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anonymous

China, Russia and the World Beyond Afghanistan - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...a_and_world_beyond_afghanistan

geopolitics russia china

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • What is of interest is what is not being discussed in the Situation Room. By this, we do not mean Iraq — or even Iran. We mean the countries that will define American foreign policy for the next decade (or decades): Russia and China. These two heavyweights have interests most at odds with those of the United States and the power to do something about it.
  • The lack of meaningful competitors, in other words, allowed a relatively weak entity to take center stage.
  • Moscow is in the process of consolidating its influence all across its periphery from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus to South Central Asia. It is driven by an awareness of a looming demographic crisis that will force it to turn inward in the years ahead to sustain itself, meaning that the way it settles matters along its periphery and the strength of those arrangements will define Russian security far beyond the immediate future.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • China, meanwhile, is crafting an ever more powerful and robust anti-access and area denial capability to slow the approach of American naval power toward its shores. China, too, is driven by a need to achieve what it can in foreign policy while the United States is looking in another direction as China also works to contain and manage powerful internal tensions and cross currents that span the political spectrum from fiscal to cultural.
  • Ultimately, the strength and breadth of American national power that Washington has at its disposal is immense. But the potential adversaries that the United States will find itself faced with in Eurasia when it does finally break free of that focus will present far more daunting challenges than they did a decade ago.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "What is of interest is what is not being discussed in the Situation Room. By this, we do not mean Iraq - or even Iran. We mean the countries that will define American foreign policy for the next decade (or decades): Russia and China. These two heavyweights have interests most at odds with those of the United States and the power to do something about it." At StratFor on September 14, 2010.
anonymous

The Myth of the Yellow Peril: Overhyping Chinese Migration into Russia - 0 views

www.russiablog.org/...post_15.php

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 20 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Since 1989 the population of the Russian Far East declined by 14% to 6.7 million in 2002; shorn of subsidies from the center, it is now dependent on the rest of East Asia for food and consumer imports. It sits next to Chinese Manchuria (the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin), an environmentally-strained rust belt of 108 million souls. Thus it is not surprising to see American geopolitical jockeys, Russian xenophobes and anti-Putin "liberals" alike (i.e. Radio Free Europe's Aleksandr Golts and Echo Moskvi Radio's Yulia Latynina, etc) claiming that a stealth demographic invasion of Russia is well underway which will in a few years result in a Chinese Far East.
  • The issue of Chinese migration to Russia and its political consequences starts with one main question - how many of them are there? All reputable estimates are in the range of 200,000 to 400,000, with 500.000 as the absolute maximum, most of them shuttle traders or seasonal laborers. The academic Gel'bras first came with these figures in 2001, based on adding up numbers from separate towns and regions.
  • Most migrants come from cities or small towns, and only 20% from villages - although the latter figure is higher in Moscow. Only 5% were employed in agriculture back in China. 38% were "workers" and 11% were "worker-peasants". Although only 6% admitted they had been unemployed, the real figure is much higher since 70% of workers and 68% of worker peasants said they migrated because they couldn't find a job in China.
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  • Chinese Migration - Facts, Objectivity and Subjectivity: a Kazakh perspective. As in Russia, they massively overstate the Chinese presence, mixed marriages, etc. Ironically twice as many Kazakhs visit China every year than vice versa. What's happening with Chinese expansion in Russia?: a comprehensive and sarcastic recounting of prior alarmist estimates of the numbers of Chinese in Russia. The Russian vector in global Chinese migration: notes that the alarmism of the 1990's and early 2000's is dwindling away and being replaced by more scientific views of Chinese migration to Russia. Notes that Russian migration as a share of total Chinese global migration is tiny - as of 1990, the total number of Chinese overseas was about 37mn, including 30% of the population in Malaysia, 10% in Thailand, 17% in Brunei and 4% in Indonesia. Lots of other stuff.
  • I will now go beyond demography into geopolitics. China is not the monolith that it is usually painted as in the West; its strong central government conceals a greater deal of simmer, dynamism and regionalism.
  • China aimed to achieve three geopolitical aims in the following order:
  • 1) Maintain central authority over the commercial seaboard and the peasant hinterland 2) Surround itself by a buffer of vassal states on land - Tibet, Sinkiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, etc. 3) Build a strong navy to repel sea-based foreign predation, protect its trade and extend its influence over East Asia. Now and in the future, China is going to have cope with a panoply of threats to those geopolitical goals - rising inequalities, a disconnected bureaucracy, ethnic separatism and American and Japanese sea power. In other words, it's going to have its hands full and Chinese willingness to pursue reconciliation and friendship with Russia is a reflection of its need for a safe strategic rear (see Sino-Russian Relations in China Debates the Future Security Environment, Michael Pillsbury).
  • anonymous on 20 Oct 10
     
    "One of the staples of alarmist, pessimistic and/or Russophobic (not to mention Sinophobic) commentary on Russian demography is a reworking of the yellow peril thesis. In these fevered imaginations, Chinese supposedly swim across the Amur River in their millions, establishing village communes in the taiga, and breeding prolifically so as to displace ethnic Russians and revert Khabarovsk and Vladivostok back to their rightful Qing Dynasty-era names, Boli and Haisanwei." By Anatoly Karlin at Russia Blog on April 1, 2009.
anonymous

Some Insights on Generation Size/Dates - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...sights-on-generation-sizedates

generations

shared by anonymous on 02 Nov 10 - Cached
  • The demographic challenge facing America is not as severe as the challenge facing near all of the other developed countries (and even some of the developing countries, like China).  The reason is pretty simple: We have a higher fertility rate and we have a higher immigration rate.  Indeed, we are the *only* developed country experiencing  “replacement rate” fertility.  And we are the only developed country whose total population is projected to continue growing (albeit very slowly), and not turn negative, through to the end of the next century.  The U.S. fiscal situation is also helped by the fact that our pay-as-you-go cash pension system is smaller and less generous, relative to GDP, than those of other countries.  But this plus is more than offset by our super-expensive health-care entitlement edifice, which is much more expensive as a share of GDP than any other country’s and is growing faster as a share of GDP. 
  • anonymous on 02 Nov 10
     
    "I have recently run into discussions where there is confusion about the date boundaries and sizes of generations. Even the word "generation" can sometimes be up for contention. On the definition of "generation," I don't get hot and bothered about it. The etymological history of the word "generation" is sufficiently broad (having been applied to families, computers, eras, what have you), that people are pretty much free to call any arbitrary cohort group a "generation" if they feel like it. Most of these definitions, however, are ad hoc. Even the famous Census Bureau definition of Boomers (which they define as 1946-64) is ad hoc, determined entirely by an arbitrary uptick and then downtick along a broad fertility-rate swell." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on November 1, 2010.
anonymous

Germany: Looking for Bismarck - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...00325_germany_looking_bismarck

geopolitics military germany

shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 10 - Cached
  • According to the draft circulated on Thursday at the two-day EU heads of government summit, Greece would indeed be offered a financial aid package of around 22 billion euro, but only after Athens was no longer able to raise funds by selling its bonds in the international markets, and even then at above-market rates, entirely obviating the point of the bailout. That is akin to offering a homeowner, who is about to default on a mortgage, a refinancing offer that equals or increases his mortgage rates above the rate he already cannot pay.
  • The proposal may very well push Athens to pursue an International Monetary Fund package independent of the eurozone, which could be the intention of Berlin perhaps looking to wash its hands of the entire problem.
  • Germany essentially has a limited window of opportunity in the next 10 years to make or break its leadership of the European Union and therefore its claim to global relevancy. Germany’s birth rate is lower than all of the major European powers that surround it (France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden), while its population is significantly older than that of Poland.
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  • The ultimate problem for Germany is that the moment the rest of Europe perceives that Berlin is looking out solely for its own national interests — such as when it refuses to put up money to save a eurozone member state — it ceases to be a viable European leader.
  • But the clock is ticking, and Europe’s demographic challenges are right around the corner. At that point, all of Europe will be so embroiled in domestic political, economic and social concerns that settling issues of leadership and power will be impossible, and that is if the EU even survives the coming crisis.
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 10
     
    The Geopolitical Diary entry (at StratFor) for March 26, 2010.
anonymous

Germany as Eurozone Leader - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...100513_germany_eurozone_leader

shared by anonymous on 14 May 10 - Cached
  • And that project will have to deal with a number of other geopolitical trends unraveling around it. These trends include the Russian resurgence in Central and Eastern Europe, NATO’s increasing tensions, the United States’ eventual move to counter Russia’s resurgence, Central European security fears of a resurgent Russia, a French realization that Paris is no longer equal to Berlin, and Europe’s underlying demographic and debt problems.
  • Germany now senses the opportunity to reform the eurozone so that similar crises do not happen again.
  • anonymous on 14 May 10
     
    May 14, 2010
anonymous

Never Fight a Land War in Asia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0228-never-fight-land-war-asia

shared by anonymous on 01 Mar 11 - Cached
  • First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?
  • Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.
  • When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of materiel, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.
  • The United States compensates with technology,
  • from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.
  • The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war.
  • the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with.
  • The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited
  • The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines.
  • The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians.
  • As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender.
  • Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly.
  • Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.
  • The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country.
  • Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home.
  • The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.
  • Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II.
  • In each case it is obvious: for political reasons.
  • In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable.
  • There are two problems with American strategy.
  • The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission.
  • Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory.
  • Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale.
  • The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak.
  • By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end?
  • Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient.
  • Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States.
  • Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating.
  • The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results.
  • An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message
  • As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.
  • anonymous on 01 Mar 11
     
    "U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.""
anonymous

5 Reasons Humanity Is Terrible at Democracy | Cracked.com - 0 views

www.cracked.com/-terrible-at-democracy_p2.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Polls consistently show that we think those who disagree with us politically are simply bad people, on a personal level.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 11
       
      What's fascinating is how irrelevant our partisan political affiliations are, on a day to day basis, but oh how we imagine them to be the center of our being.
  • Now take a look at this study, which compared a person's average political knowledge with their primary source of news. The results were surprising: The most knowledgeable groups were viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hot on their heels? Fans of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
  • Never mind the fact that it's a pretty bad sign when the most politically educated people in the country are relying on either comedy shows or political pundits for their news. The key is that these outlets are primarily about ruthlessly mocking and dismissing the other side. Yet they attract more knowledgeable voters, not less.
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  • In the world of psychology, they call this attitude polarization; the more times the average person spends thinking about a subject, the more extreme his position becomes -- even if he doesn't run across any new information.
  • once you get to the point where you're rooting so hard for one side of an issue that you're just short of painting your chest in team colors, then all that time spent reading up on the issues stops being about becoming an informed citizen and becomes more about accumulating ammunition for the next argument.
  • #1. We Hate Each Other Over Imaginary Differences
  • For example, a study asked Americans of various demographics and political stances about the ideal way they feel wealth should be distributed across the country. Young or old, male or female, Republican or Democrat, the answers they provided were almost identical.
  • Don't get us wrong; it's not that there are no disagreements, it's just that we vastly overestimate the degree to which we disagree, because the differences are all we focus on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 11
       
      For instance: During the Obama-McCain debates, their stated foreign policy stance was virtually identical. It was only on matters of how quickly a withdrawal would occur, not whether, if and how. This was almost completely glossed over by the left. In fact, the broad continuance of foreign policy is evidence of a geopolitical 'pull' that exists beyond partisanship and personalities.
  • We don't want the news to just give us information -- we want a story, and every story needs a villain, a battle between good and evil.
  • Knowing this, the news media decades ago started covering politics like a war, or a sport (in the biz, they call it "horse race coverage") where the reporting is entirely about which side is winning -- at the expense of figuring out the actual impact the resulting election or legislation will have on you as a human being. We tune in for "Us vs. Them," so that's what they give us.
anonymous

Making Sense of the Syrian Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...504-making-sense-syrian-crisis

shared by anonymous on 05 May 11 - Cached
  • A survey of the headlines would lead many to believe that Syrian President Bashar al Assad will soon be joining Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in a line of deposed Arab despots. The situation in Syria is serious, but in our view, the crisis has not yet risen to a level that would warrant a forecast that the al Assad regime will fall.
  • Four key pillars sustain Syria’s minority Alawite-Baathist regime: Power in the hands of the al Assad clan. Alawite unity. Alawite control over the military-intelligence apparatus. The Baath party’s monopoly on the political system.
  • Syria’s complex demographics make it a difficult country to rule.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Alawite power in Syria is only about five decades old. The Alawites are frequently (and erroneously) categorized as Shiite Muslims, have many things in common with Christians and are often shunned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims alike. Consequently, Alawites attract a great deal of controversy in the Islamic world.
  • Syria is not simply a mirror reflection of a country like Bahrain (a Shiite majority country run by a minority Sunni government). Rather than exhibiting a clear Sunni-Shiite religious-ideological divide, Syria’s history can be more accurately described as a struggle between the Sunnis on one hand and a group of minorities on the other.
  • The seed was thus planted for an Alawite-led military coup while the Sunni elite were preoccupied with their own internal struggles.
  • anonymous on 05 May 11
     
    "Syria is clearly in a state of internal crisis. Protests organized on Facebook were quickly stamped out in early February, but by mid-March, a faceless opposition had emerged from the flashpoint city of Daraa in Syria's largely conservative Sunni southwest. From Daraa, demonstrations spread to the Kurdish northeast, the coastal Latakia area, urban Sunni strongholds in Hama and Homs and to Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus. Feeling overwhelmed, the regime experimented with rhetoric on reforms while relying on much more familiar iron-fist methods in cracking down, arresting hundreds of men, cutting off water and electricity to the most rebellious areas and making clear to the population that, with or without emergency rule in place, the price for dissent does not exclude death. (Activists claim more than 500 civilians have been killed in Syria since the demonstrations began, but that figure has not been independently verified.)"
anonymous

The Gen-X Nostalgia Boom - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-gen-x-nostalgia-boom.html

generations nostalgia Gen-X

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 11 - Cached
  • We bristled when we heard them wax self-congratulatory about ending segregation and war
  • We resented their monopoly on cultural space, realizing that “boom” also described what their collective voice would always be, compared with our demographically feeble squeak.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      I was a late bloomer in this regard. When I finally had a small degree of cultural awareness, I began to note things. Mainly that my music sucked, we sucked, and everything was better before I was around.
  • And when they did briefly notice us, in the Generation X media frenzy of the mid-1990s, it was only to reduce diverse people and experiences to catchwords like “slackers” and “grunge” and dismiss paralyzing economic and ecological anxiety as privileged extended-adolescent angst.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      I had that TIME Magazine. I used to read P.J. O'Rourke bitching about my generation. I bristled at being called a gen-x'er (I only ever tolerated grunge). As quickly as that media fascination came, it went. I guess maybe we were 'dealt with'.
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  • I would say we were marked by two traits: our dislike of nostalgia and our irritation whenever our barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at us.
  • it brings on something of an identity crisis to see Gen X’s formative years become part of the cycle of retro revivalism
  • Meanwhile MTV is exhuming “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Pop-Up Video,” while Nickelodeon is offering a 1990s-themed block of late-night programming with old shows like “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” presumably to help herbally sautéed 20-somethings regress in giggly reminiscence.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      With our beer bongs and our hula hoops.
  • Most kids who entered college this year weren’t even born when grunge broke. If it’s too soon, you’re too old.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      Ouch.
  • But of course we are not just the unwilling victims of the 20-year cycle of resuscitation. We are its architects, as a few of us have been able to wrest culturally influential posts away from baby boomers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      S&H would (probably) argue that this is because Gen X is a reactive one (like Silents). 
  • One of The Onion’s most biting headlines this year: “Winona Ryder finally agrees to sleep with Generation X.”
  • This is the sting in the rising buzz of 1990s nostalgia: It feels like retroactively giving in to those reductive media representations.
  • At that time, the sharpest articulation of generational pique was found in The Baffler
  • Now we’ll get to see how The Baffler dissects the rise of Gen-X-Squared
  • age can prompt even the most cynical to realize not only nostalgia’s sickly-sweet temptation but also its usefulness.
  • What is nostalgia good for, then?
  • it runs search-and-rescue missions against the disposability of consumer capitalism
  • And it raises exception to the great leveling effect of the Internet
  • In intimate terms, nostalgia is a glue that reinforces bonds of solidarity and shared experience
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      And that's one reason why, as much as I railed against the Gen X label, I certainly was part of a peer group with shared experiences.
  • Today’s Birthers and Tea Partiers seem less apocalyptic if you remember that the last time a Democratic president battled Republicans over health care and federal budgets, he was being smeared as a conspiratorial murderer.
  • So how can an anti-nostalgic generation honor its past without becoming the thing it hated?
  • One answer is the old standby: Gen X’s endemic, possibly pathological, sarcasm.
  • Rather than the 1990s being, as the demoralizing claim went, the “end of history,” it turned out to be more like a mix-tape pause of history between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, a kind of break from big convulsions while humankind mainly figured out how to work the Internet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      That's a great bit.
  • There’s a model here for nostalgia that doesn’t wish away the distance between past and present; doesn’t romanticize the past as tragic and heroic; and doesn’t simply trivialize it (as so much 1980s nostalgia did) as trite and silly.
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 11
     
    Long before we had much life to look back on, North Americans my age knew that nostalgia was a sickness. It's not that we were aware the term was coined to describe the crippling melancholia that overcame many 17th-century Swiss soldiers when war took them away from the bucolic mountain landscapes of home. It was that, being in our teens and 20s in the early 1990s, we had grown up in the penumbra of the great eclipsing nostalgia of the baby boomers
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    And here I could swear I've been toying with nostalgia my whole life. Mind you, it was always nostalgia for previous countercultural movements.
anonymous

USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...x-2011-keynote-network-se.html

whimsy technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.
  • The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?
  • a few basic assumptions about the future
  • ...82 more annotations...
  • it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.
  • The idea of an AI singularity
  • the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men.
  • if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.
  • at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down
  • My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.
  • We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.
  • engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems
  • Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.
  • without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.
  • if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.
  • we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology
  • We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.
  • it’s quite likely that within another century the mechanisms underlying cellular senescence will be understood and treatable like other inborn errors of metabolism
  • another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.
  • Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide
  • Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it
  • but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent.
  • there are problems
  • . In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years
  • Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies
  • The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents
  • Finally, representative democracy scales up badly
  • Nor are governments as important as they used to be.
  • the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
  • we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.
  • At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
  • The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.
  • Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.
  • a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa
  • In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.
  • by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.
  • And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk.
  • It’s a normative projection
  • I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.
  • And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.
  • Let’s imagine that, circa 1961 – just fifty years ago – a budding Nikolai Tesla or Bill Packard somewhere in big-city USA is tinkering in his garage and succeeds in building a time machine. Being adventurous – but not too adventurous – he sets the controls for fifty years in the future, and arrives in downtown San Francisco. What will he see, and how will he interpret it?
  • a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar
  • Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted
  • Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions
  • He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.
  • But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves
  • The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber.
  • Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings
  • But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks
  • Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.
  • The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.
  • Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places
  • For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.
  • to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house
  • The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.
  • We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.
  • So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.
  • the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication
  • funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.
  • These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.
  • This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian
  • the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?
  • Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.
  • wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.
  • What can you do with 2 terabits per second per human being on the planet?
  • One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.
  • the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.
  • Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.
  • Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.
  • The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
  • if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.
  • whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.
  • at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.
  • We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing.
  • In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.
  • full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.
  • Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.
  • These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system.
  • Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.
  • A second crisis we face is that of cancer
  • we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.
  • If our metagenomic environment is routinely included in lifelogs, we have the holy grail of epidemiology within reach; the ability to exhaustively track the spread of pathogens and identify how they adapt to their host environment, right down to the level of individual victims.
  • In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.
  • With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.
  • the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.
  • So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 11
     
    "Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security." A fun read by Charlie Stoss."
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    I feel like cancer may be a bit played up. I freak out more about dementia.
anonymous

Russia's Evolving Leadership - 4 views

www.stratfor.com/...04-russias-evolving-leadership

russia leadership geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 05 Jul 11 - Cached
  • In the past decade, one person has consolidated and run Russia’s political system: former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
  • Under Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s strategic economic assets were pillaged, the core strength of the country — the KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the military — fell into decay, and the political system was in disarray. Though Russia was considered a democracy and a new friend to the West, this was only because Russia had no other option — it was a broken country.
  • While an autocrat and KGB agent (we use the present tense, as Putin has said that no one is a former KGB or FSB agent), he hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s most pro-Western city, and during his Soviet-era KGB service he was tasked with stealing Western technology. Putin fully understands the strength of the West and what Western expertise is needed to keep Russia relatively modern and strong. At the same time, his time with the KGB convinced him that Russia can never truly be integrated into the West and that it can be strong only with a consolidated government, economy and security service and a single, autocratic leader.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Putin’s understanding of Russia’s two great weaknesses informs this worldview.
  • The first weakness is that Russia was dealt a poor geographic hand.
  • The second is that its population is comprised of numerous ethnic groups, not all of which are happy with centralized Kremlin rule.
  • Russia essentially lacks an economic base aside from energy.
  • These geographic, demographic and economic challenges have led Russia to shift between being aggressive to keep the country secure and being accommodating toward foreign powers in a bid to modernize Russia.
  • However, Russia cannot go down the two paths of accommodating and connecting with the West and a consolidated authoritarian Russia at the same time unless Russia is first strong and secure as a country, something that has only happened recently.
  • Which face they show does not depend upon personalities but rather upon the status of Russia’s strength.
  • Putin, who had no choice but to appeal to the West to help keep the country afloat when he took office in 2000, initially was hailed as a trusted partner by the West. But even while former U.S. President George W. Bush was praising Putin’s soul, behind the scenes, Putin already was reorganizing one of his greatest tools — the FSB — in order to start implementing a full state consolidation in the coming years.
  • After 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to phone Bush and offer any assistance from Russia. The date marked an opportunity for both Putin and Russia. The attacks on the United States shifted Washington’s focus, tying it down in the Islamic world for the next decade. This gave Russia a window of opportunity with which to accelerate its crackdown inside (and later outside) Russia without fear of a Western response.
  • During this time, the Kremlin ejected foreign firms, nationalized strategic economic assets, shut down nongovernmental organizations, purged anti-Kremlin journalists, banned many anti-Kremlin political parties and launched a second intense war in Chechnya.
  • Western perceptions of Putin’s friendship and standing as a democratic leader simultaneously evaporated.
  • When Medvedev entered office, his current reputation for compliance and pragmatism did not exist. Instead, he continued on Russia’s roll forward with one of the boldest moves to date — the Russia-Georgia war.
  • By 2009, Russia had proven its power in its direct sphere and so began to ease into a new foreign and domestic policy of duality.
  • Only when Russia is strong and consolidated can it drop being wholly aggressive and adopt such a stance of hostility and friendliness.
  • With elections approaching, the ruling tandem seems even more at odds as Medvedev overturns many policies Putin put into place in the early 2000s, such as the ban on certain political parties, the ability of foreign firms to work in strategic sectors and the role of the FSB elite within the economy. Despite the apparent conflict, the changes are part of an overall strategy shared by Putin and Medvedev to finish consolidating Russian power.
  • These policy changes show that Putin and Medvedev feel confident enough that they have attained their first imperative that they can look to confront the second inherent problem for the country: Russia’s lack of modern technology and lack of an economic base
  • Russia thus has launched a multiyear modernization and privatization plan to bring in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to leapfrog the country into current technology and diversify the economy. Moscow has also struck deals with select countries — Germany, France, Finland, Norway, South Korea and even the United States — for each sector to use the economic deals for political means.
  • two large problems
  • First, foreign governments and firms are hesitant to do business in an authoritarian country with a record of kicking foreign firms out.
  • At the same time, the Kremlin knows that it cannot lessen its hold inside of Russia without risking losing control over its first imperative of securing Russia.
  • The first move is to strengthen the ruling party — United Russia — while allowing more independent political parties.
  • While these new political parties appear to operate outside the Kremlin’s clutches, this is just for show. The most important new party is Russia’s Right Cause launched by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.
  • Right Cause is intended to support foreign business and the modernization efforts.
  • The Popular Front is not exactly a political party but an umbrella organization meant to unite the country. Popular Front members include Russia’s labor unions, prominent social organizations, economic lobbying sectors, big business, individuals and political parties. In short, anything or anyone that wants to be seen as pro-Russian is a part of the Popular Front.
  • It creates a system in which power in the country does not lie in a political office — such as the presidency or premiership — but with the person overseeing the Popular Front: Putin.
  • The new system is designed to have a dual foreign policy, to attract non-Russian groups back into the country and to look more democratic overall while all the while being carefully managed behind the scenes.
  • In theory, the new system is meant to allow the Kremlin to maintain control of both its grand strategies of needing to reach out abroad to keep Russia modern and strong and trying to ensure that the country is also under firm control and secure for years to come.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Jul 11
       
      I would imagine that it seems that way to most Americans, but then we're tech-focused. We have a very hard time understanding that the only time Russia has ever felt geographically secure is *when* they're aggressive. This means upgrading tech, infrastructure, and social-glue all at the same time. Add: There are all those quotes from past leaders about feeling as though they had to expand their borders or influence just to feel secure at home. We Americans may as well be from Mars: We have two giant oceans and we culturally dominate our few neighbors with trade. This is why I agree with StratFor (read as: resignedly fear) that a confrontation with Russia is in the offing two decades hence. If they dominate central Asia and hold levers in Europe, as they are quite obviously trying to do, they will be perceived as a threat, and the U.S. is all too willing to help those who are afraid of Russia. All this strikes me as a prelude that we'll gloss over in future readings of the 'past'. But then, it's another case where I'm *begging* to be wrong.
  • anonymous on 05 Jul 11
     
    "Russia has entered election season, with parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2012. Typically, this is not an issue of concern, as most Russian elections have been designed to usher a chosen candidate and political party into office since 2000. Interesting shifts are under way this election season, however. While on the surface they may resemble political squabbles and instability, they actually represent the next step in the Russian leadership's consolidation of the state."
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Jul 11
     
    I get the security concern, but Putin has always seemed to overemphasize and overextend the issue into something bigger and more offensive. It seems to me that the infrastructure and tech needs are much more pressing and would yield more results.
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Jul 11
     
    There are still plenty of places where we're not willing to push back (the Polish Belorussian genocides being a prominent example in my mind), but you're right at how foreign that mindset is. Foreign or bizarrely 19th century.
anonymous

Traveling Through Multiple Europes - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eling-through-multiple-europes

shared by anonymous on 06 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The crisis is having an uneven effect on EU member states because the eurozone locks countries with different levels of economic development into the same currency union.
  • Europe's geography helps explain these differences: Countries in the south have traditionally dealt with high capital costs and low capital-generation capacity, while countries in the north have seen the opposite.
  • Merely moving people and goods from point to point on the Iberian Peninsula has always posed formidable challenges for governments and traders.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • In contrast, most of Germany is flat.
  • The lack of any real physical borders to the east and west also helps explain Germany's historical conflict with its neighbors.
  • The same geography that made Germany a place of conflict also explains its economic power: Germany is the center of Europe from almost every possible point of view.
  • Greece is a rugged country with narrow coastal plains that swiftly give way to mountains.
  • Greece's extremely fragmented geography and its strategic position on the eastern Mediterranean helps explain why it has struggled throughout history to get anything done.
  • Whenever I'm in a foreign country, I make an effort to visit bookstores because the books people read and write offer insights into the social mood.
  • In an Oporto bookstore, among the bestsellers was a book called We Are Not Germans, while a Rome bookstore had a book called It's Not Worth a Lira, a plea to leave the euro and return to Italy's old currency, that appeared to be quite popular.
  • Germany is seen as a country where everything works and governments are efficient. On the other hand, it is also seen as a hegemon that doesn't understand or care about the situation in the nations it is trying to lead.
  • While conservative forces are moving to the right and nationalist forces are gaining strength, the center-left is going through an identity crisis that is generating frictions within the parties and confusing their traditional voters
  • The irony is that the same process that is creating political and social tensions in Europe's core is helping to mitigate the negative effects of a demographic change.
  • Poland was a country confident about its economic strength but worried about its future. History has given the Poles a deep understanding of geopolitics and too many reasons to be worried about the events beyond their borders.
  • The Poles are proud of being members of the European Union, but they are not completely confident that Brussels will come to their rescue should the crisis with Russia escalate.
  • . The crisis has now reached a point where its two main players are under extreme pressure. Germany joined the eurozone under the assumption that no bailouts would be given to nations in distress and no monetization of debt would take place. France joined the eurozone under the assumption that it would remain the political leader of Europe. The crisis has put all the promises and agreements that supported the Franco-German unity in doubt.
  • Europeanists believe that things would be much better if the European Union became a true federation. They are probably right. The question is how to accomplish this.
  • anonymous on 06 Nov 14
     
    "Europe is overcrowded with people and with nations. Six decades ago, the need to suppress the dangerous forces of nationalism led to the unprecedented political, economic and social experiment now known as the European Union."
anonymous

The Virtue of Subtlety: A U.S. Strategy Against the Islamic State - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...strategy-against-islamic-state

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 14 - Cached
  • It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted.
  • A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
  • Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Given the situation, the United States has an unavoidable strategy.
  • The United States has been concerned about the status of Russia ever since U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The United States has been concerned about the Middle East since U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British to retreat from Suez in 1956. As a result, the United States inherited -- or seized -- the British position.
  • A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him.
  • The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible.
  • For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.
  • This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power.
  • For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.
  • The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
  • There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions.
  • the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago.
  • Finally, the Islamic State -- engaged in war with everyone around it -- is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack.
  • In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
  • Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power.
  • There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State's forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways.
  • In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges.
  • The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.
  • The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara.
  • The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.
  • It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins.
  • The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance.
  • The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
  • It is not clear why he thinks those NATO countries -- with the exception of Turkey -- will spend their national treasures and lives to contain the Islamic State, or why the Islamic State alone is the issue.
  • U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must -- with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait -- and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed.
  • In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition.
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 14
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama said recently that he had no strategy as yet toward the Islamic State but that he would present a plan on Wednesday. It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted. A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it."
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