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5 mins to read

Waiting for the silver lining

Thu, 09 Sep 2010

By now you may be “quaked out” with Canterbury. Depending on whom you speak to, this is a far worse disaster than is depicted, because many homes are unliveable, or the damage is being exaggerated.

Certainly, all substantial office, accommodation, retail and industrial buildings constructed under tough earthquake standards and building codes have survived unscathed.

I was told of one new multi-million factory, largely pre-fabricated in Europe to a specialist design, which had to have locally made bracing installed before it met compliance standards.

As a result, it survived Saturday’s quake completely intact.

The resilience of Canterbury’s businesses has been widely admired by outsiders, who may be surprised to learn the local business awards, due to be held tonight, had to be postponed.

I imagine the Champion Canterbury Awards will be even more impressive when they are eventually held. Cantabrians can also take comfort that their closest trans-Pacific neighbours in Chile are enjoying a huge post-quake boom.

Bloomberg reports
Chile’s economy will probably expand the most in five years as it recovers from last year’s recession and February’s earthquake, the central bank said, raising its forecasts for growth and inflation this year.

Gross domestic product will likely grow 5-5.5% this year… as South America’s fifth-largest economy rebounds faster than economists forecast. The economy grew 7.1% in July from a year earlier and 6.5% in the three months through June.

February’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Concepción in February, knocking out that country’s most prolific agricultural region, a large port and killing 521 people.

One can’t lose, one can’t win
In the world of low expectations, the much-hyped Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are being hailed because none of the parties has pulled out.

Yet, oddly enough, Israel seems to have won the propaganda war in the western media. This Washington Post op-ed (reprinted in the Dominion Post last Monday) is a salient analysis by an academic, Hussein Agha, and former US diplomat Robert Malley.

They conclude Benjamin Netanyahu, who has the backing of the entire spectrum of Israeli opinion, is a winner regardless of the outcome.

His Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, by contrast, is a loser on all counts. This is because Palestinian intransigence is now working more against them than for them.

Their only sympathisers in the West remain those who are doggedly anti-Semitic. Not among them, you may be surprised to learn, is none other than Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

The wily communist invited The Atlantic magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg to Havana for an interview in which Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was criticised

for denying the Holocaust… [Castro] explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the "unique" history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.

Castro outlined his objections to theological anti-Semitism, which has occurred for more than 2000 years.

"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."

There is much else of interest in this interview, with more to come in further postings at The Atlantic. Read on.

Turning on a demographic
Another popular myth about Israel has also unravelled since the peace talks were renewed.

Israel no longer has demographics against it, as was supposed. As recently as 2007, the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned of a “demographic battle, drowned in blood and tears,” if Israel did not settle with the Palestinians.

But a new population study, reported in this San Francisco Chronicle op-ed by Joel Brinkley, says

to most everyone's surprise, that Israeli Jews far outnumber Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. What's more, Jewish birth rates are higher now, too. The demographic threat, these demographers say, simply doesn't exist.

Brinkley goes on to cast doubts Palestinian population claims, saying birth rates on the West Bank are dropping due to higher prosperity, there has been double counting of Arabs living inside Israel and birthrates are soaring among the Jewish settlers.

Meanwhile, Time magazine’s controversial cover story on Israel (the Asia and US editions but not the South Pacific, which has Tony Blair) has not done that publication any favours.

It’s an odd week when I agree with Castro and disagree with one of the US media’s pillars.

Turning off the light (bulbs)
An era in the history of world business and invention has ended with the closing of GE’s last light bulb factory in the US.

GE originated among companies founded by inventor Thomas Edison, who developed the first commercially successful incandescent light bulb in 1880.

Ironically, the Winchester, Virginia, factory is closing because of a US government ban on energy-hungry bulbs from 2014. As the Washington Post notes,

Rather than setting off a boom in the US manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China. Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labour, which is cheaper there.

So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the US.

GE engineers were the first to make spiral fluorescent tubes, which use 75% less electricity to make the same energy as incandescents, but passed on turning them into a mass manufactured item.

Instead they were seized on by a Chinese immigrant, who set up factories in China. Moves to make them in the US failed because of the high labour costs compared with offshore manufacture.

The final blow came when energy conservation measures were passed.

Light bulbs, like batteries, anger consumers because you never know how long they will last. The Labour government attempted to end the use of incandescents ahead of the last election but the ban was lifted.

Cheap incandescent bulbs, even from leading brands such as Philips, are still available but do not last as long as the New Zealand-made ones I remember.

Another interesting footnote is that Osram, the original German manufacturer of light bulbs, was one of the few companies to set a successful exporting business behind the Iron Curtain. Made-in-Hungary Osram bulbs were a rare communist product that reached western standards.

Hungarians developed the first brighter and longer life tungsten-filament light bulb in 1904 and the product was originally called Tungsram. I suspect the cheap Chinese bulbs use low-grade tungsten.

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Waiting for the silver lining
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