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anonymous

A Competitive China-U.S. Re-Engagement - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...d-us-competitive-re-engagement

geopolitics u.s. china

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 11 - Cached
  • The United States seeks continual interaction separate from other aspects of the relationship, whereas China cannot afford to separate what Washington views as “political” issues from its military engagements and frequently cuts off exchange. Thus it is important that the two sides are talking at all.
  • However, the visit has also attracted attention because it is an exceedingly interesting time for the two sides to be talking
  • The view among some regional players, whose national security depends on their accurate assessment of the situation, is that a kind of leveling is taking place.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Despite the U.S. re-engagement throughout the region, some East Asian states suspect that weakness and a long-term lack of commitment lie at the base of its prolonged distance from regional affairs.
  • They have agreed to hold drills on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, as well as counter-piracy, and to work toward holding more traditional military exercises in the future.
  • The recent warming in U.S.-China relations has drawn inevitable comparisons to the Kissinger-style detente. However, the contrast between these events is more striking. When Kissinger traveled to China, relations between the two countries could hardly have been worse and because the countries shared a common enemy, relations had ample opportunity to improve.
  • At present, the prospects for improvement appear limited, whereas their many differences on economic, military and strategic interests present serious pitfalls.
  • The clash over the South China Sea will intensify regardless of a warmer diplomatic atmosphere.
  • the warming of relations continues apace because China is not yet the great power it aspires to be.
  • What allows both countries to defer confrontation is not only American preoccupation elsewhere but also — as Chen all too readily admitted during Monday’s meeting — China’s persistent military weaknesses, despite its recent highlighting of a fifth-generation fighter-jet prototype, an aircraft carrier and anti-ship ballistic missiles.
  • What Chen inadvertently pointed to is that, like the Soviets, Beijing’s competition with the United States has an economic basis. Economics is at the heart of military power. However, in this regard the Chinese do not have as great an advantage as is widely thought. The American economy has shown itself to be resilient after many recessions, while the current Chinese model shows all the signs of unbalanced and unsustainable growth.
  • China’s great challenge is to face not only a rising international rivalry but also its eventual combination with deteriorating domestic economic conditions.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 11
     
    "U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen continued his visit to China on Monday. He met with Chief of General Staff of the People's Liberation Army Chen Bingde, future Chinese President Xi Jinping and other officials at naval and air force bases in China."
anonymous

1940's whiskey ads predicted the future - 1 views

www.impactlab.net/...iskey-ads-predicted-the-future

futurism technology predictions

shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 11
     
    "Seagram's advertised its VO Canadian whiskey back in the mid-1940's with a series of extremely manly magazine ads about "Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow". They were unspecified futuristic thinkers who liked the fact that Seagram's was patient enough to age VO for six years. Each of the ads depicted a different miracle that would transform postwar America and they were glorious." Thanks to Theron Jacobs.
anonymous

The Social Effects of the European Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...social-effects-european-crisis

shared by anonymous on 05 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities March 2 to demand an end to the government's austerity measures and, in some cases, to call for the resignation of Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho. The European Union considers the Portuguese government a success story in implementing austerity measures after it received a bailout in 2011. However, unemployment doubled in Portugal between 2008 and 2012 and currently affects more than 16 percent of the country's workforce.
  • In Spain, the government announced March 4 that more than five million people in the country are unemployed -- the highest rate seen there in more than three decades -- and a series of suicides committed by people who were to be evicted from their homes has spurred widespread protests.
  • In Greece, reports suggest that the country is going through a shortage of medicines; hundreds of drugs, including antibiotics and anesthetics, are in short supply.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In Portugal, the Secretary of State for Emigrant Communities recently said that up to 240,000 people (roughly 2 percent of the nation's population) have left the country since 2011, due in large part to unemployment and economic contraction.
  • As the recurrent protests in Spain, Greece and Portugal show, there is a growing dissatisfaction in many of the EU member states with the austerity measures proposed by the European Union and applied by national governments.
  • Independent of their ideological orientation, most EU governments have applied the austerity policies proposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The traditional parties' lack of alternatives to austerity has generated a growing unease among local populations.
  • Such crises of legitimacy are often accompanied by an increase in euroscepticism, since many of these new parties blend anti-establishment rhetoric with opposition to the European Union or Germany's leadership of the bloc.
  • The combination of economic, social and political crises growing in Europe concerns Brussels for a number of reasons.
  • First, political uncertainty often generates instability in the financial markets.
  • Second, and perhaps most important, the economic crisis creates an environment conducive to the growth of extremist political views, both from the left and from the right.
  • anonymous on 05 Mar 13
     
    "In recent weeks, many European bureaucrats and national leaders have expressed optimism about the future of the economic situation in the European Union and have suggested that the worst of the crisis has passed. However, events over the past few days show that the crisis is not over and that it continues to have a deepening social impact on eurozone states."
anonymous

Cautiously Toward Utopia: Automation and the Absurdity of Capitalism - 2 views

ieet.org/...abbott20130404

shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Solid analyses of the present automation conundrum abound, ranging from Marshall Brain's classic treatment to recent pieces here at IEET by Brian Merchant and Federico Pistono.
  • Contesting the many economists who insist that the market will adapt, Brain and company articulate the straightforward thesis that replacement of human workers by robots will lead to unemployment, particularly for so-called unskilled workers.
  • As Jaron Lanier writes, if artificial general intelligence remains elusive and software resource use continues to bloat, the need for technical support could keep employment high.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • With those caveats, I do consider waxing unemployment precipitated in part by automation an extremely likely near-term future scenario.
  • In rough strokes, the story of machines displacing and immiserating skilled workers reiterates the very genesis of capitalist modernity.
  • In contrast with the Neo-Luddites of today, the nineteenth-century Luddites expressed no desire to terminate civilization but instead fiercely defended their economic interests against capitalist competition that would reduce them dependent wage labor.
  • Despite the lack of even basic computers – much less artificial intelligence – some radicals in the nineteenth century already proposed that necessary labor could be reduced to a few hours per day.
  • The later Technocracy movement made automation the core of their analysis, argued it would cause mass unemployment, and promoted a society of equally distributed abundance managed by technical experts.
  • As concise distillation of the desires described above, the following passage for Oscar Wilde's “The Soul of Man under Socialism” poetically proclaims a techno-utopian position years before the dawn of twentieth century
  • Looking at this corpus of radical discourse on automation and how mechanization has already displaced and impoverished workers provides context for today's debate.
  • Thus far, capitalism has managed to reinvent itself and weather numerous crises. Prophesies that automation would result in total economic collapse and dreams that it could create a post-scarcity paradise to date remain unrealized.
  • Even manufacturing still requires vast human labor at the moment. Living and working conditions for many twenty-first-century factory workers aren't meaningfully better than over a hundred years ago. State-socialist attempts at rationally planned industrial development have had dubious material benefits while inflicting intense environmental damage and human suffering.
  • Our current circumstances suggest automation of at least basic physical tasks will keep advancing; lights-out factories already exist. The prospect of robots replacing humans at the majority of present-day jobs appears genuinely plausible if far from certain.
  • This allows us to imagine the scenario that folks like the Technocrats were ahead of their time, that the robotization of workforce will lead to long-structural unemployment as it becomes cheaper buy and maintain a robot than pay a human employee. If this comes to pass, widespread poverty seems inevitable without significant changes to actually existing capitalism.
  • As Pistono writes, increasing “[c]ivil unrest, riots, police brutality, and general distress of the population” would at least initially define such a future. I see welfare capitalism, old-fashioned dictatorship, corporate feudalism, state socialism, fascism, and/or anarchism emerging from the ashes.
  • I favor the latter.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Apr 13
       
      I find that surely dubious. Perhaps that's because anarchism seems no less a naive idealism than Libertarianism.
  • Social relations would become profoundly altered if – consistent with Wilde's utopian vision – each individual had independent access to basic necessities and comforts without having to toil.
  • When it comes to post-scarcity, the differences between libertarians and anarchists like myself blur.
  • Barring nanotech genies who grant unlimited wishes, I assess community control of the means of production as my desired arrangement. With proper political mobilization, robotization may allow for prosperous self-sufficient or largely self-sufficient communities.
  • Whatever labor machines could not perform could be divided amongst the populace. Given the magical and alien quality of complete automation – a world without drudgery – the conservative communal scenario akin to nineteenth-century radical utopias intuitively feels more creditable to me. But I know better – or worse – than to always trust intuition.
  • Although the life of any single worker means little or nothing to them, they cannot annihilate the working class without doing the same to their own privilege. Robots change this. Human obsolescence could spell doom for the masses. If structural dynamics drive behavior, a powerful enough group of elites might simply liquidate the unruly hordes of no-longer-need labors.
  • More believably, the rich could withdraw to their own well-guarded estates – whether terrestrial, orbital, or beyond – and live decadently off the fruits of their robotic slaves. Those of us without capital would then be at the mercy of automation's aristocracy for our daily survival. This scenario conflicts with dominant notions of modern morality, but I'd rather have class organization on my side than rely on the sentiments of the oppressors.
  • I want to give automated utopia an honest try, but I also desire fertile landbases for my primitivist comrades. As personally enamored as I am with the transhumanist path, I encourage and endeavor to practice a revolutionary pluralism that respects meaningful diversity.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 13
     
    "The longstanding and growing concern over structural unemployment caused by automation highlights the absurdity of capitalism. Like homelessness caused by too many houses, poverty from mechanization looks perverse and nonsensical from a system-optimization standpoint. This article briefly sketches the history of both fears and hopes surrounding automated labor in order to argue against economic status quo of coercion, inequality, and inefficiency."
anonymous

The Technium: Bootstrapping the Industrial Age - 0 views

www.kk.org/...bootstrapping_t.php

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 13 - Cached
  • In February 1942, R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food.
  • But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe.
  • It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful.
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  • The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more sophisticated items.
  • During the two years of their interment the lathe remade the tools -- like taps and dies -- which were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive qualities.
  • Over years of tinkering, Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make real stuff.
  • Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. This was a small 5-gallon bucket packed with sand.
  • In its center was a coffee can of smoldering BBQ charcoal. Inside the can of charcoal was a small ceramic crucible into which he threw scrap aluminum – cans, etc. Gingery forced air into this crude furnace via a fan, burning the charcoal with enough heat to melt the aluminum. He poured the molten metal into a mold of wet sand carved out in the shape he wanted. When the cast was cool he had a workable metal holding plate, which became the heart of a homemade lathe. Other lathe parts were cast. He finished these rough parts with hand tools. His one “cheat” was adding a used electric motor – although it is not impossible to imagine a wind or water powered version.
  • When the rough lathe was up and running he used it to turn out the parts for a drill press. With the drill press and lathe operating he constantly reworked pieces of the lathe itself, replacing parts with improved versions. In this way, his tiny machine shop was an upcreation device, capable of generating higher a machine of precision than itself.
  • Gingery recapitulated the evolution of technology, the great pattern by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on infinitum. This expansion of upcreation power is the means by which an entire culture lifts itself out of mud by pulling up on its bootstraps.
  • Yet is it obvious this little demonstration is not pure. As a way to make your own machine tools, Gingerys’ plans are fine and dandy. He uses cast off washing machine motors and other junkyard scrap parts to grow a fairly robust machine shop. But as an example of relaunching a technological society in a kind of Robinson Crusoe maneuver – landing somewhere and starting civilization up -- it’s a cheat because in this latter game you don’t get to start with discarded aluminum cans, scavenged nuts and bolts, old electric motors and waste sheet metal.
  • To really navigate the minimum bootstrap path through the industrial web, you’d have to start with finding your own ore, mining and refining it with primitive tools, firing up bricks, rolling out sheet metal, developing screws and bolts by hand – all just to get you to the point where you’d have enough tools and materials to make the simple 5-gallon bucket foundry that Dave Gingery started with.
  • Select at random any one of the many thousands items within the reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.
  • Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
  • This is why restarting a sophisticated society after a devastating setback is so hard. Without all the adjacent items in a given ecological bundle, a single technology can have no effect
  • you need them all working to get one working
  • The conundrum of disaster relief is a testimony to this deep interdependency: one needs roads to bring petrol but petrol to clear roads, medicines to heal people, but healthy people to dispense medicines, communications to enable organization but organization to restore communications. We see the interdependent platform of technology primarily when it breaks down.
  • This is also the explanation of why we should not confuse a good clear view of the future with a short distance. We can see the perfect outlines of where technology is going, but we tend to overestimate how soon it will come. Usually the delay (in our eager eyes) is due to the invisible ecology of other needed technologies that aren’t ready yet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 13
       
      Classic example that's relatable to nerds: Virtual Reality. In the '90's, the graphics tech wasn't close to where it needed to be. Also, ram prices and other hardware limitations (speed) made implementing it in any serious way a joke. Now, of course, the Oculus Rift is a consumer good. We don't call stuff "VR" anymore (as a buzzword), we just know we can buy a cool attachment that makes everything 3D.
  • The invention will hang suspended in the future for many years, not coming any closer the now. Then when the ignored co-technologies are in place it will appear in our lives in a sudden, with much surprise and applause for its unexpected appearance.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 13
     
    "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?"
anonymous

Would Legalizing Marijuana Be Too Hard on Simpletons? - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267007

shared by anonymous on 10 Jan 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Jan 13
     
    "One final point about the "unsophisticated" people the paternalists are out to protect. So long as prohibition persists, a subset of them will be risking their futures and perhaps their lives by deciding to sell drugs on the black market. And another subset of the "unsophisticated" will trust the wrong people to supply their drugs and wind up with a product more dangerous than it would otherwise be. I wish David Frum's family all the best, but catering drug policy to the needs of upper-middle-class kids in homes with parents who actively talk to them about drug abuse doesn't make much sense, even from a paternalist perspective -- especially given the awful track record of "it's illegal" in preventing American youth from experimenting with marijuana."
anonymous

On SXSW 2013: Vanishing Interfaces, Wearable Tech, & AI's - 0 views

ragoodwin.blogspot.com/...2013-vanishing-interfaces.html

shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The last year has presented us with the vanguard of the Wearable Tech revolution.  Faced with products coming out of Kickstarter and perhaps most prominently, the Google Glass project, the equation is about to become very complex.
  • Krishna spoke specifically to the idea that we need to eliminate as many interfaces as we can in clever ways to enhance the User Experience.  The AI panel emphasized the changes coming to the User Experience as predicted by products like Siri and Google Now.  Together, they paint a picture of how building with an eye to streamlining interfaces with AI modules will build a new future for us - a future that is going to be increasingly filled with various devices.
  • what functions do your products have that best fit on those interfaces?
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  • The vanguard is already here in Siri and Google Now.  Each of these represents a type of agent that knows a few things about us.  Google Now will tell you, without your asking, the time it takes to get home from work.  Siri and Google Now both will take your voice input and perform actions that would normally be fairly complicated through a series of interfaces.
  • Not all of us have access to complex and robust voice recognition libraries and a network of camera-equipped cars.  Many of us are, however, in a position to collect or analyze large sets of data.
  • App collects data, sends output to wearable tech.
  • an interface can still exist behind this.  You can open the app and adjust parameters or inputs, but these interfaces become supporting elements, not the primary interface element.  Data that's collected becomes the primary input, done automatically.
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "Less than six years ago the Apple iPhone blew our minds with a new way to think of something we thought we knew really well:  the cellphone.  A couple years later, tablets crashed the party, giving us a big, rich interface to browse and connect with while leaned back in our recliners.  Technologists like myself have been scrambling all the while to find the best methods to utilize the capabilities of these new interfaces ever since."
anonymous

The Strategic Implications of Immigration Reform - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...mplications-immigration-reform

geopolitics immigration reform

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • It would make it possible for illegal immigrants currently in the country to seek legal residency and eventually citizenship. Finally, and perhaps most important, the bill would shift the composition of the inflow of legal immigrants, increasing quotas for highly skilled individuals and constraining the number of visas available to people whose family members are U.S. citizens. 
  • The history of U.S. immigration policy is necessarily long and controversial. Not only is the United States the biggest economy in the world, it is also the largest recipient of immigrants.
  • Immigration law has been used to control the legal entry of people based on a wide range of factors.
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  • These include placing quotas on nationalities and forbidding the entry of polygamists and political extremists. At the same time, U.S. immigration law has been used to encourage the entry of people with specific skill sets.
  • In 1942 the United States negotiated an agreement with Mexico during an agricultural labor shortage. This agreement, known as the Bracero program, allowed millions of Mexican workers to enter the United States between the time the program was implemented and when it ended in 1964.
  • The program opened the door for significant Mexican migration based on family reunification. What appears to be a more contemporary version of that program -- a temporary worker permit specifically designed to integrate migrant agricultural workers -- was included in the bill introduced Wednesday.
  • Though each new wave of immigration brings with it political and social controversy, the United States' ability to integrate new populations gives it a distinct advantage over many other developed countries.
  • In the first place, Latin American immigrant populations tend to have higher fertility rates than the national average. This allows the United States to maintain a population large enough to drive the world’s largest economy -- in stark comparison with Europe, which is set to experience a notable aging and shrinking of its population.
  • Many students from around the world come to study in the United States, but legal restrictions prevent them from staying and working in the country. The proposed system appears designed to help keep more highly educated foreigners in the United States, a country that depends on technological innovation to create high-skilled, high-value jobs.
  • The generation and protection of intellectual property is a strategic national objective amid rising international competition, and if the proposed law successfully increases high-skilled labor immigration, it will contribute significantly to U.S. competitiveness
  • The Mexican government has long made it a priority to find a way to normalize immigrant status. It also has an interest in encouraging population flows that generate billions of dollars worth of remittances annually to Mexico.
  • The fact that immigration reform is attached to the new border security initiative will sweeten the deal for Mexico during negotiations with the United States.
  • For the United States, the big question now is about global competitiveness, and any reform to immigration will seek to address that question.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "A bipartisan group of eight leading U.S. senators on Wednesday officially filed the most comprehensive immigration reform bill since 1990, opening the door for the United States to address an issue that will help to shape the country's economic and demographic future. The bill links the issue of border security with that of immigration and will require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to significantly ramp up its monitoring of the U.S. border over the next 10 years."
anonymous

The Declining Relevance of Generation Gaps - 1 views

declineofscarcity.com/?p=2647

shared by anonymous on 08 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In terms of cultural artifacts, we are shifting to an on-demand system, in which all the media from all of the ages just exists in a giant pile on the internet for anyone to peruse at any time.
  • The increasing fragmentation of entertainment outlets suggests that what will matter most is not so much what generation you’re from, but what micro niche you belong to.
  • Computers interfaces are getting easier to use and increasingly dumbed down.
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  • Relatively fast adoption of new technologies is already pretty much a necessity
  • Better health and medical technology will make the physical differences between the young and the old increasingly less salient.
  • The increasing difficulty of finding a job, the growing impermanence of jobs that exist, the inevitable transformation of higher education, and the continued decoupling of education from work
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 13
     
    "Something I think is already happening and will accelerate in the future, is that traditional generation gaps are going to stop being relevant."
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 13
     
    My comment to the post: What I'd add is that the more traditional elements of generation gaps - namely the cohort/group you identify with - will remain. I'm thinking here of "You were in *this* age group when *that* global event happened." Still, on the surface I can't see anything to disagree with. Surely, the maturation of IT is definitely levelling the operational playing field quite a lot. When I started using PC's, it was considered more akin to, say, having a "chemistry set." Now, my son, my parents, and my grandparents all use the computer as a productivity device in a variety of overlapping fashions. I suppose one could argue against this, claiming (correctly) that all generations have enjoyed TV, but that's a consumption device, a small but very important distinction. As for education, you ain't kidding. In fact, noticing how my son and his peers use or do not use the internet with sufficient interest gives rise to an INTEREST gap. Namely: If you care to invest the effort, you can excel. If not, you don't have too many excuses. Regarding point #5, that's (at least) true for Gen-X'ers and younger. The idea of workplace stability seems almost anachronistic at this point. :) Great post!
anonymous

The Geopolitics of the Yangtze River: Conflicting Imperatives - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-river-conflicting-imperatives

shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In the case of Yangtze development, an official from China's National Development and Reform Commission noted in May 2011 a shift in the focus of central government port development policy from the coast to the interior, adding that most of the opportunities for future port-related investment would be in cities along the Yangtze River.
  • Wuhan's 10-year port redevelopment program is set to consume a large percentage of that investment -- at $28.6 billion, the program accounts for around 70 percent of the country's total ongoing and planned port construction -- though another $4 billion to $5 billion has been set aside for dredging and port expansion everywhere from Chongqing municipality in southwest China to Wuhu in Anhui province.
  • The central government's heightened emphasis on inland waterway port expansion is incongruous with port throughput trends during the previous five-year period, 2007-2011.
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  • Not surprisingly, China's coastal ports dwarf inland ports in terms of both overall throughput and throughput growth. But more telling is that of the major Yangtze ports for which the National Bureau of Statistics provides freight traffic data, only three (at Chongqing, Yueyang and Wuhu) showed significant growth in throughput between 2007 and 2011.
  • Wuhan, the flagship of new port investment on the Yangtze as well as nationally, actually saw declines in both the number of berths and freight throughput during that period.
  • The apparent gap between central government policy prerogatives and the reality of port traffic growth trends exemplifies the way economic development policy under the Communist Party not only responds to present needs but also in many ways actively shapes future realities.
  • Going forward, the question for Beijing will be whether and to what extent it is able to realize its ambitious plans for the Yangtze River corridor and inland China as a whole. Even then, it is not clear that expanding and industrializing a handful of inland cities will reduce mounting economic imbalances or social tensions unless combined with significant changes to a range of other policies, including the hukou (or household registration) system and the fiscal and financial relationship between city, provincial and national governments. Significant changes to these policies will, in turn, meet steep resistance from entrenched bureaucratic interests. More fundamentally, such changes would likely unleash the social unrest that Beijing's entire political economic system is intended to manage.
  • port development in Wuhan is similar to projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the ongoing South-North Water Transfer Project, which seeks to divert up to 10 percent of the Yangtze River's flow to water-starved provinces in northern China. All three are attempts to reconcile immense geographic and environmental constraints with the ballooning demands (both consumer and industrial) of an enormous population and an ever-expanding economy -- all while providing enough jobs to maintain a degree of stability.
  • The problem, then, is not simply that the Chinese government's approach to economic development is inconsistent with the needs of the economy and population as a whole
  • Rather, it is that the needs of the economy -- growth with stability, and energy security despite energy demands that far outstrip domestic resources -- are themselves inconsistent and contradictory.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "Beijing pursues far-reaching development programs such as the industrialization of the Yangtze River region not always because they make economic sense -- often they do not -- but because it must do so to sustain the basic social and economic structures that secure the regime."
anonymous

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities - 0 views

grist.org/...ies-according-to-u-s-utilities

shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
  • Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
  • You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages.
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  • But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power. That’s how they make their money.
  • Here’s how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying “we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we’ll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we’ll need to charge these rates.”
  • The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits.
  • Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
  • First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility’s point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility’s product.
  • (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don’t like reduced demand!)
  • It’s worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use — “peak load.”
  • Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren’t just reducing demand, they’re reducing demand for the utilities’ most valuable product.
  • This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, “DER” means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.) Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?” [Emphasis mine.]
  • Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.”
  • What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities.
  • As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances, etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility’s credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility’s credit even further damaged. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle:
  • One implication of all this — a poorly understood implication — is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations, because it goes straight at utilities’ main profit centers.
  • (“Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations,” the report notes dryly, “it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question.” In other words, investors aren’t that smart and rational financial markets are a myth.)
  • So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)
  • The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies.
  • In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.
  • Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention.
  • This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground."
anonymous

Why America's Fiscal Reality Will Make Euthanasia Inevitable | The Ümlaut - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...ill-make-euthanasia-inevitable

shared by anonymous on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • “A third of the Medicare budget is now spent in the last year of life, and a third of that goes for care in the last month,” reports Susan Jacoby. In the unlikely event that everyone agreed to be euthanized 30 mere days before natural death, we would save 11 percent of the cost of Medicare—or more, counting the secondary effects of decreased demand for medical services. And considering that most of these end-of-life expenses are concentrated in relatively few patients, we wouldn’t need 100 percent uptake to make a substantial dent in costs.
  • But even putting aside fiscal considerations, social acceptance of these practices seems inevitable in the long run. Social norms tend to converge—albeit slowly at times—toward economic efficiency. And devoting enormous medical resources to keep people alive, often uncomfortably, for a few additional weeks is clearly inefficient.
  • We are simply at an early stage of the convergence of social norms toward the efficient equilibrium in which euthanasia is widely accepted and practiced. The fact is, the problem of the long-term ailing elderly is relatively new to human history and even to our society. Not so long ago, old people would simply die when they got sick. Consequently, we are still holding onto the norms that were quite possibly efficient for that era—that unlimited care must be given to those near death. But as such care becomes ever more costly, the old norms will be steadily undermined, and we will move toward the new efficient equilibrium.
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 13
     
    "Liberal attitudes toward end-of-life decisions are gaining political ground, both in America and around the world. Twenty years ago, assisted suicide was legal only in Switzerland. Today, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and three American states allow assisted suicide or euthanasia for at least the terminally ill. These trends will continue. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to imagine a future in which euthanasia is illegal in rich countries. But perhaps surprisingly, the legalization of euthanasia is likely to be driven not by moral contemplation but by the economics of life and death."
anonymous

United Kingdom Moves Away from the European Project - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...om-moves-away-european-project

shared by anonymous on 22 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Cameron has pledged to hold a referendum after 2015 on the United Kingdom's role in Europe. He has also said he would reclaim powers London surrendered to the European Union. While they no doubt reflect similar anxieties across the Continent, such statements are anathema to the European project, and by making them, Cameron could be setting a precedent that could further undermine the European Union.
  • According to various opinion polls, roughly 8-14 percent of the country supports the United Kingdom Independence Party, even though it received only 3.1 percent of the popular vote in the 2010 elections. These levels of support make the party a serious contender with the Liberal Democrats as the United Kingdom's third-largest party (after the Labour Party and the Conservative Party). Some polls show that the United Kingdom Independence Party already is the third-most popular party, while others suggest it has poached members from the Conservative Party, a worrying trend ahead of elections for the European Parliament in 2014 and general elections in 2015.
  • Despite his criticisms of the bloc, Cameron has said he does not want to leave the European Union outright; rather, he wants to repatriate from Brussels as many powers as possible.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • London also believes that the United Kingdom has surrendered too much of its national sovereignty to supranational EU institutions.
  • Yet the United Kingdom is a strong defender of the single market. Roughly half of its exports end up in the European Union, and half of its imports come from the European Union.
  • Some critics suggest that the United Kingdom could leave the European Union but remain a part of the European Economic Area, the trade agreement that includes non-EU members, such as Iceland and Norway. However, the country would still be required to make financial contributions to continental Europe and adapt its legal order to EU standards, but it would not have a vote in EU decisions. According to Cameron, the United Kingdom must be part of the common market and have a say in policymaking.
  • The issue points to the United Kingdom's grand strategy. Despite an alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom is essentially a European power, and it cannot afford to be excluded from Continental affairs.
  • However, this is the first time that London has openly demanded the return to a previous stage in the process of European integration. At no other time has a country tried to dissociate itself from the bloc in this way. The decision not only challenges the Franco-German view of the European Union but also makes a compromise extremely difficult and risky between France and Germany and the United Kingdom.
  • Cameron's rhetoric suggests that he is positioning the United Kingdom to be the leader of a counternarrative that opposes Germany's view of the crisis.
  • In recent years, the country's veto power in the European Union has been reduced substantially. With each reform of the European treaties, unanimous decisions were replaced by the use of qualified majority
  • London could try to become the leader of the non-eurozone countries, but these countries often have competing agendas, as evidenced by recent negotiations over the EU budget. In those negotiations, the United Kingdom was pushing for a smaller EU budget to ease its financial burden, but countries like Poland and Romania were interested in maintaining high agricultural subsidies and strong development aid.
  • The dilemma is best understood in the context of the United Kingdom's grand strategy. Unnecessary political isolation on the Continent is a real threat to London. The more the European Union focuses on the eurozone, the less influence the United Kingdom has on continental Europe
  • As long as London is the main military ally and a major economic partner of the world's only superpower, continental Europe cannot afford to ignore the United Kingdom.
  • anonymous on 22 Jan 13
     
    "British Prime Minister David Cameron will deliver a speech in London on Jan. 23, during which he will discuss the future of the United Kingdom's relationship with the European Union. Excerpts leaked to the media suggest that harsh EU criticism will figure prominently in the speech, a suggestion in keeping with Cameron's recent statements about the bloc. But more important, the excerpts signal an unprecedented policy departure: renegotiating the United Kingdom's role in the European Union. London has negotiated exemptions from some EU policies in the past, even gaining some concessions from Brussels in the process; this time, it is trying to become less integrated with the bloc altogether."
anonymous

America's Pacific Logic - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...-pacific-logic-robert-d-kaplan

america pacific logic geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 12 - Cached
  • When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, signaling communism's defeat in Europe, security experts talked about a shift in diplomatic and military energies to the Pacific. But Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 led to a decadelong preoccupation with the Middle East, with the U.S. Army leading a land war against Iraq in 1991 and the Navy and Air Force operating no-fly zones for years thereafter. Then came 9/11, and the Bush administration's initiation of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a response. Finally, the ending of both those conflicts is in sight, and the United States, rather than return to quasi-isolationism as it has done with deleterious effect after other ground wars in its history, is attempting to pivot its focus to the geographical heart of the global economy: the Indian and Pacific oceans.
  • The Indian Ocean is the world's energy interstate, across which passes crude oil and natural gas from the Arabian Peninsula and Iranian Plateau to the burgeoning, middle-class urban sprawls of East Asia.
  • Though we live in a jet and information age, 90 percent of all commercial goods that travel from one continent to another do so by container ship, and half of those goods in terms of global tonnage -- and one-third in terms of monetary value -- traverse the South China Sea
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • And it is the U.S. Navy and Air Force, more than any other institutions, that have kept those sea lines of communication secure, thus allowing for post-Cold War globalization in the first place.
  • This is the real public good that the United States provides the world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 12
       
      I posit that this is a slight misnomer. While it provides the world with a long, reliable trade route, it is still focused around maintaining U.S. global primacy and so serves a national interest. It doesn't befit us to get weepy-eyed at how much we've 'given.' Not that StratFor is DOING that, but I'm just trying to clear my throat on a tiny detail that (I think) matters.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 19 Apr 12
       
      All of capitalism's worth is tied up in the external benefits stemming from self-interested actions, innit?
  • Beijing has been buying smart, investing in subs, ballistic missiles, and space and cyber warfare as part of a general defense build-up. China has no intention of going to war with the United States, but it does seek to impede in time of crisis U.S. military access to the South China Sea and the rest of maritime Asia.
  • China, through the combination of its economic and military power, will undermine the sovereignty of countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, all of which are de facto or de jure U.S. allies.
  • The country that is the biggest target for China is Vietnam, whose seaboard forms the western edge of the South China Sea and whose economically dynamic population of 87 million makes it a future maritime Turkey, a midlevel power in its own right
  • If China can "Finlandize" Vietnam, Beijing will in practical terms capture the South China Sea. This explains Washington's increasing military and interest in Hanoi.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 19 Apr 12
       
      Dropped a word, there. ;)
  • The Chinese are simply unable to psychologically divorce their claims on the nearby South China Sea from the territorial depredations directed against China by the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries. To Chinese officials, the South China Sea represents blue national soil.
  • Of course, American diplomacy has been active on these matters for years, but U.S. diplomats would lack credibility if they were not backed by a robust military presence in the future. This is what the pivot is all about: The United States does not intend to desert maritime Asia in its hour of need. As one high-ranking diplomat of a South China Sea country told me, if the United States were to withdraw an aircraft carrier strike group from the region it would be a "game-changer," ushering the region toward Finlandization.
  • A profound socio-economic crisis in China itself -- something that by no means can be ruled out -- might have the effect of slowing this quasi-imperial rise. But that hasn't happened quite yet, and in the meantime, the United States is forced to react to China's growing military and commercial capabilities.
  • But the change in U.S. policy focus is not literally about containing China. "Containment" is a word of Cold War vintage related to holding ground against the Soviet Union, a country with which the United States had a one-dimensional, hostile relationship. The tens of thousands of American students and corporate executives in Beijing attest to the rich, multi-dimensional relationship the United States enjoys with China. China is so much freer than the former Soviet Union that to glibly state that China is "not a democracy" is to miss the point of China's rise entirely.
  • Were the United States not now to turn to the Indo-Pacific, it would risk a multipolar military order arising up alongside an already existent multipolar economic and political order. Multipolar military systems are more unstable than unipolar and bipolar ones because there are more points of interactions and thus more opportunities for miscalculations, as each country seeks to readjust the balance of power in its own favor.
  • If American power was diminished, China, India and other powers would be far more aggressive toward each other than they are now, for they all benefit from the secure sea lines of communication provided by the U. S. Navy and Air Force.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 12
       
      I buy this, and the relationship fascinates me. I like how U.S. control over the sea lanes tempers hostility. These nations can tolerate U.S. control more than they can their other regional competitors.
  • Australia, a country of only 23 million inhabitants, will spend $279 billion over the next two decades on submarines, fighter jets and other hardware. This is not militarism, but the reasonable response of a nation at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific oceans in order to account for its own defense in the face of rapidly changing power dynamics.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 12
     
     by Robert D. Kaplan The Obama administration "pivot" to the Pacific, formally announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last November and reiterated more recently by the president himself, might appear like a reassertion of America's imperial tendencies just at the time when Washington should be concentrating on the domestic economy. But in fact, the pivot was almost inevitable.
anonymous

Dating the Fourth Turning - 12 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...dating-the-fourth-turning

generations

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Pending stunning new developments, I believe the catalyst occurred in 2008. 
  • First, the economy.  Yes, the U.S. recession technically started in December of 2007, but neither the public nor the market felt it until the spring and summer of the following year.  In fact, if I had to give the catalyst a month, I would say September of 2008
  • Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson later recounted (in On the Brink) that in the last two weeks of September, 2008, they were only “days away” from “economic collapse, another Great Depression, and 25 percent unemployment.” 
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • And, to add even greater edge to this catalyst, we were at that time just six weeks away from the election of Barack Obama, who brought a new party to power and was America’s first African-American President.  Would he have won without the meltdown?  Who knows.  It would have been a much closer election. 
  • As a rule, a new turning starts a few years (typically 2 to 6) after each living generation (especially the new youth generation) enters a new phase of life.  2008 was 4 to 6 years after the oldest Millennials reached age 21 and graduated from college—and 3 years after the oldest Boomers (born in 1943) started to receive their first Social Security retirement checks.  In terms of phase of life, this is right on.
  • 9/11 will go down as one of the more famous crisis precursors in American history.  A crisis precursor is an event that foreshadows a crisis without being an integral part of it.  Other such precursors in American history include the Stamp Act Rebellion (1765), or Bleeding Kansas (1856), or perhaps the Red Scare (1919). 
  • Now let’s move on to the next question: Where is the regeneracy?
  • I think it’s pretty obvious that the regeneracy has not yet started.
  • We may like to imagine that there is a definable day and hour when America, faced by growing danger and adversity, explicitly decides to patch over its differences, band together, and build something new.  But maybe what really happens is that everyone feels so numb that they let somebody in charge just go ahead and do whatever he’s got to do.
  • The regeneracy cannot always be identified with a single news event.  But it does have to mark the beginning of a growth in centralized authority and decisive leadership at a time of great peril and urgency.  Typically, the catalyst itself doesn’t lead directly to a regeneracy.  There has to be a second or third blow, something that seems a lot more perilous than just the election of third-party candidate (Civil War catalyst) or a very bad month in the stock market (Great Power catalyst).
  • When it happens, I strongly suspect it will be in response to an adverse financial event.  It may also happen in response to a geopolitical event.  It may well happen over the next year or two.  Given the pattern of historical 4Ts, it is very likely happen before the end of the next presidential term (2016). 
  • Which means we already know who will be President at that time: Either Obama or Romney.  (Or at least this is high probability: According to Intrade, it is now over a 96 percent bet, so if you disagree you can make 25-to-1 by betting against global future traders.)  It’s interesting that both men are temperamentally similar—cool, detatched, capable of gravitas–and that one could imagine either playing a Gray Champion role if history required it.
  • When will the 4T climax take place?  To be honest, I have no idea.  On timing, let me toss out my guess based on the typical pattern of historical 4Ts: The climax may arrive around 2022-2025.
  • The point here being that 4Ts are pretty chaotic.  During 4Ts, the future seems much less certain than in retrospect.  They are mostly defined not so much by how much institutions provide order, but by how much people want order.  Here’s where the Millennials will play a key role.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 12
     
    Readers of The Fourth Turning already know that 4Ts in history are dated and internally subdivided into stages by four critical events.  The first event, the catalyst, triggers or starts the 4T.  It is "a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood." The second, the regeneracy, marks the beginning of "a new counter-entropy that reunifies and re-energizes civic life." The third, the climax, is "a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and triumph of the new."  The fourth is the resolution, "a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order."
anonymous

NATO's Ordinary Future by Robert D. Kaplan - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...rdinary-future-robert-d-kaplan

shared by anonymous on 03 Jul 12 - Cached
  • The statistics regarding just how much the United States had to go it alone in Libya -- pushed by the British and French -- despite the diplomatic fig leaf of "leading from behind," are devastating for the alliance.
  • More than 80 percent of the gasoline used in the intervention came from the U.S. military. Almost all the individual operation orders had an American address. Of dozens of countries taking part, only eight air forces were allowed by their defense ministries to drop any bombs. Many flew sorties apparently only for the symbolism of it. While most airstrikes were carried out by non-U.S. aircraft, the United States ran the logistical end of the war.
  • "Europe is dead militarily," a U.S. general told me.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Americans are deeply proud of their armed forces, even during wars that have become quagmires. For the most part, that is not the case in Western Europe, where the soldiers' profession is quietly looked down upon. (The United Kingdom, France and Denmark are among the exceptions.) Europeans tend to see their own armed forces members as civil servants in funny uniforms. The idea that it is the military that defends their democratic freedoms is something many Europeans find laughable.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 05 Jul 12
       
      I think this is rightly so, especially given the history that many of the other nations have with fascism and military dictatorship in the 20th century. When I talk to a pro-military German, Italian or Spaniard, I worry that I'm speaking to a fascist.
  • Of course, during the Cold War NATO had a core purpose, which it lacks today: defending Central Europe against Soviet divisions. The disappearance of that core purpose immeasurably weakens NATO. And the withdrawal of two of the four U.S. Army brigade combat teams from Europe by 2014 will weaken it further, even with the missile deployments in Eastern Europe. But that doesn't mean the alliance has no uses.
  • Geography still rules.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 03 Jul 12
       
      This is where I still clear my throat. ;) I've yet to see any compelling reasons why technology (and/or social change) has trumped geography.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 05 Jul 12
       
      I call that an unfounded assertion. Is it intended as an introduction to the topic of Russian inroads? If so, why should Russian influence in European nations wary of Russia (by dint of history, when geography was more important) be easier than Russian or Chinese inroads in Africa?
  • Moreover, the more that Europe reels from its debt crisis, the greater the possibility of geopolitical inroads made by Russia, and thus the more relevant NATO becomes.
  • Analytically, it is a mistake to assume that just because a political-military organization is less useful now than it was a quarter-century ago it is useless altogether.
  • NATO, like the United Nations on occasion, still provides diplomatic cover of varying degrees for American actions. NATO is American hegemony on the cheap. Imagine how much less of a fiasco the Iraq War would have been were it a full-fledged NATO operation, rather than a largely unilateral one. Without organizations like NATO and the United Nations, American power is more lonely in an anarchic world.
  • land engagements are especially problematic for militaries in pacifist-trending societies. NATO might be ideally suited for air and naval rescue missions in Africa and points beyond. But NATO will be kept alive so that it can continue to serve as a vehicle for European political coherence.
  • A more dynamic Russia, a more chaotic North Africa and continued unrest and underdevelopment in the Balkans might all pose challenges to Europe. If they do, NATO will provide a handy confidence-building mechanism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 03 Jul 12
       
      More practical stratforian argumentation. They are a useful counter to both the ebuliant pro-NATO prostelyzers as well as the anti-NATO [usually Uhmrrican] detractors. It's a polito-military entity like any other: It has strengths, weaknesses, and qualities that are as yet untested.
  • anonymous on 03 Jul 12
     
    Whatever one thought of the Libya intervention, the details make for a bad advertisement about NATO. As one U.S. Air Force planner told me, "It was like Snow White and the 27 dwarfs, all standing up to her knees" -- the United States being Snow White and the other NATO member states being the dwarfs. The statistics regarding just how much the United States had to go it alone in Libya -- pushed by the British and French -- despite the diplomatic fig leaf of "leading from behind," are devastating for the alliance.
anonymous

The Legend of the Tsar's Finger - 0 views

bigthink.com/...the-legend-of-the-tsars-finger

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The anomaly is also known as the Tsar’s Finger, because the story goes that Nicholas I stuck out a finger over the ruler, and in his furious impatience, simply drew around it. Since nobody dares to correct a Tsar, especially not an angry one, the railway was built exactly like Nicholas had demanded, bypass included.
  • Unfortunately, it's too good to be true: the Moscow-St Petersburg Railway was completed in 1851, four years before Nicholas died of pneumonia [2]. The curve in the otherwise remarkably (but not entirely) straight railway line wasn't built until 1877.  
  • The Tsar's Finger was in use for almost 125 years; advances in locomotive technology had long since rendered the detour unnecessary before the track was restored to its original, straight course in 2001. The trip between Moscow and St Petersburg was shortened by 3 miles, to 404 miles. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While there is no literal truth in the story 'explaining' the Verebinsky Bypass, like many other urban legends, it resonates with out perception of the subject. In this case, the relationship between Russia and its ruler [3].
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "Tsar Nicholas I's glorious vision - a railway connecting St Petersburg with the Empire's second city, Moscow - is held back by the bickering of engineers. Unable to agree on the best route of the future railway line, they test the patience of the Russian autocrat until it snaps. In exasperation, Nicholas snatches the map from the dithering technicians, grabs a ruler and draws a straight line between both cities: Gentlemen, there's your route! "
anonymous

What happened before the Big Bang? - 0 views

io9.com/...t-happened-before-the-big-bang

shared by anonymous on 02 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Standard Answer: Nothing. So please don't ask.
  • In the normal general relativity picture of things, the moment of creation produced not only space, but time; the two are incredibly intermixed, after all. To Einstein, talking about what happened before the Big Bang is just as nonsensical as asking what happens if you travel north of the North Pole. There just isn't just a place, or consequently such a time.
  • Our knowledge of physics in the first 10^-44 seconds after the beginning (which, admittedly, is a pretty damn short time) is virtually non-existent. This instant is known as the Planck Time, and since we don't know what happened before the Planck time with anything even remotely resembling certainty, we absolutely don't know what happened before the Big Bang. Regardless, logic dictates that we're left with one of two possibilities: The universe had some sort of beginning, in which case we're left with the very unsettling problem of what caused the universe in the first place. The universe has been around forever, in which case there's literally an infinite amount of history, both before and after us.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Model #1: The Universe out of Nothing
  • You know what we call something with no size? Nothing.
  • It's troubling to think that the physics existed before the universe did, or, for that matter, before time did.
  • Model #2: The Universe gave birth to itself
  • Gott and Li showed that it was possible to solve Einstein's equations of general relativity in such a way that a universe started off going around and around in a continuous loop, and that that loop could serve as the "trunk" of a tree that sprouted, giving rise to our own universe.
  • Model #3: This Is Not the First Universe
  • The problem with this (besides the fact that there is too little stuff in our universe to make it collapse again) is one of disorder. As we've discussed previously, the universe loves disorder.
  • Looking back, our universe was very smooth, and in a very high state of order. This wouldn't solve the problem at all.
  • And there are even more models, some including extra dimensions, some include concepts like "loop quantum gravity," some infinite in time, and some with a definite duration. At the end of the day, the Big Bang theory has the same basic problem as evolutionary theory. Both do a nearly perfect job in explaining how the universe (or life) changed when it first came about, but neither can explain how things really got started in the first place.
  • anonymous on 02 Feb 12
     
    We spend a lot of time thinking about futurism, but the past is pretty interesting, too. In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we get extra speculative and think about what things may have been like before the beginning of time. What was there before the Big Bang? Did anything exist before our current universe? Here's what we know.
anonymous

The Next Transitions in the Technium - 0 views

www.kk.org/...the_next_transi.php

shared by anonymous on 03 Feb 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 03 Feb 12
     
    "What kinds of developmental thresholds would any planet of sentient beings pass through? The creation of writing would be a huge one. The unleashing of cheap non-biological energy is another. The invention of the scientific method is a giant leap. And the fine control of energy (as in electricity) for long-distant communications is significant as well, enabling all kinds of other achievements. Our civilization has passed through all these stages; what are some future transitions we can expect -- no matter the fashions and fads of the day? What are the emergent thresholds of information and energy organization that our civilization can look forward to? Most of these thresholds are gradual, so we can't assign dates, but each of these structures seem to be a natural transition that any civilization must reach sooner or later."
anonymous

Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy - 0 views

www.faz.net/...ice-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • let us not pass over America’s surveillance addiction in silence. It is real; it has consequences; and the world would do itself a service by sending America to a Big Data rehab. But there’s more to learn from the Snowden affair.
  • It has also busted a number of myths that are only peripherally related to surveillance: myths about the supposed benefits of decentralized and commercially-operated digital infrastructure, about the current state of technologically-mediated geopolitics, about the existence of a separate realm known as “cyberspace.”
  • First of all, many Europeans are finally grasping, to their great dismay, that the word “cloud” in “cloud computing” is just a euphemism for “some dark bunker in Idaho or Utah.”
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • Second, ideas that once looked silly suddenly look wise. Just a few months ago, it was customary to make fun of Iranians, Russians and Chinese who, with their automatic distrust of all things American, spoke the bizarre language of “information sovereignty.”
  • Look who’s laughing now: Iran’s national email system launched a few weeks ago. Granted the Iranians want their own national email system, in part, so that they can shut it down during protests and spy on their own people AT other times. Still, they got the geopolitics exactly right: over-reliance on foreign communications infrastructure is no way to boost one’s sovereignty. If you wouldn’t want another nation to run your postal system, why surrender control over electronic communications?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Aug 13
       
      This could have been written by StratFor.
  • Third, the sense of unconditional victory that civil society in both Europe and America felt over the defeat of the Total Information Awareness program – a much earlier effort to establish comprehensive surveillance – was premature.
  • The problem with Total Information Awareness was that it was too big, too flashy, too dependent on government bureaucracy. What we got instead, a decade later, is a much nimbler, leaner, more decentralized system, run by the private sector and enabled by a social contract between Silicon Valley and Washington
  • This is today’s America in full splendor: what cannot be accomplished through controversial legislation will be accomplished through privatization, only with far less oversight and public control.
  • From privately-run healthcare providers to privately-run prisons to privately-run militias dispatched to war zones, this is the public-private partnership model on which much of American infrastructure operates these days.
  • Communications is no exception. Decentralization is liberating only if there’s no powerful actor that can rip off the benefits after the network has been put in place.
  • Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Aug 13
       
      THIS right here, is crucial.
  • The sheer naivete of statements like this – predicated on the assumption that somehow one can “live” online the way one lives in the physical world and that virtual politics works on a logic different from regular politics – is illustrated by the sad case of Edward Snowden, a man with a noble mission and awful trip-planning skills.
  • Fifth, the once powerful myth that there exists a separate, virtual space where one can have more privacy and independence from social and political institutions is dead.
  • Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels of privacy and security.”
  • Read this again: here’s a senior Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.
  • Convergence did happen – we weren’t fooled! – but, miraculously, technologies converged on the least secure and most wiretap-friendly option available.
  • This has disastrous implications for anyone living in dictatorships. Once Microsoft and its peers start building software that is insecure by design, it turbocharges the already comprehensive spying schemes of authoritarian governments. What neither NSA nor elected officials seem to grasp is that, on matters of digital infrastructure, domestic policy is also foreign policy; it’s futile to address them in isolation.
  • This brings us to the most problematic consequence of Snowden’s revelations. As bad as the situation is for Europeans, it’s the users in authoritarian states who will suffer the most.
  • And not from American surveillance, but from domestic censorship. How so? The already mentioned push towards “information sovereignty” by Russia, China or Iran would involve much more than protecting their citizens from American surveillance. It would also trigger an aggressive push to shift public communication among these citizens – which, to a large extent, still happens on Facebook and Twitter – to domestic equivalents of such services.
  • It’s probably not a coincidence that LiveJournal, Russia’s favorite platform, suddenly had maintenance issues – and was thus unavailable for general use – at the very same time that a Russian court announced its verdict to the popular blogger-activist Alexei Navalny.
  • For all the concerns about Americanization and surveillance, US-based services like Facebook or Twitter still offer better protection for freedom of expression than their Russian, Chinese or Iranian counterparts.
  • This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.
  • On matters of “Internet freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in neither.
  • Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence.
  • What is to be done? Let’s start with surveillance. So far, most European politicians have reached for the low-hanging fruit – law – thinking that if only they can better regulate American companies – for example, by forcing them to disclose how much data and when they share with NSA – this problem will go away.
  • This is a rather short-sighted, naïve view that reduces a gigantic philosophical problem – the future of privacy – to seemingly manageable size of data retention directives.
  • Our current predicaments start at the level of ideology, not bad policies or their poor implementation.
  • As our gadgets and previously analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere. One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost.
  • In other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange, you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush.
  • If this is, indeed, the future that we are heading towards, it’s obvious that laws won’t be of much help, as citizens would voluntarily opt for such transactions – the way we already opt for free (but monitorable) email and cheaper (but advertising-funded) ereaders.
  • In short, what is now collected through subpoenas and court orders could be collected entirely through commercial transactions alone.
  • Policymakers who think that laws can stop this commodificaton of information are deluding themselves. Such commodification is not happening against the wishes of ordinary citizens but because this is what ordinary citizen-consumer want.
  • Look no further than Google’s email and Amazon’s Kindle to see that no one is forced to use them: people do it willingly. Forget laws: it’s only through political activism and a robust intellectual critique of the very ideology of “information consumerism” that underpins such aspirations that we would be able to avert the inevitable disaster.
  • Where could such critique begin? Consider what might, initially, seem like a bizarre parallel: climate change.
  • For much of the 20th century, we assumed that our energy use was priced correctly and that it existed solely in the consumer paradigm of “I can use as much energy as I can pay for.” Under that paradigm, there was no ethics attached to our energy use: market logic has replaced morality – which is precisely what has enabled fast rates of economic growth and the proliferation of consumer devices that have made our households electronic paradises free from tiresome household work.
  • But as we have discovered in the last decade, such thinking rested on a powerful illusion that our energy use was priced correctly – that we in fact paid our fair share.
  • But of course we had never priced our energy use correctly because we never factored in the possibility that life on Earth might end even if we balance all of our financial statements.
  • The point is that, partly due to successful campaigns by the environmental movement, a set of purely rational, market-based decisions have suddenly acquired political latency, which has given us differently designed cars, lights that go off if no one is in the room, and so forth.
  • It has also produced citizens who – at least in theory – are encouraged to think of implications that extend far beyond the ability to pay their electricity bill.
  • Right now, your decision to buy a smart toothbrush with a sensor in it – and then to sell the data that it generates – is presented to us as just a purely commercial decision that affects no one but us.
  • But this is so only because we cannot imagine an information disaster as easily as we can imagine an environmental disaster.
  • there are profound political and moral consequences to information consumerism– and they are comparable to energy consumerism in scope and importance.
  • We should do our best to suspend the seeming economic normalcy of information sharing. An attitude of “just business!” will no longer suffice. Information sharing might have a vibrant market around it but it has no ethical framework to back it up.
  • NSA surveillance, Big Brother, Prism: all of this is important stuff. But it’s as important to focus on the bigger picture -- and in that bigger picture, what must be subjected to scrutiny is information consumerism itself – and not just the parts of the military-industrial complex responsible for surveillance.
  • As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from programs like Prism.
  • Some might say: If only we could have a digital party modeled on the Green Party but for all things digital. A greater mistake is harder to come by.
  • What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it.
  • Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” – it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved.
  • The Pirates’s tragic miscalculation was trying to do too much: they wanted to change both the process of politics and its content. That project was so ambitious that it was doomed to failure from the very beginning.
  • whatever reforms the Pirates have been advancing did not seem to stem from some long critical reflections of the pitfalls of the current political system but, rather, from their belief that the political system, incompatible with the most successful digital platforms from Wikipedia to Facebook, must be reshaped in their image. This was – and is – nonsense.
  • A parliament is, in fact, different from Wikipedia – but the success of the latter tells us absolutely nothing about the viability of the Wikipedia model as a template for remodeling our political institutions
  • In as much as the Snowden affair has forced us to confront these issues, it’s been a good thing for democracy. Let’s face it: most of us would rather not think about the ethical implications of smart toothbrushes or the hypocrisy involved in Western rhetoric towards Iran or the genuflection that more and more European leaders show in front of Silicon Valley and its awful, brain-damaging language, the Siliconese.
  • The least we can do is to acknowledge that the crisis is much deeper and that it stems from intellectual causes as much as from legal ones. Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.
  • anonymous on 05 Aug 13
     
    "The problem with the sick, obsessive superpower revealed to us by Edward Snowden is that it cannot bring itself to utter the one line it absolutely must utter before it can move on: "My name is America and I'm a dataholic.""
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