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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Mon, 27 Oct 2003]
Post-Cancun Blues
The empire (EU/USA) strikes back- new limits on textile imports from India. Luckily, I think that textile quotas will go away in a couple of years. Note that India discussed this with China, Brazil, Egypt and Argentina already ;-)
More on (Indian) Special Forces
Indian Express seems to be running a special on them- there is a
discussion of how to make them more effective (a separate command under
Integrated Defence Staff might not be totally foolproof) and an article
about how some SF officers are leaving.
I can see the future...and I am hungry
Guardian has an article about the future of a British family in 2020.
Slightly dire predictions, I'd say. But then again, it is the job of
futurists to make interesting predictions. Interesting tid-bits ?
Disappearing (island) nations and the return of the kitchen garden.
More co-operation across defence services
Here's an article bemoaning the lack of necessary cooperation between the
Indian army, navy, and the air force. There has been some cooperation
recently, but there has been little attempt to form a combined
anti-terrorism squad- a special forces drawing from all the three
branches. Each branch has its own special forces and they are not
cross-trained. Moreover, the elite anti-terrorism unit, the NSG, is being reduced to a glorified
security agency. The author says that India doesn't yet have the capability to
send in appropriately trained special-ops units for covert, surgical
operations across the border.
Well, it could be worse! There are 3 different versions of the new uber-bomber that the US DoD is having built: one each for the USAF, US Navy, and the Marines...
The business of healthcare
Three different articles, all somewhat related.
There is a news item about US having, on average, twice as many mammograms
as UK and still not catching any more breast-cancer cases. Its probably
not just test-happy doctors, though. The British often insist that 2
radiologists look at each mammogram, while the Americans often let just
one radiologist do it. There's another article about how heart-speciality
hospitals are opening up in the mid-west. Medicare's weird system of
payments lets hospitals make a lot more money in heart disease/operation
cases than in some other ailments. Hence the gold rush in Indiana.
The 3rd article, from NYT, provides a great discussion about what'd happen if health-insurance became costlier. Will people reduce their trips to the doctor for all imaginary and real ailments ? Or will it be the case that "good health is priceless" and we'll end up pricing good health-care out of the reach of many people ? Putting monetary value on the value of health/longevity is a rather uncomfortable business, but very central to this whole discussion.
Spin turning full-circle
Sorry for the bad pun ;-) . A few weeks ago, there were some news
articles (
MSNBC,
TIME) about how the Bush team was looking to get its
message out to the masses. In particular, they wanted to talk about how
the war in Iraq is going A-OK. The only catch was that "traditional" and
"liberal" news sources were not objective enough. So Colin Powell went to
Letterman and Condoleezza Rice went to Oprah. NYT has an
article about how this isn't really working well for the Bush
team- he says the press will ultimately catch on.