Episodit

  • This week we talk about the Rwandan genocide, the First and Second Congo Wars, and M23.

    We also discuss civil wars, proxy conflicts, and resource curses.

    Recommended Book: Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. Ghodsee

    Transcript

    The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, was previously known as ZaĂŻre, a name derived from a Portuguese mistranscription of the regional word for "river."

    It wore that monicker from 1971 until 1997, and this region had a rich history of redesignations before that, having been owned by various local kingdoms, then having been colonized by Europeans, sold to the King of Belgium in 1885, who owned it personally, not as a part of Belgium, which was unusual, until 1908, renaming it for that period the Congo Free State, which was kind of a branding exercise to convince all the Europeans who held territory thereabouts that he was doing philanthropic work, though while he did go to war with local and Arab slavers in the region, he also caused an estimated millions of deaths due to all that conflict, due to starvation and disease and punishments levied against people who failed to produce sufficient volumes of rubber from plantations he built in the region.

    So all that effort and rebranding also almost bankrupted him, the King of Belgium, because of the difficulties operating in this area, even when you step into it with vast wealth, overwhelming technological and military advantages, and the full backing of a powerful, if distant, nation.

    After the King's deadly little adventure, the region he held was ceded to the nation of Belgium as a colony, which renamed it the Belgium Congo, and it eventually gained independence from Belgium, alongside many other European colonies around the world, post-WWII, in mid-1960.

    Almost immediately there was conflict, a bunch of secessionist movements turning into civil wars, and those civil wars were amplified by the meddling of the United States and the Soviet Union, which supported different sides, funding and arming them as they tended to do in proxy conflicts around the world during this portion of the Cold War.

    This period, which lasted for about 5 years after independence, became known as the Congo Crisis, because government leaders kept being assassinated, different groups kept rising up, being armed, killing off other groups, and then settling in to keep the government from unifying or operating with any sense of security or normalcy.

    Eventually a man named Mobutu Sese Seko, usually just called Mobutu, launched a real deal coup that succeeded, and he imposed a hardcore military dictatorship on the country—his second coup, actually, but the previous one didn't grant him power, so he tried again a few years later, in 1965, and that one worked—and though he claimed, as many coup-launching military dictators do, that he would stabilize things over the next five years, restoring democracy to the country in the process, that never happened, though claiming he would did earn him the support of the US and other Western governments for the duration, even as he wiped out any government structure that could oppose him, including the position of Prime Minister in 1966, and the institution of Parliament in 1967.

    In 1971, as I mentioned, he renamed the country ZaĂŻre, nationalized all remaining foreign owned assets in the country, and it took another war, which is now called the First Congo War, to finally unseat him.

    And this conflict, which began in late-1996, spilled over into neighboring countries, including Sudan and Uganda, and a slew of other nations were involved, including but not limited to Chad, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, alongside foreign assistance granted to various sides by France, China, Israel, and covertly, the United States.

    The conflict kicked off when Rwanda invaded ZaĂŻre, more neighboring states joined in, all of them intending to take out a bunch of rebel groups that the Mobutu government was no longer keeping in line: Mobutu himself having long since fallen ill, and thus lacking the control he once had, but still profiting mightily from outside influences that kept him as a friendly toehold in the region.

    So these other nations sent military forces into ZaĂŻre to handle these groups, which were causing untold troubles throughout the region, and the long and short of this conflict is that it only lasted a few months, from October 1996 to May 1997, but the destruction and carnage was vast, everyone on both sides partnering up to take out rebels, or in the case of those rebels, to join up against these government militaries, and all of them using the opportunity to also engage in violence against ethnic enemies with whom they had long-simmering beefs.

    This led to the collapse of Mobutu's government, the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo when a new government was installed, but very little changed in terms of the reality of how that government functioned, so all the same variables were still in place a year later, in 1998, when what's now called the Second Congo War kicked off, informed by basically the same problems but bringing even more African governments into the fighting, many of them pulled into things by alliances they had with involved neighbors.

    And just as before, a variety of groups who felt aggrieved by other groups throughout the region used this conflict as an excuse to slaughter and destroy people and towns they didn't like, including what's been called a genocide of a group of Pygmy people who lived in the area, around 70,000 of them killed in the waning days of the war.

    In mid-2003, a peace agreement was signed, most of the warring factions that had fought in Congolese territory were convinced to leave, and it was estimated that up to 5.4 million people had died during the conflict.

    What I'd like to talk about today is what's happening in the DRC, now, at a moment of heightening tensions throughout the region, and in the DRC in particular, amidst warnings from experts that another regional conflict might be brewing.

    —

    A transition government was set up in the DRC in 2003, following the official end of that Second Congo war, and this government, though somewhat weak and absolutely imperfect in many ways, did manage to get the country to the point, three years later, in 2006, that it could hold an actual multi-party election; the country's first ever, which is no small thing.

    Unfortunately, a dispute related to the election results led to violence between supporters of the two primary candidates, so a second election was held—and that one ended relatively peacefully and a new president, Joseph Kabila, was sworn in.

    Kabila was reelected in 2011, then in 2018 he said he wouldn't be running again, which helped bring about the country's first peaceful transition of power when the next president, from the opposing party, stepped into office.

    During his tenure in office, though, Kabila's DRC was at near-constant war with rebel groups that semi-regularly managed to capture territory, and which were often supported by neighboring countries, alongside smaller groups, so-called Mai-Mai militias, that were established in mostly rural areas to protect residents from roaming gangs and other militias, and which sometimes decided to take other people's stuff or territory, even facing off with government forces from time to time.

    Violence between ethnic groups has also continued to be a problem, including the use of sexual violence and wholesale attempted genocide, which has been difficult to stop because of the depth of some of the issues these groups have with each other, and in some cases the difficulty the government has just getting to the places where these conflicts are occurring, infrastructure in some parts of the country being not great, where it exists at all.

    That 2018 election, where power was given away by one president to another, peacefully, for the first time, was notable in that regard, but it was also a milestone in it marked the beginning of widespread anti-election conspiracy theories, in that case the Catholic Church saying that the official results were bunk, and other irregularities, like a delay of the vote in areas experiencing Ebola outbreaks, those areas in many cases filled with opposition voters, added to suspicions.

    The most recent election, at the tail-end of 2023, was even more awash with such concerns, the 2018 winner, President Tshisekedi, winning reelection with 73% of the vote, and a cadre of nine opposition candidates signing a declaration saying that the election was rigged and that they want another vote to be held.

    All of which establishes the context for what's happening in the DRC, today, which is in some ways a continuation of what's been happening in this country pretty much since it became a country, but in other ways is an escalation and evolution of the same.

    One of the big focal points here, though, is the role that neighboring Rwanda has played in a lot of what's gone down in the DRC, including the issues we're seeing in 2024.

    Back in 1994, during what became known as the Rwandan genocide, militias from the ruling majority Hutu ethnic group decided to basically wipe out anyone from the minority Tutsi ethnic group.

    Somewhere between a 500,000 and a million people are estimated to have been killed between April and July of that year, alone, and that conflict pushed a lot of Hutu refugees across the border into the eastern DRC, which at the time was still ZaĂŻre.

    About 2 million of these refugees settled in camps in the North and South Kivu provinces of the DRC, and some of them were the same extremists who committed that genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and they started doing what they do in the DRC, as well, setting up militias, in this case mostly in order to defend themselves against the new Tutsi-run government that had taken over in Rwanda, following the genocide.

    This is what sparked that First Congo War, as the Tutsi-run Rwandan government, seeking justice and revenge against those who committed all those atrocities went on the hunt for any Hutu extremists they could find, and that meant invading a neighboring country in order to hit those refugee groups, and the militias within them, that had set up shop there.

    The Second Congo War was sparked when relations between the Congolese and Rwandan governments deteriorated, the DRC government pushing Rwandan troops out of the eastern part of their country, and Kabila, the leader of the DRC at the time, asking everyone else to leave, all foreign troops that were helping with those Hutu militias.

    Kabila then allowed the Hutus to reinforce their positions on the border with Rwanda, seemingly as a consequence of a burgeoning international consensus that the Rwandan government's actions following the genocide against the Tutsis had resulted in an overcompensatory counter-move against Hutus, many of whom were not involved in that genocide, and the Tutsis actions in this regard amounted to war crimes.

    One of the outcomes of this conflict, that second war, was the emergence of a mostly Tutsi rebel group called the March 23 Movement, or M23, which eventually became a huge force in the region in the early 20-teens, amidst accusations that the Congolese government was backing them.

    M23 became such an issue for the region that the UN Security Council actually sent troops into the area to work with the Congolese army to fend them off, after they made moves to start taking over chunks of the country, and evidence subsequently emerged that Rwanda was supporting the group and their effort to screw over the Congolese government, which certainly didn't help the two countries' relationship.

    Alongside M23, ADF, and CODECO, a slew of more than 100 other armed, rebel groups still plague portions of the DRC, and part of the issue here is that Rwanda and other neighboring countries that don't like the DRC want to hurt them to whatever degree they're able, but another aspect of this seemingly perpetual tumult is the DRC's staggering natural resource wealth.

    Based on some estimates, the DRC has something like $24 trillion worth of natural resource deposits, including the world's largest cobalt and coltan reserves, two metals that are fundamental to the creation of things like batteries and other aspects of the modern economy, and perhaps especially the modern electrified economy.

    So in some ways this is similar to having the world's largest oil deposits back in the early 20th century: it's great in a way, but it's also a resource curse in the sense that everyone wants to steal your land, and in the sense that setting up a functioning government that isn't a total kleptocracy, corrupt top to bottom, is difficult, because there's so much wealth just sitting there, and there's no real need to invest in a fully fleshed out, functioning economy—you can just take the money other countries offer you to exploit your people and resources, and pocket that.

    And while that's not 100% what's happened in the DRC, it's not far off.

    During the early 2000s and into the 20-teens, the DRC government sold essentially all its mining rights to China, which has put China in control of the lion's share of some of the world's most vital elements for modern technology.

    The scramble to strike these deals, and subsequent efforts to defend and stabilize on one hand, or to attack and destabilize these mining operations, on the other, have also contributed to instability in the region, because local groups have been paid and armed to defend or attack, soldiers and mercenaries from all over the world have been moved into the area to do the same, and the logic of Cold War-era proxy conflicts has enveloped this part of Africa to such a degree that rival nations like Uganda are buying drones and artillery from China to strike targets within the DRC, even as China arms DRC-based rebel groups to back up official military forces that are protecting their mining operations.

    It's a mess. And it's a mess because of all those historical conditions and beefs, because of conflicts in other, nearby countries and the machinations of internal and external leaders, and because of the amplification of all these things resulting from international players with interests in the DRC—including China, but also China's rivals, all of whom want what they have, and in some cases, don't want China to have what they have.

    In 2022, M23 resurfaced after laying low for years, and they took a huge chunk of North Kivu in 2023.

    For moment that same year, it looked like Rwanda and the DRC might go to war with each other over mining interests they control in the DRC, but a pact negotiated by the US led to a reduction in the military buildup in the area, and a reduction in their messing with each other's political systems.

    In December of 2023, though, the President of the DRC compared the President of Rwanda to Hitler and threatened to declare war against him, and UN troops, who have become incredibly unpopular in the region, in part because of various scandals and corruption within their ranks, began to withdraw—something that the US and UN have said could lead to a power vacuum in the area, sparking new conflicts in an already conflict-prone part of the country.

    As of March 2024, soldiers from South Africa, Burundi, and Tanzania are fighting soldiers from Rwanda who are supporting M23 militants in the eastern portion of the DRC, these militants already having taken several towns.

    Seven million Congolese citizens are internally displaced as a result of these conflicts, having had to flee their homes due to all the violence, most of them now living in camps or wandering from place to place, unable to settle down anywhere due to other violence, and a lack of sufficient resources to support them.

    Rwanda, for its part, denies supporting M23, and it says the Congolese government is trying to expel Tutsis who live in the DRC.

    Burundi, located just south of Rwanda, has closed its border with its neighbor, and has also accused Rwanda of supporting rebels within their borders with the intent of overthrowing the government.

    Most western governments have voiced criticisms of Rwanda for deploying troops within its neighbors' borders, and for reportedly supporting these militant groups, but they continue to send the Rwandan government money—Rwanda gets about a third of its total budget from other governments, and the US is at the top of that list of donors, but the EU also sends millions to Rwanda each year, mostly to fund military actions aimed at taking out militants that make it hard to do business in the region.

    So changes in political stances are contributing to this cycle of violence and instability, as are regular injections of outside resources like money and weapons and soldiers.

    And as this swirl of forces continues to make the DRC borderline ungovernable, everyday people continue to be butchered and displaced, experiencing all sorts of violence, food shortages, and a lack of basic necessities like water, and this ongoing and burgeoning humanitarian nightmare could go on to inform and spark future conflicts in the region.

    Show Notes

    https://archive.ph/lk0mN

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kabila

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

    https://gsphub.eu/country-info/Democratic%20Republic%20of%20Congo

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo

    https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/why-fighting-is-flaring-eastern-congo-threatening-regional-stability-2024-02-19/

    https://archive.ph/lk0mN

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/a-guide-to-the-decades-long-conflict-in-dr-congo

    https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/violence-democratic-republic-congo

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_23_Movement

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivu_conflict

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Congo_War

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War



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  • This week we talk about mergers, acquisitions, and the Shale Oil Revolution.

    We also discuss liquid natural gas, energy diplomacy, and political hypocrisy.

    Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

    Transcript

    For the sixth year in a row, the United States is the largest oil producer in the world.

    As of March 2024, it's producing an average of 12.93 million barrels of oil per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it periodically pops above that average for stretches of time, like in December of last year when it managed to average just over 13.3 million barrels per day.

    That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil.

    For context, while Saudi Arabia remains the holder of the world's most substantial spare oil capacity and was the largest oil exporter in 2023, they set aside plans to increase output to 12 million barrels a day back in January, which leaves them about a million barrels a day shy of the expansion target they set in 2020.

    In 2023, the US produced about 28% more oil than Russia and about 33% more than Saudi Arabia, on average.

    The US is becoming a huge player in oil exports, too, but it really shines if you look at not just crude oil, but also natural gas liquids and refined petroleum products. In aggregate, in 2023, the United States exported nearly the same volume of these products that both Saudi Arabia and Russia produced, not exported, which is pretty wild.

    As is the fact that in December of 2023, the US exported about 400 billion more cubic feet of natural gas than it imported; and it imports a lot, and it only started exporting natural gas a few years ago, so that's the figure for an industry that didn't even exist until 2016, and didn't really grow until the 2020s.

    The US hasn't always been this kind of force in the global oil market. It's long been a consumer of huge quantities of the stuff, but while it produced a decent amount until the late-90s, competing with Russia and trailing Saudi Arabia, though not by much, US production levels dropped substantially beginning in the early 90s, the US becoming a huge importer of fossil fuels, its production levels dipping down to something closer to those of Iran by the mid-2000s; when 9/11 happened in 2001, one of the big concerns was that the US's fundamental reliance on Middle Eastern oil would complicate its military options and hamstring its economy.

    That all changed, though, with what became known as the Shale Revolution, when the widespread investment in and deployment of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" technologies, combined with developments that allowed for horizontal drilling, opened up huge swathes of new oil-rich territories in the US and Canada, making what were previously usable, but incredibly expensive to exploit fossil fuel resources less expensive and easier to tap, and southern US states in particular saw a wave of new and expanded drilling, leading to a surge in the US's production output, and ultimately allowing the US to become the top producer in the world beginning in 2018.

    The degree to which this has changed things, geopolitically, cannot be overstated, in the US and globally.

    Stateside, petroleum prices became less tethered to the whims and political motivations of mostly Middle Eastern nations and Russia, which, working together via the OPEC+ oil cartel, were long able to threaten and coerce the US government and its allies in various ways.

    That remained the case for a while, even after this shale oil boom, as production and export figures weren't optimally aligned. But as this new reality has set in, the US government has been more strategic in how it has stockpiled fossil fuels resources and how it's been willing to use those stockpiles to manage price fluctuations, for itself and its allies, when warranted.

    This has also been important for manufacturing, shipping, and other energy-hungry aspects of the US economy, and it has stoked booms in all sorts of consumer-facing industries, alongside the deployment of power-hungry infrastructure like new power plants and data centers.

    Globally, this increased production has allowed the US to become a player in energy diplomacy, exporting fuel to allies that needed it because of disasters or foreign meddling, and recently, the US has taken this up a notch by bolstering Europe's energy supplies in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine—an invasion that led to sanctions from the EU against Russia, those sanctions arriving more slowly than they might have otherwise arrived because of concerns that Russia's stranglehold on much of the bloc's energy resources might turn into a chokehold, hobbling their economies, military preparedness, and civilian support for the sanctions, because people would be paying extreme prices for ever-shrinking volumes of energy.

    In the decades leading up to that invasion, many European nations, especially Germany, completely recalibrated their economies so they could profit from Russian fuel, so the fear that those fuel supplies would dry up if they made the wrong move, supported Ukraine too ardently, was a significant concern and shaped a lot of what happened in those early days of the invasion.

    The US started exporting liquified natural gas to the bloc, though, which is gas that's turned into a liquid using incredibly low temperatures, which shrinks it so that it's easier and cheaper to ship. And these shipments arrived first in drips and drabs, because the infrastructure on the receiving end, to convert that chilly liquid gas back into room-temperature, full-volumed gas, needed to be installed, but once that infrastructure was in place, LNG began to arrive from the US in huge volumes, a whole new energy economy popping up essentially overnight, relative to how these things typically go, anyway. And that enabled more and sterner sanctions from the EU, of a kind that may not have been feasible, lacking that energy resource backstop.

    What I'd like to talk about today is another, even more recent development within the US oil industry, and what it might mean for the future of this industry.

    —

    In 2023 alone, the businesses that make up the US energy sector spent about $250 billion scooping up clients, suppliers, and rivals.

    A poll of energy executives in December of the same year suggested we could see another $50 billion or so invested in more acquisitions and mergers over the next two years, and in 2024, so far, as of mid-March, we've already seen APA buy Callon, Chesapeake buy Southwestern, Talos buy QuarterNorth, and Sunoco acquire NuStar; these deals all close at the tale-end of Q1 or in Q2 2024, and they were worth around $4.5, $7.4, $1.29, and $7.3 billion, respectively, so nearly $20.5 billion worth of big oil industry deals, already, and the year is just getting started, so that $50 billion figure is looking prescient.

    The majority of next-step deals are expected to center around the Permian Basin, which is located in western Texas, with a little bit of overflow across the border into New Mexico.

    This basin is the highest-producing oil field in the US, generating nearly 6 million barrels of oil and around 25 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day, as of early 2024, and this is a region of intense investment and growth; oil fields around the country are shutting down, and that increase in gas and oil production that we're seeing is mostly the consequence of more effective technologies and upgrades in the hardware and software being used by the industry.

    So better exploration, better tools to get to the best pockets of resources, better capturing technologies and means of shuttling what they pump from place to place—it's a full stack of better tech and systems, and that is allowing the industry to consolidate its sprawl into fewer areas, many of them in the Permian Basin, and that's thought to be part of why we're seeing so much consolidation at the moment: more investment in fewer wells and fields in a smaller portion of the country is leading to more output, and that means the bigger companies with more R&D capacity and higher-end assets will tend to have a bigger advantage than their more dispersed, smaller rivals.

    It's anticipated, though, that a collection of variables, including that consolidation, will actually slow the growth of the US's fossil fuel-based energy industry, at least for the next few years.

    Less activity from fewer business entities and fewer investments that will lead directly to higher output is expected to nudge that 12.93 million barrels a day up by maybe 120,000 or 170,000 barrels per day, rather than the previously projected 1 million barrel a day increase.

    That's the EIA projection, as least—some other analysts have higher expectations, in some cases double or quadruple that range, but the general consensus is that more of the oil wealth in this region being owned by larger entities that are aiming for consolidation, not growth in the sense of exploring and exploiting a bajillion new wells, will likely lead to a period of more tempered industry-wide growth, and probably a period in which these now-bigger companies will be focusing on getting all their ducks in a row, reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in their new, combined collection of assets, and possibly eyeballing other acquisition targets, as well—so that'll means more investment in efficiencies, less investment in upping those already sky-high production numbers.

    All of this is happening within the context of efforts, globally, to reduce humanity's reliance on and use of fossil fuels. And that's led to some strange combinations of policies and political messaging, and no shortage of claims of hypocrisy from all sides of the conversation.

    Case in point: even as US President Biden has celebrated US energy independence and the associated security enabled and supported by this expansion of fossil fuel production and processing, he has also flogged and signed all sorts of laws and regulations meant to reduce oil use and to increase the deployment of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources.

    He's also pushed hard for government investment in clean energy and related infrastructure, including things like electric vehicles and upgrades for homes, and he's not alone in this: other wealthy nations in particular have been pushing hard to emphasize and enable this transition, as all the data indicates the faster we shift away from burning fossil fuels and engaging in other emitting activities, the less destructive the impacts of human-amplified climate change will be, and the less expensive it will ultimately be to adapt to those new realities, and to stop making them worse; to fully transition to a net-zero, and then eventually, a practically non-emittive future.

    This seemingly bipolar stance can be disorienting, especially for those it directly impacts.

    And consequently, rather than making everyone happy, as both sides of the climate change, renewables conversation are getting a fair bit of what they want due to these seemingly opposing investments, it's mostly just pissing everyone off, as environmentalists, climate change activists, and everyday people who are concerned about the impacts of the changing climate that they're seeing around them, more and more each year, are irritated that the segue to a non-emittive energy future isn't happening faster, while oil, gas, and coal companies are peeved that they're being elbowed out, despite having arguably gotten the country to where it is today, provide the US economy with a substantial chunk of its overall income and wealth, and in a very real way enable modern, everyday life—even for those people who want them and their products to disappear as quickly as possible.

    That perception of hypocrisy is difficult to sidestep, then, because while, yes—there has been a lot of new, clean infrastructure deployed, many EV and similar companies have been invested in, and on the other side there have been all those big expansions of oil and gas infrastructure and an increase in the market for those sorts of products—these two narratives are also in diametric opposition to each other, at least in the long-term, and slow-walking a transition away from fossil fuels makes climate change worse, its impacts more devastating and longer-lasting, the worst stuff arriving faster, too, while the shift toward cleaner energy is stealing market share from those emittive energy companies, and this movement toward renewables puts a cap on fossil fuel companies' very existence, as well—some policies suggesting that they can't exist, or at least not exist at any real scale, doing the type of business they've always done, past a certain, government-mandated date.

    And both of these perspectives are arguably true; so those victories both sides are accumulating are often lost in the sea of concomitant victories for the perceptually opposing side, which manifest as losses for the non-victorious side.

    It's worth noting, too, that both sides actually have pretty good arguments, in isolation.

    Lacking the dominant, fossil fuel-based energy sources of today, the US military wouldn't be able to operate; it simply wouldn't be able to function, which would have all sorts of knock-on effects, until and unless all of those vehicles and missiles and other bits of hardware could be replaced with cleaner versions of the same.

    Lacking a full-scale replacement of every fuel-chugging car, bus, train, jet, and other piece of transportation infrastructure, the US economy would come to a halt, overnight, and that would wreak untold havoc in-country and around the world.

    There's a chance that certain plastic goods would disappear, too, and a gobsmackingly large portion of all things created in the modern world are made of some kind of plastic, which is a petroleum product, and the well-being of that industry is in some ways correlated with the well-being of the rest of the industry's efforts.

    That said, if we don't shift away from the use of these fuels and materials soon, we may lose the ability to counter some of the worst impacts of climate change, including many that are deadly, like overpowered and more regular storms and heatwaves, and others that will take out ecosystems and the creatures living in those ecosystems, permanently, changes to their conditions arriving so quickly they don't have a change to adapt.

    Military conflicts and economy collapses may seem quaint compared to the cost and loss of lives and treasure associated with forthcoming, more common, climate change-triggered disasters and norm-shifts.

    There's some indication that some Big Oil companies are making tweaks to how they do things in order to reduce the distance between their economic priorities and the priorities of folks who want them to stop pumping more fossil fuels from the ground.

    Top mining officials from Saudi Arabia recently announced they're building out the systems and hardware necessary to extract the more than $2.5 trillion worth of metals they're so far located in their territory, for instance, and other state-run businesses have suggested they intend to do the same: leveraging their knowledge, tools, and expertise to mine and process some of the resources that'll be most necessary (and thus, valuable) for the transition to cleaner energy.

    Some US-based Big Oil companies have made announcements about their own intentions in this regard, some saying they'll pull lithium from their oil wells, while others claim they're investing in rare earth mining infrastructure.

    ExxonMobil recently announced that it would be returning to one of its old, long-closed oil wells in a small town in Arkansas to mine lithium there, which could be beneficial for their bottom line, but also for folks in that region who were left in the lurch when Exxon left to refocus on Texas in the 1990s.

    A coal company operating in Wyoming, with the help of the US Department of Energy, recently discovered what could be one of the largest rare-earth metal deposits in the world, and the biggest in the US, on land that they originally bought for coal mining purposes.

    These sorts of investments are not consequence-free, as mining of any kind tends to deplete local resources, especially water and energy, and can have serious and deleterious effects on people and ecosystems, too. But this does seem like one of the more likely avenues through which these companies' interests may slowly come to align with those of folks, businesses, and governments that are trying to segue the US and other economies to clean energy; and that's meaningful because otherwise these companies almost always represent the most significant, well-moneyed and lobbyist-employing roadblocks to legislation and investment that would speed up the deployment of renewables and associated infrastructure; so this type of pivot would conceivably give them reason to support, rather than hamstring those efforts.

    That said, some of these announced efforts may end up being mostly PR plays, similar to how big oil companies have dangled the possibility of cleaning up their emissions using carbon drawdown technologies, for years, but few such investments have been made, and some of the deployed tools were eventually retired, as they didn't really do what they were supposed to do.

    So there are potential avenues via which priorities might align more closely in the coming years, if the economics of such paths can be worked out and if the market validates them, but there's also a chance these opposing interests remain oppositional for the foreseeable future, even though both arguably scratch necessary itches, and both represent anchors and wings for politicians who support and rely upon them.

    Show Notes

    https://grist.org/energy/oil-companies-used-to-run-this-town-now-theyre-back-to-mine-for-lithium/

    https://www.reuters.com/default/more-us-energy-deals-likely-2024-wave-consolidation-2024-01-24/

    https://www.semafor.com/article/03/13/2024/inside-saudi-arabias-plan-to-take-over-the-mining-industry

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-leads-global-oil-production-sixth-straight-year-eia-2024-03-11/

    https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-aramco-says-it-will-cut-planned-maximum-capacity-12-mln-bpd-2024-01-30/

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/record-us-oil-output-challenges-saudi-mastery-kemp-2023-12-04/

    https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-rise-of-the-u-s-as-top-crude-oil-producer/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/gauravsharma/2023/12/19/as-2024-approaches-us-leads-global-crude-oil-production-roster/?sh=107f8c582706

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/is-us-shale-oil-revolution-over-kemp-2022-11-22/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_States

    https://www.nrdc.org/stories/fracking-101

    https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9133us2M.htm

    https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/liquefied-natural-gas.php

    https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-was-top-lng-exporter-2023-hit-record-levels-2024-01-02/

    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523

    https://jpt.spe.org/the-trend-in-drilling-horizontal-wells-is-longer-faster-cheaper

    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/28/energy/eu-us-oil-imports-overtake-russia/index.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/25/climate/fracking-oil-gas-wells-water.html

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2422110-methane-leaks-from-us-oil-and-gas-are-triple-government-estimates/

    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_in_the_United_States

    https://www.marketplace.org/2024/02/12/diamondback-and-endeavor-merger-trend-bigger-fewer-oil-companies/

    https://www.strausscenter.org/energy-and-security-project/the-u-s-shale-revolution/



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
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  • This week we talk about foreign aid, brain drain, and long-term economic consequences.

    We also discuss the Rasputitsa, counteroffensives, and strategic rethinks.

    Recommended Book: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

    Transcript

    We've done this a few times before, but it's been a while since I've done a real update on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine—September of last year, I think, was the last one, a bonus episode on the topic—and a fair bit has happened since then, even if a lot of these happenings have been overshadowed by other conflicts, most especially the invasion of Gaza by Israel following the attacks on Israel by Gaza-based Hamas.

    But before diving into what's been happening, recently, in Ukraine, let's walk through a quick summary of events up till this point.

    In early 2014, Ukraine's people rose up against their Russia-aligned government in what became known as the Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity.

    This was a long time coming, by many estimates, because of changes that had been made to the country's constitution and government since a decade previous, most of those changes orienting Ukraine more toward Russia's sphere of influence, authoritarian policies, and various sorts of corruption at the top, and the protests that led to this revolution began in November of 2013 before culminating in February the following year, which led to the toppling of the government, the creation of a new, interim government, the president fleeing to Russia, and new elections that kicked off a period of decoupling from Russian influence.

    This was not well received in Russia, which has long seen Ukraine as being under its sway, if not belonging to Russia, outright, Ukraine serving as a large, friendly buffer between it and Europe, so Russian forces were send in, the flags and other identifiers on their fatigues removed, to support separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine.

    This sparked what became known as the Donbas War, which periodically flared up and sometimes merely simmered, but continued from when it began in February of 2014 all the way up to Russia's more formal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following several months of buildup along the countries' shared border.

    Against the odds and most analysts' assumptions, Ukraine managed to fend off Russia's initial assault, Russia managing to capture some territory, but not the capital city, Kyiv, and thus it wasn't able to decapitate the Ukrainian government and replace it with folks who would be loyal to Russia, as was apparently planned.

    Russia's stated plans changed several times over the next few years, as their assaults continued to falter in the face of stiffer than expected resistance, and eventually the so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine became a more overt, full-on war, complete with forced conscriptions, massive loss of life, the demolition of infrastructure and entire towns, and a recalibration of the global order, new alliances popping up, others being challenged, and everyone, to some degree at least, being sorted into categories based on who they support, who they don't, and who they are willing to tolerate despite not supporting—that latter category consisting mostly of less-aligned nations like Brazil and India, which have done pretty well for themselves, economically, staying somewhat neutral and aloof from this conflict, and thus continuing to deal with both the Western alliance supporting Ukraine, and the comparably small team of opposing nations, including China, North Korea, and Iran, all of which back Russia to varying degrees.

    In September of 2023, when I did the last update episode on this conflict, the state of play was largely defined by drone-based harassment of soldiers and infrastructure, like energy sources and bridges, by both sides against the other, Ukraine's flagging counteroffensive against Russia, which started out pretty good, but then ran intro trouble, seemingly due to sturdy Russian defenses that had been built around the portion of Ukraine they'd captured, the arrival of the "Rasputitsa" muddy season, which makes movement difficult in the region, and discussions about whether the US would provide longer-range artillery to Ukrainian forces, as Russia was comfortably settled-in, lobbing endless missiles and drones at Ukrainian forces and civilians, so longer-range munitions would help Ukraine counter that advantage, but there were concerns that this could lead to more attacks by Ukraine against Russian targets within Russia, which—because they would be using US weaponry—could help Russia justify expanding the war, which could, in turn, lead to WWIII, nuclear deployments, and the end of the world.

    There was also discussion about whether the US should keep sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, with Republicans mostly saying it wasn't okay, and some European leaders, especially those in Hungary, saying the same, while essentially everyone else said we need to keep Ukraine stocked with weapons and ammo, as the money is well-invested.

    What I'd like to talk about today is what's happened in the months since, and what folks in the know are expecting to happen, next.

    —

    Since last September, the debate over sending money to Ukraine has increased in volume, with countries like the UK scrambling to increase their funding to help fill the gap left by the US, where Congress is still deadlocked over a $60 billion aid package, the lack of which has left the Ukrainian government in the lurch, debating tax increases and spending cuts, while also rationing ammo, because they've hit their ceiling in terms of spending.

    Most of those gap-filling aid packages from elsewhere, though, weigh in at tens or hundreds of millions, not billions, so one of the main challenges Ukraine faces right now is figuring out how to adapt their strategy for a wartime reality in which they're not well-funded from outside sources, as there's a chance more funding could eventually arrive from the US and other sources, but it's looking like the appetite for uncapped aid checks is drying up, even though Ukrainian President Zelensky continues to make the case that funding his country's defense is an investment, not a hand-out, because it ties up, and potentially even halts Russia's military ambitions in the area, which might otherwise be aimed at other nations Russia considers to be part of its orbit, and in some cases even thinks of as stolen territory, like Estonia—an attack on which would bring the whole of NATO into a conflict like the one Ukraine alone is facing, currently.

    Ukraine has also been escalating its attacks, mostly surreptitious, but sometimes a bit more flagrant, into Russian territory near their shared border, using on the ground special forces teams on occasion, but mostly leveraging their remote-controlled and autonomous drone fleet to strike primarily military and energy targets, like fuel depots and fighter jets parked at airports.

    Over this same period, Russia has hammered Ukrainian cities and towns with heavier-than-usual waves of rockets and explosive drones, targeting some military infrastructure, but more often hitting civilian centers, apartment buildings, and shopping malls.

    A much-vaunted counterattack by Ukraine against Russian forces occupying their territory in November of 2023 achieved a few small, mostly symbolic goals, but failed to tally the large number of strategic successes accomplished during another counterattack earlier in the year.

    This failure to replicate that previous success led to a wave of pessimism in Ukraine and allied nations, and new calls for some kind of peace talks—though then, as now, the Ukrainian government maintains that it won't hold serious talks until Russian forces have left the Ukrainian territory they've occupied, and they also say—with merit, according to most analysts—that any ceasefire before a Ukrainian victory would mostly benefit Russia, which would likely spend the time shoring-up its military and then invade again within the next few years, no matter what the terms of the ceasefire said.

    So a ceasefire, at this point, would seemingly favor Russia, and most experts think the current situation on the ground in Ukraine favors Russia, as well, though Russia is suffering some serious consequences from their invasion, both of the short- and long-term variety.

    In the short-term, Russia's economy—though not collapsing as many of the nations applying sanctions, like the US and EU countries, had hoped—is not doing anywhere near as well as it would have been doing, had this invasion not happened, or had it gone better for them, ending quickly, within a few days or a week, as they had initially expected.

    It's become a lot more difficult for them to do business with much of the world, too, and their influence over global energy markets in particular have been severely hamstrung, which in turn has lessened the geopolitical heft of the OPEC + Russia oil cartel.

    Russia has also nearly emptied its prisons, giving even incredibly violent and unstable prisoners the option of joining the military and being sent to the frontlines, those who survive granted their freedom; and this has reportedly led to a lot of horribleness back home, as these prisoners have been causing the sorts of trouble you might expect violent and unstable people to cause after being freed from prison, with the addition of also potentially suffering from the effects of PTSD and other sorts of trauma from having survived on the frontline of what has often been described as a meatgrinder sort of conflict, and in some headline-grabbing cases, they've brought military weapons back home with them, allowing them to cause enough more damage than would have otherwise been possible.

    Russian citizens also have to worry about being conscripted, in some cases grabbed from the street and taken, with little preparation, to the front line somewhere in Ukraine, and about the sporadic drone attacks from Ukrainian special forces and Russian groups that support Ukraine in this conflict.

    More abstractly, the Russian economy is not doing great, they've been largely unable to produce much in the way of high-end or high-tech goods for several years, now, and they're also running short of workers, more than 43% of industrial enterprises in the country reporting worker shortages as of July, 2023.

    In parallel, more than 1000 companies have withdrawn from Russia, including their own google-equivalent, Yandex, which took a 50% hit on its already substantially depleted value just to be able to leave the country and operate elsewhere; this has given the Russian government more direct control over their regional slice of the internet, but it's also a tradeoff many companies, international and local, have decided to make, as being cut off from the rest of the world and having significant sanctions applied to their behaviors if they stick around generally isn't considered to be worth the upsides.

    Also leaving Russia are its people. And while there will almost certainly be long-term consequences of those contemporary economic issues for Russia and Russians, this so-called "brain drain" could prove to be even more significant, especially when paired with the large number of deaths amongst Russia's troops, estimated to tally somewhere between 70 and 120 thousand since the full-scale, 2022-era invasion began.

    Also since late-February 2022, at least 2,500 scientists have left Russia, and that's on top of the around 50,000 Russia's own Academy of Sciences estimates it has lost over the past five years—all those researchers moving to greener pastures in other countries.

    An estimated 11-28% of the country's software developers have fled, and as of early 2023, it was estimated that hundreds of thousands of young people have left Russia since the invasion.

    Research from within Russia that same year indicated that about 1.5 million people under the age of 35 left the Russian workforce in the year between December of 2021 and December of 2022, alone, for brain drain and other reasons, and this—combined with all the young people who have been conscripted, adding up to around 521,000 soldiers by the end of 2023, the goal being around 745,000 by the end of 2024—that's a lot of people, all from a relatively narrow age demographic, roughly 18 to 30, who are not working, are not getting a formal education, who are not dating, not home with kids or their older family members, to take care of them.

    From a demographer's perspective, this is the seed-corn of a country, the next generation that will step into roles that are currently held by the adults in the room. And Russia is a country of around 144 million people, so it's not small, and these figures won't wipe them out or anything, but their population has been on the decline since the mid-1990s, and the median age in the country is already just over 39 years old.

    So losing, to other countries, to the black market, maybe, or to death, disability, or the other consequences of a military conflict, a significant chunk of the younger portion of your population is not ideal, as that leaves a country with fewer people who are capable of stepping into the roles that their elders will be leaving over the next few decades, and that means fewer younger people to keep the economy ticking along, to make discoveries, to earn money and pay taxes, which over time perpetuates all kinds of negative cascades and spirals, economically, demographically, and in terms of a country's capacity to compete, globally.

    One of the most long-lasting consequences of this invasion, then, could be a demographic collapse in Russia that leads to untold consequences, up to and including the eventual overthrow of a government that, no matter how cleverly it navigates this war and whatever happens next, won't be able to bring renewed equilibrium, safety, success, and flourishing back to the country, because of issues like demography that are not really salvageable once the dice are cast.

    Of course, Ukraine is in an even worse state, and would be even if all the money than had been promised and implied by its wealthy western allies had arrived on time: the country is devastated, its people are almost uniformly traumatized, it's governance and infrastructure is operating only at subsistence level, and some of its towns and cities have been almost entirely leveled, no buildings left standing, completely unlivable, and not just because there's no running water or electricity or shelter—the very soil in many of these areas, some of which are vital breadbasket regions for the world, have been polluted with toxins and chemicals from the conflict, and that's when they haven't been freckled with mines.

    Over the past few months, the story on the ground has remained largely the same, with Russia managing to take a few symbolic and moderately strategic cities and towns, and the front line barely moving at all in either direction.

    Ukraine has been hobbled by a lack of resources and those aforementioned defense lines Russia set up, after it committed to hold still, shooting long distance stuff, and periodically flooding the zone with meat-shield, waves of soldiers, which seems to be working decently well, though with a significant loss of life as a tradeoff.

    The Ukrainian leadership replaced the country's commander-in-chief in early February 2024, amidst rumors of disagreements between him in the president about how to proceed, and there's been word that the US is encouraging Ukrainian's government to settle in for the long-haul, rather than aiming for shorter-term victories and press release-worthy counterattacks, building up their in-country manufacturing capacity so they can produce their own weapons and ammo, and making it more likely that Russia will likewise be tied up indefinitely, having to invest more and more resources for every square foot it takes and occupies.

    The degree to which this will work has been questioned, and Russia has shown itself to be more than capable of striking targets well beyond the front lines, so anything Ukraine builds, especially in terms of military manufacturing capacity, would likely be targeted before it could come online.

    In Russia, anti-government sentiment was recently inflamed by the seeming killing of anti-Putin crusader Aleksei Navalny, who was previously reportedly poisoned by the Russian government, before returning to the country, being put in a prison camp, and then apparently killed—though the nature of his death and treatment of his body, family, and supporters after the event has left this sequence of events as much of a puzzle as the deaths of the other people who have run afoul of the Kremlin and then mysteriously died of poisons, by falling out of windows, and so on—the specifics are in question, but most experts assume these deaths were ordered by Putin or one of his people.

    The degree to which this will matter, how much this renewed support of anti-Putin people and causes will impact anything in a country that's pretty well locked down in Putin's favor at this point, is a big question mark right now.

    But it is a wildcard that could go on to influence this larger conflict, and the eventual state of this part of the world when it finally ends, whenever that happens to be.

    Though at this point, knowing what we know now, publicly, it seems likely to persist for at least another year, and maybe a lot longer than that.

    Show Notes

    https://www.semafor.com/article/02/06/2024/sale-of-russias-google-yandex-tightens-moscows-grip-on-the-internet

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/13/russia-diaspora-war-ukraine/

    https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/04/11/russia-lost-13m-young-workers-in-2022-research-a80784

    https://archive.ph/oEs0l

    https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/2024/01/brain-drain-hammering-russia-more-2500-scientists-have-already-left-disaster-experts-say

    https://archive.ph/n1D8R

    https://archive.ph/XXKPw

    https://archive.ph/YKfDR

    https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1176769042/russia-economy-brain-drain-oil-prices-flee-ukraine-invasion

    https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/04/11/russia-lost-13m-young-workers-in-2022-research-a80784

    https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/russia-population/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

    https://www.reuters.com/world/india-says-it-busts-trafficking-racket-duping-people-into-fighting-russia-2024-03-08/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us-embassy-warns-imminent-extremist-attack-moscow-2024-03-08/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240308-turkey-ready-host-ukraine-russia-peace-summit-erdogan-zelensky?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/world/europe/russia-ukraine-avdiivka-villages.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/world/europe/ukraine-women-soldiers-army.html

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-putin-nato-troops-latest-b2510252.html

    https://reuters.com/world/europe/pope-says-ukraine-should-have-courage-white-flag-negotiations-2024-03-09/

    https://www.reuters.com/pictures/ukraines-winter-war-scenes-frozen-frontlines-2024-03-08/

    https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-is-pumping-out-weaponsbut-can-it-keep-it-up-ba30bb04

    https://archive.ph/T6lK8

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.

    We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.

    Recommended Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez

    Transcript

    Ransomware is a sub-type of malware, which is malicious software that prevents its victim from accessing their data.

    So that might mean keeping them from logging into their cloud storage, but it might also mean encrypting their data so that there's no way to access it, ever again, unless they have the necessary decryptor, which is a piece of software or sometimes just a key that allows for the decryption of that encrypted, that locked-down data.

    The specifics of all this, though, are often less important than the practical reality of it.

    If you're attacked by a ransomware gang or hacker, your stuff, maybe your personal files, maybe your business files, all your customer information, your valuable trade secrets, anything that's stored digitally, might be completely inaccessible to you, and possibly even prone to deletion, though that might not even be necessary since strong encryption is essentially the same thing as deletion, for most intents and purposes; but all that data is gone, held hostage until and unless you pay some kind of ransom to the person or group that encrypted it, and which holds the key to its decryption.

    Most ransomware software is transmitted to its victims' computers via a trojan, which is a kind of malware that seems like real-deal software that you actually want or need to install, and folks are generally tricked into downloading and installing it because of that presumed legitimacy.

    So maybe you receive what looks like a software update for a tool you use at work, and it turns out the update was faked and what you installed was actually a trojan that installed malware on your computer, and consequently on your network, instead.

    Or maybe you pirated some software, and alongside the fake copy of Photoshop you installed, a trojan also carried another snippet of code that then, in the background, when your computer was hooked up to the internet, downloaded malware that looked for private data and encrypted it.

    At some point after ransomware is delivered and installed, your data successfully encrypted and inaccessible, you'll receive the ransom demand.

    For a while this was kind of an ad hoc thing, in some cases targeting people randomly on early internet usenet groups, in others big companies and other wealthy entities being specifically targeted and then ransomware teams calling or emailing or texting them directly, because they knew who they were hitting.

    In recent years, this has become a more distributed and mainstream effort, akin to an, organized business, and that mainstreamification was partially enabled by the dawn of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, which allow for relatively anonymous transactions with strangers, and the development of ransomware that is self-contained, in that it can install itself, find the right, valuable files, and then demand a ransom from its victim, providing that victim with the proper bitcoin wallet or other crypto-banking system into which they need to deposit a fixed amount of money in that less-trackable digital currency.

    The software can then, still autonomously, either decrypt the files once the ransom is paid, or delete the files, killing them off forever, if the ransom isn't paid by an established deadline.

    Other variations on this theme exist, and some ransomware doesn't use encryption as a motivator to pay, but instead locks down users' machines, displays some kind of demand for money, purporting to be a government agency (or lying about having encrypted or stolen something of value), or it threatens to install illegal pornographic images of minors on the victims' machine if they don't pay the ransom.

    By far the most popular approach to ransomware, today, though, is encryption-based, and recent evolutions in the business model backing ransomware has escalated its use, especially what's become known as ransomware-as-a-service, which was popularized by a Russian hacker group calling itself REvil that started using it against a variety of targets, globally, to devastating and profitable effect.

    What I'd like to talk about today is another group that has made successful use of this business model, and a recent investigation into and operation against that group.

    —

    First observed by cybersecurity entities in 2019, LockBit quickly became one of the most prolific and effective ransomware-as-a-service providers in the world, their offering, a product called LockBit 2.0, representing the most-used ransomware variant globally in 2022, accounting for something like 23% of all ransomware attacks in the US in 2023, and around 44% of all such attacks globally.

    According to the FBI, LockBit has been used to launch around 1,700 ransomware attacks in the US since 2020, and according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, about $91 million worth of ransoms were paid in the US alone over the past three years, and it's estimated that number is in the hundreds of millions when we include targets around the world.

    LockBit's offerings work like many other ransomware-as-a-service offerings, in that they provide what amounts to a dashboard filled with tools that allow users, those who wish to deploy ransomware attacks, those users being their customers, everything they need to do so, and most of their offerings allow even folks with little or no technical knowledge to launch a successful ransomware campaign; it's that user-friendly and intuitive.

    Hackers using LockBit announced the 2.0 version of the service by attacking professional services giant Accenture in 2021, using what's called a double-extortion approach, which involves encrypting their victim's data, and then threatening to release it if their victim doesn't pay up.

    They then hit French electrical systems and administrative and management services companies, alongside a French hospital, a group of British automotive retailers, a French office equipment company, the California Finance Administration, the port of Lisbon, and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children in 2022—in that latter case backtracking after realizing a children's hospital was hit, the group formally apologizing for what they called a violation of its rules by a member of its group, who it claimed was no longer a part of its affiliate program; it provided a free decryptor for the hospital so it could regain access to its data.

    And that response gestures at the larger opportunities and problems associated with this kind of business model.

    LockBit is run by a group of people who develop the software tools and provide the services backing up those tools to help anyone who wants to use their product successfully launch ransomware attacks against whomever they want.

    There are apparently rules about who they can attack, but that's kind of like being a gun store operator who tells their customers they're not allowed to shoot anyone, and if they do, they'll have their gun taken away: they can certainly have those rules in place, but by the time they take back the gun they sold to someone who ends up shooting someone else with it, some damage has already been done.

    The business models of ransomware-as-a-service schemes vary, and some groups allow their customers to just pay a set licensing fee, once or reccuringly, others have profit-sharing schemes, while others have affiliate programs of some flavor.

    LockBit seems to have landed on a scheme in which they take something like 20% of whatever their customers, those using their LockBit service, are able to get as a ransom.

    And just like other software-as-a-service companies, LockBit is thus incentivized to continue providing better and better services, lest their customers leave and use one of their competitor's offerings, instead.

    Thus, in mid-2022, they release LockBit 3.0, and among other innovations it offered a bug bounty program, which provides payouts to security researchers who find errors in their code—something that companies like Microsoft and Google do, but not something other ransomware gangs have done in the past.

    The attacks kept coming through 2022 and 2023, and though the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against one Russian national for his alleged connection to LockBit as an affiliate, and the arrest of another for his participation in a LockBit-oriented campaign, the hits just kept coming, LockBit affiliates attacking a French luxury goods company, a Germany car equipment manufacturer, a chain of Canadian bookstores, the Hong Kong branch of the China Daily newspaper, the Taiwanese TSMC semiconductor company, the Port of Nagoya in Japan, US aerospace and defense company Boeing, the Chicago Trading Company, and Alphadyne Asset Management, and it kicked off 2024 by encrypting the computer system of Fulton County, Georgia.

    On February 19, 2024, the UK's National Crime Agency, working with Europol and agencies from 9 other countries seized LockBit's online assets, including more than 200 crypto wallets, 34 servers located in eight countries, and about 11,000 domains used by LockBit and its affiliates as part of its ransomware-installation and payout process.

    They discovered that some of the data supposedly deleted by the group when their victims paid their ransoms wasn't deleted as promised, and they released decryptors to free the data of victims who hadn't paid ransoms, and who had thus been going without access to their data, in some cases for a long time.

    They also issued three international arrest warrants and five indictments that target other people related to LockBit's operations, and they've issued a reward of up to $15 million for information about LockBit associates.

    This operation, called Operation Cronos, took years to set up and months to complete, once it was ready to go, and though the agencies behind the operation say they've still got plenty left to do—as those in charge of LockBit are still in the wind, some ransomware tools are still functioning, at least partially, and thousands of accounts associated with LockBit affiliates have been identified, but not yet shut down—it's also being seen as a pretty solid success, allowing them to develop a universal decryptor for LockBit 3.0, and taking out much of the online infrastructure LockBit relied upon to function, not to mention, no doubt, a fair bit of its reputation, as it's likely many of its potential customers will now flee to other offerings for their ransomware-as-a-service needs.

    All that said, ransomware continues to be a significant threat, for individuals, but especially for business entities, agencies, and organizations of any size, and there are plenty of other options out there for such tools, and only so many cybercrime agencies capable of tackling them; and it seems to take a lot longer to do the tackling than it does to set up a successful, large-scale ransomware-as-a-service business.

    So the combination of potent encryption tools, automated services, and a potent means of earning fairly consistent income seems likely to keep ransomware tools of this kind in the money for the foreseeable future, and that means, even with these periodic takedowns of people involved with the larger-scale entities in this space, this approach to siphoning money from wealthy entities from a distance will probably continue to grow, until the next, more profitable and effective version of the same comes along.

    Show Notes

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/police-arrest-lockbit-ransomware-members-release-decryptor-in-global-crackdown/

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lockbit-ransomware-disrupted-by-global-police-operation/

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-gang-apologizes-gives-sickkids-hospital-free-decryptor/

    https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/ransomware-spotlight/ransomware-spotlight-lockbit

    https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-165a

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63590481

    https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/russian-and-canadian-national-charged-participation-lockbit-global-ransomware-campaign

    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/02/feds-seize-lockbit-ransomware-websites-offer-decryption-tools-troll-affiliates/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/20/lockbit-ransomware-cronos-nca-fbi/

    https://www.axios.com/2024/02/19/lockbit-ransomware-takedown-operation?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/20/lockbit-ransomware-cronos-nca-fbi/

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/police-arrest-lockbit-ransomware-members-release-decryptor-in-global-crackdown/

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/us-offers-up-15-mln-information-lockbit-leaders-state-dept-says-2024-02-21/

    https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/02/after-years-of-losing-its-finally-feds-turn-to-troll-ransomware-group/

    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/lockbit-ransomware-group-taken-down-in-multinational-operation/

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-21/russia-s-lockbit-disrupted-but-not-dead-hacking-experts-warn

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockbit

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomware

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomware_as_a_service



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • This week we talk about the Meiji Revolution, shoguns, and the Lost Decade.

    We also discuss NVIDIA, economic bubbles, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

    Recommended Book: The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski

    Transcript

    What became known as the Meiji Restoration, but which at the time was generally, locally, called the Honorable Restoration, refers to a period of massive and rapid change in Japan following the restoration of practical powers to the country's Emperor.

    In 1853, the arrival of Commodore Perry and his warships in Japan forced the country to open up trade to the rest of the world, initially with the US but shortly thereafter with other nations, as well. This led to the signing of a series of treaties that were heavily slanted in favor of those other nations, at Japan's expense, and the Meiji Restoration was a consequence of those humiliating treaties, which were essentially forced and enforced by military might, not because Japan wanted anything to do with these foreign entities and their money and goods.

    So in the 1860s, some reformist political leaders in Japan started to support the Emperor, who had become something of a ceremonial figure in recent generations, during the country's multi-century seclusion from the rest of the world, and this, among other things, led to a decision by those in charge, who now had more power at their disposal, to shift from a feudal society into an industrialized one.

    There was a fair bit of tumult and internal conflict during this period, but the eventual upside was the re-centralization of the country and its land and other assets under the Emperor, away from the shoguns who had been running their own pseudo-countries within Japan for a long while, alongside an order that the country would do a complete 180, no longer isolating itself and eschewing anything foreign, instead seeking knowledge far and wide, wherever it originates, sending folks around the world to discover whatever they can, and to then bring that understanding back to Japan, to strengthen this new iteration of the nation.

    By the end of the 19th century, industrialization was the name of the game in Japan, and those in charge had successfully encouraged civilians to bolster the economy by tying its success to the country's military success.

    Other governments were happy to play into this transition, as it meant enriching themselves, as well, creating a new, modernizing trade partner that they could exploit but also invest in, and this led to a doubling-down on rapid modernization by the the government, including the culling and destruction of traditional practices, landmarks, and social classes, which wasn't popular amongst the nation's many samurai and other previously celebrated and upper-class people, but it did help the government further centralize power and influence, and reorient things toward economic success and away from a more feudal style of distributed military-backed fiefdoms.

    This allowed Japan to become the first non-Western great power, and it's what allowed them to grow to the point that they could take on half the world in World War II, expanding their control throughout Asia and across the Pacific.

    Because Japan suffered relatively less from the Great Depression than most Western nations, it was also in a pretty good spot compared to the countries that would become its opponents in WWII leading up to the conflict, and its GDP growth in the 1920s and 30s is part of what allowed it to expand so rapidly across Southeast Asia, grabbing a lot of Chinese territory and turning much of the region, including parts of the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, and Thailand into plantation-like colonies.

    The war and post-war periods, though, were a lot less great for Japan, as essentially all the economic gains it made during the Meiji Restoration were lost, their manufacturing capacity wiped out, their infrastructure destroyed, their population numbers depleted, and their civilians psychologically scarred by the drawn-out war and its eventual arrival on their doorstep.

    Japan lost its colonies, and as tends to be the case with post-colonial nations, it had to endure a period of economic recalibration, as it could no longer rely upon cheap labor and commodities from these colonies.

    It also had to make changes based on the treaties it signed upon its surrender, shifting resources away from its military—which had been a major focus of its entire culture and economy until this point—and moving from an imperial system into a democracy.

    The country was then occupied for years, and the previous landlord class that owned much of the country's rural territory was dissolved, the land distributed to the tenant farmers that worked it.

    Huge business conglomerates that were close with the government, and which owned much of the economy for about a century were also broken up, and new laws that encouraged business competition and discouraged monopolistic practices were enacted.

    After Japan's manufacturing capacity was restored and people were able to rebuild their homes and businesses and everything else that had been destroyed during the war, Japan opened up to international business entities, invested heavily in industries that other countries valued, like chemical production and information technology, and from the 1960s onward, this led to a surge in the country's economy, Japanese industry seeming to always get the jump on its international competition, especially in high-tech fields, like the burgeoning electronic appliance, television, and personal computer markets.

    What I'd like to talk about today is how Japan's fresh, 20th century rise fizzled out at the dawn of the 21st century, and why its stock market is booming, now, despite other economic indicators saying the opposite.

    —

    Things weren't perfect for Japan in the latter-half of the 20th century—they, like much of the rest of the world, experienced an oil crisis in the 1970s, for instance—but they really did chart an impressive economic trajectory for most of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

    Their success was even more impressive in comparison to other wealthy nations at the time, as that oil shortage, mostly the result of geopolitics, hampered growth in the West, especially the United States, and that allowed Japan to steal a march on its main, electronic hardware and automobile industry competition.

    Japan was also in a good spot to profit in these spaces because it had a well-educated population that was used to working long, arduous hours, the former the result of a huge investment in schools, post-WWII, and the latter baked into the culture for generations, due to the country's long history of feudal governance and philosophies that celebrate labor as a moral pursuit.

    This allowed Japan to attain a spot amongst the most successful economies in the world, achieving the third-largest gross national product in the 1970s, following only the US and USSR, and achieving first place in the same by 1990.

    Previous waves of economic growth in the country had been spurred by exports, but the boom in the late-1980s that led to its 90s-era success was caused by an increase in local consumption, and that, in turn, increased the nation's imports, to feed still-increasing local demand for all sorts of luxuries, alongside fundamentals that were being upgraded, like medical services, leisure-related goods, and basic quality-of-life improvements.

    This period was also marked by heavy investment in telecommunications and computing research and development, and that made it the home of the world's largest stock exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, as everyone, everywhere around the world wanted to invest in the most up-and-coming companies, most of which were operating in these industries, and many of them were thus based in Japan, whose cities felt like a sort of science fiction glimpse at the future compared to cities located elsewhere during this period.

    Beginning in 1989, though, Japan started to run larger and larger trade surpluses, the yen grew in value, and Japanese citizens were encouraged, through a variety of tariffs and other policies, to save their money rather than spending it.

    This led to a period in which businesses were incentivized to buy their foreign competitors rather than investing locally, because their yen bought more overseas than in-country, and this further appreciated the value of the yen, increased the trade-surplus even further, and led to a boom in financial assets, which led to a lot more speculation on the Japanese financial assets market.

    That increased popularity in financial speculation led to banks making riskier loans and the rates dramatically increasing on bonds, stocks, and housing, and that, as we've seen happen elsewhere over the years, led to a real estate bubble that made it difficult for Japanese citizens to afford housing, but which also, eventually caused an economic crash, all that investment that was aimed at booming Japanese businesses suddenly flooding outward, instead.

    This led to less investment in tech-centric R&D, which led to less-competitive Japanese businesses that were suddenly unable to compete with their foreign rivals, and that, combined with low local consumption, because a lot of people lost their savings in popped-bubble assets and were thus no longer spending as enthusiastically as they had been.

    This led to a deflationary spiral that was amplified by banks continuing to hand out money to basically anyone who asked, leading to even more bad investments and the emergence and popping of a number of smaller bubbles into the late-1990s.

    The government was forced to subsidize the banks that went under because of all those bad investments, and they did the same for businesses that could no longer do much of anything, but which continued to technically function, earning them the monicker "zombie businesses," of which there were many across Japan.

    This period, during which the country's meta-financial bubble slowly collapsed, rather than dramatically popping, has become known as Japan's lost decade, and despite moments of optimism here and there in the years, since, it has arguably become a lost couple of decades, as the government's many attempts to address its deflation and the devaluation of its stock market and larger economy haven't done much to stop the bleeding, and the slow-growth its Nikkei stock index has seen since late-2012 as a result of efforts to increase the country's money supply and eliminate deflation was halted by the implementation of significant new consumption taxes, the damage caused by a huge super typhoon in 2019, and the global recession sparked by the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020.

    All of which makes recent news out of Japan, that the country's Nikkei index reached a record high, surpassing its 1989 bubble-era peak in late-February of this year, a bit surprising.

    After all, most of the fundamentals in the country haven't really changed, not enough to significantly nudge the needle, anyway, and the other big headlines about Japan's economy, of late, have been about the recession that it entered at the end of 2023.

    Data released the same month the Nikkei hit that 34-year high indicate that at the tail-end of 2023, Japan entered a recession, and adding insult to injury, fell off the list of the world's top-3 economies, ceding its third-place position (after the US and China) to Germany—which also isn't doing great right now, but is still doing a bit better than Japan.

    What seems to be happening is that COVID-era recession is still weighing on consumer spending in Japan, and the country's industrial output is still low, wages are still low, and inflation is eating up the excess money folks have managed to put away.

    This has hurt the country's somewhat-burgeoning service industry, as folks aren't spending on services anymore, lacking enough extra money to do so, and capital spending seems to be stalling, as well, leading to production stoppages at automotive plants, which have reportedly been amplified by a lack of skilled labor, which is itself a problem tied to both insufficient pay and a rapidly aging population.

    The jump in the stock market, in contrast, seems to be the result of AI-linked enthusiasm throughout global markets.

    Chip-maker NVIDIA has been a huge success story in the US, propping up the market there, and serving as a sort of stand-in for AI optimism more broadly, because it makes the majority of the best, most AI-centric high-end computer chips, and that has led to a surge in its valuation, but also that of other companies even tangentially connected to it and its industry.

    Japan houses several such companies, including Tokyo Electron and Advantest, which make equipment that NVIDIA relies upon, and Japan actually still makes computer chips, even if its not as competitive as Taiwan-based TSMC or Netherlands-based ASML, which makes the machines that make chips.

    Japan, then, is in a relatively favorable position if this surge in AI-investment continues, because it has the infrastructure and skilled laborers necessary to build-out a hopping high-end chip manufacturing base—so investments are throwing money at some local, relevant companies in the hopes that they'll pay out in the way NVIDIA is currently paying out; which is a lot.

    The Japanese government is leaning into this, recently announcing about $68 billion in resources for chip-making companies and related entities in-country, which is a big bet to make, but similar to bets being made by other governments, all hoping that chips will become the next oil, and that they'll be in a position to become market leaders over the next decade, benefitting from further investment, and from that increased long-term capacity of this increasingly fundamental resource.

    All of which may or may not play out in their favor, as there's a chance a lot of the hype in AI right now does turn out to be just hype, similar to what we saw with crypto-assets a handful of years ago.

    There's also a chance that Japan's fundamentals just aren't where they need to be to sustain this kind of build-out, which would leave them with a lot of incomplete or non-competitive assets that further drain the country's economy and bank account, without providing much in the way of long-term payout.

    In the meantime, though, Japan's economy is incredibly uneven, the majority of people continuing to suffer under high-levels of inflation and wages that aren't keeping up, while a relative few are seeing their stock holdings boom, earning a lot more than they have in recent decades from these sorts of investments, and hoping that trend continues.

    Show Notes

    https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/nft/2003/japan/index.htm

    https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/JPN

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-20/japan-s-67-billion-bet-to-regain-title-of-global-chip-powerhouse

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/tokyo-stocks-rally-many-japanese-find-themselves-left-behind-2024-02-22/

    https://www.investopedia.com/5-things-to-know-before-the-stock-market-opens-february-22-2024-8598465

    https://www.ft.com/content/8b982ad2-8923-4f48-adc6-946c10964657

    https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/japans-nikkei-after-34-years-briefly-tops-record-close-in-intraday-trading-7c29e029

    https://www.ft.com/content/1539d638-7499-4dc9-af4f-8a8f2a06ec9b

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/business/japan-stocks-record.html

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-18a



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.

    We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.

    Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

    Transcript

    The term spacial computing seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s within the field of geographic information systems, or GIS, which focuses on using digital technology to mess with geographic data in a variety of hopefully useful ways.

    So if you were to import a bunch of maps and GPS coordinates and the locations of buildings and parks and such into a database, and then make that database searchable, plotting its points onto a digital map in an app, making something like Google Maps, that would be a practical utility of GIS research and development.

    The term spacial computing refers to pulling computer-based engagement into physical spaces, allowing us to plot and use information in the real world, rather than relegating that information to flat screens like computers and smartphones.

    This could be useful, it was posited, back in the early days of the term, as it would theoretically allow us to map out and see, with deep accuracy and specificity, how a proposed building would look on a particular street corner when finished, and how it would feel to walk through a house we're thinking of building, when all we have available is blueprints.

    This seemed like it would be a killer application for all sorts of architectural, urban planning, and location intelligence purposes, and that meant it might someday be applicable to everyone from security services to construction workers to doctors and health researchers who are trying to figure out where a pandemic originated.

    In the 1990s, though, the embryonic field of virtual reality started to become a thing, moving from research labs owned by schools and military contractors out into the real world, increasingly flogged as the next big consumer technology, useful for all sorts of practical, but also entertainment purposes, like watching movies and playing games.

    During this period, VR began to serve as a stand-in for where technology was headed, and it was dropped into movies and other sorts of speculative fiction to illustrate the evolution of tech, and how the world might evolve as a consequence of that evolution, more of our lives lived within digital versions of the world, rather than in the world itself.

    As a result of that popularity, especially throughout pop culture, VR overtook spacial computing as the term of art typically used to discuss this type of computational application, though the latter term also encompassed use-cases that weren't generally covered by VR, like the ability to engage with one's environment while using the requisite headsets, and the consequent capacity to use this technology out in the world, rather than exclusively at home or in the office, replicating the real world in that confined space.

    The term augment reality, or AR, is generally used to refer to that other spacial computing use-case: projecting an overlay, basically, on the real world, generally using a VR-like headset or goggles or glasses to either display information onto lenses the user looks through, or serving the user video footage that is altered to include that data, rather than attempting to project the same over the real thing; the latter case more like virtual reality because users are viewing entirely digital feeds, but like AR in that those feeds include live video from the world around them.

    A slew of productized spacial computing products have made it to the consumer market over the past few decades, including Microsoft's HoloLens, which is an augmented-reality headset, Google's Glass, which projects information onto a tiny screen in the corner of the the user's eyeline, and Magic Leap's self-named 1 and 2 devices, which are similar to the HoloLens.

    All three of these products have had trouble making much of a dent in the market, though, and Magic Leap is in the process of retiring its first headset, though it's reportedly partnering with Meta on a new device sometime soon, Microsoft has mostly pivoted to working with companies and agencies rather than selling to consumers, though future versions of their headsets might revert back to their original intended customer base, and Google Glass was retired in 2015, replaced by enterprise editions (sold to businesses and agencies) from that point forward, though those enterprise editions were also halted in 2023.

    What I'd like to talk about today is the current status of this space, which is being shaken up by two big, global players and their products: Meta with their Quest line of spacial computing devices, and Apple with it's new Apple Vision Pro.

    —

    In 2014, the company that was at the time known as Facebook, but which is now called Meta bought a virtual reality company called Oculus for about $2 billion.

    Oculus made a popular VR device, popular for VR devices in 2014, at least, that was only ever released as a development prototype, but which garnered a huge amount of attention nonetheless, blowing away its Kickstarter goal and attracting tens of millions of dollars in investment from well-known tech-world venture capitalists.

    The purchase was criticized by many, as part of the appeal of Oculus was that it was independent from the big players in the space, but $2 billion is a significant amount of money, so the sale went through after regulators approved it, and Facebook, now Meta, started churning out its own headsets, initially continuing to use the Oculus branding, but it was more cohesively integrated with Meta's portfolio of offerings in 2021, redesignating this now sub-company Reality Labs, and entwining it with other Meta products like Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp—that effort culminating in 2022 with the complete retirement of the Oculus monicker, re-designating the company's products with the Quest brand, its social platforms renamed Horizon, as in Horizon Worlds.

    So beginning in 2022, Meta had a fully integrated Meta Quest line of virtual reality products, including the hardware and a slew of online components, like social networks, and game, app, and other digital product stores.

    The company has a long, for this space, anyway, history of now-discontinued products, including partnerships with the likes of Samsung and headsets that vary in price and power, some plugging into one's computer to provide processing heft, but most of the new ones serving as self-contained, all-in-one headset devices, which typically include little handheld controls, wired or wireless, as well.

    They've also scooped up a variety of related companies, and in 2021, they attempted to buy a company called Within, which makes popular VR games like Beat Saber and Supernatural, but the FTC blocked the purchase on competition grounds; in 2023, though, the purchase was given the go-ahead, so those, and other popular VR-focused apps are now owned by Meta, as well.

    Meta also partnered with glasses-maker Ray-Ban in 2021 to release a product called Ray-Ban Stories, which are glasses that have built-in cameras that can upload videos they record to social media.

    So Meta has been investing heavily in this space for years, and their products are relatively well-developed, most of the teething issues faced by new products worked out, at this point, and their products are priced between a few hundred dollars on the low end, about $500 in the middle, and around $1000 at the top.

    They also have a decent-sized catalog of in-VR offerings for users, and all of their products plug into all of their other products—for better and for worse, as many people who were irritated about the Oculus purchase were angered by the realization that they would need to have a Facebook account to keep using their hardware; so this is both pro and con, depending on who you are.

    Despite Meta's relative success in the world of spacial computing, though, the big story in this space, as of 2024, is that Apple has released their own augmented-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, and it's similar but also distinct from Meta's spacial computing offerings.

    It has bogglingly detailed screens, which are what project stuff to the user inside the headset, in terms of pixel density, it has a sophisticated hand-tracking interface that allows users to gesture in a fairly natural way to control things within their virtual environment, no separate controllers necessary, it has video pass-through, as do the Quest models, that show the real world within the user's view, but which then superimposes virtual stuff over it, and its tracking of things in the real world is quite detailed and accurate, to the point that some users have been—ill-advisedly, if not illegally—driving their cars while wearing their Vision Pros, and it even offers some possibly just experimental, somewhat creepy quality-of-life additions, like inward facing cameras that track a users face and then display that face while they're video chatting from within the headset, and which project a 3D-video feed of their eyes to the outside of the display, so folks in the world around them can see what their eyes are doing, despite their face being largely covered by this heavy, compared to Meta's headsets, anyway, VR helmet.

    Apple's Vision Pro also costs $3,500, which is about 7-times the cost of Meta's entry-level, mid-tier, most popular Quest 3 headset.

    So what we have here is two companies presenting different visions of what the spacial computing industry will look like.

    Apple's pricing will likely come down, and some of the differences between these products, like Meta's lighter weight headsets and Apple's higher-quality screens, will almost certainly intersect at some point a few product iterations down the line, as they both figure out what's ideal in terms of the quality to price ratio.

    Other attributes may disappear, like the outward-facing eye projections, which don't seem terribly effective or useful, though some, like those eye-projections, may also evolve into something that people can't live without, and which Meta and other future competitors will then go on to copy.

    We're also seeing the emergence of different market positions within this space, which isn't something we've really had until this point.

    Meta had been occupying the perceptual high price point, as their products were the most fleshed-out and for most consumer purposes, at least, useful, and a thousand bucks at the high end is a lot of money for what's mostly an entertaining lark, for most consumers, at this point.

    Apple's entrance into this space, though, is a bit like when they stepped into the phone market in 2007 and announced a $500 iPhone: it changed the math, and recalibrated people's expectations of what they should expect to spend in the future.

    $500 seems almost ridiculously cheap for a premium device that's become fundamental to so many people for so many purposes, today, and it's possible that Apple's entrance in this space will do the same, allowing Meta to position its products as the Android of the spacial computing world, cheaper, sure, but also more useful for many people, with more pricing tiers, and serving as a sort of practical, non-luxury, and non-overpriced version of what most people want to get from this type of hardware.

    The reviews so far seem to support this positioning: Quest headsets are generally quite good, but that's it—they're not blowing any of the tech reviewers away, and most of what they do is passable, not magical.

    Apple generally aims for magical, and a lot of its initial reviews have suggested that what the Vision Pro does well, it does VERY well; at that magical level, if not beyond it.

    That said, a lot of the same reviews, and the reviews that have arrived since, after the device formally hit the market, have indicated that it has enough bugs and issues and missed opportunities to be incredible in some relatively few areas, but not worth $3,500 in most other regards; many of the stories on the device as of the week I'm recording this episode are about how many people, who enthusiastically forked over thousands of dollars for a first generation Vision Pro when it was released, are now returning their devices so as not to miss the 14-day return window.

    The Vision Pro is possibly revolutionary, then, but perhaps not in the sense that it replaces everything that came before: it'll probably change the space in significant ways, but it'll take several iterations before it becomes a must-have product, and in the meantime it'll mostly be meaningful because of how it resets price-expectations, sets a new bar for quality in some regards, and stokes a new round of competition in a space that hasn't seen much in the way of competition for years.

    Which is basically what happened with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other Apple-made devices, as well. They tend to be really impressive and magical-seeming right out of the gate, but not great, practically, until the third or fourth generation, at which point they're just astoundingly good by most metrics.

    There's a chance that this product will find its feet eventually, too, then, though Meta seems keen to give them a run for their money on this, as their long-held desire to own a hardware product category now seems within reach, their past attempts at making their own watch and phone having been incredible failures.

    Their pivot to the metaverse, which has been put on hold a little bit because of the advent of generative AI technologies and all the big tech companies trying to figure out what their next steps should be, considering how influential those technologies have turned out to be, those technologies now seem likely to make that metaverse aspiration more viable in the long-term, and these headsets, especially if they can keep making them smaller and lighter and more useable in more contexts, seem like they could be the best entry-point for a Meta-owned network of metaversal platforms, all sorts of content generated on the fly by AI, keeping folks engaged longer, but only if they can maintain their lead over competitors while they build-out those virtual worlds, and as they attempt to grab more relevant companies and refine the relevant hardware, in the meantime.

    It's still an open question, though, despite this flurry of hype and investment, whether anyone will really want to use these sorts of devices on a regular basis, beyond those with more money than they can spend and people who are super-enthused about any new tech gizmo.

    Some analysts contend that the best access-point for the metaverse, whatever it eventually evolves into, remains and will remain the screens we have on all of our gadgets, and that the idea of face-based computing is a little bit silly and too cumbersome to ever become mainstream.

    Others have suggested, though, that we long assumed the same about pocketable computing, and wearing such devices on our wrists—which is something many of us now do, because smartwatches—a field that was for a long time super niche and weird and rare—became incredibly popular after Apple introduced its Apple Watch and then iterated the thing until it was useful, a slew of other companies, including those that were working in this space long-before Apple stepped in, all upgrading and refining their own products, in turn, making the smartwatch world a lot richer and more useful and popular, as a consequence.

    If these headsets become lighter, cheaper, and possibly even evolve into goggles or glasses, rather than headsets, that could make them a lot more accessible and useable by many people who, today, struggle to understand why they should care, and what possible use they might have for this kind of device, when their smartphones and computer screens seem to work just fine, and with less neck-strain.

    So we could be looking at a flash in the pan movement, or we could be living through the emergence of a new, mainstream, perhaps even universal computing-related product type; but there's a good chance we won't know which for several more years.

    Show Notes

    https://stratechery.com/2024/the-apple-vision-pro/

    https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/02/our-unbiased-take-on-mark-zuckerbergs-biased-apple-vision-pro-review/

    https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-price

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24058318/apple-vision-pro-sharing-difficulties

    https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-instagram-facebook-meta-posting-era-vision-pro-quest-2024-2

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/13/24072413/mark-zuckerberg-apple-vision-pro-review-quest-3

    https://www.theverge.com/24074795/vision-pro-returns-xbox-future-gemini-open-ai-vergecast

    https://fortune.com/2023/02/06/meta-buying-vr-startup-within-unlimited-after-ftc-battle/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_computing

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HoloLens

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

    https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24010787/microsoft-windows-mixed-reality-deprecated



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • This week we talk about The Messenger, ads, and generative AI.

    We also discuss search engines, algorithms, and Semafor’s new curation tool.

    Recommended Book: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

    Transcript

    There was a piece published on McSweeney's, a humorous, often satirical writing site, recently, entitled "Our Digital Media Platform Will Revolutionize News and Is Also Shutting Down," written by Devin Wallace, that includes gems, ostensibly from an announcement by some kind of new media business, like this one:

    "Our new digital media platform is changing the way people consume content. We’re a one-stop-shop location for breaking news, long-form journalism, and in-depth art criticism. We’re also currently shutting down without any notice whatsoever."

    It goes on to say:

    "Mainstream media will try to shut us down, but they’ll never succeed since we already shut down at 3 a.m. with absolutely no warning to our readers or even our employees."

    This piece is a completely unveiled criticism of The Messenger, a news-focused digital media company that launched in May of 2023 and was dissolved on January 31, 2024, about 8 months after its founding.

    It was started by 70-something Jimmy Finkelstein, the former owner of The Hill, a DC-based politics and policy-oriented publication he bought in 2012, which was then acquired by another media company in 2021, who said he wanted to start The Messenger for legacy purposes, and which he raised $50 million to fund, before scooping up the assets of another new online media company, Grid News, and hiring a bunch of well-known writers and journalists from other publications, promising higher-than-usual for the industry wages for the 150 employees it hired for its launch, and that number was doubled to around 300 within a handful of months.

    The Messenger was then unceremoniously shut down, the company's staff learning about its collapse and their layoffs from other publications reporting on the matter, many of them suspecting a closure, though, when their Slack conversations were suddenly shut down and their connections to the company, company emails, insurance, and the like, all stopped functioning or simply shut them out.

    Company leadership, including Finkelstein, had bragged that The Messenger would defy the slow-motion collapse the rest of the news media world was experiencing, with few exceptions, because it would expand aggressively and publish constantly, increasing employment to 750 people and earning $100 million in annual revenue on the back of 100 million unique monthly visitors by 2024.

    That...did not happen. It did achieve 100,000 unique daily visitors shortly after launching, but it was only able to earn about $3 million in total revenue by the waning days of 2023, and it burned through cash faster than its competitors.

    That $50 million in funding had dropped to around $1.8 million in the bank from May to December of 2023, and the sudden closure seemed to be an effort by company leadership to cut their losses, though the explosion of activity and sum of money invested, followed by such a rapid decline and disappearance has earned The Messenger and those involved in its sudden shut-down the reputation for having invested in one of the most spectacular collapses in online news media history.

    What I'd like to talk about today is the broader online news media industry, the challenges this industry faces, and how those challenges are shaping what's happening now and what's likely to happen next.

    —

    Explanations for The Messenger's rapid and explosive demise are rampant, but some of the most popular orient around Finkelstein's apparently outdated ideas about how to run a news publication, his reportedly bad attitude and horrible relationships with upper-management and other underlings (alongside his reported homophobia and misogyny, which may have amplified those issues), a lack of effort or capability within the ad sales team, which by some indications barely existed, the wasted money spent on Grid News, which was apparently doing some interesting things, but which was almost immediately shut down, killing its brand equity and losing its talented staff, and the incredible amount of bias Finkelstein injected into the publication, despite his claims that he was aiming for something more in the middle for folks who were sick of ideological bias.

    It's also been claimed that talented journalists were forced to work in content-farm conditions, churning out dozens of click-bait calibre stories a day, and that Finkelstein and his cronies were basically accustomed to failing-up their entire lives, and thus were caught off guard when their out of touch, but to them brilliant assessment of what was going wrong in the news media world, today, proved to be not just wrong, but company destroyingly wrong—and that then led to a frantic attempt to merge with the LA Times, which was also spiraling, that was destined to fail, and a series of other smaller decisions that TV editor and culture writer Liam Mathews memorably called "ineptitude bordering on cruelty."

    Some post-death assessments, though, have supported—implicitly if not explicitly—some of the excuses provided by Finkelstein himself, pointing at the larger winds of change within the industry and blaming those ebbs, flows, and disruptions for the failure of his legacy-defining project.

    Among the cited issues is the shift back and forth between ad-supported news and a reliance on subscriptions and memberships: folks paying for the news with their attention versus folks paying monthly or yearly, basically.

    There was a big segue toward an absolutist take on subscription and membership-paid content a few years ago, away from the ad-first revenue model that had dominated until that point for most of modern memory, but even big news entities like The Washington Post, Time, Quartz, The Atlantic, the Chicago Sun-Times, and TechCrunch are revamping their approach on this, following Gannett's lead with its newspapers, beginning in 2022, to reduce the number of stories published behind hard paywalls and to either go fully ad-supported once more, or to use more flexible approaches, optimized for what readers are willing to pay, or allowing for generous, ad-supported access to the majority of what they write, with relatively few pieces retained just for paid supporters.

    We're also seeing a big move away from the growth-at-all-costs phase of the economy, which lasted from around 2010 until the pandemic, during which many of these entities shoveled gobs of investor money and cheap debt into expansion efforts and experiments, few of which panned out as they'd hoped, evolving into resilient income streams, and when interest rates were hiked as the pandemic peaked, profitability became the name of the game, and many of these companies were caught flat-footed with a lot of unprofitable assets and no-longer-serviceable expenses—so they started killing off components of their mini-empires and firing swathes of employees.

    The threats and opportunities inherent in the emergence of generative artificial intelligence technologies are playing a role here, too, as some news entities will no doubt be able to replace some number of their workers with robo-versions of the same, reducing their headcount and paycheck-related liabilities, while also, in theory at least, bulking up some of their AI-handle-able output.

    The degree to which this will be true has yet to be seen, but there have already been some early deals between relevant entities, including one recent deal for which Semafor will be paid by Microsoft and OpenAI to use their generative AI technology to help their journalists curate news via a tool called Signals; which in practice is similar in many ways to the news streams you see all over the web, today, with a big headline, an image, a summary of what happened, and some supplementary links.

    The idea is that someday this type of tool might be ubiquitous, each news entity with their own spin on the concept, but these rundowns and curated feeds also serving as a jumping-off point for the rest of a media entity's content: something that could change the way they publish and monetize substantially, if it goes as planned.

    All of which is leading to waves of layoffs, the industry experiencing what's been called a bloodbath, and even long-lauded brands like Sports Illustrated and Pitchfork are shutting down or becoming merged or stranded assets, their owners struggling to find a way to keep them solvent until they can figure out a business model that works in whatever this new stage of journalism and online publishing turns out to be.

    By one estimate 538 journalists were laid off from US-based news publications in January of 2024, alone, not counting the 300-or-so people laid off from The Messenger, and that's following more than 3,000 in 2023 and more than 16,000 in 2020.

    Some entities have announced that further firings are impending this year, and quite of a few of the ones that have remained silent so far are on deathwatch, possibly following in The Messenger's wake, collapsing entirely because they weren't able to figure out a way to keep existing in this new, still-emerging paradigm.

    Part of the issue with the membership and ads component of this conversation, which are the two ways most news publications are funded, is that there's an increasing focus on algorithmic search and information-discovery on the internet, which basically means rather than someone going to a news entity they like, perusing their offerings and clicking around to different stories from their main website, they might google it or search on TikTok, bypassing traditional players in this space and going to curators and analysts and influencers, instead, reading the news or hearing a summary of it on these other platforms.

    One of the major developing trends here, which could further change everything, possibly forever, is the shift within search engines like google toward becoming AI chatbot hubs instead of portals to other webpages.

    Google is seemingly attempting to scrape all the information on the internet so folks can ask their on-search-page chatbots questions, and they can plop the answers and resources right there on the google webpage, rather than redirecting those people elsewhere.

    Other search engines like Microsoft's Bing are doing the same, and other options are taking this concept even further, not displaying search results and links at all, but instead making a complete website full of information scraped from other sources every time you search, eliminating the need to go anywhere else, ever.

    This dramatically changes the math for everyone who makes a living from ads, because folks no longer have to go to their pages and view their ads, which is what generates revenue for the site, in order to get the information they paid to produce. And it impacts membership and subscription income, as well, because why would folks pay for such things when they can just get it for free via google or some other AI-powered search engine?

    What we're seeing now, then, is a partial reflection of what's happening elsewhere throughout the economy, as well, as everything recalibrates toward the interest rate and technological reality in which we find ourselves, today.

    But it's also possibly a preview of what comes next, as a variety of additional factors, more focused on media and news media in particular, continue to hamstring the entities running the companies in this space, allowing a few, like the New York Times and The Guardian and quite a lot of right-leaning editorial-focused entities to flourish, but killing off basically everyone else during the transition, leaving us with far fewer, less diverse options, and an industry that doesn't seem to have a reliable business model anymore.

    Show Notes

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/media-in-decline-advertising-layoffs-labor-unrest-1235806888/

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/27/is-the-journalism-death-spasm-finally-here-00138187

    https://www.axios.com/2024/01/26/media-layoffs-strikes-journalism-dying

    https://airmail.news/issues/2024-1-27/sports-immolated

    https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-hairpin-blog-ai-clickbait-farm/

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240126-ai-news-anchors-why-audiences-might-find-digitally-generated-tv-presenters-hard-to-trust

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/23/media/los-angeles-times-layoffs-strike/index.html

    https://www.theringer.com/2024/1/23/24047683/us-media-industry-meltdown-sports-illustrated-layoffs-pitchfork

    https://www.vulture.com/article/what-we-owe-pitchfork.html

    https://www.adweek.com/media/go-media-portfolio-sale/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    https://archive.ph/SMSDU

    https://www.semafor.com/article/02/04/2024/inside-conde-nasts-breakup-with-pitchfork

    https://www.adweek.com/media/recurrent-ventures-blackstone/

    https://www.therebooting.com/the-media-blame-game/

    https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/cnn-philippines-close-down-1235890177/?_hsmi=291911003

    https://www.axios.com/2024/01/30/wall-street-journal-washington-layoffs-restructuring

    https://www.adweek.com/media/techcrunch-shutters-subscription-layoffs/

    https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/business/media/sports-illustrated-covers.html

    https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/01/a-student-newspaper-in-iowa-just-bought-two-local-weeklies/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/12/19/media-companies-have-slashed-over-20000-jobs-in-2023/

    https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/journalism-layoffs-00138517

    https://pwestpathfinder.com/2022/05/09/the-big-sixs-big-media-game/

    https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/futureofmedia/index-us-mainstream-media-ownership

    https://www.axios.com/2024/02/03/news-media-business-implosion-philanthropic-wealth

    https://www.axios.com/2024/02/06/great-subscription-news-reversal

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/style/journalism-media-layoffs.html

    https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our-digital-media-platform-will-revolutionize-news-and-is-also-shutting-down

    https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Messenger_(website)

    https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/messenger-shut-down-closes-jimmy-finkelstein-fundraising

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/media/messenger-closing-down.html

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/02/the-messenger-startup-collapse-journalism-takeaways

    https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/ineptitude-bordering-on-cruelty-a-roundup-of-recent-news-on-the-messenger/



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  • This week we talk about CAR Ts, lupus, and antigen-presenting cells.

    We also discuss Hashimoto’s, potential cures, and allergies.

    Recommended Book: The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd

    Transcript

    Chimeric antigen receptors, usually shorthanded as CARs, are a type of protein structure that receives and transmits signals within biological systems.

    The term "CAR T cell" refers to chimeric antigen receptors that have been altered so that these structures can give T cells, which are a component of the human body's immune system, attacking stuff that our immune systems identify as being foreign or otherwise potentially harmful, it gives these T cells the ability to target specific antigens, rather than responding in a general sense to anything that seems broadly off.

    So while T cells are generally deployed en masse to tackle all sorts of issues all throughout our bodies all the time, CAR T cells can tell them, hey, see this specific thing? This one thing I'm pointing at? Go kill that thing. And then they do.

    The potential to use CAR Ts for T cell-aiming purposes started to pop up in scientific literature in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and in the mid-90s there was a clinical trial testing the theory that T cells could be guided in this way to targeted cells throughout the body that are infected with HIV.

    That clinical trial failed, as did tests using CAR T approaches to sic T cells on solid tumors; there just didn't seem to be enough persistence in the T cells, in their targeting, to do much good in this regard.

    Second-generation CARs improved upon that original model, and that led to tests with more follow-through, better focus for those guided T cells, basically, and that improved their capacity to clear solid tumors in tests.

    By the early 2010s, researchers were able to completely clear solid cancers from patients, leading to complete remissions in some of them, though those patients were also treated with more conventional therapies beforehand.

    These new approaches led to the first two FDA-approved CAR T cell treatments in the US in 2017, for a type of leukemia and a type of lymphoma.

    As of late-2023, there were six such treatments approved for use by the FDA, most of them leveraged only for cancer patients who didn't respond well to conventional treatments, or who continued to relapse after several rounds of cancer therapy. It's a last line of defense, at this point, in part because it's still relatively new, and in part because the current collection of CAR T therapies seem to work best when the cancers have already been weakened by other sorts of attack.

    What I'd like to talk about today is another potential use for this same general technology and therapy approach that, until recently, was considered to be a really pie-in-the-sky sort of dream, but which is rapidly becoming more thinkable.

    —

    There's a theory that essentially all human beings have some kind of immunodeficiency: something that our immune systems don't do well, don't do at all, or don't do in the expected, baseline way.

    Any one of those immunodeficiency types can result in issues throughout a person's life, ranging from a higher-than-normal susceptibility to specific infections to a tendency to accidentally target healthy cells or biota, which can then result in all sorts of secondary issues for the host of those cells or biota.

    One especially pernicious and increasingly common issue in this space is what's called autoimmunity, which refers to the tendency of one's immune system to attack one's own cells and tissues and organs.

    If these autoimmune attacks are substantial and consistent enough, they can cause a disease in the afflicted body components, and diseases caused in this way are called autoimmune diseases.

    You've almost certainly heard of some of the more common of these diseases:

    Lupus, for instance, varies in its specifics, but arises when someone's immune system attacks their skin or muscles or joint tissues or components of their nervous system, resulting in an array of problems that has earned this disease the categorization as a "great imitator" condition, because it replicates the symptoms of a slew of other diseases and disorders.

    Folks with celiac disease experience all sorts of gut issues, primarily centralized in the small intestine, that disallow the comfortable and healthful consumption of gluten, which is present in all sorts of foods and which, if consumed, can cause incredibly uncomfortable and painful side effects, alongside other gut-related problems.

    Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, as is multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Addison's disease, Grave's disease, and Hashimoto's thyroiditis, in which one's immune system slowly destroys one's own thyroid, causing all sorts of problems, including, potentially, hypothyroidism and sometimes a rare type of cancer called thyroid lymphoma.

    All of these issues are associated with a variety of other issues beyond their initial, simplified portfolio of symptoms because our bodies are ecosystems, all the things connected to all the other things, so it's borderline impossible to tweak one thing without causing ripples throughout the rest of the system.

    If part of that system attacks another part of the system, then, there will be waves of long- and short-term consequences resulting from both the attack and the damage caused by the attack, so these issues, though in some cases quite mild, depending on the person who has them, can also flare-up periodically, after being triggered by something or for no apparent reason, and they can change in nature over time, perhaps seeming like nothing, flying under the radar most of our lives, until one day they pop up out of the woodwork, wreaking all sorts of havoc that can be debilitating and terrifying, especially since the person experiencing those issues generally doesn't know what's happening and may initially attribute them to something else.

    I actually speak with experience in that regard, as I have Hashimoto's, and only found out about it a few years ago—and it took nearly a year to figure out what was suddenly causing all sorts of health problems that seemed to arise from nowhere, but which were apparently lurking there, waiting to crest the surface of awareness, for the thirty-plus years it took me to reach that point.

    So autoimmune diseases are varied but stem from the same core issue of our immune systems attacking some component of the bodies they're meant to defend, and though the majority of such disordered immune system behaviors will lead to nothing, causing no damage and possibly being counteracted by some other component of our complex internal ecosystems, some cause damage leading to disease, and some of those diseases are significant and life-altering or life-threatening.

    About 50 million Americans have one of the more than 100 tracked autoimmune diseases, and it's estimated that something like 4% of the total human population has at least one autoimmune disease, though methods of identifying and tracking such things are imperfect, and methods for doing so vary greatly from country to country.

    It's long been known that women suffer from a lot more and more intense autoimmune diseases than men—about 80% of people who have autoimmune diseases are women—and the results of recent research suggest this may be because a molecule called Xist (which deactivates one of a woman's two X chromosomes, preventing the dangerous overproduction of proteins in their bodies) seems to play a role in the production of molecular complexes that are linked to a lot of the autoimmune diseases we track, those complexes triggering chemical responses that spark the cascade of other issues that then result in autoimmune problems.

    This is still very new science and a lot of the more thorough looks into the Xist molecule have been in mice, so far, so while some exploration of this same process has been done in humans, this is still pretty speculative right now.

    That said, better understanding this molecule and its triggers, and other potential, similar triggers, might someday help us bypass or reduce the influence of those chemical responses, which could in turn reduce the incidence or impact of these diseases.

    For the foreseeable future, though, we'll probably be plagued, on a significant scale, by autoimmune diseases. And the number of people suffering from these things seems to be going up; there's some evidence that folks are more prone to some autoimmune diseases after being infected with COVID-19, which suggests there might be a long-term infection component of these sorts of issues, with the viruses and bacteria we encounter over the course of our lives messing with our bodily functions just enough to tweak the variables that inform our autoimmune behaviors, sometimes permanently and negatively.

    But incidences of autoimmune disease have been on the rise for years, and there's some evidence that points at what we might call the Western Diet and its spread around the world for some of this increase, as the real uptick began about 40 years ago, when the American version of the Western Diet started to go global in a big way, and in the wake of that spread we've seen inflammatory bowel disease surge in the Middle East and Asia, along with the seeming export of Type 1 Diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis across parts of the world that had never really seen them on any scale before, but which, after the installation of a bunch of McDonalds and the introduction of highly processed foods to global supermarkets, began to show up in a big way.

    This is also still pretty speculative, so take this with a grain of salt, and it's also worth noting that environmental variables like the food we eat is only one component of this issue, even if a more direct causal relationship could be proven: you can eat nothing but ultra processed foods and never develop and autoimmune disease, and you can eat a perfect whole foods diet and develop one; none of these seeming amplifiers are being flagged as absolute causes: this seems to be something we're prone to, regardless, and the way we live and how we eat and maybe even the microsplastics in our environments are maybe tweaking the likelihood of autoimmune predispositions becoming autoimmune issues—they're probably not sparking the potential for those issues out of whole cloth, though, based on what we currently know, at least.

    Whatever's causing or fanning the flames of this increase in autoimmune issues, though, a recent series of announcements is becoming more significant as those numbers increase.

    Therapies based on research that was initially conducted back in the early 2000s suggest that it may be possible to either kill or dampen the impact of the cells that attack our own bodies as part of an autoimmune disfunction.

    It was reported back in 2022 that five people suffering from a severe autoimmune disease had those diseases driven into remission by a therapy that uses CAR T cells to tell the body to attack the patient's B cells, which in the case of these patients, were the cells responsible for their lupus.

    So this therapy programmed some of their T cells to attack their B cells, which were causing their symptoms, including lung inflammation, fatigue, arthritis, and fibrosis of their heart valves, and those symptoms then cleared up; the attacks stopped, and so did their symptoms.

    Even more interesting is that once the B cells were wiped out, the ones behaving badly, the therapy was halted, their B cells populations started to tick back up because the T cells stopped attacking them, but the new B cells didn't engage in the damaging behavior—they did what they were supposed to do, rather than attacking their host.

    The subjects' immune systems were also tested, as the researchers didn't want solve one problem but cause another, impairing their patents' immune systems in such a way that they were then prone to all sorts of other infections.

    That didn't seem to be the case: their immune responses were similar to those of other people, and that led them to conclude that the reprogrammed T cells were primarily targeting the bad B cells, not wiping out the whole of their immune functionality; which was a real issue with earlier versions of this concept which were tested about five decades ago, most of which basically demolished a patients' immune system and hoped for the best, leading to unfortunately predictable and terrible outcomes.

    In the year or so since that initial trial was conducted, ten more people have had their severe autoimmune diseases forced into remission by this approach, and there's now hope that it might also work on other such conditions, beyond the three that it has been shown to work on, so far.

    There's another, related approach being tested that aims to help the body develop a better sense of self-awareness, boosting its tolerance for what it wrongly perceives to be bad stuff, so that it doesn't have such a hair-trigger for attacking things it thinks are dangerous and foreign, slowly but surely upping the cap for attack until it no longer does so, or doesn't at a level that causes diseases symptoms.

    One approach to achieving this outcome uses a synthetic versions of what're called antigen-presenting cells, which pop around our bodies picking up little bits of antigens—which are detritus like chemicals and bacteria and pollen and so on, stuff that isn't part of us—and then they meet up with our T cells and tell them which of these things should be attacked, and which should be ignored because they're safe.

    The synthetic version of this system sends in nanoparticle replications of these antigen-presenting cells, using them to flag the stuff that's being errantly attacked as good, changing the T cells' opinion of those things over time, basically, but it's also possible to achieve something of the same by manipulating how the natural antigen-presenting cells operate.

    It may also be possible to use these signifiers to tell the T cells to attack the B cells, in the case of wanting to help folks with certain types of lupus, for instance, accomplishing what those other therapies accomplish but via different, less-invasive and more straightforward means.

    What we're seeing right now, then, is a change in how we think about autoimmune diseases and what causes them, and we're taking recent research and understandings about the mechanisms of how this stuff functions and trying to decide how best to recalibrate and even hijack those mechanisms to correct for issues in the system; the idea being to tweak one small thing, perhaps just once, and to consequently permanently change how the system functions in favor of healthier, happier outcomes.

    We are still at the beginning stages of this, but the pace at which these sorts of therapies are being developed and moved to clinical trials is heartening.

    It's possible that at some point in the next decade or two we could see commonly available treatments for things like lupus and Hashimoto's, which would be great, in my 100% biased opinion, but also for related issues like allergic reactions, which would make use of the same general theory and process to tell our immune systems not to freak out when they're exposed to, for instance, peanut proteins or pollen, changing the lives of even more people, as long as we can figure out how best to consistently and safely administer these therapies to folks who currently suffer from such things.

    Show Notes

    https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(08)00624-7

    https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2018.02359/full

    https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2107725

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1142963

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41584-023-00964-y

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/08/global-spread-of-autoimmune-disease-blamed-on-western-diet

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/02/01/why-women-have-more-autoimmune-diseases/

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autoimmunity-has-reached-epidemic-levels-we-need-urgent-action-to-address-it/

    https://archive.ph/0outq

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00169-7

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25277817/

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/15/scientists-hail-autoimmune-disease-therapy-breakthrough-car-t-cell-lupus

    https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/crispr-cancer-cell-therapy-autoimmune-lupus/701528/

    https://www.wsoctv.com/news/trending/fda-issues-warning-secondary-cancer-risk-linked-car-t-therapies/RPAPN44ZCRFWFOROZOZLG2ZKG4/

    https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t-cells

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/health/fda-cancer-car-t-warning.html

    https://phys.org/news/2024-01-nanoparticles-anaphylaxis-side-effects-mouse.html

    https://hillman.upmc.com/mario-lemieux-center/treatment/car-t-cell-therapy/fda-approved-therapies

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_CAR_T_cell_delivery

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_adoptive_immunotherapy#Chimeric_Antigen_Receptor_(CAR)_T_Cell_Therapy



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  • This week we talk about robo-Biden, fake Swift images, and ElevenLabs.

    We also discuss copyright, AI George Carlin, and deepfakes.

    Recommended Book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

    Transcript

    The hosts of a podcast called Dudesy are facing a lawsuit after they made a video that seems to show the late comedian George Carlin performing a new routine.

    The duo claimed they created the video using AI tools, training an algorithm on five decades-worth of Carlin's material in order to generate a likeness of his face and body and voice, and his jokes; they claimed everything in this video, which they called "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," was the product of AI tools.

    The lawsuit was filed by Carlin's estate, which alleges these hosts infringed on the copyright they have on Carlin's works, and that the hosts illegally made use of and profited from his name and likeness.

    They asked that the judge force the Dudesy hosts to pull and destroy the video and its associated audio, and to prevent them from using Carlin's works and likeness and name in the future.

    After the lawsuit was announced, a spokesperson for Dudesy backtracked on prior claims, saying that the writing in the faux-Carlin routine wasn't written by AI, it was written by one of the human hosts, and thus the claim of copyright violation wasn't legit, because while the jokes may have been inspired by Carlin's work, they weren't generated by software that used his work as raw training materials, as they originally claimed—which arguably could have represented an act of copyright violation.

    This is an interesting case in part because if the podcasters who created this fake Carlin and fake Carlin routine were to be successfully sued for the use of Carlin's likeness and name, but not for copyright issues related to his work, that would suggest that the main danger faced by AI companies that are gobbling up intellectual property left and right, scraping books and the web and all sorts of video and audio services for raw training materials, is the way in which they're acquiring and using this media, not the use of the media itself.

    If they could somehow claim their models are inspired by these existing writings and recordings and such, they could then lean on the same argument that their work is basically the same as an author reading a bunch of other author's book, and then writing their own book—which is inspired by those other works, but not, typically anyway, infringing in any legal sense.

    The caveat offered by the AI used to impersonate Carlin at the beginning of the show is interesting, too, as it said, outright, that it's not Carlin and that it's merely impersonating him like a human comedian doing their best impression of Carlin.

    In practice, that means listening to all of Carlin's material and mimicking his voice and cadence and inflections and the way he tells stories and builds up to punchlines and everything else; if a human performer were doing an impression of Carlin, they would basically do the same thing, they just probably wouldn't do it as seamlessly as a modern AI system capable of producing jokes and generating images and videos and audio can manage.

    This raises the question, then, of whether there would be an issue if this AI comedy set wasn't claiming to feature George Carlin: what if they had said it was a show featuring Porge Narlin, instead? Or Fred Robertson? Where is the line drawn, and to what degree does the legal concept of Fair Use, in the US at least, come into play here?

    What I'd like to talk about today are a few other examples of AI-based imitation that have been in the news lately, and the implications they may have, legally and culturally, and in some cases psychologically, as well.

    —

    There's a tech startup called ElevenLabs that's generally considered to be one of the bigger players in the world of AI-based text-to-voice capabilities, including the capacity to mimic a real person's voice.

    What that means in practice is that for a relatively low monthly fee you can type something into a box and then have one of the company's templated voice personas read that text for you, or you can submit your own audio, creating either a rapidly produced, decent reflection of that voice and having that read your text, or you can submit more audio and have the company take a somewhat more hands-on approach with it, creating a more convincing version of the same for you, which you can then leverage in the future, making that voice say whatever you like.

    The implications of this sort of tech are broad, and they range from use-cases that are potentially quite useful for people like me—I've been experimenting with these sorts of tools for ages, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can take a week off from recording if I'm sick or just want a break, these tools allowing me to foist my podcasting responsibilities onto my robo-voice-double.

    In my opinion these tools aren't there yet, not for that purpose, but they're getting better all the time, and fast, and that the consumer-grade versions of these things are as good and accessible and easy to use and cheap as they are, today, suggests to me that I'll probably have something close to my dream in the next year or two, maybe sooner.

    That said, this startup has gotten some not great mainstream attention, of late, alongside the largely positive press it's received for being a popular tool for making marketing videos and generating voices for characters in video games, because it was apparently used by someone to generate an audio recording that sounds a lot like US President Joe Biden, and that recording was then used to make robo-calls to voters across New Hampshire, encouraging them not to vote in the democratic primary there, and to instead save their vote for November—which is not a thing you have to do, but this is being seen as a portentous moment in politics nonetheless, because although AI-generated images and videos and audio clips have been used in other recent elections around the world, with varying, still mostly low-key levels of impact, the upcoming presidential election in the US in November is being closely watched because of the stakes involved for the country and for the world.

    The folks running ElevenLabs have said they suspended the person who created the fake Biden audio clip from their service, and though the company recently achieved a valuation of more than a billion dollars and is, again, being generally seen as one of the leaders in this burgeoning space right now, this news item points at very tangible, already here risks for this sort of company, as there's a chance, still theoretical at this point, but a chance that has now become more imaginable, that this sort of deepfake audio or video or image could cause some kind of political or international or even humanitarian catastrophe if deployed strategically and at the right moment.

    This political AI story arrived shortly before another torrent of relevant news about a deluge of what we might call explicit material—I'm going to try to avoid saying pornographic so as not to trigger any distribution filters on this episode, but that's the type of material we're talking about here—featuring AI-generated versions of performer Taylor Swift.

    The most recent update to this story, as of the day I'm recording this, is that the social network formerly known as Twitter, now called X, has had to completely remove users' ability to search for the words Taylor and Swift on the platform, because efforts to halt the posting of such images and videos were insufficient due to the sheer volume of media being posted.

    One such image attained 45 million views, hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks, and about 24,000 retweets before it was taken down by X's staff, 17 hours after it was originally shared.

    Reports from 404 Media suggest that these images may have originated in a Telegram group, Telegram being a pseudo-social network that operates a lot like WhatsApp, and on 4chan, which is a forum that's basically dedicated to creating and sharing horrible and offensive things.

    Most of the images shared were not deepfakes, where an existing image has another person's face plastered over it, but instead original AI-generated, let's say "adult" works, based on Swift's likeness.

    The Telegram group recommends folks use Microsoft's AI image-generator, which is called Designer, to make these sorts of images—and though Microsoft has put limitations in place to try to keep people from making this sort of content, prompt-hackers, folks who enthusiastically figure out ways to bypass limitations on how AI tools respond to different prompts, telling them what to make, have figured out ways around most of these blocks, including those related to Taylor Swift, apparently, and those related to nudity and the other violatory themes that were incorporated into many of these images.

    Like ElevenLabs, Microsoft isn't thrilled about this and has said they're looking into it and are figuring out ways to prevent this from happening again in the future, including outright banning users who make these types of images.

    It's worth mentioning, though, that Taylor Swift, as a very famous and successful woman, has long been a target for this sort of thing, even before AI was used, back when folks were just photoshopping their fantasies and sharing those comparably less-sophisticated images in similar forums and on similar platforms.

    It's important to note here, too, that Swift isn't the only person dealing with this kind of violation.

    All sorts of people, men and women, though mostly women are also having their likenesses turned into explicit imagery and video content, and though this is an extrapolation on the way things have always been—the creation and distribution of revenge porn has plagued, again, mostly but not exclusively women since the dawn of the internet, and people have been making sometimes satirical, sometimes just intentionally vulgar images of other human beings since the dawn of pictographic communication.

    Back in November of 2023, there were reports of teenage boys using these sorts of AI tools to create fake nude photos of their female classmates without those classmates' knowledge (or, obviously, permission).

    The outcry following these revelations was substantial, as these were underage girls being turned into explicit images by their peers, which is creating all sorts of legal, interpersonal, and psychological problems, including but not limited to issues related to the creation of images featuring sexualized children, and issues related to the victimization of people via what amounts to completely fabricated revenge porn.

    There are really substantial and tricky layers to all of this, then, because while mimicking someone's voice for political purposes is in some ways the same as reproducing someone's facial features in order to portray them in adult situations, there are additional concerns when the content being generated makes it seem as if the portrayed people are doing or saying something that they didn't do or say, and it's even more complicated when the human beings in question are of a protected class, like children.

    There's also the question of degrees:

    To what degree is this better or worse, or maybe the same, as people creating these types of images with Photoshop, or drawing them in a sketchbook with a pencil, rather than using AI to create realistic images?

    How similar does a character in one of these images have to look to a real person, be they Taylor Swift or a classmate, in order for it to be, in the legal sense, a violation of their rights? How about a violation of their sense of personal security?

    How explicit must a generated character's youth be for that character to count as underage, in the eyes of the law?

    And how much protection does a normal, non-famous person have over their image, and should the legal consequences for violating that image be greater or less than the consequences for violating the image of a public figure who makes a living off their name and look and voice and persona?

    It's a big tangle of questions, all of them related to potentially quite traumatic and scarring experiences for the people being targeted and portrayed in this way.

    At the moment there are no clear answers about the legalities of all this, just a lot of in-the-works court cases and legal theories, and periodic pronouncements by government officials that we need to do something—but many of those same representatives are also slow-walking actual action on the matter due to a lack of legal precedent, an inability to do much about it, in a practical sense (because of the nature of these tools), and because some of them worry about stifling the fast-growing AI industry in their jurisdictions with regulations that may not actually address these issues but which would hamper potential productive uses of the same tools; throwing out the good stuff to try to hobble the bad, but not actually managing to do anything about the bad, so it's only the good that suffers.

    One potential upside of Swift being targeted like this, if there can be said to be an upside to something that, again, is often traumatic and scarring for those afflicted—is that the US government finally seems to be moving more aggressively to do something because of her status, though the nature of that something is still unclear at this point.

    The White House press secretary said that the government is alarmed by these reports, though, and they believe Congress should take legislative action, as there are no federal laws on the books that can keep someone from making or sharing these things at the moment, boggling as that may seem.

    Research from 2019 found that something like 96% of all deepfake videos are non-consensual, explicit videos of this kind, and they're mostly of women, and there are thousands of known sites dedicated exclusively to sharing such content and teaching people to make more of it.

    We're living through a tumultuous period in this regard, then, and are awash with flashy new technologies that grant everyday people heightened powers to create both incredible and harmful things.

    We will almost certainly see some of these ongoing court cases establish new policy in the coming year, though it will likely be several years before actionable legal, and concomitant practical technological solutions to these sorts of problems start to roll out—at which point the same denizens of the internet who are bypassing today's restrictions on such things will get to work finding ways around those new barriers, as well.

    Show Notes

    https://mashable.com/article/fake-biden-robocall-creator-suspended-from-ai-voice-startup-elevenlabs

    https://www.wired.com/story/biden-robocall-deepfake-elevenlabs/

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/ai-startup-elevenlabs-bans-account-blamed-for-biden-audio-deepfake

    https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-taylor-swift-porn-twitter/

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050334/x-twitter-taylor-swift-ai-fake-images-trending

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/26/was-deepfake-taylor-swift-pornography-illegal-can-she-sue/72359653007/

    https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/x-twitter-blocks-searches-taylor-swift-explicit-nude-ai-fakes-1235889742/

    https://www.wsj.com/tech/x-halts-taylor-swift-searches-after-explicit-ai-images-spread-06ef6c45

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68123671

    https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/high-school-student-allegedly-used-real-photos-to-create-pornographic-deepfakes-of-female-classmates/

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/deepfake-nudes-of-high-schoolers-spark-police-probe-in-nj/

    https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/11/04/teens-are-terrorizing-classmates-with-fake-nudes

    https://www.ft.com/content/0afb2e58-c7e2-4194-a6e0-927afe0c3555

    https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/arts/carlin-lawsuit-ai-podcast-copyright.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Qk0.GtfO.azJzGDa58AVv&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/fair-use



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  • This week we talk about Operation Iron Swords, October 7, and the International Court of Justice.

    We also discuss human rights abuses, the Red Sea, and Iran’s influence.

    Recommended Book: Empire Games by Charles Stross

    Transcript

    In the early morning of October 7, 2023, the militant wing of Hamas—which is also a political organization that has governed the Gaza Strip territory since 2007, a few years after Israel withdrew from the area and then blockaded it, leading to accusations from international human rights organizations that Israel still occupies the area, even if not officially—but the militant wing of this Sunni Islamist group, Hamas, launched a sneak-attack, in coordination with other islamist groups (a term that in this context usually but not always refers to groups that want to claim territory they can govern in accordance with what they consider to be proper Islamic fashion, usually defined by a fairly extreme interpretation of the religion).

    This sneak-attack was successful in the sense that it caught seemingly everyone off guard, despite the Israeli military's foreknowledge of this possibility; that foreknowledge only becoming public months after the attack, and the possibility of such an attack dismissed by those who could have prepared for it because it seemed to them to be a sort of pie-in-the-sky aspiration on the part of a group that was disempowered and incapable of putting up any kind of fight beyond periodically launching unsophisticated rockets that could be easily taken out by Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system.

    So for more than a year the Israeli government had information indicating Hamas was planning some kind of incursion into Israel, but they dismissed it, and by some accounts they had every reason to do so, as Hamas had seemed to be more chill than usual, pulling back on the overt military activity and lacking sufficient support from the Gaza population to attempt even a tenth of what they had blueprinted.

    Three months before the attack an Israeli signals intelligence analyst raised a red flag on this issue, indicating that Hamas was conducting intense training exercises that seemed to be in line with those pie-in-the-sky plans, but this flag was ignored by those higher up the chain of command, once again.

    Consequently, when Hamas launched a huge flurry of rockets, around 3,000 by most estimates, sent drones to take out automated machine guns and cameras placed along the border fences between Israel and Gaza, and sent militants through holes in the fence, in on motorcycles, and over barriers using paragliders, Israeli defense forces were caught flat-footed, taking a surprisingly long time to respond to the incursion and failing to protect a military base that housed the defense division responsible for security in Gaza, alongside several other bases, and the around 1,200 people who were killed and around 250 who were taken hostage.

    Dozens of nations immediately decried Hamas's attack as a terrorist act, many of Israel's neighbors made noises about not liking it, but then blamed Israel's long-standing alleged occupation of Gaza and the West Bank for the attack, and attempts to shore-up defenses, clear out lingering Hamas fighters, and tally the dead and missing began; the numbers and the experiences of those involved were all pretty horrifying.

    Israel's response, a plan that was designated Operation Iron Swords, arrived alongside a state of emergency for the portions of Israel within about 50 miles or 80 km of its border with Gaza, and the country's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country was at war with Hamas and would destroy them and anyone else who dared to join them.

    The nation's defense forces were also ordered to shore up its other borders to prevent anyone else from joining on in attacking Israel at a moment in which it might be seen as weak.

    In the just over 100 days—108 as of the day this episode goes live—everything has changed or been amplified in the Middle East as a consequence of this conflict.

    Most immediately, the Gaza Strip has been turned into a wasteland by Israel's counterattack, which involved heavy bombardment of what the Israeli military said were confirmed and potential Hamas hideouts, but which included countless civilian homes and businesses and other bits of infrastructure, and Gaza's population has been herded into public spaces and makeshift tents, the majority of them down at the southern end of the territory where Israel told them they would be safe, but which has since, itself, also come under bombardment and ground assault.

    Something like 25,000 Gazan residents have been confirmed dead by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 70% of them women and children, around 8,000 more have been reported missing, and around 61,000 have been officially tallied as injured since the counterattack began.

    Israel has been accused of all sorts of human rights abuses because of this counterattack, has lost a fair bit of the support it garnered in the early days after Hamas' sneak attack against them, and Netanyahu has faced heightened challenges to his leadership, from outside entities, but also from Israeli civilians and service people who question his motivations for maintaining the offensive stance that he's still maintaining, and by those who question the logic of how that stance is playing out, strategically.

    What I'd like to talk about today is the bigger picture in the Middle East, and what we might expect to happen in the region, next.

    —

    The general state of play, as of the day I'm recording this at least, and this is a big collection of fast-moving interconnected stories, so this is all prone to change and quickly, but the big-picture layout right now is this:

    Israel is run by Prime Minister Netanyahu who is in the midst of a corruption trial and is facing opposition for his response to Hamas' attack and his alleged human rights-violating flattening of Gaza and treatment of Gaza-residing Palestinians, and that pushback is coming from Israeli citizens, from within Israel's defense leadership structure, and from a growing number of the country's allies.

    Israel's biggest and generally most supportive ally, the US, has been sending all sorts of support and throwing out vetoes in Israel's favor, as well, when international bodies have tried to hold them accountable for some of those alleged human rights violations, and when they've tried to push for official ceasefires, but there are reports that the Biden administration is reaching the end of its rope on this, and that's partially because much of the world is not a fan of how brutal this response has been and how badly Gazans have been treated, but also, reportedly at least, because this is not good for Biden's reelection potential in November, as young people in the United States have largely sided with the Palestinians rather than what they perceive to be the bigger, badder, abusive aggressor—the Israeli military.

    The EU, also a long-time and enthusiastic backer of Israel, most of the countries in the bloc, anyway, has arguably already reached the end of its rope, the bloc's foreign ministers increasing pressure on Israel to consider a two-state solution post-fighting, which would basically mean making a real-deal Palestinian state in the area, rather than two Palestinian Territories run or blockaded by Israel, as Netanyahu has recently said he won't even consider the concept as it would be bad for Israel's long-term national security, but the majority of influential nations that are providing support for Israel are saying, well, you're probably going to need to do this, so let's think this through.

    The EU is even calling for consequences for Israel if Netanyahu continues to oppose a two-state solution, the idea being that his stance on the matter is fanning the flames of violence, and will continue to stoke them long-term, so some new state of affairs is necessary to change the existing, incredibly tumultuous status quo.

    The UN is even more pointed on this matter than the EU, those three groups—again, nations and organizations that are typically on Israel's side with pretty much everything—becoming publicly pissed off at Netanyahu's apparent slow-walking of this counterattack, his standing in the way of any kind of long-term ceasefire or peace-making, and his increasingly extremist, nationalist language when it comes to the possibility of a Palestinian state at some point in the future.

    Chinese leadership have also said they think Israel should stop punishing Palestinians in their hunt for Hamas militants and leaders, South Africa brought a case against Israel to the international Court of Justice, alleging genocide—and while this case was originally seen as a bit of a headline-grabbing sideshow and still has some staunch opponents, it's gathering more and more support, especially from other African nations, including those that have seen genocidal and genocide-like massacres at some point in their past.

    Chile and Mexico, in recent days, have also asked the ICJ to investigate possible war crimes committed by Israeli forces against civilians in Gaza.

    Maybe the most important responses here, though, from Israel's Muslim majority neighbors, have been universally negative—and this is in the context of a period of pseudo-normalization of these nations' relationship with Israel, a lot of negotiating and deal-making leading to a flurry of announcements that seemed primed to set the area up for a period of peace and prosperity—former opponents suddenly dealing with each other peaceably instead of lobbing munitions at and threatening each other pretty much continuously.

    Instead, what we see now is Egypt worrying that Israel is trying to push Gazan civilian across their shared border, Saudi Arabia warning of potential long-term consequences from Israel's invasion of the Strip, the Hezbollah government and military in Lebanon increasing the intensity of its fighting with Israeli forces across their shared border in the north, an increase in the tempo of fighting between Israeli assets and Iran-linked assets in Syria, and a huge new push by the Houthis, a group that's been engaged in a long-term civil war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen, to fire at and take hostage the crews of cargo ships passing through the Red Sea toward the Suez Canal, which has massively disrupted global trade; the Houthis say they're doing this in support of Gazans, demanding the Israelis pull out of the strip or they'll keep it up, though they've been doing this kind of pirating for a long while now, if not at this volume, so the degree to which they're just engaging in a rebranding effort for these attacks is up for debate.

    The general vibe of escalatory potential, though, is reshaping the region, and that's especially true of Israel's neighbors, like Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, which have suffered extreme economic damage—by some calculations around $10.3 billion, which is about 2.3% of their total, combined GDP—and that damage is expected to push hundreds of thousands of their citizens into poverty.

    This is the result of a dramatic decline in tourism to the area, a drop in oil production and oil market prices, and the confluence of climate-amplified droughts, economic and financial crises, and reverberations from other nearby conflicts like the ongoing fighting in Syria, which, among other things, has turned the Syrian government into one of the world's biggest illicit drug producers and exporters, which is having a hugely detrimental effect on many other nations in the region, in terms of their health outcomes and in terms of heightened and empowered gang activity.

    Uncertainty is a big variable, too, though, as investment money is suddenly finding other homes, those controlling these resources not wanting to plant their funds in a region that might soon catch fire, and the potential benefits from all that foreordained normalization, all that potential peace and divided entities suddenly able to do business with each other after a period of separation, has more or less disappeared.

    We're also see more military activity on the outskirts of this, the US and its allies launching regular air strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, which themselves continue to launch strikes against vessels passing through the Red Sea, and Israel has been lashing out at other targets in the region, too, mimicking Iran's attacks on what it's called terrorist groups operating within its neighbor's borders—which has upped the volatility level even further, as one of those Iranian neighbors, Pakistan, is nuclear armed and working through its own collection of instability-inducing variables, at the moment.

    There are a lot of entities in this region that are taking this opportunity to bulk-up their reputations with their constituents and allies, doing things that allow them to show strength, and doing those things in such a way that it looks like they're opposing Israel, even when they're not really actually doing that—as is probably the case with the Houthis and some of Iran's efforts—because this framing of their efforts allows them to grab more power, reinforce their existing power, and potentially even team-up, if only loosely, with other regional fellow travelers against the new regional baddy of the moment, an even-more-opposable-than-usual Israel.

    This is all a lot! But one thing I think we can fairly confidently say at this point is that Iran seems like it's using this opportunity to expand and flex its influence throughout the region, mostly by using proxy groups, as it tends to do, to annoy and hurt its various enemies, including but not limited to Israel, the US, the West in general, and Saudi Arabia.

    We're also seeing cracks in the veneer of unity Israel's government and military have promoted following Hamas' sneak-attack, people in power coming out against the way things have been handled, and folks on the ground maintaining a steady cadence of protests aimed at many facets of how Netanyahu has done things and is continuing to do things, including but not limited to not seeing the sneak-attack coming, not prioritizing rescuing hostages, and arguably pushing the region deeper and deeper into a state of war, rather than looking for ceasefire options.

    So there's a chance we could see a change in leadership in Israel soon, whether by election or other means, which would likely then change the reality on the ground throughout the region.

    There are also signs, as I mentioned earlier, that the US and other Israel-allied governments have just about reached the point where they'll formally step away from Israel's side on this, and it's unlikely anyone involved wants that to happen, so we could see a grand pivot on this matter, from Israel's side, sometime in the next few weeks.

    And there have been still-in-the-background reports that the plan, amongst some US negotiators and their allies, anyway, is to try to promote a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as the means by which a new stability in the Middle East could still be reached: Israel's Muslim neighbors helping a new, Palestinian state get off the ground and everyone living together in relative harmony, except for Iran and its allies, which would see their influence substantially reduced by this potential new state of affairs.

    It's anyone's guess as to whether this possibility has any legs, as again, this is still a kind of under the radar possibility at this point, and Netanyahu has said with increasing force and clarity that he will not allow a Palestinian state to happen—so who knows, this may be dead in the water before it's even formally proposed and promoted.

    So this continues to be a central flashpoint and major variable informing a lot of what's happening in the world right now, which is saying something at a moment in which China is increasingly vocal in its intention to take Taiwan, by force if necessary, in which Russia is still in the midst of an increasingly long-term invasion of Ukraine, and in which a record-number of democratic and pseudo-democratic elections are happening around the world, potentially leading to untold other, non-military upsets, further rearranging the pieces on the board and consequently, maybe, some of those aforementioned alliances and animosities, as well.

    Show Notes

    https://archive.ph/sJ75U

    https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/eu-foreign-ministers-to-meet-with-israeli-palestinian-arab-top-diplomats/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/business/economy/israel-gaza-regional-economy.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/20/world/middleeast/houthi-red-sea-shipping.html

    https://www.axios.com/2024/01/21/biden-middle-east-gaza-palestinian-state-israel

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/21/world/israel-hamas-gaza-news-iraq

    https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-pushes-hostage-release-plan-aimed-at-ending-gaza-war-d48b27e1

    https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-toll-thus-far-falls-short-of-israels-war-aims-u-s-says-d1c43164

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/20/us-military-yemen-houthis/

    https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/after-100-days-israel-hamas-war-threatens-to-spill-beyond-gaza-disrupt-global-trade-2d36ab09

    https://archive.ph/J0e5W

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/21/hamas-attack-october-7-conspiracy-israel/

    https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/hostage-talks-continue-israel-rejects-hamas-demand-full-idf-withdrawal-rcna134975

    https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/mexico-chile-international-criminal-court-investigate-crimes-gaza-106495506

    https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/fierce-fighting-gaza-war-hits-100-days-2024-01-14/

    https://www.npr.org/2024/01/14/1224673502/gaza-numbers-100-days-israel-hamas

    https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/1/14/israels-war-on-gaza-100-days-of-death-and-suffering

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs.

    We also discuss emergency powers, authoritarianism, and the cocaine trade.

    Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

    Transcript

    Nayib Bukele is the 43rd president of El Salvador, and he's an unusual leader for the country in that he's young—born in 1981, so just 42 years old, as of the day I'm recording this—and in that he's incredibly popular, having maintained an approval rating of around 90% essentially since he stepped into the presidency back in 2019.

    He's also unusual, though, for his policies.

    He has, for instance, made the crypto-asset Bitcoin legal tender in the country, buying up a bunch of them using government funds, developing a crypto wallet for citizens to use for storing and paying for things with their own digital assets, and he even announced the construction of what he called a bitcoin city, which would be built at the base of a volcano and would use geothermal energy to mine bitcoin, which basically means powering a bunch of powerful computers using the energy produced by the geothermal activity in that region.

    That gamble hasn't turned out as planned—Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence in recent months as some governments have passed somewhat favorable policies, including the SEC's recent decision to allow the sale of Bitcoin ETFs to everyday investors in the US—but he bought into the asset when the prices were high and lost a lot of the government's money on the gamble; it was estimated in late 2023 that El Salvador has lost something like 37% of the money it invested in this way, equivalent to around $45 million; though that's based on external estimates as the country doesn't provide transparent figures on this matter, so it could be more or less than that.

    Bukele has also caused a stir with his freewheeling approach to politics, which some local and international organizations have labeled authoritarian, as he's shown no compunction about trampling democratic norms in order to get things he wants done, done, and that has included sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to pressure them into approving a loan necessary to militarize the National Civil Police force, he and his party booted the Supreme Court's justices and the country's attorney general in an act that has been described as an autogolpe, or self-coup, a move by which the president takes full authoritarian control of his country while in power, he instigated widespread arrests and allowed all sorts of police abuses during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, and he and his party have been accused of all manners of corruption—though the attorney general who was investigating twenty such instances of corruption was fired, as I mentioned, so there's no longer any watchdog in the country keeping tabs on him and his cronies as they seemingly grab what they can— and that's led to a shift in the country's corruption perception index ranking, dropping it to 116 out of 180 ranked countries in 2022, with a score of 33 out of 100, higher being better on that latter figure; for comparison, that puts it on equal footing, according to this index's metrics, with Algeria, Angola, Mongolia, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Zambia.

    All of which is to say, after taking control of El Salvador, Bukele has rapidly reinforced his position, grabbing more of the reins of power for himself and firing or disempowering anyone who might be in the position to challenge the increasingly absolute power he wields.

    Despite all this, as I mentioned, though, he is incredibly popular, and the primary reason for this popularity seems to be that he has aggressively gone after gangs, and that has apparently dropped the homicide rate in the country precipitously, from around 103 murders per 100,000 people in 2015 down to just 17.6 per 100,000 in 2021; and the government has said it fell still further, down to half that 2021 that number, in 2022.

    So while there's reason to question the accuracy of some of these numbers, because of the nature of the government providing them, the reality on the ground for many El Salvadorans is apparently different enough, in terms of safety and security and fear, that everyone more or less just tolerates the rapid rise of a 40-something dictator because he's a dictator who is killing or jailing the bad guys who, until he came into power, functioned as a second, even more corrupt and violent government-scale power in the country.

    This crackdown has come with its own downsides, if you care about human rights anyway, as there are abundant allegations that Bukele's government is using this war against the gangs as an excuse to scoop up political rivals and other folks who might challenge his position, as well—basically, some of the killed and imprisoned people aren't actually gang members, but because of the scale of the operation, this is overshadowed by all the actual gang members who are also arrested.

    This effort has rapidly earned El Salvador the distinction of having one of the largest prisons in the world, which holds about 40,000 prisoners; a necessary investment because, as of early January 2024, more than 75,000 people who have been accused of having gang connections have been arrested as part of this effort, and as of 2023, El Salvador had the highest incarceration rate in the world, arresting people three-times as fast as the also notoriously arrest-happy United States.

    What I'd like to talk about today is a recent series of happenings in Ecuador, and why some analysts are wondering if this might point at a spread of Bukele's approach to dealing with gangs—with all its associated pros and cons.

    —

    In November of 2023, Ecuadorians elected a 36-year-old president named Daniel Naboa who ran on a promise to reform the country's prisons, which have in recent years become vital to the country's gang-run drug trade.

    In 2016 the government of Colombia signed a peace deal with the FARC, a guerrilla group that was at fighting odds with the government for more than 50 years, and that led to a period of relative stability in Colombia, but led to the opposite in Ecuador, which until that moment had been fairly peaceful, most of the gang stuff happening in neighboring Colombia.

    But the FARC entering a state of peace and the consequent end of their de facto monopoly on cocaine trafficking from Colombia into Ecuador, where a lot of the drug is shipped around the world from Ecuadorian ports, caused a flare-up in violence as local, previously connected but relatively small groups, rose up to fill the power-vacuum.

    So Mexican and Colombian cartels and the Albanian mafia and other local gangs that were tied to various aspects of the FARC-led cocaine network in the region were all suddenly scrambling to grab what they could grab, and Ecuador's road infrastructure, its use of the US dollar as its official currency, and its lack of visa requirements for foreign nationals made it a highly desirable location for building out assets for producing and shipping drugs, especially cocaine, globally.

    The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and a drop in oil prices, oil being Ecuador's main legal export, amplified this rush, as a slew of now job-less and prospect-less young people were funneled into various gangs, these gangs being the only real economic opportunities in town, and over the past few years this has created a state of near-constant inter-gang warfare, which in turn sparked a series of prison massacres in 2020 carried out by competing gangs.

    In the wake of those massacres, gangs more or less took over about a fourth of the country's prisons, using them as bases of operation for their drug- and inter-gang-warfare related efforts.

    The country's president from 2007 through 2017 did a pretty good job of keeping gang activity in Ecuador to a minimum by basically allowing gangs to become cultural institutions and leaving them alone, so long as they stopped with all the violence. But this hands-off policy was part of why the government was unprepared when things went sideways beginning in 2016 and even more so in 2020.

    Ecuador's social safety net fell apart in the wake of that peaceful coexistence period, as well, and organized crime was able to accumulate more wealth and influence than the government in many regards, because of how lucrative the drug trade was becoming, which allowed it to fill in some of the blanks left by those diminished safety nets and the government's new austerity policies.

    This also allowed them to insinuate themselves throughout the government, grabbing control of some of the country's mega prisons, but also a whole lot of military-grade weaponry and people in positions of power throughout the justice system.

    Entire regional governments have been captured by local gang leaders, a whole generation of youths has been incorporated into their ranks, and though the previous president, before Naboa, seemed to understand the growing issue with gangs in the country, he was unable to do much to fight them and his meager efforts in that direction were defeated before they could be implemented: possibly, allegedly at least, because some members of his inner-circle were co-opted by the Albanian mafia and other local gangs.

    So Naboa coming into power was both a big deal and not a big deal: big in that he seems keen to do something about these gangs and their violence from the get-go, but less big in that other politicians have tried and failed to do the same, and there's a good chance his efforts will fail just as completely as those that came before.

    Then, in the wake of Naboa's formal ascension into office, during which he reiterated his vow to respond to the threat of these gangs with violence is necessary, and following several months of political assassinations, the blowing up of bridges and the killing and kidnapping of prison guards and police officers, on January 7, 2024 a drug lord nicknamed Fito who leads the Los Choneros gang escaped from prison, ostensibly because of Naboa's intended prison reforms, and the fact that until this point he'd been sort of running his gang from the prison where he was technically detained.

    A series of riots shook-up prisons across the country, a bunch of guards were taken hostage and a bunch of other inmates escaped, as well. Some more bombs went off, too, creating a general sense of carnage across Ecuador.

    President Naboa announced that the country was now in a state of internal armed conflict, sent the military into the streets and the prisons to search for Fito and to reestablish order, and 22 gangs were officially classified as terrorist organizations.

    A few days later, on January 9, a group of masked, gun-wielding men attacked a local TV station and broadcast, live, their taking the station staff hostage, telling viewers that they were doing so because the government was trying to mess with the mafias.

    The government announced they arrested 13 suspects in that TV station attack, and that they freed those and other hostages that were taken across the country, but the big outcome of that attack and that general carnage that surrounded it is that Naboa announced a state of emergency and a declaration of war on the gangs operating in the country.

    This state of emergency is scheduled to last for 60 days, and grants the government additional, temporary powers meant to help them combat heavily armed and well-connected gangs.

    But there's some concern that this temporary suspension of some people's rights and the ability to go hard and brutal against these gangs, bringing the full force of the country's police and military to bear against them, might end up being less of a temporary thing and more of an initial justification for a new status quo in which the government wields more, and more absolute power so they can do difficult things, but at the expense of human rights in the country.

    And folks worry about this because something similar was done, and seems to have worked really well, by some measures at least, in El Salvador.

    Officials from across the political spectrum, far-left to far-right and everything in between, from Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, and Chile have publicly expressed admiration for the model that's working, for some value of "working," in El Salvador, at times suggesting or outright saying they would like or intend to replicate the so-called "Bukele Plan" in their own countries.

    The sense here, amongst some analysts who know the region and the players well, is that the popularity Bukele enjoys is desirable for politicians, and so far it's the only proven way to deal with gangs that are this powerful: you have to grab all the power, do away with human rights, and basically just go completely sociopathic against them, giving everyone the sense that the government is the biggest and most violent beast around, not the gangs, and anyone who steps out against the government will be killed or imprisoned for doing so.

    This sort of approach, of course, often leads to what's sometimes euphemistically called "democratic backsliding," and in this case what's sometimes called "hustle-bro populism" serves as a foot in the door toward outright dictatorial, if very popular rule.

    And there's no shortage of concern from the international community, in particular, but also political opposition within these countries, that the presence of strongman leaders, no matter how popular they are, will degrade the rule of law and democratic norms in these countries, which in turn often leads to corruption, more violence—justified by gesturing at the common enemy of the people, in this case, at this moment, the gangs—and that then goes on to justify all sorts of other abuses, as well.

    The big issue here, though, is that most of the other attempts to control this gang problem in South and Central America—which in this part of the world is fueled by the drug trade, and thus, secondarily, by wealthier countries—those attempts haven't worked.

    And this approach, though flawed in many ways, does seem to work.

    And people living in El Salvador, thus far at least, seem to be willing to suffer those negative consequences if it will make their day to day lives less dangerous and violence-prone.

    What we're seeing in this relative success of what we might think of as an illiberal democratic model in Central America, then, isn't the traditional issue of a populism-powered, corrupt politician grabbing control, because not having a powerful and popular dictator who's willing to use violence in this way in control would seem to be, in some ways at least, worse.

    And that would seem to represent a failure of the many alternatives that have been tried and proposed, and the entities—including the world's many liberal democracies—that continue to support them.

    There's a chance these not-uncommon variables and outcomes spark a wave of Bukele lookalikes through Latin America, then, though it's also possible that Bukele's own antics will catch up with him, and he, like many authoritarians throughout history, will crumble under his own weight and ambition before his movement can expand and really take off.

    It may also be that this model isn't replicable, is an El Salvador-specific thing, or that politicians like Naboa will figure out a way to make use the concept on a temporary basis, serving as a more traditional version of the dictator, taking on more power in order to put the whammy on the gangs, but then beneficently stepping aside, handing that power back in order to reassert the primacy of democracy; it's not a common outcome, but it's possible.

    There's no way to know which way things will go yet, but we'll probably have a better sense in a few months, when this state of emergency in Ecuador is set to lapse, and other leaders throughout the region will have had the chance to assess the benefits of a shorter-term play, and will thus have a more complete sense of how to structure their platform and pitch for the many elections being held throughout the region in 2024.

    Show Notes

    https://www.cfr.org/blog/surge-crime-and-violence-has-ecuador-reeling

    https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/ecuadors-crisis-a-long-road-ahead/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_gang_crackdown

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/7/could-el-salvadors-gang-crackdown-spread-across-latin-america

    https://archive.ph/49KLp

    https://www.democratic-erosion.com/2022/10/14/el-salvador-is-objectively-becoming-safer-but-at-what-cost-to-democracy/

    https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/nayib-bukeles-growing-list-of-latin-american-admirers/

    https://archive.ph/S78X5

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/10/ecuadors-narco-gang-violence-a-timeline-of-the-recent-crisis

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/14/ecuador-prison-staff-held-hostage-by-inmates-all-freed

    https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ecuador-cracks-down-prisons-restore-order-after-hostage-crisis-2024-01-14/

    https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-09-02/two-years-of-bitcoin-in-bukeles-el-salvador-an-opaque-experiment-with-a-little-used-currency.html

    https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022



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  • This week we talk about the raising of Chicago, Jakarta, and sea level rise.

    We also discuss groundwater, flooding, and insurance.

    Recommended Book: Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

    Transcript

    In the mid-19th century, the city of Chicago, its many sidewalks and buildings and other infrastructure, were hoisted using jackscrews, which are kind of like heavy-duty versions of the jacks you might use to lift your car to replace a tire.

    The impetus for this undertaking, which was substantial and paid for with a combination of city and private funds, was Chicago's persistent drainage issues: the city was located at about the same altitude as neighboring Lake Michigan, and the ground upon which it was constructed was consequently pretty swampy to begin with, but became even more so as all those sidewalks and buildings and other human-made environmental objects were installed, putting downward pressure on that swampy soil, which led to widespread and persistent pools of standing water throughout the city.

    All this standing water led to the spread of diseases like dysentery and typhoid fever—the sorts of issues that tend to arise when there's opportunity for pathogenic beasties to hang out and spread and come into contact with drinking water sources, not to mention essentially every surface in a city, and in 1854 there was an outbreak of cholera—which is also caused by bacteria getting into peoples' bodies, usually from infected water sources—that killed about 6% of Chicago's total population.

    So this was an area that was already prone to what's called subsidence—the sinking of land that can be both natural and sparked or amplified by human activity in various ways—and Chicago's development into a city sped up that process, causing it to sink even further, quite rapidly, and that led to a collection of mostly but not exclusively water-related issues, which at this moment in history, the mid-19th century, meant a lot of disease-spread due to insufficient water sanitation efforts and infrastructure, and a very hit-or-miss understanding of the mechanisms of the diseases that were carried by that insufficiently treated water.

    The first brick building to be hoisted in this way was elevated in January of 1858 and required about 200 jackscrews to lift it six feet and 2 inches higher than its previous altitude, and that kicked-off a period of remarkably rapid and successful elevations throughout the city, including all sorts of huge, heavy, at times quite wide and cumbersome buildings of all heights and material composition, installing elements of the city's new sewage systems around the existing buildings, then covering all that up with soil, pouring or reinstalling roads and sidewalks atop that soil at the new height, and then raising all the buildings, filling the space beneath them with soil as they were slowly cranked up to that new baseline.

    This wasn't a straightforward effort, and there were several false-starts, initial problems that had to be solved, and quite a few pieces of the old city that either couldn't be elevated, and thus had to be buried and rebuilt, or that were moved to new locations, placed on rollers and shifted to areas, mostly on the outskirts of the city, which kept them aloft without having to raise them using the jackscrew method.

    Interestingly, some of the elevated buildings, like the Tremont House hotel, continued to function even as they were raised; guests continued to frequent the hotel, and some of them apparently didn't even realize it was in the process of being elevated while they were staying there.

    This process was largely completed in the 1960s, and much of the city, as it existed at the time, was raised by 4 and 14 feet—and that provided space for the new sewage system that would help with all those water and water-borne illness issues, while also establishing a new baseline altitude for future developments, which would be able to use that same sewer system while also being lifted up high enough that flooding and similar water-adjacent, low-lying land issues wouldn't be a problem most of the time.

    What I'd like to talk about today is the issue of subsidence in other cities around the world, today, and some of the solutions we're seeing deployed to address it.

    —

    The world is packed with sinking cities: a term typically applied to urban centers that are rapidly losing elevation, sinking into the ground due to a combination of natural and human instigated variables.

    Chicago is a sinking city, as though all that lifting back in the 19th century helped it with both immediate and potential future, sinking-related problems, the Chicago metro area is still primarily built atop clay which contracts as it's heated.

    This heat-related deformation hasn't always been much of an issue, but as more buildings have been erected and as the shift in our global climate has led to on-average higher temperatures for more of the year, the ground beneath Chicago, and quite a few other cities worldwide, has been slowly but measurably deforming, expanding and contracting more rapidly and dramatically due to temperature swings, which in turn has caused building foundations to shift and the surface, the ground upon which residents walk and build and live, to sink downward, which causes damage to those building foundations and to infrastructure that doesn't flex to accomodate this movement past a certain point, like roads, bridges, power lines, and basically everything else that makes up a city.

    The majority of sinking cities, those at the top of the list in terms of ground deformation and elevation loss, anyway, are located on coasts, and because about 2.15 billion people live in near-coastal zones, and around 898 million live within the most directly impacted, low-elevation coastal zones around the world—both of those numbers steadily rising as more people move closer to the world's on-average wealthier and more opportunity-rich coastal areas—this is a significant and growing issue because the costs and dangers associated with such areas are also increasing, in part because larger populations tend to amplify the same.

    A study published in 2022 that looked at the subsidence rate in 99 coastal cities from 2015 to 2020, intending to get a more accurate sense of just how rapidly they're sinking, found that while sinkage is occurring most rapidly across Asia, it's also happening on all the other inhabited continents—all of them except non-city-having Antarctica—and while the latent properties of these areas are partly to blame, human activity, especially the extraction of groundwater, is often a primary culprit causing these cities to sink.

    Even more alarming, in some ways, is that while experts are already alarmed about rising sea levels, as ice caps and glaciers and other stores of water melt due to higher average temperatures and more frequent and dramatic heat waves, the rate of subsidence in most of these sinking cities is higher than the rate of sea level rise.

    In other words, sea level rise is already causing insurance companies to leave some coastal areas and government coffers to run dry as they attempt to shore-up regions that are being lost to global oceans, but it would seem that many cities that are subsiding in this way are sinking faster than the water around them is rising—so the two opposite movements in parallel are amplifying those sea-level-rise-associated issues, but the issue of subsidence, which hasn't been as big a focus in mainstream conversation thus far, would seem to be the larger issue in many cases, and not terribly well addressed in most cities where it's an issue.

    Important to note is that just as subsidence isn't a single cause problem, since it's the consequence of both natural features and human activity, it's also not a single consequence issue: just as Chicago suffered from both flooding-related and disease-related problems tied to subsidence, so too do these other sinking cities suffer a portfolio of associated ailments.

    Probably the most immediate concern for most sinking cities, today, is similar to that of sea level rise.

    While it may be common to imagine that rising sea levels will someday leave threatened cities underwater 100% of the time like a modern Atlantis, the real issue, today, is that as the ocean gets higher, closer to the level of coastal land, it takes smaller and smaller perturbations in that water for it to surge inland, covering more and more territory.

    So buildings and roads that previously flooded once every ten years will flood every year, those that were previously inconvenienced by minor floods will be severely, perhaps permanently damaged by deeper and more intense floods that stick around longer, and areas further inland that were previously protected from surging ocean waters will start to flood, despite never having experienced flooding previously, and thus not being built to standards that would allow them to survive even relatively minor flooding.

    Again, the combination of sea level rise and subsidence is basically doubling the impact of this sort of issue, causing more intense and regular flooding in these regions earlier than was previously anticipated, and thus messing with or totally screwing over plans made by city governance to handle such problems.

    I mentioned earlier that the consumption of groundwater is often a component of this problem, and the general idea is that when modern humans move into a new region, they typically drill wells and start pumping water from deep underground, moving that underground water above ground for all sorts of uses, from drinking to filling our toilets to watering our lawns to manufacturing-related applications.

    Moving all that water from underground to aboveground is similar, in terms of consequences, to moving a bunch of rock or soil from underground to aboveground: it causes the remaining ground to sink, because there's less stuff down there to hold everything on the surface up at its existing level.

    Some previously sinking cities, like Tokyo, have been able to largely halt their subsidence by reducing the pumping of groundwater, Tokyo officials having implemented regulations to address the issue in the early 1960s, which brought their sinking issues to an end about a decade later.

    Shanghai did something similar, but instead of halting all groundwater pumping, they required that these underground supplies of water be refilled after extraction, so the amount of water down there stays roughly equal, even if some is pumped for various uses sometimes—another way to accomplish essentially the same end, and a solution that seems to have not quite halted, but significantly slowed sinkage in Shanghai in the years since that policy was implemented.

    Houston, in the US, also introduced groundwater remediation efforts in the 1970s, which seemed to have helped slow its sinkage, as did the Silicon Valley area in the 1960s.

    The fastest-sinking cities in the world, today, according to that new study, and other recent research into the same, are Tianjin, Semarang, and Jakarta, the first of which is located in China, and the latter two of which are located in Indonesia.

    These three cities are sinking almost 15-times faster than global mean sea levels are rising, and this is a big part of why the Indonesian government decided to move its capital from Jakarta to a new city the government is building on the island of Borneo.

    It's estimated that one-third of Jakarta could be completely submerged essentially 100% of the time by 2050, and there are about 10.5 million people living in Jakarta, so that means a lot of people whose homes and businesses and neighborhoods are prone to flood regularly, today, may be gone completely, lost to the ocean, by mid-century—which by any measure is a highly destabilizing sequence of events, and will almost certainly lead to a large number of lost lives and a huge sum of lost wealth, not to mention the secondary issues that may arise as all those people moving out of these no longer habitable areas move elsewhere, stressing the systems in those new areas, including but not limited to the need for more water, which may need to be pumped from underground, causing more urban centers to sink, or to sink faster.

    Jakarta is not alone in facing this heightened risk: there are many other big population centers around the world that are prone to similar outcomes, including but not limited to Chittagong and Dhaka in Bangladesh, Manila in the Philippines, Karachi in Pakistan, Kolkata and Mumbai in India, Guangzhou in China, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Bangkok in Thailand, Miami and New York City and New Orleans in the US, and Mexico City in Mexico, alongside many, many other cities that are built on naturally subsidence-prone land, are draining that land's groundwater or oil or other underground resources, are building heavy infrastructure on the ground which causes it to settle and sink, and in some cases are built atop or near shifting tectonic plates that rumble continuously enough that the sediment is pretty much always naturally compacting, the ground always deforming just a little bit, and all that adds up over time, causing the same or similar issues.

    The most immediate consequences we're seeing in many of these areas is that insurance companies are leaving because it's no longer a winning bet to be operating in increasingly disaster prone regions, and that is likely to spread to other industries that no longer want to invest in assets that may be underwater part time or all of the time before they're expected to recoup their investment cost.

    People will either leave these areas, fleeing for more secure ground, or they'll stay, putting their lives and their wealth of various kinds at risk as they do so.

    Poorer people, so far at least, have tended to bear a disproportionate amount of the burden associated with these sorts of shifts, and resultantly the human and economic costs associated with impoverished populations are tending to increase, as is the number of impoverished people in afflicted areas, because of that aforementioned risk to wealth, an accompanying lack of security, and the increasingly difficult time people and businesses are having insuring their assets in these areas.

    There are efforts to mitigate subsidence underway in some of these regions, including the use of advanced tools like LIDAR and satellite imagery to pinpoint the primary regional causes of sinkage, and the passing of policies, like the groundwater regulations introduced in several sinking cities in the 20th century, that then help halt or slow their city's subsidence rate.

    Many cities are reorienting around an adaptation strategy, too, in part because sea walls and similar solutions don't work as well when it's not just sea level rise you have to worry about, and in part because the costs are more moderate than completely revamping a city's infrastructure to account for all that sinking.

    In most cases this means deploying a series of systemic changes alongside relatively light-touch infrastructural ones, so increasing the ground's capacity to sponge-up water, rerouting, replacing, or removing water-based infrastructure that can reduce a city's capacity to absorb rainfall, planting trees and similar water-breaks in flood-prone coastal areas, introducing early warning systems and evacuation plans in case of severe flooding, and overall attempting to allow flood waters to roll through with the minimum amount of damage, rather than struggling, and failing, to keep it out entirely.

    We're in the early days of this sort of adaption and mitigation evolution, though, and a lot of what we're trying now likely won't work as well as we had hoped—not everywhere it's tried, at least—and other solutions will almost certainly emerge in the coming years that turn out to be much more effective, and possibly cost-effective, too.

    The sheer expansiveness and significance of the problem, though, will necessarily spark the innovation of a variety of approaches, systems, and technologies, and it's possible we'll see a flurry of new moderating elements deployed and installed in the coming years—alongside a slew of fresh tragedies in cities that suffer essentially continuous problems related to subsidence and flooding, in the meantime.

    Show Notes

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/east-coast-ground-continues-to-collapse-at-a-worrying-rate/

    https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/07/the-ground-is-deforming-and-buildings-arent-ready/

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-coastal-futures/article/population-development-as-a-driver-of-coastal-risk-current-trends-and-future-pathways/8261D3B34F6114EA0999FAA597D5F2E2

    https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL098477

    https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/372/189/2015/

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/why-indonesia-is-moving-its-capital-from-jakarta-to-borneo

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_cities

    https://archive.ph/YVJdq

    https://faculty.washington.edu/jwh/207mexic.htm

    https://qz.com/2155497/coastal-cities-are-sinking-faster-than-sea-level-rise

    https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3285/nasa-led-study-pinpoints-areas-of-new-york-city-sinking-rising/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/30/land-sinking-us-subsidence-sea-level/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_1885_cholera_epidemic_myth

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidence



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  • This week we talk about Indonesia, South Africa, and geopolitical risks.

    We also discuss the South China Sea, the US Presidential election, and Potemkin democracy.

    Recommended Book: The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell

    Transcript

    By many metrics, 2023 was a tumultuous year.

    In the latter-quarter, in early October, the paramilitary group Hamas launched a sneak-attack on Israel which kicked off a new round of turmoil directly, on the ground, in the Gaza Strip, where Israel launched a hastily organized counterattack, and that's led to a fresh humanitarian crisis in the Strip, as resident Palestinians have been killed in the tens of thousands, as the Israeli military has sought out and tried to get revenge against Hamas fighters and leaders, but it's also upended the region as Egypt has tried to position itself as peacemaker, while also trying to stave-off the possibility of hundreds of thousands of Gazans being pushed across the border into the Sinai Peninsula, and further north Hezbola militants have engaged in an, at this point anyway, relatively low-key shootout with Israel across the Lebanese border, increasing the perceptual likelihood, at least, of a conflict that increases in scope, encapsulating more of Iran's allies and subsidiary groups, and possible even Iran itself.

    That component of the conflict has also started to impact global trade as the Red Sea—a channel connecting Asia with Europe through the Suez Canal—has been plagued by gunman and drone and missile attacks by Houthi groups in Yemen, which are also supported by Iran and ostensibly launching these attacks in solidarity with those under-siege Palestinians in Gaza.

    Further north, across the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which kicked-off in earnest when the latter invaded the former in late-February of 2022, continues apace, though the frontlines in the conflict have remained fairly static for the better part of a year, and the two sides have doubled-down on launching missiles and drones at each other, reorienting toward asymmetric attacks on stockpiles and supply chains, alongside attacks on civilian centers meant to psychologically damage the other side, rather than fixating entirely on ground assaults meant to formally claim or reclaim territory.

    This conflict continues to shape global alliances and eat up gobs of monetary and military resources, as Russia imports weapons and supplies from allies like Iran and China, and Ukraine receives funding from mostly Western nations, though that support could diminish or even largely dry up, soon, depending on the political meanderings of its allies in those countries in the coming months.

    The drumbeat toward potential conflict in the South China Sea also continues to increase in tempo as the Chinese military upgrades and reorganizes its infrastructure and leadership, and forced accidents between ships in the area—especially but not exclusively between Chinese and Filipino assets—have become more common as both sides have decided to draw a line in the sand, China wanting to maintain a sense of invincibility and inevitability for its expansionary efforts, and the Philippines becoming more confident in its regional alliances, which are solidifying around efforts to prevent growth and influence-expansion on the part of China's military—including its stated intention to bring Taiwan under its control, by force if necessary, sometime in the next handful of years.

    There's also heightened concern about conflicts and potential conflicts in the Sahel region in northwestern Africa.

    A series of recent military coups against elected governments have lent this strip of land the nickname "the coup belt," and a handful of military dictatorships that have emerged from these coups have gestured at creating a sort of rough alliance meant to deter opposition from local democracies—many of which are themselves wary of coups within their own borders, and suffering from many of the variables that tend to make coups more likely, like regional terrorist activity from extremist paramilitary groups, and persistent economic and humanitarian issues.

    These sorts of conflicts and potential conflicts are examples of what are often called geopolitical risks: things that are problems unto themselves, but which might also reverberate outward, causing even more problems secondarily and tertiarily, and not just in their immediate vicinity, but globally—all of which messes with efforts to plan much of anything, because something could pop up to render the assumptions informing those plans moot at the drop of a hat.

    Economic crises and resource crises are also common sources of geopolitical risk, but 2024 will be historically prone to another common type: that of democratic elections. And some of the record-number of major elections scheduled for 2024 are truly significant, beyond even the normal risks associated with the potential peaceful handover of power.

    —

    In 2024, there will be significant elections in around 50 different countries, with some wiggle-room in that number because some of the elections expected to occur in 2024 may not, and others might pop up as the year progresses. And around 76 countries will have some type of election, inclusive of smaller, regional rather than national races.

    If these numbers prove even generally accurate, that will make 2024 the most election-heavy year in history, and something like 2 billion people will head to the polls for those top-level elections, and around 4 billion for some kind of vote—these people deciding who will take the reins of some of the world's largest militaries, economies, and populations.

    In practice, that means we'll see elections in the US, India, Mexico, South America, the 27 European Parliament countries, alongside nations that are up-and-coming in various ways, like Indonesia and Venezuela, and those that have seen a lot of instability of late, like South Sudan and Pakistan.

    There will be an election in Taiwan that could determine, among other things, and in part, how hawkish a stance its government takes toward neighboring, bristling-with-weapons-and-animosity, China, and the UK will also see a leadership race—one that hasn't been scheduled yet—but if it does happen, that election could flip the House of Commons from the long-ruling Tories to the opposition Labour party for the first time since 2010.

    The 2024 Presidential election in the United States is already being complicated by a slew of lawsuits, most of them aimed at former President Trump or his allies, Trump having been accused of all sorts of crimes, and who, as a consequence of his connection to the insurrection at the Capital on January 6, 2021, has been banished from the ballots in two states, so far.

    The Supreme Court will almost certainly determine if those banishments will be allowed stand sometime in the next few months, if not weeks, though the other cases also inform Trump's election run-up schedule, as he'll be in and out of courthouses and may see substantial fines and even potential prison time if one or more of them don't go his way.

    Republicans have also launched inquiries into President Biden and his son Hunter, and while these mostly look like counterattack efforts from Congressional Republicans at this point, it's possible one them might turn up something real and actionable, so those could also be volatile variables in this election, which will determine whether Trump returns to office and is able to act on his platform of doubling-down on the ambitions of his previous term in office and seeking revenge against those who wronged him, or if Biden will be able to continue his collection of policies, locking things like the Inflation Reduction Act into place, rather than seeing them on the chopping block before they had a chance to really take root.

    India's elections looks all but certain to go current Prime Minister Modi's way, as he and his administration have been immensely popular, continuing to roll out a series of policies that favor the nation's Hindu majority at the expense of the Muslim minority, and that popularity is bulwarked with efforts and alleged efforts to disadvantage his opponents and anyone else who might criticize him and his accomplishments—including journalists—using the levers of state; and as tends to be the case in such circumstances, another win would provide him and his party another term in office during which they could double-down on what's working, for their constituents and for themselves.

    Mexico's election in June of 2024 will, for the first time ever, feature two women candidates from the country's leading parties, making it likely the next president will be a woman. This election will also ask voters to elect around 20,000 people to fill vacant and soon-to-be vacant public positions across the country, which is a record for Mexico, and could change the on-the-ground political reality for a huge portion of the country's citizenry.

    Venezuela's next presidential election hasn't been scheduled for a specific day yet, and it's all but certain to result in another win for current president Maduro, in large part because he's been accused of stacking the deck in his favor in previous elections, and in case that wasn't enough, he's also barred the leading opposition candidate from running, citing alleged political crimes as the rationale, though no one's really buying that excuse, as it's the go-to option in the authoritarian's playbook when you want to ban a popular opponent while making it seem like you're acting to uproot corruption.

    This election is interesting, though, despite the outcome being basically preordained, because of Maduro's recent posturing surrounding the issue of the Essequibo region controlled and government by neighboring Guyana, which Maduro has recently said should actually belong to Venezuela, alongside the vast stores of oil and gas that have been discovered there in recent years; he's gone so far as to task local companies with exploring the area to assess where the oil wells and mines should be built, and had a referendum asking citizens if they thought the region should be annexed, all the people living there issued Venezuelan citizenship—and while there's reason to believe this is mostly just posturing and he'll ultimately settle for a deal with Guyana's government to somehow profit from those resources, there's a chance things don't go his way and military action starts to look like an appealing means of staying in power while seeming to be sticking around on the country's behalf.

    Indonesia's general election will be held early in the year, in mid-February, and this election will be important in part because Indonesia is such a huge country in terms of population, and a burgeoning giant in terms of its economy and its diplomatic heft: it boasts an abundance of natural resources and is located along the South China Sea, making it a strategically important ally; but it's also one to watch because the people who have run the country's government until this point have largely been elites who were able to take political, business, and military power during the nation's pre-democratic 32 years of authoritarian rule.

    The country's current president was the first real outsider to break through that wall of authoritarianism-empowered elites, and he's immensely popular, but hasn't been able to get much done because the rest of the government has been controlled by cronies of those elites.

    This election could determine the shape of the rest of that government, and the elites are positioning themselves behind a portfolio of new cronies they would also control, while the current president—who's ineligible for a third term in office, and thus won't be running again—has said he intends to meddle in the election, trying to position himself as a kingmaker in this upcoming and future votes, which could help more outsiders break through that elite barrier, and maybe reshape things in Indonesia in a more fundamental way.

    Russia's upcoming election is a Potemkin vote, current President Putin having jailed his actual, serious competition, and his stranglehold on power and the media in the country ensuring that unless he decides otherwise, he'll be cake-walking back into the Kremlin—elections are a farce in Russia, these days.

    In Iran, though, where leaders hold some of the same powers over the electorate as Putin, including but not limited to jailing those they think might challenge their influence, there's a chance 2024's election might either force the country's Supreme Leader to clamp down on opposition he doesn't like, hard, in a way that could further alienate an already somewhat alienated public against him and his rule, or, failing that, he might have to deal with a parliament stacked with political rivals who could make his job more difficult.

    There was some hope amongst Iran's rivals that 2021's election cycle might give those in charge cause for concern in this way, but that ended up not being the case. So this isn't a certain thing, and there's a good chance the higher-ups just decide to double-down on oppression, as that's worked pretty well for them in most regards up till this point. But there's a chance opposition will be able to slip into some positions of relative power, which could then nudge some of the country's behaviors internally, and throughout the region, in a direction the Supreme Leader and his people aren't happy about.

    The European Parliament election will happen in early June, and will see more than 400 million voters elect 720 people to parliament across the 27 member countries, and this will be meaningful in part because it's such a big, rich, influential bloc, but also because there's been a surge in far-right candidates in some countries, that surge seemingly tied to immigration concerns and the conflict in Ukraine, among other issues of the day.

    Poland's government, in contrast, moved in the opposite direction, a far-right government that was in the process of locking itself into permanent power replaced by a more center-left leadership.

    So we could see an EU that doubles-down on what it's been doing, in a sort of generally center-left fashion, or one that shifts somewhat or dramatically to the right, reorienting toward more isolation and less support of neighbors like Ukraine, which would then also go on to influence the outcome of that conflict, among other global happenings.

    One more election that I think is worth mentioning here is that of South Africa, which will see the ANC party, which has run things since 1994, face its stiffest competition since Nelson Mandela stepped into office and became its first black president.

    In the decades since, the ANC has never faced a real threat to its governing majority until now, and that means it could be forced to form a coalition with other parties, which could substantially alter the balance of power in the country with the biggest economy in Africa, and one that has suffered from all sorts of corruption issues and problems with infrastructure and spending under ANC's governance.

    There are countless potential sources of geopolitical risk and turmoil in 2024, including the aforementioned military conflicts, but also things like pandemics, the emergence of new, disruptive technologies, and economic fluctuations that don't align with the models the experts have been working from and basing their policy decisions on.

    But elections are maybe the most straightforward and direct path toward fundamental change at the governmental level, which is part of why they're so valuable, but also part of why they represent so many unknowns and so much trepidation.

    Only something like 43 of the 76 countries that'll have elections of some kind this year are considered to be home to fair and free elections, but even those that are mostly just going through the motions have the potential to spark non-vote-related repercussions, so this'll be a year to watch as around half of the human population heads to the ballot boxes and engages in the complex process of both doing democracy in the first place and dealing with the consequences it.

    Show Notes

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/business/economy/global-economic-risks-red-sea.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Venezuelan_presidential_election

    https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/10/05/indonesia-s-2024-presidential-election-could-be-last-battle-of-titans-pub-90711

    https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/2024-election-cycle-starts-iran

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_national_electoral_calendar

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/12/2024-elections-around-world/

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-11-01/2024-is-election-year-in-40-countries-and-podcast-elon-inc-launches-next-week

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_risk

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

    https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/territorial-disputes-south-china-sea



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • Note: I’m taking next week off for the new year and to work on my next book—this month’s More Things bonus episodes has thus been moved to this upcoming Thursday, and you’ll see the next LKT episode on January 2!

    This week we talk about Venezuelan, Guyana, and the British.

    We also discuss oil deposits, gold, and the Geneva Agreement.

    Recommended Book: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross

    Transcript

    In 1581, Dutch colonists arrived in South America, setting up a colony along the northern coast—but that embryonic settlement, called Pomeroon, was wiped out about a decade and a half later by the British; and survivors from Pomeroon then founded a new settlement on the back of an existing but abondoned Portuguese fort, located on an island in the middle of a river, that was an offshoot of the major regional waterway, the Essequibo River—they took over this fort, and then eventually retook Pomeroon from the British, with the help of their allies, the French.

    The specifics of all this conquering and reconquering aren't terribly important, though: what's important to know is that this settlement was located in a strategic area, globally, because it allowed Europeans to grow incredibly valuable crops, like sugarcane, in an region that was accessible to ocean-traversing vessels, and in a location that was an established crossroads for local trade, which made acquiring local resources a lot easier, and getting workers for these plantations at lot simpler, as well.

    All of which has meant this region—like many other scattered throughout the world, but especially those with natural ports and located somewhere near the equator—was a somewhat tumultuous, violent place for a long while, in large part because all these Europeans kept popping in to kill and take and build and destroy existing buildings and to fight with each other, while also leaving a lot of dead locals and destroyed local infrastructure and ecosystems in their wake.

    Following that initial period of back and forth, though, things calmed down a bit, and the Dutch fleshed out their holdings, vastly expanding the scope of their plantations, even to the point—and this was fairly controversial at the time—that they allowed English planters to join them from 1740, onward, which increased the scope of the plantations thereabouts still-further.

    In February of 1781, some British privateers showed up, captured the main settlements, and then left, and in March of that same year two Royal Navy sloops arrived and did the same, conquering the area for the British Crown until the French showed up, beat the local British forces, and occupied the colony; though a peace deal back in Europe resulted in this colony being handed back to the Dutch in 1783.

    In 1796 it was reoccupied by the British, the Dutch retook it, holding it from 1802 until 1803, then the British took it again during the Napoleonic Wars, and it became an official British territory in mid-1814.

    That was the end of that second period of conflicts, as the big, violent rush to claim as much area as possible during the Age of Discovery was beginning to wane, there was a sort of peace, in some aspects of the word, at least, emerging between European powers, and many of these entities were finding they made more money by trading than by fighting with each other all the time.

    That said, a more fundamental conflict remained in this area, as the Spanish held a neighboring territory, the border between that territory and this one held by the British typically delineated by the Essequibo river.

    So the Spanish were busy with a series of colonial independence movements when the British rolled up this collection of plantations and habitations on the east side of the Essequibo river, and thus the Spanish didn't really have anything to say on the matter, despite at times having claimed portions of the territory the British were now claiming as their own.

    And maybe partially because of that distraction on the part of Spain, Britain's new, official maps that were drawn in 1835 showed British Guiana, the name of its new, official territory thereabouts, beginning at the Orinoco River, not the Essequibo, while neighboring Venezuela's maps showed the latter river as the border.

    When the government of the relatively newfound state of Venezuela, which is what that neighboring Spanish territory became, realized that their neighbor was claiming territory they thought of as their own on their maps, they complained, threatened, and negotiations began, but no compromise was reached and in 1850 the two governments agreed to not occupy the disputed area along their shared border.

    Less than a decade later, though, gold was discovered in that disputed area, and British settlers almost immediately moved in and started setting up formal mining infrastructure, alongside a company through which they could profit from it.

    The Venezuelan government continued to complain and attempted to solve the disagreement through arbitration, but the British weren't keen to do so. This led to Venezuela breaking diplomatic relations with the British in 1887, and it asked the US for help, and when the US suggested that the UK enter arbitration, they were told no, even when then-President, Grover Cleveland, said that the US might have to intervene if the British didn't do something, based on the Monroe Doctrine, which basically says European powers shouldn't meddle in the Western Hemisphere, or else.

    The British eventually said okay to arbitration in 1897, and a decision handed down in 1899 gave 94% of the disputed area to British Guiana—and the Venezuelan government was perhaps predictably fairly upset about this outcome, but both sides formally accepted this new boundary in 1905.

    What I'd like to talk about today is a new rift resulting from a fresh batch of resources discovered in this long-contested area, and how that rift could spark still-further conflict.

    —

    In 1958, British Guiana was divided into official administrative regions, and that led to the dissolution of an historical region called Essequibo, after the river that bisected it.

    In 1962, as the European powers were undergoing a phase of decolonization in the wake of WWII, Venezuela re-stated its position that the claim it made to the territory back in the 19th century was legit and should never have been questioned or legalized away, and part of its argument was that the British had a deal with the Russians back when that arbitration effort was completed, the folks on the arbitration board—who were supposed to be objective—allegedly were swayed by that alliance to rule in favor of the Brits.

    The British said this is nonsense, as did the government of British Guiana, but this remained in dispute—and still is to this day in dispute, in some corners of policy and diplomacy—until British Guiana gained independence from the British, as a dominion, in 1966, becoming the nation of Guyana, with those arbitration-established borders still in place, and they remained in place when it became a republic in 1970, as well.

    Shortly after that independence was attained, though, Venezuela started taking action of diplomatic, economic, and military varieties to retake the territory it considered to be its own, and to have been unfairly stolen from it, arguing—and this is just one of the many arguments it has made toward this intended end—that the Geneva Agreement that it, then-British Guiana, and the British signed in 1966 nullified the original arbitration agreement the parties signed earlier that established the still-in-place, British Guiana-favoring border.

    That new agreement also said that the signatory nations would solve all disputes through dialogue, though, which is part of why recent saber-rattling by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been so shocking to many, as even though this has been an, again, tumultuous and violent area for a long time, in recent memory it's been tumultuous, but mostly peaceful, despite those long-simmering resentments from Venezuela about this perceived violation of trust and wholesale theft of a region it considers its own.

    On December 3, 2023, Venezuela held a referendum that asked voters if they reject the 1899 arbitration agreement, if they support the 1966 agreement, if they agree with the government's stance that the International Court of Justice has no say in this matter, if they agree that the Venezuelan government should be able to oppose Guyana's claims about the region, and if they think the government should turn the disputed region into a new Venezuelan state called Guayana Esequiba, granting all locals Venezuelan citizenship as a consequence.

    Low turnout was reported at polling stations for this referendum, but the official results indicated that more than 95% of voters responded "yes" to each of those five questions, and despite that low turnout and claims that the government may have falsified these results, they've been using those "yes" numbers as part of their justification for seemingly moving forward with an annexation of the region—though as of the day I'm recording this at least, and this could change before this episode goes live, that annexation is only on paper, not a practical, real-life reality.

    Now, part of why that vote and the results and the government's response to the results are so shocking is that this region has been governed by Guyana in its many governmental guises for generations; this isn't an area that's gone back and forth between the two countries in recent memory—it's been well and truly Guyanan for a long time, and the people living in the region, all 125,000-or-so of them, out of Guyana's total 800,000-ish population, would tell you the same if you asked them. It also makes up something like 2/3 of Guyana's total landmass.

    In 2015, though, oil was discovered just off the coast of this disputed territory, and that led to calls by then, as today, Venezuelan President Maduro, to take this territory back; Venezuela has a lot of oil already, but these new reserves were looking to be sizable, and this new discovery had the potential to further enrich already rapidly enriching, from the sale of oil in other reserves, Guyana—so through some lenses, it made sense to to try grab the land attached to these reserves if possible, both to get that money, and to prevent a neighbor with whom they've long had all sorts of conflicts from getting that money, as well.

    That call eventually died down a bit; it remained, but wasn't at the forefront of conversation the way it was in 2015, when Venezuela was in the midst of a Presidential crisis that Maduro was likely keen to conceal a bit, moving the spotlight to something else, and ideally something nationalistic in nature.

    So while getting that money was probably a big part of that renewed push, there's a good chance that political expediency and trying to get both the public and the media to look at something else, something potentially titilating in the sense that the possibility of military action tends to be titilating, and something that might rile up the nationalistic base in support of their president, rather than encouraging them to continue questioning that president's legitimacy, which was otherwise a major topic of conversation.

    In October of 2023, a consortium of fossil fuel interests, led by Exxon Mobile, announced the discovery of a significant new reserve of oil and gas, marking the fourth such discovery in 2023, alone.

    That announcement ran parallel to increasingly bad news for Venezuelan president Maduro, who is incredibly unpopular with Venezuelans, for all sorts of alleged corruption and driving the economy into the ground, and who is up for election in January of 2024, that election almost certain to be rigged, though the US has offered him incentives to not rig the election, allowing it to be free and open and fair, in exchange for lessening some of the oil export sanctions the country has been operating under for a long while.

    So the state of play is that Maduro would almost certainly like to rig this upcoming election the way he has previous elections, keeping his hold on power as a consequence, and he kind of has to rig it if he wants to win, based on his popularity numbers, but he could potentially better those numbers by allowing something closer to a free election, getting sanctions lifted, the economy improving a bit, and he could possibly goose his numbers further by raising the Essequibo issue once more, riling up the nationalistic base and thus, possibly benefitting from those lifted sections while also winning the election with the minimum of corruption required on the back of pro-Venezuela fervor.

    That's one theory of what he's up to, at least, as there's a chance he's ramping up to just move into the contested region, start setting up shop, guarding roads and claiming the area for Venezuela based on those historical claims.

    But that option is considered to be quite risky by many analysts, as military action of that kind, annexing a neighbor's internationally recognized territory, in the western hemisphere, could be a step too far, bringing neighboring militaries, including Brazil's, which already has troops on the border because of this dispute, into the conflict, alongside forces or other types of support from the US.

    What might be better, instead, for his seeming purposes, at least, is to just keep on rattling that saber, raise the possibility of annexing the area, maybe make some deals with the Guyanan government, threatening the whole time, and consequently grabbing some small piece of the territory, or maybe just economic, monetary rights to some of the assets—deals instead of land—and that would still be more than he started with, alongside those aforementioned election-related benefits that could help him stay in power, without having to do much in the way of election fraud.

    This is all speculation at this point, though, as the public face of this burgeoning crisis is the threat of a much larger, wealthier, more powerful nation and military telling their smaller, weaker neighbor that a significant portion of their land is not theirs, and will therefore be incorporated into that larger neighbor.

    That's not unheard of—it's similar to the claim made by the Russian government about Ukraine, recently, pre-invasion—but it's also not super common in the modern world, as the taking of territory in this way has been disincentivized by international structures and alliances that generally make the consequences of doing so a lot weightier than the benefits of acquiring that bit of land.

    We're entering a new, post-Ukraine-invasion age, though, in which a lot of those prior norms and expectations are being challenged or upended, neighbors invading neighbors, maybe gesturing at a new norm, but some of these governments maybe just hoping to get in while the getting is good, righting perceived wrongs and grabbing what they can before the international order gets wise and implements some new system of carrots and sticks, assuming—not without reason—that it will make more sense for everyone, in the aftermath, to just leave things where they are at that point, rather than trying to put the pieces of the former setup back together in some way.

    The governments of Venezuela and Guyana had a meeting in the nearby island of St. Vincent recently, in which they agreed to an 11-point declaration, which included a mutual promise not to use force against each other, no matter what, and to avoid escalating the conflict in any way—but their disagreement over who should have jurisdiction here, with Guyana pointing at the International Court of Justice, and Venezuela saying that Court should have no say in the matter, could complicate these discussions before they really start, making any progress a slogging, pit-trap laden effort.

    Show Notes

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67635646

    https://time.com/6343549/guyana-essequibo-region-venezuela-dispute/?utm_placement=newsletter

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67645018

    https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-opposition-referendum-machado-guaido-0f615a5aa835a4cae7d83403321c6c6d

    https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2023/guyana-venezuela-tensions-drive-us-military-exercises

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Venezuela#2006_changes

    https://apnews.com/article/guyana-venezuela-essequibo-oil-united-nations-maduro-fd9e3a3275de8d88dc0a0982f8e7cda4

    https://archive.ph/VMWiR

    https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20231214-venezuela-guyana-presidents-meet-to-de-escalate-tensions-over-disputed-oil-rich-region

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/venezuela-and-guyana-agree-not-to-use-force-in-essequibo-dispute

    https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-tells-world-court-referendum-go-ahead-despite-guyana-resistance-2023-11-15/

    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/14/guyana-venezuela-essequibo-maduro-kenneth-mohammed

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Guiana

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essequibo_(colony)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Kyk-Over-Al

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana%E2%80%93Venezuela_territorial_dispute

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
  • This week we talk about stainless steel, DARPA, and GNoME.

    We also discuss ceramics, DeepMind, and self-driving labs.

    Recommended Book: Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

    Transcript

    In a recent episode, I talked a bit about the bronze and copper ages, and how reaching the level of technological know-how so that it's possible to heat metals so you can blend them with other metals, forge them into useful things, and generally work with them in a more fundamental way than is possible if you're simply chipping away at them, bending them with brute strength, and so on, grants you all sorts of additional powers that those cruder methods do not offer.

    Copper's a pretty basic material to work with, as metals go, in part because of its elemental properties, and in part because it appears in nature, on Earth, in its pure form, so it's not something our ancestors would have had to imagine from whole cloth—they could see it, work with it, and thus, had a pretty good sense of what it was and what it was capable of.

    Bronze, an alloy of copper—with some amount of tin mixed into the copper to make it more resilient and strong, and thus, useful for many things—was different in that it's not natural and doesn't occur unless we synthetically produce it.

    Iron is similar to copper in that it's natural, though it's also a lot stronger and thus harder to work with, lacking the metallurgical capacity to melt it down and reshape it in a liquified form, and steel is in this way a bit like bronze in that it's an alloy of iron—iron mixed with carbon—and variations on the theme, like stainless steels, have some amount of chromium blended in with the iron and carbon, alongside nickel, in some cases, which makes it even more complex, and thus essentially impossible to imagine if you're limited to what nature provides you, in terms of practicality, and thus, often at least, your conception of materials-related possibilities.

    So part of the challenge in attaining mastery over difference materials, including but not limited to metals, is discovering them and having access to the requisite natural resources, like iron and copper, in the first place, but then also, over time, learning that you can manipulate them in various ways, and then over time—often long, long stretches of time, generationally long periods of time in some cases—refining those methods of manipulation until it's possible to do so economically, but also, typically, at some kind of productive scale: allowing you to make enough of the material so you can churn out, for instance, armor and swords made out of it, or if we're talking about ceramic goods, stuff made of clay and silica and carbon, among other substances, scaling-up the process so you can produce more jugs and pots and urns, more food-preservation technologies and clay tablets for writing and bricks for building homes and other structures; and that's alongside the parallel process of simply learning how to capably work with these materials, once a sufficient volume of them becomes available.

    So while metal and clay are different sorts of substances, they're both materials that we use to make objects—we take basic, earth-derived stuff and reshape it into things that are useful to us in some way, whether that means as a weapon or means of manufacturing things, or as clothing, homes, or objects of beauty—artworks and such.

    Materials science is a field focused on the many facets of these types of resources, with some practitioners working with existing materials in order to better understand them, others sussing out various means of scaling-up production or iterating upon existing modes of production to make them more economical or sustainable, while still others aim to produce new materials of this kind: in some cases discovering existing-but-rare new materials, in the sense that we haven't discovered them, at least in the scientific sense, before, but often production, in this context, means combining different elements or other raw materials to create new materials.

    Just like our ancestors figured out how to make stronger, longer-lasting ceramic pots and how to make stainless steal out of iron alloyed with other substances, the contemporary version of that field often means working in laboratories and manufacturing hubs to investigate the blending-potential of various materials, and to then refine successful blends to see if the resulting whatever might have utility that can be exploited for some kind of productive purpose.

    What I'd like to talk about today is materials science, and how new innovations in the AI realm could push this field into an entirely new, and much faster-moving, paradigm.

    —

    As I mentioned in the intro, we've been doing what you might call materials science research and development since our earliest days of civilizational evolution, and almost certainly for quite a long while before that, too, because our deep, deep ancestors were all about making clever use of their environments and the materials in those environments, to get a leg-up over their competition.

    That said, modern materials science arose out of earlier, differentiated fields like metallurgy and ceramics engineering classes and laboratories, some of these educational and commercial hubs slammed together into unified, materials science departments in the 1960s when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency—the precursor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA—started throwing money at universities with laboratories that seemed capable of helping the US economy, and by association the US military, gain broad-scale advantages over their international competition, by approaching materials research not just from the 30,000-foot, macro-scale view that pretty much every such department had approached such things from until this point, but also the micro-scale, atomic-level perspective: something more fields were beginning to attempt in the wake of WWII and the increasingly common realization that we've been missing out on a lot, not looking at things from the atomic level, up till that point, and that by leveraging advanced understandings about how these substances work from other fields, like physics, we could probably speed-up our development of new incredibly useful, omni-versatile materials, like steel or aluminum, dramatically.

    This would allow us to start our research with assumptions based on molecular and atomic science, rather than empirical, observational, comparably quite slow approaches, and that meant rather than waiting to observe and measure something interesting that happened, usually by doing a lot of fiddling around and hoping for good luck, over and over, day after day, we could instead very intentionally start cycling through all the potential blends that these other scientific understandings have told us are both possible and might be useful or interesting for various reasons.

    In the decades since, materials science has expanded still-further, encompassing new and ever-smaller scales, and new material types, like polymers—plastics, basically—that weren't really a thing when the unified field first, itself, became a thing.

    The impact this reorganization and refocus has had on the development of new materials cannot be overstated: among other things, innovations in this space has led to the development of artificial skin for burn victims, metal composites that have worked their way into all kinds of consumer products, making them more durable and lightweight, the production of medical hardware capable of performing magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasounds, the materials required to produce microchips of ever-smaller sizes, but with ever-denser capacities, nanotechnologies that have allowed for the shrinking of all sorts of components and devices, and the materials that have made the rapidly increasing efficiencies of solar panels possible, alongside the materials used in wind turbine blades and batteries with ever-embiggening capacities, safety features, and durabilities.

    The modern world, in essence, all modern technologies, and especially all digital goods, but also everything made out of any kind of metal or plastic that isn't raw iron or copper, both of which are increasingly rare in consumer goods, at least, was enabled by the field of materials science; lacking that mid-20th century development, it's a fair bet we would have been held back in pretty much every other scientific field, and thus, technological development, as well.

    That ubiquity and importance is part of why a recent announcement by Google's DeepMind division—an artificial intelligence lab under the larger company's brand-umbrella—has been getting so much attention.

    DeepMind has become well-known for its upending of chess, the game of Go, and more recently for creating a protein structure database that contains all its predictions for the 3D structures of folded proteins—showing how more than 200 million proteins will likely look based on their amino acid sequences, alone, solving what has long been called the "protein folding problem," which I spoke about at greater length in a previous episode, by the way.

    So we've got a database full of protein ingredients, amino acids, for all the proteins we've ever discovered, but just having those ingredients doesn't tell us what the finished proteins will look like in three-dimensions, once they've been built, because they fold up into a final shape after construction.

    Figuring out how finished, folded proteins made up of those ingredients we knew about, how they would actually look in real-life, has thus been a time-consuming, ponderous and expensive effort—all of science, our entire human civilization-wide scientific effort, was able to demonstrate the final, folded structures of something like 170,000 of the more than 200 million proteins we knew about, up till the early 2020s.

    That changed with DeepMind's AlphaFold program, which—using an AI technique called deep learning—was able to predict, imperfectly, but with enough accuracy to successfully predict single-mutation effects (what will happen if a protein has a single change to one of its amino acids, and how that will impact the final shape of the folder protein) all of those known proteins in our existing database.

    So predictions that are usable for many use-cases, and at what's been called a borderline miraculous or magical scale, applying this prediction model to every single protein we know about, as a species, at this point.

    That same lab has now applied a similar AI system to predicting and simulating how various materials will work together, if blended, and how their fusion, the product of that blending, will behave; what properties it will have.

    The company announced that they've developed a new deep learning system optimized for this purpose, called Graph Networks for Materials Exploration, or GNoME, and the initial outcome of running this tool was the discovery of about 2.2 million new crystalline structures, about 380,000 of which are stable enough to warrant further materials science investigation.

    Using current methods and extrapolating on the research currently being done and funding currently available to researchers in this space around the world, it's estimated that around 736 of these 380,000 new potential materials have already been discovered by researchers in experimental settings, and that this stockpile is equivalent to about 800 years'-worth of knowledge based on current levels of investment and output.

    So it would take about 800 years, at current levels of research in this space, to discover this many new potentially useful materials.

    All of which is wonderful, as—like with the folded protein predictions provided by AlphaFold—this new GNoME model gives materials scientists some focused areas to be looking at, making every experiment more likely to provide us with useable outcomes, rather than the shot-in-the-dark approach that's more common when looking into unfamiliar blends of materials.

    Many of these 380,000 potential new structures will likely be not useful for today's purposes, then, but this type of research rigs the dice so that each investigation is relatively more likely to yield something really valuable, which could prove to be hugely beneficial, especially since that catalog of potentially useful structures, like the protein fold catalog, has been published and made available to whomever wants it, for free.

    That's still a lot of work to do, of course, churning through all these potentially useful materials, which is why another development in this space—what's sometimes called self-driving labs—is also notable and potentially vital for the more-rapid development of materials science.

    Self-driving labs are basically lab spaces optimized for robotics that allow non-human, robot arms and other hardware, to perform the requisite, and often slogging, ponderous, tedious work of basic materials science experimentation, safely and continuously, around the clock.

    So just as you might automate a fast-food restaurant by telling some software what ingredients to combine and how to process them, in order to make a burger or some fries, keeping tabs on the temperature of everything and what's been mixed with what along the way, using specialized, automated equipment, you can also tell some software which materials to combine, and how, and have it keep track of everything's properties throughout the process using an array of sensors, and then some robot arms perhaps, or maybe just a big box with pipes and the ability to move stuff from here to there when prudent, will combine a slew of varied substances from a catalog of options, and then keep tabs on the resulting materials, tucking away examples for further, human exploration and confirmation if they're auto-tagged as being interesting for the sorts of properties we want to see, but otherwise maybe just categorizing them according to their properties, adding to the body of knowledge we already have for such things, and giving us a sort of materials reference library that we can tap into when we need a specific material with specific attributes, in the future.

    What this potentially does, then, is robotically automate the checking of the AI-generated catalog of potentially useful materials.

    The degree to which this could change the field cannot be overstated, as while that earlier, 1960s-era formalization of the field, combining earlier realms of inquiry was a big deal, changing everything, this next step could do the same, replacing humans—who are in many cases doing systematic, tedious work—with sleepless, emotionless, unkillable robots working from software-generated possibilities in order to provide us with a new menu of materials we might use, moving forward.

    This sort of development is especially important, arguably, because of all these new possibilities we now have available to try out: the number of possible combinations grows incredibly rapidly as the number of new materials and possible materials increases, and because there are only so many humans with the necessary skills and knowledge to do this kind of work, those human researchers have become kind of a bottleneck: good at what they do, but mostly tasked with responsibilities that can be automated, at least to some degree, their hands and eyes replaced with robot versions of the same, nothing lost in the transition and possibly a lot to be gained by swapping them out, including the optimization of those boring, predictable processes, and the ability to work more AI into the loop, those AI empowered to make more predictions and assumptions as new data from these experiments roll in, further speeding up the process of development and further optimizing the economics of such research, alongside the tangible fruits of that research.

    All of this, of course, is still bleeding-edge new, and there's a nonzero chance that some component of it ends up being not as useful or accurate as predicted or claimed, or that there will be some other glaring flaw that makes it not as desirable as it currently seems to be.

    And that might mean we have some wonderful new predictions to work from, but are stuck with the same plodding pace of working through them—or in contrast, maybe those predictions turn out to be not as great as advertised, and instead we have super-fast experimental robots in our arsenal, but a much smaller menu of potential materials to work through, limiting what we can do with those self-driving laboratories—at least in this field, at this moment.

    This is a maybe quite exciting moment for a field that touches essentially every other field, though, and if even a single-digit percentage of the purported possibilities of these new developments turn out to be accurate and manifestable, a lot of things could change very quickly, across many aspects of many industries, similar to the development of steel or plastics, but possibly even more rapidly deployed, and at a scale that the folks innovating those earlier wonder materials couldn't have dreamed of.

    Show Notes

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06734-w

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06735-9

    https://www.mtu.edu/materials/what/

    https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/google-deepmind-invents-400000-materials

    https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.218401

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold

    https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz8867

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-022-00231-0

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_science

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_materials_science



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  • This week we talk about renewables, open-pit mines, and the Bronze Age.

    We also discuss the Cobre mine, First Quantum, and environmentalism.

    Recommended Book: The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green

    Transcript

    Depending on whose numbers you use, and where you choose to place your chronological brackets, the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, began around 5,000 BCE, around 7,000 years ago, with the smelting of copper at high temperatures.

    The oldest confirmed and dated site relevant to the beginning of this age is in Serbia, though this capability seems to have been developed, independently, at various places around the world within a few thousand years of each other, including China, North America, in the Great Lakes region, and in what is today Pakistan, as well, among other locations.

    The process of smelting copper that was practiced in Eurasia, in what we might today call Central or Eastern Europe and Western Asia, slowly moved the continent out of the Neolithic period, which was largely defined by humanity's construction of organized settlements, widespread adoption of agriculture and animal domestication, and large-scale pivot away from nomadic, hunter-gatherer-style ways of living.

    Folks at that time were also getting a lot of mileage out of early ceramics and stone tools, alongside all sorts of ornaments and artworks made of these and other materials that required skill and some level of technology to use, but which didn't require metallurgy.

    Humans were still using a lot of stone tools during this period, then, but started to include heat-worked copper elements into their tools, as well.

    So the Copper Age saw the development of very basic metallurgy by many interconnected groups throughout this part of the world, and though some early writers on the subject grouped the use of copper and bronze together, defining a much larger period as the Bronze Age in an undifferentiated way, modern scholarship on the matter, beginning in the late 19th-century, breaks them apart into the earlier Copper and subsequent Bronze Ages because the manipulation and use, and often then the heavy reliance on copper tended to segue a society, eventually, toward bronze, the latter being more difficult to wield, and the former generally serving as a transitional sort of technology.

    And that's because copper is one of the rare metals that naturally occurs in a usable form in the Earth: so folks were using copper for a variety of purposes as far back as 8,000 BCE-ish, but we tend to use the smelting of copper as a delineation for the eponymous age, because that's when humans started to really work it, having become capable of building the technologies required to reach the requisite heat levels, and to control the metal and shape it, rather than simply finding it in its raw form and using chunks or slivers of it for decoration or weaponry-related purposes.

    Bronze is an alloy consisting of copper and tin, and the proper melding of these two metals makes the resulting substance, bronze, a lot more durable, resistant to environmental wear, and more capable of holding its shape: that also means it's a lot more difficult to work, if you want to make things out of it, but it also made things like armor and sword edges dramatically more effective, which is why when civilizations learned how to work it and built the infrastructure necessary to do so on scale, they tended to do pretty well, in terms of military victories and economic competition, compared to their bronze-less neighbors.

    Copper, though in some ways replaced by its alloys, like bronze, for many use-cases throughout history, has continued to be incredibly useful for a broad range of purposes, and what I'd like to talk about today is the closure of a copper mine in Panama, and the predicted global copper shortage we may soon face.

    —

    In the latter-half of 2022, the International Copper Study Group, or ICSG, reported that they expected a copper surplus of around 155,000 tonnes on the global market in 2023.

    That would represent a small surplus, as about 26 million tonnes of copper land on the international market each year, but a surplus of any kind would have been notable, following a long period of deficits, largely due to a huge amount of growth and construction throughout China, and a failure of international copper mines to produce as much marketable metal as they're theoretically capable of producing.

    The ICSG updated their expectation in early 2023, changing their official expected figure from a surplus of 155,000 to a deficit of 114,000 tonnes, and that's following a deficit of 431,000 tonnes in 2022.

    The upside of which is that the world has been demanding more copper than has been produced for a while now, and while current deficits are low compared to the record-high deficit of about 1 million tonnes in 2014, some prognosticators are saying we could see a deficit of somewhere between 1.5 million to 9.9 million tonnes by 2035, depending on how a collection of variables play out in the coming years.

    One major variable is how expansively and aggressively the world's governments and companies decide to invest in and deploy new, renewable energy-centric technologies and accompanying infrastructure.

    Copper is fundamental to the production of solar panels, electric vehicles, battery storage technologies, and even the cables that, when strung together, form our electric grids.

    Because of that funamentalness, copper is generally seen as being an easy bet, in terms of production investment, because it's so necessary for development and growth and building things, that—using existing technologies and systems and methods, at least—we'll always need more of it.

    And there is investment in copper projects around the world, including a slew of recent takeovers, like the April 2023 approval for BHP Group to buy OZ Minerals for nearly $6.4 billion, and the attempt by Swiss multinational Glencore to buy-out Canadian-owned Teck Resources for around $23 billion, which failed, but that eventually led to a separate deal for Glencore to buy Teck's steelmaking-grade coal business for around $9 billion; so Teck held on to their copper business in that deal, but that more than $20 billion price tag gives you a sense of how big this market is, and how competitive it's getting.

    The issue, though, is that while there's interest in this industry, and a lot of growth potential more or less baked into the way the world is going, with so many new renewables being deployed and grid systems needing to be upgraded essentially everywhere to account for more transmission of larger volumes of electricity to more locations, there's still a lack of sufficient mined copper—growth in mining volume has sputtered, and some analysts have suggested that with copper as cheap as it is, there's less appetite to invest in that side of the industry; as of September 2023, the average price of a key grade of copper was just over $8,500 per tonne, and some analysts have said the price needs to be something like $15,000 per tonne, nearly double that, in order to justify the necessary investment in mining volume capacity.

    Thus, we're at a moment in which we're already short of copper, we're expected to, globally, need a lot more of it very soon, but the price isn't high enough to justify expanding output, and that means we could run up against a shortage before the price reaches the point it needs to be at, which may then compound the issue for several years, until that new capacity can be built-out and come online, at which point we may be way behind on this transition, but also possibly hurting across other endeavors, as well, like making repairs to infrastructure, building new buildings, and even expanding access to fundamental services like telecommunications, because all of these things require a substantial amount of copper, which could become quite expensive for a while, if a balance isn't established, soon.

    That potential for a global shortage and concomitant price increase spiral is part of why news out of Panama, regarding a copper mine called the Cobre mine, is so unwelcome to many market watchers.

    The Cobre mine, located about 75 miles or 120 km west of Panama City and just shy of the Caribbean coast, is a huge open-pit copper mine that spans about 53 square miles or around 138 square km, and, according to many environmentalists, is severely damaging to local ecosystems, including the jungle area where it's located, and it substantially depletes local water supplies.

    The mine also accounts for about 1% of global copper output, somewhere between 3.5-5% of Panama's total GDP, and employs something like 8,000 people directly, and tens of thousands more, indirectly.

    A Canadian company called First Quantum bought the land in 2013 and started building it in 2014, and it then began operation in 2019.

    A concession for the land had been granted to another company by the government, and that concession was confirmed with the passing of a law in 1997.

    A lawsuit was brought to the country's Supreme Court in 2009, the idea being that the concession was illegal because there hadn't been a public tender on the matter—no bidding process, basically—so the concession should be deemed illegal as the process of granting it was maybe corrupt.

    In 2017, the Supreme Court agreed with that claim, but in 2019 when the government attempted, unsuccessfully, to basically just give a new concession similar to the old one, to make the mine and the company operating it legitimate in the eyes of the law, First Quantum was just beginning to make its first shipments of copper from the mine, and in 2021, when negotiations had finally started up for a new contract, since that 2019 attempt didn't work, the mine was already nearly at full production strength—so the realities on the ground behind all of this legal maneuvering became trickier and tricker, because not only was this company nearing full operational capacity, it was bringing in money for the government, it was employing gobs of people, and it had pretty firmly rooted itself in the region—to the chagrin of many, but also to the benefit of many, because of all that money and employment.

    The mine ended up closing for two weeks in late 2022, leading up to a decision by the Panamanian congress, which, in October of 2023, approved a new bill that, like the old bill that was declared unconstitutional, would allow First Quantum to keep mining copper in the area, despite the environmental issues inherent in the work they have been doing there, and the alleged corruption and non-constitutionality of the process granting them mining rights.

    A wave of protestors surged into the streets across the country, blocking roads and shipments and the conduct of normal business, and while there were a few skirmishes where police hit protestors with tear gas, these protests remained mostly peaceful.

    Protestors said they didn't think it was constitutional to approve the mine the way the government did, and that it seemed as if the president was secretively pushing something he wanted to get done, despite the contract—like its predecessor—not being valid.

    Then, in late November 2023, the Panamanian government ordered the mine closed, following the Supreme Court's ruling that, yes, this new bill granting the mining company concessions wasn't legal, either.

    We're now entering a period of uncertainty in regards to the mine's future, as there's a chance international arbiters will decide that First Quantum should receive a huge payout for their troubles and investments, or, if things were to go a different direction and they were to negotiate a new, constitutionally allowable contract, allowing the mine to start back up in some capacity, things could still be tricky, as the mine has lost around half its global market share since those huge protests began back in October.

    There's also a chance the Panamanian government could nationalize the mine, or that the mine will simply close forever, though that still leaves questions about what will happen to the surrounding area, much of which has been deforested or otherwise harmed by the size and open pit nature of the mine.

    This issue has become a big deal in Panama, as it touches on some touchy subjects, like alleged corruption by politicians—it was assumed by many that the president and his government were behaving corruptly in this matter, because the payout the government would receive from the Canadian mining company was considered to be quite small, compared to what the company would take—but also environmentalist issues, which have become increasingly vital at a moment in which much of the wealthy world is attempting to shift their raw material needs, especially those that come with environmental damage, overseas.

    And some poorer nations are attempting to fight that shift, but with mixed results, as in some cases those raw materials provide them with much of their export-related wealth, as is the case in Panama, where something like 80% of its exports reportedly came from this mine.

    There are also issues of international concern here, though, because of those aforementioned global copper needs and how the surge of investment in renewables and accompanying infrastructure and technologies require a lot of raw materials like copper, but also lithium, cobalt, and other such metals and elements.

    The conflict, then, is that there's still an imbalance here, as although some nations might be able to flip the switch on mining some of these newly desirable materials and selling them to wealthier nations, become something like the next-stage of a petro-state, there are also valid concerns related to the killing-off of local ecosystems and flora and fauna, in pursuit of what amounts, through the eyes of some, to a quick buck.

    Is it worth attaining some amount of money if you have to trade the environmental well-being of your country to do so?

    That's the question Panama has asked itself, and it has apparently decided in favor of its environment, though this is a question many other people in many other places are asking themselves right now, too, and their answers will further inform how this global transition plays out, and what sorts of trade-offs will or will not be made in the process.

    Show Notes

    https://apnews.com/article/panama-mining-canada-first-quantum-mineral-arbitration-6530dceccfb60fb9a06bc3136c04d2cc

    https://apnews.com/article/panama-mine-copper-protest-environment-economy-6e893c48311540eeb81ce35173b9f558

    https://apnews.com/article/panama-copper-mine-supreme-court-canadian-629d8a7838f23cc4ed845a1b3c7a2941

    https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/panamas-supreme-court-rules-against-first-quantum-mine-bab0cfa2

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67565315

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobre_mine,_Panama

    https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/11/30/panama-celebrates-court-order-to-cancel-mine-even-as-business-is-hit

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadian-owned-mine-will-begin-closure-in-panama-after-contract-deemed-unconstitutional-1.6668760

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/top-panama-court-rules-first-quantum-mining-contract-unconstitutional-2023-11-28/

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/copper-shortage-threatens-green-transition-620df1e5

    https://www.eetimes.com/copper-may-be-the-next-real-shortage/

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/coppers-anticipated-supply-surplus-is-proving-elusive-2023-05-10/

    https://about.bnef.com/blog/copper-prices-may-jump-20-by-2027-as-supply-deficit-rises/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcolithic



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  • This week we talk about weeds, lawn mowers, and California’s Air Resources Board.

    We also discuss ornamental lawns, leaf blowers, and two-stroke engines.

    Recommended Book: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

    Transcript

    The concept of the modern lawn—a term that originally referred to a somewhat ecologically varied, short-cropped green space that was used for livestock, in contrast to fields that were used for growing agricultural plants—is derived from a variation of the lawns built and maintained by European aristocracy, especially British aristocracy, in the mid- to late-teens centuries, BC.

    The concept evolved from a sort of posturing that only wealthy people could manage, back then, before the advent of grass-trimming machinery.

    And the flex here was two-fold:

    First, here is an expanse of land, which typically would have been put to use, in this case for livestock, but which I, because I'm wealthy, can leave unproductive, untarnished by beasts, and thus for purely beautification and recreational purposes; I can impress people with my sweeping plots of greenery, I can make it uniform and, thus, interesting, in an age in which nature is still being wrestled with and perfection by any standard is rare, and I have enough people working for me that all this maintenance, despite its incredible weight, all that grass in some cases being hand-scythed and sheered by human beings toiling all day long—I can afford to do that. So, look upon my fields, my vast tracts of ornamental land, and be amazed.

    So simply setting aside land for this aesthetic-focused purpose was big, but so was maintaining such a thing in a period in which that maintenance was the consequence of long, hard, expensive human labor.

    That ornamentality became more accessible to more people with the advent of early mowing machines, the first of which was unpowered, made from wrought-iron, and used a cylinder of blades that would spin when you pushed it.

    That was invented in 1830 in England, and from there these Budding Machines, named after the inventor, Edward Budding, were sold to entities with large expanses of land, like the Oxford colleges and Regents Park Zoological Gardens, which in turn helped Budding, mostly financially, evolve his machine, which was then manufactured at a larger scale and licensed to other companies that wanted to make their own version of the same.

    Within a decade, these mowing devices had been augmented so they could be pulled by horses, donkeys, and other beasts of burden.

    Just over sixty years after that first model was built by Budding, the first steam-powered mower, still pulled by animals, usually, but much more powerful, was patented, and then eventually built and sold, and by 1900 a popular model of steam-powered mower, the Ransomes' Automaton, which is just a wonderful and steampunk name for anything, was dominant in the English market, and the first riding lawn mowers arose around the same time, as seats for operators were added on to the increasingly complex machines.

    Mower designs started to show up in patent offices elsewhere around the world around this same time, as the concept of lawns had already spread globally, due to the British Empire's presence and influence, and in the US, the concept of the ornamental lawn was especially appealing: landowners who were gobbling up vast expanses of the—by their standards, basically uninhabited North American continent—were adding these sorts of areas to their growing estates, and the US Civil War meant that some of these landowners were finding themselves with a lot less abundant human labor—of the inexpensive and slave variety, at least—than before, thus the market for mowers, to maintain these brag-worthy lawns, grew quickly from the mid-1860s, onward.

    The first gas-powered lawn mowers were produced in Lansing, Michigan back in 1914 by a company called Ideal Power Mower Company, and that same company went on to develop the first-ever self-propelled riding lawn mower, of the sort that would be recognizable today, as it didn't need a horse or other animal to pull it, and this collection of mowing-related innovations, combined with the rapid expansion of suburbs around the United States following World War II—which was partially the consequence of trying to keep war-era manufacturing operating at scale, post-conflict, but also the flood of money that entered the economy as veterans were all but given access to higher-education and cheap loans for houses in rapidly developing city outskirts—that ended up being exactly the right combination of elements to help the lawn spread still further, into a country that was looking to flaunt its wealth a bit, and in which a large number of people were suddenly becoming homeowners, with little patches of lawn all to themselves, adopting the standards of landowners that came before them, including using these patches of non-house land more or less exclusively as decoration.

    What I'd like to talk about today is an impending, near-future disruption the lawn care industry faces as a consequence of the global shift toward renewable energy.

    —

    It's estimated that about 2% of the total continental US landmass is lawns.

    The data on this vary, as this is mostly based on estimates from state-level agencies, which are imperfect, and from entities like NASA which have provided satellite imagery that helps us clarify, with decent resolution, which patches of land are covered by what sorts of materials; but it can only ever really be estimates, because of the nature of what's being measured.

    But whatever the specific figure, lawns of the ornamental, just kind of sitting there and not doing anything variety, are immensely popular in the United States, and that's made them popular in many other countries, as well, as just like the British Empire was able to spread their norms globally by throwing around money and military units, US norms and priorities tend to spread through the country's vast and powerful media apparatus—so just like American-style malls and toilets and dating and hamburgers, American-style lawns have popped up all over the place, for better and for worse, though by most metrics, mostly for worse.

    And that's because lawns are almost uniquely net-negatives for the environments they occupy and bump up against.

    Lawns are typically monocultures, meaning plant-life that doesn't adhere to the visual norms of the prioritized green, green grass of a certain length and shape, is killed, sometimes only at great expense and with much effort, and often at the expense of local species, including pollinators and other food-web staples.

    Lawns require substantially more watering than a varied collection of local plant-life.

    They also generally necessitate the application of chemicals to prevent or kill-off weeds and other undesirable elements—weeds, of course, being any plant that isn't uniform grass of the kind we want to see.

    Turf of the kind typically prioritized for these sorts of lawns also has incredibly shallow roots of less than half an inch, which is part of why they require so much watering—they can't get what they need from the soil, themselves—but this also leads to compacted soils over time, which keeps it from absorbing as much water as it might, otherwise, which leads to more flooding and runoff issues, the soil basically eroding into storm sewer systems, which can clog and block them, compounding flooding issues, rather than helping with them.

    Another fairly significant issue inherent in ornamental lawns is the volume of greenhouse gas emissions—alongside pollutants—that are churned into the air by all the equipment people use to maintain them.

    According to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency, using a modern gasoline-powered lawnmower for one hour emits about the same volume of nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds—like benzene, formaldehyde, and tetrachloroethylene, all stuff you don't want in the air or environment—as driving a modern car 45 miles.

    These lawn care tools are responsible for about 5% of the US's total air pollution, and oil spills associated with filling up lawnmowers and other such equipment tally an estimated 17 million gallons across the US each year, that spilled gas then finding its way into the local ecosystem, impacting plant and animal life, but also the drinking water humans ultimately use and consume.

    Now, gasoline does actually make it into these devices, unspilled, and around 800 million gallons of gasoline is consumed through their use, each year, and because many pieces of lawn care equipment are powered by two-stroke rather than four-stroke engines, the fuel blends with the oil used for lubrication, and consequently around a third of it doesn't fully combust—and as a result emissions from tools and vehicles using two-stroke engines are around 124-times higher than from engines without that blending issue.

    Four-stroke engines are a bit better than two-stroke, but still not great: a four-stroke engine-powered land mower used for an hour generates emissions equivalent to driving a passenger vehicles about 300 miles.

    Leaf-blowers are also pretty brutal machines, in terms of emissions and pollution.

    A typical, off-the-shelf leaf-blower releases more hydrocarbons into the environment than a pickup truck, and research from 2017 suggested that gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and other such lawn equipment can produce more ozone-depleting pollution in the state of California than all of the passenger vehicles in the state, combined, leading to an announcement and warning on the issue by the California Air Resources board, that year.

    That and similar concerns were the primary motivations behind a recent decision to ban the sale of new gas-powered lawn tools in the state beginning in 2024.

    The argument is this:

    These types of engines, those that power lawn-care tools, create just a boggling amount of pollution and other emissions, and that's an especially pressing issue in California, which is highly populated, filled with cars, and which has areas that are deserts—like Los Angeles and its metro area—where folks spend gobs of time, energy, and resources, including very finite resources like water, trying to maintain lawns that struggle to survive in the, again, desert where they've been installed.

    So all that being true, it makes sense to try to temper at least some of this issue by making it more difficult to acquire and use these highly polluting tools, forcing people to either spend less time, energy, and resources on these unproductive, decorative spaces, or to just buy electric versions of the same, which are, today, widely available, and which can be powered by electricity that is generated cleanly, by solar, wind, etc.

    This ban is not without controversy: folks who have these sorts of devices already will be able to keep using them, and it's not a big issue to acquire a new gas-powered whatever if you really want to do so, but it will likely have some effect in that it makes it more difficult to casually acquire one, and in that it makes alternatives like electric versions of the same, and bigger changes like xeriscaping one's yard—using local plants and rocks and things like that, instead of generic green grass, in areas that are short on water—more thinkable for more people.

    What it does, in other words, is marks a moment at which a transition in this norm might be kicking off, and that's alarming for business entities that make these sorts of tools and which haven't transitioned their catalog over to electric versions, yet, but also for folks for whom the electrification of things has become a culture-war issue, and for whom—for instance—the idea of not being able to install new gas stoves or buy new gas-guzzling cars feels like an overstep, like oppression, on the part of regulators and other government ne'er-do-wells.

    There's also the noise element to this discussion: lawn-care equipment with gas-powered motors are incredibly loud, and there's an ever-growing body of evidence that this kind of noise is bad for animals, bad for human stress-levels, and can itself be partially ameliorated by the far, far quieter electric versions of the same, which tend to be something like 15-20 decibels quieter—and with every 6 decibels sound difference, the volume of noise doubles, so that's a pretty substantial change, even if big electric lawn mowers are far from silent.

    All that said, gas mowers are the more developed and iterated technology, and they'll tend to be cheaper up front, and at times more powerful and convenient in some ways; and the same is broadly true across the arsenal of available lawn tools on the market, today.

    So even though electric versions tend to be massively better in terms of environmental and public and personal health, and far superior in terms of the noise they generate, the amount and cost of maintenance, and the ease of handling, gas versions are still cheaper and sometimes more powerful, and likely will remain so for some time—though bans like this impending one in California make it more likely that costs on the e-versions will come down quickly, as the market expands, competition picks up, and norms shift, leading to more iteration, more cost-savings, and more overall power for these tools, as well.

    California is just one state, of course, but their regulations tend to spill-over into other states, as they often opt for stricter regulations on things like passenger vehicle fuel efficiency and the use of potentially cancer-causing chemicals in products, and because their market is huge and on average quite wealthy, which means companies don't want to be left out of the California market, but it also seldom makes sense to produce two versions of every product, one for California and one for the rest of the US, so those tighter restrictions often inform the shape their products take, elsewhere, as well.

    And though these sorts of tools exist everywhere around the world, these days, North America makes up about 58% of the $25 billion global power lawn- and garden-equipment market, so if this ban is implemented successfully, and then informs the state of things across the US, there's a good chance this industry could shift relatively quickly, in its entirety, leading to a far more rapid than would be the case, otherwise, transition away from inefficient and loud motors, to a cleaner version of the same, and at a more basic level, maybe more consideration for decorative lawn alternatives in relevant regions, as well.

    Show Notes

    https://www.des.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt341/files/documents/2020-01/ard-22.pdf

    https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/5/11/law-maintenance-and-climate-change

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/james-fallows-leaf-blower-ban/583210/

    https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/zero-emission-landscaping-equipment

    https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/carb-approves-updated-regulations-requiring-most-new-small-road-engines-be-zero-emission-2024

    https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/lawn-mowers/gas-vs-electric-lawn-mower-which-is-better-a1057954260/

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/gas-lawn-care-ban-in-california-tests-electric-leaf-blower-appeal

    https://archive.ph/XCJNI

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-bad-for-the-environment-are-gas-powered-leaf-blowers/2013/09/16/8eed7b9a-18bb-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-american-obsession-with-lawns/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_mower

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War



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  • This week we talk about methane, the UAE, and organizational capture.

    We also discuss climate change, broken governmental promises, and Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.

    Recommended Book: Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus

    Transcript

    The United Nations Climate Change Conferences, often referred to as COP meetings, short for "Conference of the Parties," are formal, annual meetings where issues related to climate change are discussed by attendees.

    These meetings have been occurring at their yearly cadence since 1995—though the November 2020 meeting was put off till November 2021, because of the COVID pandemic that almost entirely dominated international attention and governmental efforts, that year.

    COP meetings are held in different locations around the world, with host countries chosen from among those that offer to provide the requisite facilities and services for all attendees, which can represent a who's who of governments and businesses; so this isn't quite an Olympics level of commitment and expense, but it is quite an undertaking, as those host countries need to provide security for all those leaders, translation services for six different working languages, and they also need to help engage stakeholders, ranging from diplomats to the CEOs of the world's biggest companies, flogging support for the meetings themselves, but also the core themes of each meeting, which vary from year to year.

    These themes are important, as they've historically led to some of the most vital agreements we've seen between nations and other stakeholders, including the Kyoto Protocol, which was an early, 1990s-era emissions-reduction agreement between wealthy nations, and the Paris Agreement, which expounded upon that same general concept, though with much more aggressive targets and a wider scope of things the signatories had to take into consideration.

    On November 30 through December 12 of 2023, signatory nations and other entities will meet for the COP28 meeting, this time hosted in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

    This is interesting for several reasons, but the most prominent—and the reason this choice was controversial—is that the UAE, like many other nations in the region, is a huge fossil fuel producer, about 30% of its total economy reliant on oil and gas exports.

    What's more, the President-Designate for COP28—the person who was put in charge of running things, but also getting those aforementioned stakeholders in line, making commitments, showing support, doing all the things they need to do to make this a successful COP meeting with something to show for their efforts—is Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber: the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology for the UAE, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, also called Masdar, and the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—the first CEO to serve as a COP President, and, well, definitely the first oil company CEO to head up a meeting meant to help the world deal with climate change that's being amplified by the products his company is producing and selling.

    What I'd like to talk about today is COP28 and what we might expect to emerge from this very unusual, but also quite significant, get together.

    —

    Al Jaber's appointment as the COP president for this year's meeting was a controversial choice, to say the least.

    Dubai being selected as the host-city was one thing, but an oil executive running the show? This reeked, to some commentators and analysts, at least, as a sort of organizational capture: the United Nations either overrun by financial interests to the point that those interests were able to insert themselves even into this increasingly vital annual summit, or—maybe—the organization overcome by a naive sort of optimistic earnestness, wanting to get everyone involved, including those in some ways most responsible for the climate-related issues we face, to the point that the reins were ultimately handed over to one of those people, to do with as he and his ilk please.

    It's unclear which of these, or other possibilities explain this, again quite controversial choice of host city and president, but there has already been some more obvious, scandalous behavior arising from this meeting, beyond the jarring dissonance of having oil people run a climate change-focused meeting.

    Back in June of 2023, it was reported that the UAE's state oil company, Adnoc, was able to read emails to and from the official COP28 summit office, despite claims that the latter's email system was kept separate from the former's.

    The concern was that this state oil company, which would seem to have immense financial interest in slowing or stopping the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, as the longer they can keep legally and profitably pumping and selling, the more profit they can wring from their existing assets, they could see what was being said by and to the folks behind this climate summit, which is ostensibly at least meant to help speed up that transition away from fossil fuels.

    Those concerns were confirmed by The Guardian, and though the COP28 office altered their digital setup after the reporting was done, this added fuel to the concern-fire that was already burning because the UAE and Al Jaber were in charge of things; it seemed like they would have every reason in the world to put their thumbs on the scale and nudge the meeting in favor of the fossil fuel industry, given the chance, and this email issue seemed to confirm that notion.

    There have also been concerns that the UAE authorities will weaponize their already widespread digital surveillance apparatus—which is generally used to stifle religious and political freedoms in-country—to target COP meeting attendees with the same, tracking their actions and communications with spyware, among other violations.

    A letter was written to the UN by a bunch of politicians from the EU and US, asking the body behind the COP meetings to remove Al Jaber, and a slew of organizations and activists have separately done the same.

    The counterpoint presented by the UAE and Al Jaber himself, though, alongside supporters of how this meeting is coming together, including, at times at least, the US climate envoy John Kerry and EU climate chief Frans Timmermans, is that alongside his role running a state-owned fossil fuel company, Al Jaber also founded and runs Masdar, which invests heavily in renewable energy, and which is meant to serve as a foot in the door for the UAE as they attempt to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels; Masdar has invested in renewable projects in 40 countries, so far, and have targeted builting 100GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.

    Under Al Jaber, Abu Dhabi's National Oil Company has invested in carbon capture and green hydrogen projects, and has been investing in nuclear and solar power, as well.

    None of these efforts compare to the investments that have been made, under his leadership, in fossil fuel capacity; it's night a day.

    But the argument in his favor is that he's a skilled energy world executive, and one that is actually making practical moves to transition to renewables: he's not doing it overnight, but he's actually doing something, and that makes him a credible source for usable ideas as to how other companies can do the same, while also putting someone at the reins who knows how to talk to and deal with energy executives—many of whom couldn't care less about investing in renewables—and that means it's possible he might be able to get them to make these sorts of iterative changes, as well.

    He's a choice that doesn't preach to the choir, basically; he's meant to preach to those who aren't yet convinced.

    And this will be a COP meeting with a LOT of oil industry higher-ups in attendance; which theoretically at least supports the assertion made by critics that the meeting has been captured, serving as a safe space for fossil fuel industry representatives who want to paint themselves as eco-friendly and thus, empowered to play a role in determining how quickly, or slowly, the transition to renewables occurs.

    But the counterpoint to this regulatory capture theory is that having true-believers at the helm—folks who see the oil industry as villains, in many cases—having them running things, hasn't historically served to get these oil companies to do anything except deny deny deny and do what they can to further entrench themselves in their existing energy source and business models; so maybe this, putting one of their own at the front of the room, and one of them who seems to be comfortable keeping a foot in both worlds, maybe that will help shift their collective stance a bit.

    Beyond the hubbub over who's hosting the show, there are also a few other interesting things to watch as this year's COP meeting unfolds.

    The first is that the US and China recently came to a new agreement to dramatically increase the production of renewable energy, tripling global capacity by 2030 in order to reduce their emissions and displace fossil fuels.

    The US and China's emissions, combined, account for something like 38% of the world's total, so anything these countries do in this space is already a big deal.

    But the last time the US and China landed on this sort of agreement, back in 2015, the language they used ended up informing the Paris Agreement that was made real at that year's COP meeting—an agreement meant to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius; so it could be that this new agreement also feeds into a larger, more international and inclusive agreement, once again.

    That said, there's a lot of arguably justified concern that this year's COP, like many previous COPs, will be a lot of talk without much or any action.

    It's easy to make commitments in a context in which one's words will net one's country a lot of goodwill in the press, but a lot more difficult to actually live up to those commitments—as governments around the world have discovered time and time again with climate-related issues.

    Our newest climate data indicate we'll likely fly right by the 1.5 degrees C average warming milestone this decade: much earlier than was previously estimated, and early enough that many experts are saying that goal, keeping temperature increases below that level, which has become a bit of a rallying cry for environmentalists and entities shifting to renewable energy, in recent years, they say it's probably out of reach.

    It's still important that we reduce emissions and halt heating as soon as possible, in other words, but the number we've held up as being an aggressive, optimistic goal that is nonetheless achievable might not be realistic, anymore.

    That new report is far from the last word on this, but a seeming inability to live up to climate commitments, combined with ever-bettering data-collection and computational resources has left us with a much higher-resolution understanding of how bad the situation is, and a much steeper mountain to climb if we want to accomplish even the relatively less-impressive goals that are still within reach; which makes the whole concept a tougher sell, especially when it seems easier to just throw up one's hands in frustration or disbelief, rather than making the sacrifices that might be necessary to get where we ostensibly need to be.

    And that's the second main, interesting thing to be watching here: the impact that better tools and data from those tools, and research done with that better data, will have on these discussions and the overall timber and tone of what people are saying.

    These new talks are arriving in the wake of some significant new developments in methane-tracking capabilities: satellites that allow researchers to pinpoint methane emissions hotspots, which in turn tells them which governments are failing to cap emitting wells, or which businesses are, as was the case in Kazakhstan recently, a local mining company allowing methane to flow freely from their infrastructure, causing untold damage that can be relatively inexpensively remedied once the emitting entities know what's happening and if the right kind of pressure is applied, to force their hand—two variables that are increasingly likely to align, appropriately, because of these new tools and techniques.

    Satellites capable of providing other sorts of high-resolution data, like where CO2 emissions are the worst, for instance, down to the level of an individual power plant, can also help us figure out where our problems are centralized, but they also allow us to name-and-shame, with receipts, if necessary, to force entities that would otherwise try to deny and sweep this kind of thing under the rug to acknowledge their failure in this regard, making issues that they currently might record as externalities, internal, in turn making it more likely something will be done, rather than these issues being ignored and compounding over time.

    And third, one of the many commitments countries—especially wealthy countries—have made over the course of previous COP meetings, is to provide a bunch of money to less-wealthy countries meant to help pay climate-related reparations, and for a transition to renewables, helping them bypass the emissions-related excesses today's wealthy countries have indulged in.

    Those already wealthy countries are the source of the vast, vast majority of today's emissions, and the idea is to help not-yet-wealthy countries scale-up and become richer without also creating more emissions as a consequence: a reasonable-sounding ambition, but that kind of pivot is not cheap or easy.

    The aid many countries have been told they would get as part of this effort hasn't yet materialized, though—$100 billion was promised by wealthy countries for poorer countries by 2020, to kick things off, to help them move toward renewables, and for losses and damages caused by existing climate change impacts.

    And that was meant to be just the initial round of funding that would eventually lead to trillions a year.

    Even that initial $100 billion didn't arrive, though, and while you could argue that some other, fairly immediate concerns reared their heads in 2020 that necessitated the rerouting of those funds toward other, pandemic-related issues, this is often touted of an example of just how untrustworthy these wealthier countries and their promises are; even the initial promise was a lie, so why shouldn't these countries that were lied to pursue whichever path is best for them and their immediate fortunes, whatever the consequences, like those wealthier countries were able to do in previous decades and centuries?

    Those are big questions, but probably the biggest one is whether those attending COP28 will be able to get an actual commitment to phase-out fossil fuels on the table, and then adopted by those participating.

    Many nations, including the most powerful and emitting in the world, have been unwilling to do this, consisting adopting weaker language, making smaller, pseudo-promises, not quite stepping up to the plate on a firm commitment to that kind of transition, instead opting for language that allows wiggle-room and doesn't upset any of the existing fossil fuel-related global systems, including existing energy businesses, but also countries—like the UAE and the US—that are major fossil fuel exporters.

    Most analysts don't expect that language to arrive at this meeting, either, and the general consensus is that we'll probably see another relatively, iterative step in the right direction across many metrics at COP28; maybe something based on all that new data with a little more enforcement-related teeth, but likely not a big enough step to close the gap between where we thought we were, and where we now realize, because of the most up-to-date climate findings, we actually are.

    Show Notes

    https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/environment-co2-pollution-satellite

    https://archive.ph/ODvEK

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/uae-oil-firm-cop28-climate-summit-emails-sultan-al-jaber-adnoc

    https://archive.ph/Ta5hk

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/uae-concerns-around-authorities-use-of-digital-surveillance-during-cop28/

    https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/380412/masdar-renewable-energy-hydrogen/

    https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-warming-will-reach-15c-threshold-this-decade-report-2023-11-02/

    https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/18/us-china-agreement-sets-the-tone-for-cop28/

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/17/cop28-host-uae-breaking-its-own-ban-on-routine-gas-flaring-data-shows

    https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17112023/harder-to-kick-climate-can-from-cop28/

    https://grist.org/international/international-climate-finance-adaptation/

    https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-the-eu-and-us-want-to-get-done-at-cop28/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/climate/us-china-climate-agreement.html

    https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/10/cop28-host-uae-pushes-oil-producers-for-climate-pledges-00126619

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/15/un-climate-cop26-pledges/?stream=top

    https://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/worlds-first-commercial-co2-sensor-in-orbit/

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-15/exxon-ceo-says-making-big-oil-villains-harms-net-zero-drive?stream=top#xj4y7vzkg

    https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-promises-substantial-climate-damage-funding-pledge/

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67143989

    https://archive.ph/KHWOL

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-13/gulf-nations-must-overhaul-everything-to-meet-climate-goals?cmpid=BBD111523_GREENDAILY

    https://www.semafor.com/article/11/10/2023/the-battle-lines-to-watch-at-cop28

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-04/the-bankers-are-back-finance-industry-plans-for-cop28?cmpid=BBD111523_GREENDAILY#xj4y7vzkg

    https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cma2023_12.pdf

    https://www.wri.org/research/state-climate-action-2023

    https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/un-climate-change-emissions-gap?stream=top

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Climate_Change_conference

    https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/conferences/the-big-picture/what-are-united-nations-climate-change-conferences/how-cops-are-organized-questions-and-answers

    https://www.uae-embassy.org/discover-uae/climate-and-energy/uae-energy-diversification



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  • This week we talk about Rubinomics, government spending, and US federal debt.

    We also discuss the Government-Household analogy, the House of Representatives, and the looming government shutdown.

    Recommended Book: Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku

    Transcript

    Early in November 2023, the credit firm Moody's lowered its outlook on the US government's credit rating from "stable" to "negative," pointing at a huge decline in debt affordability—the government's ability to borrow money cheaply, basically—and an ever-increasing, already gargantuan deficit as its primary justifications for that change.

    And those issues are on top of another standoff in the House of Representatives over funding the government, which, if something isn't done, will come to a head on November 17.

    A previous agreement struck by the previous House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, expires on that day, and if a new collection of 12 funding bills, which are what allows the government to pay for things, are not passed by then, the government could be shut down, possibly further diminishing the government's rating, on top of the many other consequences of not providing funding for things like national defense, energy and water development, and the Justice Department.

    This new reduction in outlook by Moody's follows a recent downgrade by Fitch back in August, when that ratings firm dropped the US government's rating from AAA to AA+, largely because of all the down-to-the-wire negotiations about funding the government that have roiled Congress over the past few years, and what that kind of tumult does to a government's ability to say for 100% certain that they'll pay their debts and never default; the US has never defaulted on its debt, but the possibility becomes more realistic-seeming each time these politicians fail to provide funding for essential government functions, including, debt-paying.

    Fitch also, like Moody's, cited the general diminishment in fiscal circumstances across the government, though, referring to a collection of variables that have been weighing down the state's capacity to acquire cheap debt.

    Ratings are one such variable, as each decrease in a nation's credit rating makes debt more expensive, folks and other states buying bonds and treasuries and the like demanding more interest for the same amount of loaned money—which is what those sorts of financial instruments are, at the end of the day.

    But beyond reputation, there are also factors like high interest rates, hiked by the Fed in order to tamp-down on inflation, and the accumulated interest payments that must be paid on previous debt taken out by the government to pay its bills.

    So in addition to the government suddenly having to pay more interest on all its new debt, it also has to pay more and more interest on its existing debt, and that latter figure is compounding to the point that a lot of folks who are otherwise generally unconcerned about such things, are starting to take what could turn out to be practical notice.

    What I'd like to talk about today is Rubinomics, government spending, and why the US federal debt is becoming a political talking point once more.

    —

    In the context of federal spending, fiscal responsibility refers to the balancing of a state's budget so that its spending is almost always close to, or below its revenue.

    So if a government brings in a trillion dollars in revenue, from taxes, for example, and spends a trillion dollars to keep agencies running, infrastructure maintained, and its military up to date, that's a balanced budget.

    If that same government were to spend a trillion and a half dollars without increasing tax revenues, though, it would have a deficit of half-a-trillion dollars.

    And if it were to spend less than it pulls in, if it were to reduce the social safety net programs it provides or spend less on its military, and thus only spent a half-trillion of the trillion it earns in taxes, that would represent a surplus of a half-trillion dollars.

    This is similar, at its most basic, at least, to how an individual might manage their money.

    Spend more than you make and you'll tend to go into debt, spend less than you make and you can sock money away or invest it, and spend exactly what you make, and your bills will all be paid without accruing debt.

    This comparison, though intuitive in a way, at least for the purposes of defining the outline of how this works, is also quite flawed—and economists have given it a name, potentially to make criticizing it that much easier: they call it the Government-Household analogy.

    And this analogy is often-touted by politicians, usually when they want to criticize their opponents for their spending by making it seem like they're less capable and responsible than the average heads of a household; why should we good, hardworking citizens be required to assiduously manage our personal economies, but these freewheeling politicians can't seem to balance a budget of billions or trillions of dollars?

    The analogy falls apart, though, when you look at the specifics of a household versus a government.

    Governments, after all, can literally print money if they so choose. They also tend to get far favorable terms on debt, can increase their budgets by raising taxes, and, oddly, if you think of a government as a household, different facets of a government can owe other facets money, so part of the debt owed might be owed to itself.

    While this analogy is often convincing to voters, then, it's not terribly useful as a model for economists and folks working to actually manage budgets of the scale and with the peculiarities of a government's budget.

    All that said, there are pros and cons to every possible approach to government debt, as running a deficit, spending more than is pulled in via taxes, means that a state can invest in more programs and infrastructure, and just like a company taking on debt to invest in more manufacturing capacity or warehouses or restaurant locations, that can mean setting things up for growth in the future: a healthy, happy, secure, well-educated populous will tend to do better than the opposite, so spending money on programs that improve and amplify those sorts of things can lead to more revenue sometime later.

    On the other hand, just like any other debt, federal debt tends to be paid back with interest, and that means the government taking on such debt will not just be on the hook to pay back the initial, principle amount they borrowed, but more than that—and possibly, especially if debt accrues for a long while, or accrues during periods of high interest rates, for them specifically, or more globally, they could be on the hook for a lot more than that.

    The last time the US government had a balanced budget was in 2001, and it's enjoyed the same for five years total in the past five decades—four of which were the years leading up to and including 2001, the fifth being 1969.

    This is such a rare state of affairs, in part, because the general economic consensus, amongst economists in the US, at least, is that federal debt isn't a big deal, that it tends to lead to more benefits than downsides, and that it is therefore prudent to not balance the budget, most of the time, because doing so leads to austerity—severe cuts in vital programs and other investments—and that hobbles the nation and its capacity for growth over the long-haul.

    Balancing the budget just to balance the budget, then, isn't really such a good thing, according to this prevailing theory; it's a compelling rallying cry for some folks occupying some spots on the ideological spectrum, traditionally those on the conservative side of things more than the left, but not spending also comes with consequences, and those consequences tend to outweigh the downsides of accruing some amount of debt, year to year.

    This mainstream sensibility about debt, though, was subbed-out during that 1998-2001 period, during the Bill Clinton administration, when the Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, implemented a policy that became known as Rubinomics, which was defined by an attempt to keep the federal budget balanced as part of a larger effort to control inflation and interest rates—the theory being that this would improve perception of the US economy, which in turn would lead to more investment, local and international, and would allow US economic entities, and thus, US citizens, to flourish.

    There's been a fair bit of debate as to whether this theory was proved-out by Ruben's policies.

    Yes, the US economy absolutely killed it while Clinton was in office, and yes long-term interest rates on treasuries and bonds dropped, making it less expensive for the government to take on debt when it wanted to borrow money for whatever.

    The country's GDP averaged around 4% during that period, inflation maintained a 2.5% rate, which is just north of the 2% rate the Fed prefers, and the US economy saw its longest continuous period of expansion at any point in history.

    But, and this is a big but, those variables might have also been tweaked by the so-called "peace dividend" of the late-1990s, which was defined by a post-Cold War drawdown of military activity and thus, military spending around the world during that span of time.

    They may also have been influenced by a series of new trade agreements, hands-off monetary policies, and the benefits of new technologies that were finally being exploited for profitable purposes after a long period of investment, like the consumer internet.

    So there's a chance that Rubinomics played a role in all that monetary flourishing, but there's also a chance that it was either just one of several influences, or maybe it was mostly just a bystander, or even a downward pressure, on the same, the flourishing primarily or totally the consequence of other variables.

    Today, part of the aforementioned drama playing out in the US House of Representatives is being driven by a focus on reducing the federal deficit, the total debt the US owes, which recently hit an all-time record high of something like $33 trillion, which carries a total interest payment, as of 2023, of somewhere between $659 billion and a cold trillion dollars a year, depending on who's numbers and analysis you use.

    That interest payment, at that level, has become one of the top expenses, of any expense category, for the government, surpassing things like the cost of all transportation and veteran's benefits payments, and approaching, or surpassing, depending on which figure you use, the cost of Medicare or the Military.

    It's primarily, right now at least, the further right members of the House that are demanding substantial cuts to the budget, the Senate mostly keen to keep spending levels where they are, and the majority of House Republicans seem happy to do the same, though Democrats are more likely, on average, to want higher levels of spending nearly across the board, again, right now—who wants what tends to change, at least in the specifics, every decade or so.

    And this is such a big issue right now in part because of that ballooning deficit, and in part because there's just a lot to spend on, these days, with military and humanitarian funding for Ukraine and Israel on the table, alongside investments in renewable energy infrastructure, in health care, and in other such—by some estimates at least—foundational elements of the government's various programs and priorities.

    Last weekend, reports from within the House indicated that the new house Speaker, Mike Johnson, wants to pass a stopgap funding bill to avoid a government shutdown before the November 17 deadline, and to do so, he wants to break the funding extension into two parts, rather than having Representatives vote on all 12 funding bills all at once.

    Each bill would cover different aspects of government funding and would extend spending a little further into the future, keeping spending levels where they are, currently, and providing no new funds to Ukraine or Israel—the former of which is a sticking point for a lot of conservative Representatives, and though this approach is meant to win over enough people from both sides of the aisle to get a stopgap funding bill passed in time to avoid a shutdown, folks across the political spectrum have seemed generally unhappy with it; voting on this could begin as soon as today, and we'll see if people are unhappy in the sense that they didn't get what they want, but they're okay to keep fighting for those things they want while the government stays open, or if they're unhappy in the sense that they'll play chicken with a government shutdown in order to prove their point; for what it's worth, analysts seem pretty mixed on whether this will work or not, at the moment.

    This general topic, that of the deficit, is likely to only become a more pressing issue, and thus, a more potent political hot potato, as interest rates, which look likely to stay high for at least another year, increase the debt-load the US government has to tend to, making debt more expensive for the government, and safe investment vehicles like treasuries more lucrative for investors—which can have the knock-on effect of making stocks and similar, riskier investments less appealing, possibly hindering economic investment and development even as the government watches the interest payments balloon as an increasingly major expense on its accounting spreadsheets.

    Show Notes

    https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-are-pros-and-cons-operating-balancedbudget.asp

    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/11/politics/house-speaker-mike-johnson-pitches/index.html

    https://archive.ph/iyAwI

    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rubinomics.asp

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/14/facts-about-the-us-national-debt/

    https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/-ungovernable-house-republicans-nix-votes-two-funding-bills-shutdown-d-rcna124441

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/where-are-12-us-govt-funding-bills-avert-shutdown-2023-11-08/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/20/interest-debt-payment-treasury/

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00213624.2007.11507047

    https://nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-republicans-unveil-plan-avert-government-shutdown-week-rcna124629

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/where-are-12-us-govt-funding-bills-avert-shutdown-2023-11-08/

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/moodys-changes-outlook-united-states-ratings-negative-2023-11-10/

    https://www.ft.com/content/226b4ebc-f405-4e03-8b40-44cd9fbb69d0

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fitch-cuts-us-governments-aaa-credit-rating-by-one-notch-2023-08-01/



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  • This week we talk about regulatory capture, Open AI, and Biden’s executive order.

    We also discuss the UK’s AI safety summit, open source AI models, and flogging fear.

    Recommended Book: The Resisters by Gish Jen

    Transcript

    Regulatory capture refers to the corruption of a regulatory body by entities to which the regulations that body creates and enforces, apply.

    So an organization that wants to see less funding for public schools and more for private and home schooling options getting one of their people into a position at the Department of Education, or someone from Goldman Sachs or another, similar financial institution getting shoehorned into a position at the Federal Reserve, could—through some lenses at least, and depending on how many connections those people in those positions have to those other, affiliated, ideological and commercial institutions—could be construed as engaging in regulatory capture, because they're now able to control the levers of regulation that apply to their own business or industry, or their peers, the folks they previously worked with and people to whom they maybe owe favors, or vice versa, and that could lead to regulations that are more favorable to them and their preferred causes, and those of their fellow travelers.

    This is in contrast to regulatory bodies that apply limits to such businesses and organizations, figuring out where they might overstep or lock in their own power at the expense of the industry in which they operate, and slowly, over time, plugging loopholes, finding instances of not-quite-illegal misdeeds that nonetheless lead to negative outcomes, and generally being the entity in charge in spaces that might otherwise be dominated by just one or two businesses that can kill off all their competition and make things worse for consumers and workers.

    Often, rather than regulatory capture being a matter of one person from a group insinuating themselves into the relevant regulatory body, the regulatory body, itself, will ask representatives from the industry they regulate to help them make law, because, ostensibly at least, those regulatees should know the business better than anyone else, and in helping to create their own constraints—again, ostensibly—they should be more willing to play by the rules, because they helped develop the rules to which they're meant to abide, and probably helped develop rules that they can live with and thrive under; because most regulators aren't trying to kill ambition or innovation or profit, they're just trying to prevent abuses and monopolistic hoarding.

    This sort of capture has taken many shapes over the years, and occurred at many scales.

    In the late-19th century, for instance, railroad tycoons petitioned the US government for regulation to help them bypass a clutter of state-level regulations that were making it difficult and expensive for them to do business, and in doing so—in asking to be regulated and helping the federal government develop the applicable regulations—they were able to make their own lives easier, while also creating what was effectively a cartel for themselves with the blessing of the government that regulated their power; the industry as it existed when those regulations were signed into law, was basically locked into place, in such a way that no new competitors could practically arise.

    Similar efforts have been launched, at times quite successfully, by entities in the energy space, across various aspects of the financial world, and in just about every other industry you can imagine, from motorcyclists' protective clothing to cheerleading competitions to aviation and its many facets—all have been to some degree and at some point allegedly regulatorily captured so that those being regulated to some degree control the regulations under which they operate, and which as a consequence has at times allowed them to create constraints that benefit them and entrench their own power, rather than opening their industry up and increasing competition, safety, and the treatment and benefits afforded to customers and workers, as is generally the intended outcome of these regulations.

    What I'd like to talk about today is the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence and why some players in this space are being accused of attempting the time-tested tactic of regulatory capture at a pivotal moment of AI development and deployment.

    —

    At the tail-end of October, 2023, US President Biden announced that he was signing a fairly expansive executive order on AI: the first of its kind, and reportedly the first step toward still-greater and more concrete regulation.

    A poll conducted by the AI Policy Institute suggests that Americans are generally in favor of this sort of regulatory move, weighing in at 68% in favor of the initiative, which is a really solid in-favor number, especially at a moment as politically divided as this one, and most of the companies working in this space—at least at a large enough scale to show up on the map for AI at this point—seem to be in favor of this executive order, as well, with some caveats that I'll get to in a bit.

    That indicates the government probably got things pretty close to where they need to be, in terms of folks actually adhering to these rules, though it's important to note that part of why there's such broad acceptance of the tenets of this order is that there aren't any real teeth to these rules: it's largely voluntary stuff, and mostly only applies to the anticipated next generation of AI—the current generation isn't powerful enough to fall under its auspices, in most cases, so AI companies don't need to do much of anything yet to adhere to these standards, and when they eventually do need to do something to remain in accordance with them, it'll mostly be providing reports to government employees so they can keep tabs on developments, including those happening behind close doors, in this space.

    Now that is not nothing: at the moment, this industry is essentially a black box as far as would-be regulators are concerned, so simply providing a process by which companies working on advanced AI and AI applications can keep the government informed on their efforts is a big step that raises visibility from 0 to some meaningful level.

    It also provides mechanisms through which such entities can get funding from the government, and pathways through which international AI experts can come to the United States with less friction than would be the case for folks without that expertise.

    So AI industry entities generally like all this because it's easy for them to work with, is flexible enough not to punish them if they fail in some regard, but it also provides them with more resources, both monetary and human, and sets the US up, in many ways, to maintain its current purported AI dominance well into the future, despite essentially everyone—especially but not exclusively China—investing a whole lot to catch up and surpass the US in the coming years.

    Another response to this order, though, and the regulatory infrastructure it creates, was voiced by the founder of Google Brain, Andrew Ng, who has been working on AI systems and applications for a long time, and who basically says that some of the biggest players in AI, today, are playing up the idea that artificial intelligence systems might be dangerous, even to the point of being world-ending, because they hope to create exactly this kind of regulatory framework at this exact moment, because right now they are the kings of the AI ecosystem, and they're hoping to lock that influence in, denying easy access to any future competitors.

    This theory is predicated on that concept I mentioned in the intro, regulatory capture, and history is rich with examples of folks in positions of power in various spaces telling their governments to put their industry on lockdown, and making the case for why this is necessary, because they know, in doing so, their position at the top will probably be locked in, because it will become more difficult and expensive and thus, out of reach, for any newer, smaller, not already influential and powerful competitor, to then challenge them moving forward.

    One way this might manifest in the AI space, according to Ng, is through the licensing of powerful AI models—essentially saying if you want to use the more powerful AI systems for your product or research, you need to register with the government, and you need to buy access, basically, from one of these government-sanctioned providers. Only then will we allow you to play in this potentially dangerous space with these highest-end AI models.

    This, in turn, would substantially reduce innovation, as other entities wouldn't be able to legally evolve their AI in different directions, at least not at a high level, and it would make today's behemoths—the OpenAI's and Meta's of the world—all but invulnerable to future challenges, because their models would be the ones made available to everyone else to use; no one else could compete, not practically, at least.

    This would be not-great for smaller, upstart AI companies, but it would be especially detrimental to open source large language models—versions of the most popular, LLM-based AI systems that're open to the public to mess around with and use however they see fit, rather than being controlled and sold by a single company.

    These models would be unlikely to have the resources or governing body necessary to step into the position of regulator-approved moderator of potentially dangerous AI systems, and the open source credo doesn't really play well with that kind of setup to begin with, as the idea is that all the code is open and available to take and use and change, so locking it down at all would violate those principles; and this sort of regulatory approach would be all about the lockdown, on fears of bad actors getting their hands on high-end AI systems—fears that have been flogged by entities like OpenAI.

    So that collection of fears are potentially fueling the relatively fast-moving regulatory developments related to AI in the US, right now; regulation, by the way, that's typically slower-moving in the US, which is part of why this is so notable.

    This is not a US-exclusive concern, though, nor is this executive order the only big, new regulatory effort in this space.

    At a summit in the UK just days after the US executive order was announced, AI companies from around the world, and those who govern such entities, met up to discuss the potential national security risks inherent in artificial intelligence tools, and to sign a legally non-binding agreement to let their governments test their newest, most powerful models for risks before they're released to the public.

    The US participated in this summit, as well, and a lot of these new rules overlap with each other, as the executive order shares a lot of tenets with the agreement signed at that meeting in the UK—though the EO was US-specific and included non-security elements, as well, and that will be the case for laws and orders passed in the many different countries to which these sorts of global concerns apply, each with their own approach to implementing those more broadly agreed-upon specifics at the national level.

    This summit announced the creation of a international panel of experts who will publish an annual report on the state of the art within the AI space, especially as it applies to national security risks, like misinformation and cybersecurity issues, and when questioned about whether the UK should take things a step further, locking some of these ideas and rules into place and making them legal requirements rather than things corporations agree to do but aren't punished for not doing, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak said, in essence, that this sort of thing takes time; and that's a sentiment that's been echoed by many other lawmakers and by people within this industry, as well.

    We know there need to be stricter and more enforceable regulations in this space, but because of where we are with this collection of technologies and the culture and rules and applications of them, right now, we don't really know what laws would make the most sense, in other words.

    No nation wants to tie its own hands in developing increasingly useful and powerful AI tools, and moving too fast on the concrete versions of these sort of agreements could end up doing exactly that; there's no way to know what the best rules and regulations will be, yet, because we're standing at the precipice of what looks like a long journey toward a bunch of new discoveries and applications.

    That's why the US executive order is set up the way it is, too: Biden and his advisors don't want to slow down the development in this space within the US, they want to amplify it, while also providing some foundational structure for whatever they decide needs to be built next—but those next-step decisions will be shaped by how these technologies and industries evolve over the next few years.

    The US and other countries are also setting up agencies and institutes and all sorts of safety precautions related to this space, but most of them lack substance at this point, and as with the aforementioned regulations, these agency setups are primarily just first draft guide rails, if that, at this point.

    Notably, the EU seems to be orienting around somewhat sterner regulations, but they haven't been able to agree on anything concrete quite yet, so despite typically taking the lead on this sort of thing, the US is a little bit ahead of the EU in terms of AI regulation right now—though it's likely that when the EU does finally put something into place, it'll be harder-core than what the US has, currently.

    A few analysts in this space have argued that these new regulations—lightweight as they are, both on the global and US level—by definition will hobble innovation because regulations tend to do that: they're opinionated about what's important and what's not, and that then shapes the direction makers in the regulated space will tend go.

    There's also a chance that, as I mentioned before, that this set of regulations laid out in this way, will lock the power of incumbent AI companies into place, protecting them from future competitors, and in doing so also killing off a lot of the forces of innovation that would otherwise lead to unpredictable sorts of outcomes.

    One big question, then, is how light a touch these initial regulations will actually end up having, how the AI and adjacent industries will reshape themselves to account for these and predicted future regulations, and to what degree open source alternatives—and other third-party alternatives, beyond the current incumbents—will be able to step in and take market share, nudging things in different directions, and potentially either then being incorporated into and shaping those future, more toothy regulations, or halting the deployment of those regulations by showing that the current direction of regulatory development no longer makes sense.

    We'll also see how burdensome the testing and other security-related requirements in these initial rules end up being, as there's a chance more attention and resources will shift toward lighter-weight, less technically powerful, but more useful and deployable versions of these current AI tools, which is already something that many entities are experimenting with, because that comes with other benefits, like being able to run AI on devices like a smartphone, without needing to connect, through the internet, to a huge server somewhere.

    Refocusing on smaller models could also allow some developers and companies to move a lot faster than their more powerful but plodding and regulatorily hobbled kin, rewiring the industry in their favor, rather than toward those who are currently expected to dominate this space for the foreseeable future.

    Show Notes

    On the EO

    https://www.aijobstracker.com/ai-executive-order

    Reactions to EO

    https://archive.ph/RdpLh

    https://theaipi.org/poll-biden-ai-executive-order-10-30/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/us/politics/biden-ai-regulation.html?ref=readtangle.com

    https://qz.com/does-anyone-not-like-bidens-new-guidelines-on-ai-1850974346

    https://archive.ph/wwRXj

    https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-big-tech-is-lying-about-ai-human-extinction-danger-20231027-p5efnz

    https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1718670073391378694?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

    https://stratechery.com/2023/attenuating-innovation-ai/

    First take on EO

    What EO means for openness in AI

    Biden’s regulation plans

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-lawmakers-face-struggle-reach-agreement-ai-rules-sources-2023-10-23/

    https://archive.ph/IwLZu

    https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/01/politicians-commit-to-collaborate-to-tackle-ai-safety-us-launches-safety-institute/

    https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-sci-tech/on-ai-regulation-the-us-steals-a-march-over-europe-amid-the-uks-showpiece-summit-9015032/



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe