = with wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge




evil = serpent

Adam and Eve each hold a golden apple.

Elisha of Ascoli's Ketubah: Mantua, Italy on 31 August 1629

Since this was a decoration for the upper right corner of a ketubah (a marriage certificate used mostly by Sephardic Jews from about 1400 to the 1950s), the Hebrew inscription (happily!) doesn't directly correspond with the image.

Many happy returns!

This is birthday girl

Deluxe version

Large, somewhat grainy animated GIF with music 

Днем Рождения! Happy Birthday! 

Low bandwidth silent version

Demise of the Navajo Generating Station

Here's the Quora question: How can California go completely to electric cars when we already experience brown-outs and other rolling blackouts due to not having enough electricity?

This answer by Quora user Edw says it all.

California is decommissioning its nuclear plants. Wind and solar won't be able to take up the slack so it will have to buy power from nuclear and coal plants in neighboring states.

That might not be as easy as it once was. More on that in a moment. I upvoted the answer and left a comment of agreement.

Yes, you are correct. California has been sucking all the electricity from Hoover Dam for decades. The Colorado River and Hoover Dam are on the border between Arizona (where I live) and Nevada. Yet my state only gets 10% of the electricity generated by the hydroelectric power from Hoover Dam. Nevada gets about the same. California takes over 50%.

There's more. Californian insanity has spread like a contagion to states north and east of California, and now they are decommissioning their nuclear power and coal plants too!

Let me tell you about another victim, not a nuclear plant, but important nonetheless

The Navajo Generating Station

The Navajo Nation operated a coal power plant on reservation land for DECADES. They were forced to shut it down in 2019. Green liberal Democrats and Republican renewable energy business didn’t care that the Navajo Generating Station had kept the reservation energy-independent. It is a tragedy how 700 Navajo people lost their good jobs, that were right there, on the reservation in northeast Arizona. The generating station produced more energy than needed locally, so the extra was sold through interties to the electric power grid. AND the coal was mined locally!

The Navajo nation protested regulatory demands for plant closure, instigated by California, to no avail. Although it was located on supposedly sovereign native American land, The State shut down their power plant. There is nothing to replace it. 

Google Maps retrospective

I was curious, and had a look at what Google Maps reviews had to say about the Navajo Generating Station, which was run with assistance from a Maricopa County public utility, the Salt River Project. I reproduced some of the reviews here. 

Wind and solar will never replace nuclear and coal, despite what John Kerry and other attendees at COP say. This first review describes solar only advocates as ignorami.

This guy HATED the Navajo Generating Station, as it detracted from his Lake Powell experience, OMG!