I’ve gotten stuck a day late, it seems.

USPSA

• The first match of the year is in the books – Here’s the video with commentary, if you miss the podcast, and here’s one without.

The ‘Rona

• Beijing clamps down as new coronavirus cluster emerges

Defense

• France just test-fired a new SLBM
• Indian and Chinese soldiers fight with rocks and sticks – I don’t think it’s quite what Einstein meant when he said that thing about the weapons used in the fourth world war. Fascinating nevertheless. “We can’t use guns, because it’ll start a bigger war, but we still have to fight,” is an interesting tactical position. Odds on a bigger China-India spat in, say, the next five years?
• Canada to upgrade its CF-18s with AIM-9X, new radars – That guy with the private air force must be devastated to see that a good source of jets is not yet on the table.
• Stryker cannon competition still healthy, Army boss says – Two of the six companies contracted to provide 30mm remote control turrets are confirmed to have dropped out. To be fair, the design contract spots you a Stryker and a 30mm cannon, but makes you provide the turret and all the control electronics, and unless you think you’ve got a good shot at winning, the $150,000 figure for the initial design contract seems a little skimpy.
• Surprising nobody, Chinese shipyards could probably outpace American ones in replacing warship losses – In the Chinese column: a lot of indigenous shipyard capacity not currently being used for warships. In the Allies-For-Democracy column: three of the five largest civilian shipbuilders in the world. (South Korea: 1st. Japan: 3rd. Philippines: 4th.) We might also secure ‘Nam, in 5th, depending on the nature of a hypothetical war with China. Back in the Chinese column: all of those shipyards are in easy strike range of the mainland.
• Cato: how dependent is the US on foreign supply chains, anyway? – They answer three questions: what percentage of US GDP comes from foreign trade? (A low one, relative to the world at large—only Cuba and Sudan get a lower percentage of GDP from trade.) What percentage of US manufacturing inputs are sourced from foreign suppliers? (9% from China alone, but they don’t say which 9%, exactly¹, or what kind of inputs we’re talking about.) What percentage of US exports depend on foreign inputs? (9.5%.) Not as dire as I might have thought.

Science and Technology

• Do you remember QuadrigaCX, the Canadian crypto exchange which mysteriously lost all of its users’ money before its CEO vanished in a part of India notorious for faked deaths? – Turns out it was definitely a fraud from day 1. Are they watching the widow?
• Saturday morning’s SpaceX launch stream had some really good shots of a booster descending toward sunrise on Earth
• Slow regexes and you – The algorithmic-complexity points still stand, but it’s also some fifteen years later, and I wonder how much better regex-matching algorithms and better processors have ameliorated the original issue.

Grab Bag

• Thousands of used cars melting in fire aboard container ship in Florida – Or at least, they were still melting as of last Friday. The fire might be under control now.
• File under ‘needs a flight sim’: DC 10 fire bombers attack Arizona blazes – Parvusimperator’s link; strong agree from me. Sims are more fun when you have objectives. I might review F1 2019 to that effect sometime soon.