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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."
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David Stockman's Dystopia - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...david_stockman_s_dystopia
shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 13 - Cached
  • What's more, his perps would have to be held in separate cells, because they're of remarkably different stripes. Milton Friedman is implicated (his sin: advocating managing the money supply), but so is Paul Krugman (and of course his spiritual mentor John Maynard Keynes).  Franklin Roosevelt is on the list of "policy villains," but so is Richard Nixon, who dealt the final blow to the gold standard. Former Reagan economic advisor Art Laffer (Mr. Supply Side) is there, a few names away from Larry Summers (these days, Mr. Demand Side), who served, most recently, as Barack Obama's top economic advisor.
  • So what's the connection? I'll give you a hint: They all advocated economic interventions. They thought they could help boost growth, lower unemployment, raise revenues, stimulate investment, smooth out volatility, and so on. And, as Stockman sees it, the problem is not simply that they all failed miserably. It's that their failure has doomed America.
  • It's easy to poke fun at a rant like this, and most of it is just plain wrong (more on that in a moment). But what's more interesting is to figure out where Stockman is on target.
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  • There are, unquestionably, aspects of American capitalism that have been corrupted -- in no small part through money in politics, something Stockman vividly rails against. He's also right that the U.S. economy is seriously underperforming and bad policy is implicated. One of his hobbyhorses, crony capitalism -- a frequent target of the very progressive economist Dean Baker -- is surely holding back growth, skewing the distribution of income and wealth, and steering investment not toward its most productive uses, but to those most favored by the tax code.
  • Unfortunately, those points are not central to his argument.
  • What Stockman is most worked up about is that for almost a century, economic policymakers have ... um ... made policy, and that's led to cheap money, high indebtedness, and econo-moral turpitude.
  • Stockman insists that the market should work out its failures without all these meddlers trying to fix them (there must be "a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy"); no government investments in industry; central banks shouldn't mess with the money supply, and so on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Apr 13
       
      Sigh... standard LP refrain.
  • The reader gets tons of invective against interventionists from FDR to Obama, but never a compelling explanation as to why America would have been better off if we did nothing to lessen the economic pain caused by the Great Depression or the Great Recession by applying Keynesian stimulus. Nor is there any analysis of why mainstream economics is wrong to believe, based on decades of empirical evidence from economies across the globe, that such stimulus, both fiscal and monetary, actually works.
  • Similarly, not only is there absolutely no benefit assigned to any of the Federal Reserve's actions over the years to push back on inflation and joblessness (and no question, they've made mistakes), but Stockman, with apparent ignorance of the historical record, atavistically pines for the gold standard.
  • If you want to get rid of central banks, you'd better come up with some other stabilizing mechanism a whole lot better than gold buggery. And I'm quite certain that would lead you right back to independent central banks.
  • Moreover, sovereign debt is neither bad nor good -- its assessment must be situational. Even a cursory analysis should stress that debt that's paying for inefficient health care is a serious problem. Debt that's financing productivity-enhancing public goods or temporarily offsetting a large demand contraction is a very different story.
  • Stockman never explains how a market failure such as underinvestment in such sectors would be overcome by simply not having the government help directly by subsidizing research and development or backstopping credit to offset the high risk premiums investors would otherwise demand.
  • Instead, we get a "revisionist history of our era," as he puts it, where Keynes and FDR are villains, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge heroes, gold is king, central bankers are legal counterfeiters, and debt is always evil.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 13
     
    "Why Reagan's former budget chief is like a crazy person howling in the wind. Let's ignore him."
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China's Emerging Economic Center - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...hinas-emerging-economic-center
shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 13 - Cached
  • From west to east, it binds the upper and lower stretches of the Yangtze together, serving as the intermediary for goods passing between the Sichuan Basin -- western China's industrial powerhouse -- and the Yangtze River Delta.
  • From north to south, it anchors the Beijing-Guangzhou railway, a 2,324-kilometer-long (1,444-mile-long) trunk line that gives China's traditional political core, the North China Plain, direct access to the prosperous but historically restive Guangdong province.
  • Between 2001 and 2011, fixed asset investment into Wuhan (much of it centrally allocated) rose nearly eightfold. Gross industrial output grew by 760 percent over the same period, while local government revenue grew by 680 percent and the city's gross regional product more than quadrupled.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 13
     
    "Situated at a bend in the Yangtze River near the geographic center of Han China, Wuhan is a natural transportation crossroads."
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Visualization and Time Travel - 0 views

jackmoreland.wordpress.com/...visualization-and-time-travel
shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 13
     
    "My master's thesis was on time perception in virtual environments, looking at elements that make time seem to pass more quickly/slowly. This being the case, I'm also interested in how time is described and perceived in various works of fiction."
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Escalating Tensions on the Korean Peninsula (Agenda) - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nsions-korean-peninsula-agenda
shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 13 - Cached
  • It has now got to the point where you have a former CIA director, Michael Hayden, saying the possibility of North Korea funding a nuclear attack is somewhere between extremely remote and zero.
  • Well I think one in looking at his statements you have to look at the difference between nuclear and conventional warfare. The North Koreans have developed a nuclear device that they are able test underground. It's highly unlikely that the North Koreans have developed a deliverable nuclear weapon. And therefore, North Korea striking with a nuclear weapon at South Korea and particularly the ability of the North Koreans to strike at Japan or the United States is extremely remote.
  • At the same time, North Korea does have a very large conventional force. That conventional force is forward deployed, and the North Koreans and the South Koreans are exchanging certain types of rhetoric; they're both adjusting their rules of engagement or are at least claiming to be adjusting those.
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  • Well the United States and the Chinese are going to have some meetings coming up in the not too distant future. Certainly, North Korea's going to be in discussion during those. The United States, however, has really tried to stick to its policy of ignoring the North Koreans to death.
  • in some sense the impression and the face that the U.S. is putting on this is that they're not willing to enter any form of negotiation at this time with the North Koreans until after the North Koreans reduce tension -- so not enter talks to bring tensions down but to wait until tensions come down to enter talks.
  • right now, the U.S. and the Chinese are on a very different page about what to do about this crisis.
  • In fact, it has taken most of the world attention off of what had been focused on what was perceived as Chinese maritime aggression in the region and it shifted it all to North Korea.
  • There really is no pre-emptive military action the South Koreans could take that doesn't risk triggering off a complete war.
  • The problem is that what the North Koreans have that threatens South Korea is not necessarily the nuclear program. It's not even really even the missile program. It's the frontline artillery. And there's no way to take out, to attack, to destroy that frontline artillery without basically triggering the response from North Korea to start shelling the greater Seoul-Incheon area.
  • The North Koreans right now, everybody's interpretation -- at least from the government level in looking at the North Koreans -- is that the North Koreans are not intent on actually triggering a war, that North Korea is just as concerned as everybody else about a war and perhaps even more because although the South Korean economy may be devastated in the short term, the likelihood of the North Korean regime being able to continue in the long term is very, very low.
  • So they will lose a war, effectively.
  • Rodger a few days ago I happened to be talking to Alexander Zhebin, a North Korean expert from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He was once the Tass correspondent in Pyongyang, and he argued that the issue for Kim Yong Un was getting a guarantee that his regime would survive, and that once he got that, progress could be made. Do you see any truth in this?
  • I think there is actually some truth in that. The North Koreans…their entire policy that they've been pursuing is a policy of securing and strengthening the Kim regime and securing the elite; it's maintaining control within North Korea.
  • And their pattern of raising tensions and backing down and then they have to raise tensions higher the next time before they back down, has really been going on for about 20 years.
  • They have lived since the end of the Korean War under how they perceive under the guns of the Untied States -- that they are under constant threat from the much larger United States. And whether the U.S. really has an interest in going after North Korea or not doesn't matter to the North Koreans.
  • From the North Korean point of view, Kaesong is probably economically more important for them than it is for South Korea, although there are a lot of small South Korean companies operating there that could be seriously damaged if the facilities close. But for the South Koreans, it is much more psychologically important because it really is the centerpiece of South Korean policy toward North Korea and it's that tiny piece that keeps a connection between the two. And from the South Korean perspective, as long as Kaesong is open, they see it as a signal from the North that they're really not going back to confrontation.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 13
     
    "While President Xi Jinping gives the keynote speech at this weekend's Boao Forum on the Chinese island of Hainan, attended also by business icons like Bill Gates and George Soros, one friend of China will not be there -- North Korea's Kim Jong Un, now pondering his next move in the escalating threats uttered from Pyongyang."
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OSU climate researchers discover 1,800-year-old 'Rosetta stone' ice cores - 0 views

www.dispatch.com/...t-rosetta-stone-ice-cores.html climate ice
shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The Thompsons realized that the Peruvian cores were similar to other ice cores they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. When they found matches in ice cores taken from opposite sides of Earth, they knew they had “Rosetta Stones” with which to compare other climate histories from tropical and subtropical regions.
  • “Looking at ice cores from the tropics has been especially important in allowing us to understand how this very stable climate system has changed over time,” said Daniel Schrag, a Harvard University climatologist.
  • The Quelccaya ice is important because it is perched on a wide flat shelf in a region with clearly defined wet and dry seasons. Each year’s ice is separated by a thin layer of dust, which is blown there during dry months. Researchers can estimate changes in ocean temperature by measuring the ratio of different oxygen isotopes in frozen water molecules. The glacier’s flat perch also keeps each layer straight, which makes it easier to compute annual changes in snowfall, said Ian Howatt, an OSU glaciologist and ice core study co-author.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "Ice cores taken from a remote South American glacier are revealing a year-by-year tropical climate history over nearly two millennia. "
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North Korea: Suspected Missiles Present New Threats - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...d-missiles-present-new-threats geopolitics north korea
shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Neither missile system has been tested, but it is their mobility, rather than their proven effectiveness, that worries U.S. and South Korean observers. Their mobility could enable North Korea to launch a surprise attack -- something nearly impossible to achieve at its stationary satellite launch sites.
  • For several weeks now, South Korean officials have reported movement of North Korean road-mobile missiles. The most recent reports suggest Pyongyang is positioning them on the east coast, possibly to launch them around April 15 to commemorate North Korean founder Kim Il Sung's birthday.
  • North Korea often exploits satellite and reconnaissance activity around the Korean Peninsula to display movement and activity deliberately.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • It is unclear which missile systems Pyongyang is supposedly moving.
  • The United States is taking the development of the KN-08 seriously and has already moved to increase its Ground-based Midcourse Defense array accordingly.
  • The significance of the missile systems is two-fold.
  • If tested successfully, they prove that North Korea is capable of launching longer-range missiles from mobile units.
  • But more immediately, the systems enable North Korea to shape the perceptions of those involved in peninsular affairs.
  • The United States is already taking physical steps in anticipation of a launch, reinforcing its 7th Fleet ballistic missile defense-capable destroyers and other defenses already in theater with out-of-theater assets
  • For North Korea, the current rise in tensions is not a drive to war -- Pyongyang does not believe it could win such a war -- but rather a drive to create political tensions in and between Seoul, Washington, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow and others.
  • The threat of miscalculation or an accident grows as the level of tension grows. Even if the other countries do not see North Korea as seriously pursuing a war, they must step up their own precautions and rules of engagement as precautionary measures.
  • Once the United States and China see this as a real possibility or uncertainty, allowing North Korea to continue its rhetorical challenge unchecked begins to seem less optimal. Washington believes North Korea is unwilling to go so far as to launch an attack beyond small skirmishes, but it is the escalation cycle from the South Korean response that now seems less predictable. This may encourage the United States and others to rethink their strategy of ignoring Pyongyang into submission.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "North Korea's decision to move some of its medium- and long-range ballistic missile systems corresponds with the country's strategy of shaping and dominating the psychological battlefield. South Korean media has reported April 4 that Pyongyang was relocating the missiles, though accounts differ as to whether Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles or the KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missiles were the missiles in question."
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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."
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When the Worst Performers are the Happiest Employees - At Work - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...ad-at-their-jobs-and-loving-it
shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • “Low performers often end up with the easiest jobs because managers don’t ask much of them,” he said, so they’re under less stress and they’re more satisfied with their daily work lives.
  • Meanwhile, dedicated and conscientious workers end up staying at the office late, correcting the work of the low performers, and making sure clients or customers are satisfied. This pattern breeds frustration and disengagement in the high performers—and perhaps ultimately drives them to seek work elsewhere. “They feel stressed and undervalued, and it starts to undermine the high performers’ confidence that the organization is a meritocracy,” said Mr. Murphy.
  • To remedy the situation, managers should speak frankly with high and middle performers, ferreting out what frustrations might potentially send them looking for new opportunities. They should also find out what could motivate them to stick around, he added.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Apr 13
       
      Sadly, this is very hard to do in some environments. To me, it's a matter of metrics and truly understanding your teams. For instance: It could be that buying people tablets for work (with the unspoken nod that it'll be fun to play with) will placate some, but doing so is a political nightmare. Same with almost any fringe item. They're hard to justify and even harder to know if it's well spent money since job satisfaction is in this 'nebulous zone' with little data. But, as I've seen happen, someone really valuable will leave and an org will effectively 'lose' way more productivity than buying tons of tablets would have cost.
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  • In the remaining 58% of organizations surveyed, high performers were the most engaged, or engagement scores were about equal among the employees. In the rarest cases, Murphy said, the middle performers were the most engaged.  That segment of the workforce—the employees who are neither superstars nor slackers—tends to be ignored by managers, he said.
  • Low performers were also more likely than the other two groups to recommend their company as a “great organization to work for.” And in many cases, they didn’t even realize they were low performers. When asked whether the employees at the company “all live up to the same standards,” low performers were far more likely to agree with the statement than their higher-achieving counterparts.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "A new study finds that, in 42% of companies, low performers actually report being more engaged - more motivated and more likely to enjoy working at their organization, for example - than middle and high performers do." - Thanks, Erik. Although I don't know why I should *thank* you for this data. :)
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North Korea Threatens to Attack the United States Again - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ens-attack-united-states-again united states US north korea geopolitics
shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • On March 29, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un placed the country's Strategic Rocket Forces on standby to strike the U.S. mainland and U.S. military bases in Hawaii, Guam and South Korea.
  • South Korea meanwhile is reportedly tracking increased activity at North Korean missile sites. Much of North Korea's behavior can be considered rhetorical, but it is nonetheless unclear how far Pyongyang is willing to go if it still cannot force negotiations through belligerence.
  • North Korean news agency Rodong Sinmun published several images of Kim at an emergency military operations meeting at 12:30 a.m. March 29.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The images were published to show North Korean citizens the resolve of its leaders and to incite speculation abroad. However, including Texas on the maps suggests they were part of outdated attack plans; it is possible they were made during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, when an attack on Texas held symbolic meaning.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Apr 13
       
      My guess is this was intentional. The news was created for North Korean consumption, wherein the average citizen doesn't even understand the significance (other than a lot of strategic depth in the missle-flight). Possibly, it's meant to confuse *external* audiences since including Texas clearly exhibits that it's either outdated or meant to keep observers wondering about true intent.
  • North Korea has been stepping up its warnings of war, and the United States, acting within the framework of military exercises with South Korea, responded by signaling its commitment to South Korea's defense.
  • These signals included flights of B-52s on March 25 and flights of B-2As on March 28.
  • South Korean media has reported signs of activity around North Korean missile bases. If these reports are true, they would be consistent with the order to step up the alert level and with preparations for a missile test. It would also be consistent with North Korea's exploitation of foreign satellite and other intelligence observation capabilities to shape the psychological battlefield.
  • The North Korean announcement, coupled with the pictures of the war room, are intended to raise the level of concern to a level that forces the United States and South Korea to enter dialogue to de-escalate.
  • The North Korean nuclear test, the rejection of the Armistice Agreement, artillery and amphibious landing exercises and raising the missile alert level are all part of the same campaign.
  • However, there are few signs of real war preparation in North Korea, and the border at Kaesong remains open. The United States has responded to each North Korean provocation with a stronger signal of its own. So far, this is still a game of rhetoric. But Pyongyang's threats-for-rewards policy clearly is becoming less and less effective, and it remains to be seen how Pyongyang will react if it cannot maintain that policy.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Apr 13
       
      The irony is that if the U.S. continues to behave this way, war may be *more* likely since NK is already heavily isolated and has been on the defensive for generations. "It sure would be a shame if this region became a warzone...." it seems to say.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "North Korea may conduct additional missile tests this weekend to heighten tensions on the Korean Peninsula and to force negotiations for de-escalation."
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Libyan Report Card - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...libyan-report-card geopolitics libya
shared by anonymous on 03 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The authorities in the capital of Tripoli openly acknowledge the fact that they do not monopolize the use of force and have wisely opted for compromise and arbitration in eastern Libya (the Benghazi region) and in the far-flung Sahara to the south.
  • Libya's fundamental problem is that rather than comprising a compact cluster of demography like the Nile Valley, it is but a vague geographical expression -- a monumentally vast desert and coastal region between historic Egypt and Greater Carthage (Tunisia).
  • Because Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt are geographically associated with specific knots of civilization going back to antiquity, they did not require suffocating forms of tyranny to hold them together like Libya, and to a lesser extent like Algeria, which for decades during the height of the Cold War had a radical socialist regime. For Libya, Moammar Gadhafi's regime was, in fact, anarchy masquerading as tyranny.
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  • Therefore, it should surprise no one that the toppling of Gadhafi brought about the veritable collapse of the state. Libyan authorities do not govern so much as negotiate the terms of geographic control.
  • Modern states have borders; weak and failed states have frontiers.
  • The stability of regimes in places like Mauritania and Niger are somewhat more in doubt than before Gadhafi's collapse. Libya, for that matter, is now an ungovernable space in significant parts of the country where al Qaeda can very possibly find refuge. The killing of the American ambassador in Benghazi was indicative of the terrors that a chaotic, post-Gadhafi Libya can offer up.
  • It would seem from this accounting that the Obama administration's decision to militarily intervene in Libya (along with its NATO allies) was a blunder of the first magnitude.
  • A post-Gadhafi world now clearly presents the CIA with greater security challenges than it had before.
  • But the political reckoning for the Obama administration is not that simple.
  • Those reportedly in the forefront of arguing for intervention on such grounds were then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and National Security official Samantha Power.
  • The three women had good arguments: Were Gadhafi to have massacred large numbers of civilians with U. S. warships hovering just offshore, it would have been a demonstration of American fecklessness comparable to that of European (and particularly Dutch) fecklessness when Serb troops massacred large numbers of civilians in 1995 in Srebrenica under the thumb of U.N. peacekeepers.
  • The loss of prestige the United States might have suffered throughout the Arab world as a result could have been substantial.
  • More to the point, because we still do not know all the intelligence the administration had available at the time regarding Gadhafi's intentions in Benghazi, to condemn administration officials outright is too easy a judgment at this date.
  • But there is a conundrum here that those who favored intervention -- in Libya as well as elsewhere -- do not own up to. That is, short of deploying large numbers of ground troops, the ability of the U.S. government to rebuild weakened or collapsed states is severely limited.
  • Even the presence of more than 100,000 American ground troops was insufficient to make Iraq an adequately effective democracy, so how can one argue that a band of civilian experts, plus small numbers of special operations forces, could have accomplished more in Libya?
  • Gadhafi's regime had virtually eliminated civil society in a country that was barely a country -- and you say that the United States had it in its power to make it all whole, or partly whole, again?
  • Toppling an evil regime or stopping a war is a profoundly moral act.
  • But taking moral responsibility for what happens next in a country is the hard part.
  • because Washington tends to overestimate its own significance in terms of its ability to alter distant societies, the following pattern will continue to emerge: a terrible war resulting in calls for humanitarian intervention, an intervention in some cases, always followed by a blame game inside the Washington Beltway after the country has slipped back into tyranny or anarchy.
  • Meanwhile, here is a probability: Libya's relatively short history as a strong state is over. It will go on and on as a dangerous and weakly governed area between Tunisia and Egypt. Its considerable oil resources can internally generate revenue for armed groups and politicians both. Thus, Libya will become a metaphor for much of North Africa and the Sahara, places where frontiers are more common than borders. 
  • anonymous on 03 Apr 13
     
    "In the starkest terms, a state is defined by a bureaucratic hierarchy that monopolizes the use of force over a specific geography. Ideally, nobody need fear the authorities except those who break the law. And because the authorities monopolize violence, nobody need fear his fellow man. Of course, tyrannical states induce general fear among much of the population. And weak states have a difficult time monopolizing the use of force -- the reason they are weak in the first place. By these standards, many states in the world are weak. And Libya has gone from being a tyrannical state to being barely a state at all."
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What Gay Marriage Polls Tells Us About Marijuana Legalization | TPMDC - 0 views

tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...litymarijuana-legalization.php
shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 13 - Cached
  • But if you were surprised at how quickly marriage equality happened, get ready for another shock: pot’s going to be legal too. The same demographic and cultural changes that propelled marriage equality to majority status are already pushing support for legal pot to the same place.
  • TPM analyzed all available, nationwide polling data on the questions of full marijuana legalization and marriage equality for the past 18 years and found public opinion on the two issues has taken a nearly identical trajectory.
  • Though marijuana legalization is slightly behind marriage equality in terms of public opinion, it has enjoyed a steadier climb along the way to earning the support of nearly half the country. As the accompanying chart shows, backing and opposition to marriage equality has undergone some dramatic dips and peaks over the last seventeen years. On the other hand, support for marijuana legalization has simply moved, pardon the pun, higher and higher each year. This could be an indication marijuana legalization may enjoy an even smoother ride to ultimate approval than marriage equality.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • TPM spoke with activists working on both issues and they identified several reasons marijuana legalization may have a less bumpy road along the way to earning nationwide support.
  • Erik Altieri, a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a pro-marijuana lobbying group, said a major factor behind this may be legalizations natural appeal among some conservatives and libertarians who see it as a civil liberties issue.
  • They also pointed out marriage equality has entrenched opposition among religious, social conservatives — something pot legalization lacks.
  • “The argument for legalization has really been sort of couched in medical usage. You still have to sell marriage. Not everyone knows a gay person or a gay person who wants to marry their same-sex partner. Everyone knows someone who smokes weed,” the consultant said.
  • In theory, support for pot legalization could stall at the current 50/50 split. But one key trend, the same driving the seemingly inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, makes that outcome highly unlikely. Young people overwhelmingly support legalization. And diehard opposition is heavily concentrated among older voters.
  • Between 2009 and 2012 support for marijuana legalization grew at nearly twice the rate it had at any time since 1995. Altieri attributes this rapid increase to the economic crisis.
  • “What I would really pinpoint as the source of this last four year nudge up where we jumped up 10 points is the economy,” Altieri said. “People always knew we shouldn’t be giving such harsh punishments to those arrested for marijuana offenses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in jail. It became much more imperative when we had the financial crisis and then we’re seeing the debt ceiling.”
  • In two dozen states there are forty or so marijuana reform bills in play ranging from simple decriminalization, to medicalization and full-on legalization. Where we’re also seeing the movement is on the federal level where we haven’t previously. There are six to seven federal marijuana bills in Congress and they span the scope like we haven’t seen before including a call for a presidential commission to look at medical marijuana and Jared Polis’ legislation to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, which would essentially end the federal government’s involvement in marijuana prohibition.”
  • While President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and a growing crowd of the most high-level national politicians has jumped on the bandwagon of marriage equality backers, the marijuana legalization movement hasn’t had a similar infusion of political star power.
  • “More politicians are going to come aboard as they are realizing that this is no longer a political third rail, that this is a political opportunity for them. They’re self interested creatures at heart, so that’s what theyre paying attention too,” Altieri said. “When Colorado and Washington did what they did, it took the issue to a new level of legitimacy that we’d never seen. This was no longer something that people could make snide comments about on cable news.” 
  • Washington and Colorado’s legalization law also set the stage for a pivotal moment where Attorney General Eric Holder will decide whether to intervene in those states and arrest those involved in the (still federally illegal) marijuana trade.
  • “History has shown that, once you hit 60 percent on an issue in this country, it gets really hard to go against it,” he said. At the average rate support for legalization has grown since 1995, public opinion will hit that magic 60 percent threshold by 2022. But based on the rate backing for legalization has grown between 2009 and 2012, we could see public support for the issue reach that number bey 2019.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Apr 13
       
      That's entertainingly close to the two dates (from non-related sources) that point to our cyclical/structural socio-economic realignment. On thing is certain (to me): Pot legalization will suddenly become a non-issue as states (and eventually, the feds) see it as a much needed source of revenue (along with cutting a few legs out of the prison-industrial complex).
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 13
     
    "With the Supreme Court now at least considering a definitive statement in favor of gay marriage and support for marriage equality now practically a litmus test issue for Democratic politicians, Americans across the political spectrum are expressing surprise at how rapidly this once marginalized idea became something like a national consensus."
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Considering a Succession Plan in Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...idering-succession-plan-russia geopolitics russia
shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Putin has worked since 2000 to consolidate Russia's government and political system under his leadership. Decisions regarding policy and strategy have for the most part been made by Putin himself, even as the country's networks of power circles and politicians have manifested themselves in various ways.
  • Over the past 13 years, Putin has shifted between the opposing camps as he has seen fit to strengthen and stabilize the country.
  • at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, the consolidation of Russia faced social and political challenges with United Russia losing credibility in contentious elections, the rise of anti-Kremlin protestors and the fracturing of Kremlin clans into a string of conflicting groups.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The Kremlin was forced to start an accelerated political restructuring in 2012 -- one entailing a countrywide effort to devise programs to plan for Russia's future.
  • The Kremlin launched a major domestic anti-corruption campaign that began targeting the government in an attempt to curb behavior that has had a long-term decaying effect on the country.
  • Russians believe good health to be an important aspect of one's ability to lead, and Putin's back trouble caused many in the Kremlin to panic. The Russian media and the Russian people had never seen Putin falter due to ill health. This was in stark contrast to his predecessor, former President Boris Yeltsin, who was plagued with health issues that negatively impacted his ability to run the country.
  • Though Russia has a formal electoral process to choose its leaders, in reality Putin makes the choices regarding leadership.
  • due to the intricate workings of the internal power circles -- and especially because Medvedev is a reformist, not a security hawk -- Medvedev was quickly deemed irrelevant, and Putin remained in power as premier.
  • Putin is not just a president; he is the ultimate arbitrator of Russia's factions and sectors. Before Putin could find a successor capable of assuming that role, he had to break down the existing power structure and create a new system through which a successor could rise.
  • Since the end of 2012, a new system – coined the Politburo 2.0 by widely followed Kremlin analyst Yevgeni Minchenko – has broken down much of the previous clan system and created an inner Kremlin circle of nine men, with Putin as its overall leader. This is not a formal system, like the Cabinet of Ministers, which implements Putin’s vision. It is rather a way to balance the most powerful decision-makers in the country, each with connections and power bases in politics, energy, finance and the military. Outside of the Politburo 2.0 are political circles from which Politburo members may draw support.
  • With a newer, though untested, system in place, the concept of succession is now being considered, and a vice presidency is seen as one possible solution.
  • The concept of a vice presidency that would lead into a successor role is fraught with peril for Putin's new Politburo 2.0. There has never been a formalized second-in-command position under Putin for which various power groups could vie.
  • Creating such a position will most likely lead to vicious competition between the power circles, as well as attempts to discredit the person who becomes vice president.
  • There is also a danger to Putin himself: Previous attempts to install a vice president have led to moves to overthrow the president.
  • The first attempt took place in 1990, during the last years of the Soviet Union, when Gennady Yanayev held the office under former President Mikhail Gorbachev. Yanayev turned on Gorbachev in 1991, taking part in the coup that at first made Yanayev acting president of the Soviet Union. This was before he was arrested and replaced by Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin, Alexander Rustokoi held the role of vice president from 1991-1993. He eventually attempted to overthrow Yeltsin in 1993 during two weeks of mass violence across Moscow ending with Rustokoi’s arrest.
  • With so many dangers related to creating a vice presidency, and with the new Politburo 2.0 still untested, it may be too early for the implementation of a new succession system in the Kremlin.
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 13
     
    "Advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday submitted proposals concerning a possible restoration of the office of vice president, a move that could create part of a succession plan for a post-Putin Russia."
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The Geopolitics of the Yangtze River: Developing the Interior - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...gtze-river-developing-interior yangtze geopolitics river developing interior
shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 13 - Cached
  • As the competitive advantage of low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing in China's coastal industrial hubs wanes, Beijing will rely more heavily on the cities along the western and central stretches of the Yangtze River to drive the development of a supplemental industrial base throughout the country's interior.
  • Managing the migration of industrial activity from the coast to the interior -- and the social, political and economic strains that migration will create -- is a necessary precondition for the Communist Party's long-term goal of rebalancing toward a more stable and sustainable growth model based on higher domestic consumption. In other words, it is critical to ensuring long-term regime security.
  • China is in many ways as geographically, culturally, ethnically and economically diverse as Europe. That regional diversity, which breeds inequality and in turn competition, makes unified China an inherently fragile entity. It must constantly balance between the interests of the center and those of regions with distinct and often contradictory economic and political interests.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • the central government has targeted the Yangtze River economic corridor -- the urban industrial zones lining the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai -- as a key area for investment, development and urbanization in the coming years. Ultimately, the Party hopes to transform the Yangtze's main 2,800-kilometer-long (1,700-mile-long) navigable channel into a central superhighway for goods and people, better connecting China's less developed interior provinces to the coast and to each other by way of water -- a significantly cheaper form of transport than road or railway.
  • The Yangtze River is the key geographic, ecological, cultural and economic feature of China.
  • Stretching 6,418 kilometers from its source in the Tibetan Plateau to its terminus in the East China Sea, the river both divides and connects the country. To its north lie the wheat fields and coal mines of the North China Plain and Loess Plateau, unified China's traditional political cores. Along its banks and to the south are the riverine wetlands and terraced mountain faces that historically supplied China with rice, tea, cotton and timber.
  • The river passes through the highlands of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the fertile Sichuan Basin, the lakes and marshes of the Middle Yangtze and on to the trade hubs of the Yangtze River Delta. Its watershed touches 19 provinces and is central to the economic life of more people than the populations of Russia and the United States combined.
  • The river's dozens of tributaries reach from Xian, in the southern Shaanxi province, to northern Guangdong -- a complex of capillaries without which China likely would never have coalesced into a single political entity.
  • The Yangtze, even more than the Yellow River, dictates the internal constraints on and strategic imperatives of China's rulers.
  • The Yellow River may be the origin of the Han Chinese civilization, but on its own it is far too weak to support the economic life of a great power.
  • The Yellow River is China's Hudson or Delaware. By contrast, the Yangtze is China's Mississippi -- the river that enabled China to become an empire.
  • Just as the Mississippi splits the United States into east and west, the Yangtze divides China into its two most basic geopolitical units: north and south.
  • This division, more than any other, forms the basis of Chinese political history and provides China's rulers with their most fundamental strategic imperative: unity of the lands above and below the river. Without both north and south, there is no China, only regional powers.
  • The constant cycle between periods of unity (when one power takes the lands north and south of the Yangtze) and disunity (when that power breaks into its constituent regional parts) constitutes Chinese political history.
  • If the Yangtze did not exist, or if its route had veered downward into South and Southeast Asia (like most of the rivers that begin on the Tibetan Plateau), China would be an altogether different and much less significant place.
  • The provinces of central China, which today produce more rice than all of India, would be as barren as Central Asia. Regional commercial and political power bases like the Yangtze River Delta or the Sichuan Basin would never have emerged. The entire flow of Chinese history would be different.
  • Three regions in particular make up the bulk of the Yangtze River Basin
  • the Upper (encompassing present-day Sichuan and Chongqing), Middle (Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi) and Lower Yangtze (Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, as well as Shanghai and parts of Anhui).
  • Geography and time have made these regions into distinct and relatively autonomous units, each with its own history, culture and language. Each region has its own hubs -- Chengdu and Chongqing for the Upper Yangtze; Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang for the Middle Yangtze; and Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai for the Lower Yangtze.
  • In many ways, China was more deeply united under Mao Zedong than under any emperor since Kangxi in the 18th century. After 1978, the foundations of internal cohesion began to shift and crack as the reform and opening process directed central government attention and investment away from the interior (Mao's power base) and toward the coast.
  • Today, faced with the political and social consequences of that process, the Party is once again working to reintegrate and recentralize -- both in the sense of slowly reconsolidating central government control over key sectors of the economy and, more fundamentally, forcibly shifting the economy's productive core inland.
  • Today, the Yangtze River is by far the world's busiest inland waterway for freight transport.
  • In 2011, more than 1.6 billion metric tons of goods passed through it, representing 40 percent of the nation's total inland waterborne cargo traffic and about 5 percent of all domestic goods transport that year
  • By 2011, the nine provincial capitals that sit along the Yangtze and its major tributaries had a combined gross domestic product of $1 trillion, up from $155 billion in 2001. That gives these cities a total wealth roughly comparable to the gross domestic products of South Korea and Mexico.
  • Investment in further industrial development along the Yangtze River reflects not only an organic transformation in the structure of the Chinese economy but also the intersection of complex political forces
  • First, there is a clear shift in central government policy away from intensive focus on coastal manufacturing at the expense of the interior (the dominant approach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s) and toward better integrating China's diverse regions into a coherent national economy.
  • Thirty years of export-oriented manufacturing centered in a handful of coastal cities generated huge wealth and created hundreds of millions of jobs. But it also created an economy characterized by deep discrepancies in the geographic allocation of resources and by very little internal cohesion.
  • By 2001, the economies of Shanghai and Shenzhen, for instance, were in many ways more connected to those of Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles than of the hinterlands of Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces.
  • The foundation of this model was an unending supply of cheap labor. In the 1980s, such workers came primarily from the coast. In the 1990s, when coastal labor pools had been largely exhausted, factories welcomed the influx of migrants from the interior. Soon, labor came to replace coal, iron ore and other raw materials as the interior's most important export to coastal industrial hubs. By the mid-2000s, between 250 million and 300 million migrant workers had fled from provinces like Henan, Anhui and Sichuan (where most people still lived on near-subsistence farming) in search of work in coastal cities.
  • This continual supply of cheap labor from the interior kept Chinese manufacturing cost-competitive throughout the 2000s -- far longer than if Chinese factories had only had the existing coastal labor pool to rely on.
  • But in doing so, it kept wages artificially low and, in turn, systematically undermined the development of a domestic consumer base. This was compounded by the fact that very little of the wealth generated by coastal manufacturing went to the workers.
  • Instead, it went to the state in the form of savings deposits into state-owned banks, revenue from taxes and land sales, or profits for the state-owned and state-affiliated enterprises
  • This dual process -- accumulation of wealth by the state and systematic wage repression in low-end coastal manufacturing -- significantly hampered the development of China's domestic consumer base. But even more troubling was the effect of labor migration, coupled with the relative lack of central government attention to enhancing inland industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, on the economies of interior provinces.
  • In trying to urbanize and industrialize the interior, Beijing is going against the grain of Chinese history -- a multimillennia saga of failed attempts to overcome the radical constraints of geography, population, food supply and culture through ambitious central government development programs.
  • Though its efforts thus far have yielded notable successes, such as rapid expansion of the country's railway system and soaring economic growth rates among inland provinces, they have not yet addressed a number of pivotal questions. Before it can move forward, Beijing must address the reform of the hukou (or household registration) system and the continued reliance on centrally allocated investment, as opposed to consumption, as a driver of growth.
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 13
     
    "This is the first piece in a three-part series on the geopolitical implications of China's move to transform the Yangtze River into a major internal economic corridor."
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Learning CSS - 1 views

www.w3.org/...learning.en.html CSS javascript essential jobhacking
shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 13
     
    This is one user's CSS Bible. It has a lot of meat and very little fat (by the looks of it). Highly recommended "Starting with HTML + CSS teaches how to create a first style sheet. For a quick intro, try chapter 2 of Lie & Bos or Dave Raggett's intro to CSS. Or see examples of styling XML and CSS tips & tricks. W3C's Core Styles are simple style sheets ready for use. Two different self-study courses (under development) are CSS for beginners and Web Standards Curriculum. Also on this page: English and non-English articles, discussion fora, books, and secondary resources."
3More

Look at This Visualization of Drone Strike Deaths - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...nteractive-visualization-pitch geopolitics death
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The data is legit; it comes from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, but as Emma Roller at Slate notes, the designers present it weirdly, claiming at the beginning of the interactive that fewer than 2 percent of drone deaths have been "high profile targets," and "the rest are civilians, children and alleged combatants." At the end of the visualization, you find out that a majority of the deaths fall into the "legal gray zone created by the uncertainties of war," as Brian Fung put it at National Journal.
  • But the "legal gray zone" itself is alarming enough—highlighting the lack of transparency surrounding the administration's drone program—as are the discrepancies in total numbers killed. It's between 2,537 and 3,581 (including 411 to 884 civilians) killed since 2004, if you want to go with the BIJ. Or it's between 1,965 and 3,295 people since 2004 (and 261 to 305 civilians), if you want to believe the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Or perhaps it's 2,651 since 2006 (including 153 civilians), according to Long War Journal. (The NAF and Long War Journal base estimates on press reports. BIJ also includes deaths reported to the US or Pakistani governments, military and intelligence officials, and other academic sources.)
  • anonymous on 28 Mar 13
     
    "Pitch Interactive, a California-based data visualization shop, has created a beautiful, if somewhat controversial, visualization of every attack by the US and coalition forces in Pakistan since 2004." Fucking sobering.
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Oil and Militancy in the Niger Delta - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...oil-and-militancy-niger-delta geopolitics africa oil
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "With militancy in the Niger Delta on the rise, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan must convince oil investors to keep their money in Nigeria while retaining the services of Niger Delta militants -- one of his most potent political tools. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta grew from popular protest movements that believed energy companies were exploiting their home region. But militancy then became an extortion method by which the region's political elite could gain a stake in the federal government. Leaders and commanders, including imprisoned former leader Henry Okah, were given political and security leeway to attack energy infrastructure on the condition that they minimize foreign casualties and allow for enough crude oil production to leverage in political negotiations. Okah's former commanders remain in the Niger Delta and, under the auspices of oil pipeline and waterway security contracts, prosper from private and public payoffs. Frequently these leaders are in Abuja managing their relationships with government officials. Abuja will use Okah's 24-year sentence, announced by a South African court March 26, to show that it is trying to contain militancy in the Niger Delta. Jonathan's administration does not want international oil companies invested in the Nigerian oil sector to lose confidence in Nigeria's security environment or to relocate to more stable and secure countries. Increased bunkering, kidnapping and piracy operations have validated concerns of even more militancy in the region. In fact, Italian energy company ENI and Royal Dutch/Shell recently shuttered two pipelines, bringing some 200,000 barrels of oil per day offline."
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How the internet is making us poor - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...how-the-internet-made-us-poor technology unemployment computing
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Sixty percent of the jobs in the US are information-processing jobs, notes Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of a recent book about this disruption, Race Against the Machine. It’s safe to assume that almost all of these jobs are aided by machines that perform routine tasks. These machines make some workers more productive. They make others less essential.
  • The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever.
  • Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?
  • To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)
  • Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)
  • Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.
  • For many years, the question of whether or not spending on information technology (IT) made companies more productive was highly controversial. Many studies found that IT spending either had no effect on productivity or was even counter-productive. But now a clear trend is emerging. More recent studies show that IT—and the organizational changes that go with it—are doing firms, especially multinationals (pdf), a great deal of good.
  • Winner-take-all and the power of capital to exacerbate inequality
  • One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.
  • But it can also exacerbate income inequality, says Brynjolfsson. This contributes to a phenomenon called “skill-biased technological [or technical] change.” “The idea is that technology in the past 30 years has tended to favor more skilled and educated workers versus less educated workers,” says Brynjolfsson. “It has been a complement for more skilled workers. It makes their labor more valuable. But for less skilled workers, it makes them less necessary—especially those who do routine, repetitive tasks.”
  • “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.
  • The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.”
  • Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.
  • “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.
  • In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.
  • This time it’s fasterHistory is littered with technological transitions. Many of them seemed at the time to threaten mass unemployment of one type of worker or another, whether it was buggy whip makers or, more recently, travel agents. But here’s what’s different about information-processing jobs: The takeover by technology is happening much faster.
  • From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.
  • Brynjolfsson thinks he knows why: More and more people were doing work aided by software. And during the great recession, employment growth didn’t just slow. As we saw above, in both manufacturing and information processing, the economy shed jobs, even as employment in the service sector and professional fields remained flat.
  • Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.
  • There are many reasons why the economy has reversed this “compression,” transforming into an “hourglass economy” with many fewer workers in the middle class and more at either the high or the low end of the income spectrum.
  • The hourglass represents an income distribution that has been more nearly the norm for most of the history of the US. That it’s coming back should worry anyone who believes that a healthy middle class is an inevitable outcome of economic progress, a mainstay of democracy and a healthy society, or a driver of further economic development.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is the meaty center. It's what I worry about. The "Middle Class" may just be an anomaly.
  • Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”
  • So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.
  • But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "Everyone knows the story of how robots replaced humans on the factory floor. But in the broader sweep of automation versus labor, a trend with far greater significance for the middle class-in rich countries, at any rate-has been relatively overlooked: the replacement of knowledge workers with software. One reason for the neglect is that this trend is at most thirty years old, and has become apparent in economic data only in perhaps the past ten years. The first all-in-one commercial microprocessor went on sale in 1971, and like all inventions, it took decades for it to become an ecosystem of technologies pervasive and powerful enough to have a measurable impact on the way we work."
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New cosmic background radiation map challenges some foundations of cosmology | KurzweilAI - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/-some-foundations-of-cosmology science cosmology cosmos cmb
shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The fluctuations in the CMB temperatures at large angular scales do not match those predicted by the standard model in physics — their signals are not as strong as expected from the smaller scale structure revealed by Planck.
  • An asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look.
  • A cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Dark energy, a mysterious force thought to be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe, accounts for less than previously thought.
  • One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe.
  • In this scenario, the light rays from the CMB may have taken a more complicated route through the Universe than previously understood, resulting in some of the unusual patterns observed today.
  • The Planck data also set a new value for the rate at which the Universe is expanding today, known as the Hubble constant. At 67.15 kilometers per second per megaparsec, this is significantly less than the current standard value in astronomy. The data imply that the age of the Universe is 13.82 billion years.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Mar 13
       
      Whoa. 13.82 billion?
  • oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old.
  • At that time, the young Universe was filled with a hot dense soup of interacting protons, electrons and photons at about 2700ºC.
  • This cosmic microwave background (CMB) — shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities at very early times, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.
  • According to the standard model of cosmology, the fluctuations arose immediately after the Big Bang and were stretched to cosmologically large scales during a brief period of accelerated expansion known as inflation.
  • The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin.
  • “The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements. They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,” says Paolo Natoli of the University of Ferrara, Italy.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 13
     
    "The most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background - the relic radiation from the Big Bang - acquired by ESA's Planck space telescope, has been released, revealing features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe and may require new physics."
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Assessing Inspire Magazine's 10th Edition - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...inspire-magazines-10th-edition geopolitics terrorism
shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • I have been very surprised at how the media and other analysts have received the magazine. Some have overhyped the magazine even as others have downplayed -- even ridiculed -- its content. I have heard others say the magazine revealed nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
  • All these reactions are misguided. So in response, I've endeavored to provide a more balanced assessment that can be placed in a more appropriate perspective.
  • Inspire 10 is not going to launch the grassroots jihadist apocalypse al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seeks to foment any more successfully than the magazine's previous nine editions. The fact that a photograph of Austin, Texas, appears in the magazine does not mean that the city is somehow being secretly targeted for attack by jihadist sleeper cells.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • But laughing at the magazine or dismissing it as irrelevant would be imprudent. The magazine has in fact inspired several terrorist plots.
  • Other cases have not been as blatant as those involving Abdo and Pimentel. However, they have involved individuals who were radicalized or motivated by Inspire.
  • Some commentators have noted that most of the suspects arrested in connection with these plots were fairly hapless and clueless -- the type of individuals we have long referred to as "Kramer jihadists." Though partly incompetent, these grassroots operatives are exactly the demographic al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is targeting for radicalization and mobilization.
  • Inspire seeks to reach amateur terrorists living in the West; professional terrorists already know how to create pipe bombs. For this reason, the magazine urges amateurs to undertake simple attacks rather than the complex attacks. Too often they find assistance from an FBI informant.
  • It is a grave error to dismiss Kramer jihadists and assume they pose no threat.
  • Kramer jihadists can also be deadly if they actually find a real terrorist, rather than a government informant, to assist or equip them. It is very important to remember that amateur, committed jihadists such as shoe bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly succeeded in destroying an airliner.
  • Twenty years ago last month, I witnessed firsthand the dangers of discounting Kramer jihadists when I peered into a massive crater in the floor of the World Trade Center parking garage. The FBI had deemed those responsible for the attack too hapless to do much more than assassinate the leader of the Jewish Defense League in a midtown Manhattan hotel. And they were -- until a trained terrorist operative traveled to New York and organized their efforts, enabling them to construct, deliver and detonate a massive 590-kilogram (1,300-pound) truck bomb.
  • I also take umbrage at those who snicker at the thought of grassroots jihadists lighting fires. As noted last month, I believe that fire is an underappreciated threat. Many people simply do not realize how deadly a weapon it can be, even though starting fires does not require sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      This is intriguing, and something I hadn't thought about. With the limited response resources, a bunch of nasty terrorists *could* affect an area too large for response capability to control. Ugh.
  • Like all propaganda and political rhetoric, its assertions must not be taken at face value. But to claim that the magazine tells us nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is simply lazy analysis.
  • Clearly, the concept of reaching out and attempting to radicalize and equip English-speaking jihadists was not something promoted only by Anwar al-Awlaki and Khan. English-speaking outreach has continued after their deaths. The group maintains that traveling to places such as Yemen for training is too dangerous.
  • That al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continues to publish Inspire, which takes time and resources to produce, is also revelatory.
  • The copyediting in Inspire 10 was also cleaner than the previous edition, which had a major typo on the front cover. The new editor, who uses the nom de guerre Yahya Ibrahim, has worked with Khan since the first edition of the magazine.
  • In Inspire 10, for example, Ibrahim attempts to replicate the insulting one-page "advertisements" that Khan included in earlier editions of the magazine -- one in particular racially derided U.S. President Barack Obama -- but they lack the bite and general snark of Khan.
  • Inspire seems to be more serious and less edgy than when Khan was in charge. This may dull its appeal to its targeted audience.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      StratFor: Offering design and outreach advice to the editorial crew. Hah!
  • Another thing we can ascertain from Inspire 10 is that, despite al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's continued commitment to foment grassroots terrorism in the West, the group is clearly disappointed by the response it has gotten.
  • The Open Source Jihad section also continues to show the low view that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's professional terrorist cadre has for grassroots operatives. They see them as not-so-exceptional individuals
  • Inspire 10 can also tell us some important things about what tactics we can expect the group to use and what locations we can expect it to target.
  • Clearly the magazine continues to focus on targets in the West that have insulted the Prophet Mohammed. It revives the "the dust has not settled" theme from the first edition of the magazine and provides an updated hit list of individuals who have insulted Mohammed, including Terry Jones, the controversial Koran-burning pastor; Morris Sadek, who made a controversial film that disparaged Islam; and Stephane Charbonnier of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Mar 13
       
      Terry Jones?! Okay, now it's ON.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released the 10th edition of its English-language magazine, Inspire, on March 1. After discussing its contents with our analytical team, initially I decided not to write about it. I concluded that Inspire 10 conformed closely to the previous nine editions and that our analysis of the magazine, from its inception to its re-emergence after the death of editor Samir Khan, was more than adequate."
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