COVID-19 Growth Rate Trends

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The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has increased by this much daily (most recent three days average) in the following countries:

1) Korea: 1%
2) Japan: 5%
3) Italy: 14.2%
4) Spain: 22.8%
5) Germany: 26.8%
6) USA: 29.6%

Korea
Korea seems to be getting close to getting the epidemic under control. Patients who have officially recovered now outnumber new infections day by day. That is very encouraging.

Japan
Due to geographic proximity and economic relations with China, Japan was also one of the countries with early cases, many of them visitors to China. It crossed the 100 confirmed case threshold on February 22, one day before Italy, yet the outcome could not have been more different. Since then the case number doubled three times in Japan (about every 8 days on average) versus 8 times in Italy (about every 3 days). Confirmed case numbers can not always be taken at face value as they can be quite dependent on the amount of testing and most mild cases will most likely never be counted. There could easily be an order of magnitude more cases than listed in the official statistics. However, 28 deaths in Japan vs 2,503 in Italy (i.e. about 90 times more) suggests that there were actually hugely different outcomes in these two countries. Japanese infection case numbers have increased about 9 times since they were below 100 whereas in Italy they increased about 400-fold since that threshold. One would expect higher mortality in Italy once the medical system was stressed to limit and beyond. Quite plausibly Japan and Italy have been counting a similar percentage of actual cases, but case numbers have been growing much slower in Japan (9% daily average over 24 days) than in Italy (28% daily average over 23 days) and with less stress to the medical system, outcomes have been less lethal on top of numbers being smaller. With intensifying efforts at social distancing, Japan may be next at halting the spread for now. It will still be a difficult road.

Italy and Spain
In Italy the absolute number of daily new infections has been more or less flat for the last 4 days. As a percentage of existing cases it is now half of what it was about week ago, but as total numbers still tripled, the new cases are still at a peak, even if steady. In Spain too the daily increase as a percentage has slowed but like in Italy it has some way to go before it comes close to zero.

Germany and US
Neither in Germany nor in the US is there a clear drop in the daily case growth percentage yet. They are still in exponential growth. Hopefully self-isolation measures will bite soon.

Other numbers
Germany has 5 times as many respirators as France (25,000 vs 5,000).

Italy now has about half as many infections per million inhabitants (~500) than Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, had at the peak of the local outbreak (1,100 per million).

Sources:

COVID-19 Growth Rate in USA and Italy

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“And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
(Donald Trump, Feb 26, 2020)

Looking at charts for the number of total COVID-19 cases in the US and in Italy, it looks like in the 11 days from March 1 to March 12, case numbers increased by an average of 33% per day in the US (75 to 1697).

A week earlier (February 22) Italy already had a similar number of cases and numbers have also been growing exponentially (79 to 1701 in 8 days, an average daily increase of 48%). The infection growth rate seems to have slowed to around 24% after quarantine in parts of Northern Italy and then a countrywide lock down on March 9 (1701 to 15113 cases in 11 days). Nevertheless, in some of the worst affected areas in Italy the health care system is already stressed to the breaking point.

Assuming the US case numbers keep increasing at 33% a day, it would exceed a million cases around April 4. At 24% it will happen a week later, on April 11. But regardless of the timing, if 5% of a million infected Americans were to need intensive care, that’s more than there are ICU beds in the entire US (and most of those are already in use, of course).

This is a very worrying picture. Obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are known risk factors for severe outcomes of COVID-19 and these are highly common in the US. 45% of the US population over 45 are either obese or severely obese (both men and women). On top of that, some 25 million people in the US are not covered by any health insurance.

Worldometers Coronavirus data:
USA Coronavirus
Italy Coronavirus

How Taiwan handled the COVID-19 epidemic

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As one country whose economy is closely entwined with mainland China, Taiwan was expected to take a major hit from COVID-19, but it appears the Taiwanese authorities’ response has been exemplary, resulting in a small number of infections (45 as of March 6) and only a single death so far.

Almost a million Taiwanese live in mainland China and close to 3 million Chinese a year visit Taiwan. China accounts for 23.9% of trade with Taiwan.

This report makes for fascinating reading on how quickly and efficiently the government dealt with the emergency:
Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing

It helps to have competent people in charge:

In addition to daily press briefings by the minister of health and welfare the CECC, the vice president of Taiwan, a prominent epidemiologist, gave regular public service announcements broadcast from the office of the president and made available via the internet. These announcements included when and where to wear a mask, the importance of handwashing, and the danger of hoarding masks to prevent them from becoming unavailable to frontline health workers. The CECC also made plans to assist schools, businesses, and furloughed workers.

Many other countries could learn from Taiwan’s common-sense approach, yet the WHO does not even provide Taiwan with any information on the worldwide epidemic or allow its representatives to attend its conferences. That’s because the People’s Republic of China, a UN and WHO member, claims Taiwan as one of its provinces. The WHO expects Taiwan to receive all information from Beijing and report its findings that way too.

In the March 6, 2020 WHO Situation Report (PDF), the WHO lists Taiwan under “Taipei and environs” in a table on “Confirmed and suspected cases of COVID-19 acute respiratory disease reported by provinces, regions and cities in China”. Interestingly, all but three of the provinces listed there have far higher number of infections and those three have but a fraction of the population of Taiwan (e.g. Macao SAR has only 3% of the population but 22% of the number of infections of Taiwan; Hongkong SAR has 231% of the infections of Taiwan but only 32% of the population). Though it probably helps that Taiwan doesn’t have a land border with mainland China, it also has fewer infections than far away countries such as Norway or Spain that are 8 time zones away from China.

On March 1, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) removed Taiwan from its list of countries with community spread of COVID-19.

What about COVID-19 in Turkey?

In stark contrast with the openness of the government in Taiwan, there has so far not been a single officially confirmed case in Turkey, which beggars belief considering that the WHO lists 15 countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region with COVID-19, including over 3500 confirmed cases and over 100 deaths in next-door Iran.

Turkey claims to have tested 940 individuals with symptoms by March 3 but that every one of them tested negative. The same day, a passenger on a Turkish Airlines flight to Singapore tested positive for COVID-19. It was a French Citizen transiting through Istanbul from Europe. By March 5, Turkey claims to have tested 1,363 persons, still all negative. Turkey claims to have developed its own corona virus test.

Closing the land borders to Iran and Iraq as happened on February 23 could be like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.

Also, almost 300,000 Chinese tourists visited Turkey in the first eight months of 2019 alone. And therein may lie the rub: The Turkish economy is highly dependent on tourism. If Turkey were to share Italy’s fate with hundreds of counted cases, it would deal a heavy blow to an important source of foreign currency and employment, which would weaken President Erdoğan’s grip on power.

But if infections have been spreading in Turkey, which I suspect is highly likely, it will not be possible to hush it up forever. Viruses don’t tend to respect authoritarian politicians’ sensibilities.

Test-driving a Tesla Model 3 in Tokyo

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Recently my son Shintaro and I went to the Tesla showroom in Aoyama, Tokyo to take a Tesla Model 3 for a test drive. I wanted to see for myself how this electric vehicle compared to my almost 12 year old Prius hybrid and to be able to compare it to future EVs from other brands that we may eventually consider.

I’d noticed an increasing number of Teslas around Tokyo, though they’re still far rarer than around the San Francisco bay area. Given that much of Japan is densely populated, range anxiety (an often cited reason for slow electrification) should be less of an issue here compared to the US, particularly with cars that already have over 400 km of range.

I love the practicality of the rear hatch of my Prius that allows me to carry two road bikes without disassembly by simply folding the rear seats. The Tesla Model 3 has a much less accessible trunk, which pretty much rules it out for me. The Model Y will be more practical, but is also even bigger. Apparently it won’t be available in Japan until a year or two after it starts shipping in the US this month (March 2020).

Tesla’s models are quite large by Japanese standards, with implications for parking and for driving on narrow back streets. For example, these are the dimensions of the Tesla Model 3 vs. the current generation Toyota Prius (XW50):

Length: 4690 / 4570 (+120 mm)
Width: 1850 / 1760 (+90 mm)
Height: 1440 / 1470 (-30 mm)

Exact numbers for the Model Y aren’t available yet, but it’s expected to be about the same width but about 1600 mm tall (160 mm taller than the Prius).

The test drive was an unusual experience by Japanese standards. Somebody had mentioned that the dealer experience with Tesla is more like visiting an Apple store than a traditional dealer showroom. I’d say the difference was even greater.

Customer service expectations in Japan are incredibly high and that is probably one factor for Tesla’s relatively sluggish sales here, see a recent Japan Times article.

Shintaro had tried to make the reservation online and was promised a callback within 48 hours, but that never happened so he had to call again to fix up an appointment.

Even when I take my Prius to an oil change at a local gas station, I’ll be served a cup of coffee while I wait. By contrast, when we visited the Tesla showroom to evaluate a JPY 5,100,000 (USD 48,000) car, all we received was a business card of the sales person. They don’t even give you paper brochures. You can look it all up on the website, right?

Before the test drive they took photo copies of our drivers licenses. We were instructed not to take any pictures and to follow the rules of the road. We would be liable for any incidental damage to the car during the test drive. Then we got into the car parked by the roadside outside the showroom, first as passengers, then later taking turns driving it around Akasaka.

I liked the seats, which were nice and firm. The acceleration when you put your foot down is amazing. It feels like a big car but with enough power for its weight. Getting back into the Prius later, it felt quite light by comparison, by which I don’t mean acceleration but it simply feels like a lot less metal being moved around. It tips the scales at about 280 kg less than the base Model 3 (1335 kg vs. 1612 kg).

Some of the controls took some getting used to, such as the lever action of the indicator stalk (which is on the left unlike in Japanese cars) or putting the car into park or into drive with the right stalk. Much of the demonstration involved showing the use of the center screen and its user interface. Many of the functions of the car, such as the electrically assisted steering or the regenerative breaking can be tweaked there, to change the feel of the car.

Headroom in the Tesla was good but personally I don’t much care for the glass roof. In a roll-over accident I would feel safer with a steel roof, but maybe those are not so likely with the low center of gravity afforded by the floor-based battery. The car interior felt overheated when we got into it and no fan was blowing, but I only asked about fan control towards the end of my driving portion. In any other car I would have easily figured it out on my own.

Checking out the trunk and the “frunk” (front trunk) after we got out of the car, the limited access for bulky luggage from the rear was quite a contrast to our Prius, in which we regularly move large items from a DIY center or bicycles for cycling tours far from Tokyo. The Model Y will address that, but it’s also 160 mm taller than the Prius on top of being 90 mm wider like the Model 3. That’s more air resistance and more kWh used to overcome it. That’s one thing I love about the Prius, it offers all this interior space despite being compact and efficient on the outside. 🙂

The width would already make a Model 3 or Model Y a very tight fit in our driveway. We would also have to figure out if there’s enough clearance around the car to plug in the charging cable for overnight charging.

In summary, Tesla’s range of cars is not an easy sell for me as a Japanese customer. While they have great technology, some of the design choices are not a good fit for Japan and the customer experience when dealing with the company (especially given the price range) will not match a lot of cultural expectations.

UPDATE (2020-03-19):

Size information has finally been released for the Model Y. These are the exterior dimensions compared to my current Prius:

Length: 4751 / 4570 (+181 mm)
Width: 1921 / 1760 (+161 mm)
Height: 1624 / 1470 (+154 mm)

Given the width and height it looks like it has roughly 20% more frontal area than the Prius which will impact its air resistance and hence energy usage at freeway speeds.

The train to Galápagos

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If you have read my previous article about the route of the Japanese Chuo Shinkansen, you will know that I am both interested in and sceptical of the high speed Maglev train route now under construction between Tokyo and Nagoya, later to be extended until Osaka.

I recently came across an insightful article by German train expert Sven Andersen in which he highlighted some serious drawbacks of the superconducting magnetic levitation technology to be used for the project. As he pointed out, despite its exorbitant cost the new line will only add about 25% of the capacity of the existing Nozomi trains and 19% of the capacity of the Kodama and Hikari trains (the former only stop at major stations while the latter also stop at intermediate stations).

The mix of different train classes on either rail and wheel based or maglev routes means that (without two separate tracks in either direction) faster trains will have to pass slower trains while those are stopped at stations, with a need for switches to direct them to alternative track sections around each station. A new type of switch had to be developed for maglev trains which did not even exist yet when JR Central already decided on maglev as the technology for the new line: A lengthy piece of concrete track with embedded magnets is push sideways using hydraulic pistons, which takes considerable time. This slow operation of switches limits how closely different classes of trains can follow each other or how closely spaced they can arrive at different platforms at a head station (Tokyo Shinagawa and Nagoya or Osaka).

The two main reasons given for building the new Chuo Shinkansen line were 1) to provide more passenger capacity as the Tokaido Shinkansen line is running at capacity and 2) to provide an alternative route in case the Tokaido Shinkansen is hit by a natural disaster.

If the new maglev line can only provide a quarter or a fifth of the capacity of the existing line then it will not really be able to live up to either objective.

Andersen therefore strongly favours rethinking the plans by going for a rail and wheel-based approach on the new line. Though it would limit top speeds to 350 km/h instead of 500 km/h, it would allow many more trains to be run per hour, which dramatically increase capacity. It would also make it possible for trains operating on the new line to interconnect with the existing rail network, e.g. on to Hiroshima, Kyoto and other parts of Japan, instead of passengers having to get off one train with their luggage, ride 10 floors of escalators and then board a different train to get to their ultimate destination.

Like the German Transrapid Maglev system that was a commercial flop, the Chuo Shinkansen without wheels and rails will be an island within the rail network of an island – an amazing technical feat, but not really a solution for the needs of passengers in Japan and elsewhere.

Toyota is yielding the future to Tesla and other EV makers

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In October 2019, Toyota along with General Motors and Fiat Chrysler sided with the Trump administration in its effort to strip the state of California of its ability to set tighter vehicle emission standards than set by the Federal government. In July 2019, several other car makers including Ford, Honda and Volkswagen had sided with California.

This seemed a very odd move for a company whose iconic Prius hybrid was once seen as a way for people ranging from middle class families to Hollywood stars to show their green credentials. Toyota seems on the wrong side of history now.

I also drive a Prius which I bought almost 12 years ago. When it came out, it was way ahead of everything else: Three times as fuel efficient but more spacious and more reliable than my Audi. It wowed me when I first saw one and later when I first test-drove a friend’s. As an engineer I appreciated the clever technology behind it and as a family man I could rely on it for affordable transport.

However, if I were to buy a car now, I’d have a hard time making up my mind. If Tesla had designed its Model 3 as a mid-size hatchback (like the Prius) instead of giving it a trunk, the choice would be easy. Tesla seems set to address that criticism with its forthcoming Model Y, which will be like a slightly larger hatchback version of the Model 3. If Toyota had redesigned its Prius as a battery electric vehicle (BEV) with at least 300 km of range, the choice would have been even easier. The problem is, Toyota isn’t going to do that and I think I understand why.

I have talked to Toyota dealer sales representatives who came to sell me a new Toyota and when I mentioned about electric vehicles, they kept telling me the time wasn’t ripe for that yet, that infrastructure was too spotty and range too short. I would be better off getting another hybrid as the next car. And Toyota has many hybrid models.

This is precisely the problem: Toyota kept enhancing the hybrid drivetrain of the Prius, improving fuel economy with every new version. Now many different models, from the Toyota Aqua / Prius C to the Corolla Hybrid to the JPN Taxi basically all use the same family of engines, gearbox, battery, inverter and other electric systems. This has kept development costs low and maximized economic gain from the numerous patents that Toyota has received for the Prius.

Meanwhile, Tesla appeared on the scene as a complete outsider and took a radically different approach. By going for an all-electric drivetrain they don’t need an Atkinson-cycle internal combustion engine (ICE), an electrically controlled planetary gear transmission and many other mechanical parts that make the Prius family unique. They just need a bodyshell, an electric motor/generator, inverter and battery. For the first models the battery was basically built up from the exact same “18650” cells that power laptops and the bodyshell for the Tesla Roadster was bought in from Lotus.

Batteries for the automotive market are made by specialized suppliers such as Panasonic and LG instead of being based on in-house designs and intellectual property such as ICEs or gearboxes. Motor/generators and inverters are much simpler and less proprietary than ICEs. The basic technology for inverters used in BEVs and the electric part of hybrid drivetrains has been around since before the 1960s. Toyota engineers got the inspiration from the electrical systems used in bullet trains (shinkansen) that launched before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

If current owners of conventional or diesel cars replace their aging vehicles with hybrids then Toyota and its stable of Prius and cousins will do very well. If people however take a good look at the ecological realities of the 2020s and beyond, they will see that the sooner we can stop pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, the less catastrophic our future will be on this planet. If we still drive cars, they will have to run on renewable energy sources, which hybrids can’t do (except plug-in hybrids for relatively short distances).

This raises a second issue: Toyota has been betting on hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Its Toyota Mirai runs on compressed hydrogen (H2), which is converted into electricity in an on-board fuel cell. This gives it a range of about 500 km between refuelling.

If Toyota were to sell BEVs with ranges of 300-450 km, this would undermine the rationale for hydrogen cars which need a completely new infrastructure for refuelling. Each H2 station costs millions of dollars and the fuel is expensive.

The most economical way of making hydrogen is from natural gas or coal, which releases greenhouse gases. Though one could make hydrogen through electrolysis (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity), because of inefficiencies inherent in this process, this would actually consume about three times more renewable electricity than covering the same distance by charging/discharging a battery. This is why hydrogen will ultimately remain an automotive dead end.

What hydrogen technology basically gives Toyota is a political fig leaf: They can claim to have a path into a carbon-free future that does not rely on batteries (like Tesla and others). Using that fig leaf they think they can keep selling cars that burn gasoline, in California and elsewhere. Perhaps they can hold off moving beyond hybrids for years and years to come. If they can keep selling what they’ve got they may make healthy profits in the short term, but for the sake of the planet I hope this plan won’t work.

I’ve seen this movie before. In the 1990s Sony launched its MiniDisc (MD) player as a replacement for analog audio tapes and recordable alternative to digital Compact Discs (CDs). Then, in the late 1990s MP3 and flash memory came along: smaller, cheaper, more simple. The whole strategy fell apart. Sony could have accepted that MP3 was a superior solution, but that would have then put them on a level with every other audio consumer product maker. Their patents on MD would have become worthless. So they struggled on with trying to promote MD until they eventually had to kill it. From the inventor of the iconic Sony Walkman that had created a whole new market and sold the brand name to billions of consumers, Sony turned into a company that had lost its way. It let newcomers such as Apple with its iPod (which soon morphed into the iPhone) take over the market and consumer mindshare. The rest is history.

So if you’re listening, Toyota: Please build a car as spacious, practical and reliable as the Prius, but without a hybrid drivetrain that still releases CO2 with every km driven. Make it a no compromise battery electric vehicle. Support vehicle-to-grid technology, in which parked cars have an important role to play for stabilizing the electrical grid. Instead of working with fossil fuel companies to turn fossil fuel into hydrogen for thousands of yet to be built H2 filling stations, support expanding renewable power production from solar, offshore and onshore wind, geothermal and large scale storage, which is what we will need for a carbon-neutral future.

Meanwhile, when the time comes to replace my 12 year old car I will look at all the battery electric hatchbacks on the market then. If there is no Toyota amongst them then my next car will not be a Toyota. It’s as simple as that.

The Runway to Hell

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Even four years after the Paris climate agreement, politicians, businesses and consumers are still in denial what this means for our future and what we must do today. At best, we’re all paying lip service while trying to postpone making real changes.

Two examples: Narita airport is planning for a major expansion in flight capacity in the 2020s and Tepco and Chubu Electric Power are trying to open a new coal fired power station in 2023.

One of the greatest concerns behind climate change goals are climate feedback loops, where any amount of additional global warming triggers new causes of global warming. A few examples:

  • If arctic temperatures rise enough for the ground in permafrost regions to thaw in the summer this will lead to CO2 and methane releases from frozen ancient organic matter that starts to rot and decay.
  • Warming oceans may release methane trapped in icy slush as methane clathrate on the sea bed.
  • If summer air temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet rise enough to melt snow during daytime before freezing again, it changes the albedo of the frozen surface to absorb more sunlight and melt again more easily.

So if we want to avoid runaway global warming, we have a very tight CO2 budget that we can still release before the world has to run on 100% non-fossil energy sources.

What we would need is a moonshot-like project, with our brightest minds and financial resources focused on switching all power generation to non-fossil energy, expanding it to take over from other uses of oil and gas such as transport while minimizing release of CO2 outside of power generation. That means not just electric cars and trucks but also fewer cars, less air travel, no more deforestation, minimal consumption of cement and steel and more recycling.

While the Japanese government has formally committed itself to fighting climate change, the reality looks different. Last year the Narita International Airport Corp., government ministries and local government agreed to a plan to increase annual takeoff and landing slots from 300,000 to 500,000. To this purpose, a 2,500 m runway will be extended to 3,500 m to handle bigger planes and a third runway of 3,500 m will be built in the 2020s. Currently, there is no practical alternative to kerosene-based jet fuel. More flights and bigger aircraft mean more CO2 emissions from fossil fuel. Instead of making it possible for more people to fly more often, we should be looking for ways to discourage and avoid flying wherever possible.

JERA, a joint venture between Tepco and Chubu Electric Power is trying to build a coal-fired power station at Kurihama near Yokosuka, with plans to start operating in 2023. Coal is the most carbon-intensive of all fossil fuels. One kWh generated by burning coal even in the most advanced coal-fired thermal power stations releases about twice as much CO2 as the same amount of electricity generated from a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power station running on natural gas. With a limited carbon budget it makes no sense to burn any coal if we still have gas. If we really still must expand fossil fuel power generation (and we probably don’t in Japan), coal is by far the worst choice of all fossil fuels available!

Instead of expanding airports and building coal power stations, we should expand offshore wind power and geothermal energy while raising taxes on air travel, for example by taxes on jet fuel. A recent International Energy Agency report estimated the worldwide potential for wind energy production at 11 times the annual electricity consumption of the world. Japan has almost completely blocked offshore wind power. It has a huge Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), yet in 2018 Britain’s installed offshore wind power base was over 120 times that of Japan, Germany’s about 100 times and China 70 times. Even Belgium which controls only 0.5% of the North Sea had 20 times more installed offshore wind power capacity than Japan in 2018.

Some air travel can be shifted to trains or to less energy intensive ships. Eventually we will develop technology to fly airplanes with non-fossil fuel, such as methane produced from CO2 with renewable electricity in reverse fuel cells though that won’t be cheap or particularly energy-efficient. But until then we need to make hard choices that take us closer to our goals, not further away from them.

Future generations will struggle as coastal land where hundreds of millions of people worldwide currently live or where they grow food will disappear in the sea as warming oceans expand and glaciers melt. They will have to deal with it.

Whole countries will disappear in the next couple of centuries, including the Netherlands and Bangladesh. The same will happen to most of the ten largest cities in the world. The sea level rises projected until 2100 are by no means the end of the story: Sea level rises for several centuries to come are already locked in with the emissions of the last 200 years. The last time this planet had more than 400 ppm of CO2 in its atmosphere (as opposed to 280 ppm before the industrial revolution) was 3 million years ago, when sea levels where 20 m higher than today. So that’s going to happen again, even if we stopped burning all coal, oil and gas today. But because we are still going to keep doing that for a number of years or decades, the ultimate sea levels will be even higher than they were then.

Maybe in some ways it’s easier to speak truth if you’re a 16 year old school kid, not a politician who wants to get campaign finance from friendly businesses or to get reelected by voters who still want to fly on vacation to Thailand, or a business leader trying to please shareholders instead of saving the planet. But reality is reality, even if we look away. We, or our children and their children, will have to face it eventually and it will be what we make it today.

Loan Application Spam

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Usually Gmail does a great job at keeping spam out of my Gmail inbox, but this morning I found an unsolicited email that looked like perhaps it was meant for someone else, supposedly for a loan application I had made:

Hi,

Welcome to Statforge Finance!!

Thank you for applying loan with Statforge Finance.

As per the telephonic conversation, please find attached the company brochure and list of required documents.

Please find below the list of documents which you need to submit as a primary and secondary identification proof.

1. Primary Identification Proof (Driver’s License or Copy of the passport)
2. Address proof (Any utility bill under your name. Most recent is preferred)
3. Income Proof (Recent 3 Months of bank statement/Pay stubs/Tax Documents)

In case of any further clarification please revert on this email or feel free to reach us back on our Toll Free number 1-855-892-0516.

Please submit all the required documents on our email or fax us on 1-810-222-7376 in order to proceed further.

We are happy to help you.

Thanks & Regards,
Communication Department,
Statforge Finance US LLC
Contact No: 1-855-892-0516
Fax No: 1-810-222-7376
Email: info@statforgefinance.com
Website: https://www.statforgefinance.com/

I had never heard of this company, let alone contacted them for a loan (I don’t live in the US).

Sometimes I receive mail meant for people with a similar address, so I wanted to check out if this was perhaps legitimate, but the more I looked the more I found that was odd about it.

To start with, the email wasn’t addressed to anyone by name, nor was it signed by anyone by name. “Thank you for applying loan” is broken English. This matched up with a line in the email header that mentioned an IP address in India:

x-originating-ip: [175.111.128.90]

I had a look at the website listed in the mail footer. The “About Us” page stated:

Statforge Finance loans are best-received and utilized by our customers when they are able to easily understand the loan terms and determine whether the product is the correct fit for their needs.

Searching Google for that line, without the company name, also found the same wording on a couple of other websites, e.g.

Ventura Financials loans are best-received and utilized by our customers when they are able to easily understand the loan terms and determine whether the product is the correct fit for their needs.

and

LOANRAFT finance loans are best-received and utilized by our customers when they are able to easily understand the loan terms and determine whether the product is the correct fit for their needs.

Web contents ripped-off from other websites is never a good sign, but sometimes it’s not straightforward to tell whether a site is a legitimate original or a dodgy clone. So I looked at all three sites (there may be more).

These were the contact details for “LOANRAFT”:

Give us a call
855 955 9655
Mail us
info@loanraftfinance.com
FAX
3023518834

855 955 9655
Address: Delaware Avenue , Wilmington, DE 19801
Email: info@loanraftfinance.com

Notice the absence of a number on the street address. Like the other two companies it uses an 855 free dial phone number with a physical area code for the fax number. The domain is registered through GoDaddy, with the registrant hidden:

Domain Name: loanraftfinance.com
Registry Domain ID: 2283058202_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Updated Date: 2019-07-09T16:51:23Z
Creation Date: 2018-07-06T22:55:47Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2020-07-06T22:55:47Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4806242505
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry
Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Registrant Street: DomainsByProxy.com

Contact details for Statforge Finance:

info@statforgefinance.com
Greenfield Rd, Oak Park, MI 48237
Statforge Finance US LLC
Contact No: 1-855-892-0516
Fax No: 1-810-222-7376

Again no number on the street address, 855 free dial and a physical area code for the fax. However, the 810 area code does not include Oak Park, MI which instead uses 248 and 947.

The domain is also registered via GoDaddy, only two months earlier and the registrant is also cloaked:

Domain Name: statforgefinance.com
Registry Domain ID: 2259908468_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Updated Date: 2019-05-13T20:06:35Z
Creation Date: 2018-05-04T17:19:55Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2020-05-04T17:19:55Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4806242505
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry
Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC

And this is the third one in the set:

Green Valley Parkway,
Henderson, NV 89074
+1 (855) 850 7390
info@venturafinancials.com
Fax: 13033747343

No number on the street address, 855 free dial plus physical area code for the fax.

It is also registered via GoDaddy, in the same month as loanraftfinance.com:

Domain Name: venturafinancials.com
Registry Domain ID: 2416866824_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Updated Date: 2019-07-25T21:31:33Z
Creation Date: 2019-07-25T21:31:32Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2020-07-25T21:31:32Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4806242505
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry
Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC

Looking at who hosts email for the three different domains:

loanraftfinance.com. 3600 IN MX 0 loanraftfinance-com.mail.protection.outlook.com.
venturafinancials.com. 3600 IN MX 0 venturafinancials-com.mail.protection.outlook.com.
statforgefinance.com. 2858 IN MX 0 statforgefinance-com.mail.protection.outlook.com.

They are all using Microsoft’s Outlook mail infrastructure. This is also where my initial sample email was sent from.

While I don’t know yet what exactly these people are up to, I would advise anyone who received a loan offer via spam to steer well clear of such offers.

It Takes a Child to Raise a Village

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A few years ago I was visiting Venice. It was a fascinating experience to walk around this ancient city without cars, built on some islands in a lagoon that protected it from the chaos after the fall of the West Roman Empire. I was surprised how eastern some of the architecture looked, because I hadn’t known how tight the connections were between Venice and the Byzantine empire, the successor state to the East Roman Empire. More than a thousand years of history come alive when you walk those ancient cobble-stoned streets.

For a long time Venice has been slowly sinking into the sea. In many buildings I saw, the ground floor was more or less uninhabitable and ruined due to water damage or the risk from regular flooding during storm surges. Sadly, despite all efforts to save it, Venice will disappear in the ocean, gradually swallowed up by rising seas.

The same will happen to Amsterdam, once the capital of a trading nation from where ships sailed to every continent. And not just this city will disappear, but almost the entire country of the Netherlands. It’s not a question of if but when.

Its inhabitants will gradually migrate to other countries in Europe, such as Germany, France or Spain that will be less affected by a 20 m rise of global sea levels. The Netherlands will be virtually wiped out when that happens. So will be Bangladesh and many island nations, as well as Miami, Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, much of Tokyo, London, New York City and many other coastal megacities around the world.

When I was a schoolkid, I learnt from science books that 0.3% or 300 ppm of the earth’s atmosphere was carbon dioxide (CO2). I wasn’t told that only 200 years earlier, before the Industrial Revolution it had only been 280 ppm. Later I learnt that CO2 is a so called “greenhouse gas”, as it traps heat from the surface of the earth and prevents it from escaping into space, thus raising the surface temperature of the planet. As our civilization burns coal, oil and gas and clears forests the CO2 level increases and the greenhouse effect intensifies. In the last couple of decades this has been happening at an increasing rate.

Last year the world consumed about 100 million barrels of crude oil a day. 99.6% of passenger cars on the roads worldwide in 2018 run exclusively on fossil fuels. Worldwide power generation from coal is growing rapidly and is expected to double from 2011 to 2023. Of all the fossil fuels, coal releases the highest amount of CO2 per kWh produced, yet many countries are still building new coal-fired power plant capacity, including here in Japan, where a TEPCO – Chubu Electric Power joint venture still wants to open a new coal-fired power station in Kurihama near Tokyo in 2023/2024.

In 2013, the 400 ppm level was already breached and it is still rising at an increasing rate. How significant is that number? Since humans walked on this planet it had never been as high as this: You have to go back millions of years to find an era when there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere: The last time the CO2 level was above 400 ppm was in the Pliocene (about 3-5 million years ago).

At that time the average global temperature was some 2-3 C higher than today, but temperatures in the arctic and in Antarctica were significantly higher than that. Trees were growing in the southern part of Greenland, which was not covered in thick glaciers as it is today. Trees were also growing in parts of Antarctica. Without billions of tons of water locked up in glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, sea levels were 20-25 m higher than today. Also these oceans were warmer than today and water expands when it warms up. The rising CO2 levels will melt these glaciers again, until a new equilibrium is established several hundreds years or more in the future. The coast lines will move, gobbling up cities and farm land alike. Ultimately they may well look like those in the Pliocene again, but how much ice will melt and how rapidly it will melt still depends on what we do from now.

To give you an idea of the long term impact of this kind of sea level rise, the former Chinese capital of Nanjing, 200 km from the Yellow Sea, lies only 20 m above sea level. With 25 m of sea level rise the ocean would penetrate about 180 km inland southwest of Beijing. Some of the most densely populated areas of China (national population: 1.3 billion) would be swallowed by the sea.

In Vietnam the two biggest cities, Hanoi and the Red River plain around it, and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and all of the land southwest of it will drown. Many of Asia’s river plains that are now its biggest rice baskets will turn into continental ocean shelf. The same will happen in the Nile valley or along the Euphrates and Tigris in the Middle East.

Note that these are changes that will happen over the next centuries or more regardless of what we do from now. They are the least bad outcome of what is possible. If we do nothing, it will get far worse.

There are feedback cycles that amplify the negative effects. For example, once it gets warm enough in summer in arctic permafrost regions that the ground will melt in summer, then peat and other frozen organic matter in the wet soil will start to decay, releasing huge amounts of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. This in turn will raise temperatures even higher. Where white sea ice melts in the summer, darker ocean water is exposed below, leading to more sunlight being absorbed and higher air and ocean temperatures. This in turn leads to less sea ice coverage the next year. When snow on top of glaciers thaws and refreezes, it also changes its albedo. The ice absorbs more sunlight than the virgin snow. So every warm spell leads to more warming. Once the thick ice sheet in Greenland and East Antarctica starts melting, its elevation will drop. It’s colder at higher elevations. The reduction in thickness will speed up melting. We could end up with a run-away effect that is impossible to stop until there is no ice left (see this article in National Geographic for maps of what the world will look like then).

The young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who started campaigning against inaction against climate change as a 15-year old, used the image of a “house on fire”:

Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire. […] Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

The changes brought about by man-made climate change will be dramatic, but political action so far has been underwhelming. The steps taken so far or even the steps discussed in public fall far short of what is necessary to avoid even worse outcomes.

There is considerable resistance to taking action against Climate Change. We are not used to thinking much about events beyond our own life time. Politicians will worry about the next elections, business leaders about their next annual business results. Politicians tend to take drastic action only in wars and other major disasters, but Climate Change is going to be bigger than any (non-nuclear) war or hurricane.

If we were honest and ethical, we would not put the stock market value of our power companies or car or airplane manufacturers or our airlines or tourism industry above the future of the planet. The resistance to change from both industry and consumers will be huge, but we owe people the unvarnished truth: That we can’t continue with business as usual.

Even if we switch to electric cars, the steel, copper and glass for those cars for now will be made using fossil fuels. Even the wind turbines, solar panels and battery storage that we have to build at a massive scale to supply renewable energy for our future civilization will largely be manufactured using fossil fuels for years to come. We have to spend our dwindling carbon budget wisely, for example on rebuilding infrastructure instead of on holidays in Bali or a shiny new BMW SUV.

There is as yet no clear technical solution for air travel or for international cargo ships without fossil fuel. The same is true for making cement or for steel production from iron ore. In the short term we could replace kerosene or heavy fuel oil with LNG to reduce CO2 output in transport, but that is not enough and we will need to go much further than that. The next steps will be much harder. We don’t have the solutions yet. Therefore we need a modern moonshot program for a post-fossil future, an all-out effort — not to put more humans on the moon again — but to decarbonise our economies.

Over the last year Greta Thunberg has become a household name worldwide. She has drawn attention to the urgency of change and to the drastic nature of the changes needed. Her youth and thus her expected life span versus those of the politicians and business leaders of today, who mostly won’t be around after the year 2050, gives her a different perspective which the rest of us can then also relate to. It’s not all about us, but about our children and all of humanity after us. Sometimes it takes a child to educate the world.

Archiving/Exporting Skype Chats

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Many long time Skype users have been unhappy how the service has changed over the years, especially after the company was acquired by Microsoft. I am one of them.

Starting out as a fairly powerful, secure and private peer-to-peer network, Skype gradually mutated into a client-server product with limited privacy and significantly reduced functionality and performance.

Every now and then I used to make backups of important Skype chats, so I would have the information available for future reference. This used to be doable with copy and paste, but that no longer works. Skype then offered a function to export the chats to a file, for viewing with a viewer.

In late 2017 that chat export functionality was removed from the macOS client in the upgrade from version 7 to version 8. Everything typed in chats after that upgrade no longer gets tracked on the client side but ends up on the server, where of course it is no longer private. According to Microsoft, the chat archives going back as far as April 2017 will be maintained until you delete them.

Skype chat archives after April 2017

To download chat archives, log into your Skype account from a browser using this link:

https://go.skype.com/export

Select what you want to download and click “Submit request”. You will be notified once an archive of the chats is ready for download. Alternatively, you can go back to above export link to check manually. Once you download and extract the archive, there’s a Javascript viewer for it.

Skype chat archive until 2017

For older chats, the macOS Skype client has an option to export the locally saved chats. Go to:

Setting / Messaging / Export chat history from Skype 7.x