Fredish Smörgåsbord

The Russian Sukhoi SU-27 has a top speed of Mach 1.8 (more than 1,300 mph) and a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 1:1. In other words, it can accelerate while climbing straight up. It was designed to fight the best the United States had to offer, and it can be yours for the cost of a mediocre used business jet.

The former Soviet Su-27 is now price tagged for sale. Since it's so similar to the J-11 used by China's PLA Air Force, maybe the Taiwanese government should go for the two and ask for a 20% discount.

Well, we might be using J-11 soon. :P

前蘇聯一線戰鬥機Su-27的教練機版本現在已經買得到了，一架只要區區500萬美金。因為這款飛機跟中共空軍目前使用的「殲11」幾乎完全相同，也許台灣政府應該把目前美國人手上這兩架都買下來，看能不能打個八折。

天曉得，也許過幾年殲11就是我們的標準配備了。XD

As a consensus emerges in Taiwan on establishing closer relations with China, the thaw is calling into question the United States' deeply ambiguous policy, which is supposed to serve both Taiwan's interests (by allowing it to retain its autonomy) and the United States' own (by guarding against an expansionist China). Washington now faces a stark choice: continue pursuing a militarized realist approach -- using Taiwan to balance the power of a rising China -- or follow an alternative liberal logic that seeks to promote long-term peace through closer economic, social, and political ties between Taiwan and China.

This is in fact a manifest of US's attitude to remain as a global superpower while keeping tension with another "expansionist" nation. The thing is that Taiwan is only a counterweight in the pendulum game, and our leader and his lieutenants haven't truly realized that; at least they don't know how to play the survival game in a smarter way.

Foreign Affairs.com的這篇文章，已經很露骨的說出了美國在最近台灣親中趨勢之中的兩難問題：在繼續保持世界強權地位之餘，要利用台灣作為籌碼，繼續對抗積極擴張勢力的中國、還是在台灣傾中的過程中獲取利益。

然而，我們的領導者似乎不清楚目前台灣在美國這個「鐘擺」政策中的微妙地位，或者至少他不知道如何在這個縫隙之中以更聰明的方式生存、甚至以遊走兩大強權遊戲規則的方式來獲利。

However, once you reach 45 and above, finding a job is a challenge. Older Singaporeans have struggled with this problem for many years. Recently the MoM came out with a set of guidelines on the re-employment of older workers[Link]. These set of guidelines will lead to legislative changes in 2012. So 3 years from now we will discover these guidelines to be inadequate and ineffective. Why?

Our structural unemployment problem is caused by our liberal foreign worker policy which brought hundreds of thouands of young workers from India, China, Phillipines etc. Our workforce demographics has been distorted by this high influx. With a large pool of young workers available why would employers try to retain or hire older Singaporean workers? Remember in the past we never had the structural unemployment problem because during the boomtime, employers will have a hard time find workers and they are 'forced' to hire older workers and give them a chance.

(Too busy to write a Chinese version today, maybe later.)

Sooner or later we're going to face this, I am just somehow closer to it than most of my readers.

So, is locking up the country to block younger foreign workers a solution to deal with this? I don't think so. Younger workers could replace domestic workers to cause "structural unemployment", but they could also displace certain kinds of domestic workers and enable the latter to engage more productive professions (from the domestic perspective, of course).

No, it doesn't mean I am supportive to the "liberal foreign worker policy", and I understand that the displacement effect is just theoretical; more often the domestic workers being displaced didn't opt for jobs with better GDP, they were forced to either go abroad, stay at home or school, or simply become unemployed.

In Taiwan, an island country lacking natural resources and markets of economic scale, we're facing the similar situation to Singapore, and we're also facing an aging population structure. Eventually the problem will emerge, and then it (and we, and yourself) would be your problem too, young fellows.

在政治立場或情緒上，我應該算是溫和派的，但最近放水球事件、美牛進口與中科四期環評的新聞，實在令人感到不斷累加的憤怒！我的憤怒心情就像是Michael Jackson的經典歌曲《They Don't Care About Us》一樣，他們真的不在乎我們，這裡的「他們」指的就是政府！

...

這三則新聞都不是藍綠的核心爭議，無關統獨，但卻是一再再地無法傾聽小老百姓的聲音，讓人怒不可遏，就如同Michael歌詞裡的一段「告訴我 我的權利而今何在/Tell me what has become of my rights，因為我的渺小讓你視而不見就可以忽視我嗎Am I invisible because you ignore me ? 」

這篇文章也是我想說的話。最近沒有時間和能力整理這方面的想法，所以直接推薦這篇文章，請關心這些基礎民生議題的朋友去看看。

The Taiwanese government is deceiving people, especially who are in the agriculture prefectures, on issues such as importing potentially hazardous American beef and internal organs, passive attitude to illegal gamling on professional baseball leagues (similar to the Black Sox Scandal in the US) and using farmlands in central Taiwan to assist highly pollutional manufacturing industries (called "Science Park"). We care about these, but the incapable, selfish government doesn't seem to.

"Hasta la vista, school."

Elementary school notebook parody.

With the market for electronic book readers set to take off, things are looking up for a little-known Taiwanese company that will probably supply most of the “e-paper” they use.

The company, Prime View International, said this summer that it would pay about $215 million to acquire E-Ink, which owns the technology for displaying text in the most popular readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.

...

DisplaySearch, a market researcher based in Austin, Texas, forecasts the global market for e-paper, including e-paper used in e-books, to hit $5.9 billion by 2015, from $400 million this year.

...

It was also a good fit considering Prime View’s pedigree. The company is a subsidiary of Yuen Foong Yu Group, a Taiwanese paper and pulp company. The group started making toilet paper and paperboard as early as 1939 and began producing coated paper in the 1950s with Japanese technology, according to its Web site.

While eBooks in the future may not be in the form we've imagined, however e-paper that only consumes power when switching colors (only black/white for now) will eventually take off to replace a certain share of "permanent" paper usage. PVI may not be the last standing, but its mother company indeed has the money and the position to give it a try. I am giving it an optimistic eye.

也許將來的電子書不一定是我們現在看到或想像的樣子（類似平板電腦的造型），但只在轉換顏色（目前僅有黑白）時才耗電的電子紙（e-paper或e-ink）遲早會起飛，取代今天部分紙張長時間、高價值顯示的用途。

在電子紙的發展和競爭過程中，元太科技（PVI）不一定是最後的贏家，因為其他廠商的技術、資金等門檻相對不算太高，但它的母公司永豐餘應該算是比較有錢、而且也比較順利成章的來涉足這個領域。

撇開資金、併購、政治這些「非產品」、「非技術」的面向不談，我對電子紙這個產業的遠景和產值是樂觀的；過一陣子再來看我想的對不對。:)