Pearls [China’s String of]
China now owns/controls many ports along the Belt and [maritime] Road. Gwadar, in Pakistan; Piraeus, in Greece and in 2018,…
Mobile Pay
Mobile Pay – paying for goods and services by phone – is just one of the many ways that China…
Guns and Butter?
China has two overarching and interrelated imperatives. Provide improving economic and personal opportunities for its citizens, and reestablish its historic…
China’s Perspective
China remembers its former greatness. Magnificent civil engineering projects: the Dujiangyan Water Project still functioning after 2400 years; the Great…
Chinese Credit
The Chinese banking system has long been afflicted by massive lending to State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), organizations whose purposes did…
Made in China 2025
The formalized industrialization component of the grand ambition, now well under way: including the Belt and Road initiative, the String…
South China Sea
The United States Energy Information Administration has estimated that 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of…
Armenia’s Velvet Revolution
The “Independence Generation”, born after the collapse of USSR [less than 30 years old], led eight days of peaceful protest. …
My Library
Essentials, Foundational The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962. A conceptual framework for understanding how paradigm shifts in…
China’s Perspective
China remembers its former greatness. Magnificent civil engineering projects: the Dujiangyan Water Project still functioning after 2400 years; the Great…
Autonomous Vehicles
A good overview of the state of the self-driving art is here. Google’s Waymo will have a fleet of driverless…
My Meaning of Life
To my family, friends and communities, I offer all the love, support, information, stimulation and engagement I can. Every day,…
Robotics Tension
“We’ll still need people, but robots . . . .” from a New York Times article about robots in the…
Graphene at the Gates?
Incredibly disruptive AS it comes. University of Manchester is where I’m starting my research. From Manchester’s Graphene site: “The world’s…
Game of Threes
The geopolitical landscape through a potentially useful lens: three competing powers, three areas of conflict and three fields of endeavour. …
Chinese Credit
The Chinese banking system has long been afflicted by massive lending to State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), organizations whose purposes did…
Virtual Reality
“Reality is one of the few words that means nothing without quotation marks.” – Vladimir Nabokov. To which, I might…