Long Game

Getting rid of leap seconds would certainly make it easier to calculate UTC, but this measure would also decouple astronomical time from civil time: The time measured by atomic clocks would gradually diverge from the time counted out by the movement of Earth through space.

After hundreds of years of letting planetary and lunar motion define time, we will shrink our scale, and let atoms determine it instead.

3. Since writers can’t make a living any more, we are sliding into an era of bullet point-ism.

4. In many cases, there’s more than ten things that you should know, or fewer than ten things that you should know.

5. It’s a way for pentadactyl animals to feel superior to unidactyl animals.

6. At this point in the list, with four more to go, we enter the fat and boring midsection of the list of top ten things you should know about lists of ten things. It’s basically not remembered, so there’s really no point in putting anything here. Ditto for 7, and 8.

9. Because of the well documented recency effect, it’s time to start having content in our list of ten things again.

10. If we’ve maintained our concentration to this point in the list, we will be rewarded with a bit of humorous fluff that helps bind some of our anxiety about the essential meaninglessness of our lives, and — especially — our time spent on reading yet another list of ten things we should know.

Nearly 150,000 troops cannot and will not be suddenly extracted from landlocked Central Asia in short order. Whatever the case, a full drawdown is at best years away. And even with a fundamental shift in strategy, some sort of training, advising, intelligence and particularly, special-operations presence, could well remain in the country far beyond the deadline for the end of combat operations, currently set for the end of 2014.

Recall the rapid dwindling, in the latter years of the Iraq war, of the “coalition of the willing,” which, aside from a company of British trainers, effectively became a coalition of one by mid-2009

Potential spillover of militancy in the absence of a massive American and allied military presence in Afghanistan affects all bordering countries. Even in the best case scenario, from a regional perspective, a deterioration of security conditions can be expected to accompany any U.S. drawdown.

Others, like Russia, will be concerned about an expansion of the already enormous flow of Afghan poppy-based opiates into their country. From Moscow’s perspective, counternarcotics efforts are already insufficient, as they have been sacrificed for more pressing operational needs, and are likely to further decline as the United States and its allies begin to extricate themselves from this conflict.

Domestically, Afghanistan is a fractious country. The infighting and civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal ultimately killed more Afghans than the Soviets’ scorched-earth policy did over the course of nearly a decade.

In effect, this stratagem would be a return of the status quo ante during the PRI administrations

no matter who wins the 2012 election, the new president will have little choice but to maintain the campaign against the Mexican cartels.

over the past decade there have been changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States.

much of the U.S. supply came into Florida via Caribbean routes.

Over the past decade, the tables turned. Now, the Mexican cartels control most of the cocaine flow and the Colombian gangs are the junior partners in the relationship.

they are also involved in the smuggling of South American cocaine to Europe and Australia. This expanded cocaine supply chain means that the Mexican cartels have assumed a greater risk of loss along the extended supply routes

These changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States mean that the Mexican narcotics-smuggling corridors into the United States are now more lucrative than ever for the Mexican cartels, and the increasing value of these corridors has heightened the competition — and the violence — to control them.

Most of the violence in Mexico today is cartel-on-cartel, and the cartels have not chosen to explicitly target civilians or the government. Even the violence we do see directed against Mexican police officers or government figures is usually not due to their positions but to the perception that they are on the payroll of a competing cartel.

Consider this: Three and a half years ago, the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) was a part of the Sinaloa Federation. Following the arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva in January 2008, Alfredo’s brothers blamed Sinaloa chief Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, declared war on El Chapo and split from the Sinaloa Federation to form their own organization.

not only did the BLO leave the Sinaloa Federation, it also split twice to form three new cartels.

Another problem is the change that has occurred in the nature of the crimes the cartels commit. The Mexican cartels are no longer just drug cartels, and they no longer just sell narcotics to the U.S. market.

Up until a few months ago, it was common to hear U.S. government officials refer to the Mexican cartels using the acronym “DTOs,” or drug trafficking organizations. Today, that acronym is rarely, if ever, heard. It has been replaced by “TCO,” which stands for transnational criminal organization. This acronym recognizes that the Mexican cartels engage in many criminal enterprises, not just narcotics smuggling.

Mexican cartels have become involved in kidnapping, extortion, cargo theft, oil theft and diversion, arms smuggling, human smuggling, carjacking, prostitution and music and video piracy.

Another way the cartels have sought to generate revenue through alternative means is to increase drug sales inside Mexico. While drugs sell for less on the street in Mexico than they do in the United States, they require less overhead, since they don’t have to cross the U.S. border.

There has been a view among some in Mexico that the flow of narcotics through Mexico is something that might be harmful for the United States but doesn’t really harm Mexico. Indeed, as the argument goes, the money the drug trade generates for the Mexican economy is quite beneficial. The increase in narcotics sales in Mexico belies this, and in many places, such as the greater Mexico City region, much of the violence we’ve seen involves fighting over turf for local drug sales and not necessarily fighting among the larger cartel groups

But, obviously, those in Pakistan's government have different preferences and priorities. And hoping for that to change isn't a strategy.

Prague has always had a little more room to maneuver when it came to the BMD system. It is not positioned on the borders with a resurgent Russia nor would any of its buffer states such as Ukraine and Belarus.

Unlike Poland and Romania, which had missile components of the new BMD system, Prague was left with an early warning system, which really constituted nothing more than a room full of computers

Moscow will be able to use the SCO statement to show that it’s not just Russia that has problems with the U.S. plans for BMD in Europe but also for another very important security player in the world - China.

No other country is as well placed as Russia to fulfill this role, and Moscow is eager to take advantage of the opportunity. The Germans’ refusal to take part in the air campaign has exposed a major rift in the alliance that works in the Russian interest. Russia also has a strategic interest in positioning itself to be able to exploit Libya’s energy assets: By acting as a mediator to all sides, it can work toward its ultimate aim of scuttling European hopes that North Africa may present an opportunity to lessen the dependence on Russian energy supplies.

Credibility is on the line, and that will be a powerful driver for these countries to succeed in their mission of regime change. It came as no surprise last Thursday to hear an anonymous NATO official concede that efforts are being made to assassinate Gadhafi in the course of selecting targets for bombing.

Ilyumzhinov may rival Gadhafi for personal eccentricity — Ilyumzhinov is famous for declaring that he was once taken aboard a UFO, and for claiming he can communicate through telepathy — but he is acting as a tool of Russian foreign policy in his dealings with Gadhafi.

A former president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, he has ties to the Kremlin as well as Russian intelligence. He claims his visit was not mandated by Moscow, yet admits that he informed President Dmitri Medvedev’s personal envoy for Africa, Mikhail Margelov, of his trip in advance.

GURGAON, India

In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.

Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.

Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”

Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.

From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.

The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.

“We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”

Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.

Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.

Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.

“The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”

“Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.

Is there anyone -- anywhere -- who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya?  After almost three months of fighting and bombing -- when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory -- is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya?

Instead, what distinguished Gaddafi and made him a war target was that he had become insufficiently compliant -- an unreliable and unstable servant to the West.

Wars are typically caused by the interests of multiple factions and rarely have just one motive.  As Jim Webb explained in arguing that the U.S. has no vital interest in Libya, the French and British are far more reliant on Libyan oil than the U.S. is (and this reader offers a rational dissent and alternative explanation for the war).  But the U.S. has long made clear that it will not tolerate hostile or disobedient rulers in countries where it believes it has vital interests, and that's particularly true in oil rich nations (which is one reason for the American obsession with Iran).

That unpleasantness seems to have a spillover effect: making us less happy in general.

Long commutes also make us feel lonely.

Those stressful hours spent listening to drive-time radio do not merely make us less happy. They also make us less healthy.

overall, people with long commutes are fatter, and national increases in commuting time are posited as one contributor to the obesity epidemic.

Why do people suffer through it? The answer mostly lies in a phrase forced on us by real-estate agents: "Drive until you qualify."

But wait: Isn't the big house and the time to listen to the whole Dylan catalog worth something as well? Sure, researchers say, but not enough when it comes to the elusive metric of happiness. Given the choice between that cramped apartment and the big house, we focus on the tangible gains offered by the latter. We can see that extra bedroom. We want that extra bathtub. But we do not often use them. And we forget that additional time in the car is a constant, persistent, daily burden—if a relatively invisible one.

This is a huge project. Conservatively, very conservatively, this is $100 billion infrastructure project. More realistically it’s more like $300 billion and that doesn’t even include the cost of building a natural gas grid in China in order to take advantage of the gas. Even now the Chinese do not have a unified system like most states.

And so the future of energy cooperation between the two countries will undoubtedly grow but $2-$300 billion infrastructure tag? That’s pretty doubtful. And timing is a big issue here too. The Russians have been working for the last 35 years to build one of these megaprojects starting in the Yamal Peninsula going down the Europe. That project is now finally nearing operational status but it took 35 years and tens of billions of dollars of investment. Even if the Chinese do agree with the Russians on every aspect of what would be the world’s largest infrastructure project ever, it’s not going to come online until 2030.