ENTREPNEW - New Ideas and Innovation: Next Big Future

Here are new big future events from feedblitz. Be guided and be successful:

1. Driverless trucks for the army; (run by iPhone? hahaha)

2. China declares war on poverty;

3. China's army is weak but dangerous

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 3:06 PM
Subject: Next Big Future - 3 new articles

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"Next Big Future" - 3 new articles

Driverless trucks for US Army convoys

Lockheed Martin has shown that fully autonomous convoys can safely navigate road intersections, oncoming traffic, stalled and passing vehicles, and pedestrians. A series of advanced tests in the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS) program for the US Army and US Marine Corps were completed. The testing, Lockheed said, showed that fully autonomous convoys can operate in urban environments and with a mixture of vehicle types.

The AMAS program for the Pentagon's ground troops uses standard-issue vehicles outfitted with a kit of gear including a high-performance LIDAR sensor and a second GPS receiver, locked and loaded with a range of algorithms. That gear, Lockheed said, could be used on virtually any military vehicle, but in these tests was affixed to the Army's M915 tractor-trailer trucks and to Palletized Loading System vehicles.

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China military is weaker and more dangerous than it looks

The Diplomat reports that Chinais the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine. China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier.

Here is an analysis from the Diplomat by Ian Easton is a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute.

Not truly capable military Hardware and pretend soldiers

China’s lack of decent hardware is somewhat surprising given all the hype surrounding Beijing’s massive military modernization program, the state of “software” (military training and readiness) is truly astounding. At one military exercise in the summer of 2012, a strategic PLA unit, stressed out by the hard work of handling warheads in an underground bunker complex, actually had to take time out of a 15-day wartime simulation for movie nights and karaoke parties. In fact, by day nine of the exercise, a “cultural performance troupe” (common PLA euphemism for song-and-dance girls) had to be brought into the otherwise sealed facility to entertain the homesick soldiers.

China’s marines (or “naval infantry” in PLA parlance) and other amphibious warfare units train by landing on big white sandy beaches that look nothing like the west coast of Taiwan (or for that matter anyplace else they could conceivably be sent in the East China Sea or South China Sea). It could also be why PLA Air Force pilots still typically get less than ten hours of flight time a month (well below regional standards), and only in 2012 began to have the ability to submit their own flight plans (previously, overbearing staff officers assigned pilots their flight plans and would not even allow them to taxi and take-off on the runways by themselves).

Intense and realistic training is dangerous business, and the American maxim that the more you bleed during training the less you bleed during combat doesn’t translate well in a Leninist military system. Just the opposite. China’s military is intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce risk-averse behavior, because an army that spends too much time training is an army that is not engaging in enough political indoctrination.

Lack of Combat experience makes them dangerous. Real combat soldiers are not hawkish

It is precisely China’s military weakness that makes it so dangerous. Take the PLA’s lack of combat experience, for example. A few minor border scraps aside, the PLA hasn’t seen real combat since the Korean War. This appears to be a major factor leading it to act so brazenly in the East and South China Seas. Indeed, China’s navy now appears to be itching for a fight anywhere it can find one. Experienced combat veterans almost never act this way. Indeed, history shows that military commanders that have gone to war are significantly less hawkish than their inexperienced counterparts

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50 years after US President LBJ, China also declares war on poverty

50 years ago in the USA, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. As a part of the Great Society, Johnson believed in expanding the government's role in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies. These policies can also be seen as a continuation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which ran from 1933 to 1935, and the Four Freedoms of 1941. The popularity of a war on poverty waned after the 1960s. Deregulation, growing criticism of the welfare state, and an ideological shift to reducing federal aid to impoverished people in the 1980s and 1990s culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996.

In China, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has vowed to fight a “war against poverty,” highlighting the existing imbalances in China’s economic growth. As China’s overall GDP draws ever closer to surpassing the United States’ for the position of world’s largest, more and more commentators have taken to pointing out China’s relatively low per-capita GDP. According to the World Bank’s data, in 2012 China’s per capita GDP was $6,091, lagging behind not only the United States ($51,749) but countries such as Iraq ($6,455), Azerbaijan ($7,164), Botswana ($7,238), and Columbia ($7,748). It’s a testimony to the simple fact that, while China’s overall economy is massive, it must provide for 1.36 billion people.

A 2012 survey done by Peking University showed, for example, that average family income for urban residents was $2,600 a year versus only $1,600 a year for rural resident. In 2010, China Daily reported that China’s urban-to-rural income ratio was 3.33:1, the highest level since 1978.

As a result, China’s per capita GDP doesn’t adequately capture the extent of the poverty problem. World Bank notes that China has about 128 million people living below the national poverty line (which equates to about $1.8 a day) — making China second only to India in terms of the largest population of the poor.

China’s own official estimates are lower, but only slightly so, with Xinhua reporting 98.99 million rural poor alone in 2012. To put that in context, if we go by the World Bank estimate, China’s impoverished population is greater than the total population of all but nine countries in the world (Japan, ranked #10 in total population, has just over 127 million people)

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